Credit to President Biden for this, from me a serious critic:
Biden has just shut down travel to the USA from the impacted countries in southern Africa.
My only qualm:
Ban does not go into effect for a few days. Wish it were sooner, but that might not be possible.
Bottom line: Biden has done the right thing here. I hope it buys us a little time we would not otherwise have had.
The WHO declared the new variant Omicron, rather than Nu. I guess Omicron sounds more sinister, and the WHO’s handlers back in Beijing weren’t keen on the Xi one that would normally come after Nu.
As far as I can tell, there’s a Mu but no Nu, so Nu would have normally been next in a sensible alphabetic approach. But the whole alphabetic approach was political from the start, lest people call it the Wuhan / Chinese coronavirus like all virologists for all time would have done until until now.
Voters are reporting that they are devastated to learn Biden is just as racist as Trump was when he restricted travel from China. Just like when Trump did it, Biden’s racist travel ban is obviously an attempt to keep people of color out of our country while using COVID as an excuse.
NY bans elective medical procedures to make space for the O variant they haven’t found yet.
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Friday to postpone elective hospital surgeries — something that hasn’t been done since the worst of the initial coronavirus outbreaklast year.
Hochul said she made the move to deal with staffing shortages and boost bed capacity amid an anticipated “spike” in new cases and the emergence of the new Omicron variant in South Africa. The strain is named after a letter of the Greek alphabet.
“We’ve taken extraordinary action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and combat this pandemic. However, we continue to see warning signs of spikes this upcoming winter, and while the new Omicron variant has yet to be detected in New York State, it’s coming,” Hochul said.
She’s going to kill people in a different way than Cuomo and his nursing home covid debacle, here by withholding routine care.
In what’s no doubt completely unrelated, NY implemented their health care worker vaccine mandate last month, lost 15% of their workers, and was already having to cut back on services, something that sure makes a lot of sense if you’re strapped for capacity…
To help manage any staffing shortfalls, Gov. Kathy Hochul late Monday signed a six-page executive order declaring a statewide emergency. The order allows health care workers from other parts of the country to temporarily fill empty positions and lets the state to deploy the National Guard if needed.
The effects of the mandate have already been felt throughout the state. In some areas, for example, inpatient elective surgeries have been postponed due to staff shortages.
In New York City, about 5,000 employees at the city’s 11 public acute-care hospitals remain unvaccinated (out of a total of 43,000 employees), Mitchell Katz, MD, head of NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal health system in the U.S., said at a news conference Monday.
Hospitalization levels are already at very bad numbers in many areas of the state. With Covid ICU hospitalizations (not just “the sniffles” conspiracy theories) also at record numbers matching the previous spikes.
I guess you’d rather government subsidize airlifts/transport from those areas into the cities? And then have the whole system hit capacity again anyways, as it’s on a sharp rise overall for the state too? (similar rise to the than the last spike before vaccines. At levels not seen since before May.) It’s the “libral marxists!” job to pay for the anti-vax “no mandate! my freedumbs!” ‘choices’?
The job of public health policy is to get ahead of the problem and not wait until refrigeration trucks are needed to hold bodies because the morgues and funeral homes can’t burn them fast enough…
The new variant possibly incoming is reason to prevent things from being at peak levels before that even spreads there. And yes, it’s “here”. Just like it was for months in 2020 when instead we pretended there were “13 cases, soon to be zero”.
A full 10% of passengers from S Africa to the netherlands today tested positive https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/27/amsterdam-omicron-covid-variant-lockdown/
Omicron reasons for concern
Data from South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases show how Omicron over the past two weeks quickly crowded out the highly transmissible Delta variant. It now makes up around 90% of infections in the country’s most-populous province, home to its largest city, Johannesburg.
One in 10 passengers aboard two flights that landed in the Netherlands from South Africa on Friday tested positive for Covid-19, Dutch authorities said Saturday, as governments restricted travel to hinder the spread of the new Omicron variant.
The U.K has confirmed two cases of the new Covid-19 strain omicron, Health Minister Sajid Javid said. “The two cases are linked and there is a connection with travel to southern Africa,”
It won’t be a return to 2020. We have better mitigation strategies including:
Xi-renamed-in-his-honor Omicron tracker
Ironic “Xi” variant would end China’s “zero covid policy”
If you liked the worms / ivermectin blog, here’s a response to it taking the “it probably works” stance and addressing the various arguments.
The Xi-renamed-to-omicron variant found in Canada in recent travelers from Africa.
Xi-renamed-to-omicron variant roundup of expert opinions. Caution merited, travel bans likewise (not that they’ll work, but they’ll slow things down to prepare).
It’s really quite different, as this mutation-strain graph shows.
They’ll keep using it until it doesn’t work. Hey, it’s worked for almost two years, and they won the Presidency with it. They presume everyone is stupid until proven wrong (temporarily).
That is the unwritten Democrat platform, and has been every year since, at least 1968. My memory fades for elections before then.
Have you contracted the new COVID-19 variant?
High pulse rate and extreme fatigue are symptoms.
But not loss of taste or smell.
So is it here yet?
Well, it’s in Canada. But our “experts”, like the three blind mice, have not as of this moment been able to detect cases in the USA. Stand by for a sure thing. 
Discussion of a covid hospitalization risk scoring system.
TWiV 834: COVID-19 clinical update #90 with Dr. Daniel Griffin - YouTube (tried to get the start time about right)
From the transcript, lightly edited
—-
how do you get points? you do not want points this is like golf the the less points the better
score of zero two percent of those patients ended up in hospital that’s actually a little higher than most people would think right two percent
once you get up to a score of two you already have a risk of ending up in hospital of seven percent
once you get up to three that’s 12%
once you get up to four or higher that’s 30 percent
Tomorrow’s news today
This is breaking news. And it’s not good news. Easier just to offer you the link rather than copy and paste all the detail:
Moderna boss says vaccines likely no match for Omicron: FT
All right, I will copy and paste this last part:
His more alarming tone contrasts with efforts by politicians to project calm regarding Omicron.
US President Joe Biden said Monday the strain was “not a cause for panic”.
There is not a dull moment in this life. 
Of course it’s “no match”. Why be happy selling hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine, when you can turn around and a year later sell another hundreds of millions of doses of another vaccine? He’s afraid that the effects of Omicron will be dismissed as “mild” with the current vaccinations being credited, so he’s planting the seed now that the current vaccine will not be effective and everyone should be scared and lining up for the next one.
Come on, Shin, you’ve been saying all along to ‘follow the money’.
