Actual News

 Well, there's actual news.  That didn't take long.

By now, you've heard about the Omicron variant of the COVID virus.  Almost everything that we learn about this variant is yet to come, because we don't know much at all right now.  Omicron's structure has been analyzed, and it seems that it could be trouble, on the transmissibility front and the vaccine-evading front.  But we don't have any evidence of how it actually works in the real world, because we haven't identified enough people who have it for long enough to tell us anything.

But a line in the CNN article about Omicron seems ominous:  

"Vaccine makers were fast to identify the variant as a concern. Moderna said the Omicron variant represents a 'significant potential risk' to its Covid-19 vaccine."

Uh-oh. 

I just got boostered with Moderna - essentially my third Moderna shot - last week.  And this little bugger may know the way around all of them.

That would be very bad news, and change the game, so to speak.  More to come.

More Drifting, This Time in the Wrong Direction

In case you've been holding your breath (which I hope you haven't, because little or nothing is happening on the new world front, not to mention the New World front), CNN tells us that there is, at the moment, no way to tell when the pandemic is "over."  Incredibly, there is no generally approved of dividing line between "pandemic" and "endemic."  You'd think that some authoritative public health agency would have published some work on this, but, apparently... no.  As Dr. Arnold Monto, "a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and acting chair of the US Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee" said recently, we have to "wait and see and hold our breath" to unlock what an endemic phase of the coronavirus might look like.

Thanks, Arnold.  

As the indefatigable Annie Laurie tells us over at Balloon Juice, there are many important ways that things are getting worse, not better, thus pushing that vague finish line we are holding our breath to catch a glimpse of much further away.  Just today, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Slovakia have set records for daily infections, and Russia set another daily record for deaths.*  COVID deaths in Europe generally rose 5% last week.  Here in the US, cases are up 14% in the last week.  And "the head of Germany’s disease control agency has warned that the country faces a “really terrible Christmas” unless steps are taken to..." well, to do things that we've already seen we're not willing to do.  Fröhliche Weihnachten!

So, not only do we not know how to tell when we get where we're going, we're insisting on sailing in the wrong direction.  This is, in large part, the reason for the sparse flow of posts here at the New World.  

See you when there's actual news.

 * - Russia has been setting daily records for deaths most days for weeks and weeks.