Closed again

[Frank Cox]

The omicron thing has scared the hell out of everyone in this area, including me. So I've decided to close the theatre "until further notice".

This is unfortunate since tomorrow's movie was supposed to be Spider-man, followed by Sing the following week. *sigh*

Depending on how long this goes on I'll probably end up throwing out a bunch of candy and drinks again when they expire.

The restaurant across the street put a sign on their door today too: "Closed until further notice due to coronavirus exposure."

Before I decided to close the theatre, I watched Spider-man this afternoon for my qc screening. Hands down, that's the best superhero movie that I've seen in years! It's just too damn bad that I won't be playing it for the people around here.

[Mike Blakesley]

I don't understand it, aren't a majority of people vaxxed? Why don't you just have everybody mask up if they are worried?

On top of that, Omicron is supposedly a less serious variant, symptomwise anyway.

[Frank Cox]

There's actually a requirement that everyone show their vaccine card when they come in the door.

Restaurants have the exact same requirement and, well, look at what happened to the one across the street (which is actually the best and usually by far the busiest restaurant in town). The wording of that sign indicates that they have an actual case or cases there rather than being closed on a speculative basis.

It's my understanding that this omicron can evade vaccines to some degree unless you have had a booster shot (third dose) of Moderna or Pfizer and we're still a long way from everyone having that third dose. I just got mine this past Tuesday.

This is absolutely not the Christmas present that I was hoping for, but it doesn't seem like a great time to put a bunch of people together in a room for several hours. I don't want to kill myself or any of the customers over a movie.

I hate closing the theatre. It just about drove me crazy when I had to close in 2020 and I don't think it's going to be any more fun this time around.

The last time I decided to close on Monday and the government issued an order for all theatres to close the following Thursday. I won't be surprised to see another order like that issued shortly after Christmas. In fact, another order like that might make me a bit happier since I could then have a way to determine when to re-open (that being the day that they lift the order) instead of having to figure it out for myself somehow.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't understand it, aren't a majority of people vaxxed? Why don't you just have everybody mask up if they are worried?

On top of that, Omicron is supposedly a less serious variant, symptomwise anyway.

We've been in lock-down again here for about a week now... Countries around us are more or less following suit with similar measures. In Belgium, all cinemas have been closed since Thursday... If those measures really do anything good, is everybody's guess...

But the problem is that none of the current vaccines really help against Omicron, especially not if your last vaccination was months away. This is the stuff you have to almost read between the lines, as nobody is seemingly willing to speak out about it, in fear that nobody will take any further vaccines.

Omicron is said to be a less-serious variant, but the numbers are still pretty vague. I guess we have some interesting choices to make: Either go back in lockdown until we have vaccines that have been adapted to this variant or keep stuff open and simply hope this one will be more like the flu than the last one... Our government over here went for the first option, at least until now. It's to be seen how long they'll be able to sustain this situation, as even in a country with a vaccination rate of about 85%, nobody is really believing the government has this under any form of control anymore and this renewed and very sudden lockdown, just a few days before Christmas, really hit a lot of people in the face pretty hard.

[Randy Stankey]

The omicron thing has scared the hell out of everyone...

They couldn't have picked a worse name if they had chosen "Andromeda!"

Most people don't understand the Greek alphabet and how items in a series or variations of something are named with Greek letters.
The word "omicron" just sounds dark and mysterious and only serves to create fear in the minds of people who don't understand naming conventions.

They should use a YY-MM (year-month) naming convention, instead. That way, omicron would be named "2112."

A far cooler name if you ask me!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Meh... Andromeda... That name doesn't have sufficient... strain? They should've picked Lovecraft monster names instead.

But if I'd to choose, I'd call them after Icelandic volcanoes, starting with the longest names first.

[Stefan Scholz]

Immunization, and that's what recent development and variants show, is not working on the newer virusses. Which, fdro,m a scientiffic approach was forseeable.
Patrons are scared by all the news they get, the speed this variant spreads is high. So you might tell them, on a scale of 1 to 10, you can expect a 4 - 6 severeness. Not fatal, but unformfortable, or similar to winter flu. They won't believe. They are scared, and stay home.
Same I see in theatres I visited the last couple of weeks, most operators told me about single digit ticket sales per day, in 2 or 3 screen venues and 3 shows scheduled.
Nice for those looking for private screenings, but unbearable for long, if you have to keep open, full winter heat, Air exchange and lights.
It would be more important, to have all these recently developed anti viral medicines on hand, and ready for mass application. Plus to dig deeper into medication and drug design. This could bring trust back, not more vaccines without effect.

