 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. This week, we are looking at the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic over this past week and the obvious persisting news is the direction that the new Omicron strain is giving to the spread of the pandemic. India's numbers as well as numbers elsewhere in the world make it quite obvious that the rate of increase of the numbers of cases, the daily increases in the numbers of cases, makes it very clear that even though the Omicron strain has not necessarily been identified in each and every case, there is very extensive spread of the Omicron strain in a very large number of countries across the world. This raises two or three critical issues in terms of public health policy. The first is, is enough testing being done to identify all the cases? My familiarity with India's examples makes me give those as cases in point where in Calcutta, for example, in India, the test positivity rate, meaning the percentage of tests done that are coming up as positive for COVID-19 for the SARS-CoV-2 virus is anywhere between 40 and 55% depending on which day of this past week that you're looking at. Clearly, as the test positivity rate increases, it becomes more and more apparent that very large numbers of, increasingly large numbers of actual infections are being missed and are not being identified and diagnosed at all. So one way of beginning to look at this is to think that the test positivity rate is a major indicator of how much undercounting of cases is going on. But there is a second issue involved here and that is connected to the fact that the Omicron strain has been quite regularly argued over the past three or four weeks to be a milder illness, to be associated with a milder illness. Whether this is true or not, we will come to in a moment. But if it is true, then the argument has become, why are we counting the numbers of infections anymore? Why are we not simply counting the numbers of people who are severely enough ill to need hospitalization, to need critical care, to need perhaps other rare or not unlimited resources such as medical oxygen, why are we not counting deaths and so on and so forth. And those are the two issues that really need to be thought about at this juncture. Number one, is the evidence clear that Omicron is a milder illness. Now the South African numbers that have come out over this past few weeks do indicate that, that the case numbers went up, but the case numbers split toward and began going down fairly rapidly in the province in South Africa and in South Africa in general. And while hospitalizations, intensive care admissions and deaths did go up, they didn't go up to the same extent, they didn't go up proportionately. And this is a claim that is also being made in a few other places. Government officials in local government authorities in New Delhi, for example, have been quoted as saying that corrected for case numbers, Delhi's hospitalizations are about a quarter of what they were seven or eight months ago. And that would indicate that the Omicron strain is causing severe COVID illness at a lower frequency. Against this are numbers that the New York Times has put out in New York where corrected for case numbers, the reduction in hospitalizations in intensive care admissions and in deaths seem to be reduced to only by about 20-25%. So clearly the communities in which Omicron is spreading, also the characteristics of the communities in which Omicron is spreading also have an effect on just how severely Omicron is going to lead to hospitalizations. And that is going to have to be a major factor in deciding whether we should stop counting cases or not. The point that I would like to underline here, particularly for all of us in Global South, is that this is a stage in the pandemic where a data gap that is prevalent in the Global South is becoming more and more important. And that data gap is, we don't know how many people are getting hospitalized with COVID on a daily basis. We don't know how many people are getting admitted to intensive care on a daily basis. All we know is case numbers and deaths that are much later. We need these intermediate numbers, if public health policy, if hospital facilities, if medical resources are to be carefully and precisely targeted on a daily basis. And that's a major data gap that will need to be brought out and discussed and demanded from governments. The second point is that there is a distinction between additional doses of vaccines and how much protection dose provide for Omicron versus whether the basic two dose, three dose vaccinations will provide sufficient coverage. And the major limitation there, as we have pointed out in the past, is that in communities of the Global South where there aren't enough vaccinations achieved with the basic basic vaccination protocols, talking about additional doses is essentially simply going to delay the vaccination of communities. And this is where the rapid spread of Omicron converges with the vaccination campaign limitations because when people are not vaccinated, these are not individual people scattered randomly through communities who are not vaccinated. These are small, marginalized, disenfranchised communities, working class communities under privileged communities where vaccination rates are low. And in those communities Omicron can spread extraordinarily rapidly, creating virus populations where further virus evolution becomes possible, creating situations where communities that cannot access medical care particularly well are then becoming the selective targets of the Omicron spread. And this is something that I think is important to note so much for this week.