I'm so exhausted and demoralised by this endless cascade of things-getting-worse. It's taking a really big toll on my mental health and there's no resources available in my country to offer support (and there's nothing to be done except try to learn to live with it, anyways). The future looks bleak.
Yeah, this is just what respiratory pandemics look like. Honestly, vaccination has been astoundingly successful this time around compared to previous pandemics, and even this news just downgrades it from almost unbelievably effective. The trouble is that the media in many countries has mislead people about how much control it's actually possible to exercise over a disease like Covid-19 in the long term and how effective measures have been in other countries and past pandemics, often so they can blame politicians they disagree with for failing to achieve that level of control.
since the dawn of time its been possible to spin a bleak future at any point in history. In the 900s for example they thought the world was gonna end in 1000AD with the rapture.
I believe that when we are presented with a threat our instinct is to identify and classify it to the best of our ability. A comment on HN that has stuck with me:
> Why Kids Love Garbage Trucks
> This didn't address my favorite theory: that (some) kids are programmed to learn as much as they can about the nearby megafauna, and in this world the closest approximation is these big garbage/fire/construction vehicles.
There is an asymmetry between the level of information we can collect in our immediate surroundings and online. The same method that kids employ to detect an unknown and quickly classify it as a non threat with the limited information they have available to them becomes paralyzing when the amount of information available is seemingly infinite. An endless number of threats, and an endless amount of information available about them.
Before the internet and television, how many times would a person feel threatened in their lifetime before a threat materialized that ultimately took their life? What is that number now?
Yeah it is, but it involves curating a lot of your online experiences and media consumption habits. It may involve losing contact with some of your online friends on social networks if they (re) post news. And with 'rona restrictions,
"offline" alternatives / distractions have been limited.
Feasible? Yes. But it certainly requires effort and saying now to things that are considered standard parts of daily life by much of society, such as engagement with platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
I cut myself from consuming news and FB/Twitter feeds many years ago, maybe back in 2014 when MSM went ape shit in my region.
Can't say I was successful, for number of reasons. News still find their way into my head via HN headlines (although I disabled them via Tampermonkey scripts), via buzz in comments, via talks with (some) friends etc. Also, only bad news go through via these channels, so the world looks even more depressing because when something good happens, nobody brings it up.
Probably I need to cut myself from passive consumption of reddit/HN too.
For me its just recognizing how the news is formed and syndicated.
For example, everything on the news is supposed to match your worst nightmare. The more closely it matches, the less likely it is accurate. Knowing that helps filter what you actually need to be cognizant of and react to. Actually consuming it is just to apply critical thinking to know why it isn't the complete story, and solely for conversation purposes.
I managed to reduce it a lot. I never tried to cut it to zero because I still want to be informed and because I think the problem is consuming a lot of news.
- The radio I used to listen to during the day had a small news segment every hour. I replaced it with listening to my own music (or use Spotify, Apple Music, etc). It was mostly repetitive and had advertising, so it was easy to replace.
- I no longer watch TV, especially news stations. They keep repeating the same thing every 30 minutes anyway and hyping up everything that happens because there's not enough content. What I used to watch on TV (eg: series) can be found somewhere else and I can watch it when I want.
- No more "news" notifications. Most "news" aren't really "news" (I don't care if a celebrity did or said something...) and most of the "breaking news" are not that important.
- Disabled/removed everything that had news on it (they're everywhere!). I don't use a news app, my browser doesn't show me news in the new tab page, left Facebook (best decision ever - I use direct messages to keep in touch), stopped following people that shared news or where always fighting with someone on Twitter.
Now I use newsletters, podcasts and RSS feeds to follow the news.
- Some news organisations have free weekly newsletters or a weekly podcast with a recap of the week. Short, direct and doesn't use much of my time.
- RSS feeds allow me to follow certain subjects or websites that I want to follow closely.
- Some news agencies seem to do a better job than some rag using clickbait titles to bring traffic to their crappy website. They're often not as one sided as certain orgs and tell you what happened without wrapping it in their opinion.
- Sites like Hacker News can be useful. I already knew this about the Pfizer vaccine, but some people made good points here.
Sometimes I'm a bit behind other people, but not by much. For some things, it's nice to follow everything as it is happening, but usually I don't miss much.
I might be interested in knowing what's happening, but not everything about who did it (eg: the sad story about the people involved - I can find more details if I want) or as if it was entertainment. The rush to be first at reporting the event also means that often they're wrong about something. I also don't really care about some accident that happened in a completely different country, need to know what's the covid situation everywhere in detail or something bad that may happen.
This works for me, but it also requires some self control and some curation. RSS feeds and podcasts won't help me much if I subscribe to all websites and multiple podcasts about news, politics, etc.
Don't browse news sites (including HN if the stuff here gets you down). Don't use social media where you have poor control of what gets in your feed. If you have contacts who keep sending you news, ask them to stop and if they won't, put them in an ignore list. If your in-person contacts with friends is always about the news, limit the time you spend with them.
Substitute that time with other things - be it other sites, hobbies or activities. Reading novels can be a lot of fun. Building things, etc.
This research paper shows the vaccines are highly effective against the delta variant: "Conclusions: After 2 doses of either vaccine there were only modest differences in vaccine effectiveness with the B.1.617.2 variant." The efficacy drop was about 5-6%.
Things are getting better, just not as quickly as one would like them to. I’d rather have people tell me the facts than lie and pretend like everything is fine.
* Feel good about the things you are doing that make a positive difference, however small.
* Don’t feel guilt about the things that aren’t under your control, however big.
P.S. Nobody is in control and the only way big positive differences ever happen is because of the aggregate of small positive differences that everyone makes.
Some people believe almost nothing is under their control.
These people have external locus-of-control. They don't change the world because they kickback and let life happen to them. Mostly, it's religious types who think like this and say "it's god's plan." Bullshit. They're learned helplessness cowards.
Hey, we have a vaccine at least. If you feel like this make use of the fact that you cannot do much by yourself to change the situation. Sit down, avoid the news and let the world do whatever :)
Remember that most media is built on the idea of capturing attention and it is easier to capture attention with stories of fear and disaster than it is with positive stories. 3 local acts of violence will get headlines while 300 acts of kindness will go without promotion.
I don't disagree with that view, but it's really hard to find positives from the rise of Covid. Everyday life was effectively mutilated for more than a year, we might have to coexist forever with an infectious disease that can debilitate us even after getting "vaccinated", and most of the Western ruling classes were revealed as incompetent buffoons just "winging it" from day to day.
On the other hand, we can now mitigate deadly diseases in less than 12 months, as a species, although we'll be fleeced by pharma companies for the trouble.
This new mRNA tech might completely change some degenerative diseases. My kid may benefit, although given the rarity of the condition and time to approval I'm less hopeful.
Hopefully we stop trusting politicians, physicians, and scientists and start trusting Science and statistics.
It’s funny how we came up with this amazing new tech, where the owner can access basically all the information in the world in his hands, can listen to music, watch films, basically do anything. I mean Elon basically says it turns humans into cyborgs.
And this tech was obviously very expensive, and the rich had huge advantages in keeping it to themselves, I mean why give the poor access to all information in the world right?
So the rich just kept smartphones to themselves to get richer and more powerful.
Oxford University has started a first stage trial for a HIV vaccine based on the same research as their Covid 19 vaccine (mRNA), it's looking very promising.
The mRNA vaccines didn't spring up out of nowhere, they are the culmination of ~20 years of research into mRNA vaccines.
Every other reply to this comment: "Have you tried not being sad by being happy instead?"
Sometimes the world does get worse. History is not a linear function of progress, there are many examples of generations which have been much worse off than the generations that precede them. It's time we re-evaluated society and how we care for each other because we're not at the end of history. Ruthless capitalism isn't compatible with our rapidly decaying biosphere. It's completely ridiculous how much wealth a handful of people have while the rest of us suffer under the USA's medieval healthcare system. We know what choices to make, we just refuse to make them because rich people might get mad. The world is getting worse, but we can ameliorate the biggest problems if we choose to do so.
Life is suffering with sparse sprinkles of happiness here and there. If you feel bad take a page from Budism, it's the best religion for your mind, and I am an avid agnostic. It's the "No bullshit" religion, basically it's your problem, fix it or learn to live with it.
It teaches you to embrace suffering as part of living, everything is for you to endure, consider how to solve (or not) and grow. By solve I mean reflect on the outcomes and choose to do something, just accept it or just ignore it. The best thing you can do is learn to be your own support, by analysing the issues that throuble you and choose a path.
Besides that We live in the best era human kind has ever had by a long mile.
* There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.
* Big world changing wars have not happened in almost 100 years.
* So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.
* No cold war, no dooms day clock
* Democracy, information is basically free.
* Freedom to do whatever you want ( and face the consequences too)
* Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)
Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID.
Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better.
You're either a bloody liar, delusional, naïve, or don't have functioning eyes.
- Famine in Yemen. Ongoing.
- Famine in South Sudan. Ongoing.
- Two years of drought in certain countries would push the world into global famine. Climate change weather patterns like Oregon/Canada and the ongoing mega drought in the US west and SW are just previews.
- Millions and millions of homeless in America. I can see the camps and tents in every major city.
- Standard of living decreasing. Real wages declining.
- Mass shootings every day.
- More prisoners per capita than any other country.
- Doing absolutely nothing effective about climate change... which is going to kill us, most species, and the planet.
- The threat of global nuclear war over Taiwan is very, very real.
- Healthcare costs soaring, life expectancies plummeting.
- There is no democracy, it's a plutocracy. The very rich own the majority of Western countries outright.
Two comments stood out to me in browsing as needlessly rude and angsty, and it turns out they were both yours. Are you commenting for effect or just to vent?
The famine in Yemen and Sudan is a result of logistic breakdown when the war etc. makes it very expensive to transport food.
US produces enough food to feed like 2-3 billions people. It is just the vast majority of it goes to feed animals to get cheap meat. So even with agricultural output drop like 50% the will be no famine in US. The meat will be much more expensive, but no calories shortage.
Well it’s still better than it has ever been in the history of humanity:
- While famines are still a thing, the number of deaths due to hunger has fallen considerably since the start of the 20th century.
- The real median household income in the US has been consistently increasing in the past several decades. While growing inequality is a huge problem most people in the world still have a much higher QOL than their predecessors.
- While there was a spike in homicides in 2020, the homicide rate in the US is lower than it has ever been since the early 60’s (obviously it’s still huge compared to all other developed countries).
- Climate change obviously is going to have a huge effect, however claiming that it’s going is destroy all life on earth is delusional.. In any case most natural ecosystems have already been destroyed or permanently altered by humans, in the past few thousands of years anyway, so there isn’t that much left for climate change to “kill” besides humans (whom I’m sure will manage to adapt to a couple percent rise in avg. temperature, even though it’s likely it will cost several millions of lives).
- There is zero incentive for either US or China to start a nuclear war over Taiwan (or anything else for that matter) so I’d say the threat of a nuclear war is pretty low.
- Life expentancy has been increasing prior to 2020 and there is no reason to believe that it won’t rebound to the previous level soon and continue growing in the future. Healthcare related costs are likely to continue increasing due to ageing societies and higher R&D costs (as technologies become more complex). I don’t see this as huge problem, though, as long as it’s outweotghted by increasing productivity in other sectors. Ensuring universal access to high quality healthcare is a political problem that needs to be solved but even a market based system will likely result in better outcomes for the majority of the population.
To play devil's advocate here: things are of course better today than they have been for most of human history. But for those of us in prosperous Western countries, they aren't necessarily better than they were, say, 50 years ago. In fact I would argue that we're in much worse shape. Part of the problem is that things have gotten worse on a rather short timescale. Millenials know very well the feeling of being judged by the older generations for not owning a house and two cars, not having a wife and children, not having a high-paying job to go with our university degrees.
Some of your points are true, but I would argue about these in particular:
> * There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.
> * So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.
> * Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)
Many more Americans are food insecure than they were 50 years ago. The USDA estimates that 11 million children are food insecure in the US. Poverty in the US has in fact been increasing for decades, but government statistics don't reflect it because they measure poverty based on a 1950s spending model.
The West has endured decades of trickle down economics when the reality is that wealth trickles up. Of course total wealth is increasing, but the lower and middle classes have captured none of it. The vast majority of humans on Earth cannot afford to travel or even take vacations, and those in prosperous Western countries have had continually decreasing disposable income for decades.
> * No cold war, no dooms day clock
> * Democracy, information is basically free.
You have this so backwards that it's baffling. The doomsday clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been since its inception in 1947. It currently sits at 100 seconds to midnight. World leaders have become increasingly reckless, unstable and authoritarian. The last US president said, "We have all these nukes, why aren't we using them?"
Whether we lack a cold war is debatable. There has not been a significant drop in proxy wars or in militarization of world powers since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US still spends an ever increasing share of its budget on military, and it actually uses it to kill. The US has been in a continuous state of war for the longest period in its entire history. There are people voting today that were not yet born when the war with Afghanistan started.
> Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID. Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better
This is not as true as you think, and I don't believe it will be true for long. For most of human history there were very few humans. There were probably about 100 billion humans that have ever lived, and about 8 billion are alive today. So if you were to pick a random human from history, there's a non-negligible chance that your pick would be alive today.
I've argued above that we in the West are experiencing decreasing quality of life. I worry it will start to fall much more rapidly over the coming decades due to climate change, wealth inequality and potential nuclear war. Considering the big picture is probably not a good idea; we may be better off living in ignorant bliss.
