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Old Joe restricts travel to some countries because of Covid

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  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    All this scaremongering over something with even more mild symptoms:

    This is what the Branch Covidians are trying to fearmonger about:

    https://www.reuters.com/world/africa...ms-2021-11-28/
    A South African doctor who was one of the first to suspect a different coronavirus strain among patients said on Sunday that symptoms of the Omicron variant were so far mild and could be treated at home.




    Dr. Angelique Coetzee, a private practitioner and chair of South African Medical Association, told Reuters that on Nov. 18 she noticed seven patients at her clinic who had symptoms different from the dominant Delta variant, albeit "very mild".
    Now designated Omicron by the World Health Organization, the variant was detected and announced by South Africa's National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) on Nov. 25 from samples taken from a laboratory from Nov. 14 to Nov. 16.




    "Symptoms at that stage was very much related to normal viral infection. And because we haven't seen COVID-19 for the past eight to 10 weeks, we decided to test," she said, adding that the patient and his family turned out to be positive.




    On the same day, more patients came in with similar symptoms, which was when she realised there was "something else going on." Since then, she's seen two to three patients a day.
    "We have seen a lot of Delta patients during the third wave. And this doesn't fit in the clinical picture," she said, adding she alerted NICD on the same day with the clinical results.




    "Most of them are seeing very, very mild symptoms and none of them so far have admitted patients to surgeries. We have been able to treat these patients conservatively at home," she said.
    Coetzee, who is also on the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Vaccines, said unlike the Delta so far patients have not reported loss of smell or taste and there has been no major drop in oxygen levels with the new variant.




    Her experience so far has been that the variant is affecting people who are 40 or younger. Almost half of the patients with Omicron symptoms that she treated were not vaccinated.
    "The most predominant clinical complaint is severe fatigue for one or two days. With them, the headache and the body aches and pain."




    The news of the new variant emerging from South Africa prompted a swift reaction from several countries, including Britain, which on Friday imposed a travel ban on several southern African countries with immediate effect, a decision South Africa has strongly contested
    https://www.cityam.com/coronavirus-b...delta-variant/

    Hospitals and GPs across Southern Africa are increasingly reporting that the symptoms of the aggressive new Covid strain Omicron are “unusual but very mild,” according to various media in South Africa this weekend.

    Around 90 per cent of all new infections in the Johannesburg region are now caused by the Omicron strain but, so far, the Covid death rate and even hospital admissions appear not to be increasing significantly, local media report.

    Some experts are therefore cautiously optimistic that – if Omicron turns out to be less lethal but more contagious and dominant than the Delta variant – the new mutation may actually be a blessing in the sky.

    Mild symptoms


    Hundreds of infected people across Southern Africa reportedly complain of nausea, headaches, fatigue and a high pulse rate, but none seem to suffer from a loss of taste or smell, which has been the case with most other Covid mutations.

    Moreover, more and more medics across Southern Africa are confirming that most Omicron-infected patients merely have a severe headache, nausea or dizziness.

    Dr Angelique Coetzee told various newspapers in South Africa: “Symptoms are so different and so mild from [non-Omicron] Covid patients I have treated before.”

    A GP for over three decades, and chair of the South African Medical Association, she was the first African doctor to suggest to local authorities Covid had mutated into a new strain.

    Coetzee reportedly said the symptoms “did not make immediate sense”, with patients including young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with fatigue and a young child with a high pulse rate.

    Blessing in the sky


    Looking at the first data coming out of Southern Africa, virologist Marc van Ranst said this weekend that “if the omicron variant is less pathogenic but with greater infectivity, allowing Omicron to replace Delta, this would be very positive.”

    The WHO warned that preliminary evidence suggests the variant has an increased risk of reinfection and may spread more rapidly than other strains, including Delta.

    They said there is early evidence to suggest Omicron has an “increased risk of reinfection” and its rapid spread in South Africa suggests it has a “growth advantage”.

    “It is extremely important we need to closely monitor the clinical data of Omicron patients in South Africa and worldwide,” Van Ranst stressed.

    The variant has more than 30 mutations – around twice as many as the Delta variant – which make it more transmissible and evade the protection given by prior infection or vaccination.

    Meanwhile, officials in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Czech Republic, Italy as well as the UK have confirmed the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus has appeared in their respective countries, leaving governments around the world scrambling to stop the spread.

    Nearly two years since the start of the pandemic that has claimed more than 5 million lives around the world, countries are on high alert.

    In the Netherlands, 61 people on two flights from Cape Town to South Africa tested positive for Covid upon arrival in Amsterdam.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
    Omicron seems to be super contagious. It might rapidly become the dominant strain.
    There doesn't seem to be any actual evidence of that. Just fearmongering suppositions and moronic countries like Israel locking down despite not having any cases (EDIT: sorry, ONE case)and having literally almost every citizen at least double vaxxed if not triple vaxxed. And then doing this: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/omnic...-israel-687223
    Last edited by Gondwanaland; 11-28-2021, 10:40 AM.

    Leave a comment:


  • rogue06
    replied
    Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
    Omicron seems to be super contagious. It might rapidly become the dominant strain.
    Have any of the variants not been called super contagious?

