Covid-2019

CDC Director Walensky (yes, the one who has "feelings of doom" from time to times) defends the agency's new less stringent 5-day quarantine guideline in the Omicron wave: "it really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate." This is an example of what we've been saying: the US government, at this point, has little choice but to recognize that the American people are tired of living in fear and isolation, and under the thumb of unelected bureaucratic dictators. IMPORTANT DATA NOTE: We'd think enough days have gone by after the Christmas holidays for the new-case data to stabilize, but it's still all over the map. We're worried that our attempts to groom and smooth it are counterproductive, so with today's charts and tables we are displaying it pretty much as it is provided from reliable sources. So be prepared for some crazy-looking numbers. What's really strange is how uneven it is, with seemingly impossible large numbers coming from Europe and the US, with Asia and the developing world looking entirely normal. Oddest of all: there is no correlation between seemingly surging case-loads and the prevalence of the Omicron variant from locale to locale.

Ignore the scary case and fatality numbers you are hearing reported today. It's the data-dump of unreported events over the holidays, all lumped into one new post-holiday business day. We've done our best to smooth it out in our charts, but there are residual anomalies (really, use caution with the numbers, especially in the tables; some of them are quite unreal).

Go figure. New cases today in South Africa, where every case is the supposedly "wildly contagious" Omicron, are lower than the same day last year. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas from the front page of the New York Times: "Another Christmas of Death and Distress in America’s I.C.U.s".

A new all-time high for new cases on a global basis. Nevertheless, Page One of the New York Post says "All We Want for Christmas is SANITY," featuring a cri de coeur editorial proclaiming "We’ll never end the COVID pandemic if politicians keep making same mistakes." True enough, especially in New York. But at the national level, we applaud Biden's speech Tuesday: an exemplar of sanity, ruling out lockdowns and urging that schools stay open. He was gracious to the prior administration, giving it due credit for developing the vaccines. Yes, he did say his administration was spocktiling the vaccines. A sign of his age? No! It was a shout-out to Star Trek fans.