I would say your view is very much biased towards your own country. I not showboating or anything but have lived in 4 countries and travelled to 30 or more most during the 90’s and more recently, the change is palpable.
I also live in a 3rd world country and it’s a sharp upwards change on the last 50 years.
Population has increased 5x but there is less people starving to death, getting killed by curable diseases and so on.
The only thing that has increased is crime because of drug gangs related issues here.
Most, middle eastern, eastern European, Asian, Central and South american countries enjoy a far more democratic governments than 50 years ago. Number of crazy dictators has decreased greatly in those 50 years.
Maybe the american situation is getting worst but I would argue that the vast majority of the planet is now being able to enjoy a bit of that “american life” that was only the privilege of a few.
Coronavirus was never a big deal unless you were old, sick, or obese. Even with these demographics, it had a 1% death rate, the same order of magnitude as various viral illnesses.
We really should have not blown this out of proportion. I think when people realized we could work from home, people faked fear to enjoy a mini vacation. Media loves fear. Politicians wanted to use this.
Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars? No, but apparently if we use statistics we should.
I'm sorry, you yourself haven't provided a single citation either. You are requiring others to have a stronger level of evidence than the level of evidence you are providing for your claims.
I don't find it to be in particularly good faith that as soon as someone disputes your claims, you immediately ask them to do research work that you didn't want to do.
> Coronavirus was never a big deal unless you were old, sick, or obese.
Or unless you happen to require hospitalisation at the same time than a lot of "old, sick or obese" people where saturating the available beds and ICUs of every hospital.
There are second order effects on the wave that we experienced. The most dramatic probably has been in India, where the lack of available oxygen produced a lot of deaths. And we will start to discover next year what other effects like undetected conditions, or worsened after a year of delaying treatment, will cause.
A 1% of a considerable chunk of the population is a lot of people.
This comment makes me want to bet money that you don't work in the health space and you aren't friends with a single practicing healthcare provider.
> Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars?
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's annual budget exceeds $1T (EDIT: $1 billion, not trillion, thanks KptMarchewa) [1], and that's just part of government spending on highway safety -- far from the full picture of "vehicle safety." Your homework is to look up the safety R&D spending of the top automotive manufacturers in the USA. "We" absolutely do spend a ton of money and research on vehicle safety, and it's paid off in the form of an exponential drop in deaths per unit distance traveled.
> Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars? No, but apparently if we use statistics we should.
Yes, we probably do, if you consider the cumulative cost of better engineering and safety technology on all the cars sold and serviced in a year, plus highway construction standards.
And that's before considering that personal car transport is probably _inherently_ dangerous, and most cities are trying to move to a higher percentage of walking and cycling.
I think its important to step back and reassess how the bleak picture that is often painted differs from the reality of day to day life. One of the reasons it was difficult to convince people to take effective action like social distancing and quarantine is because even at its worst (in the US), most people didn't get sick, and very few that did experienced severe disease. For the majority of people, beyond the restrictions to day to day life, Covid didn't seem that different from a flu season in terms of the burden of the disease. Ironically, I personally have been pretty cautious in my interactions over the course of the pandemic, and as a result 2020 was the longest stretch of health my family has ever had.
None of this is to say that the pandemic is no big deal, or that it was handled well. But the point is that between mainstream media and social media, the picture, not just of the pandemic, but for any given topic, is always taken to the extreme. Every new bit of information is evidence of the apocalypse, the collapse of society, and the impending extinction of the human race. Enemies are everywhere. Nothing can be trusted. You are always being taken advantage of. The dystopia is now. You can't even google symptoms for an illness, without, as my doctor puts it "discover that your stubbed toe is actually terminal cancer and you have six months to live".
The reality is that there are definitely things worth being concerned about both as a society and individually, but very rarely does it live up to the "hype". I've found that the more I unplug and spend that time and energy engaging in my day to day life, the less bleak the world seems, and the happier I am.
yes, I've been lucky to not get it. But many friends/family got sick. Again, so far I was lucky that they are all ok. But there were scary moments, and a friend (even if somewhat distant one) is in ICU in hospital right now. Covid is very much present in our lives. I did not see those things ont TV, and luck has played a part in the outcome. I don't like pushing my luck for a long time, it hast to run out.
" there's no resources available in my country to offer support"
What did your ancestors do for 10 000 years up until public healthcare in rich nations? How did they stick it out so that eventually you could prosper? And FYI I'm not sure there are any public resources in most rich nations for this kind of support anyhow.
We're over the worst of it, the data on D variant is just a warning to maintain vigilance.
The very best thing you can do to help yourself AND help combat coronavirus is go outside, enjoy the sun, get some exercise, and do all of that with a big gaggle of family and friends.
Try it. You'll be improving your own immune system, you'll be happier, and you can forget all this fearmongering garbage.
Isn't this exactly what we would expect? It's more or less similar to what probably happened with the flu in 1920. New flu variants were still popping up, but they weren't like the 1918-1919 type, and the mortality rate was much lower. Plus, I recall being told before the vaccines showed up that they would be better at reducing mortality than at eliminating getting sick at all.
Now, if you thought you were going to just stay in hiding and neither get vaccinated nor get sick, and just wait it out, well that's not going to work (and was never a good strategy). Covid-19 is the new flu, it will always be in circulation, but just get vaccinated and get on with life.
Unlike New Zealand, most countries don’t think indefinite draconian restrictions on travel and ever-present risk of being locked down with little notice are an acceptable price to pay for a small increase in life expectancy. I share that viewpoint, and am very happy not to live in New Zealand.
Except there would be no need for an ever present risk of lockdown if every single country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks a year and a half ago.
But no, muh freedomᵀᴹ and the economy!! are far more important considerations that certainly didn't turn out to actually be incredibly short-sighted.
I'm lucky to live in a place with >70% vaccination rate. So this no longer comes from a place of grievance toward personal inconvenience. I'm shaking my damn head at the collective lack of wisdom that was exhibited in countries' responses, including my own.
Yes, my freedom over the course of almost 1.5 years was adversely affected because we couldn't handle a month without it.
And yes, the economy was adversely affected because most small businesses were shuttered for half a year and swaths of them went out of business since we could not bear closing everything down for a sixth of that time period.
Edit: Please explain to me how swallowing real estate, employee, and supply chain expenses for 30 days would have been more difficult or less preferable to the splintered schedule of mandated closings over a far longer time period.
The intention of keeping freedom and not harming the economy was IMNSHO not matched by that effect and the discrepancy wasn't really surprising.
The authorities where I live decided to keep more open than I considered wise, and not much later closed a lot of sports, for example. The effective choice was freedom now against freedom later, even if the intention was to choose more freedom rather than less.
>This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world.
China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.
The importance of freedom and the economy are not in dispute. The point is that both would have suffered less in the long term if "draconian" lockdowns had been implemented in the short term. It's game theory, and NZ chose the winning strategy while much of the world chose the losing one.
When you live on islands thousands of miles away from anywhere with a fairly homogenous population and diversified economy, it's easier both physically and politically to take isolation action against a pandemic.
I think the crux of the matter is that I speak with the benefit of hindsight whereas governments had no such luxury. I think, perhaps, if we truly knew with certainty that the pandemic was a more prolonged situation than one could hope for (despite being warned of such), that a more organized and simultaneous effort to shutter economies and travel for a temporary short-term would have been an easier position to argue politically.
Perhaps. In the United States, the Federal government lacks the power or manpower to make such a decisions, and given that there are 50 states, you’ll always have exceptions.
Valid point. That's a whole extra tier of cooperation necessary. I suppose in this case it would not be unfair to treat each state similarly to a country on the global level, but it does complicate the path to the success condition.
The very fact you’re suggesting every country locks down for 3-4 weeks” as a solution shows youre ignoring reality.
All it would take is for 1 person to travel for the epidemic to continue. Maybe developed nations could do it but developing nations are still dealing with illegal border crossers even 1 year into the epidemic.
In my scenario travel in both directions would be disallowed for the time period. This also requires neighboring nations to do the same, as well as farther off countries to implement checks at the airport. All this was somewhat done regardless but in a haphazard manner devoid of full international cooperation.
So we suffered the major drawbacks anyway all while reaping a partial reward.
What is a strong enough disincentive? Would you recommend building physical walls along our borders and using violence against people who attempt to cross without authorization?
No, I wouldn't. Gosh, and if I didn't respond it would almost look like I did support that wouldn't it? Toss out these cheap tactics...
There are obviously many levels on the spectrum of what could be done to sufficiently increase compliance without falling back on martial law and giving the governments more reason to erode our freedoms.
That's a strawman for an entirely separate discussion.
But I'll bite. No, it wouldn't. However that's not only why we shouldn't. It is most effectively and altruistically addressed as a medical and humanitarian issue.
Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose.
Also, as a vaccinated New Zealander who after spending 5 months at home is now traveling again, I can assure you people there are happy and mostly oblivious to what has gone on overseas.
The travel restrictions whilst draconian, aren’t absolute and are being eased when needed. The travel bubble with Australia being a good example of this.
> Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose.
How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme.
Are you aware how hard it is to move the needle by any significant percentage when you are dealing with sets of millions? Life expectancy is essentially an average of when people die.
Not to mention life expectancy was going up. So it not only stopped whatever gains we had, but reversed it by a substantial amount.
We were expected to gain 2 years from 2017 to 2030. That's 13 years to go up 2 years.
About 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The current life expectancy is about 80 years. To make that 80 become 78.8 is the equivalent of 1.5% of the people or 42,000 babies dying as soon as they were born.
Anything that can move the needle that much in such a short time is pretty extreme.
If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens.
To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy.
Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome.
If half are over 82, what does that make the other half?
I'll wait for you to figure that one out.
1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened.
Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible".
I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy.
Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?
Switzerland has had just under 11,000 people die, NZ 26 (twenty-six).
Not to mention, NZ had complete lockdown for all of two months. The rest of the time peoples daily lives were unchanged. No masks (generally), concerts with 10,000+ people no problem. Summer holidays etc etc.
New Zealand was exceptionally successful, and other areas which tried that strategy weren't so lucky. Some parts of Australia were shut down for something like 9 of the past 18 months. (Sydney is under lockdown orders today!) And I think it's hard to find fault with the strength of lockdowns in France, Spain, or Italy - their lockdowns just didn't fully eliminate transition, so we put them in the "weak lockdown" bucket, even though as a matter of government policy they were doing the same thing.
They solved it as long as they can live without contact with anyone else.
As much as it shows what could be done with drastic measures, NZ is an island with small population, in the middle of nowhere so it can easily lock its borders compared to say, pretty much any European country.
They certainly handled it better, but I'm not sure that they will actually be ready to live in a COVID world any time toon without a strong and thorough vaccination rollout like everybody else.
Wanting to keep zero case as all cost is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain: how long will the population accept that they can't travel? Can an economy partially dependent on tourism afford not to be open? Wouldn't NZ be penalized at some point if business people/athletes/students/engineers/scientists can't fly to or from it?
Even if all western countries had been exemplary -ignoring that it would probably be impossible anyway- as long as we don't ensure that even poorer countries are able to stamp out the virus, there will always remain sources of variants that will continue to spread across the world.
Look at Australia. Small population, big country, huge barriers to entrance (even for residents), extreme quarantine measures, and yet, you only need a single infected person to start spreading again.[1]
As long as the population won't reach the minimum vaccination level required, they will continue to be barred from travelling and get lockdowns.
Looks like the only hope we have is to accept it's there and ensure that the impact remains manageable through vaccination and targetted health control measures.
Just to be clear, Australians are barred from leaving the country whilst NZers are free to come and go, provided when they return they do a 14 day quarantine at their own expense.
Getting a spot in the quarantine hotels is difficult but possible on a 3 month time frame.
As for the tourism thing, I’ve heard that it’s actually a net positive for the country(~1.5%). Whilst we have no foreign tourists, we’re also not heading overseas spending money.
In NZ? NZ currently has no community covid cases so sports continue. Daily life is largely uninterrupted aside from having less international tourists.
That's what I though. Considerably more freedom than many other countries, IMNSHO, including those whose leaders chose policies with emphasis on maintaining liberty.
NZ already has vaccinations rolling out. They do not plan to have restricted borders forever. Last I heard 1.5m doses had been distributed and govt expects everyone to be vaccinated by end of year.
People can travel but on return would face a quarantine process so most do not bother (except for recent travel bubble destinations). Athletes travel.
Most people have been supportive of the NZ govt as the healthcare infrastructure may not hold up with large numbers of sick COVID patients, hence the vaccine being helpful in reducing those critical cases requiring hospitalisation.
NZ's strategy only makes sense with eventual vaccines. There is no chance that this disease would ever not become endemic. The world is too large, and too many countries don't have the advantages NZ does (comparitavely wealthy, isolated, low population density). They deserve props for keeping their population healthy until this point, but the idea that it can continue indefinitely, or that it was ever feasible for a large proportion of the world to replicate it is pure fantasy.
NZ's strategy (and all lockdown strategies) never made any sense and it was obvious from the get-go.
Very early into the pandemic, we learned three crucial facts:
1) Covid is non-transmissible outside.
2) Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of respiratory illness in general and covid in particular.
3) Obesity is the greatest risk-factor associated with covid.
With these taken into account (and all are very well-supported by many of those peer-reviewed studies everyone seems to need in order to take any action), the best course of action is to encourage everyone to go outside, hang out with friends, don't wear masks outside (because this discourages going outside), exercise, and soak up lots of sun.
