Patterns

Two virus-worthy stories in this week's news:

Feeling a sense of deja-vu in the rush to cancel flights. We went through this in early 2020 (by the first flight cancellation, SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading by community transmission throughout the US), again for the delta variant, and now B.1.1.529.* It's hard to see a country-specific flight ban having any effect, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea for the moment. I'd rather have a more extensive system for repeated testing of travelers before and after landing, coupled with a quarantine, implemented worldwide. Cheap or free rapid tests pretty much are the way out of this pandemic. If they were available now in the US, thousands of lives could be saved over the holidays.

* It's been named Omicron. It's worth noting that South Africa has an excellent sequencing program, and this may be the reason they noticed this variant prior to other countries.  I'm sure we'll know more in the next few weeks.  Also, some reporting from an unfortunate Times correspondent tweeting from the tarmac of Schiphol, where they are deciding what to do with the passengers from Johannesburg.

 

 

 

Surge of cases in Europe. So far, the U.S. has reliably followed:

“Time and again, we’ve seen how the infection dynamics in Europe are mirrored here several weeks later,” Carissa F. Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, said during a Wednesday briefing. “The future is unfolding before us, and it must be a wake-up call for our region because we are even more vulnerable.”