I'm confused (a familiar state of affairs): if you're a Canadian national or resident I believe you've been able to enter the country with or without vaccination, although subject to shifting quarantine requirements. Am I wrong about this?

Assuming I'm correct, it seems to me there is a real possibility that this new variant will be found in Colombia, at which point you really *won't* be able to enter Canada. The effectiveness of this sort of measure might be up for debate--see the posts above--but unless you'd really rather stay in Colombia until that's all sorted, perhaps it's time to head home.

Personally, I'd be inclined to keep quiet about the whole lambs-to-the-slaughterhouse thing until safely thru immigration. Those guys can make anyone's life miserable if they choose to.

Mark

You are correct: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-heal...ion-sheet.html

If you are an unvaccinated citizen returning to Canada, you must go into quarantine upon arrival for two weeks. Perhaps that is expensive or difficult for the poster to arrange.

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Bruce Clarke - 2020 Yamaha XV250

I confused (a familiar state of affairs): if you're a Canadian national or resident I believe you've been able to enter the country with or without vaccination, although subject to shifting quarantine requirements. Am I wrong about this?

Assuming I'm correct, it seems to me there is a real possibility that this new variant will be found in Colombia, at which point you really *won't* be able to enter Canada. The effectiveness of this sort of measure might be up for debate--see the posts above--but unless you'd really rather stay in Colombia until that's all sorted, perhaps it's time to head home.

Personally, I'd be inclined to keep quiet about the whole lambs-to-the-slaughterhouse thing until safely thru immigration. Those guys can make anyone's life miserable if they choose to.

Mark

I'm trying to picture this. In the US, something like 40% of the adult population is deemed vulnerable by virtue of age and/or health condition. What would their lives look like--for the past 20 months and for an indefinite period moving forward? I can imagine myself in locked-down isolation all this time--not with any pleasure, but at least it's conceivable. I honestly can't imagine how the country itself would function with another 90+ million in the same position.

Yes. My reference to other viruses was merely supposed to illustrate my point. Sounds like it failed to do so.

With all due respect, you live in an island country, relatively wealthy, easily-isolated from the rest of the world, which instituted some fairly draconian lockdowns quite early--including the one which forbids you to visit your son. Furthermore, your NSW government claims an adult vaccine rate well over 90%, which is something much of the world will never, ever achieve. Could that have something to do with those recently-stable rates of illness and death?

It's a far cry from letting COVID burn through the population until natural immunity is reached. If you'd like to know more about what THAT would look like, read up on places where it's been more or less allowed to happen--New York in the early days, maybe India more recently, parts of Brazil at one point, coastal Ecuador for a while...

Well, that's probably enough verbiage out of me for the night. Safe journeys to us all!

I see your point. I tend to agree. However, if that 40% were vaccinated then it is a very, very small percentage that would be vulnerable to serious illness when they catch it. We have had one or two cases of fully vaccinated pro-morbidity individuals die of Covid.

Interestingly, our island has not really done anything to prevent the new mutants. We found the African one the same time as everyone else did.

Anyways, all the best to all.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I wouldn't be so depressed; omicron strain x5 times more contagious than delta it displaces so it will likely take over the world much quicker..

Whilst the Omicrom variant may be more transmissible than, say, Delta there are initial thoughts at least that the symptoms are milder than Delta at least in non-vulnerable people - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-59450988 - this link is to an interview with the doctor that first identified it in South Africa.

If correct, and applicable to otherwise vulnerable people, this could help in getting back to some sort of normality worldwide - as has been alluded to Spanish Flu still circulates globally but in a very much attenuated form so it doesn’t cause very high numbers of deaths.

Please note I am no virologist so it is all supposition.

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

We have been using face masks and border closures more or less for more then a year now, still we get the one variant, or wave, after another. It makes me thinks these steps are not working. The virus spreads over the whole world and if i get infected it doesn´t really care which nationality the one has who infects me.
I live in a island-country, people say just close the border and we don´t have any covid. Maybe that´s right but in our modern world no country is a island anymore, not even the geographic islands. With our modern way of living each country is depending on other countries. We can not close the borders for a couple of months, let alone years.
Each time a new variant get´s detected, countries put in place more restrictions but then it´s already too late because the new variant has already been spreading without us knowing it.

Or that things would be a lot worse if these steps were not taken.

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Bruce Clarke - 2020 Yamaha XV250

Well, it's better to have Omicron sweeping the world than Unicron, I suppose

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

Maybe, but.........

In Asia, including China, many people where wearing face masks in cities because of high air pollution, long before Covid 19 started.
Yet this widespread use of face masks did not prevent this pandemic, which even started there.

All the reports I've seen so far recommend caution, typically saying that Omicron is highly contagious, possibly more so than the delta variant, but it is not yet clear whether Omicron will be able to displace Delta. Where did you see the definitive 5x figure?

The South African doctor who first identified the Omicron variant says in this Telegraph article the symptoms are unusual but mild, however the age demographics in South Africa are that older people only form about 5% of the population, so the effect on older people isn't so clear.

What the epidemiologists are praying for is a super contagious variant with mild symptoms. If this took over completely and spread across the world the dangerous part of the pandemic would be at an end.

As soon as the virus enters the human host it rapidly replicates itself and sometimes errors are introduced into the copying of the RNA, creating a variant (thousands to date). What seems to happen in a few very rare cases, rather than the patient fully recovering, the virus remains active, potentially mutating over and over again as time passes. Some of these mutations are 'drifts' in which a single change occurs, the worrying ones are 'shifts' with many changes and it's thought the 30+ changes to the protein spikes with Omicron variant happened in a single patient. That mutation probably happened somewhere in Africa which is why Morocco suspended flights from six southern countries, but it was South Africa that identified cases in its country through genome sequencing, and gets the blame, just as the UK got the flak over the Kent variant.

EDIT: Jay's post must have come in after I started to type, but our thoughts are the same.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

I don't think we'll have to wait longer than 2 or 3 weeks to find out what impact (if any) this new Omicron flavour of virus will have.

It is spreading in South Africa, a relatively poor country that has a low rate of vaccination and a high incidence of crowded housing. So we should see some pretty definitive results before Christmas - either all hell breaks loose and lots of people get sick & die, or not much changes at all from what has been going on for the past 18 months.

Tim's comment noting that South Africa has fewer elderly people as a percentage of population than first world countries is noteworthy, but I think that is offset by RSA having more folks who don't have access to health care, or have HIV or malaria or other disadvantageous infections.

So let's just sit tight for a couple of weeks and see what happens down there.

Michael

https://youtu.be/cdkCVeWc1pQ

I've not come across anything much in the medical or scientific press or heard anything via my wife's medical grapevine about the Omicron version - other than its been identified and, at first glance, seems to have a number of mutations that give it different characteristics. However I know all about it, from its birthday to its shoe size and how its going to slash and burn its way across the planet leaving only death and misery in its wake, from the popular press. And the more popular the press the more speculative and sensationalist the reporting - exactly as usual!

I have no doubt there are a number of laboratories taking it to bits as I type this, and that in due course some actual information about it will be available, but for the moment it's all not far off guesswork. As Tim mentioned, it's in the nature of viruses to mutate so it's not surprising that new versions pop up from time to time. What we see are the few that prove to be viable. The many many mutations that don't give any survival value vanish without even being noticed. It's a jungle down there at cellular level and the virus is in a fight to the, well, not quite death as it's still a matter of debate whether they qualify as alive, but survival anyway. We're just collateral damage. The virus won't even know we exist.