Community transmission. In Hawaii.

This is a baffling case, and if you think I was worried about the data coming out of South Africa last night, color me double worried tonight.  The individual was unvaccinated, but had already been infected with COVID (supposedly) in the past.  So now we have someone whose "natural immunity" (to quote Dan Denning, which I never do without a major disclaimer waiting in the wings) should have been protective.  Indeed, if you had the choice of confronting a new variant like Omicron with a backdrop of a recent COVID-19 infection, or a booster with the standard iteration of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, I would take the infection every time, because the vaccines were not engineered to handle the greatly mutated spike protein of the Omicron strain.

Well even pre-infection with the strain du jour proved of no help.  This individual had no travel history, which means Hawaii (look at their low case numbers and low death numbers, the envy of every state save Vermont) is somehow already brewing Omicron when we just heard about it for the first time last week.

Ouch.