The Joyful Entry of Omicron

The Joyful Entry of Omicron (acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cm) is a painting about an announced disaster. Everyone with some grain of common sense knew that with the start of the traditional flu season The Bug would strike again. And yeah, there you have its latest spawn that has been baptized Omicron.

What actually nerves me is the amount of people in Western countries who had plenty of opportunities to get a vaccine, who are now filling up the IC beds. Like the sixty years old vaccine refuser Valentin who lies since October on the oxygen in an IC unit. It goes better with him since they took him from the respirator, but he will need a double lung transplantation because the virus destroyed his lung tissue.

Meanwhile, my brother can´t get his cancer operation because Valentin lies in his bed. The operation has been postponed till January. If the cancer hasn´t spread by then, and if Valentin doesn´t jump ahead of him to get his transplants. Don´t even get me started about who will pay for Valentin´s choice of not getting vaccinated.

And yes, also vaccinated people land on the IC unit. Mostly the old and the sick who have a weaker immunity system that makes the vaccine less effective. 80 % protection is not 100 %, so vaccinated people still can get Covid, but as far as the statistics go, there is almost no incidence of healthy vaccinated adults landing on IC or dying because of Covid.

It´s also not very astonishing that most variants come to us from countries where the vaccination rate is very low. As long the virus can circulate, it will keep mutating, and produce other variants. Non-vaccinated people are Covid-variant producers and it´s probably just a question of time before the highly contagious but not very lethal Covid virus (mortality about 2.5 %) will fuse with a lethal flue variant. Like the bird´s flue H5N1, who has a mortality rate of a staggering 60 %, but is luckily not very contagious. Unless it would team up with a Covid variant. Cross my fingers it won´t happen, but this is a strong case where Murphy´s Law may come down hard.

So Omicron is here to stay for the remainder of the flue season. Let´s hope it´s not any nastier than its Delta cousin and that our vaccines will hold out against it. And make the vaccine compulsory and damn the refuseniks with their laments about their constitutional rights. My brother too has constitutional rights. While the statistics are very precise about the amount of people that died on Covid, there is an equally big number of people who died unnoticed because they didn´t get the care they needed. Collateral damage I suppose?