My summary of what I learned about Covid in 2020 and 2021:
Masks do almost nothing. If you are infected, and do not social distance, and you cough or sneeze in the direction of a healthy person, without covering your mouth / nose with your hand, then a mask will reduce the spray distance. That does not add up to much.
Tests are inaccurate. You could get infected ten minutes after a negative test. Especially with Omicron.
Social distancing works for Covid. But for Omicron, social distancing requires you to be in a different room from an infected person, or in a different home!
Delta Covid is a Covid variant. It had two spike protein mutations versus the prior Covid variant, very similar symptoms (meaning it is sometimes deadly).
Omicron is not a Covid variant. It is a new coronavirus common cold. It had about 50 mutations versus Delta Covid, including about 30 mutations of the spike protein.
The symptoms are the same as any other coronavirus common cold. If there is a new virus, and it has the same symptoms as a common cold, then it is a common cold.
Omicron is nothing to fear, whether you are vaccinated or not. I am not vaccinated, to avoid adverse short term side effects, and unknown adverse long term side effects. I do take the following food supplements to strengthen my immune system: Vitamin C, Vitamin D, zinc and quercetin.
Vaccines are designed to prevent severe Covid symptoms and death. They do that, at least for a few months, at the expense of the worst adverse side effects,by far, of any vaccine in US history. But remember that 99.8% of Americans under age 60 survived Covid infections. So for them, the vaccines could only reduce deaths by 0.2 percentage points, even if they were 100% effective. That would be a tiny absolute risk reduction.
Omicron rarely requires hospitalization, and death is extremely rare (it would be a death with Omicron, not from Omicron). There are rarely severe symptoms that a vaccine could reduce, even if the vaccine was effective for Omicron, which it is not.
Natural antibodies after recovering from a prior Covid infection may be useful to prevent Omicron.
Natural antibodies after recovering from a coronavirus common cold are somewhat useful to prevent Delta Covid infections -- suggesting Omicron natural antibodies may be somewhat useful to prevent Delta Covid infections too. But that remains to be seen.
Now for the good news:
If it is true per the CDC that almost all "Covid cases" are now Omicron, that suggests the pandemic will end in a few months. Mutations into a less deadly variant are how every pandemic ended in the past 100 years. Omicron is a lot less deadly than any Covid variant so far.
I can't predict when the Covid fear porn and government fascism will end, or if it will ever end. I do know that Democrats want lots of Covid fear to exist this Summer, so they can implement absentee ballots for everyone voting in November 2022.
I wonder why?
