Hey everyone kevin here, this video is brought to you by the daily upside, more information in the description down below all right folks. Take a look at this, i'm going to show you a few things here that are quite interesting about the omicron. First, it's worth noting this chart. In fact, i would potentially take a picture of this little chart here because look at this, the detectability of a covid or the omicron variant by a pcr test, really long tails beyond the infectious period.

And this is creating a lot of frustrations for a lot of people who want to work who want to get back to normal, where they're testing positive for omicron but they're, not infectious anymore. In fact, the infectious period appears to be between day three and day seven, but people are still testing positive, frequently on eight nine ten up to eleven. That's an additional four days of testing positive, even though you might not be infectious anymore, very interesting. You also see that the lateral flow tests, their detect detectability cuts off a lot sooner, which is much more in line with the infectious period.

But the problem is, nobody can get freaking tests anymore, as people went around started hoarding these things and then obviously omicron came to america and started going crazy and uh. Well now now you can't, you can't uber eats the tests anymore, even which i know a lot of people were using those uh just i'll deliver you some tests, but anyway, so this is what's happening around our country. Look at this we're supposed to have a government. That's supposed to be leading to here i'll blow this up a little larger, we're supposed to have a government providing a more coveted testing, and yet this is what we've got.

We've got people throughout, not just the united kingdom, but the united states is the united states. United states people are lining up for hours just to get tests. I mean honestly at this point it's kind of like. If you get sick, you almost it, you know you almost may as well just go.

You know what it's omicron i'ma isolate for five days and maybe then test or or whatever or just isolate a little longer i mean it is it's ridiculous to get tested right now that people are waiting, sometimes two three hours even out here in california, we've got Somebody who wanted to uh to to come babysit our kids and uh they they they were in line for two three hours or something like that which just crazy - and this is uh, despite the fact that we've got a governor and apparently a federal government. That's like, oh, don't worry, don't worry. We've got plenty more testing capabilities. Look at this 90 minute wait uh for testing here per uh kutv up from a day earlier, and then here's some coronavirus pictures as well in the united kingdom of individuals uh showing pictures here of arriving at 5 15 a.m for a kova test at 8 am And you'll probably be in line for a few hours, just nutty uh.

What we're seeing happening right now with with the testing just absolutely terrible, but we do have some news to hit and that's exactly what we're going to talk about uh, first and honestly, the cdc's quite frankly become quite a bit of an eye roller here with how Many times they're either flipping or just getting things wrong, but it is worth noting that, right now it looks like the us is seeing a higher number of kids in hospitals as omicron spreads. Most of them are unvaccinated, however, and this was a really good find new york times actually pointed this out this morning, which i thought was incredible from december today. The 29th new york times mentioned, even though pediatric hospitalizations are up, especially amongst the unvaccinated children. Regular seasonal flu hospital admissions are down substantially, so it seems like even though uh you know we're seeing this.

This increase in hospitalizations from children. If, if we were in sort of a normal flu season, we'd actually be having a whole lot more uh, kids, essentially getting oxygen or getting an iv, because sometimes when kids get sick, they they don't eat or they don't drink. And then they need fluids because they're essentially dehydrating so on one hand, this is bad news with more children going to the hospital, but on the other hand we have good news that we actually have less children in the hospital than we would during a normal flu Season on top of this, a new study came out by a new south african study by a virologist at the africa health research institute, and it showed that being infected by omicron actually protects against delta, which is really good. We've been worried that what, if you catch omicron, but it actually doesn't protect you against delta, which is, by all accounts, a much more severe disease.

But according to this, research, omicron is likely to push delta out and provide protection against, not just delta, but maybe even future mutations very good. Now this study was only conducted on 13 patients with very, very small preliminary findings. Preliminary research, six of them were vaccinated. Uh.

Sorry, seven were vaccinated and six were not, but it's good to see that in this independent study, as well as independent reviews of this study, scientists on both sides are optimistic about these results. So this is good, so the more omicron grows, the less we see delta, and this is now being verified in studies as well. An epidemiologist at yale said he is observing the same trend in connecticut. He says quote: we're seeing omicron exponentially rise, while delta cases are falling.