The next "big wave" of covid in the northern hemisphere is going to come in the winter, just as all "seasonal illnesses" do. In fact, there's at least one study out lately that indicate that there's nothing seasonal about illnesses, but that vitamin D deficiency, brought on by staying inside during the cold months lowers group immunity and causes increased illness.
1) might not be true with Delta. There are cases of "passing" transmission of <30s contact. Too soon to tell, but what we learned early in the pandemic pre-delta may not apply now.
2) is still up in the air with studies going both ways (but get your vitamin D still, it has multiple benefits outside of this)
3) is somewhat true, but there are other big comorbidities as well (Diabetes, Downs Syndrome, etc), it's just that it's one that's highly visible in Western society and hypertension is very common in obese people.
It seems like you're of the mind that every new novel virus that enters the biosphere requires several months worth of randomized control trials to determine best paths forward.
The precautionary principle would tell us that it's best to ensure your immune system is as strong and healthy as it can possibly be, which requires going outside, getting fresh air and sunshine, visiting with family and friends, and getting fit.
The way your reply is phrased, it makes it seem like every time a new variant or whatever is announced, we should all default to locking down, staying inside, and slowly killing our immune systems.
That doesn't seem to make sense. We know what makes humans healthy, and we should be constantly reminding people to do the daily things to build their natural immunity, which is an amazing and effective defense against covid and myriad other ailments.
Imagine if we'd spent the past 1.5 years collectively working to lower the BMI of the USA and getting everyone a little more tanned. We'd be far better off along basically every metric and the pandemic would've been far less impactful.
That our Public Health Professionals know all these things work and never ever talk about them and instead seem to always recommend staying inside and spiking cortisol levels, we shouldn't really pay them any mind whatsoever.
Your attempt at reading my internal mindstate was wrong, I'm afraid. I was simply correcting your assertions that have not been backed up by real data, and the fact that you've glossed over the changes in the virus that have been observed in the wild over the last few months.
But let's talk about this: having an immune system be as strong as possible is not a good thing. Weak immune systems are bad. Overly "strong" immune systems result in auto-immune disease.
"Natural immunity" to COVID is no different ($) than vaccine immunity, and our vaccine-given immunity comes with far less risk. We've been given a miraculous vaccine technology, tested it at scale and found that it's safe. If you want to make some real change, focus on changing the minds of the anti-vaxxers that are extending the pandemic through their lack of action.
Sure, getting everyone fitter would help. Getting people more vitamin D will help with other things (but again, probably not to a great extent with COVID). But that doesn't change the fact that we were grappling with a deadly virus that can quickly overwhelm health care systems and cause long-term "long-COVID" damage that we are still not completely understanding.
($) I don't have the numbers at hand, but the last study I read suggested that getting COVID was slightly better at preventing future COVID than a single Pfizer dose, but worse than two Pfizer doses. Will look for this again.
> "Natural immunity" to COVID is no different ($) than vaccine immunity
You can't find any studies to back this up, can you?
It'll be hard without clarification at first, because it's not clear what you mean--do you mean "natural immunity" as in somebody who, when encountering the virus for the first time, has an immune system which fights off the infection without any symptoms and low/no transmission to other hosts? If that's what you mean, then no, natural immunity, present in basically everyone sub-40 who's not fat, is far superior to vaccines, because it comes with zero long-term risk and from what everyone can tell has a death rate too small to measure: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
If you're talking about someone who has fought off covid and has naturally-produced antibodies, then you have I presume no citation to say it's "as good as vaccines". Natural immunity in every case it's been studied has been shown to be robust, long-lasting, and superior to vaccines. In fact, the survivors of Sars-Cov-1 from back in 2005 still have robust immunity against sars-cov-2. In fact, some large percentage of the population had t-cell reactivity to sars-cov-2 without ever having contact with the virus: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563
It's also super-weird to have people like hold the bar as "vaccine-level immunity". The human body is a genius achievement of evolution, and THAT is the bar.
Zero studies have ever shown any way in which vaccine-based immunity is superior.
And now we have all this talk of boosters. LOL!
Don't need no booster for natural immunity. But there sure are some people who want you to have 'em anyway!
> You can't find any studies to back this up, can you?
The "($)" which you quoted indicates a reference at the bottom of my comment, where I linked a study that explicitly showed that natural immunity from COVID and vaccine immunity are similar (but fully-vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine is best).
I don't believe you're willing to have a conversation in good faith, as you are clearly anti-vaccine. Good day.
yep, it may be that these new variants are not attempting any kind of immune escape against vaccines. They might just replicate faster or may be more transmissive and we are seeing the inevitable outcome of a non-sterilizing vaccine: you still get an infection, it just usually isn't a bad one.
Yes, escape from circulating neutralizing antibodies (so the virus is able to infect you and replicate) is one thing.
Escape from CD4+ T-cells is another thing (the dreaded "reset to 2019" fear).
And the 1918 H1N1 influenza circulated as the only form of seasonal influenza until 1957 (when it was displaced by H2N2 which later became H2N3). From 1957 to 2009 H1N1 mutated in swine. After 50 years of mutating in probably billions of pigs the H1 envelope protein jumped back to humans in 2009. Since old people had pretty universally been exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 they had cross reactive partial immunity from T-cells that still recognized the H1 envelope protein and that pandemic fizzled.
If you can't escape CD4+ T-cells after 50 years of mutating in pigs, I don't think that this coronavirus is going to be able to escape them in a year or two.
Also at some point to achieve escape from neutralizing antibodies this virus is likely going to have to start making "choices" which make it less virulent.
A decline in vaccine efficacy against delta could also indicate that the enhanced transmissibility of delta comes through partial vaccine/immune escape and not through ratcheting up R0/Rt (which would be more consistent with reports that it isn't more lethal / doesn't have higher viral loads, since those switches are all likely to move together).
Would that mean there's an increased likelihood I'll be out and about while contagious if I get the vaccine?
It would be hilarious if the same finger-waggers who want everyone vaccinated or quarantined would eventually want to reserve the vaccine for a privileged few.
Education and intelligence are necessary for achieving autonomy. In general, it's hard to take claims for "autonomy" seriously when so many people's decisions seem to be arrived at by uncritically following social media.
That cuts both ways. I remember the finger-waggers - for weeks - mocking people who chose to wear a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with the same tone of smug superiority they today reserve for people who choose not to. I'm a lot more worried about those types of people than the type who arrive at what look to me like sillier conclusions but don't seek to impose them on everyone.
I agree on the priority, but the latter types are ultimately still imposing the consequences of their decisions onto others - their extended families when they want to visit, their friendships where they can't help but pushing the nonsense into every conversation, public spaces if they're not actually continuing to wear a mask and social distance, institutions that are going back to business as usual (eg schools), etc.
I'm all for making one's own decisions and going against the grain (eg wearing a mask at the start of the respiratory pandemic). I'm just saying that the dissent seems to consist of very few well-reasoned viewpoints, and a whole lot of herd following and outright nonsense.
Unfortunately, when places like the world's largest video site censor debates between different medical professionals on the topic, it's hard to be confident how rare those well-reasoned viewpoints actually are.
Even without the censorship, the non well-reasoned narratives would still drown out the well-reasoned ones. The social media hypothesis that many opinions could be distilled down into useful information has been a failure.
So I'm speaking locally based on the people that I know personally who have bought into the "skepticism", and they don't seem well-reasoned at all. For example, one sent me a video saying that Covid is caused by 5G and asked my opinion (thank goodness for small things). I responded with corrections of specific technical claims in the video, only to have them fall back to relativism because "nobody can know". Ultimately the manipulation and conviction in the video won out over scientific facts. It's like the new dark ages.
Also, there are also Internet forums with a higher signal to noise ratio than effortless-publishing mass-media, and I do believe that if there were anything worthwhile it would gain momentum.
To be quite honest: I'm not comfortable with my current education level regarding the vaccine considering the pretty aggressive censorship everyone has been doing with information on it.
I agree, which is why I don't feel terribly autonomous with respect to my decision to get vaccinated. The best I could do was wait several months to see if anything major shook out as they scaled up.
But the autonomy applies to the decision process, and not the specific choice. Choosing the contrary conclusion is just as non-autonomous.
I don't quite understand the "censorship" argument. Of course governments and public health officials are going to push the most effective tools we have to save as many lives as possible.
What is censorship in this case? Not spreading debunked or poorly-supported claims?
True censorship would've been something like keeping hush the rare blood-clotting incidents with J&J. But there are so many studies across so many countries that are freely available to read and be informed by.
Even the claims of twitter/other social media censoring don't hold water for me. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof imo
So by that logic, if the vaccine makes me more likely to have a 'walking case' of the virus, I shouldn't be allowed to get it unless I'm high-risk, right?
The vaccine doesn't make you more likely to have a walking case, it still provides substantial protection. It doesn't provide as much protection as hoped against that variant.
It is a good argument for the vaccinated to continue to wear masks when mixing with the unvaccinated.
Ah. So I took your use of the word "want" more literally than you seem to have intended it. I "want" everyone to get the vaccine. You seem to be specifically calling out the desire to "compel" which I am much more ambivalent about. (I'd probably be in favour of "incentivising" with a careful eye on unintended blowback).
But the phrase "finger waggers" is just divisive and raises the temperature. I'd strongly suggest you moderate such phrasing on HN.
Fair enough. As I mentioned elsewhere, the same people I'm referring to were trying to shame anyone who wore a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with no gain in self-awareness since. I consider that type of unreflective desire to compel dangerous to democracy and opposing it something of a civic duty, I can get a bit overzealous when speaking against it.
I think you're confusing population wide death rates with post infection hospitalization rates. There's about 10x between death and hospitalization and there is about a 3-10x difference between population vs infection (for many countries 10-33% is a reasonable range of infection... except for China/Taiwan/Korea which are in the <1% range).
A study of 2 million people with Covid.
1/4 had symptoms 1 month and later after the initial infection.
1/5 of those were asymptomatic -- they did not know that they had Covid until they complained of health issues consistent with others who had Covid and then were tested.
Areas of the US that are not well vaccinated will be having real problems, but even those that are vaccinated will have to be very, very careful.
I think efficacy is usually defined as preventing symptoms, a higher bar than preventing hospitalizations. I believe most vaccines were extremely successful at preventing hospitalizations.
Edit: Pfizer's primary endpoint was efficacy against lab-confirmed Covid-19 [1].
This is pure anecdata, but I’m hearing nearly daily from a friend in Indonesia about someone he knows dying of Covid. They’ve all had their sinovac shots.
That's not a one time risk though! So far it seems a person can be infected multiple times.
Say you get Covid once a year, that's 0.004% per year. Also, wether you need hospitalisation or not, doesn't change the fact that some people are having permanent issues like lost their stamina, hair loss, loss of smell. I have a coworker with neurological issues, but he is not in a hospital.
So the big question is: how effective are the vaccines against long Covid?
And we need that number at or below 0.001% or Covid will overtake other diseases in terms of life expectancies and QoL implications. Assuming we would get once every one to two years.
You are much less likely to get infected with the same variant once you've recovered from it, and once vaccinations and natural immunity is more widespread worldwide new variants will arise at a slower rate, similar to flu or cold.
It's not as easy. Number of cases in that second period are ~10x the number of cases in that first period. Which means you have more propagation, potentially affecting more at-risk chunk of the population. E.g. the very few cases happening in May-June may have beeen predominantly occuring in young people with extensive social contacts, now that the transmission is going up it can spread to more isolated communities (e.g. old people with less social contacts, that are more at risk of isolation).
There is not a single number that you can look in isolation that will give you an answer.
Not including that people who are vaccinated's guard is down more, will likely be gathering more with wider social networks, etc; what are the chances an escape mutant variant occurs that spreads wide, has long delay before causing deadly effects, etc?
And when does Ivermectin come into mainstream and every COVID discussion? Based on the evidence it looks like used as a preventative, give it to literally everyone for 2 weeks, and we could close to abolish COVID and variants. The suppression of conversation and scientific debate is the biggest problem out of all of this.
Edit to add: whomever downvoted this, you're part of the problem of suppression - good for you.
I'll do 99 better for you: https://c19ivermectin.com/ - "Database of all ivermectin COVID-19 studies. 100 studies, 63 peer reviewed, 61 with results comparing treatment and control groups."
COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein
Bret Weinstein (evolutionary biologist) and Geert Vanden Bossche (virologist) explaining in lay how mRNA vaccine skips a step in innate immune response and may cause problem with escape variants:
I don’t think they’re denying that vaccines do not work at all. Have you watched their interviews or listen to their podcasts? They’re quite long but they are challenging the fact that vaccines aren’t the only way out and we need to consider alternatives and one of that alternatives is ivermectin. If you want to reach herd immunity, you want people to get immunity through different means (like getting vaccines and getting covid but with lesser symptoms. Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization).
Is it contrary or is he’s saying that ivermectin can be a good alternative to the vaccine? It still doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work, but why not authorize it (especially in places were the cases are high and hospitals are overwhelmed with a vaccine shortage, why not try?). You can skin the cat multiple ways. You’re going to have people who don’t want to take the vaccine or vaccines effectiveness is starting to drop (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/8003930/israe...) and we need to come up with another plan.
The old, safe antihistamine/anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine is promoted by a few lucid doctors as basically an antidote for the serotonin storm that underlies severe cases of COVID-19. @farid__jalali (tweets are now private, maybe he got tired of harassment?) is one of the major advocates for this treatment strategy. He liked my recent comment about "missing the forest for the trees" [0].
> Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid
A lot of people have already had a case of SARS-CoV-2 (and are therefore already immune), as it was spreading like wildfire well before the tests became available in March 2020 [1]. I had an odd headache in the December 2019/January 2020 period; in June 2020 I met a woman who claimed the symptoms of her eventually-diagnosed COVID-19 started December 7, 2019, "soon after [her] friends came back from their trip to China."
I had a blood draw for the T-Detect test last week. This will determines if my T-Cells recognize SARS-CoV-2. T-cells are a more long-lasting indicator of immunity than antibodies.
> and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization
The problem with hospitalization is that doctors have forgotten that pure oxygen is toxic and causes a cascade of harm to the whole body. I've put some effort into exposing the routine use of oxygen by our medical system as #MedicalHyperventilation [2]. The tragedy of routine hyperventilation is that the antidote is simple, effective, and profoundly therapeutic. While most doctors are aware of #OxygenToxicity, they are not aware of the antidote. :(.
p.s. Welcome to Hacker News, I noticed that your first comment was ~5 days ago. Here's some upvotes. :)
Thanks! I’ve been trying to find a place where people debate and discuss with less rage. Hopefully this is the place. Though I think my upvote is gone haha. I’m interested in learning about your test results!
* as the top comment points out, the confidence intervals matter
* the numbers are all over the place
I don't know the data for the Israel study, but I'm not sure we can confidently conclude something as specific as "4x higher chance of hospitalization".
Interesting. 57% fully vaccinated with phizer in Israel and 55% of new cases are vaccinated. Looks pretty even unlike what this report from the UK shows, hopefully the mortality rate is lower with phizer...
A study of 2 million people with Covid. 1/4 had symptoms 1 month and later after the initial infection. 1/5 of those were asymptomatic -- they did not know that they had Covid until they complained of health issues consistent with others who had Covid and then were tested.
Areas of the US that are not well vaccinated will be having real problems, but even those that are vaccinated will have to be very, very careful.
Lol, turn out fine. Health condition is not binary. There are way more nuances between healthy, hospitalised and dead. We are only now getting a better picture of the aftermath.
> I.e., Delta is more likely to get you sick, but you’ll still turn out fine.
Except for possible brain damage:
> In a June paper[5], he and his team analysed clinical details for 125 people in the United Kingdom with COVID-19 who had neurological or psychiatric effects. Of these, 62% had experienced damage to the brain’s blood supply, such as strokes and haemorrhages, and 31% had altered mental states, such as confusion or prolonged unconsciousness — sometimes accompanied by encephalitis, the swelling of brain tissue. Ten people who had altered mental states developed psychosis.
> Not all people with neurological symptoms have been seriously ill in intensive-care units, either. “We’ve seen this group of younger people without conventional risk factors who are having strokes, and patients having acute changes in mental status that are not otherwise explained,” says Michael.
Note that the vaccines can also cause strokes via blood clotting, disability and death. It is not a huge surprise because the mechanism of action for the mRNA vaccines is quite similar to that of the virus itself. The primary difference is in the controlled dosage, as the mRNA does not self-replicate (at least not yet - some researchers are working on "self amplifying mRNA vaccines").
Wait, so you had symptomatic COVID, then later got a vaccine? Or did you get COVID (with symptoms and a positive test) despite being vaccinated? In either case, how do you disentangle vaccine side effects from potential "long COVID"?
I had mildly symptomatic covid while my wife had acutely symptomatic covid. Then I had a year+ of long covid symptoms.
Then I got a vaccine dose and was very sick for 4 days and had painful systemic inflammation for 6 weeks, during which time my covid toes and tongue and cough disappeared. My second dose only gave me stomach pain for a week.
Not the original commenter, but it seems clear that they had symptoms of long covid for >1 year after first catching covid, and those symptoms stopped <9 weeks after getting the first dose of the vaccine.
I don't think it's clear at all, OP made a distinction between some symptoms lasting up to 9 weeks (presumably after covid) vs symptoms from the vaccine lasting 6 weeks
> In my case, remaining symptoms[of long covid] started disappearing after 2 weeks[after the vaccine]. By week 9[after the vaccine] I could no longer identify a single symptom[of long covid].
> However the vaccine itself had weird and strong side effects on me for a month and a half[= 6 weeks][after the vaccine].
> The ICD-10 code U09.9 Post COVID-19 condition code is not currently available in the United States and is under review by the U.S. ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee. In the meantime, CDC recommends the following ICD-10-CM code be used for post-COVID conditions: B94.8 Sequelae of other specified infectious and parasitic diseases
Anyways, it's not uncommon to get what a disease is wrong the first time. The CDC also initially referred to HIV as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency).
Long Covid is ill defined, not especially common (~5-15% depending on the study), usually not that serious, and correlated with the intensity of the disease (so it will be lessened with vaccines avoiding hospitalization).
I’ve probably had some long COVID symptoms myself, but self reporting on something like this is next to worthless. You’ve got a mix of the placebo effect with people that had COVID attributing everything negative after to it, all backed with the media constantly reminding them of long COVID.
Agreed. I’ve suspected that I’ve had some after effects from COVID including some sleep and lung issues but I couldn’t tell you which is from COVID and which is from gaining weight during lockdowns. Chances are that it’s just that I gained weight and need to get back into shape.
Even if it is placebo effect - so what? Placebo effect is still real and has real world consequences.
If someone has higher levels of fatigue, or is more susceptible to depression or anxiety after COVID (both symptoms of long COVID) - is it any consolation to them that 'it is all in their head'? It is still an effect that must be considered and that must be studied and treated.
The things that would be studied would be quite different.
Real long COVID - are there still viruses or virus fragments in the body? Is it a minor autoimmune condition? Is it due to damage that the virus did? Is severity of initial disease progression linked to severity of long COVID effects?
Placebo long COVID - To what extent are people susceptible to media influence when it comes to disease effects? Are people in blue states more likely to get it than those in red states? What can be done to assure people that there's nothing wrong with them?
Also, if they acknowledge it might all be in their head then any placebo/nocebo effects might in fact go away.
The problem is that we do not know how long covid works, so both areas of research need to be considered. The discussion around long covid is very similar to the discussion around CFS. Both are somewhat subjective and not easily measurable, unless the form is really severe, yet to the people experiencing them are very real with a clear 'before' and 'after'. The exact mechanism for either of them is unknown. There is some evidence that CFS is caused by a viral infection (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32129496/). There is also some evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy can help with CFS (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-cfs/t...). So there appears to be both a physical and a psychological side to it, and that is likely to be the case with long covid as well.
Just because something 'might all be in their head', or has a partly psychological cause does not mean that it is easy to treat or can be dismissed, or that it won't happen to you. It just means it needs to be treated with appropriate methods, e.g. therapy.
The bottom line is that long covid most definitely needs to be considered both when setting public policy, and when deciding on the risks everyone personally is willing to take. And we do not yet have enough data on the effects that vaccines have on long covid or on the risks of getting it.
If it's a placebo effect then we should not consider long covid to be an important aspect of the vaccine strategy.
I don't think it's a placebo so much as just typical persistent flu symptoms and people misattributing other problems to their COVID case.
Which is not to regurgitate the meme about covid just being the flu, but if your body is weak and fights off a problematic disease, its not crazy that it takes a long time to heal fully. My original point, poorly worded, was mostly that if you're reducing hospitalizations, you're going to reduce long covid. It's not a mysterious orthogonal effect.
UK study with access to NHS patient records: Within 1,199,812 individuals with any acute COVID-19 code, 3327 individuals also had a recorded long COVID code, constituting 0.27% of COVID-19 cases.
Furthermore very few self-reports of long covid symptoms can be paired with a positive covid test.
How do you explain the difference in estimated prevalence of 'long covid'?
The headline seems misleading. Isn’t the reduction possibly caused as much by easing of restrictions as by the Delta variant?
> Israel has recorded a steep drop in the efficacy rate of the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE in preventing coronavirus infections, due to the spread of the delta variant and the easing of government restrictions.
Makes sense. If a vaccination protects you from catching the disease after being exposed to small amounts of the virus ... once you remove the mask mandate you will be exposed to larger viral loads and may get sick.
A different source [1, German only] details that these numbers are based on observations from the last two weeks, and that 50 percent of the newly infected people had been vaccinated.
I've lost count of how many times we've seen the same headline for different variants and relating to different underlying results, and this "less effective" headline always seems to get interpreted by people I talk to as "we'll be back to living like it's 2020 again pretty soon here" rather than the much more accurate "kinda sucks for us collectively but if you and all your close contacts get vaccinated (if!) then it's probably not enough additional risk that you should want to change your behavior".
I notice that I'm also curious what their methodology for coming up with these effectiveness numbers is, and even the "original" public source at https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rJQ1O5kp00 doesn't seem to make that clear.
I'm wondering whether this number is a population-level observational result that has more to do with someone ignoring base rates rather than delta actually being much better at causing infection.
Re: downvotes: is there good reason to believe this interpretation is definitely wrong? I wasn't able to find any details on where this number came from, and while I'd like to give Israel's public health officials enough credit that they wouldn't make this mistake, I'm hesitant to actually do that without more than a few mystery meat "percent effectiveness" numbers.
anecdotal but my son has had cough and fever for the last week. we took him to the urgent care at the hospital and because he's vaccinated they didn't even bother with a covid test.
A more official source from the Israeli ministry of health:
> Notably, Israel’s SARS-CoV-2 testing policy was
different for unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals
during the study period. At 7 days after the second dose,
vaccinated individuals were exempt from the
SARS-CoV-2 testing required of individuals who either
had contact with a laboratory-confirmed case or returned
from travel abroad. This testing policy might have
resulted in a differential bias that would cause over-
estimation of vaccine effectiveness against asymp-
tomatic infection (ie, asymptomatic people who received
two doses were less likely to be tested than unvaccinated
asymptomatic people).
I realize the article is specifically about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the delta variant, but even in more general articles about immunity, 'natural immunity' is left out of the conversation[1]. You can carry your COVID test paperwork and latest antibody test to show you are equally, if not better protected, however, it strangely is ignored. Or, a study by a vaccine producer (NOVAX), comes up with evidence that natural immunity is not as effective. Pfizer is projected to do about $15bn worth of business with a 30% profit margin by year's end [2,3]. I think following the money and opinions of certain groups says a lot about their motivations, and not the science they claim to perform. It takes 3 to 7 years to see some negative consequences of vaccines, and the COVID vaccines only have 7 months, since the first vaccine was given, and limited testing and populations before approval to vaccinate the general public. I hope for my family's sake and others, these side effects don't materialize.
NOTE: Open a private browsing window to forego the paywalls/registration popups for the links below:
> The history of vaccines shows that delayed effects following vaccination can occur. But when they do, these effects tend to happen within two months of vaccination
> These experiences demonstrate two important findings. First, when these events occurred, the onset was within eight weeks of receipt of the vaccine.
The nightmare scenario is antibody-dependent enhancement of a mutated strain of NCov-SARS-2, or a related coronavirus.
It's impossible, of course, to test for this.
However unlikely it might be (not keeping me up at night, to put it mildly), this would be a negative vaccine consequence which wouldn't reveal itself until whenever said related virus broke out into the population.
This is the first mRNA vaccine; it cannot be measured by the same standards as a standard vaccine.
Per your first comment, see Johnson&Johnson's own website[0] for typical time periods for vaccine testing and approval. Phase 1, Preclinical stage can usually take up to 4 years, but mRNA circumvents a lot of this, and J&J did it from end of January 2020 to end of March 2020. Phase 1/2a usually takes several months to a year. I am not talking about immediate side effects that a lot of people experience, but possible, long term effects we cannot know at this point in a novel vaccine. We are getting reports of pericarditis and myocarditis emerging in otherwise healthy young males. Rare given the number of vaccines given, but so then are deaths rare to the same age group this is occurring in [1], and we've only been giving the vaccine for almost 7 months (first vaccine Dec. 14, 2020). There have been 326 deaths in 0 to 17 year olds in the US as of June 30, 2021. That's 9.939e-7 or 9.939e-5 percent based on a US population of 326m. By comparison and for perspective of risk/benefit, there were 792 deaths by pneumonia in the same age bracket in the US. Why rush to vaccinate our young and healthy, and those healthy, young people who have already had COVID?
On the positive side, mRNA vaccines take away the risk associated with making vaccines the traditional way in the handling of live virus to produce a traditional vaccine, allow for transmitting the formula electronically anywhere to be made by a suitable laboratory, and production can be sped up. I am excited by its future to fight disease and save lives, however, it's just too soon for a push to vaccinate 12 year olds given the risk/benefit analysis and the amount of data to study.
I have skin in this game, like most of us, not just improving my Google Fu or points on HN. I have older children who have been vaccinated at ages 21 and 23(even though they had COVID already in late December 2020), and younger ones (2 and 6 years old who I will not vaccinate until more data has been collected and evaluated. The mRNA COVID vaccines seem to have a wider bio-distribution than a traditional vaccine's contents do, specifically in the ovaries of women and in the bone marrow, and only time will tell what this means. It is the first of its kind, so I hardly think it can be evaluated under the same criteria as traditional vaccines. 30% profit margin on $15bn and total immunity for the vaccine companies should something go wrong per the PREP act doesn't give me confidence as a consumer of a novel vaccine. I am not an anti-vaxxer, maybe a anti-novel-vaxxer-without-sufficient-data-and-time person!
