On Tuesday, Hot Air posted an article about the origins of the new variant of the coronavirus. As usual, what we are being told does not necessarily line up with the actual facts.
The article reports:
Last year, Trump complained frequently that the only reason America’s COVID case numbers looked so grim on his watch is because we did so much testing. There was logic to that, of a sort: Obviously the less testing you do, the fewer confirmed cases you’ll find. If you’re dejected by the misery around you, just close your eyes and pretend like it’s not there. What if Omicron has been spreading in hot spots across the globe but South Africa is the only country with its eyes open, doing the testing needed to detect it? Like the UK, they’re aggressive about genomic surveillance. It’s no surprise that they would detect a case of a new variant early while the U.S. still has no confirmed cases despite the fact that literally everyone believes the variant is already here.
If the variant didn’t originate in Africa but was merely spotted there first, the travel ban that’s been imposed on the southern part of the continent is essentially a penalty for being diligent about surveillance. Not great.
The news today from the Netherlands bolsters the possibility that Omicron didn’t originate in Africa, although what’s described here isn’t the earliest known case of the variant.
The article notes:
Three different European countries had Omicron on their turf before South Africa’s experts knew about it, eh? And at least one case in Germany was found in a person who hasn’t traveled abroad or been in contact with anyone who has, a smoking gun of local community spread. Are we looking at a European origin for Omicron?
Well, hold on. The earliest known samples to test positive from the variant came from four people in Botswana who tested positive on November 11. Botswana is an African country, of course, one that borders South Africa to the north. But there’s a catch about the four people who tested positive: They were … foreign diplomats. And Botswana hasn’t said which country they were from or where else they had traveled. Did those diplomats bring the virus in from their home country or did they pick it up while they were in Botswana? Hmmmm.
Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It includes charts and graphs that create more questions than answers. The only good news here is that so far medical experts are saying that the new variant is much less severe than the variants we have seen so far. If that is true, we can end our panic and get back to life as usual.