No. I am not hurting or intend to hurt anyone
Coin toss: If heads means I don't believe you, tails means I accept the implications of believing you; it becomes a question of whether your behavior is sinister or stupid.
Consider
your insistence↑: "Then nothing really valid in absolute can be decided. One is if it [is] friend or a foe."
This is either low-grade wordplay ("nothing really valid in absolute") or blithering ignorance ("if it is as friend or foe"). Again,
there is no context by which Covid 19 is a friend. Simply holding out on an article of faith, insisting on some pretense of uninformed uncertainty, is dangerously stupid:
Moreover, we may also need to understand that since virus in making its copies use our material, can that material also impact characteristic of new variants in our benefit?
We may need to see the published data on that Omicron is killing more people even in number than its preceding variants.
You've been
told↑,
before↑ about other aspects of Covid infection, but seem inclined to ignore those considerations because they are inconvenient to starry-eyed romanticism.
While the raw death toll projections eye numbers suggesting fifteen percent comparative death rate to Delta, the fact of over tenfold comparative infection rate for Omicron expects a higher number of dead for this variant.
Meanwhile, the United States now faces an even more grim potential:
One researcher is predicting that the U.S. will experience the highest death rate from the omicron variant than many other developed nations, despite the variant being less severe.
Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research Institute, tweeted a series of data points that compared the daily COVID-19 case count and deaths per million people for seven large nations. Topol said the U.S. has a much higher baseline of deaths per capita because there was a relative lack of containment during an earlier surge of the delta variant and a lack of vaccinations.
(Ali↱)
Beyond the death tolls, though, it seems absurd to describe future treatment of diabetes and kidney disease as friendly outcomes. And we also come back to what NIH Director Collins reminded, last year, about SARS-CoV-2 and blood clotting, because the news out of South Africa, two weeks ago brings important insight:
"A recent study in my lab revealed that there is significant microclot formation in the blood of both acute COVID-19 and long COVID patients," Resia Pretorius, head of the science department at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, wrote Wednesday in an op-ed.
Pretorius writes that healthy bodies are typically able to efficiently break down blood clots through a process called fibrinolysis. But, when looking at blood from long COVID-19 patients, "persistent microclots are resistant to the body's own fibrinolytic processes."
Pretorius' team in an analysis over the summer found high levels of inflammatory molecules "trapped" in the persistent microclots observed in long COVID-19 patients, which may be preventing the breakdown of clots.
Because of that, cells in the body's tissues may not be getting enough oxygen to sustain regular bodily functions, a condition known as cellular hypoxia.
(Migdon↱)
There is no reasonable definition of
friend,
friendly, or
friendship that applies, here.
And that's the problem: There are myriad questions about Covid 19 variations, and how the disease works, and its implications this side of mortality, but trying to frame this range as a question of friend or foe requires an extraordinary pretense of friendship not otherwise functionally tenable.
Again↑: There is no manner of calling Covid 19 Omicron a friend that does not require an extraordinary definition of friendship. The idea that the question would even be structured as such very nearly seems to be its own question. And this
persistent↑, even
desperate↑ need to find a friend in Omicron really does become a question all its own.
The differences between Covid 19 variations are important to understanding how to respond collectively; as a public health consideration, this is one quickly ascending to the importance of a question for our species. The idea of disease management strategy at a public health scale is actually kind of soul-searing, but nowhere in trying to figure out how to bargain between death and chronic illness can the human species afford to pretend some kind of friendship with this or any variation of SARS-Cov-2.
What can be assessed to be a benefit of disruptive evolution is determined
many generations later, and there is nothing about the time and circumstance of disruption that ought to be considered friendly. And while there is no eugenic pretense to adequately justify such danger in our moment, neither is the superstition of seeking friendship in Covid 19 Omicron so comprehensive or even thoughtful.
____________________
Notes:
Ali, Shirin. "Why the US could have a higher death rate from omicron than other countries". The Hill. 11 January 2022. TheHill.com. 17 January 2022. https://bit.ly/3Iu2H6P
Migdon, Brooke. "South African scientist thinks she may have solved the mystery of long COVID-19, which afflicts 100M people". The Hill. 5 January 2022. TheHill.com. 17 January 2022. https://bit.ly/3A4UTFv