Given I am otherwise healthy (no diabetes, heart disease, obesity, or other conditions), and my entire immediate family has had COVID, I will play it safe and go with natural immunity until the vaccines have more time under their belt. I am still skeptical on why natural immunity is being pushed to the side. Try finding reputable articles and studies vs. the number of social and regulatory pressures to get vaccinated. Even when antibodies no longer show in some testing, it has been shown that the body has been prepared to deal with future COVID or SARS viruses vs. a first exposure. Natural immunity also triggers based on the entire surface of the virus, and not just the spike protein that the mRNA is engineered to, so it offers a wider response to COVID/SARS than the mRNA vaccine IMHO.
It's so, so strange that otherwise smart people believe that this one giant category of medical technology has no long-term side effects.
Like, FDA phase 3 trials are totally superfluous for vaccines, right? Because you can detect all the problems in 2 months!
Remember, the medical community can absolutely get things super-wrong in super-damaging ways for huge swaths of the population. OxyContin was for decades called "non-addictive" and prescribed like candy, leading to a nation-wide opiate crisis.
The very same pharma community that lead to that is also responsible for making it seem like vaccines are just so insanely great there're never side-effects.
(Disclaimer: I am more vaccinated than you, have e.g. yellow fever and rabies vaccines, I love vaccines, but still I'm not touching these vaccines as they have not completed phase 3 FDA trials.)
You try and stave off criticism to play concern troll by making the claim you are "more vaccinated" than everyone else. But you are peddling junk science about other vaccines to discredit this vaccine.
> the COVID vaccines only have 7 months, since the first vaccine was given
Your comment is full of factual inaccuracies, and this one is easy to refute. The first COVID vaccines were given in trials in February 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced, and they've already got 17 months of data.
Also worth repeating what another commenter said, vaccine side effects always show up in the first two months.
You may not trust governments and their narratives. I don't either, and I can still see that the evidence clearly points to these vaccines being safe and effective. There doesn't seem to be much evidence in support of continued living in fear.
Stop spreading misinformation during a deadly pandemic, it's dangerous, and you're killing informed consent by lying to people about possible side effects.
To boot, even if what you said were true (which it's 100% false), then you'd be talking about an entirely different technology, that being, the various old categories of vaccines. These are entirely new vaccines with at least 3 brand spanking new medical technologies in them (if you count the LNP, which I think you have to).
Did you read my statement? "only have 7 months, since the first vaccine was given" was meant to address the first vaccine after approval to the public. The first vaccine was December 14, 2020 in the US.
>Your comment is full of factual inaccuracies,
Which others do you dispute?
>Also worth repeating what another commenter said, vaccine side effects always show up in the first two months.
This is a 'novel' vaccine and we do not have enough data on mRNA vaccines administered to the general public to make a blanket statement on its long-term safety. It's your decision to get the vaccine. My argument is I have had COVID, there's evidence natural immunity is equal if not better (it 'knows' the whole surface of the SARS2 virus, not just the 'spike' protein), I am relatively healthy, and although older, not in the top brackets of high mortality for the disease. My children are in the least-affected age brackets, and they have had COVID. Yet, social and regulatory pressures are gaining momentum while ignoring natural immunity.
I agree that they appear to be safe in the short term aside from the number of issues that have been reported, but I cannot say, and I don't see how the 'experts' and government can say unequivocally that they are safe in the long term, and then push them on still-developing preteens. Why?
>There doesn't seem to be much evidence in support of continued living in fear.
I am not living in fear. I feel healthy and not worried about COVID at all for me. I am worried I will have to be vaccinated to keep my job, go to a concert, and shop without restrictions among other liberties.
Read my comments following this thread. All of my sources are official government or even the vaccine companies' website.
My argument is for not ignoring natural immunity for those who have had COVID already, and being a bit skeptical about data starting to emerge of side effects for a novel vaccine and technology with huge profits to big pharma and a 'get out of jail free' card in the form of the PREP act which gives them immunity from a majority of possible ill effects of the vaccine.
Probably we shall take into account, that journalist like to spread bad news! Looking back at the previous variants, the vaccines keep working. This is good news! What will bring is into trouble are non vaccinated people which build a big resource pool for Covid-19 to become more aggressive.
Lockdowns, removal of rights or masks cannot eliminate Covid-19 (so called short term workarounds) but the vaccines can make it rather safe (i.e. solution). What we need to get done is vaccinating as much people as possible, Covid-19 only mutates when it has a pool to do so. So it is stupid saying "I'm healthy and don't need to be vaccinated", you're just postpone a problem in front of you until it becomes worse - either for you, your loved ones, humankind or your rights. So two problems remain, stupid people and getting enough people vaccinated quickly - especially third world! We have to care about Asia, Africa and so on or we will lose.
We get all vaccinated as toddlers against various diseases, sometimes it enough to not care about the illness anymore, sometimes we have eliminated the disease entirely and sometimes we need to repeat the vaccination (FSME/TBE). Clearly better than dying for preventable stuff.
The fact that the "Creator of mRNA" got a own Wikipedia page only two weeks ago makes me suspicious. And that his name is only listed on questionable websites. And I've learned that big things are usually not created by one person. The developments around mRNA are mostly attributed to Katalin Karikó, Ingmar Hoerr and Robert Langer - over a long time period.
Before Robert Malone gained media attention, I actually read about him in Wikipedia cited as such. I should have taken a screenshot and there probably are archives but over the next couple days when his name became bigger, I re-read Wikipedia and it was removed. So I went and read his earlier papers in the 8/90s about it
> Covid-19 only mutates when it has a pool to do so
Have the vaccines shown to prevent infection and transmission, or only reducing the chances of getting sick? If not the case, will variants still develop among a mostly vaccinated population?
---
A: The data to support the EUA include an analysis of 36,523 participants in the ongoing randomized, placebo-controlled international study, the majority of whom are U.S. participants, who completed the 2-dose vaccination regimen and did not have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection through 7 days after the second dose. Among these participants, 18,198 received the vaccine and 18,325 received saline placebo. The vaccine was 95 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 disease among these clinical trial participants with 8 COVID-19 cases in the vaccine group and 162 COVID-19 cases in the placebo group. Of these 170 COVID-19 cases, 1 in the vaccine group and 3 in the placebo group were classified as severe.
---
Maybe less with more aggressive variants.
---
A: Most vaccines that protect from viral illnesses also reduce transmission of the virus that causes the disease by those who are vaccinated. While it is hoped this will be the case, the scientific community does not yet know if the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine will reduce such transmission.
---
That said. Results in Germany look like transmission can be stopped but not must:
258 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] thread> Why Kids Love Garbage Trucks
> This didn't address my favorite theory: that (some) kids are programmed to learn as much as they can about the nearby megafauna, and in this world the closest approximation is these big garbage/fire/construction vehicles.
There is an asymmetry between the level of information we can collect in our immediate surroundings and online. The same method that kids employ to detect an unknown and quickly classify it as a non threat with the limited information they have available to them becomes paralyzing when the amount of information available is seemingly infinite. An endless number of threats, and an endless amount of information available about them.
Before the internet and television, how many times would a person feel threatened in their lifetime before a threat materialized that ultimately took their life? What is that number now?
Can't say I was successful, for number of reasons. News still find their way into my head via HN headlines (although I disabled them via Tampermonkey scripts), via buzz in comments, via talks with (some) friends etc. Also, only bad news go through via these channels, so the world looks even more depressing because when something good happens, nobody brings it up.
Probably I need to cut myself from passive consumption of reddit/HN too.
For example, everything on the news is supposed to match your worst nightmare. The more closely it matches, the less likely it is accurate. Knowing that helps filter what you actually need to be cognizant of and react to. Actually consuming it is just to apply critical thinking to know why it isn't the complete story, and solely for conversation purposes.
To my experience, it's the opposite.
- The radio I used to listen to during the day had a small news segment every hour. I replaced it with listening to my own music (or use Spotify, Apple Music, etc). It was mostly repetitive and had advertising, so it was easy to replace.
- I no longer watch TV, especially news stations. They keep repeating the same thing every 30 minutes anyway and hyping up everything that happens because there's not enough content. What I used to watch on TV (eg: series) can be found somewhere else and I can watch it when I want.
- No more "news" notifications. Most "news" aren't really "news" (I don't care if a celebrity did or said something...) and most of the "breaking news" are not that important.
- Disabled/removed everything that had news on it (they're everywhere!). I don't use a news app, my browser doesn't show me news in the new tab page, left Facebook (best decision ever - I use direct messages to keep in touch), stopped following people that shared news or where always fighting with someone on Twitter.
Now I use newsletters, podcasts and RSS feeds to follow the news.
- Some news organisations have free weekly newsletters or a weekly podcast with a recap of the week. Short, direct and doesn't use much of my time.
- RSS feeds allow me to follow certain subjects or websites that I want to follow closely.
- Some news agencies seem to do a better job than some rag using clickbait titles to bring traffic to their crappy website. They're often not as one sided as certain orgs and tell you what happened without wrapping it in their opinion.
- Sites like Hacker News can be useful. I already knew this about the Pfizer vaccine, but some people made good points here.
Sometimes I'm a bit behind other people, but not by much. For some things, it's nice to follow everything as it is happening, but usually I don't miss much.
I might be interested in knowing what's happening, but not everything about who did it (eg: the sad story about the people involved - I can find more details if I want) or as if it was entertainment. The rush to be first at reporting the event also means that often they're wrong about something. I also don't really care about some accident that happened in a completely different country, need to know what's the covid situation everywhere in detail or something bad that may happen.
This works for me, but it also requires some self control and some curation. RSS feeds and podcasts won't help me much if I subscribe to all websites and multiple podcasts about news, politics, etc.
Don't browse news sites (including HN if the stuff here gets you down). Don't use social media where you have poor control of what gets in your feed. If you have contacts who keep sending you news, ask them to stop and if they won't, put them in an ignore list. If your in-person contacts with friends is always about the news, limit the time you spend with them.
Substitute that time with other things - be it other sites, hobbies or activities. Reading novels can be a lot of fun. Building things, etc.
It is in your hands.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257658v...
* Feel good about the things you are doing that make a positive difference, however small.
* Don’t feel guilt about the things that aren’t under your control, however big.
P.S. Nobody is in control and the only way big positive differences ever happen is because of the aggregate of small positive differences that everyone makes.
These people have external locus-of-control. They don't change the world because they kickback and let life happen to them. Mostly, it's religious types who think like this and say "it's god's plan." Bullshit. They're learned helplessness cowards.
Remember that most media is built on the idea of capturing attention and it is easier to capture attention with stories of fear and disaster than it is with positive stories. 3 local acts of violence will get headlines while 300 acts of kindness will go without promotion.
On the other hand, we can now mitigate deadly diseases in less than 12 months, as a species, although we'll be fleeced by pharma companies for the trouble.
Hopefully we stop trusting politicians, physicians, and scientists and start trusting Science and statistics.
For those who can afford it. Just another example of the rapidly growing chasm between the wealthy and the poor.
If they're lucky, Medicaid is in no way universal. Why shouldn't everyone have access to this technology via universal health care?
I'm both mocking the healthcare cartels and giving you a genuine solution.
Universal healthcare doesn't solve the supply issue.
And this tech was obviously very expensive, and the rich had huge advantages in keeping it to themselves, I mean why give the poor access to all information in the world right?
So the rich just kept smartphones to themselves to get richer and more powerful.
Oh wait… what did I get wrong in this story?
We still can't create a vaccine against HIV (but we have some ideas).
The mRNA vaccines didn't spring up out of nowhere, they are the culmination of ~20 years of research into mRNA vaccines.
It hides inside the immune system itself! It writes itself into your DNA! Diabolical stuff when you think about it.
Sometimes the world does get worse. History is not a linear function of progress, there are many examples of generations which have been much worse off than the generations that precede them. It's time we re-evaluated society and how we care for each other because we're not at the end of history. Ruthless capitalism isn't compatible with our rapidly decaying biosphere. It's completely ridiculous how much wealth a handful of people have while the rest of us suffer under the USA's medieval healthcare system. We know what choices to make, we just refuse to make them because rich people might get mad. The world is getting worse, but we can ameliorate the biggest problems if we choose to do so.
Life is suffering with sparse sprinkles of happiness here and there. If you feel bad take a page from Budism, it's the best religion for your mind, and I am an avid agnostic. It's the "No bullshit" religion, basically it's your problem, fix it or learn to live with it.
It teaches you to embrace suffering as part of living, everything is for you to endure, consider how to solve (or not) and grow. By solve I mean reflect on the outcomes and choose to do something, just accept it or just ignore it. The best thing you can do is learn to be your own support, by analysing the issues that throuble you and choose a path.
Besides that We live in the best era human kind has ever had by a long mile.
Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID.Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better.
It absolutely is not, there are many threats to democracy right here in the USA. Many Republican states are passing massive voter suppression bills.
I mean in the world, yours might be worst but check the other countries, in the last 50 years a lot of military governments and dictatorships ended.
- Famine in Yemen. Ongoing.
- Famine in South Sudan. Ongoing.
- Two years of drought in certain countries would push the world into global famine. Climate change weather patterns like Oregon/Canada and the ongoing mega drought in the US west and SW are just previews.
- Millions and millions of homeless in America. I can see the camps and tents in every major city.
- Standard of living decreasing. Real wages declining.
- Mass shootings every day.
- More prisoners per capita than any other country.
- Doing absolutely nothing effective about climate change... which is going to kill us, most species, and the planet.
- The threat of global nuclear war over Taiwan is very, very real.
- Healthcare costs soaring, life expectancies plummeting.
- There is no democracy, it's a plutocracy. The very rich own the majority of Western countries outright.
