Omicron notes

[brainwane]

I think the kinds of cautions I am taking (meeting outdoors instead of indoors with people from outside my household, wearing N95 masks when in shared indoor spaces with other people) still prevent COVID infection, but must be kept up rigorously. And COVID cases everywhere, especially in New York City where I live, are shooting sky-high and are going to be record-breaking high starting in about a week and going through part of January.

There's a projection at https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-update-dec-17 that I found helpful: "models suggest that Omicron will start spiking case rates between Christmas and New Years. On a national level, we will probably peak in the second week of January." But we're going to run out of tests and lab capacity to properly test people, so the reported numbers will undercount the true case numbers.

The big outbreak at Cornell -- 1,345 cases in the last week, where nearly everyone was vaccinated and many were boosted -- is a worrying sign. Cornell says: "The vast majority of cases are linked to off-campus student social gatherings where masking and other public health measures were not followed....there has been no evidence of classroom virus transmission."

My cautious working assumption is that this is accurate, that transmission happened indoors among people who were unmasked or wearing poor-quality masks or wearing masks incorrectly. I am on the lookout for evidence that Omicron is better than previous variants at transmitting outdoors, or transmitting among people who are wearing high-quality masks correctly, but haven't found anything yet saying that.