[JPKab]

You are judging a response that is motivated by "abundance of caution" with zero limiting principle. They don't trust the South African data (in my opinion this is old fashioned bigotry by rich governments towards government agencies they view as being inferior in poorer countries) even though everything the South Africans has said for weeks has turned out be correct.

Bureaucrats aren't incentivized to do anything but minimize their own risk, with no regard to other factors like creating a panic.

It was blatantly obvious to those of us who give a shit about India (not the myopic, inward focused US media) in February that the delta variant was horribly dangerous based on what the doctors in India were saying. But in South Africa, we're ignoring their doctors and pretending like we're superior, and are the only ones capable of collecting and analyzing data in Excel.

My prediction:

Omicron will turn out to not increase hospitalizations (only cases, which don't really matter anymore with 90% of senior citizens being vaccinated), the media will focus on the cases, and the percentage of people who think the authorities/media are untrustworthy will go up even more than it already has. This is really really bad. I live in a county in Colorado with a mask mandate. It's a suburban, blue county. Heavily blue. And the mask mandate is universally ignored. That wasn't happening earlier in 2021. It is now, and it's very noticeable. They don't trust the authorities anymore, and this will make that worse.