The epidemiologist at yale envisioned three different potential futures, one where covid mimics the flu or just potentially, is like a version, a variant of the flu, another scenario where kovid mimics a type of fever with several variants coexisting in invading antibodies, leading people to get sick. Every few years from them, so this being a little bit more of a severe style cold where you're out with a fever and it's sicker and the third which is most desirable, is one variant wins out. And then it becomes very easy to prevent the virus. Because uh either through a vaccination or we just we just deal with it, because it's not that big of a deal and we don't have to worry about other variants like the seasonal variant.

That's like the flu. That's constantly changing, not ideal. Our bodies. Don't have that t cell response to being able to recognize it? We know the antibody response does not last that long.

For example, individuals who had coveted before omicron really only have about a 19 chance of not getting omicron if they're exposed and unvaccinated just having prior illness. However, if you have double shot, you're only you're, barely any better you're only at about 23 and we've broken down. All these statistics uh in other videos as well, but this is just sort of a reminder of that prior information that now i'm going to hide myself here. So we can more properly explore the global situation here.

But oh and just a quick note before we go through some of these statistics, which are fascinating check out the daily upside via the link down below it's a free business and investing newsletter sent right to your inbox every morning. If you're like me and you get tired of clickbait financial news headlines and biased coverage, it's important to check out the daily upside start, your mornings with the daily upside. It helps you cut through all that noise. You have a better jump on the markets every single day it was founded by a team of career journalists and financial experts to better inform both retail investors and seasoned wall street professionals.

It's a five-minute read every morning that isn't afraid to dive deep into hot topics and give real high-level, unbiased analysis and as someone who built a career around real estate and investing in the stock market, i can't recommend enough. Recently, i've been enjoying their new weekend edition newsletter as well, especially since, on the weekends i kind of get bored this past week, they dove into the health and wellness sector which covered everything from peloton's m a strategy to apple's future in fitness as a competitor to Peloton even join over 200 000 readers for free by going to met kevin.com upside or use the link in the description down below a couple days ago, we were wondering why the united kingdom had this sudden decline in cases here. This may have just been an issue in reporting and remember. We expect a lot of people are actually not reporting or getting tested at all united kingdom inflecting right back up united states inflecting up, but look at this germany doing quite well and getting these cases back down germany a little bit more stringent in restrictions, uh and The netherlands have done the same thing, so what would be good is going ahead and seeing if we can get the netherlands just thrown up here as well, just to see here's the netherlands there you go, you have those lockdowns in effect and you're, really seeing that Decline in cases in the netherlands as well, if we can, let's see if we can throw in south africa and south america here, just to be able to compare these two south america barely just getting started with a little bit of a movement here.

Hopefully we stay low here, south africa, that continuation down is uh is remaining strong, which is very, very good. Let's now go ahead and jump on over to uh, hospitalizations uh and the share of variants or of omicron, and so right now, according to our world and data, we are somewhere just about 40 dominant in the united states. The cdc says we're around 58. This is revised down from the over 70 percent.

Cdc had a set uh once again, cdc was wrong, but uh what's worth noting here is a hospital admissions and what we really want to find is not just hospital admissions but weekly new hospital admissions for covid 19.. Very very important: that's for covid19, and so we are seeing these hospitalizations continue to inflect up in the united states and in south africa, which is quite interesting, given the fact that their case count is rotating down. But in better news, the united kingdom is staying relatively flat and netherlands and germany, who have much more of that lockdown mentality are seeing a rotation down. So hopefully, the precedent that germany and the netherlands are setting is not a clue to the united kingdom or the united states that oh for some reason we need uh any kind of uh.

You know lockdowns here. I think that's the last thing that we want. If we look at icu patients at any given time intensive care unit patients, we are seeing a slight uptick in the united states and relatively stable in the united kingdom very good and then again a decline here in germany in the netherlands. Hopefully, once again not a signal that, oh that's it, we need uh, we need lockdowns.