    What's more important is how lethal is it.

    Leave a comment:


  • firstfloor
    replied
    Omicron seems to be super contagious. It might rapidly become the dominant strain.

    Leave a comment:


  • seanD
    replied
    Originally posted by seer View Post
    It's never going to end - is it....
    Nope. Unless we the people forcefully end it.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    Originally posted by Faber View Post
    It's interesting that this new African variant is called omicron variant. They bypassed the Greek letter xi. I wonder why?

    xi.jpg
    Yep, and IIRC it's the WHO who has been doing the naming, so not surprised they skipped naming one after their boss.

    At least skipping Nu made sense, because it would sound like you're saying New Variant instead of Nu variant when you say it out loud. This one, well, the explanation is plain.

    Leave a comment:


  • Faber
    replied
    It's interesting that this new African variant is called omicron variant. They bypassed the Greek letter xi. I wonder why?

    xi.jpg

    Leave a comment:


  • seer
    replied
    It's never going to end - is it....

    Leave a comment:


  • Thoughtful Monk
    replied
    What amazes me is how slow the travel ban is taking affect in the US. It's on Monday. Over in Europe, it's immediate. CNN was telling about one flight from South Africa to I think the Netherlands that the passengers found out about the ban half-way through the flight. They were stuck in the airport for while the officials tried to figure out what to do with them.

    I don't know if the travel ban is a good idea or not. I lean towards it is but I'm a cautious person.

    Other point, if the government really needed to move fast, I wouldn't count on it. It's become too bureaucratic and how many companies have gone down because they couldn't react fast enough. I experienced this in my work life. When I start there, it was a Fortune 100 company. Now it struggles to find a reason to keep existing. Our government is going to collapse someday because it won't be able to react fast enough.

    Leave a comment:


  • rogue06
    replied
    Originally posted by tabibito View Post
    There is a long and growing list of countries that have banned travel from Africa, and the list of countries getting banned can be expected to lengthen in short order.
    Did any of them previously call such bans "xenophobic" and those who put them in place racist? And I do not recall old Joe (or any of the others in chorus from the left at the time echoing him) ever retracting such statements before taking the same sort of measures himself.

    Leave a comment:


  • alaskazimm
    replied
    I've heard the term "scareiant" used for this latest excuse to inflict draconian mandates.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    New York already pumping out the fear porn by declaring a state of emergency over the strain that hasn't even been detected in their state let alone the US:
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/york-decl...074026369.html

    Leave a comment:


  • CivilDiscourse
    replied


    Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/05/coronavirus-trump-closing-borders/

    As the world grapples with the spread of a new coronavirus known as Covid-19, Trump still seems to hold similar beliefs on borders. He flirted in the past week with suggestions for border restrictions that would probably do more harm than good. But experts warn that some draconian public health interventions — such as completely closing borders — can quickly become counterproductive. Once a disease has taken hold inside a country, the best options are domestic interventions by state and local public health authorities with ample support from the federal level.

    “I hope President Trump is not thinking about shutting down the borders completely, because then you really do have a situation in which we can’t help other nations and the disease will nonetheless be here,” said Amy Fairchild, an ethicist, public health historian, and dean of the Ohio State University College of Public Health. “We will only end up creating vulnerable, underserved populations in this country, and we’ll exacerbate the challenges of providing aid to African and Asian countries that have more fragile health care systems.”

    “You divert a lot of resources when you are focused on closing borders, rather than focusing on protecting your health workers, preparing your health systems, and enhancing your disease surveillance,” she told The Intercept. “You mistakenly think, ‘Oh, we closed our borders. We’re fine.’ But giving people the sense that they are the enemy, that they are the problem, makes people hide because they become very frightened of the consequences. They’re not sure that identifying themselves with the authorities will be something that has good consequences for them as we saw with Ebola.”

    SO-CALLED medieval methods of disease control — quarantines, closing borders, trapping people in outbreak areas — can work, at least for a time. Interventions like barring entry to non-Americans who were recently in China may have initially slowed the spread of Covid-19 in the United States. “We have, through some very good early decisions — decisions that were actually ridiculed at the beginning. We closed up our borders to flights coming in from certain areas, areas that were hit by the coronavirus and hit pretty hard,” Trump said last Thursday. “A lot of people thought we shouldn’t have done it that early, and we did, and it turned out to be a very good thing.”

    The Centers for Disease Control believes the spread of the disease is unavoidable. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s national center for immunization and respiratory diseases, last Wednesday. But asked about it a day later, Trump offered a completely contradictory judgment. “Well, I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he began before launching into a meandering response. Reality upended the president’s incoherent pronouncements as word soon emerged that Covid-19 has likely been spreading undetected for around six weeks in Washington state, where the first U.S. deaths from it were reported this past weekend. Trump does now admit that “additional cases in the U.S. are likely.”

    © Copyright Original Source

    Leave a comment:


  • firstfloor
    replied
    Two Omicron cases found in the UK today. You can’t stop it traveling.

    Leave a comment:


  • tabibito
    replied
    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
    Surely you don't expect a lack of flagrant hypocrisy in political rhetoric.

    Leave a comment:

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