If Omicron is So Mild, Why Are ICU Admissions Skyrocketing in Australia?
There’s little doubt that Omicron is causing milder disease in the U.K., as well as in South Africa, Denmark, and many other places.
However, what’s going on in Australia? ICU admissions have shot up as Omicron has taken hold (see above), as have deaths (see below). Bear in mind 77% of the population are double-vaccinated and it’s the middle of summer there.
Now, it could be just that there are so many more Omicron infections in the formerly ‘Zero Covid’ country than there were of previous variants, and that despite being milder sheer numbers are causing the spike. Indeed, Delta positivity peaked at 1.3% whereas Omicron positivity is at 22.5% and still rising (see below). With an infection rate up to 20 times higher, the fact that ICU patients are still below the Delta peak (for now) suggests it is milder and there’s just a lot of it.
However, it’s one to watch to see what happens next, as Australia lacks the natural immunity from widespread previous infection that other countries benefit from. If Omicron does turn out to be more virulent there, it may tell us something about the role natural immunity is playing in reducing the severity of the virus.
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I could be wrong, but I fear that Australia and New Zealand’s isolationism from other nations and each other during this shambles may end up having a similar effect to those poor native Americans who found they were defenceless against European diseases, with the natural immunity of Antipodeans likewise damaged by their governments’ measures.
Any thoughts?
P.S. on the subject of Oz, the Djokovich visa ban has reportedly been overturned (GB News) – but the government may try and uphold the ban anyway (despite his natural immunity). This is the sort of madness bordering on OCD that I mean.
i agree – I just posted after you before reading comments
My thoughts? I don’t FEAR Australia and New Zealand are suffering from their isolationism. I actually rather hope they do. I certainly don’t want the imprisonment of their population to pay off, no matter how willingly they’ve engaged in it. It would set a terrible precedent. My hope is that their isolation turns out to be an unmitigated disaster so it’s never attempted again.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer person than horse face Jacinda.
Ah, “Saint” Jacinda, what some might call a nasty piece of work. I dare say she could count on a knighthood if they have them in NZ.
I recall the words in that film about Waterloo – “the worst thing next to a battle lost is a battle won”. I fear that many innocent people will have to suffer before this shambles ends.
I dare say she can count on a huge stack of Yuan from her owners.
I don’t think she can any more (if that was indeed her motivation), as New Zealand has abandoned Zero Covid while China doggedly persists in it.
A Blair protege
It’s not going to happen to her but to the people who unwisely saddled themselves with her. Something might happen to her afterwards, though, and that’s not going to be a touch on the shoulder with a ceremonial blade.
You’re looking at two nations which have been gaslighted and taught to fear a virus which is not a mortal threat to the majority. I wouldn’t want to see people who have been treated like this punished with illness or worse. While we on here always knew their policies would fail, it’s the leadership which needs punishing, not the people.
What has happened in Australia and NZ is nothing compared to what has happened in China and Taiwan, where the masses truly believe that the West’s failure to copy their Zero Covid approach is symptomatic of a civilizational death wish.
Can’t think why they’d regard Covid as an extinction-level threat, given that even Delta in the unvaccinated isn’t among the worst diseases to have afflicted humanity.
I don’t want Australia and NZ to suffer from a lot of severe disease now, as I expect the conclusion they’d draw from that is that abandoning Zero Covid was a catastrophic error.
What I’m desperately hoping is that Omicron turns out to be the variant that even China is unable to wipe out, as China and Taiwan are the last countries whose population remains fanatically committed to Zero Covid.
China will claim to have wiped it out whether or not they actually have…
Which is very very scary, as it’s likely that only bodies piling up in the streets of China would be enough to break the Chinese people’s dedication to Zero Covid.
If that: after all Hitler wouldn’t surrender even when the Red Army had 203 mm howitzers inside Berlin, blasting the city’s buildings at point-blank range.
Arguably a sensible decision in light of the Russian behaviour after Berlin did surrender. And even then it took a further 44 years to get rid of them from half the city.
Any thoughts of what will happen in Taiwan: a democracy where if the government abandoned Zero Covid they’d likely lose power to an opposition campaigning on a Zero Covid ticket?
I quite agree. The Antipodeans have behaved particularly badly during the pandemic, particularly their police who display the sort of brutality one expects of a nasty totalitarian state like China or Iran. Their political leaders have been quick to adopt authoritarian human-rights abuses and have also been egregious in their dishonesty about the efficacy of vaccines.
To be fair the Antipodeans have long had a biosecurity mentality because of the struggles to defend their unique and fragile ecosystems against invasive species. One early example of this is the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, in which the equestrian events were banished to (funnily enough) Stockholm.
And didn’t Australia quarantine all their human arrivals for a period of time too: a period which IIRC also ended in the 1950s?
