Covid-19 Variant Omicron Scrabbles Travel Restrictions

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

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22 Responses

  1. Michael Cain says:

    …a new round of countries rushed to cut off or restrict travel to the southern region of Africa.

    I admit that I’m somewhat perplexed by the President’s announcement that it will be too dangerous to allow people from those countries to enter the US on Monday, but apparently not too dangerous the preceding Saturday or Sunday. And excepting a whole list of categories. Being the sibling of a US permanent resident (to pick one category from the list) doesn’t confer any sort of protection against being a carrier of the virus.Report

  2. Lou Callahan says:

    Lockdowns in highly vaccinated countries are not a sign of the vaccine working.
    Advice from medical professionals to have the vaccinated “mask up” in their own homes, are not a sign of the vaccine working.

    … and all that was with Delta, 4 mutations away from complete vaccine avoidance.

    This is the end of the beginning. We can all get started calling Omicron “SARS3” now.

    “Four mutations is very very unlikely.” — welp, now we’ve got 32.Report

  3. fillyjonk says:

    My prediction: it’s already in the US, it’s maybe what’s driving some of the northern surges we’re seeing, but because our testing-for-strains is far, far, far worse than South Africa’s, it’s not been picked up yet and may not be until later this week.

    Remains to be seen “how bad.” I am holding out hope that at least vaccinated individuals will have SOME protection against severe disease; most in-the-know epidemiologists seem to say that complete immune escape is highly unlikely. But I don’t like this at all. I am bracing to either hear “you can’t travel back home after Christmas” (FINE, THEN I WILL TEACH ONLINE FROM MY MOM’S HOUSE) or I will get back here and be told we’re going all online for spring. My only consolation is that the “don’t travel interstate” advice will not come – if it winds up coming – until AFTER I have arrived at my mom’s, about 2 1/2 weeks from now.

    I don’t know that anything could have made this better, I don’t even know if high vaccine rates or “vaccine equity” or sending all the vaccines to the Global South while telling folks in the so-called developed world to wait on Dose 2 (let alone boosters) would make this better. I don’t know if the whole vaccine/masking thing had not become an idiotic political football if things would be better. I know how I FEEL (that if people had just masked and assumed the epidemiologists knew what they were doing, things would be better), but there’s no way to rewind the tape and run an “Earth 2” scenario.

    I am just very discouraged right now and trying to acclimate myself to the idea that the life I lived for the roughly first 50 years of it is never coming back, and my reality now is “stay home as much as you possibly can, avoid other people, wear a mask in public, and teach half online for the students who wind up having to isolate” and I’m just angry at everything right now. I’ll stop being so angry if omicron turns out to be a nothingburger but I don’t think it’s going to be a nothingburger, and who knows what’s coming AFTER omicron?Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to fillyjonk says:

      One of the hospital’s in Soweto gave a briefing that indicated that 65% of people coming to the hospital with severe disease are unvaccinated, most of the rest partially vaccinated. Also the ages in skew young in a country in which mostly just the old vaccinate. That pretty much resembles the kind of breakdowns the U.S. currently has with Delta.

      Probably a good argument for boosters here. I’ve not gotten a boost, but had been thinking about it.Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    I remember in the early days of lockdown how much of a pain in the butt just being in lockdown was. We had people complaining about it and it hadn’t been a week. Like, not just Trumpers either!

    Well, we’re coming up on two years and talking about “three weeks to slow the spread” gets discussions about how people who argue that it didn’t “work” didn’t understand what “slow the spread” meant.

    I don’t know what more can be done. We have vaccines and we made them available. We manufacture N95 masks and make them available. We’ve got expensive rapid tests and they’ve been made available. Hand sanitizers is in stores again and it’s available.

    The virus is one of those that doesn’t have to get into the interesting parts of your body (the parts with an active immune system) to replicate. It just has to get into your sinuses and can do what it needs to there for a while before your body even notices. So fully vaccinated people can get it and spread it and so now what.

    It seems obvious to me that the whole “that thing we failed to do for the last two years” probably isn’t going to be perfected in the next two years.

    My questions that I want answered all begin with the assumption that Covid is now endemic. So now what. And messages about how we just need to do what we’ve failed to do over the last two years but do it right this time strike me as pie-in-the-sky… especially when dotted with explanations for why so-and-so not following the rules we want everybody to follow was not a particularly notable breach.Report

    • JS in reply to Jaybird says:

      Jesus, this website is going down the drain.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

      Where’s the failure? I know I’ve said this before, but it’s really important. We slowed the spread enough that we mostly were able to treat it without the health care system getting overwhelmed. As we treated it, we learned more about treatment, and developed new techniques. And amazingly we came up with vaccines for a virus! The vaccines and new treatments reduce the severity of the disease, to the point that healthy, vaccinated people under 70 have no legitimate reason to be afraid.

