To answer your questions...
 

There you go Rapax- a travelling T-shirt to match your mood!
I knew this thread was going to be good for a few clicks :Beach:

and here is a message from Bojo
 

There is nothing quite the power of positive thinking!
Merry Christmas!!

This pandemic has proved to be highly profitable for some. Especially those in positions of power.

It's also been an excellent way to control the free movement of people.

It's a dream scenario for Governments in order bury other bad news and dark politics (Brexit etc) whilst giving themselves far reaching powers using 'emergency measures'

So it's never going away. It's been a dream come true for dodgy politicians and the top 1% who are making more money than ever.

I don't think we will EVER have the freedoms of travel we once did whilst this is the case.

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.

Omicron...
Strange....an anagram for this is 'Moronic'...
Are we being taken for a ride?
Could there be a hidden political agenda here or is this 'fresh meat' for a new conspiracy theory?

Do debate! ;) and whilst doing so, you are saving the planet by not burning more hydrocarbons!

1. Omicron is a Greek letter, just like the other variants.

2. We are usually being taken for a ride in one way or another...but not about the existence of this variant. It exists.

3. There are certainly people with hidden (or overt) political agendas which they are eagerly attaching to the new variant as we speak. There will certainly be new conspiracy theories ad nauseam. However, the most likely, efficient, and believable explanation is exactly as originally offered, i.e., a new variant of unknown origin with multiple DNA changes and unknown effects.

I'd wonder: What is *your* agenda in asking these questions? And what are *your* answers?

Mark

To the OP asking the questions. Google gave me the following:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/w...ame-covid.html

Try it some time?

I'm waiting to see it being referred to as the OMG version. It probably is already in some nether regions of social media with sketchy knowledge of the Greek alphabet. I must admit I was expecting the Epsilon variant to appear next, but things change fast in the world of viruses so maybe I missed that - plus the other nine variants between Delta and Omicron. We'd better fix it soon as there's only another eight to go before we hit Omega, and we all know what happens when that strain turns up. :rofl:

Agendas come in all shapes and sizes, whether they're political ones lambasting the government for its shortcomings or climate change luddites or current vaccine issues. It's interesting to see someone try to pick apart an anti vax agenda and look at what's going on 'under the bonnet / hood' This was an article I came across a few days ago:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ovid-pandemic/

The essence of what it's about is neatly summed up in the subtitle:

"Vaccine refusal by parents is not about a lack of education, but amassing social status"

In it there's a mention of "secret vaccination sites" where people can go and get vaccinated without anyone in their anti vax peer group knowing. I've not heard of any moonlight vaccination sites in the local woods over here but, then again, I don't suppose I would. Everyone (almost everyone to be accurate) I know has put their petty differences to one side and had the jabs. The only exception is a journalist for a religious newspaper. He obviously sees pandemic salvation coming from a different direction - and who knows, he may be right, but we're avoiding him for the time being just in case.

Easy one.Just keeping new posts coming in; there has been a dearth of them for a long time!

@ Chris
It is all rhetoric but thank you for introducing me to google!:rolleyes2:

All you need to know that in South Africa it outcompete Delta and that out of 50 mutation 32 on spike protein and 10 on receptor binding domain (IIRC delta and SA variant only had 8 and 3) but regardless the immune escape is even more likely with omicron.

Is it deadlier than what we had seen so far is yet to be seen; most likely not viruses usually evolve to being less deadly and more contagious but we will know it soon. Some estimates show that it is 500% more contagious than delta, so if R jumps to R5-8 the health system will be under alot of strain hopefully not a repeat of NYC and northern italy or worse.

Oh, I like to know a lot more than that. :rofl: I may not need to know, but it's in both my nature and my background to want to know. I sit around here in the evenings discussing this stuff with my medical wife, daughter and son. Come around to my house for an evening of riveting conversation and sparkling wit :rofl: :rolleyes2:

They have to deal with this stuff at the sharp end and so far their only source of info about the Omicron variant has been the Daily Mail (and the rest of the hysteria rags). It's only this morning I've seen the first actual information in a journal I'd trust. No doubt there's loads more on the way but it takes time to do the work, write it up and publish it. To misquote Mark Twain, "a headline is halfway round the world before truth has put its boots on". There's money to be made from scaring people.


An interesting ... well, what are we dealing with here? Is it observation, analysis, hypothesis, insider knowledge? Usually though when someone purports to 'know' what's actually going on I tend to react with a degree of suspicion. History has proved again and again that we're all - governments, businesses, markets, all our august institutions - just blown around by the winds of change. Almost nobody has the faintest idea, and if they seem to in the short term, a longer baseline usually shows it was either chance or simply in the right place at the the right time. As is often said of politicians it's better to be lucky than talented. If enough of them spout enough nonsense the chances are someone will get close to what actually happens.

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

I am beyond amazed how much has been written about a virus on a motorcycle web site. Consider this: when AIDS/HIV first came along, there was a lot of fear and changes in social/sexual behavior. I had a nephew who died from it in the early 80's after a short illness. Today there are ads on TV selling meds to allow you to live long and prosper even with the virus in your body. With enough vaccinations, covid will be like polio, isolated in a few places.

Virulence and infectiousness are not necessarily linked. There is no evolutionary pressure for Covid to become less deadly. Unlike some viruses (such as MERS - to which it is related - and Ebola), it doesn't kill 70-90% of those it infects. Such high kill rates do favour less deadly variants, because the host population isn't wiped out.

Covid is on average 1% fatal so there is no pressure on it to become less deadly. Its strongest weapon is its infectiousness, and the spike protein mutations have strengthened that weapon. The worry is they may help it escape the vaccines as well. Given that the spike proteins are the means it used to enter human cells and replicate, it seems likely to this layman that an increased viral load will result in more cellular damage. At this stage we don't really know, because the infections from Omicron are in the hundreds compared to the millions we have seen with Delta.