In most countries, reported infections have hit record highs during the Omicron wave, smashing previous records.
Fortunately, the variant has turned out to be up to 90% milder than the previous Delta variant, so the large outbreaks have not led to overwhelmed hospitals or heavy death tolls. Nonetheless, many countries have seen substantial waves of Covid deaths, notably Denmark, but also South Africa (where the deaths have continued to climb despite reported infections dropping off since mid-December), Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Norway (among others, including America).
Importantly, though, these Omicron deaths are not leading to a wave of excess deaths, which have come down across the board since Omicron took over (see below). Denmark has seen a small rise in the most recent week, but not anywhere near as much as the scale of recent Covid deaths might lead you to expect. The Danish Government has been keen to stress that many of the Omicron deaths are ‘with’ rather than ‘from’ Covid. The ONS is currently reporting that around a third of deaths registered as Covid deaths in England and Wales are from a different underlying cause.
Deaths are usually higher in January and February owing to the winter flu wave each year. This means the average number of deaths at this time of year is higher, so that even if there is a wave of winter ‘flu’ (or Covid) deaths there may not be any excess deaths if the wave is a smaller wave than normal. That is likely what is happening this year, with the Omicron wave being like a mild flu wave so not clocking up excess deaths. We can see this clearly in the data for England and Wales from the ONS (below), where the wave of deaths due to Omicron, while still a wave (or a ripple), is trending significantly below the five-year average. The average shown below includes data from 2021, which was a severe winter (by recent standards), but if the 2015-19 average is used instead the trend is still below average (about 3% below).
This makes the Omicron wave largely a phantom Covid wave, as the massive levels of reported infections are translating into relatively few Covid deaths (for the number of infections), which are themselves translating into low or zero excess deaths. No wonder sensible countries are lifting restrictions.
A final note on India. Like Botswana (where Omicron was first detected) but unlike most places, India’s Omicron wave was smaller than its Delta wave. Is this because of higher levels of natural immunity following the huge Delta wave last spring? India’s Covid deaths have also dropped sharply since the start of the month, albeit not yet to where they were before Omicron hit. Unfortunately, we don’t have data on excess deaths in India to compare with Covid deaths, but despite relatively low vaccination rates (around 50%) it appears that India has now weathered its Omicron wave and is out the other side.
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Can anyone explain how Omicron is differentiated from Delta? Is this possible using PCR testing or do hospitals have some different tests?
Questioning the narrative is verboten. You lose even more points with your dangerous use of logic. Don’t you know there’s a war on?
We have always been at war with cogent questions.
A doctor friend in Germany says the PCR tells the difference, but I am sceptical.
It detects and replicates the spike protein. If it’s a new ‘variant’ to what do they compare it?
I have wondered the same.
I think they do routine samples from the pcr’s and then do a calculation based on the statistical prevalence.
for example if 90% of samples tested that week are om then they assume 90% of all total tests that week are om.
Wasn’t it just that there was S-gene dropout?
A negative on one of the three genes looked for on PCR.
Normally that would’ve made it a likely negative but with Omicron there was the happy choice to declare it positive for the new variant, thus increasing the numbers
Quite so – I saw somewhere a protocol requiring an absent S-gene and a cycle threshold of 25 – but there is no indication that there is any such standardisation of cycles in the UK, so there will be many false… nothing new there.
The variants are gene sequenced In Silico which means they are computer generated. The PCR test cannot differentiate between individual viruses because it was never designed to do so! It is quantatitive, it detects the presence and amount of a viral load, not what the virus is!
Thank you for that. Do you know how they do differentiate? Is it all BS?
They can’t (differentiate), its all BS! But PCR is the basis for it all, and LFT is way worse. To create a 100% accurate test to identify one specific virus in all tested subjects would be a monumental task!
Lets also ignore the fact that a positive PCR test does not indicate an active infection of anything, it could be a cold that has been recovered from, and dependent upon the number of test cycles performed. Anything greater than 30 (and probably as low as 25 or even less) is invalid and most likely a false positive.
Follow this (official NHS England) link and open the latest version, select tab3, it shows the number of deaths in England by age, and wheteher they had other pre-existing conditions. It works out at 4.5% of all reported “Covid” deaths had no other known chronic conditions.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/weekly-total-archive/
Bear in mind England accounts for 86% of the UK population, those figures do not seem to be available in that format for Scotland, Wales and NI NHS.
If you extrapolate its about 6,000 who may have died “from” Covid, if you accept the PCR test, and the never before used metric of 28 days after a positive PCR test are in any way reliable and valid.
i dont think it can detect viral load, because it is designed to replicate bigger amounts of viral material even from one or a few fragments in order to give enough to study, since viruses cannot themselves be isolated and grown like bacteria.
If a reasonable amount of virus from a specimen can be replicated in under 28 cycles it suggests a viral load sufficient to cause disease, but it is an assumption.
Here you go this is a brilliant explanation of exactly this.
