I kinda get all of this - but the Omicron variant by all measures is easily spreadable but very very mild. The South Africans qualified it similar to a cold.
There will be variants from here on out like the flu - are we going to cancel everything the moment some folks test positive for milder and milder variants.
Omicron is good news - the virus variants are cycling down in severity.
Proportionality is something to consider here.
You may be right, but you may be wrong -
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03794-8
"It has been less than four weeks since the announcement that
a mutation-laden coronavirus variant had been discovered in southern Africa. Since then, dozens of countries around the world have reported Omicron cases — including
a worrying number of infections in people who have either been vaccinated or experienced previous SARS-CoV-2 infections.
But as political leaders and public-health officials try to chart a course through oncoming Omicron surges, they must do so without a firm answer to a key question: how severe will those Omicron infections be?
So far, the data are scarce and incomplete. 'There is inevitably a lag between infection and hospitalization,” says infectious-disease epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse at the University of Edinburgh, UK. 'In the meantime, policy decisions have to be made and that’s not straightforward.'
Hospitalization rate
Early results suggest a glimmer of hope. Reports from South Africa have consistently noted a lower rate of hospitalization as a result of Omicron infections compared with infections caused by the Delta variant, which is currently responsible for most SARS-CoV-2 infections globally. On 14 December, the South African private health insurer Discovery Health in Johannesburg announced that hospitalization risk has been 29% lower among people infected with Omicron, compared with people infected with a previous variant.
This has fuelled suggestions that Omicron causes milder disease than previous variants. But researchers say it is too early to be sure, and key methodological details of that study have not yet been published. Such details are crucial when interpreting data on disease severity, which can be confounded by factors such as hospital capacity, the age and overall health of those initially infected, and the extent of previous exposure to coronavirus.
But the results from Discovery Health are in keeping with other studies in the country, says Waasila Jassat, a clinician and public-health specialist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg. 'There are many caveats and disclaimers around early severity data,' she says. 'But the picture is very consistent.'
It will take time for a consistent picture to emerge from countries that currently have fewer Omicron infections. On 13 December, Denmark released data showing that hospitalization rates for people infected with Omicron seemed to be on a par with those for people infected with other variants. But this comparison was based on only about 3,400 cases of Omicron infection and 37 hospitalizations.
Similarly,
a 16 December report from Imperial College London found no evidence of diminished hospitalizations from Omicron infections compared with Delta in England, although this was again based on relatively few cases. Overall, the numbers are still too small to draw firm conclusions about the severity of disease caused by Omicron, says Troels Lillebæk, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Copenhagen.
And
a rapidly spreading variant could dangerously strain health-care systems, even if the risk of severe disease or death is relatively low for any individual. “A small fraction of a very large number is still a large number,” says Woolhouse. “So the population-level threat is very real.”
South Africa’s optimistic data might not be a sign that Omicron itself is more benign than previous variants. More than 70% of the population in regions heavily infected with Omicron have had previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2, and about 40% have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, says Jassat. This makes it difficult to disentangle the effects of pre-existing immunity from inherent properties of the variant itself."
fordhamsports.com