      It makes sense to aggressively slow down the spread of a new variant until we know if it’s going to be more dangerous, and then if it’s not, to go back to our reasonable precautions.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Pinky says:

        For what it’s worth, I think that what we did in the first few months was the right thing.

        (By “we”, I mean, “my household”.)

        We stopped doing stuff.
        We cancelled vacations.
        We stopped going to the grocery store.
        We stopped leaving the house entirely.

        There was, like, a month where I only left the house to do socially distanced jogging or to get the mail or package delivery. Oh, yeah. And we’d go for drives for fun.

        I remember the first time at the end of that month where I left to fill up the gas tank and drop off the check at the credit union for the mortgage and that might not have been the most fun I’d had in a month, it was definitely in the top five fun things.

        We kept it up for a good long while. I wandered slowly back to work and had a scare or two where someone I worked with had also worked with someone who tested positive for covid so I had to be quarantined in the basement for a week (dodged a bullet, he got the ‘vid, I didn’t).

        And we got our everything delivered and our idea of a date was driving up to Woodland Park and turning around and coming back home and, if we were really feeling spicy, going through the drive-through at Wendy’s.

        For, like, a year and a half until we got our vax.

        And if we want to look at that year and a half and say “hurray! we did it! SUCCESS!”, I’m down.

        My questions that I want answered all begin with the assumption that Covid is now endemic. So now what. And messages about how we just need to do what we’ve failed to do over the last two years but do it right this time strike me as pie-in-the-sky… especially when dotted with explanations for why so-and-so not following the rules we want everybody to follow was not a particularly notable breach.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

          I’m still not okay with how you’re using the word “failed”. Did we stop a virus? No, we did not burn off Earth’s crust, which is the only way we could say we stopped a virus. We did the things that we should have to get us here. Granted, we also did a lot of nonsense, but we didn’t know that all of it was nonsense at the time. I have yet to buy a bottle of hand sanitizer.

          You and I are at the same point, despite our differing analyses. You don’t want to keep doing things that didn’t eliminate the virus and are still being pushed, and I don’t want to keep doing things that got us to our present situation where we have the technology to handle the problem.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Pinky says:

            I admit to rarely seeing the last 19ish months seen as a success (or even the best we could have expected).

            Maybe I should start seeing it as “hey, we did the best we could with what we had.”

            And now what. My questions all begin with the assumption that Covid is now endemic.Report

            • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

              Calm assessment isn’t a big thing these days. But sure, however we got here, whether success or failure, today the government wants me to wrap a thong around my face to go to the grocery store.Report

  5. Kazzy says:

    I’m a little confused about travel restrictions. I read recently that the US had just resumed allowing international travelers in. But… I know plenty of people who went overseas. So were we allowing US citizens to go back and forth but not allowing folks from other countries in? I understand this isn’t a binary… limiting travel may help slow things down in a way that is good and helpful.

    But… what are we even actually doing? Does anyone know?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

      But… what are we even actually doing? Does anyone know?

      “Something”Report

    • JS in reply to Kazzy says:

      Precautionary work. Omincron might be more contagious, less contagious, vaccine resistant (although that’s not a problem. mRNA boosters tailored to Omicron could be out in six weeks from deciding it’s a problem), more deadly, less deadly, make you more sick, less sick, yadda, yadda, yadda.

      It’s different enough in the spike protein that countries are trying to slow it’s spread in case the modifications get it around the vaccines (South Africa has remarkably low vaccination rates, so if it’s better against current vaccines it’s by accident), so as to simply buy time for the vaccine companies to push out and trial a targeted booster.

      Building one only takes a few days, testing it several weeks — they’ll want to check antibody levels and check to see what the timing should be between your last dose/booster of the original vaccine and an omicron specific booster in case your immune reactions step on each other in some weird way.

      So worst case, and it’s a big problem, preventing early spread buys time for that testing so we can roll out boosters fast.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to JS says:

        Not saying we shouldn’t do it but… what is “it”? Were we allowing international travel for the past 18 months or no? Will we ban travel from these countries? Or “ban” it?Report

  6. Kazzy says:

    They just discovered Omicran in Europe at least 11 days ago.

    My hunch: It’s already here and may be a factor in the recent uptick of cases.

    We aren’t going to stop this thing or stay ahead of it. We need to learn how to deal with it.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

      Not to toot my own horn, but we just got our first confirmed case, from a test on 11/29 involving someone who returned from South Africa on 11/21. So, it’s been here at least 11 days.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        One question that I haven’t seen answered yet: Have there been any deaths associated with Omicron?

        I know that Alpha and Delta have plenty. If Omicron doesn’t… well, it’s early yet, I guess.Report

        • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

          I feel like the articles I read that quote real scientists and doctors who’ve studied the thing mostly say that it’s too early to tell what to make of Omicron and that the number of mutations matters far less than the specifics of those mutations.

          All the other articles would have you convinced Omicron has already killed more people than, well, anything.Report