I'm not - it's a site for international motorcycle touring, and the virus is getting in the way of all of us doing that.

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Bruce Clarke - 2020 Yamaha XV250

I understand that, what amazes me is the number of posts and how long they are. Yes, we are limited in what we can do and where we can go--for now. It is not the end of the world, unless we get sick and croak of course. Get vaxed, travel as far as you can in the current situation, and plan for the future, which is what a lot of the posts on this site are about. Cool, chill, take a ride.

Curious as to what happened to all of TodoTerrano’s posts on this topic? Deleted by who and why?

Not curious, a self-explanatory decision of a responsible admin imho.
Justified by users doubtful world explaning theory about C19 relating issues.
My answer to his post is also gone and I am absolutely fine with that.

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Yup, that says it all.

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Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
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Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

https://youtu.be/5E6gpPJwYIY

Looks like omicron variant is a hybrid of sars-cov-2 and hcov-229e which is a common cold; more contagious but less severe.. so pandemic should be over in a few weeks when it displaces delta. Time to make travel plans?

Unfortunately all those Datasets I try to read arent complete. I do follow more the science reports in german language - and did see how developed country`s like germany or switzerland arent able to get more helpful data from the hospitals.

I dont know what is the really issue to request the necessary data from the hospitals, but in Switzerland as example we have what we had since corona did start:

Our Goverment Website:
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/de/hosp...ty/icu?rel=rel

We can see that the hospital emergency beds are around 30% occupied by corona patients. We know too that we had more beds at 2020 - but - there is currently still enough free beds.

But we didnt know how many of the patients are in hospital because of covid, we just know how many have covid.

We also don`t know exactly, how many persons in the emergency beds are vaccinated, 1shot, 2nd shot, 3rd shot (boostered) or unvaccinated.

We just have some hospitals who tells directly stuff to the newspaper. If the newspaper wrote about the Situation in "Schaffhausen" as example, that 50% of the corona sick people is vaccinated - it tells us nothing helpfull- they have 7(!) emergency beds.

Yes, there are values about hospitalised people:
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/de/vaccination/status
They shows us that they didnt know about the vaccination status for around 10%. They didnt recognice if someone is boostered or not. They dont know, when a person got their vaccination. So those values - are just not usable at the end. Specially if you dindnt know if a patient is because of covid, or with covid - in the hospital.

Poor Goverment - who has to make ongoing hard decissions - without beeing able to have a basic dataset to work. However, the goverment try`s his best - I cant complain in switzerland.

How is the situation in the uk? Do you have better data quality from the hospital and goverment?

I dont see a progress with (c) - guess we will have see lockdowns and travel restrictions at wintertime and a more or less relaxed summer for the next 2 years. Hoping I`m wrong.

Surfy

Edit:

I`m not to stupid to find those values - too some experts seems to have the same issue with the data quality:

Today swiss newspaper- Article:
https://www.20min.ch/story/experten-...n-639343713089

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About Overlanding, Travelogues, Equipment
Trans-Africa over the west coast

These are very good questions; even if omicron x3 times less severe but x5 more contagious you will have hospitalization influx. And how many of those in hospital who are diagnosed with CV were identified due to routine screening and didn't know they had it?

Think it is much too early to state how much less severe or more contagious omicron is because monitored data is from patients course of disease of South Africa and by this not universally valid for the rest of the world.
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-11-...ate-on-omicron
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...n-variant.html
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/public...iant-b.1.1.529

Yesterday, 8th december, a camouflaged omicron variant, a one which is hard to detect with common pcr test was published. So science is still exploring omicron charateristics and finding unknown Omicrom variants.
https://news.in-24.com/world/362052.html

In the moment the world excluding some countries of Africa has still a Delta problem - Omicron will be a bigger one by its supposed charakteristics as soon or maybe earliest in spring 2022. In the moment Omicrom hasnt spread wide and deep enough into different countries to be the majoy C19 problem! (check: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-e...ata-9-december )

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Here's your answer:
https://youtu.be/5r0AA41dgLU

All of Dr John Campbell's videos (like the one linked above by cyclopathic) are worth viewing.

As the infection rates spiral it’s going to get much harder trying to make sense of the figures with journalists blithely repeating press release numbers—not understanding the underlying facts, or not asking pertinent questions. Here's something I wrote for my extended family about the UK situation.

1. INFECTIONS: Scientific and medical experts from South Africa were quick to reassure the UK that although the Omicron variant was spreading more rapidly, symptoms, hospitalisations and deaths were much reduced from those of Delta. The UK Health Security Agency felt this was optimistic and in order to impress the urgency of the situation, it issued a statement on 13 December through Health Secretary Sayid Javid saying that current infection levels (people catching the virus THAT day) in the UK were 200,000 per day and doubling every 1.9 days. If this were true then by now the figure would be over 1.1 million infections today. And looking ahead only two weeks, would reach 100 million per day by 31 December—which is 1.5 times the entire population of the UK being infected each day!!



"What are they smoking?” was the general reaction and the UKHSA has now admitted it was wrong to assume the growth rate, and has declined to give an up-to-date estimate of infections.

