Australia’s Omicron wave

….amazingly Australia records 115570 cases today. Despite ‘some of strictest rules against Covid’. To put that in perspective it would be the equivalent of 1500,000 cases in the USA….or 6200000 cases in India.

No doubt Australia’s been following lockdowns, masking, vaccinating and isolating. It has huge advantages in climate, the fact that it’s surrounded by water and has moderate urbanization.

More than anything we have seen yet this shows the difficulty of containing this scourge. Sweden’s initial idea of protecting the vulnerable seems particularly on point for Australia’s current situation, especially as Omicron is much milder. 

Omicron is a different kettle of fish. 
It can't be contained with lockdowns, and vaccines offer short-time protection from being infected. What is key is that fewer people in Australia will die, and get long Covid due to vaccination, and a weaker variant. Something like 1 million people in the UK, or almost 2% of the UK population has long Covid, assuming the diagnosis and reports are correct. 

3 doses are a stop-gap until there is a universal vaccine for all variants that can prevent infections over a longer-term- assuming Covid does not continue to get weaker by itself with new more infectious variants. 

Deltacron is a different kettle of fish….discovered in Cyprus. The beat goes on.

By the time Omicron "arrived"(it was probably already in the community) which was after it was discovered in South Africa, Australia had scrapped lockdowns, social distancing and the wearing of masks. With great fanfare they declared Freedom Day. The government decided on a wait and see approach with Omicron so to say Omicron breached the world's strictest protocols is nonsense.....there were non to breach other than the 80%+ double vaxxed. Had they persisted with lockdowns the economy would have collapsed and even now as infections balloon they are still persisting with a far less strict approach than previous .