Man, this is getting tiring folks, it is monday december 13th and omicron news is taking over. We even now have a news of the potential first death of omicron. Now i'm going to talk about this on some of the wording that was used for this first death. We're also going to talk about some other updates that could affect markets, uh and, of course, well our society uh.

So folks, let's just get right into the news, let's pop on over to our usual handy-dandy flowchart. So first things. First, let's talk about this first death. According to boris johnson, with confirmation this morning, one person has died with omicron in britain, he says quote and sadly at least one patient has been confirmed to have died with omicron.

Now i am adding the emphasis. Why am i adding the emphasis? Because folks, we know that when we look at south africa, many individuals who are hospitalized and then are discovered to have omicron are hospitalized for a reason that is not omicron. They just happen to have omicron while they're in the hospital, and so my question is - and we don't have the details of this yet. But i think it's critical, because i expect that markets are negatively reacting to as usual.

The headline that a person with omicron has died but wait a minute. Why did boris johnson say that a person died with omicron rather than from omicron? Why don't we have more details here? I think this is very important. I don't actually find this to be a conclusive omicron death. Yet, though, what do i know, i'm just being skeptical kevin.

Let's pay attention to this. Boris johnson did use this as an opportunity. This death - and this is expected for a politician to basically pitch vaccines and boosters. Now i don't blame that i'm a big supporter of choice.

You all know that. However i am vaccinated, i encourage people get vaccinated. I encourage the boosters now i'm just being transparent about that. That does not mean i force it upon individuals now, boris johnson here says the idea that this is somehow a mild version of the virus is something that i think we set on the side and just recognize the sheer pace at which this relates, or rather spreads Through the population properly written here, uh so anyway, boris johnson is using this as an opportunity to say hey, you know what look somebody just died with omicron.

We can't call omicron mild. I think this is political speech here. I don't think we've seen any evidence that omicron is not mild. We continue to see reiterating evidence that omicron is in fact quite mild.

That is literally what the cdc director in the united states says now believe the cdc or not. It is also what we see. Doctors say in south africa: it's also what harvard health professionals say when they suggest that we could be bringing the end of kovid into our society with omicron as omicron outpaces delta takes over delta, and now we have the more mild form, which is great, perfect path. For a virus to take, it goes from killing its host to no longer killing its host, so it could try to survive longer.

I mean that's just a natural mutation, it's not like it does that consciously right, but anyway uh some other things to note and some of these quite uh important, so very important to pay attention to these first united states infections have passed 120 000 per day, and This is the highest level since the delta surge we've had in september. We do expect that uh cases will continue to rise, but according to bloomberg, most of these cases continue to be described again as mild. While we expect cases to rise, remember, though, most folks and the market are going to think that okay cases are going to go up, then hospitalizations and then deaths are going to go up and this whole first death thing is going to reiterate that belief. But if indeed omicron does prove to be more mild, we might see cases go up and hospitalizations and deaths not actually move.

Now. This is a little bit complicated by the fact that delta is still the predominant variant in the united states. So the more delta cases you have, the more hospitalizations and more deaths, you're gon na have so you're gon na have this weird transition period. That's going to leave the market very uncertain and very confused, and when you get titles like of individuals expecting a tidal wave of infections in the united kingdom, well then you're going to have some more potential drama as well.

Okay, now omicron is now in more than 30 states, including in my county, which is the county of ventura. California, expectations are that omicron can fuel 75 000 deaths this winter in england again these headlines, not great news right. This is potentially another reason why our markets are pained right now. The two-shot dose of pfizer is estimated to be just 22.5 percent efficacious against omicron.

This is really bad. 22.5, efficacious against omicron, very, very bad. Now they do say it could limit severe disease. This is according to experiments in the south african lab studies that have been released over the weekend here uh.

I uh read about this not only in the new york times, but also in time.com and on bloomberg and other sources. So this is pretty well sourced. Uh 22.5 for two dose not great. This is another reason: we're seeing a lot of push for boosters, because boosters are expected to be 70 to 75 percent efficacious and again, that's because of that that massive drawdown in antibodies and the mutations to that tip of the covet spike protein keep in mind.