[Van Dalton]

Most people don't understand the Greek alphabet and how items in a series or variations of something are named with Greek letters.
The word "omicron" just sounds dark and mysterious and only serves to create fear in the minds of people who don't understand naming conventions. They should use a YY-MM (year-month) naming convention, instead. That way, omicron would be named "2112."

That's precisely why the sensationalist commercial mass media use naming schemes like random Greek letters. It puts asses in front of television screens and scares people into staying tuned, and makes for quick screaming above-the-fold headlines which sell papers. Fear sells ad time. The media are a business. They're not in it to report facts, it's all about ratings and making money. An alphanumeric name like a date code, although more scientifically proper, doesn't create the same psychological subliminal effect of dread that Greek letters can. It's not as easy of a sell, plus it'd be too much of a mouthful for the bubble-headed bleach-blonde who comes on at five and can barely pronounce local place names without getting tongue-tied, though she can sure tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.

This is why [it*] has been so excessively reported on in the commercial mass media, especially in America. Devote no less than 75% of your nightly report to it, then follow it with an heartwarming cute cat story in your last two minutes, scare 'em into complacency and watch your nightly People Meter rating and your monthly cume soar; get the sheep buying erectile dysfunction/restless leg pills and hiring ambulance-chaser lawyers like good obediant consumer drones; rake in the ad dollars. Follow the money. It's a proven strategy for an easy sale.

Also, if I recall the Greek alphabet correctly, there are at least nine or ten letters between delta and omicron. Unless there have truly been 14 or 15 strains since it first was diagnosed in 2019 (which I find doubtful), it seems like somebody in some propaganda office somewhere is just pulling letter names out of their ass. What will they do next fall when the phrase "omega variant" is exhausted and no longer marketable? Run through three or four Cyrillic letters carefully selected for maximum psychological impact and sales potential? "Shcha variant" -- today's reporters' 1950s predecessors couldn't figure out how to pronounce Nikita Khrushchev's last name correctly....

* Bowdlerised to as not to "offend" certain types of people and send them into pointlessly profane tirades.

[Bobby Henderson]

The omicron thing has scared the hell out of everyone in this area, including me. So I've decided to close the theatre "until further notice".

That's pretty unfortunate. Hopefully the shut-down won't last very long. It possible it may not considering the far more contagious nature of omicron. It's possible that variant may "burn" through most of the populace in a matter of just a few weeks. The first several weeks of a new year usually stinks for movie-going. Studios traditionally roll out a lot of bad product during that time.

This latest covid wave could have been prevented if the bosses in charge world-wide had gotten their shit together when this pandemic first got started. Over the past 2 years it has been a parade of pooch-screw errors. All the errors have been wrapping around, compounding on themselves. The anti-vax hysteria, disorganized mitigation policies and "rich" countries being general douchebags to poor countries by hoarding vaccines and supplies are all serious problems that go back to poor crisis management and poor messaging.

Breaking the chain of transmission should have been priority #1 this entire time, including now. Somehow that message got watered down or completely lost. Because so many people, especially Americans, only viewed SARS-CoV-2 from the perspective of how the virus may or may not affect them personally. Far too few of these selfish jerks bothered to think about someone other than themselves. "Oh, I'm not worried, I'm not scared of 'rona." It doesn't occur to them they might pass the virus along to someone that gets killed by it.

We're still doing this bullshit now. People are more concerned about their rights being violated by mask, vaccine or testing rules than they are about killing someone else with the lung cooties they might be exhaling. The level of selfishness that has been on display by both the general public and a lot of elected leaders for the past couple years is really disgusting.

As long as we have our heads buried deep up our asses with this problem we're going to keep seeing more and more of these SARS-CoV-2 variants. Omicron won't the be last one.

On top of that, Omicron is supposedly a less serious variant, symptomwise anyway.

A lot of medical observation points to omicron generally causing less severe disease. Unfortunately that bit of good news may be more than cancelled out by the far more contagious nature of omicron. Far greater numbers of people may be infected with this new variant all at once.

