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Welcome to the commentary magazine, Daily Podcast, the first podcast of the year 2022.

I am John Poghurtz, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always, executive editor

Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Associate editor Noah Rothman, Hi, Noah. Hi, John.

And senior writer Christine Rosen, Hi, Christine, who is under the weather. Yes, hi, John.

Hi, again in there. So she's hanging in there. I and I had COVID the other week. So I now have super powers.

I can go anywhere and do anything I can eat a mask in front of you. It was in fact, as you keep

reading about nothing. And I am a 60 year old man with a comorbidity. So if I had Omicron and it was

nothing and my kids who had it had very few symptoms, I mean, we had a little bit of a sore throat,

a little bit of runny nose. That was it. No fever stuff like that. At least that is my own

personal anecdotal evidence that all of the information that we're getting about Omicron

being significantly milder, not leading to and increase in hospitalizations. And certainly

to the extent that people are being hospitalized, they are all entirely unvaccinated.

A friend of mine who is on the board of a major hospital in New York City informed me on Christmas

day that there were 82 hospitalizations for COVID, 81 of whom were unvaccinated. And 69 of those

81 had been intubated. So obviously Omicron like every version of COVID is extremely dangerous for

the unvaccinated and at least again anecdotally in my case. And it appears a longitutally in the case

of data from South Africa, from Britain, and now increasingly from what's going on here.

It really isn't dangerous except in very, very extreme cases for anybody who is vaccinated.

So that's why we had this weird shift in tone and emphasis over the last 10 days.

That I think through a lot of people for a loop, right? The CDC announcing that the not only

with the period of isolation once a positive test didn't reached be reduced from 10 days to five.

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