Random Rant Thread

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Some more good news from South Africa, although it's foolish to simply extrapolate it to other countries.

Another important thing is that the length of hospital stay seems much reduced from that in the Delta wave.

Also, don't forget that South Africa had a pretty horrible Delta wave in the summer, and it subsided a while ago.

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OK, add two more NYC friends to the Omicron tally. One of them hasn't been boosted, and has gotten fairly sick. Not sick enough to be hospitalized, but can't get out of the bed. The other one has been boosted, and is asymptomatic.

I must say this: Most of my friends, even the asymptomatic ones, sound pretty shocked, stunned, and to be perfectly frank, it's telling. Almost all of them are fairly well-off Professional Managerial Class people. They were always the first to mask up when the guidance changed, work remotely, refrain from eating out, use delivery services extensively, be the first in line to get vaccinated etc. For them, if just subconsciously, Covid-19 has been something that they were very concerned about yet could totally stay away from anyway. It was basically a disease for essential workers, laborers, lower-class African Americans, Hispanics, rural rednecks and so on. They never actually considered it to be *real* danger for them personally, as long as they kept up with the latest information.

And now, Omicron shattered that illusion, and they had to face the reality of viral diseases. Needless to say, many of them are not the type of people who can deal psychologically well with that kind of stuff.

Thankfully, Omicron does not seem to make you too sick if vaccinated and boosted unless your immune system is relatively weak. But the psychological damage for a very loud and visible section (PMC) of the population seems very real, and that's another concern about Omicron.

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The longer I've been in Japan, the more I realized that there are now an absolutely huge number of non-Japanese people living in Japan who are very fluent in the language. It seems that Covid disrupted their lives in so many ways though, and I feel truly sorry for them.

Anyway, it was just unthinkable 15, even 10 years ago.

I guess the sheer volume of information and tools available online these days drastically changed the situation. They can share information so quickly and comprehensively that it seems to take half the time nowadays for them to become reasonably good at the language, and there are so much more career and life opportunities in the Japanese society for foreigners outside the usual JET program route than before that their motivation level has gone through the roof, as it's very realistic for them to live and work in this country pretty comfortably almost indefinitely now.

I mean, in the last few months, I met two Americans, one German dude, and one English girl through my friends, all of whom are in their 20s/early 30s now and very passionate for the Japanese culture (mostly pop culture, of course), and on those occasions I didn't have to say a single word of English. Not even a word. It was 100% Japanese, no problem. The foreigners in Japan more often than not couldn't speak a word of Japanese - meaning perhaps 100 words at most - when I was young.

The German dude in particular was quite shocking; He's the youngest, and had studied Japanese hard only for four or five years. But boy. It would probably take five minutes of a phone conversation for me to realize he's actually not a native speaker.

I wasn't quite aware of such a drastic social shift for some reason. Things are perhaps getting better in this country even if they don't look it. Those non-Japanese people who learned the language even though they did not grow up with it as a child or anything are all hugely intellectually capable. The difficulty of Japanese for (non-Korean) non-Japanese people is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it *is* very difficult. Takes a brain *and* passion for sure.

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As for our new friend Omicron, it still looks like the dude's not really replacing Delta in England, but just adding a whole lot of new infections by breezing past the neutralization layer of the immunity.

Not much more to say about it at this point, really. We'll need several more days to assess the situation, but for what it's worth, things do look to me kind of better than feared. I don't want to jinx it, but Mr. Omicron does not feel as robust as Delta even though it's a hell of a lot more transmissible. Something feels off about this variant, but I'm of course talking out of my ass for real here.

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Speaking of Japanese fluency, for a native English speaker who did NOT grow up with the language as a child, this American dude for example is probably as good as good can get, as fluent as fluent can get.



This is 100% native-level Japanese with zero foreign accent, textbook standard Japanese even, and almost no one can even dream of reaching this level even after 40 years of living in Japan. But the German dude was actually pretty close, and the other guys weren't far behind either. I was blown away. Maybe today's young generations are significantly better with languages in general or something.

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OK, a Flemish friend of mine sounded absolutely pissed at the Dutch "refugees".

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Re: my post about the PMC people in NYC and Covid, I should've made one thing clear: Yes, Covid *was* very real for them during the first wave where many New Yorkers passed away and the city was basically locked down for a while. It was overwhelmingly POC and "essential workers" that lost their lives, but there were quite a few PMC people who succumbed to the disease as well.

