President Biden Delivers Remarks to Provide an Update on the Omicron Variant
Biden up, beginning at 32 minute mark.
by WaterGirl| 19 Comments
This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Open Threads, Politics
President Biden Delivers Remarks to Provide an Update on the Omicron Variant
Biden up, beginning at 32 minute mark.
Comments are closed.
eachother
Greasing the skids for a jolting announcement about the presence of Omni in the hood.
Inevitable.
rikyrah
Cousin Omicron has come to town.
germy
@rikyrah:
JoyceH
Does anyone else remember a brief scare, after the arrival of Delta, about some other scary variant? If I remember correctly, it was out of India, and there was a great deal of concern about it for a short period of time, before it turned out to be overwhelmed by Delta.
Elizabelle
@JoyceH: Lambda??
dmsilev
@Elizabelle: There was also Mu. Starts to blur together after a while…
Cermet
So, tail meet dog; over hype, meet serious person; shark frenzy, meet chum. Omicron is not even a pandemic level threat (or even necessarily worse then Delta) and the President has to address a variant just because the “serious” people are screaming about nothing and are acting like fucking Chicken Littles?
Elizabelle
@dmsilev: We are going to learn the Greek alphabet, aren’t we?
Thanks,
Obamacoronavirus.zhena gogolia
I keep thinking of Trollope’s society doctor Sir Omicron Pie.
WaterGirl
@Elizabelle: At least we are (hopefully) avoiding another “China Virus”.
zhena gogolia
Way OT, but now that I’m 90 minutes into it, I think Get Back is one of the greatest films ever made.
Ken
@Elizabelle: Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, the “On Beyond Zebra” letters…
JoyceH
@Ken:
I’m still holding out for the military alphabet – alfa, bravo, charlie, delta (okay, we’d have to skip that one), echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel, india, juliet, kilo, lima, mike, november, oscar, papa, quebec, romeo, sierra, tango, uniform, victor, whiskey, x-ray, yankee, zulu.
JoyceH
@JoyceH:
(You just have to remember to pronounce papa like you’re Lady Mary Crawley, “Pa-PA”, and quebec as ‘kay-beck’.)
JoyceH
@JoyceH: (And lima as in Peru, not the bean, Lee-ma.)
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Well, when they’re using Greek letters as part of a numbered list (like a, b, c, etc.), they’re not actually doing it the way the Greeks do it. Their lettered lists go like this: α, β, γ, δ, ε, στ, ζ, η, θ, ι – and then go ια, ιβ, ιγ, ιδ, and so on. I don’t know why they have the στ between ε and ζ, though it might be a call-back to something from classical or ancient Greek.
By that numbering system, omicron would be number seventy. And each letter after that would be another ten count higher until one reaches ρ, rho, after which following letters indicate hundreds.
Which might be necessary given the direction COVID variants and human stupidity are taking us.
featheredsprite
Biden says be careful but don’t panic. WHO is in panic mode. A lot of countries are overreacting I think. On the other hand, they might know more than I do.
Fully vacc’d and boosted.
What’s with that low number of folks getting the booster? 10 to 11 percent, depending on who you ask.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: “Delta Plus”, which was Delta with some other mutation. Got overwhelmed by Delta.
There was also the Kappa variant, closely related to Delta but not quite as big a contender.
Lambda was spreading in South America; there were a bunch of reports several months ago that it might be vaccine-resistant doomsday. It never got beyond the “Variant of Interest” designation though.
Ken
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: There was an archaic Greek letter between ε and ζ, from when they took the alphabet and the numeric system from the Phoenicians. The letter got dropped because the Greeks didn’t use that sound, the number stayed.