Delta had already loaded up hospitals with more patients than they could handle. Now they're seeing a great deal more people flood into hospitals infected with omicron. The omicron variant may be a milder form of SARS-CoV-2. But if a hospital's treatment capacity is totally overwhelmed then that will make it harder to treat omicron patients successfully. And it will make it harder to treat other medical patients successfully.

Omicron has showed a pretty good ability at evading vaccines. Anyone fully vaccinated will still very likely have mild symptoms at worst or no symptoms at all. But they may be able to spread the virus to others more at risk. There is still a large number of people who aren't vaccinated. There are many in that group who have various risk factors. People over a certain age are at greater risk of severe disease. So are people with various health issues.

The flu is a seen as a relatively minor disease, but it can kill tens of thousands of Americans (and far more world-wide) in a given year. The highly contagious nature of omicron gives it even more lethal potential.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I don't understand it, aren't a majority of people vaxxed? Why don't you just have everybody mask up if they are worried?

On top of that, Omicron is supposedly a less serious variant, symptomwise anyway.

It's the people that aren't vaxed that are clogging up the hospitals. New York had 40,000 cases in one day. And now apparently many of them are fighting with hospital staff over the treatment being used. But as far as Omicron goes... you need to have the Booster in order to combat it. The forst two shots do nothing to stop Omicron. People that have had all three shots that have still gotten it usually recover very fast at home. Right now, because of the kidney transplant, my immunosuppressant system is very suppressed until some time around September. Then they wean me off most of them and I only end up taking about 6 pills a day instead of 22. So if I do go out I use an N-95 mask. They also announced today that N-95 masks are the only ones useful for Omicron.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Also, if I recall the Greek alphabet correctly, there are at least nine or ten letters between delta and omicron. Unless there have truly been 14 or 15 strains since it first was diagnosed in 2019 (which I find doubtful), it seems like somebody in some propaganda office somewhere is just pulling letter names out of their ass. What will they do next fall when the phrase "omega variant" is exhausted and no longer marketable? Run through three or four Cyrillic letters carefully selected for maximum psychological impact and sales potential? "Shcha variant" -- today's reporters' 1950s predecessors couldn't figure out how to pronounce Nikita Khrushchev's last name correctly....

You may read up a little.

Nobody is randomly pulling Greek letters out of their arse and there have been a lot more than "14 or 15 strains". Most variants, fortunately, are pretty short-lived, but some have the right properties to become a new, dominant variant. It's those you hear about in the news and that's the primary reason there are plenty of letters "missing" in your supposed "propaganda alphabet of variants".

Also, calling some variants by Greek letters is a practice that was established just this year, to avoid stigma and confusion. Before that, a variant would usually be called by its origin.

[Bobby Henderson]

Well, Van Dalton pretty much ruined his sense of credibility on this discussion by calling the SAR-CoV-2 virus the "woo floo". Those kind of statements are such that suggest the entire pandemic if faked. It is not. And such statements usually whore themselves to certain right-wing tropes of more distracting bullshit.

I will not be made to have any understanding for people who want to suggest this whole pandemic is a hoax or some other supposed agenda. I've lost enough people personally to this plague to know it is 100% for real. Fuck anyone who thinks this is a hoax.

The Greek letters naming thing for variants and strains is to make things more simple for the 90%+ level of "non-scientists" in the public, to put it nicely. If they wanted to be purely technical without any thinking about all the rest of the lame-brained laypersons in the general public every fucking Goddamn variant would have had a long-ass hexadecimal code number applied to it. Most of the public is fucking stupid and impulsive as hell, believing half the shit they hear from their chosen source of partisan news on Goddamned fucking cable. The 24/7 news networks on cable are a total jerk-off to the American public, being total whores for advertising dollars. Get a fucking clue already, SHEEPLE. The last 2 years of this pandemic and the idiot behavior surrounding it only prove that point. We're a civilized society? Fuck off! We're not but a few steps removed from total fuck-off anarchy. The illusion we have of civilized society is built on a fairly delicate balancing act.

As I said before, maybe once SARS-CoV-2 has murdered enough people to affect everyone personally with the tragedy they might wake the fuck up. But we're a bunch of selfish Goddamned morons. We think we're immune to the crisis and do not want to make any adjustment for it at all. That is until the fucking virus kills the living shit out of someone you actually care about. Then it gets real.