Please don't create accounts to do that with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
US produces enough food to feed like 2-3 billions people. It is just the vast majority of it goes to feed animals to get cheap meat. So even with agricultural output drop like 50% the will be no famine in US. The meat will be much more expensive, but no calories shortage.
We could also resolve every problem you listed and then get nailed by a meteor and have a total extinction of all life of earth. 100% possible.
- While famines are still a thing, the number of deaths due to hunger has fallen considerably since the start of the 20th century.
- The real median household income in the US has been consistently increasing in the past several decades. While growing inequality is a huge problem most people in the world still have a much higher QOL than their predecessors.
- While there was a spike in homicides in 2020, the homicide rate in the US is lower than it has ever been since the early 60’s (obviously it’s still huge compared to all other developed countries).
- Climate change obviously is going to have a huge effect, however claiming that it’s going is destroy all life on earth is delusional.. In any case most natural ecosystems have already been destroyed or permanently altered by humans, in the past few thousands of years anyway, so there isn’t that much left for climate change to “kill” besides humans (whom I’m sure will manage to adapt to a couple percent rise in avg. temperature, even though it’s likely it will cost several millions of lives).
- There is zero incentive for either US or China to start a nuclear war over Taiwan (or anything else for that matter) so I’d say the threat of a nuclear war is pretty low.
- Life expentancy has been increasing prior to 2020 and there is no reason to believe that it won’t rebound to the previous level soon and continue growing in the future. Healthcare related costs are likely to continue increasing due to ageing societies and higher R&D costs (as technologies become more complex). I don’t see this as huge problem, though, as long as it’s outweotghted by increasing productivity in other sectors. Ensuring universal access to high quality healthcare is a political problem that needs to be solved but even a market based system will likely result in better outcomes for the majority of the population.
Some of your points are true, but I would argue about these in particular:
> * There is food to survive for almost everyone, no famines in the last 100 years.
> * So much extra wealth in the world almost anyone can enjoy life a bit, have a hobbie, travel, eat out, go out, movies, theather, sports.
> * Poverty is getting smaller by the day (yeah rich are getting richer but check 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 or 1900 out for a good perspective on what being poor was)
Many more Americans are food insecure than they were 50 years ago. The USDA estimates that 11 million children are food insecure in the US. Poverty in the US has in fact been increasing for decades, but government statistics don't reflect it because they measure poverty based on a 1950s spending model.
The West has endured decades of trickle down economics when the reality is that wealth trickles up. Of course total wealth is increasing, but the lower and middle classes have captured none of it. The vast majority of humans on Earth cannot afford to travel or even take vacations, and those in prosperous Western countries have had continually decreasing disposable income for decades.
> * No cold war, no dooms day clock
> * Democracy, information is basically free.
You have this so backwards that it's baffling. The doomsday clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been since its inception in 1947. It currently sits at 100 seconds to midnight. World leaders have become increasingly reckless, unstable and authoritarian. The last US president said, "We have all these nukes, why aren't we using them?"
Whether we lack a cold war is debatable. There has not been a significant drop in proxy wars or in militarization of world powers since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US still spends an ever increasing share of its budget on military, and it actually uses it to kill. The US has been in a continuous state of war for the longest period in its entire history. There are people voting today that were not yet born when the war with Afghanistan started.
> Basically we are the luckies people that ever lived, COVID or no COVID. Randomly pick to someone from any other year that ever lived, your life is better even if you get a king it's probably still better
This is not as true as you think, and I don't believe it will be true for long. For most of human history there were very few humans. There were probably about 100 billion humans that have ever lived, and about 8 billion are alive today. So if you were to pick a random human from history, there's a non-negligible chance that your pick would be alive today.
I've argued above that we in the West are experiencing decreasing quality of life. I worry it will start to fall much more rapidly over the coming decades due to climate change, wealth inequality and potential nuclear war. Considering the big picture is probably not a good idea; we may be better off living in ignorant bliss.
I also live in a 3rd world country and it’s a sharp upwards change on the last 50 years.
Population has increased 5x but there is less people starving to death, getting killed by curable diseases and so on.
The only thing that has increased is crime because of drug gangs related issues here.
Most, middle eastern, eastern European, Asian, Central and South american countries enjoy a far more democratic governments than 50 years ago. Number of crazy dictators has decreased greatly in those 50 years.
Maybe the american situation is getting worst but I would argue that the vast majority of the planet is now being able to enjoy a bit of that “american life” that was only the privilege of a few.
Coronavirus was never a big deal unless you were old, sick, or obese. Even with these demographics, it had a 1% death rate, the same order of magnitude as various viral illnesses.
We really should have not blown this out of proportion. I think when people realized we could work from home, people faked fear to enjoy a mini vacation. Media loves fear. Politicians wanted to use this.
Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars? No, but apparently if we use statistics we should.
Or, you know, people who have "old, sick, or obese" people in their family and maybe don't want to get them killed?
The lockdowns didn't work. N95 masks do work.
The overreaction was anti science from statistics to actual implementation.
It's not a small problem. And neither is having 1% of your population sick and dying in such a short time.
Edit- And the ambiguity of the word "lots" is particularly unhelpful
I don't find it to be in particularly good faith that as soon as someone disputes your claims, you immediately ask them to do research work that you didn't want to do.
Or unless you happen to require hospitalisation at the same time than a lot of "old, sick or obese" people where saturating the available beds and ICUs of every hospital.
There are second order effects on the wave that we experienced. The most dramatic probably has been in India, where the lack of available oxygen produced a lot of deaths. And we will start to discover next year what other effects like undetected conditions, or worsened after a year of delaying treatment, will cause.
A 1% of a considerable chunk of the population is a lot of people.
But also my metro area of 5 million people never ended up having a shortage, and our area had a bunch of anti maskers.
> Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars?
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's annual budget exceeds $1T (EDIT: $1 billion, not trillion, thanks KptMarchewa) [1], and that's just part of government spending on highway safety -- far from the full picture of "vehicle safety." Your homework is to look up the safety R&D spending of the top automotive manufacturers in the USA. "We" absolutely do spend a ton of money and research on vehicle safety, and it's paid off in the form of an exponential drop in deaths per unit distance traveled.
[1] PDF Page 11 of https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2020-02/F...
Yes, we probably do, if you consider the cumulative cost of better engineering and safety technology on all the cars sold and serviced in a year, plus highway construction standards.
And that's before considering that personal car transport is probably _inherently_ dangerous, and most cities are trying to move to a higher percentage of walking and cycling.
None of this is to say that the pandemic is no big deal, or that it was handled well. But the point is that between mainstream media and social media, the picture, not just of the pandemic, but for any given topic, is always taken to the extreme. Every new bit of information is evidence of the apocalypse, the collapse of society, and the impending extinction of the human race. Enemies are everywhere. Nothing can be trusted. You are always being taken advantage of. The dystopia is now. You can't even google symptoms for an illness, without, as my doctor puts it "discover that your stubbed toe is actually terminal cancer and you have six months to live".
The reality is that there are definitely things worth being concerned about both as a society and individually, but very rarely does it live up to the "hype". I've found that the more I unplug and spend that time and energy engaging in my day to day life, the less bleak the world seems, and the happier I am.
What did your ancestors do for 10 000 years up until public healthcare in rich nations? How did they stick it out so that eventually you could prosper? And FYI I'm not sure there are any public resources in most rich nations for this kind of support anyhow.
We're over the worst of it, the data on D variant is just a warning to maintain vigilance.
Keep your chin up.
Try it. You'll be improving your own immune system, you'll be happier, and you can forget all this fearmongering garbage.
> At the same time, protection against hospitalization and serious illness remained strong.
I.e., Delta is more likely to get you sick, but you’ll still turn out fine.
Now, if you thought you were going to just stay in hiding and neither get vaccinated nor get sick, and just wait it out, well that's not going to work (and was never a good strategy). Covid-19 is the new flu, it will always be in circulation, but just get vaccinated and get on with life.
Instead we created a global persistent pandemic.
Cool.
But no, muh freedomᵀᴹ and the economy!! are far more important considerations that certainly didn't turn out to actually be incredibly short-sighted.
I'm lucky to live in a place with >70% vaccination rate. So this no longer comes from a place of grievance toward personal inconvenience. I'm shaking my damn head at the collective lack of wisdom that was exhibited in countries' responses, including my own.
̶E̶d̶i̶t̶:̶ ̶P̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶,̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶v̶o̶t̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶o̶p̶i̶n̶i̶o̶n̶.̶
This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world.
> But no, muh freedom, and but the economy!
Your mocking tone is out of place. I do in fact think freedom and the economy are both important. Don’t you?
And yes, the economy was adversely affected because most small businesses were shuttered for half a year and swaths of them went out of business since we could not bear closing everything down for a sixth of that time period.
Edit: Please explain to me how swallowing real estate, employee, and supply chain expenses for 30 days would have been more difficult or less preferable to the splintered schedule of mandated closings over a far longer time period.
The intention of keeping freedom and not harming the economy was IMNSHO not matched by that effect and the discrepancy wasn't really surprising.
The authorities where I live decided to keep more open than I considered wise, and not much later closed a lot of sports, for example. The effective choice was freedom now against freedom later, even if the intention was to choose more freedom rather than less.
China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.
For that price, we literally could have paid every human on earth $2,000 to shelter in place for 4 weeks.
When you live on islands thousands of miles away from anywhere with a fairly homogenous population and diversified economy, it's easier both physically and politically to take isolation action against a pandemic.
All it would take is for 1 person to travel for the epidemic to continue. Maybe developed nations could do it but developing nations are still dealing with illegal border crossers even 1 year into the epidemic.
So great theory but it falls flat in reality.
So we suffered the major drawbacks anyway all while reaping a partial reward.
And perhaps also the incentive of not having a years long pandemic.
There are obviously many levels on the spectrum of what could be done to sufficiently increase compliance without falling back on martial law and giving the governments more reason to erode our freedoms.
Love these solution designed by people who work from home.
But I'll bite. No, it wouldn't. However that's not only why we shouldn't. It is most effectively and altruistically addressed as a medical and humanitarian issue.
Also, as a vaccinated New Zealander who after spending 5 months at home is now traveling again, I can assure you people there are happy and mostly oblivious to what has gone on overseas.
The travel restrictions whilst draconian, aren’t absolute and are being eased when needed. The travel bubble with Australia being a good example of this.
How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme.
1: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118
Not to mention life expectancy was going up. So it not only stopped whatever gains we had, but reversed it by a substantial amount.
We were expected to gain 2 years from 2017 to 2030. That's 13 years to go up 2 years.
About 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The current life expectancy is about 80 years. To make that 80 become 78.8 is the equivalent of 1.5% of the people or 42,000 babies dying as soon as they were born.
Anything that can move the needle that much in such a short time is pretty extreme.
Life expectancy went down, but the average age of a covid death was 82 years old, meaning half were older than 82.
These octogenarians and older are pulling the average life expectancy up every year they continue living.
It would be a way different story to have the average life expectancy go down because a bunch of, say, 20 year olds died.
And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year.
When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal.
Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.
If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens.
To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy.
Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome.
But to you, it's 1.2 either way.
It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird.
edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."
I'll wait for you to figure that one out.
1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened.
Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible".
I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy.
Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?
Answer: Because you can hide the one bad year with the last 100 good years of data and trending.
Maybe you should use population growth projections from 1970 to 2070 to show that this isn't even a pandemic?
Very few travel restrictions, mostly in spring 2020, just do your part and do the right choices in ie hygiene and travel destinations.
Not to mention, NZ had complete lockdown for all of two months. The rest of the time peoples daily lives were unchanged. No masks (generally), concerts with 10,000+ people no problem. Summer holidays etc etc.
As much as it shows what could be done with drastic measures, NZ is an island with small population, in the middle of nowhere so it can easily lock its borders compared to say, pretty much any European country.
They certainly handled it better, but I'm not sure that they will actually be ready to live in a COVID world any time toon without a strong and thorough vaccination rollout like everybody else.
Wanting to keep zero case as all cost is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain: how long will the population accept that they can't travel? Can an economy partially dependent on tourism afford not to be open? Wouldn't NZ be penalized at some point if business people/athletes/students/engineers/scientists can't fly to or from it?
Even if all western countries had been exemplary -ignoring that it would probably be impossible anyway- as long as we don't ensure that even poorer countries are able to stamp out the virus, there will always remain sources of variants that will continue to spread across the world.
Look at Australia. Small population, big country, huge barriers to entrance (even for residents), extreme quarantine measures, and yet, you only need a single infected person to start spreading again.[1] As long as the population won't reach the minimum vaccination level required, they will continue to be barred from travelling and get lockdowns.
Looks like the only hope we have is to accept it's there and ensure that the impact remains manageable through vaccination and targetted health control measures.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/sydney-lockdown-cov...
Getting a spot in the quarantine hotels is difficult but possible on a 3 month time frame.
As for the tourism thing, I’ve heard that it’s actually a net positive for the country(~1.5%). Whilst we have no foreign tourists, we’re also not heading overseas spending money.
The lack of that really hurt here.
People can travel but on return would face a quarantine process so most do not bother (except for recent travel bubble destinations). Athletes travel.
Most people have been supportive of the NZ govt as the healthcare infrastructure may not hold up with large numbers of sick COVID patients, hence the vaccine being helpful in reducing those critical cases requiring hospitalisation.
Very early into the pandemic, we learned three crucial facts:
1) Covid is non-transmissible outside. 2) Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of respiratory illness in general and covid in particular. 3) Obesity is the greatest risk-factor associated with covid.
