I didn't see it on the Web, just saw it on the news, some guy extolling it's virtues as a covid passport.
Which swedes and where are they reporting? This was two years ago, imagine it now with the covid fear factor ramped up.
This story has been widely reported and this set of comments on a version published in Newsweek has a couple of people being a bit more realistic about it. A story like this one plays into the fears of the qanon crowd and gives them another crumb of information to deliberately misunderstand and misinterpret what is actually happening, this kind of thing will get twisted into they are trying to control you and tag you and will be used as evidence to support crazy claims. You're all tagged already if you carry a smartphone.
I hope you don't mind me mentioning that you are, by nature, more pessimistic than me; you have self-confessed this here in the past, although I do worry at times too. Your comment above is inspiring to me as I have not been following the data as you have been doing, Jim. This is very welcome news Thanks for posting.
I don't know what quanon is, I use a ten quid tesco old phone Er indoors is the smartphone user but I do have an android with no SIM in it for taking pics, easier to stick in my pocket than my DSLR
Should have been QAnon my mistake after a lifetime of typing u after q And I should have known you would be off grid They can still track your ten quid Tesco phone
Yes Mike I am more pessimistic than most people, in the case of COVID I would argue that is because I have been driven by a good understanding of the cellular mechanics which has allowed me to some extent to interpret the published data on SARS-CoV-2. I did study Biology for a year amongst my other studies and I got a distinction in that particular set of units, cell replication and gene expression along with cellular respiration (the intrinsic energy conversion process in cells) were part of that course and while I've forgotten a lot of the details I retain enough to allow me to interpret scientific publications. In this case my assessment of what I am reading and listening to so far with Omicron is that we have a really good chance that we are in the end game, one caveat is that it currently looks like two epidemics in the UK both Delta and Omicron but it is thought that Omicron will eventually displace Delta and that is important we really want to see Delta go away without it further mutating or forming a hybrid with Omicron. The one danger with Omicron is that because it is going to infect vast numbers of people, however mildly, those numbers come back to the mutation problem, the more hosts the virus gets teh more chance it gets to mutate and the issue is which mutations are conserved in the next variant. It's looking like the real danger with SARS-CoV-2 was the threat it posed to specific tissues, Omicron appears to replicate best in the major bronchial tubes but has a harder time of replicating in the alveoli, the bronchial tubes are quite hardy we get a lot of infections there throughout our lives but the alveoli are extremely delicate so the Omicron good news is that its mutations somehow result in it not replicating as easily deep in the lungs but it still gets to replicate and survive in the upper airways and more people will survive it as a result, it is also good news that the incubation period is now just a couple of days as people will realise they are sick quicker and longer term infect fewer people. We can only hope but it is looking good we've had just over three weeks with this variant so far and it's not a disaster yet, that does not mean that we don't need to be very careful for the next couple of months though, care is still needed. edit: my point about the alveoli is actually an oversimplification as there is quite a lot of evidence to show that SARS-CoV-2 damages many other tissues particularly in the vascular system but the primary route to death has been lung failure so anything that helps that be less severe is good.
That's quite unlikley to happen, some will need a further booster mostly the immunocompromised cancer patients and people like my friend Lesley who are on drugs for Crohn's disease. There might be one more booster for a variant but I really think it is going to burn out this coming year, it will remain more dangerous than the flu most likely but most of us should be able to live with it, the real issue will be the next pandemic as this happened as a result of of humans encroaching on environments we don't normally mix with and climate change and human environmental expansion drives that mixing these days. I'll post one of these screen grabs again, all that cyan colour is Delta and that little red branch is Omicron, you can see that a lot of branches have died out already very low incidence, now look back at the left of the graph at the root and imagine that is the red bit but back in Nov 2019, that's what happened this whole graph is what SAR-CoV-2 looked like before we ever knew about it the branches before 2019 that we can't see didn't infect humans and many of those branches probably still exist in bats but like the human versions they will have moved on a lot already and one version did infect humans. The story of a virus is never ending in this case it crossed paths with humanity and became part of our story but it has existed for millions of years, a long long time, this thing had ancestors, those ancestors survived to eventually jump to humans but vast numbers of them died out, viruses have a very short lifecycle but they, like us, have an unbroken chain of existence going all the way back to the start of life on this planet.
One of the things that has been found in South Africa with Omicron is that many people are being diagnosed through admission testing protocols as Covid positive for Omicron, however they were not admitted for Covid, the SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis is incidental. This is a good thing, it indicates milder illness, although in this specific case people who need dialysis really don't want to be getting diagnosed with Covid as well.