But for the ones who "survived" that, the pandemic was subconsciously over - as long as they did all the "right things" in their daily life, that is - especially after the summer wave which didn't affect them at all. The overwhelming majority of PMC type of New Yorkers who lost their lives due to Covid did in the first wave, and most of them were old. After that, only the foolish and careless would be in trouble, they thought.

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*For what it's worth*, Omicron's strange behavior in South Africa, even with the potentially South Africa-specific things taken in to consideration, such as the high convalescent rate, holiday season etc., makes me feel that there's something about this variant that's markedly different from the other ones.

I'm not even talking about the observed lower hospitalization/fatality rates; I'm talking about the high decline rate. Note how persistent Delta has been. Hell, 1,500-2,000 Americans have been dying every day, and nearly all of them succumbed to Delta. Once you get a Delta wave, and hit its peak after agonizing weeks and months, it takes another several months for it to reach what you can call a "low level". And in many countries, that "low level" is still ridiculously high, and all of that despite the fact that at least a clear majority of the population have been vaccinated in most developed countries. Delta is extremely, extremely good at finding the weak ones among us. And needless to say, it gets right back up as the collective immunity wanes, as it did in Western Europe, and possibly will soon even in Japan.

Omicron has been a different story so far. It climbed up faster than light in South Africa, and now is coming down faster than light. It's doing the climbdown way before the official infection number/rate hits anything that resembles a threshold. There are only two explanations for that, and one is that we've been missing a gargantuan number of asymptomatic and even symptomatic infections. The other one is, well, that Omicron is unique. I know that's not saying anything meaningful, but we just don't know shit at this point.

Yes, we are still at a very very early stage of this thing, and it's super dangerous to assume that we can extrapolate the South African case to others like that. But Delta behaved *normally* in South Africa, so...

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The decline rate is very important because speed matters.

So, conversely, the quick accumulation of hospitalizations, even though the overall *rate* is lower than in the previous waves, means bad news. Omicron's growth rate is exceptional. It's bad news no matter what.

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The lag between cases and deaths has been disconcertingly shorter in Germany than almost anywhere else, and that suggests low vaccination rates among older people. The official vaccination numbers do show that as I said in a previous post, but I kind of suspect it's even worse in reality. The lag is just VERY short in Germany.

The vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine disinformation are most problematic when they affect older people.

The lag might have something to do with the way they collect the data, but is too short for that to be the explanation.

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Ah.

All of my gut-feeling-based optimism on Omicron and actual positive news coming from South Africa and parts of the UK combined can't beat the horror of the sheer volumes of new infections in the US, and the disgusting icing on the cake is that many of them are still Delta, for which all of my hopium talk is 120% useless.

The peak of this wave in the US might be monstrously high.

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In case anyone's still wondering, yes, it's still overwhelmingly bars, restaurants and night clubs. There are still people who scream, "But the data say otherwise!" but I trust you understand that people get infected at those places and then proceed to infect their families and colleagues at their houses and offices. Of course "household" and "office" top the list, but in a way, a bit of a Foucauldian way, these should belong on a different level/category.

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One thing that is common among all Covid skeptics and Covid-no-big-deal-ers is this assumption that there are a huuuuuuuge number of untested asymptomatic cases out there.

For which there is no evidence whatsoever, of course. Zero evidence. I used to have the same assumption until, I don't know, maybe Spring-Summer 2020? So I understand the sentiment. But I came to the conclusion that it's just bullshit.

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From The Guardian:

While Omicron takes hold across Europe, parts of Asia are still battling the Delta variant.

"still"

That's why Europe's current daily covid deaths per capita is much, much higher than Asia's?

The paper makes a big deal out of South Korea's "huge Delta surge," yet Germany's daily deaths per capita is more than three times as big as South Korea's "record-level" deaths. And none of them have been caused by Omicron as far as I know, which means it's that one, the other guy whose name starts with 'D'.

I see cases have been increasing rapidly in Italy lately too, and where is the evidence that they are all Omicron? Yeah, there's none. Because they aren't.

Etc.

Europe is "still" battling Delta big time too, dummie. Omicron is going strong on top of the high level of Delta infections, not in place of them.

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The data from Australia suggest that Omicron is *inherently* less virulent than Delta.