As long as vaccine effectiveness against serious disease (i.e. hospitalisation) holds up then in the very worst case there would only need to be a lockdown or restrictions for unvaccinated people. How politically feasible or enforceable that would be is up for debate though.

My understanding is that when they report percents of Omnicron cases for a day they take (samples sequecned revealing Omicron/all samples sequenced) and not all daily cases are sequenced. That's how you get 25% Omicron, not by dividing the number of id-ed Omicron by all cases.

The Scotland logic is here

https://publichealthscotland.scot/me...ion_report.pdf

see page 10. They split the number of cases between certain (genomic sequencing), highly probable (where there is S gene target failure on PCRs) and possible - projecting from positives where S genes aren't being checked (e.g. lateral flows not confirmed by PCRs, PCRs using fixed cartridges and so on).

As of 12 December there were 186 TOTAL cases of the Omicron Variant confirmed by genotyping, 56 from S gene target failure, 4010 cases projected from other confirmed cases. Equals 4252 cases on 12 December - whereas on 5 December it was 389, and we see a scary high doubling time of 2.1 days.

And yet the government (and the media) are repeatedly saying that yesterday was the highest since the pandemic started. I wonder why, considering it's there in blue and grey on their own data site:

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...b8329abf87.png

My understanding is that the difference here is between reporting date and specimen date.

France effectively banning entry from the UK. Will the rest of the EU follow?

It will be as effective as our red list and hopefully last no longer.

It is a completely useless measure. French authorities do not do a lot of sequencing, actually barely. There is no publication of any kind about cases in France except raw numbers (because you can criticize a lot the management of the pandemic in the UK but the work done and published by its agencies and scientists is world-class) so they currently have no clue about where and who has Omicron. But it is there, and probably with just one week delay or less compared to the UK.

The issue is this ruins a lot of Christmas plans, even if it is only in place for a few weeks. Hopefully no other EU countries will follow but the precedent is now there.

Common sense has left the room a while back. See Italy's move to introduce testing for everyone and their dog coming from abroad while at the same time they're effectively mandating vaccinations internally...

It doesn't matter, they maybe flying blind in the interior, but they believe that they may buy a little time by blocking UK visitors...Even if it is a week or two, every little bit of time helps before the sht hits the fan...
I expect there will be massive booster campaigns this week with many countries increasing pace and capacity...

Am currently in the queue in deepest Edgware for my booster. My appointment was at 11:45am and at nearly 1pm I am not yet inside the pharmacy.

Here is what the queue looked like at 12pm

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...3c7095c04.jpeg

The .... in France has hit the fan already. There are 0 ICU beds available in the entire crown surrounding Paris. Omicron is here, and there are no clue about the number (today the Health minister said we have 200, but remember they sequence 1% of the tests).

Wholly, are they accepting booster walk-ins...

Yes, but the ten people in the walk in queue haven’t moved in the whole time that I have been in the “with appointments” queue.