Here is What I Hope President Biden says on Tuesday, and Why

• Omicron is going to get bad but there be no lockdowns.
• Get vaxxed, and boosted.
• Getting vaxxed does not mean you won’t be infected but it will help keep you out of the hospital and help prevent death.
• Those who don’t get vaxxed are going to get infected and may get really sick or die because Omicron is so infectious.
• Over the next few weeks, we expect the daily new infections in the United States to grow to 1,000,000 a day.  Right now, they are at 150,000 a day and growing.
• Given the levels of infections that are going to hit our front line responders and health care workers, we will likely have to allow these workers to keep working even if they have tested positive but have few or mild symptoms, for the greater good of those Americans who are really ill or are hospitalized or are in the ICU.
• We have made some mistakes in the past by over-reacting.
• One of those mistakes was to close schools.
• We are going to keep schools open: CDC has a new “Test to Stay,” policy so children can keep learning and parents can keep working.

Omicron may be less severe than Delta, but even if it is, because it will infect so many more people than Delta, we expect Omicron to hospitalize more people than ever before during the pandemic.

No country on the planet has the health care infrastructure that will not be overwhelmed when as many will become infected and hospitalized by Omicron.

The technical term for when the number of sick during a pandemic overwhelms your health care system is to “muddle through.”

And for the next five or six weeks, that is exactly what we will all be doing as the Omicron wave hits.

And Omicron will not be the last variant that becomes dominant.

There will be others, likely that will be mutations of Omicron.

And like Omicron, in order for the next variants to become dominant, they will evade natural immunity and vaccines — that is how they will become dominant, in fact, they must be able to evade natural immunity and vaccines in order to become globally dominant and displace Omicron.

We will likely be in this pandemic for another two years, and we will cope with it as best we can, but right now, your best bet is to get a booster or your two vaccine shots, if you wish to have the best chance to avoid serious illness or hospitalization.

[Here is the rationale for the straight talk recommendation above:

The American people have had enough of the delusional happy talk about the pandemic being over. 

They need reality to plan and not be oversold the impact of policies or vaccines. 

The fact that the experts have been so wrong, so many times, means it is time for some hard truths, or as my mentor, J. Patrick Rooney used to say, time for some “adult conversation.” 

Politically, resetting Americans’ expectations will pay great long-term political dividends since the happy-talk routine clearly has not and will not be politically rewarded.

The reality of future variants doing exactly what Omicron is doing now and will do over the next few months will mock the White House and the President when the next three variants (my guess)  hit — unless he gives the American public the hard truth now.

Eventually, the American public, likely about the time the next variant becomes dominant after Omicron, will begin to realize this virus is not acting like a normal virus.  This virus has superpowers because these superpowers were bred into it in a lab.  And now, this highly evolved, designed virus is in the wild, getting stronger because its starting point was so different than a naturally occurring virus.

This lab-designed and made virus is on the loose mutating in billions of humans all over the planet, and nature is helping it to become an even more efficient virus. 

The fact that no one wants to hear this does not make it less true.

And not acknowledging the reality of the health care system becoming overwhelmed is not going to stand Biden in good stead because he will look like they were not prepared when it does happen.

The fact is, no country can ever prepare for what is about to happen.  Omicron has not really taken hold in terms of making people symptomatic yet (the next couple of weeks it will) and today, right now, Wisconsin and Maryland hospitals are at capacity.  Soon, they will be overwhelmed and overrun and they will have to do the best they can — they, and other states, will have to “muddle through.“

This is what happens during a pandemic.  Rule One is that sooner or later, everyone is infected, either through natural infection or by being vaccinated, or both.]