With these taken into account (and all are very well-supported by many of those peer-reviewed studies everyone seems to need in order to take any action), the best course of action is to encourage everyone to go outside, hang out with friends, don't wear masks outside (because this discourages going outside), exercise, and soak up lots of sun.
The next "big wave" of covid in the northern hemisphere is going to come in the winter, just as all "seasonal illnesses" do. In fact, there's at least one study out lately that indicate that there's nothing seasonal about illnesses, but that vitamin D deficiency, brought on by staying inside during the cold months lowers group immunity and causes increased illness.
2) is still up in the air with studies going both ways (but get your vitamin D still, it has multiple benefits outside of this)
3) is somewhat true, but there are other big comorbidities as well (Diabetes, Downs Syndrome, etc), it's just that it's one that's highly visible in Western society and hypertension is very common in obese people.
The precautionary principle would tell us that it's best to ensure your immune system is as strong and healthy as it can possibly be, which requires going outside, getting fresh air and sunshine, visiting with family and friends, and getting fit.
The way your reply is phrased, it makes it seem like every time a new variant or whatever is announced, we should all default to locking down, staying inside, and slowly killing our immune systems.
That doesn't seem to make sense. We know what makes humans healthy, and we should be constantly reminding people to do the daily things to build their natural immunity, which is an amazing and effective defense against covid and myriad other ailments.
Imagine if we'd spent the past 1.5 years collectively working to lower the BMI of the USA and getting everyone a little more tanned. We'd be far better off along basically every metric and the pandemic would've been far less impactful.
That our Public Health Professionals know all these things work and never ever talk about them and instead seem to always recommend staying inside and spiking cortisol levels, we shouldn't really pay them any mind whatsoever.
But let's talk about this: having an immune system be as strong as possible is not a good thing. Weak immune systems are bad. Overly "strong" immune systems result in auto-immune disease.
"Natural immunity" to COVID is no different ($) than vaccine immunity, and our vaccine-given immunity comes with far less risk. We've been given a miraculous vaccine technology, tested it at scale and found that it's safe. If you want to make some real change, focus on changing the minds of the anti-vaxxers that are extending the pandemic through their lack of action.
Sure, getting everyone fitter would help. Getting people more vitamin D will help with other things (but again, probably not to a great extent with COVID). But that doesn't change the fact that we were grappling with a deadly virus that can quickly overwhelm health care systems and cause long-term "long-COVID" damage that we are still not completely understanding.
($) I don't have the numbers at hand, but the last study I read suggested that getting COVID was slightly better at preventing future COVID than a single Pfizer dose, but worse than two Pfizer doses. Will look for this again.
EDIT: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/past-covid-19-infection-p... is the study.
You can't find any studies to back this up, can you?
It'll be hard without clarification at first, because it's not clear what you mean--do you mean "natural immunity" as in somebody who, when encountering the virus for the first time, has an immune system which fights off the infection without any symptoms and low/no transmission to other hosts? If that's what you mean, then no, natural immunity, present in basically everyone sub-40 who's not fat, is far superior to vaccines, because it comes with zero long-term risk and from what everyone can tell has a death rate too small to measure: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
If you're talking about someone who has fought off covid and has naturally-produced antibodies, then you have I presume no citation to say it's "as good as vaccines". Natural immunity in every case it's been studied has been shown to be robust, long-lasting, and superior to vaccines. In fact, the survivors of Sars-Cov-1 from back in 2005 still have robust immunity against sars-cov-2. In fact, some large percentage of the population had t-cell reactivity to sars-cov-2 without ever having contact with the virus: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563
It's also super-weird to have people like hold the bar as "vaccine-level immunity". The human body is a genius achievement of evolution, and THAT is the bar.
Zero studies have ever shown any way in which vaccine-based immunity is superior.
And now we have all this talk of boosters. LOL!
Don't need no booster for natural immunity. But there sure are some people who want you to have 'em anyway!
The "($)" which you quoted indicates a reference at the bottom of my comment, where I linked a study that explicitly showed that natural immunity from COVID and vaccine immunity are similar (but fully-vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine is best).
I don't believe you're willing to have a conversation in good faith, as you are clearly anti-vaccine. Good day.
Escape from CD4+ T-cells is another thing (the dreaded "reset to 2019" fear).
And the 1918 H1N1 influenza circulated as the only form of seasonal influenza until 1957 (when it was displaced by H2N2 which later became H2N3). From 1957 to 2009 H1N1 mutated in swine. After 50 years of mutating in probably billions of pigs the H1 envelope protein jumped back to humans in 2009. Since old people had pretty universally been exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 they had cross reactive partial immunity from T-cells that still recognized the H1 envelope protein and that pandemic fizzled.
If you can't escape CD4+ T-cells after 50 years of mutating in pigs, I don't think that this coronavirus is going to be able to escape them in a year or two.
Also at some point to achieve escape from neutralizing antibodies this virus is likely going to have to start making "choices" which make it less virulent.
A decline in vaccine efficacy against delta could also indicate that the enhanced transmissibility of delta comes through partial vaccine/immune escape and not through ratcheting up R0/Rt (which would be more consistent with reports that it isn't more lethal / doesn't have higher viral loads, since those switches are all likely to move together).
It would be hilarious if the same finger-waggers who want everyone vaccinated or quarantined would eventually want to reserve the vaccine for a privileged few.
Ignoring the name-calling for a moment, what is it that you want for everyone?
I'm all for making one's own decisions and going against the grain (eg wearing a mask at the start of the respiratory pandemic). I'm just saying that the dissent seems to consist of very few well-reasoned viewpoints, and a whole lot of herd following and outright nonsense.
So I'm speaking locally based on the people that I know personally who have bought into the "skepticism", and they don't seem well-reasoned at all. For example, one sent me a video saying that Covid is caused by 5G and asked my opinion (thank goodness for small things). I responded with corrections of specific technical claims in the video, only to have them fall back to relativism because "nobody can know". Ultimately the manipulation and conviction in the video won out over scientific facts. It's like the new dark ages.
Also, there are also Internet forums with a higher signal to noise ratio than effortless-publishing mass-media, and I do believe that if there were anything worthwhile it would gain momentum.
But the autonomy applies to the decision process, and not the specific choice. Choosing the contrary conclusion is just as non-autonomous.
What is censorship in this case? Not spreading debunked or poorly-supported claims?
True censorship would've been something like keeping hush the rare blood-clotting incidents with J&J. But there are so many studies across so many countries that are freely available to read and be informed by.
Even the claims of twitter/other social media censoring don't hold water for me. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof imo
It is a good argument for the vaccinated to continue to wear masks when mixing with the unvaccinated.
There are numerous other instances of near willful infection of others.
But the phrase "finger waggers" is just divisive and raises the temperature. I'd strongly suggest you moderate such phrasing on HN.
Either way it would be fine. It basically reduces it to the level of a common cold, ie we can stop worrying about this virus.
Also those under age 40 that aren't fat don't have to worry about it either.
From May 2 to June 5, the efficacy rate in preventing hospitalization was 98.2%, compared with 93% from June 6 to July 3
That's a 4x higher chance of hospitalisation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/health/covid-19-patients....
A study of 2 million people with Covid. 1/4 had symptoms 1 month and later after the initial infection. 1/5 of those were asymptomatic -- they did not know that they had Covid until they complained of health issues consistent with others who had Covid and then were tested.
Areas of the US that are not well vaccinated will be having real problems, but even those that are vaccinated will have to be very, very careful.
Edit: Pfizer's primary endpoint was efficacy against lab-confirmed Covid-19 [1].
[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
Varies by age, but for a young person we're talking the risk going from 0.001% to 0.004%.
Say you get Covid once a year, that's 0.004% per year. Also, wether you need hospitalisation or not, doesn't change the fact that some people are having permanent issues like lost their stamina, hair loss, loss of smell. I have a coworker with neurological issues, but he is not in a hospital.
So the big question is: how effective are the vaccines against long Covid?
And we need that number at or below 0.001% or Covid will overtake other diseases in terms of life expectancies and QoL implications. Assuming we would get once every one to two years.
That's just too much rounds of Russian roulette.
There is not a single number that you can look in isolation that will give you an answer.
And when does Ivermectin come into mainstream and every COVID discussion? Based on the evidence it looks like used as a preventative, give it to literally everyone for 2 weeks, and we could close to abolish COVID and variants. The suppression of conversation and scientific debate is the biggest problem out of all of this.
Edit to add: whomever downvoted this, you're part of the problem of suppression - good for you.
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...
COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein
https://vimeo.com/557811163 (2.5 hours; deleted by YouTube)
Joe Rogan then recently had Bret Weinstein and Pierre Kory on his podcast to raise awareness of issue
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D?si=7... (3 hours - heavily repeat of what was said in link before; Spotify desktop or mobile app lets you watch video)
How to save the world, in three easy [includes inventor of mRNA, if you care about credentials]
https://vimeo.com/562724784 (3.5 hours)
Bret Weinstein (evolutionary biologist) and Geert Vanden Bossche (virologist) explaining in lay how mRNA vaccine skips a step in innate immune response and may cause problem with escape variants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyAovuUxro (~2 hours)
Lots of ongoing updates from them:
Dr. Pierre Kory - https://twitter.com/pierreKory/
Dr. Robert Malone - https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD
Dr. Bret Weinstein - https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein
Two other main resources/organizations of doctors posting regular updates of latest data/charts, etc:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/ / http://flccc.net/ (same site)
https://bird-group.org/
https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1411158326726082565
Are all your links like this? Denying what we clearly can see (that vaccines work) to promote what they think will work (ivermectin)?
EDIT: It gets worse the lower you scroll. In addition to dismissing vaccines and promoting ivermectin, he signal boosts "natural medicine" too.
https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1410028792236679175
That's contrary to the message he signal boosts in the first tweet I linked to.
The old, safe antihistamine/anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine is promoted by a few lucid doctors as basically an antidote for the serotonin storm that underlies severe cases of COVID-19. @farid__jalali (tweets are now private, maybe he got tired of harassment?) is one of the major advocates for this treatment strategy. He liked my recent comment about "missing the forest for the trees" [0].
> Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid
A lot of people have already had a case of SARS-CoV-2 (and are therefore already immune), as it was spreading like wildfire well before the tests became available in March 2020 [1]. I had an odd headache in the December 2019/January 2020 period; in June 2020 I met a woman who claimed the symptoms of her eventually-diagnosed COVID-19 started December 7, 2019, "soon after [her] friends came back from their trip to China."
I had a blood draw for the T-Detect test last week. This will determines if my T-Cells recognize SARS-CoV-2. T-cells are a more long-lasting indicator of immunity than antibodies.
> and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization
The problem with hospitalization is that doctors have forgotten that pure oxygen is toxic and causes a cascade of harm to the whole body. I've put some effort into exposing the routine use of oxygen by our medical system as #MedicalHyperventilation [2]. The tragedy of routine hyperventilation is that the antidote is simple, effective, and profoundly therapeutic. While most doctors are aware of #OxygenToxicity, they are not aware of the antidote. :(.
p.s. Welcome to Hacker News, I noticed that your first comment was ~5 days ago. Here's some upvotes. :)
[0] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1412654755415879690
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750472
[2] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...
https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpall
https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaCoronavirus/comments/oe6ajn/c...
Two observations:
* as the top comment points out, the confidence intervals matter
* the numbers are all over the place
I don't know the data for the Israel study, but I'm not sure we can confidently conclude something as specific as "4x higher chance of hospitalization".
If you’re 2x vaccinated, hospitalization is highly unlikely for Alpha and Delta variants.
See this report, page 44 bottom:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
35,251 unvax cases, 34 deaths
4,087 full vax cases, 26 deaths (!?)
I'm guessing the vax population still skews older?
Israel's overall vax rate is higher than UK, so that would be expected to a degree.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Very odd, especially given the much higher numbers of unvaccinated hospitalizations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/health/covid-19-patients....
A study of 2 million people with Covid. 1/4 had symptoms 1 month and later after the initial infection. 1/5 of those were asymptomatic -- they did not know that they had Covid until they complained of health issues consistent with others who had Covid and then were tested.
Areas of the US that are not well vaccinated will be having real problems, but even those that are vaccinated will have to be very, very careful.
Except for possible brain damage:
> In a June paper[5], he and his team analysed clinical details for 125 people in the United Kingdom with COVID-19 who had neurological or psychiatric effects. Of these, 62% had experienced damage to the brain’s blood supply, such as strokes and haemorrhages, and 31% had altered mental states, such as confusion or prolonged unconsciousness — sometimes accompanied by encephalitis, the swelling of brain tissue. Ten people who had altered mental states developed psychosis.
> Not all people with neurological symptoms have been seriously ill in intensive-care units, either. “We’ve seen this group of younger people without conventional risk factors who are having strokes, and patients having acute changes in mental status that are not otherwise explained,” says Michael.
* https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02599-5
* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/11/small-study-r...
* https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-hidden-long-term-cog...
Even if you're (fully) vaccinated, it may be prudent to wear a mask.
Unless you get long covid.
However the vaccine itself had weird and strong side effects on me for a month and a half.
Then I got a vaccine dose and was very sick for 4 days and had painful systemic inflammation for 6 weeks, during which time my covid toes and tongue and cough disappeared. My second dose only gave me stomach pain for a week.
>Then I had a year+ of long covid symptoms.
With that context, I read the first comment as
> In my case, remaining symptoms[of long covid] started disappearing after 2 weeks[after the vaccine]. By week 9[after the vaccine] I could no longer identify a single symptom[of long covid].
