Coronavirus, week 88 — the global south and more

Good Atlantic piece here about vax hesitancy outside of "the West." It starts with South Africa, where Whites are more vax-hesitant than Blacks, but are still vaccinated at a higher percentage because of access. "Privilege," maybe we should call it. Or wingnuttery, with White South Africans circulating clips by the likes of Cucker Tarlson, I mean Tucker Carlson.

From there? Russia. A mix of organized anti-West antivax trolling, combined with Sputnik having even worse transparency problems than any Chinese vax plus having efficacy problems after a quick rollout, and on top of that all, the air of Russian fatalism and Russian government mistrust, and finally, a quasi-mystical tradition of Russian folk cures, and you've got problems.

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Will omicron plus lack of booster shots, plus general vaccination slowness in America, make COVID somewhat a pandemic of the vaccinated, too? The Atlantic has thoughts. 

Derek Thompson says that more and more data from South African seems to confirm an emerging semi-consensus: Omicron is a superspreader, but relatively mild on case severity.

Zeynep Tufekci notes that, even if it is relatively mild, it could still hit nursing homes hard. She notes that, even with vaccination, the immune system of senior citizens is less robust than it is for youngers. Plus, she notes that omicron already is becoming known as a superspreader variant. But, in a new open thread, she largely agrees with Thompson.

And, Dr. Peter Hotez is more worried than Derek Thompson.

With a Wisconsin wedding a superspreader event, even among reportedly vaccinated, do need to stop talking about a "pandemic of the unvaccinated? Or will people lie about vax status, even to friends? I lean to the latter. Or, even if the vaccinated do get infected, and nobody was lying about vaccination status, will severity remain greater among the unvaxxed, and thus, especially if 51 percent of new cases are among the unvaxxed, our trope stands? Or is the sample size too small to say much of anything.

Your Local Epidemiologist describes her holiday plans.