THE ‘OMICRON’ VARIANT THAT DOES NOT EXIST FROM THE UNICORN VIRUS ‘COVID’ – BY DR ANDREW KAUFMAN
https://www.bitchute.com/video/DI8XDVfqBhuf/
We live in a computer simulation world. Covid and ‘climate change’ are computer generated with tenuous links to the real world. Most of the financial/economic stats and trends are computer generated, little link with real world actual events.
And most media we read , hear or see is based on conjecture and untruths.
Its not too hard to sell fear in such a world, not too hard to run psyops to get populations to stand on their heads if you want them to.
I used to think computers and the internet would liberate people, its been used to do the opposite, its the single biggest threat to humanity.
The key question to ask is: is the claim falsifiable? If it is not, then it is not provable either.
There is simply no way of quantifying comparative ‘mildness’ particularly with an original virus which produced very mild or no noticeable symptoms in the first place, however ‘mildness’ is qualitative by observing and comparing symptoms and severity. And the problem today is Governments and experts insist on quantifying the qualitative, because numbers are easily understood – even if fake. So 95% more effective, 90% milder, 100 times more likely, 50% less risk. All meaningless absent context.
95% effective Pfizer virus was Relative Risk Reduction, Absolute Risk Reduction was 0.84%… that is, unvaccinated risk of 0.88% – not significant – reducing it to 0.04% really is reducing the not significant to being less not significant.
This is why number of ‘cases’ was such a misleading number. ‘Cases’, were positive PCR Tests with no indication as to whether they had the disease or its severity, nor with no reference to number of tests. It told us nothing about hospitalisations. Increase in ‘cases’ was directly proportional to increase in testing. The flip side of that is if all testing had stopped there would have been no ‘cases’ therefore the ‘pandemic’ would have been over.
Omicron and Delta have different whole gene sequences.
A PCR test cannot differentiate between the two. It can only be done by wet cell culture and laboriously whole gene sequencing the virus particle on a human cell to see what strain it is.
There are thousands of variants most of which have slightly different gene sequences.
There is debate whether Omicron and Delta are related because they are so different.
I have a suspicion that Delta might be the ‘flu and Omicron the cold……
They have very similar physical symptoms in humans but the gene sequences of Delta, flu, Omicron and the common cold are different.
If the massive excess deaths are not being caused by Omicron, what caused them?
Good heavens, is that the time? Sorry, must dash…might be a war in the Ukraine, don’t you know…
Something else?
Geert van den Bosche and others warned ages ago that it is madness to mass-vaccinate during a pandemic because it accelerates the production of variants. Perhaps, therefore, the answer to the question above is in the penultimate line of the article: “relatively low vaccination rates (around 50%)”, which would have allowed more people to develop natural immunity without having their immune systems screwed up by covid experimental gene therapies.
lower vaccination rates would have killed more people.
Why do you worship these nutcases?
Can we please, please stop promoting these facile “confirmed cases” and “confirmed deaths” graphs. We know that they are nothing of the sort. They measure testing, not illness or deaths.
They’re about as meaningful as checking and reporting on how many people wore odd socks in the previous 28 days.
Confirmed deaths in the UK from CoVid, January 2020 – September 2021 according to ONS were just over 17 300. But you won’t see that reported in the media.
I copped for Convid, or whatever the fuck it was, in early 2021, was goosed for about ten day’s, recovered with RnR and IVM from India….not a sniffle since! I have a large family and an extensive circle of friends and acquaintances, anecdotally it would appear that the only people who are repeatedly sick with the Rona are the fully jibbyjabbed? Discuss…
Omicron , the phantom virus. Following its mates in the 5 million or so stable of COVSARS2 computer generated ‘virus’ mutations.
90% milder? The original was 99% milder than Common Cold so – hang on 90% x 99% = Cure for the Common Cold.
Struggling with the maths……????
Deaths in SA are NOT continuing to rise despite infections dropping. In the last 2 days 8 deaths were reported to have occurred in the previous 24-48 hour periods. However, 201 deaths were allocated to Covid due to health departments auditing previous deaths. These figures are therefore historical and represent deaths in previous waves. This is made clear in each official daily announcement of covid figures. I see Dr Craig is also perpetuating this misconception.
Have a look at the USA, and see what the death rate is for the omicron wave.
The poor vaccination rate has lead to a poor outcome.
What WJ fails to understand is observations on omicron severity are actually observations on the virus and population’s immunity combined.
The reference to 90% less severe is pure nonsense, and the “paper” referenced does not support this assertion.
Troll alert.
Goes by the moniker “leek.”
As with the others the best advice is to ignore it or it takes over the thread.
Or yu could red flag it.
Omnicron Chris Whitty ..we don’t know much about it but what we do know is it’s bad…Lord Frost .. I don’t know why he said that… South African Dr … they tried to get me to say thst omnicron was bad, but I wouldn’t….SAGE more Stalinist than Putin, no one condemns Trudeau ….