> However the vaccine itself had weird and strong side effects on me for a month and a half[= 6 weeks][after the vaccine].
> The ICD-10 code U09.9 Post COVID-19 condition code is not currently available in the United States and is under review by the U.S. ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee. In the meantime, CDC recommends the following ICD-10-CM code be used for post-COVID conditions: B94.8 Sequelae of other specified infectious and parasitic diseases
Anyways, it's not uncommon to get what a disease is wrong the first time. The CDC also initially referred to HIV as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency).
- One million self-reporting long COVID in the UK, give or take
- 89% of them reporting symptoms at least 12 weeks after infection
- 40% of them reporting symptoms at least one year after infection
- 18.5% reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been "limited a lot"
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
If someone has higher levels of fatigue, or is more susceptible to depression or anxiety after COVID (both symptoms of long COVID) - is it any consolation to them that 'it is all in their head'? It is still an effect that must be considered and that must be studied and treated.
Real long COVID - are there still viruses or virus fragments in the body? Is it a minor autoimmune condition? Is it due to damage that the virus did? Is severity of initial disease progression linked to severity of long COVID effects?
Placebo long COVID - To what extent are people susceptible to media influence when it comes to disease effects? Are people in blue states more likely to get it than those in red states? What can be done to assure people that there's nothing wrong with them?
Also, if they acknowledge it might all be in their head then any placebo/nocebo effects might in fact go away.
Just because something 'might all be in their head', or has a partly psychological cause does not mean that it is easy to treat or can be dismissed, or that it won't happen to you. It just means it needs to be treated with appropriate methods, e.g. therapy.
The bottom line is that long covid most definitely needs to be considered both when setting public policy, and when deciding on the risks everyone personally is willing to take. And we do not yet have enough data on the effects that vaccines have on long covid or on the risks of getting it.
I don't think it's a placebo so much as just typical persistent flu symptoms and people misattributing other problems to their COVID case.
Which is not to regurgitate the meme about covid just being the flu, but if your body is weak and fights off a problematic disease, its not crazy that it takes a long time to heal fully. My original point, poorly worded, was mostly that if you're reducing hospitalizations, you're going to reduce long covid. It's not a mysterious orthogonal effect.
Furthermore very few self-reports of long covid symptoms can be paired with a positive covid test.
How do you explain the difference in estimated prevalence of 'long covid'?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.24.21259277v...
> Israel has recorded a steep drop in the efficacy rate of the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE in preventing coronavirus infections, due to the spread of the delta variant and the easing of government restrictions.
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/asien/israel-studie-impfun...
- Biontech protects 64% against Delta infection (not hospitalization or something)
- No mention whether these 50% are one or two doses or with which vaccine
I notice that I'm also curious what their methodology for coming up with these effectiveness numbers is, and even the "original" public source at https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rJQ1O5kp00 doesn't seem to make that clear.
I'm wondering whether this number is a population-level observational result that has more to do with someone ignoring base rates rather than delta actually being much better at causing infection.
They've changed the testing policy for the vaccinated, so more of the vaccinated are getting tested.
The efficacy was artificially high before because the vaccinated were rarely tested and therefore rarely reported as infected.
For example (random Google search):
https://www.google.co.il/amp/s/www.makorrishon.co.il/news/33...
Vaccinated passengers coming from countries with the Delta variant asked to get tested again 72 hours after arrival.
Since then fully vaccinated were asked to get tested on multiple occasions during contact tracing when encountering the Delta variant.
To quote Prof. Ran Balicer (co-author of the 95% efficacy NEJM paper):
https://www.haaretz.co.il/health/corona/.premium-1.9971759
> It is very difficult to estimate vaccine efficacy because coronavirus testing is done selectively.
> Notably, Israel’s SARS-CoV-2 testing policy was different for unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals during the study period. At 7 days after the second dose, vaccinated individuals were exempt from the SARS-CoV-2 testing required of individuals who either had contact with a laboratory-confirmed case or returned from travel abroad. This testing policy might have resulted in a differential bias that would cause over- estimation of vaccine effectiveness against asymp- tomatic infection (ie, asymptomatic people who received two doses were less likely to be tested than unvaccinated asymptomatic people).
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00947-8
NOTE: Open a private browsing window to forego the paywalls/registration popups for the links below:
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/92836
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/13/business/business-of-covid-va...
[3] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/covid-vaccines-pharm...
I tried some Google Fu but all I came up with was this:
https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-va...
> The history of vaccines shows that delayed effects following vaccination can occur. But when they do, these effects tend to happen within two months of vaccination
> These experiences demonstrate two important findings. First, when these events occurred, the onset was within eight weeks of receipt of the vaccine.
It's impossible, of course, to test for this.
However unlikely it might be (not keeping me up at night, to put it mildly), this would be a negative vaccine consequence which wouldn't reveal itself until whenever said related virus broke out into the population.
Per your first comment, see Johnson&Johnson's own website[0] for typical time periods for vaccine testing and approval. Phase 1, Preclinical stage can usually take up to 4 years, but mRNA circumvents a lot of this, and J&J did it from end of January 2020 to end of March 2020. Phase 1/2a usually takes several months to a year. I am not talking about immediate side effects that a lot of people experience, but possible, long term effects we cannot know at this point in a novel vaccine. We are getting reports of pericarditis and myocarditis emerging in otherwise healthy young males. Rare given the number of vaccines given, but so then are deaths rare to the same age group this is occurring in [1], and we've only been giving the vaccine for almost 7 months (first vaccine Dec. 14, 2020). There have been 326 deaths in 0 to 17 year olds in the US as of June 30, 2021. That's 9.939e-7 or 9.939e-5 percent based on a US population of 326m. By comparison and for perspective of risk/benefit, there were 792 deaths by pneumonia in the same age bracket in the US. Why rush to vaccinate our young and healthy, and those healthy, young people who have already had COVID?
On the positive side, mRNA vaccines take away the risk associated with making vaccines the traditional way in the handling of live virus to produce a traditional vaccine, allow for transmitting the formula electronically anywhere to be made by a suitable laboratory, and production can be sped up. I am excited by its future to fight disease and save lives, however, it's just too soon for a push to vaccinate 12 year olds given the risk/benefit analysis and the amount of data to study.
I have skin in this game, like most of us, not just improving my Google Fu or points on HN. I have older children who have been vaccinated at ages 21 and 23(even though they had COVID already in late December 2020), and younger ones (2 and 6 years old who I will not vaccinate until more data has been collected and evaluated. The mRNA COVID vaccines seem to have a wider bio-distribution than a traditional vaccine's contents do, specifically in the ovaries of women and in the bone marrow, and only time will tell what this means. It is the first of its kind, so I hardly think it can be evaluated under the same criteria as traditional vaccines. 30% profit margin on $15bn and total immunity for the vaccine companies should something go wrong per the PREP act doesn't give me confidence as a consumer of a novel vaccine. I am not an anti-vaxxer, maybe a anti-novel-vaxxer-without-sufficient-data-and-time person!
Given I am otherwise healthy (no diabetes, heart disease, obesity, or other conditions), and my entire immediate family has had COVID, I will play it safe and go with natural immunity until the vaccines have more time under their belt. I am still skeptical on why natural immunity is being pushed to the side. Try finding reputable articles and studies vs. the number of social and regulatory pressures to get vaccinated. Even when antibodies no longer show in some testing, it has been shown that the body has been prepared to deal with future COVID or SARS viruses vs. a first exposure. Natural immunity also triggers based on the entire surface of the virus, and not just the spike protein that the mRNA is engineered to, so it offers a wider response to COVID/SARS than the mRNA vaccine IMHO.
[0] https://www.jnj.com/innovation/the-5-stages-of-covid-19-vacc...
[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
It's so, so strange that otherwise smart people believe that this one giant category of medical technology has no long-term side effects.
Like, FDA phase 3 trials are totally superfluous for vaccines, right? Because you can detect all the problems in 2 months!
Remember, the medical community can absolutely get things super-wrong in super-damaging ways for huge swaths of the population. OxyContin was for decades called "non-addictive" and prescribed like candy, leading to a nation-wide opiate crisis.
The very same pharma community that lead to that is also responsible for making it seem like vaccines are just so insanely great there're never side-effects.
(Disclaimer: I am more vaccinated than you, have e.g. yellow fever and rabies vaccines, I love vaccines, but still I'm not touching these vaccines as they have not completed phase 3 FDA trials.)
I forget because the authors have had papers on their vaccine research retracted for various reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehuda_Shoenfeld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Shaw_(neuroscienti...
(It talks about Lucija Tomljenovic in there, but Shaw isn't much better)
Or the fact that ASIA hasn't been confirmed by any reproducible study?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune/inflammatory_syndro...
You try and stave off criticism to play concern troll by making the claim you are "more vaccinated" than everyone else. But you are peddling junk science about other vaccines to discredit this vaccine.
Can you also cite a source for this claim please?
Your comment is full of factual inaccuracies, and this one is easy to refute. The first COVID vaccines were given in trials in February 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced, and they've already got 17 months of data.
Also worth repeating what another commenter said, vaccine side effects always show up in the first two months.
You may not trust governments and their narratives. I don't either, and I can still see that the evidence clearly points to these vaccines being safe and effective. There doesn't seem to be much evidence in support of continued living in fear.
Uh, what are you talking about?
There are huge numbers of vaccine side effects that show up only many years later.
Many, many autoimmune issues are caused by vaccines.
Here's an entire textbook created by the not-crazy Wiley publishing firm, taught in medical schools around the country, about exactly this: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Vaccines+and+Autoimmunity-p-9781...
Stop spreading misinformation during a deadly pandemic, it's dangerous, and you're killing informed consent by lying to people about possible side effects.
To boot, even if what you said were true (which it's 100% false), then you'd be talking about an entirely different technology, that being, the various old categories of vaccines. These are entirely new vaccines with at least 3 brand spanking new medical technologies in them (if you count the LNP, which I think you have to).
>Your comment is full of factual inaccuracies, Which others do you dispute?
>Also worth repeating what another commenter said, vaccine side effects always show up in the first two months. This is a 'novel' vaccine and we do not have enough data on mRNA vaccines administered to the general public to make a blanket statement on its long-term safety. It's your decision to get the vaccine. My argument is I have had COVID, there's evidence natural immunity is equal if not better (it 'knows' the whole surface of the SARS2 virus, not just the 'spike' protein), I am relatively healthy, and although older, not in the top brackets of high mortality for the disease. My children are in the least-affected age brackets, and they have had COVID. Yet, social and regulatory pressures are gaining momentum while ignoring natural immunity.
I agree that they appear to be safe in the short term aside from the number of issues that have been reported, but I cannot say, and I don't see how the 'experts' and government can say unequivocally that they are safe in the long term, and then push them on still-developing preteens. Why?
>There doesn't seem to be much evidence in support of continued living in fear. I am not living in fear. I feel healthy and not worried about COVID at all for me. I am worried I will have to be vaccinated to keep my job, go to a concert, and shop without restrictions among other liberties.
Read my comments following this thread. All of my sources are official government or even the vaccine companies' website.
My argument is for not ignoring natural immunity for those who have had COVID already, and being a bit skeptical about data starting to emerge of side effects for a novel vaccine and technology with huge profits to big pharma and a 'get out of jail free' card in the form of the PREP act which gives them immunity from a majority of possible ill effects of the vaccine.
Lockdowns, removal of rights or masks cannot eliminate Covid-19 (so called short term workarounds) but the vaccines can make it rather safe (i.e. solution). What we need to get done is vaccinating as much people as possible, Covid-19 only mutates when it has a pool to do so. So it is stupid saying "I'm healthy and don't need to be vaccinated", you're just postpone a problem in front of you until it becomes worse - either for you, your loved ones, humankind or your rights. So two problems remain, stupid people and getting enough people vaccinated quickly - especially third world! We have to care about Asia, Africa and so on or we will lose.
We get all vaccinated as toddlers against various diseases, sometimes it enough to not care about the illness anymore, sometimes we have eliminated the disease entirely and sometimes we need to repeat the vaccination (FSME/TBE). Clearly better than dying for preventable stuff.
I've heard a different story from an interview with Robert Malone, the creator of mRNA vaccines [1]
[1] https://www.bitchute.com/video/ukx8L3lh5CA7/
I definitely saw him talk about it recently on one of the podcasts he has been on.
Have the vaccines shown to prevent infection and transmission, or only reducing the chances of getting sick? If not the case, will variants still develop among a mostly vaccinated population?
--- A: The data to support the EUA include an analysis of 36,523 participants in the ongoing randomized, placebo-controlled international study, the majority of whom are U.S. participants, who completed the 2-dose vaccination regimen and did not have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection through 7 days after the second dose. Among these participants, 18,198 received the vaccine and 18,325 received saline placebo. The vaccine was 95 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 disease among these clinical trial participants with 8 COVID-19 cases in the vaccine group and 162 COVID-19 cases in the placebo group. Of these 170 COVID-19 cases, 1 in the vaccine group and 3 in the placebo group were classified as severe. ---
Maybe less with more aggressive variants.
--- A: Most vaccines that protect from viral illnesses also reduce transmission of the virus that causes the disease by those who are vaccinated. While it is hoped this will be the case, the scientific community does not yet know if the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine will reduce such transmission.
---
That said. Results in Germany look like transmission can be stopped but not must:
https://www.rki.de/SharedDocs/FAQ/COVID-Impfen/FAQ_Transmiss...
I depends likely on how good your immune system works. Which is expectable.