After less than a month, the supposed emergency caused by the very mild Omicron variant is already coming to an end in South Africa, where it was first discovered.
According to reports from South Africa, new COVID-19 cases, suspected to be caused by the Omicron variant, nearly halved between Thursday, December 16 and Tuesday, December 21, going from 27,000 new cases to 15,424 nationwide.
“The drop in new cases nationally combined with the sustained drop in new cases seen here in Gauteng province, which for weeks has been the center of this wave, indicates that we are past the peak,” Marta Nunes, senior researcher at the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics department of the University of Witwatersrand, said in an interview.
“It was a short wave… and the good news is that it was not very severe in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,” Nunes said, adding that it is “not unexpected in epidemiology that a very steep increase, like what we saw in November, is followed by a steep decrease.”
This should come as a shock to no one, as the doctor responsible for first discovering the Omicron variant found it to be the mildest form of COVID-19 to date and recommended that people simply take care of it at home. In other words, it’s less deadly than the common cold.
I'm no longer using the term Omicron. It's the sniffles and thats what we will call it.
— Keean Bexte (@TheRealKeean) December 23, 2021
“Looking at the mildness of the symptoms that we are seeing, currently there is no reason for panicking, as we don’t see severely ill patients,” explained Chairwoman of the South African Medical Association and private practitioner Dr. Angelique Coetzee in an interview with Reuters.
“I also checked with the hospitals, some of the hospitals in my area, and one of the biggest hospitals that have one patient currently that’s COVID positive on a ventilator, and they don’t even know whether it’s COVID or whether it’s Delta, or whether it is Omicron related.”
NEW: From Reuters🚨
South African Doctor:
"Looking at the the mildness of the symptoms, there is no reason for panicking, as we don't see severely ill patients"
"The hype that's been created out there in the media & worldwide doesn't correlate with the clinical picture" pic.twitter.com/g7tSas0qqK
— Rosie's Omicron Dance Party (@DarnelSugarfoo) November 28, 2021
“We acknowledge that it might change going forward,” Coetzee continued, “but the hype that’s been created out currently out there in the media and worldwide doesn’t correlate with the clinical picture. And it doesn’t warrant to just cut us off from any travelling and ban South Africa as if we are the variants in the whole process.”
“It should not be like that.”
Indeed, despite all the fear and propaganda being used by governments worldwide to justify restrictions, the variant has been attributed to an almost non-existent number of deaths, with the UK only reporting seven deaths since they decided to shut their entire country down.
In fact, the UK shut their country down before they had a single Omicron-attributable death.
This means the government is willing to take away its citizen’s rights to protect them from a non-threat. At this point, then, they can justify lockdowns and restrictions for any reason at all.
What all of this should mean, though, is that the Omicron variant and the COVID pandemic as a whole are coming to an end. COVID-19 is no longer a threat to humanity — if it ever was — and no reasonable person deserves to have any of their rights or freedoms diminished consequently.
It’s over. We don’t need a new normal. We deserve our old normal back, now.
