Family news: Show me your vax card (and no we can't be bribed)

After a week, they stopped giving out the vax and boosters at the city plaza down the street, and are now going door to door checking your vax card. I suspect they will come here and give it to you whether or not you want it. 

this is one of the side effects of having a good mayor: we got the vaccine for our elders in May, earlier than a lot of areas, but now it means You will get vaxxed and protected one way or another.

 And with Duterte cleaning up the cops etc. it means a small gift won't work to make them look the other way. 

yes, I am being sarcastic: To remind folks that although corruption remains a major problem in the Philippines, that not everyone is corrupt and that a lot of our officials try to do their best to protect folks in the epidemic.

 No problem: most of us in our home and our employees are double vaxed: we elders with the AZ and the drivers who were not high risk and at the time were low priority only got the Sinovax, which doesn't work well against the ordinary Covid or Delta, and doesn't work at all against the Omnicron. Which is why most of the boosters being given out locally are the Pfizer vaccine, which has shown to boost immunity including against Omicron, (partial but a lot less sick): one study showed it even worked if your primary vaccine was Sinovax, which gives poor immunity against later variants.

 Heck, no vaccine works well against the Omicron: the good news is that if you get it, you are now immune to all the covid. 

And the gov't is busy pressuring vaccines but a lot of folks might not get the vaccine because they figure they prefer to get a cold not a shot: (And the fact a local dentist's husband, who was only in his 50s, just died after getting the vaccine is not going to make people eager to get the shot).  

mixing vaccines, i.e. getting a different vaccine as a booster, is important here, because most of those vaccinated early in the year or who were considered lower risk got the Chinese shot early in 2021, before there was enough western vaccines to go around.

 The newspapers report breathlessly that we had three Omicron covid deaths (all elderly with health problems). Ah, but how many are dying of cancer because they delayed getting seen? or from stroke or heart attacks because they couldn't afford their medicine? 

It's complicated: Covid will put a frail person over the edge and kill them, but this can also happen with the weaker omicron variant that is going around now.

and to make things worse, there are limited covid beds in hospitals: so if you go into the hospital for something else but test positive, you need to go into a covid designated bed... and now with omicron, a lot of staff are getting sick.

Sigh.

 There are reports of kids/todders with a respiratory problem that is being blamed on Dengue... but is it omicron or is it just the nasty RSV virus and the kid just happens to have a positive test for covid?

But of course one could say that for a lot of folks in the hospital.

one poor neighbor whose husband left her is asking for money for a second daughter hospitalized with dengue... so are we having a dengue epidemic? it's the wrong season (it usually spreads in the rainy season) but who knows.

 The news is that there is now a second Omnicron variant that is so infectious that if one person has it, then everyone in the household will get it, which is good news for the healthy (who will end up immune to covid) but could kill the old and vulnerable. Hence the push to vaccinate with a booster the elders in our area.

The Inquirer noted that this means some families are all in quarantine at the same time, so no income. This, by the way, was not true for the earlier (Delta) variants: JoJo, Joy's brother, got a severe case and was on oxygen at home for a week and recovered, but no one else in the household got it (and yes they were tested). 

But I suspect a lot of folks mildly sick with colds are not getting tested.

But officially numbers are down:

15,789 new cases and 66 new deaths in the Philippines 

so numbers are going down, but since most of the statistics are from the Manila area or other urban centers, the bad news is that the omicron is going through our rural areas, where statistics may not be as accurate.

and the real problem is economic: But it's election year, so the politicians are giving out rice to help.

Dr. C gives the latest report on the new variants, which are spreading much more quickly than earlier variants but not killing as many, and may result in herd immunity and end the epidemic.