[Van Dalton]

U mad bro?

So apparently you think I'm somehow "right wing" (whatever that means these days) even though I'm not and have never claimed to be, just because I said a phrase once. Boy, you'd have a field day with some of my blatantly rub-it-in-everybody's-face, fringe-right idiot coworkers. If you thought Fox Propaganda Channel is wack........

But don't hold back. Why don't you tell us how you really feel and cuss a little, issue a few personal attacks, maybe even use bold text and throw the word "fuck" around a dozen times. You know, speaking of ruining one's sense of credibility.

'Murica.

[Marcel Birgelen]

So apparently you think I'm somehow "right wing" (whatever that means these days) even though I'm not and have never claimed to be, just because I said a phrase once. Boy, you'd have a field day with some of my blatantly rub-it-in-everybody's-face, fringe-right idiot coworkers. If you thought Fox Propaganda Channel is wack........

I can't speak for Bobby, but I don't see any political affinity assigned to you. What I do agree about though is that terms like the "Woo Flu" do diminish the credibility of your arguments, even if it was supposed to be cynical, it's something that transpires badly through on-line communication channels.

But, like indicated before: virus variants usually is a very technical undertaking and most are named after their specific mutations, from the same Wikipedia article:

RSYLTPGD246-253N

Otherwise referred to as del 246-252, or other various similar expression, refer to the deletion of amino acid from the position of 246 to 252, in the N-terminal domain of spike protein, accompanied with a replacement of the aspartic acid (D) at the position 253 for asparagine (N).

Something like "RSYLTPGD246-253N" simply isn't usable for broad communication, so if such a variation becomes a major variant, it's now been decided to assign a letter from the Greek alphabet to it. The Greek alphabet was chosen to avoid associations with anything particular, but letters like "Xi" have been omitted. While that one could be considered somewhat political, I guess that if "Trump" or "Biden" would be a letter in the Greek alphabet, they would've equally been omitted.

Maybe "Omicron" sounds ominous, because Greek alphabetic letters have historically been used in stuff wrapped in secrecy, especially in movies...

But as you can see, the virus colloquially called "the Coronavirus" is a much more complex beast than you may first expect. What you see here is "evolution at work", you can see how the virus evolves fast and how some variants with just the right properties make it to the top and become the new variants we hear about in the news.

[Bobby Henderson]

U mad bro?

Uh, yeah. When it comes to this topic. I'm mad as hell.

My expletive-laden rant in my previous post was not meant to be directed entirely at you personally. The phrase "woo flu" was just the launching point for it. The "woo flu" thing is one of many catch-phrases used to minimize this pandemic and insult anyone trying to take it seriously. It's a pretty broad problem.

Enough people here in my small city have died of COVID-19 to affect me personally. One of my local friends here in Lawton, a guy I knew for over 20 years, died this past Spring from COVID-19. It wasn't a quick death either. He spent a few weeks on a ventilator before finally passing. I couldn't make sense of it because the guy was a few years younger than me and didn't appear to have any major health problems. As more people keep dying of this crap it makes me wonder what friend, co-worker or relative I'm going to lose next to COVID-19. When I hear someone say the pandemic is a media hoax it's pretty hard for me not to take offense at it.

You're right that a big part of the media hypes up the fear angle about this virus, just like they hype up the fear angle on anything else. Another very partisan part of the media is doing the exact opposite, spreading their own brand of fear, anger and outrage to minimize this pandemic. They're selling bullshit about vaccines to appeal to the anti-vax crowd. They're passing along bullshit about the numbers of COVID-19 deaths being faked (the trope of cancer deaths or car accident deaths being labeled as covid to get gub'ment money). They're spreading enough bullshit about people like Dr Anthony Fauci to where he's getting death threats every day. Violent confrontations are happening all the time because someone gets their delicate panties in a twist over being told to wear a mask. It's lunacy. The 24/7 cable news channels and various media personalities on TV or the Internet don't care. They're making plenty of advertising money by selling fear and outrage. The American people are fools for willingly consuming it.

We could have been done with this pandemic already if everyone had just focused on the idea of killing this virus by breaking the chain of transmission. Instead we have a lot of people doing every contrary thing to keep the virus alive and keep giving it every chance to mutate. And possibly mutate into something even worse. As I said earlier, omicron won't be the last version of this bug.