On current transmission, the news seems very, very bad indeed, with just a glimmer of hope from SA.
Omicron cases in the UK, quite astonishingly, continue to double every 2-3 days. That's faster than the original strain, but in our population where a very high proportion have some immunity from either vax or infection. We can expect that from today onwards to reflect in the headline overall figures as omicron is significant enough to raise the overall total.
Here's Scotland, just for example, but it seems the same everywhere. As always, there are caveats, but this seems to be far too fast to be explained by anything but genuine community spread and very high immune escape, ie previous infection and vaccination doesn't give high protection.
Cases currently maybe 5-10,000 in UK?
So 20-80,000 this time next week, on top of delta, unless something changes.
I expect people will now rapidly behave more cautiously, including the wfh mandated, but in lots of other ways too, so hopefully it'll not be that bad.
The glimmer of hope is SA where at the epicenter, cases have slowed and maybe even peaked. That's hard to explain in terms of immunity. It may be behaviour, testing limitations or something else, but just maybe there's something not well understood going on and less people are susceptible than feared.