It already is an unmitigated disaster. We have a lot of craziness to go through here in NZ before it gets better. Example: you need a vaccine “pass” to take a child on a ride on the local miniature railway. Sigh. And The Unjabbed can only enter supermarkets and retail shops. All public facilities (swimming pools, libraries, public buildings, hairdressers, barbers, beauty therapists etc etc are “out of bounds”. Jacinda Ardern couldn’t give a toss – in fact she is relishing dishing out this punishment to those naughty people who wouldn’t do as they were told.
You mean No-Vac?
I guess it depends on how long they have been locked down. In the UK you could argue we were only locked down for the first nine weeks. The subsequent lockdowns-Nov 20 and Jan-Mar 21 were lockdown in name only.
It maybe a case in Aus/NZ lockdown beyond a certain limit takes you to a point of no return re immunity.
Maybe covid is a disease that affects people who refuse to keep living a normal life and just shake it off, more?
More vaccines, perpetual fear and stress, gov tyranny, economic effects, deleterious social consequences, are not conducive to beating it.
In short: the ‘cure’ is the catalyst for the persistence of the disease as well as the fear. And you can die from fear as well as psychosomatic reasons.
Spoke to one of two Kiwi’s in Lanzarote a couple of days ago. He was firmly of the view that NZ is just 18 months behind everywhere else and will play catch up with deaths etc.
I think this is further evidence that vaccines are useless and that infected nations have just built up natural immunity over the last two years totally irrespective of anything ‘man’ has tried to do.
My guess would be very little natural immunity caused by zero covid.
The second question would be just how effective are the vaccines really?
Is what we are seeing in the U.K. simply a result of herd immunity?
Oz and NZ took a terrific gamble when they locked down so severely. Both are now dependent on the effectiveness of the vaccines plus the suspicion that Omicron could be a milder variant to prevent similar mortality rates to the other western nations.
We now have two petri dishes with which to ascertain how effective lockdowns and the jabs really are.
This has been my thought to anyone saying the ‘it would have been so much worse had I not had the vaccine’ line. My comment has always been ‘prove it’ – and you can’t. Unless you have a time machine to be able to go back in time and a/b the outcome of getting covid with the vaccine and getting covid without the vaccine you have no way of knowing whether it’s been effective for you or not.
. . . and the pharmaceutical companies know this!
My girlfriend has been taking an experimental birth control “vaccine” for the past 6 months; it’s great, you only need one jab every 4 months instead of a daily pill; anyway, she is now 6 weeks pregnant but we are sure she would have been much more pregnant if she hadn’t taken the jab.
Australia is getting about 25 deaths a day. from infections a few weeks ago.
looking at deaths over the next few weeks as cases skyrocket will tell us how the vaccines work in a naive population
also – they have been in some sort of lockdown for 2 years. their immune systems will be barely working
I suspect it’s because in the UK (and other western nations) there is a large proportion with natural immunity, which Australia doesn’t have due to its Government’s policy of making it the largest prison in the world.
And the jabs, which were designed for the original infection, aren’t very effective against Omicron.
There is evidence from a number of separate studies that the vaccination increases infection rates from Omicron, so the Aussies have inadvertantly primed their populaton to be receptive to it.
One can only hope. Mankind’s stupidity needs to have consequences.
Indeed – I’m rather hoping the consequences are terrible. Just as Dresden wasn’t necessary militarily but was completely necessary as warning to a population to never again embrace tyranny, a massive wave of ADE deaths in Oz would be everything they deserve and a notice as to what happens when dogma replaces reason.
Well, looks like it took the Germans a mere 75 years to forget the lesson.
That’s a bit hard on the brave Aussies who have been turning out for protests in the face of appalling thuggery by their police force.
How about ADE?
How about the clot shots with no underlying natural immunity to protect you?
Easy. Immunity comes from prior exposure/infection, not from artificially produced jabs.
Although, skyrocketing? Really? 12 per million is skyrocketing?
I thought this is the sort of alarmist, headline grabbing phrases that got us into this mess back in March 2020.
I wrote to my ‘esteemed’ MP back in July 2020 that the ‘Government’ ignored natural acquired immunity at its peril? This plebeian could not possibly be right surely? The definition of pleb comes from the Roman for free Roman citizens who were not patricians as determined by census. So commoners in effect, ergo common sense. Says it all really.
It seems to prove that herd immunity is not such a bad thing after all. And also that people are best off if governments just fuck off and leave them alone.
Amen.
Original Antigenic Sin in action.
plus dry tinder built up
“If that ruling [clearing Djokovich to play] is overturned, what is the difference between Australia and a banana republic”? (Nigel Farage on GB News just now).
The only court now for Djokovich should be the tennis court. If the Australian government overturn this now, frankly Australia should not have such tournaments until they rejoin the civilised world.
It would be like a prorogation, which Nigel Farage also opposed.
The correct term, though, is banana monarchy.
England should never have gone on the Ashes tour.
It’s a pity that countries aren’t fully boycotting the Winter Olympics.
There is a need to check that a comparison is being made of like for like.
Maybe the Australian and NZ practice of classifying patients as ICU patients or putting them in wards classified as IC wards is currently less strict than in other countries for propaganda reasons, which is to say, for financial reasons?