The reason you can still limit severe disease is because you still have a somewhat resilient t cell response, which is good t cell responses are created by vaccines, but also by prior disease, which is worth noting. However, take a look at this. There is a severe reinfection risk with omicron that, if you've previously had covet, you are three to potentially as much as eight times as likely to get coveted again with omicron compared to some of the other variants, because we've previous previously thought that hey, if you've had Coven, it's harder for you to get coveted again, because you actually have more of a a lasting antibody and t cell response. If you've actually gotten the disease versus the vaccine like getting the vaccine was i'm sorry getting.

The disease was one of the best ways to prevent getting it again, but that changes with omicron, which is bad. Okay, next set of news mild cases, mild cases; okay, here's another report that came out it is a morbidity and mortality. Weekly report that's released by the cdc. They are suggesting that so far, four out of five individuals who are getting omicron are vaccinated.

So obviously this is leading a lot of especially the anti-vaxx groups, to say why am i bothering getting the vaccine? Obviously, the goal is to avoid severe disease. We don't want people dying, but then of course now the question is: are people dying well, boris johnson, didn't really give us clear information on this, so tbd, but anyway, symptoms right now, according to the cdc cough tiredness headache, congestion, runny, nose. Okay, this is mixed reports. Some people say yes, runny nose.

Some people say not, however, very few instances of requiring ventilators oxygen and, as of the time of this morbidity report, no reported death by omicron. Yet now we know that's potentially now different because of what boris johnson said this morning, but we'll see children. We do also see more hospital admissions. Excuse me because of omicron, however, short stays and so far no reports of respiratory complications in this particular case with children.

Here, uh not from the cdc, but rather from south africa's uh health minister. Okay, then myocarditis. It's worth making a note here, because this is something that's been circulating on social media here and i just want to provide some statistics from the wall street journal. Now.

One of the big things is right now. Scientists are not sure why it seems like there's an increase in myocarditis or pericarditis in in some small number of cases in individuals, particularly in boys. A vaccine is worth noting. The vaccines per a united kingdom study have a 99.995 percent chance of survival over one year, so getting the vaccine really really really low chance that you're going to die from it at least per research.

Now myocarditis was diagnosed in 2.3 percent of 1597 college athletes who had covent. So this is interesting that 2.3 percent of individuals who had coveted and especially college athletes, they got myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. Now, there's limited data on myocarditis in those who aren't vaccinated versus vaccinated, so there's still a lot of research to do, but so far we do know that out of one million boys aged 12 to 17 you'll end up seeing somewhere around 67 cases of myocarditis. That works out to about one in about 15 000 people are going to get myocarditis now.

There's some theories for this, i'm going to talk about in just a moment for girls. It's a lot less, it's about one in a hundred and eleven thousand. So much much more rare, none of these cases, uh ended in death and most of them were mild and resolved quickly. So again, according to the wall street journal and a theory, there are a couple theories for this.

But one of the theories is that the mrna vaccines create a protein that your body can have an inflammatory response to and that potentially people are getting that in their heart, especially if there's an improper injection of a vaccine directly into somebody's vein, sending basically the vaccine. The drug to the heart muscle through your circulatory system theories - these are just theories, but the highest risk of myocarditis is really within seven days of getting your second dose of pfizer or mrna and most get better without medical treatment, and these are the sources for that. So if you want to pause and look those up, you can look at those now. China did also detect its first case of omicron in a port city.

This is a potential risk factor, obviously for markets and supply chain constraints. The last thing we want to hear is more port shutdowns. In south africa, south africa's national institute for communicative communicable diseases mentions that cases are skyrocketing still higher over the summer, but we went from literally zero cases to over 50 000 cases in less than three weeks. In south africa, so in a very short period of time, we were becoming, we were rivaling case counts of what we've had earlier uh in the summer, especially with our delta waves.

Hospitalizations have inflected down, though this is actually a very good sign. If you look at hospitalizations in south africa, they've started to inflict down after initially going up, and that could be because people were fearful that they had covered they're checking themselves into the hospital. And now people are are not as worried because we're finding the symptoms. From a mild and so you're getting less hospital admissions, so it's very good.

