HAPPY New Year! That greeting holds despite the fact that Covid-19 continues to create Halloween-like scenarios all across the sports world, and across the entire globe, for that matter.
The disturbing, galloping spread of the Omicron variant has made us soft-pedal and retreat into caves anew, just when we were beginning to flex our long dormant muscles and angling to enjoy a fresh restart of more sports activities.
Now, the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) has prudently decided to postpone all its games due to the Covid surge, just after it got an OK to admit a 50 percent capacity crowd inside the Smart Araneta Coliseum.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has had eleven game postponements already. And nothing is clear when things will normalize because new athletes just keep getting added to the Covid Safety Protocols list.
Maverick Kristaps Porzingis is the latest addition to that list, even as New York Knick Julius Randle and Celtic Jayson Tatum have been given the go signal to return. No team has been spared from the list which includes, among others, Nugget Jeff Green, Pistons Isaiah Stewart and Cory Joseph, LA Clipper Brandon Boston, Jr., Miami Heat Duncan Robinson, Buck Thanasis Antetokounmpo, Markelle Fultz and Robin Lopez of the Magic, Landry Shamet, JaVale McGee Deandre Ayton and Jae Crowder of the Suns, Blazer Larry Nance, Jr., Jazz Joe Ingles and the Wizards’ Tremont Waters, Brad Wanamaker and Spencer Dinwiddie.
Even NBA coaches like Chauncey Billups (Portland), Rick Carlisle (Indiana), Alvin Gentry (Sacramento), Frank Vogel (Los Angeles), Billy Donovan (Chicago) and Monty Williams (Phoenix) have been removed from the game.
But wait. A new research from Denmark undertaken by its State Serum Institute offers a bit of brightness. According to Denmark’s chief epidemiologist, Tyra Grove Krause, Omicron is really not all that bad. For one, the risk of being hospitalized with Omicron is half that of the Delta variant.
There are fears that Omicron would prolong the reign of the pandemic because of the runaway level of infection, but Ms. Krause says Omicron could actually spell the end of the pandemic.
“We’ll have our normal lives back in two months,” she said boldly on Danish TV 2. The much more transmissible Omicron variant will “in effect wipe out all the other mutations of the virus,” she explained. “It will bring about the end of the pandemic.
Omicron will continue to rise and spread, “then [have a] sharp drop,” she continued. She cited real-world studies in South Africa that showed the sharp rise in cases, followed by a rapid decrease.
“I think we will have that in the next two months, and then I hope the infection will start to subside and we get our normal lives back. Omicron will peak at the end of January, and in February we will see declining infection pressure and a decreasing pressure on the health-care system,” she said. But also cautions, “We have to make an effort in January, because it will be hard to get through.”
In net, the authors of the study cited by Krause say: “Omicron is here to stay, and it will provide some massive spread of infection in the coming month[s]. When it’s over, we’re in a better place than we were before.”
People will get infected, yes, but they will also experience less serious symptoms. Then they become immune. That is how the world may finally achieve the herd immunity that we’ve all been hoping for and that will let us resume or restart our lives again.
But wait again. Fresh out of the net is this news about a new variant—B.1.640.2—which has been detected in France from a returnee from Cameroon. It’s so new, it doesn’t even have a name yet. (Could it be the Pi variant?)
This one is said to have 46 mutations (to Omicron’s 37) making it more resistant to vaccines, though nothing is known yet if it is more contagious and more dangerous.
Well, the common knowledge is that low vaccination rates favor the emergence of new mutations. Africa (where Cameroon is and where Omicron was first detected) is only 7 percent vaccinated and only one in four health workers have been fully vaccinated. Vaccines though started arriving there last December.
So what do we do now? Let’s avoid crowds, close contact, practice discipline, wear face masks, wash hands often, eat well, sleep well and stay in our caves for the meantime. We can’t have the face to face games that we want just yet. But we can stay behaved, pray for one another’s safety and dream of herd immunity.