2. CERTIFIED DAILY CASES: Although the UK is processing a million PCR tests per day the high level of positives (~10%) indicates it needs to do more testing as true figures are not being revealed. The WHO suggests that when positives are over 5%, testing should be ramped up. But in reality, infections and testing numbers are irrelevant as we can't do anything with that knowledge. Does it matter much if daily reported PCR positive cases are 100,000 or 150,000? Anyway, the real case numbers when you add in those who haven't reported are probably two or three times higher. About one in five of UK PCR tests are genome sequenced and the UKHSA has announced that detected Omicron and SGTR (S gene dropout) cases are now at an accumulated total of 101,000. SGTR is only an indication that it *might* be Omicron. London and Scotland have the highest percentage of Omicron cases. London is also the least vaccinated region of the UK thanks to vaccine hesitancy, so a double whammy.

3. HOSPITAL STATISTICS: The important figures to look out for are (a) daily hospital admissions, (b) beds occupied, (c) mechanically ventilated patients, and (d) daily deaths. At the January 2021 peak—before widespread vaccination—these were 4,580 daily admissions, 39,240 beds, 4,077 ventilated, and 1,250 daily deaths (7 day average).

4. CURRENT FIGURES: are not showing any sign of recent increase—daily admissions of 930 are lower than Oct, beds of 7,600 are lower than Nov, ventilation of 875 is lower than Nov, daily deaths of 112 (rolling average) are at the lowest for three months. As Surfy comments, we don't have the fine data from hospitals—many cases of Omicron are likely to be picked up when the patient is admitted for another reason, but will nevertheless be counted as an Omicron admission. Healthcare staff estimate 75% of (Delta) hospital admissions are unvaccinated patients. UK Health Security Agency reports just 65 hospital admissions of Omicron + SGTR (suspected Omicron) cases and seven Omicron deaths.

5. LOW DEATH RATES: South Africa's previous peak infection was in July 2021 and the current Omicron outbreak has already overtaken this in numbers of cases. But the current death rate is ~10% that of July 2021.

6. NEXT WEEK: will bring the first real indications of what is to come in the UK hospital statistics. Even though Omicron might be less serious, the fact it is highly infectious will give huge problems for the care and health sectors who will have to manage with vastly depleted personnel whilst key staff isolate. Some London hospitals are already complaining of additional staff shortages. So we can't assume the headroom stretches all the way to the Jan 2021 extremes.

7. LOCKDOWN: I am on the fence as to whether a lockdown is necessary, I believe there's a good chance the hospital figures will only show mild increases. Crossing fingers and toes. We have our own plans for Christmas including four days of isolation beforehand and lateral flow tests on the morning, so we plan to go ahead with our family celebration whatever the government says.

So best wishes to all on the forum, stay safe and have a great festive season (if circumstances permit).

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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)

Certainly worth hoping that hospital admissions, ICU usage, long-term symptoms, and death rates stay (relatively) low. But given this is a very recent development, and considering the historical lag time between cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, the fact that the later is currently lagging doesn't inspire much confidence.

All in all, there are so many variables--some known, some unknown or unaddressed--that it's largely guesswork at this point. If determined, any of us can find lots of evidence to support whatever position we wish to support, e.g., "...we plan to go ahead...whatever the government says." That may be a reasonable way to plan a Christmas dinner, but it's probably not a good way to make predictions about the future course of the pandemic. And we should all probably bear in mind that many of the folks we're relying on to provide solid information are in hot pursuit of their own private agendas, too.

The same holds true when evaluating retrospectively; if 99% of COVID cases do *not* end in fatalities (and the majority of the fatalities do not involve people previously fit, healthy and/or young), we might conclude that Christmas dinners were fine all the way around last year, too. I mean, except for the dead, the suffering, and those who care for the sickly, who're having a resoundingly difficult time.

Note that I'm not taking a stand for or against social occasions, personal precautions, lockdowns, or any of the rest. I'm just pontificating about the way we evaluate information to suit our pre-existing interests.

Mark

Are you really accusing me of slanting what I've written in the post to support the fact that we hope to be able to go ahead with Christmas with our extended family? That's laughable. As a journalist for more than a decade I have too much integrity to pick and choose snippets for my own purposes. Please point out where I have used dubious facts to support 'my position'.

As for Christmas, you may not be aware on your side of the pond, but there's currently a lot of anger in the UK about the way the government held multiple Christmas parties last year when the general populace were forbidden to visit dying relatives in care homes. Many people are so annoyed they are likely to ignore anything Boris says, even if it's intended for the best.

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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)

My friend's son lives in Denmark and has sent over some notes from today's Danish government press conference (not word for word)...

Omicron) ...it’s too late. The rate is too high and there’s no way we can stop it. It’s run away.

It will take an extreme amount of effort for each person to avoid getting infected over the winter and it’s almost inevitable.

Social distancing and hand sanitiser will not be enough.

All we can do is get vaccinated to reduce the likelihood of infection and of severe illness and protect those who are most vulnerable.

Getting vaccinated no longer means you’re unlikely to get covid. Omicron seems to be much more contagious and that vaccinated people will still get it. But the symptoms are generally much milder in vaccinated people.

____________________________________________

On the other hand Netherlands has a different strategy and is locking down from tomorrow. Both these countries are ten to fifteen days behind the UK in the Omicron trajectory. Morocco did well by suspending ALL foreign flights on 29 November.

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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)

Danmark actual:

Since todays morning theathers, cinemas, zoos, amusement park and sports facilities in Danmark are fully closed. Restaurants can stay open up to 23:00 when individually regulated by goverment.

These rules are valid up to middle of January 2022.

Since friday Danmark(6 Mio residents) has 12.000 inections per day and 20% of them are omicron ones.

If you travel from Danmark to Germany you have to stay in a 5 day quarantime if you are vaccinated - if not you have to stay 10 days. After 5 days it´s possible short quarantime through a negative pcr test.

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