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COVID is not going away, and optimism is not a plan . . .

Eric Kramer | January 29, 2022 1:14 pm

Politics

Here is what Biden said about omicron in December:

“We’re looking ahead to a brighter and happier December,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday. He ticked through a list of actions by his administration that he said would help ensure fully stocked shelves in groceries and retailers through the holidays.
Asked by reporters if he was worried that the Omicron variant, which officials announced later in the day had been detected in California, would threaten that progress, the president was undeterred.
“I’m an optimist,” he said.

Now we get this from Joshua Gans on a new omicron variant:

Where BA.2 has been measured, it appears to be 1.5 times as transmissible than BA.1. That’s a lot. Omicron was already Omicron, the most transmissible virus since the Measles that ripped across the world in mere months and was responsible for the “all my friends have Covid” feeling. 50% more transmissible than that which means in terms of growth it can replace BA.1 within weeks. This is precisely what has happened in Denmark and now is happening across the rest of Europe. It could be elsewhere but they aren’t really looking.
It is really hard to fathom that there will be any escaping this one. Epidemiologists are worried that the seeming peaking over the Omicron wave may be very short-lived.
. . . Now we have evidence that reinfection with Omicron is not only possible but can happen quite quickly. Omicron is 5 times more likely to have reinfection than Delta. What’s more, there appears to be waning immunity in just 10 weeks. All this is just preliminary but it weighs against fatalism and towards something far more worrying.
There is a chance, hopefully still a low one, that you may get Omicron again and again over the next year while it continues to circulate in such high quantities. That might mean nothing in terms of symptoms but it is hard to know. It could also mean continual bouts of illness. You may not end up hospitalised but you don’t want the flu every three months either.

President Biden’s optimistic take on COVID-19 is dangerously short-sighted. What is he going to say if BA.2 leads to a surge in cases this spring? What is he going to say if a lethal new variant evades the existing vaccines? What will he say if there is a COVID wave in the fall due to fading immunity? If COVID continues to kill significant numbers of people and to disrupt daily life – which has always been a real possibility – Biden and the Democrats will be far more vulnerable to ads attacking his naïve optimism and failed promises on COVID than critical race theory, inflation, or any other issue Republican operatives and campaign consultants dream up.

The President needs to get ahead of this. He can project optimism while still planning for contingencies and setting reasonable expectations for what life will be like with endemic COVID. This means making a major speech discussing the progress that has been made, but also noting that COVID is not going away, and asking Congress for $50 or $100 billion for vaccine development and production, development and production of new treatments and anti-virals, increased testing capacity and production of high-quality masks for people who are vulnerable, etc., etc. This is obviously the right thing to do policy-wise. It is also essential politically.

Yes, there is a bipartisan bill kicking around Congress. So what? President Biden asked for a major investment in pandemic preparedness that got left on the cutting room floor. He needs to own this issue. He needs to show a sense of urgency on this and blame Republicans for foot dragging.

7 Comments

sherparick says:

January 29, 2022 at 4:50 pm

Yep. He and his team seem to have been wrong footed on this issue since early last summer when they were surprised (and silent about) Republican sabotage of the vaccination campaign & deaf to the warnings about the likelihood of variants evading both the vaccination & prior infection immune response.
Eric377 says:

January 30, 2022 at 11:48 am

I think this is overall bad advice with a few sensible elements embedded. Gets some better masks out to the vulnerable seems like a good idea. Continuing to work on treatments has unanimous support I’d wager. But the tide is running against COVID as an on-going major story and Biden would be smarter to just let that tide go out, instead of making major speeches on it.
- Eric Kramer says:
  
  January 30, 2022 at 12:26 pm
  
  Eric, I am not saying Biden needs to make a prime time address to the nation, although I wouldn’t be opposed to that. But he needs to be clearly on the record warning that the virus may surprise us, and that we need to prepare.
  
  Even if COVID is on the way out, I think the President needs to speak to people about living with the virus. He can be optimistic as long as he recognizes downside risks and asks Congress to prepare for unwelcome contingencies. He needs to calm people who are irrationally scared, provide assistance to those at high risk, and to the extent possible coax the unvaccinated to get shots. He also needs to help people keep the economic disruption caused by omicron and by aggregate supply issues in perspective. Has he ever said something to the effect of “omicron will be disruptive, but we are making real progress with vaccines and treatments, and the evidence suggests the wave will pass quickly”? To my ears, he’s been extremely passive. People want reassurance, and I think Biden would actually be well-suited to provide it.
rjs says:

January 30, 2022 at 3:27 pm

fwiw, here’s what i wrote on Covid this morning for my weekly email environmental newsletter:

counts of new US Covid cases are now falling rapidly, but they’re still double last winter’s peak, and US Covid hospitalizations are also slowing, but also remain above last year’s high…US Covid deaths are still rising, however, and have now exceeded the death rate of the Delta variant surge, and still account for more than 25% of all Covid deaths worldwide, as they have since at least the last week in December…the falling US case count has stabilized the world totals, but there are still some countries, like Russia, where new cases are doubling every week….particularly notable are new cases in Israel and Denmark, which are leading the world on a per capita basis, with 5 new infections per 100 people every week…both countries have vaccination rates over 80%, about 18% higher than ours, and Israel is largely boostered and has administered a fourth Pfizer shot to about 10% of it’s population…
Fred C. Dobbs says:

January 30, 2022 at 4:06 pm

‘Stealth’ Variant No Cause for Alarm, but Could Slow Case Decline

NY Times – Jan 30

A mutated version of the Omicron variant could slow the steep decline in cases, but it is not likely to change the overall course of the pandemic, scientists said.
- Fred C. Dobbs says:
  
  January 30, 2022 at 4:10 pm
  
  In recent days, headlines about a “stealth” Omicron variant have conjured the notion that a villainous new form of the coronavirus is secretly creating a disastrous new wave of Covid.
  
  That scenario is highly unlikely, scientists say. But the new variant, which goes by the scientific name BA.2 and is one of three branches of the Omicron viral family, could drag out the Omicron surge in much of the world.
  
  So far, BA.2 doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease, and vaccines are just as effective against it as they are against other forms of Omicron. But it does show signs of spreading more readily. …
  
  Within weeks of Omicron’s emergence, however, researchers in South Africa started finding a few puzzling, Omicron-like variants. The viruses shared some of Omicron’s distinctive mutations, but lacked others. They also carried some unique mutations of their own.
  
  It soon became clear that Omicron was made up of three distinct branches that split off from a common ancestor. Scientists named the branches BA.1, BA.2 and BA.3. …
  
  Unlike BA.1., BA.2 lacks the spike mutation that makes PCR tests fail. Without the ability to use PCR tests to track BA.2, some scientists nicknamed it the “stealth” version of Omicron.
  
  But BA.2 wasn’t invisible: Researchers could still track it by analyzing the genetic sequences of samples from positive tests. And once Delta virtually disappeared, scientists could use PCR tests to tell the difference between BA.1 and BA.2: Samples that caused spike failures contained BA.1, whereas the ones that didn’t contained BA.2. …
  
  In recent weeks, BA.2 has become more common in some countries. In Denmark, BA.2 makes up 65 percent of new cases, the Statens Serum Institut reported on Thursday. So far, however, researchers there have found that people infected with BA.2 are no more or less likely to be hospitalized than those with BA.1.
  
  On Friday, the British government released another early analysis of BA.2, finding that the variant makes up just a few percent of cases there. Still, surveys across England show that it is growing faster than BA.1 because it is more transmissible.
  
  Reassuringly, the British researchers found that vaccines were just as effective against BA.2 as BA.1. …
  
  Trevor Bedford, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, found a similar pattern in the United States in viral sequences from recent test samples. He estimated that about 8 percent of cases in the United States are BA.2, and that figure is climbing fast, he added.
  
  “I’m fairly certain that it will become dominant in the U.S.,” Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale University School of Public Health said, “but I don’t yet know what that would mean for the pandemic.”
  
  It’s conceivable that BA.2 could lead to a new surge, but Dr. Grubaugh thinks it’s more likely that Covid cases will continue to decline in weeks to come. It’s also possible that BA.2 may create a small bump on the way down, or simply slow the fall. Experiments on BA.1 now underway may help scientists sharpen their projections.
  - rjs says:
    
    January 31, 2022 at 11:46 pm
    
    i believe this is being mischaracterized as a “new Covid” but as long as we allow the current strain to run rampant there’s going to be a chance it will combine with or evolve into something more serious..
    
    ‘1 in 3 dies, should we worry’: Wuhan scientists warn of new Covid virus ‘NeoCov’ with high death rate and spread, says report – Scientists from China’s Wuhan, where the Covid-19 virus was first discovered in 2019, have warned of a new type of coronavirus ‘NeoCov’ in South Africa, stated to have a high death and transmission rate, according to a report by the Russian news agency Sputnik. The new variant of NeoCov virus is not new, says report.
    
    Associated with the MERS-CoV virus, it was discovered in outbreaks in Middle Eastern countries in 2012 and 2015 and is similar to the the SARS-CoV-2, which causes coronavirus in humans.
    
    While NeoCoV was discovered in a bat population in South Africa and has only been known to spread among these animals, a new study published as a preprint on the bioRxiv website discovered that NeoCoV and its close relative PDF-2180-CoV can infect humans.
    
    The research findings stated that the novel coronavirus poses a risk because it binds to the ACE2 receptor differently than the coronavirus pathogen. As a result, neither antibodies nor protein molecules produced by people with respiratory diseases or who have been immunised can protect against NeoCoV.
    
    According to Chinese researchers, NeoCoV carries the potential combination of MERS-high CoV’s mortality rate (one in every three infected person dies) and the current SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus’s high transmission rate.