Jayne,Can I ask you again ... how do you know it was the omicron variant of the virus that your friends who experienced mild colds and tested positive on a PCR test, had?I agree that it's likely that most of them had the omicron variant given that it is now the most prevalent strain in the UK, and it is generally acknowledged that most omicron infections result in nothing worse than a mild cold, but you still can't know, unless the virus that infected each of your friends had been sequenced, and there simply isn't the capacity to do that with the high number of viral infections we are experiencing.I have a friend who came down with COVID before Christmas, and he was pretty ill for over two weeks, felt like he couldn't get out of bed except to go to the loo. I'm reasonably confident that it wasn't the omicron variant that he had, but I don't know that for certain, I just think it's highly likely. There's a chance (small I grant you) that he had the omicron variant, but only sequencing would rule out that small chance.With your friends, I think there's a much larger chance that at least one or two of them had a variant that wasn't omicron. Do you not agree?BTW The vaccine in the UK has been a huge success, the UK got off to a flying start compared with most other countries, I don't think we're significantly different from a lot of other countries now in terms of how we've made the vaccine available to people, it's more down now to who wants to still get vaccinated.I was really surprised there wasn't a circuit breaker after Christmas, and perhaps we'll see whether that was a good thing or not in the next few weeks. If staff absences increase more and more, then perhaps a circuit breaker would have been a good thing, but we can all speculate and there's plenty of data out there that can point one way and plenty that can point the other.On that note, Happy New Year.
Andrew Jones ● 1726d