The variant is called EG.5 and is a descendant of Omicron.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that EG.5 accounted for roughly 17.3 per cent — or one in six — of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks.

  • Takatakatakatakatak@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    You have said it very well.

    In Australia even our absolute harshest lockdowns made allowances for millions of “essential” industries.

    Unless you owned a business installing styrofoam nuns, you kept going to work in some capacity.

    We’re an island for fuck’s sake! We could have stopped this thing in it’s tracks. But no, the flights must keep arriving. Business must business.

      • Takatakatakatakatak@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        That’s pretty much the gist of it. We also had a huge in-fighting between state governments and a stubborn refusal to work together or coordinate properly that led to some really bad outcomes.

        Almost the entire time this was compounded by flight after flight of VIPs arriving in Australia for ‘diplomatic’ purposes, or of course to play sportsball. We barely even stopped normal tourist flights either, yet our own expats were not allowed to fly home until months later. None of it made any sense.

        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53776285

        This incident in itself made me highly suspicious of our governments competence and motivations. This was one of our major seeding incident here. Under no circumstances should this have been allowed to happen, yet this is just one of a long string of borderline malicious decisions by those in charge. We all forget too quickly.

      • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Me too. Was driving tow truck then. No passengers allowed and driving was a gd dream come true … :)