| Please don't toss around naive insults like "not arguing in good faith". I am arguing in excellent faith. Claims like I'm believing what I want to believe are especially stupid because they're so easy to turn around - you're clearly desperate to believe COVID is not a mild disease. OK, you really don't like that South African doctor and think she's some sort of outlier. Today we find this story reported by the BBC of all places: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60039138 South African scientists - praised internationally for first detecting the Omicron variant - have accused Western nations of ignoring early evidence that the new Covid variant was "dramatically" milder than those which drove previous waves of the pandemic. Two of South Africa's most prominent coronavirus experts told the BBC that Western scepticism about their work could be construed as "racist," or, at least, a refusal "to believe the science because it came from Africa". "It seems like high-income countries are much more able to absorb bad news that comes from countries like South Africa," said Prof Shabir Madhi, a vaccine expert at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand. "When we're providing good news, all of a sudden there's a whole lot of scepticism. I would call that racism." Prof Salim Karim, former head of the South African government's Covid advisory committee and vice-president of the International Science Council agrees. "We need to learn from each other. Our research is rigorous. Everyone was expecting the worst [about Omicron] and when they weren't seeing it, they were questioning whether our observations were sufficiently scientifically rigorous," he said, while acknowledging that the sheer number of new mutations in Omicron may have contributed to an abundance of scientific caution. And it goes on like that. Omicron is "less severe, dramatically" etc. Hospitals have never been overwhelmed by Omicron, and arguably not for COVID at any point, but the word "overwhelmed" is so vague and so heavily abused that it's not worth arguing over that. |