Re: OT: Omicron mutations

I've not looked since they first released the SAGE minutes, to see if they've cult the members down a bit, but it looked like real "too many cooks" territory back then with SAGE/NERVTAG/SPIM/SPIB

Neil Ferguson is the exaggerator in chief.

Easily stated, but clearly untrue. For example, his initial projection in March 2020 (that we'd have around 500k deaths if we just let Covid rip through the population) was astonishingly accurate, given the state of knowledge of the disease at the time.

The official figures show that we have had 145k deaths, out of 10m people who have been infected. Excess deaths for the period is slightly higher. It's quite likely that more than 10m people have been infected, but 500k deaths seems a good estimate.

He was only a factor of four high at the outset with very limited data and may yet be proved *entirely* correct in his predictions if the pandemic had been allowed to run out of control the way that Boris wanted at the time. Once Boris caught Covid things changed.

Fergusson predicted 500k as a median expected death toll for do nothing.

We paid the price for Cheltenham races and Liverpool vs Madrid going ahead. NW of England never really got out of lockdown last summer.

UK is already at ~150k dead from Covid (or more depending on how you count it). That is with 80% of the population now vaccinated cutting their risk of death from Covid by about an order of magnitude. If anything his estimate was on the low side for a business as usual no vaccine scenario.

We are damn lucky that we have the vaccine even if it is imperfect at preventing infection it goes a long way towards reducing fatalities.

It is at present unknown if Omicron is a serious vaccine escape strain and/or whether it is more or less dangerous than Delta.

I think a vaccine booster for everyone at this stage will prove to be a waste of time and money. Immunity begins to wane from just a couple of weeks after having the jab. The optimum time to do a mass rollout is a month or so before the s*it hits the fan and age/most vulnerable first.

Or 0.22% of the population. Meanwhile planet earths unsustainable population continues its relentless upward trajectory.