January 31st, 2022
This newsletter will be a little more opinionated than normal as I feel that it is time to call a spade a spade as it relates to children's health in this pandemic. I do not expect everyone to agree with me. However, as always discourse is key and you are welcome to send me your thoughts.
The data is showing us that we are in a much better place from a death and risk perspective despite massive case volume! The world around masking, testing and quarantining needs to leave the alpha/beta/delta protocol world and enter endemic omicron.
It is time to release the children from all of these annoying and mentally taxing realities. Kids are NOT the problem and no longer need masks unless they have self risk based on immune or disease parameters. It is time to shift the public policy perspective to protection of the individual through self behavior, i.e. vaccinate, boost and wear an N95 mask. The remainder of the children need a normal life that includes seeing facial expressions, being educated in person, reducing the mental stress burden of pandemic fear and so much more.
No change here: All vaccines are no longer working well to prevent transmission of SARS2 variant Omicron. The good news remains that the vaccines ABSOLUTELY prevent bad outcomes which should be the message to all. Please get vaccinated if you have no prior Covid immunity and/or have natural disease but also have major risk factors. Omicron is 91% less risky then Delta. However, 9% comparative residual risk in over a 100 million unvaccinated is still a large number of seriously sick people that could be hospitalized with a subset possibly dying.
North Carolina is beginning to turn the corner on this huge wave as is the rest of the country.
The 7 day moving average of cases for the US in recent weeks has dropped from its peak of over 800,000 cases per day to less than 600,000. Omicron is outcompeting Delta based on the data with 98+% of cases being Omicron. Early data shows that Omicron is killing less people than Delta by a wide margin.
If you have had 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine or had previous natural infection, you have a very very small risk of a significant hospitalization and therefore death from the Delta or Omicron variant based on statistics overall, however, you are likely to get some illness from Omicron now as it has escaped the two dose series protection and boosters as well.
If my risk of death is 0.000033 once vaccinated with a two dose series or survived natural infection coupled to the fact that the vaccines no longer effectively prevent against transmission, what are we talking about then??? What is the big deal now? Are we not at a really good place in the pandemic? Interesting questions to ponder.
As it stands today, the United States has had 74 million known cases and almost 880,000 deaths.
If you did not read the newsletter about an Integrative approach to health in the COVID era, read this link and this link.
As with the first newsletter on this topic, keep solace with the fact that there is a 99+% chance of survival for all of us regardless of vaccination. However,
mathematically, you now have a 99.9998% chance of survival once vaccinated and the vaccine safety for the mRNA vaccines continues to look good.
Why take on that extra risk?
Questions:
Now that you have new data on Omicron and risk, are you getting a booster?
65 % say No
If you are high risk, are you getting a booster?
33 % say No
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Weblink for home website of Dr. M's WACF
For anyone interested in the whiteboard of poor viral killing capacity see Section III
