Omicron – what’s not to like?

The more I learn about the Omigod variant (as opposed to simply imbibing what the ABC wants me to believe about it), the more it appeals to me. It’s turning out to be an epidemiologist’s dream variant – wildly infectious, little more capable of killing people than a bad cold, and bestowing upon its sufferers a broad spectrum of immunity to the earlier variants which it will, as a consequence, displace. If you haven’t had Covid yet, the likelihood, if you get it in future, is that it’ll be Omigod, and not one of its more virulent ancestors. And if you do get it, you’re unlikely to suffer badly from it.

Of course that will only intensify both the efforts of the bien pensant media to track down every single individual unlucky enough to be in the tiny minority who do have a rough time, and their ecstasy should they stumble, like grubstake gold fossickers, upon that vanishingly rare phenomenon, a fatality.

In return for giving you a nasty cold, Omigod will equip you with a substantial measure of protection from its much nastier (although far from apocalyptically virulent) ancestors. What’s not to like? All that will then stand in the way of your returning to the sort of life you had in 2019 will be the hysterical opposition of the bien pensants. They are terrified by Omigod, not from a fear of contagion, but from its reverse. Omigod threatens to bring to an end the eschatological dream in which they have been living and luxuriating for the last couple of years. The sense of belonging to a group facing a historic threat to existence has given their lives the semblance of meaning, made all the more agreeable by the private awareness that, unless they were old, fat or immunocompromised, their own chances of dying from Covid were tiny. They are fighting tooth and nail to preserve the catastrophic narrative, and doing their best to avert their eyes from the flood of data, first from South Africa, but drawing nearer by the day, that confirms the good news about Omigod.

The graphs below illustrate the dismal truth. The first shows new Covid cases in Australia over the last 90 days, appearing to grow exponentially. Below it is the picture for deaths, looking for all the world as if it’s trickling downwards, in defiance of the ‘case’ prevalence. How very dare it!?

But what about the world at large? Surely the plague continues to ravage our less fortunate neighbours? Nah, not really, guys, as the graphs below (in the same order) show. Sorry about that…

The Covidista caste will retort that it’s too early to relax and stop being terrified. The virus could still surprise us. Maybe. But not if the example of South Africa is anything to go by – and it should, given that this was where the Omigod variant began. That’s right, folks – South African Covid, unopposed as it has been by a high rate of vaccination, has completed the trajectory which all pathogenic viruses seem to take. It has mutated into one of the many coronaviruses that give us a runny nose, a headache, a scratchy throat and a temporary inability to enjoy the olfactory nuances of a good camembert, and which, because we don’t go to the trouble of giving them scary Greek names, we group under the rubric ‘common cold’.

Here are the South African 90-day graphs:

As we can see, the case numbers, in this country of the 74% unvaccinated population, are trending down, and the deaths are miniscule – 29 a day (7 -day average) in a population of 60 million, 45 million of whom are unvaccinated, is barely statistically significant.

Already, the sheer infectiousness of Omigod is rendering the rules devised to counter its ancestors simply unworkable:

“Prof Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, told BBC Breakfast that in time people with Covid should be allowed to “go about their normal lives” as they would with a common cold.

“If the self-isolation rules are what’s making the pain associated with Covid, then we need to do that perhaps sooner rather than later,” he said.”

In other words, Britain’s NHS is being overwhelmed, not by unusually high cases of dying Covid-sufferers, but by the staff absenteeism brought about by the perverse rules it did so much to frame. All this is tragic news for the bien pensants. Obsessions like Climate Change and Covid serve the purpose for humans that grooming serves for chimps – the giving and receiving of reassurances of continued membership of the tribe, between people for whom God is no longer an option. Once one bien pensant breaks ranks, a rout is not surely far away, and they will have to find another outlet for the simian need for tribal ritual. Let’s hope it’s one that they’ll pay for themselves, without their habitual recourse to the public purse. But the rest of us can give thanks to dear old South Africa, for providing such a congenial home for Covid, and thereby bequeathing to us an organism that may just finally get us out of this nightmare.

Happy 2022, Harrumpfers!