@heldinadream
Ok forget about it being omicron or covid for a moment and imagine this - if 50% - for instance - of the UK all got ill at once, ill enough to take a couple of days off work, what would happen?
Half of all of this not functioning - transport, hospitals, police, government, schools, shops, banks etc etc. So even a very mild illness, if it hits enough people with enough force all at once has the potential to cause utter utter chaos and societal breakdown. Remember it's not that half the hospitals would close and the other half would be fine it's that half staff of all the hospitals at every level are off which is enough to shut every hospital down because you can't run anything below a certain staffing level.
A million cases predicted in a week. That's a terrifying rate of growth and so many people now not taking much notice.
Death is NOT the only bad consequence of widespread illness!
There have been a few posts, but this is the one I found easily to quote.
For all of those chugging out the usual “only x% die and they are all old/have underlying conditions” crap.
The severity of this VOC is not yet properly known - there is nothing that can be done to speed up the capture of data. It is probably the best real life example of waiting for a kettle to boil ! And it’s worth remembering that Joe Public’s interpretation of mild is maybe different to that of those in the medical/scientific community.
But it’s looking fairly obvious with regards to how transmissible this is. So, it could be possible that we aren’t going to experience high levels of deaths (which many on here would wave away with “yeah, they were gonna die soon anyway”). But we could end up with large swathes of people unwell - not in hospital, but definitely not well enough to be working. And all happening at the same time, over a period of time. And this probably worries me more than I have been up until this point. Not because I’m a doom-monger. But because we’ve already seen how batshit things can get at the slightest whiff of uncertainty (hello, petrol “crisis”!). Imagine that, spread across normal, everyday life. Not thousands of lives lost every day, but a few weeks of many ordinary, everyday people being off sick at the same time.
Am I sick to the back teeth of all of this? Absolutely. Do I want more restrictions? No, I bloody well don’t.
But the possibility of this variant being so transmissible, even if it doesn’t cause huge numbers of deaths, is definitely a reason to be worried. The majority will likely survive. But how we all deal with the consequences is going to be very telling.
Schools breaking up for Christmas may help, but will probably be slightly hindered by festive celebrations. And in a few weeks there could well be multiple threads of complaints regarding reduced services across multiple platforms.
So, hopefully, there may not be large numbers of deaths. But there is a fairy strong possibility that everyday life will be impacted for a lot of people.