The share of delta, though, has substantially plummeted here in most areas. If we look at the united states, we are dropping below 60 for the share of delta and we're really seeing this very, very sharp plummeting here in other variants - and this is critical - we do not want to see other adel other variants. In fact, what we really want to see is all of this just become red. See this particular chart here is showing us the share of cases uh based on all of the different variants and we're zoomed in here to december 27th, which is from monday just giving us a little bit of an idea of the share.

You could really see that germany is fighting this delta wave they're locked down on the delta wave, and mostly the netherlands, is as well, but the united states is sitting here between the netherlands and germany, and so we still got a substantial portion of delta. We're hoping that we can crowd this out just like south africa and the united kingdom did. You know, keep in mind, and it is worth reiterating this because i get asked this question every time. I mention that yeah south africa had a whole lot more prior immunity.

Not because of vaccination, but because of prior exposure, a lot of folks get confused by that because they hear me say that the south african population is about by median age about 10 years, younger. Yes in fact, but they also have a lot more prior immunity. That's because, even though, maybe only about 20 to 25 percent of individuals in south africa, prior to the start of omicron, were vaccinated, we expected that over 70 percent of individuals who were not vaccinated had some form of exposure to covet prior and so combined. We expected that uh, you know essential resistance to any kind of omicron or covet variant would be in that higher 90 percentile range, whereas in the united states we might be closer to that 78 to 80 percent, where maybe around 20 ish percent of our population or Around 66 to 70 million people according to npr uh may have no protection at all against omicron.

Now again, fortunately, study after study indicating uh that that we are seeing uh, less severe circumstances or outcomes with omicron. However, we are starting to see uh issues in in our economic data. From this, for example, jpmorgan, as reported by behrens this morning, indicated that credit card transaction data is starting to fall as even though there are a lot of people who are very uh, dare i say, sort of uh hey. You know what i'm gon na.

I guess i can't think of the word, but very uh, i'm gon na go have fun anyway, yeah, i'm not gon na. Let the omicron stop my life, we're still seeing overall average credit card transaction data inflect down, which does indicate that we could see some sort of weight on the back of our gdp in q1, especially as we get to peak omicron cases over the next couple weeks. Now, following the cdc's move to reduce isolation periods for asymptomatic individuals from 10 days to 5 days, medical experts have a lot of mixed feelings about this. To paraphrase an associate professor, a professor from harvard he said to me, this feels more about economics than about science.

The professor suspects, what it will result in is ultimately more infectious people unisolating that potentially people who say they're asymptomatic might not even report that they have omicron or, quite frankly, might not even get tested. I mean to some degree at this point. If tests are so impossible to get, why would you even get tested if you're not having symptoms in which, because the test might not be available and you're not going to wait in line for hours for not even having symptoms unless, of course, for some reason you Had to uh, and so we might not even be able to identify asymptomatic people anymore, but anyway, there's some concerns that this could lead to more cases but hey. I think a lot of people at this point have sort of resigned to the fact that we're probably all going to get the army and everybody's just like well buckle up, let's get through it, and then can we go back to winter and go skiing again and And get back to normal now, uh.

Another thing that we're noticing is that the price of n95 masks continues to go up so, for example, if if you are traveling - and you want to at least minimize your chance of getting sick, i know a lot of people like yeah whatever. If i'm going to get it, i'm going to get it, i understand that, but we are seeing the price of n95s bump a little bit we're over about a buck a mask now on the box of 20s, but it does look like they just brought the box Of 50s back in for the honeywells, these are the ones that i purchased you'd actually see here december on uh christmas eve. But anyway these these get you under a dollar. So you can get 50 for 36 bucks over here, although most people hate wearing masks.

So i think most people are kind of tired of this stuff. I i haven't actually gone out to have a chance to use mine, yet i know lauren has, but i haven't anyway. Another thing that we have is that right now we're noticing that in portugal, 88 of adults are double vaccinated, yet we're still seeing a resurgence in cases there with omicron expected to be doubling at a rate of every eight days there, the united kingdom, denmark, france, greece And italy have all set at daily records and case counts. The united states has hit a record in case counts as well.

