Of course! It’s a lot of moving parts. And I need to put all my degrees to use SOMEhow 
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Yes, thank you for taking the time to explain this and doing it so thoroughly. Also, dang, has it really only been three-ish weeks since we first heard about Omnicron (just had to teach that to my phone’s spell check)
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Omicron and our opening date has me doing planning today on how much and what to stockpile again. I’m assuming we’ll be lockdown + primary school for the first 2 weeks, and then make adjustments from there.
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I think we aren’t doing lockdowns anymore 
Unless you mean, your family not the city.
It is a huge adjustment for me. Not long ago a handful of cases we locked down and now our CHO is like “we expect the new case number will double every 48 hours and it’s cool guys this is what we were expecting”.
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Oh yeah. My family. Definitely not the city/ state AFAIK.
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I thought the comments made by the new Queensland CHO that spread in the community was ‘necessary’ were interesting! (ie eek!) At first I wondered whether he just wasn’t used to speaking at press conferences but he pretty much repeated the phrase on Sunday. It’s hard to imagine Dr Young saying something like that.
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We don’t just love you for your memes! 
I also appreciated your graphs.
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My sister, who tends to know these things, says that we’ll probably be at 8k positive/day in the province by the end of the week. She estimates today’s number will be ~3800. And that we are likely quite underreported because the % positive is 10%.
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And recent positives and close contacts I know have not been reached by public health (assuming they are swamped).
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I didn’t think they were even trying for that any more, just going with the person giving others a heads up.
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I’m happy to have found a Rapid Diagnostic Test (ID NOW) appointment for Thursday. It’s not guaranteed, but I expect to have the results prior to gathering with my immediate family on Friday. My understanding is this is a step down from the PCR tests that take days to get results, but a step up from the Binax Now (15 minute antigen test).
Does anyone know what the current science is indicating about the window between exposure and becoming infectious for Delta and Omicron? I will see family A on Friday and family B on Saturday. I’m wondering if I’m unknowingly exposed by a family A am I exposing family B? Normally things are much more spread out and there is time to test between them.
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“ Estimates for this exposure-to-symptom gap, called the incubation period, clocked in at about fivedays for Alpha and four days for Delta. Now word has it that the newest kid on the pandemic block, Omicron, may have ratcheted it down to as little as three
If that number holds, it’s probably bad news. These trimmed-down cook times are thought to play a major part in helping coronavirus variants spread: In all likelihood, the shorter the incubation period, the faster someone becomes contagious—and the quicker an outbreak spreads…”
“…. To complicate things further, the start of symptoms tends to lag behind the start of contagiousness by, on average, a couple of days; when symptoms begin earlier, transmission might not follow to exactly the same degree.”
This isn’t quite an answer, but… possibly? I would think unlikely for a high viral load within 24 hours but who knows. Susceptibility also varies depending on someone’s underlying conditions and their age. We know that it takes less viral particles and shorter time exposure for an older adult to become infected then a younger one on the whole.
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I’ve seen a lot of thoughts that the incredibly high rate of HIV in South Africa (20% of the general population - highest rate in the world) is actually a factor in why/how mutations seem to be incubating there. People with immune systems either modified by HIV or modified by drugs for HIV are more likely to have covid longer and have it mutate in them.
There’s a possibility, depending on the way the virus strain is shaped that people with HIV might be less susceptible to symptoms from it. That’s as far as I understand, and once again, i only took freaking forest biology and I currently regret it.
Something something T cells?
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I mean, something something T cells is basically what I remember from immunology anyway
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I made bad decisions and now am paying for it
I went to two holiday parties back to back, one at work and one with friends. Positive cases at BOTH.
I’ve been taking rapid tests every day and am still negative but uuuuugh. I won’t really know until Thursday or later. The wild thing is I’m still kind of glad we went.
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US just released data, omicron is 73% of cases in the US.
I went to a work holiday party (outside) on friday so…we’ll see. I don’t feel sick but I don’t feel amazing
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I saw that…. am gonna hope against hope it does prove to be “milder” than delta. Cuz ugh.
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Wow. I knew it would be fast. But THAT WAS FAST.
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It was 25% on Friday from the same data source
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I saw one guy DW interviews say London is likely at an R=3 to 5. 
this is up from 0.7-0.9 roughly.
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