As for Novak Djokovic, I suspect that whoever advertises muck at tennis matches had a quiet word with a senior civil servant, the judge, or even a government minister johnny. But it will be great if Djokovic makes THIS gesture at a press conference, the international anti-spiking gesture known as the “Barricade”:
Mind worth considering that the Oz level of ICU admissions is only reflecting transmission in the community (back to olde with and for etc.) and no more relevant than that. So to reverse Will’s comment on the virulence of Omicron – Omicron could be reflecting that the original virus was not particularly virulent in the first place. Head scratchers unite.
What happens next?🤔 Probably even more draconian measures…because if you keep doing the same thing over and over, you must surely get a different result at some point!
How many ICU beds does Convict Island have per capita compared to the UK? Because my understanding is that ICUs tend towards being full all the time – hospitals offer the best care that they can.
Are coofs patients just displacing other patients?
“hospitals offer the best care that they can“
LOL.
Maybe that’s true about King Edward VII’s private hospital in the Harley Street district, where the queen and the royal family go.
You write as if medics don’t
If they do keep ICUs at near capacity, it will be so that state figures can justify the budget (and continue to get bribes) for spending money on equipment. That’s how the NHS works. It’s AS CORRUPT AS F*CK, just like the rest of the state.
I do know that one factor that explains why NZ went for Zero Covid back in March 2020 was the fact that they have the second-worst per-capita level of ICU provision in the OECD.
From 6 days ago in the Heil:
“Majority of Aussies in ICU with Covid have Delta – NOT Omicron”
An interesting question is how many people in all countries have omicron and NOT delta. Because whatever symptoms they may have, THEY are the group you need to know about to BEGIN to have some information about what symptoms omicron MAY cause.
For years they tried to isolate coronavirus’ and eventually gave up, is this all a mass funding exercise for pharma groups?
Yawn, if everyone has it, so do people in the ICU and have died, it doesn’t mean that’s what killed them. I thought we put this one to bed.
Vax injuries and comorbidities suppressed by 2 years of neglect.
Ask me another …
Oh ffs!!!!!
Sense of proportion! A dozen people per million in ICU.
This number-blindness disguised by graphs is at the root of our problems,.
OH NO! It’s the Aztecs, the Conquistadors and smallpox reanimated…
But seriously folk’s, zero to very little natural immunity, leaky “vaccines” that have negative efficacy and ADE, it’s a pandemic of the vaxxed!
You can stick that in ya didgerridoo and smoke it!
“Fake testing-” next question!
Because the population does not have any sort of immunity. We managed to build a modicum of immunity in between lockdowns. They have had no such opportunity. What we’re seeing is a typical Californian forest fire: They prevent fires for years and years, the dead wood piles up, and when they fail to prevent one fire, it destroys everything.
This may have been noted already but my take on this is that Omicron isn’t “mild” at all. There is no such thing as a “mild” virus, only people who are well or seriously unwell, young or very old, sick or healthy.
The no-worse-than-Omicron Delta and other variants have already carried off the weakest and sickest. The remaining population, relatively strong and healthy, bats off the latest variant like water off the proverbial duck’s back.
Australians will now have to face their own age and ill-health: the vax won’t do it for them, as won’t isolation and keeping tennis stars out of their country.
What might do it for them on the other hand, is following said tennis star’s diet and exercise regime and they too could be globe trotting and leading happy lives.
Mind you, Jesus was crucified so just because you are right doesn’t mean people want to hear what you have to say.
A very important point. In the 1980s, people with AIDS used to die of pneumonias they got from the common cold and all kinds of other everyday diseases. Virus don’t stop replicating on their own for as long as there are still cells left they can infect. Either the immune system stops them or the host body is going to die.
the numbers are so small that it is just noise. There would be more people admitted to hospital for tripping over.
‘skyrocketed’ from two to four per million? It’s just noise. And since we are still dealing with health authorities that are very cagey about the terms ‘from’ and ‘with’, it’s meaningless noise.
If science can’t be questioned it’s not science anymore. It’s propaganda. They want to rip on people for taking Ivermectin. I researched and saw the evidence on the internet. Research papers are on the internet for those who wants to see. Top respected world doctors are being under defamation by MSM and vaccine manufacturers. I won’t back down recommeding IVM. You can get yours by visiting https://ivmpharmacy.com
Perhaps the pharmaceutical version of “Swiss Cheese” would be appropriate?
3 vaccine doses, vitamin D, weight loss (if appropriate) and ivermectin in case those aren’t enough.
With these graphs, like many many others, you have to read the vertical axis. Twelve people per million in ICU is only about 270 in the whole country, up from about 160. Normal death rate is 120 per million per week, so a rise of 2 is hardly significant. Really in the noise I suspect, or below statistical significance. Twice danm-all is still damn-all. Together with the fact that they may be counting death with Covid rather than from, and normalised for age and vaccine status and co-morbidity, and I think you have a non-story. G’day..