We are now clearly uh growing at an exponential rate uh. We are uh well well, above the current measure of 267 thousand uh, as reported by the new york times. Some uh indicate some indicate that we are probably over 400 000 uh cases of positivity now, and you do have the new york times tracker here, though uh again most people say this is um way behind the curve here, in fact, if you just do a quick Search of google in most of our states you're, seeing this exponential explosion here of cases and if we zoom in here uh as of yesterday evening, we're getting this reporting here. This usually comes through at about 7 p.m.

Pacific time, but anyway, we're seeing this about 380. 000, it's almost 400 000 cases here and you can really go to individual states here and you're really going to see it everywhere. I mean look at the line we're seeing here. In california, for example, we went from cases of somewhere around uh.

You know few thousand eight thousand to ten thousand to now. Fifty thousand, all of a sudden, we go to uh, just new york individually and uh you're you're really going from you know. Twenty thousand thirty thousand fifty thousand to uh now is as high as uh. Well, yeah, 48, 000, actually uh the peak.

We're measuring right here, kind of running off the chart a little bit there, but uh yikes, big, big pay. Big spikes in case counts, but you know that, based on what we've talked about in our prior videos, only about one in ten individuals right now is actually testing positive. Who actually has omicron. So there could be a whole lot more people with omicron out there.

Now nationwide there were an average of 1200 children hospitalized each day by covin infected children still remain far less likely to become ill compared to adults and need hospitalizations. But we are averaging right now about 71 000 hospitalizations a day. The good news is - and this is still well below our peak level in the united states in saudi arabia. Starting february 1st, you will now be required to show a booster shot or proof of booster shot.

It's not like you're, going to show a syringe proof of booster shot before you're, going to be able to visit stores malls and restaurants. Singapore also charged a man who is accused of letting someone else use his vaccination card to enter a bar if convicted he could face up to five years in jail and bloomberg. It reported an outlook on the european union, which is something that we could look at as potentially an indicator of what we might expect to see in the united states and the suggestion. A suggestion here is uh that we are seeing a lockdown free london right now, but we are seeing an economic forecast of a growth of just 0.7 in q4, down from the 1.3 percent forecast, we had in q3, q1 forecasts are also being revised down by both Jp morgan and barclays and we're expecting a lot more analysts to also revise down their q1 forecasts, but then they're expecting q2 to actually be a little bit of a resurgent quarter where we get a little bit of a boost again in q2, in france, uh gdp Growth has been forecast for uh q4 of just point: nine percent, that's down from three uh three percent gdp for germany, 1.1 down from 1.7; and of course, a lot of this is due to potentially people self-isolating, we're just straight up being sick.

For for you know a little over 10 of the month, if you think about it, there are uh 30 days a month and you're you're sick for three days even and you stop spending money for three days. That's that's ten percent that uh, potentially that you are spending uh or ten percent of the days that you're spending less money on whether it's food going out, starbucks restaurants, malls whatever, unless of course you're at home on amazon and you're, actually spending more money anyway. Also, a little bit more research out of oxford university. According to john bell, a professor at oxford omicron, as we expected much less severe, but also patients do not seem to be requiring a high flow oxygen and the average length of stay is only about three days in the hospital.

He says this is very different from the disease that we saw a year ago. Hospitalization stays are substantially shorter and this is critical. I mean we were looking at seven to 14 days for people when they were getting ventilated with prior forms of covid, which was terrible. Three days, fluids little oxygen and you're out knock on wood that it continues to stay this way, because that's good, you know not that anybody going to the hospital is good.

But again, oh that's geez all right! The study also shows that 14 people have died in the united kingdom within 28 days of an omicron diagnosis. This does not necessarily mean that they died from omicron. It's right now still evidence that they're just dying with omicron, so tbd, but based on the case, counts in the united kingdom. We uh.

We expect that 14 deaths in the united kingdom is a very tiny percentage of individuals who are passing away from this uh and again of those who are actually passing away from omicron solely. We expect that number to be another fraction of that so anyway, this is a complete update on omicron for you, if you found this helpful, consider sharing the video thanks so much for watching and folks, we'll see you next one goodbye.