sigh… this will never end, will it? It’ll be 2024 and I’ll read about some poor slob working at a hotel or airport coming into contact with the Omega variant.
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That’s why we gotta rip off the bandage, let it take its course, accept the deaths and get on with livin’.
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No.
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I’m not sure I’d put it in those terms, but I think once everyone has had ample opportunity to get fully vaccinated and boosted, we should open borders. What’s the alternative? We stay closed forever? COVID is never going away. Masks, QR codes are fine (well… I have my gripes about outside masking, but it’s a small irritability compared to my parents being unable to visit). But we have to open the country again at some point and COVID will still be around in 2025, 2030, 2035…
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Even that makes no more sense. Omicron is just like a flu. It maybe makes sense to wait 2-4 more weeks so Delta is fully replaced by omicron, then open up. And to hell with mask mandates outdoors. Indoors keep them for maybe 2 more months. Then drop.
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Preach
Don’t even dream that there will be any relaxing of the restrictions in Taiwan until after CNY has passed. Even then, the Government has to figure out how to deal with the KMT when the first death of an unvaccinated, but otherwise healthy Covid-19 positive elderly citizen gets reported, even if the death was caused by him/her walking in front of a bus that ran a red light.
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They’re going to have far more trouble dealing with deaths of the vaccinated, surely?
The funny part of this is: if governments hadn’t lied about COVID deaths in the first place (by conflating “of” and “with”) the vaccines wouldn’t look so pathetically ineffective. But they can’t admit that they lied, so the statistics end up being so hopelessly polluted with noise that it’s hard to tell if the (apparent) low-to-zero efficacy is real or a statistical artifact.
If omicron is an uncontrollable as they say, then it’ll be impossible to keep a lid on it, and I just hope Chen is losing as much sleep over the possibility of losing his job as all those poor folk who had their livelihoods destroyed by his “mitigation” measures. The question is, will he go with a scorched-earth policy before he gets canned?
Yeah it’s going to be super interesting isnt it? At some point the number of cases will be so high there’ll be no option but to just give up. But my god they’ll try and contain it for as long as possible. We’ll all be locked down against the common cold for a month.
There’s a tiger at the door!
That ain’t no tiger, it’s a pussy. 
Could be worse mind, could be in China. 1.3 million locked down in Yuzhou due to three asymptomatic cases reported.
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Did I accidentally stumble into the COVID humbug thread? I guess good thing I wasn’t following the 2021 threads…
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We’re just not prepared to put our lives on hold anymore for what is not in most cases a life threatening virus. This is no longer the beast it once was. Remember when it first broke out and there was footage of people dropping dead in the streets in China? And we were all scared? And Icon was hiding behind her fridge?
Those days are over (well except for Icon, she’s still trying to grab that chimichanga she dropped behind the fridge two years ago).
200,000 new cases in Aussie this week in a population that is 90% vaxxed. Hospitalization is under 1%.
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Delta and before were not just like a flu, omicron is, look at South Africa, Norway, Denmark - just skip England which has far worse health problems in general and any flu season running havoc. Those besides African countries who have long given up the charade were first affected and all doing just fine
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personally I believed alpha strain and even delta to some extend you could control, but with omicron you’re just playing wack-a-mole with the inevitable.
she is a parking lot cleaner…where the heck did she get it from?
I’d also much rather get Omicron, which is much lousier at replicating in lungs than Delta, which killed so many because people would drown in their own fluids. Part of the reason Omicron is so much more transmissible is also why it’s milder; it’s planting itself in upper air ways and the nose, while Delta would incubate deeper in the body.
I’ve read this too. So how are the people, dying from omicron, dying?
In SA omicron wave half of the deaths were from pneumonia, 20% another cause exacerbated by COVID pneumonia.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(21)01256-X/fulltext
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Back to Taiwan, folks:
Now United Daily is reporting a member of the taxi epidemic prevention team might also have gotten the bug:
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One thing I noticed in Taiwan is people go see doctors for every little thing. Got a headache, go see doctor, got runny nose, go see doctor, got upset stomach, go see doctor. So regardless of how mild Omicron is, if people are not feeling good, I can see the hospitals/clinics seeing a surge of patients.
Another thought I had was after reading the article about the Taoyuan woman testing positive… Her family members tested negative so far… So how contagious is this virus? They suspend class for 1 day that her family member attended. So if 1 day is enough, why did we lock people up for 14 days or even 7 now.
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Surprised that neither of those things has happened sooner tbh.
Well… people still die from the flu as well, but it’s a lot less. Especially if you’re vaccinated, this is pretty much a super transmissible flu and not the OG beast it was a year and a half ago.
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