Huh, that's the opposite of how I remember it. Where on earth did you see that?

I couldn't see my family for Christmas this year because they freaked out over Omicron and insisted that me and my girlfriend would have to quarantine for 10 days before being able to visit them. This was driven entirely by "scientists" jumping to conclusions that Omicron would be as deadly as Delta but much more infectious and demanding more lockdowns, quarantines etc. They had no scientific basis for this doom-mongering, which appeared to be driven purely by some strange ideological desire for more restrictions.

I told family at the time - this is crazy. All the evidence about Omicron says it's a mild cold. There is no evidence pointing to any other conclusion. The people who discovered it in South Africa are communicating clearly that there's no crisis. Public health scientists are lying, again, because they're claiming there's no data when I was reading about that supposedly non-existent data in the press just yesterday and so you shouldn't listen.

Well, they listened to the "scientists" and not me. For a few weeks, at least. February comes around, nothing about the virus has changed but they suddenly realize that it causes a mild cold and nobody cares. The Queen gets it aged 95 and it's on the front pages for about half a day. She doesn't even stop working. Then they want us to visit so we can do the celebrations we didn't do at Christmas.

So the scores are:

    South African doctors: 1
    native_samples: 1
    Public health: -a million, again.

The people from South Africa turned out to be completely correct.