Countries are beginning lock-downs over Omicron. Is the fear justified?
Dr. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, who discovered the Omicron variant —
“Looking at the mildness of the symptoms that we are seeing — apparently, there’s no reason for panicking as we don’t see severely ill patients… The most predominant complaint is severe fatigue for one or two days, with headache, body aches and pain.
Some will have a scratchy throat and some will have a dry cough [that] comes and goes. Those are more or less the big symptoms we have seen.”
Paul Elias Alexander, Ph.D., with the Brownstone Institute:
“The WHO has said the Omicron variant can spread more quickly than other variants. Likely true. The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave.
They are mutable and mutate, and via the Muller’s ratchet theory, we expect these to be milder and milder mutations, not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead end.
The virus will mutate downward so that it can use the host (us) to propagate itself via our cellular metabolic machinery. The Delta variant has shown us this: It is very infectious and mostly non-lethal — specially for children and healthy people …
[T]here is no reporting of increased virulence/lethality of this new Omicron variant, and this will remain the case based on what we’ve seen from Delta and prior variants. There are no guarantees, but we operate based on risk and all things point to the same for this new variant.
Just because there might be a wave in South Africa does not mean there will be waves in the U.S. or Israel or other places with greater natural immunity. This was the prize of letting people enjoy day-to-day living.
The nations that have ended lockdowns are likely to move past this new variant scare, and be fine. This is more of an overreaction by the WHO and governments and much ado about nothing.”
