Feeling Familiar

With the rise of the omicron variant, it's feeling like early March 2020 again - lots of things temporarily shutting down or closing to the public "out of an abundance of caution."

Saturday Night Live, which has been filming in front of masked, vaccinated, live audiences for months, is not having an audience tonight and will use a limited cast and crew while filming their last show of the year. A Broadway show I follow on social media cancelled their Friday and Saturday performances because a member of the company tested positive for COVID and so they were testing everyone else, but expect to open next week. (I also saw a meme that said, "I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you live in New York, you have COVID.") Our local metro city's public health commissioner is urging residents to avoid in-person gatherings over the holidays. 

My employer, which hasn't really reopened our offices because moving to the next phase of the process involved meeting metrics that we were getting further away from, recently announced a change to these requirements. Now there won't be any metrics based on hospitalization rates, because this was too difficult to track (but our site leadership will be monitoring this locally), and the local infection rate for reopening is going from 5/100,000 to 15/100,000 (we're still at over 60/100,000, so not reopening anytime soon...)

This article shows how dramatic the spread of the omicron variant has been. "Cornell’s positivity rate soared from less than half of 1 percent to almost 5 percent in the span of a single week. When charted on a graph, a curve that steep doesn’t look like a curve at all. It looks like a vertical line." Cornell has a 97% vaccination rate. "Along with the Cornell outbreak, each of these data points suggests that the U.S. is about to experience what other countries are already starting to grapple with: exponential Omicron spread of the sort that will put America — which is currently enduring yet another big Delta wave — on track to reach previously unthinkable levels of COVID infection and transmission, shattering the country’s previous record."

ETA: The SNL musical guest tonight has apparently also been cancelled due to the limited amount of crew to support the show. (Very curious to see how this episode turns out!) And I forgot to mention that a number of NFL (and maybe also NBA?) games have been postponed due to too many players from some teams being on the "COVID protocol list."