It's to some degree to see cases go up, but hospitalizations go down because again it reiterates the mild nature of omicron again reiterating here. Omicron largely evades antibody resistance. If you get the booster, you should have or expect to have around 70 to 75 percent efficacy, which is still not the 90 that we were used to originally right. But then again that night - and this is this folks - is only in the early days of the booster.

So even if you get the booster and you're up to 70 to 75 percent, you know after six months you could be right back down to 20 30 40. We obviously just don't know yet uh with the boosters too early to tell. We do already know that the spread rate of omicron is 4.2 times, that of delta, not of alpha of delta. That's huge! It's very this.

This thing spreads like crazy, uh. Uk is already uh instituting more limits, changes coming to vaccine passports, new york cities requiring masks indoors unless full vaccination is required to enter uh. It is worth i made this little note here. It's worth noting in the early days of covet.

There were a lot of folks, they would wear masks and then they'd say. Oh, i got coved, but it was a nothing burger uh. You know i was asymptomatic or whatever masks could actually increase your odds of being asymptomatic, because one of the ways you are deemed asymptomatic is is getting a lower exposure to the virus. When you get a lower exposure to the virus, your body potentially might not be symptomatic, but you actually might be carrying the virus and you might actually be fighting it and masks can help lower.

Your exposure, though i do want to just you know, quick psa mention that if you're just wearing the the generic cloth masks that you kind of get off etsy, so you have like one of these right here, this little rogue world of warcraft rogue masquerade. These things kind of suck, especially when people wear them like this all the time it's it's worthless, like you may as well, virtually not even wear these. These are deemed like 15 percent effective you. You really should be looking at surgical masks if you're going to wear them.

Surgical, masks, surprisingly kind of easier to breathe into uh. Those are somewhere around 50 to 60 percent, effective uh and then, of course, an n95. If you were really concerned, a valveless n95 could put you in the neighborhood of 80 to 85 80 to 90 effective, depending on on how you wear it. Typically, you don't have to shave to have that maximum efficacy.

On other news, we have the minnesota health care systems. A group of doctors ran an advertisement, a page-wide advertisement, saying that they're heartbroken and overwhelmed describing the virus situation as critical because of daily death tolls. This is mostly expected to still be because of delta worth noting. We also have about three percent of our military that are still not vaccinated.

This is about 40 percent of active duty military, and this is just days away from joe biden's cutoff for them to get vaccinated. Ghana's main airport will start finding airlines 3 500 for every passenger who is not vaccinated or test positive. On arrival into ghana, that's interesting putting a lot of onus on. Essentially, the airlines, france, 81 percent of population, is up to one shot.

Vaccine protests in italy and germany saw 8 000 protesters and in vienna we saw 44 000. Germany is now fearful that protests protests that ended in violent altercations with the police could end up leading to more violence over vaccine passports and other aspects. Regarding merck, we got an update regarding merck here that the university of north carolina did a study on the merck pill. This is uh if you had severe uh severe well, if you were at risk of having a severe case of covid, you could potentially get this murk pill under emergency use.

Authorization. However, now there's an expectation that potentially uh there there could be birth defects, uh or or cancer induced in a developing fetus, because of how this drug interferes with rna replication, which is obviously designed to destroy the virus but could potentially also affect children. Now merck responded and said: the hamsters that were tested were exposed much longer than humans would have been, which, to some degree, kind of reiterates, uh that that there is a problem but the exposure time. That makes sense.

Sometimes, when you get lab rats or hamsters or whatever you get overexposed, but the theory is hey. If you overexpose and nothing happens, then you're more likely to be safe. If you overexpose, when something happens, okay well now, you've got to turn back the dial and you go at what point? Does this start creating an issue more on that from the new york times and so really? What's next uh we still have talk uh, the chief executive of south africa is a largest private healthcare group, look what he uh. He wrote over here.

He said this may signal the end of covet 19, with its with it attenuating itself to such an extent that it's highly contagious but doesn't cause severe disease in the early days. It's the early days, but i'm less panic panicked. It feels different to me on the ground. This is good uh.

This is this is very good, so uh. This is a complete omicron update here, uh, with some more information on all the drama, that's going on and a response to this first death uh. So, let's stay tuned for more information from this from well from from great britain and, of course elsewhere. If you appreciated this update, consider sharing the video folks we'll see in the next one thanks so much goodbye.