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   From: email@dont-email.me   
      
   Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going   
   to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID   
   transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the   
   Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to   
   cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the   
   patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden   
   northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a   
   new variant that appears better able to evade immunity, and that   
   seasonal wave could end up a tsunami.   
      
   Back in July, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that   
   COVID had become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” an   
   unfortunate turn of phrase that was soon picked up by the   
   president. Now the flaws in its logic are about to be exposed on   
   what could be a terrifying scale. Unvaccinated Americans will   
   certainly pay the steepest price in the months to come, but the   
   risks appear to have grown for everyone. The pandemic of the   
   vaccinated can no longer be denied.   
      
   The 60 percent of Americans who are fully vaccinated could soon   
   find their lives looking very different. For much of the summer   
   and fall, those who had received two Pfizer or Moderna doses or   
   one Johnson & Johnson shot were told that they were essentially   
   bulletproof, especially if they were young and healthy. But   
   preliminary data from South Africa and Europe now suggest that   
   two vaccine doses alone might still allow for frequent   
   breakthrough infections and rapid spread of the disease—even if   
   hospitalization and death remain unlikely. Getting three shots,   
   or two shots plus a previous bout of COVID, seems to offer more   
   protection. For Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute   
   for Global Health, that’s enough evidence to justify changing   
   the CDC’s definition of full vaccination. “With Omicron and the   
   data emerging, I think there is no reason why we shouldn’t have   
   a pretty strong push for everyone to have boosters,” he told me.   
      
   At this point, the CDC has recorded that less than a quarter of   
   adults who are fully vaccinated under the existing definition   
   have gotten a third shot. That leaves about 150 million people   
   who are vaccinated but unboosted. Given that the people in this   
   group are less protected against infection, they’re at greater   
   risk of passing on the disease to unvaccinated or partially   
   vaccinated kids, as well as to unvaccinated or immunologically   
   vulnerable adults. They will also pass the coronavirus more   
   readily among themselves. Settings that might have previously   
   seemed safe for vaccinated folks—say, a restaurant or   
   performance venue that strictly checks vaccination status—could   
   become fertile ground for transmission, because the people   
   inside them are more likely to catch and spread the virus.   
   Indeed, anecdotal reports already suggest that large indoor   
   gatherings of fully vaccinated people can become super-spreader   
   events in the age of Omicron.   
      
   Population-level immunity could suffer in another way too, Omer   
   said: People who were previously protected because of a prior   
   infection could now be quite vulnerable to getting reinfected   
   and passing on the disease. In fact, it’s possible that the only   
   parts of the country where community transmission might be   
   blunted are those that faced devastating early waves of the   
   virus and subsequently had strong vaccination rates—mostly a   
   handful of areas in the Northeast. “It’s really very, very   
   challenging to consider how those differences might play out,”   
   Joshua Schiffer, a disease-modeling expert at the Fred   
   Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me.   
      
   Here’s the upshot: Each fully vaccinated person might still be   
   at minimal risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID   
   this winter, but the vestiges of normalcy around them could   
   start to buckle or even break. In the worst-case scenario,   
   highly vaccinated areas could also see “the kind of overwhelmed   
   hospital systems that we saw back in 2020 with the early phase   
   in Boston and New York City,” Samuel Scarpino, a network   
   scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention   
   Institute, told me. If only a small percentage of Omicron   
   infections lead to hospitalization, the variant is still   
   spreading with such ferocity that millions of people could need   
   a bed.   
      
   Such a scenario would be especially dangerous if those millions   
   of people all needed a bed at the same time. Omicron is so   
   transmissible that cases could peak across the country more or   
   less in tandem, Schiffer and Scarpino both said, which would   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)