As of right now people are not forced to get vaccinated in Germany, so you still "own your body". This is mainly making those that choose not to get vaccinated to make a choice - don't get vaccinated and basically be restricted from doing most nonessential things, or get the vaccine.
Because the risk of transmission is understood to be significantly lower, and since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate it's in the governments best interest to get people vaccinated, a way of accomplishing this could be making life inconvenient for the uncompliant.
The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to evolve in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, the vaccines aren't very effective in people with malfunctioning immune systems.
The link references a specific response to remdesivir, but I don't see how the selective pressure isn't the same in the broader case of low-level or asymptomatic illness persisting in a vaccinated person, particularly when they'll be mingling more and taking less precautions.
A paper, while not specifically addressing vaccination in immunocompromised patients, documents pretty clearly the phenomenon of runaway mutation chains in such patients.
Edit: Another piece, specifically addressing immunocompromised + covid + vaccines:
"Studies have shown that immunocompromised people are more vulnerable to being hospitalized or dying from COVID and less likely to develop strong protection from vaccination. But there are also some hopeful signs: additional doses of some COVID vaccines, strategic timing of immunosuppressive treatments and prophylactic COVID treatments may boost protection among some immunocompromised individuals—and restore at least some of the freedoms they have lost."
Hm, so a vaccine that does not stop transmission does not create selective pressure on the virus? Wouldn’t that be unusual from an evolutionary biology standpoint?
Can we at least agree that if infected, as a vaccinated and asymptomatic carrier, there is a higher chance of transmission than if I were unvaccinated and symptomatic? This seems like common sense to me, but I recognize it goes against the Covid orthodoxy.
Also, when you say “inconvenient,” what do you mean exactly? To me, total restriction on movement and segregation from society based on medical status seems like more than an inconvenience. Maybe I’m just an anti-vaxxer, a victim of misinformation… if only I could think for myself.
While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, you're not making a valid comparison. We were able to effectively eradicate smallpox (except for a few lab samples) because the vaccines are highly sterilizing and there were no animal reservoirs.
That situation doesn't obtain with SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths but don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. And most mammal species can transmit the virus; cases have been confirmed in dogs, cats, minks, deer, tigers, etc.
This is a fact vaccine-zealots never address (I am double vaccinated by the way).
If the end game is 100% vaccination in human population (including the enormous unvaccinated reservoir of the developing world, since the rate in those countries is often single-digit percentages) we will _still_ get novel variants which bypass the latest vaccines. Are we really supposed to forcibly administer vaccines every n-months to the entire human population for the rest of eternity? It seems utterly absurd.
I don't see why the "just build more hospitals" commenter was down-voted/flagged in this thread. It at least seems more economically viable. Mobilize the national guard to do it if it comes to that. Treating those who develop covid seems a way better route than attempting the futile game of "prevention" via a vaccine regime.
We will never get to Covid eradication. It's just not possible. Yet, most of my vaccinated compatriots seem to buy into that delusion.
The rates of animal transmission are very low. If we eliminate it in humans, it's unlikely that the virus could sustain itself in animal populations and unlikely to reinfect the already-vaccinated humans.
We were setting field hospitals last year left and right in anticipation, most, luckily went unused. I don’t understand why can’t this be repeated, heck implement a protocol for quick deployment of few but massive such facilities and let economy of scale take over.
The end game should be outfitting enclosed spaces with poor circulation of air with proper and adequate ventilation and filtering. Just as we look back at the unsanitary practices of the past (dirty water, not washing hands), we need to realize the unsanitary practices of today.
> The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did with Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of vaccination.
It has been shown time and again that the covid jag does not prevent infection/re-infection/transmission so your talk of eradication smacks of propaganda, not science.
Other countries with Zero COVID policies have been successful at suppressing the virus to extremely low levels. Their citizens laugh at us on social media.
At extremely low levels, we can begin to contemplate elimination/eradication.
Your assertion about transmission is definitely not proven. It all comes down to an expected value. An unvaccinated symptomatic individual will shed a lot more virus than a vaccinated asymptomatic one. It would probably take fewer encounters to infect someone else than in the vaccinated case. So although an asymptomatic vaxed person might be out and about more, the lower viral shedding could possibly account for that we don’t know. Also you’re overestimating the intelligence of the average person, symptomatic people do stupid shit all the time [0]. This couple probably infected way more people than an asymptomatic vaxed person. Again not proven.
Vaccines probably reduce the chance of a new variant.
A lower viral load means a lower probability of a mutation happening, given that the number of mutations is proportional to the load over time.
There's some small chance that the opposite is true, and vaccines will mean deadly strains are more easily spread since the person is more likely to be asymptomatic or low-symptoms and will therefore not isolate.
But on net we expect vaccines to prevent variants.
> unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate
Maybe I'm missing something, but the vaccinated population is the one that has introduced an additional evolutionary pressure, so wouldn't we expect to see mutations (that affect vaccinated people) in that population? Vaccine tolerance is no advantage in unvaccinated hosts.
It would put pressure to avoid the vaccine. However:
1. There would be fewer cases compared to unvaccinated people to give it the chance to mutate. It doesn't have any more chance to mutate among vaccinated people. It has less chance. Just a lot of mutations that still look like the current virus will get killed off by antibodies.
2. Randomly making changes to the spike protein, this virus's most important part, is likely to reduce the virus's danger.
“Evolutionary pressure” doesn’t really exist if the virus doesn’t get a chance to replicate. The virus is trying to find a mutation which bypasses the vaccine, the more chances it gets the better. This is why people talk about animal reservoirs and immunocompromised individuals. The chance of a beneficial mutation occurring increases the more the virus is able to replicate within an organism. It replicates more in unvaccinated organisms.
Every single person who's immune system eradicates the virus causes evolutionary pressure.
If your immune system takes a long time to do this, because eg. you didn't have a vaccine so it hasn't got an antibody template to work from, then the virus has much longer to evolve in the host, under a bunch of weird and wonderful new types of antibodies that get thrown against it.
If there's already vaccine exposure then the body just needs to ramp up the antibody production, which is much faster and will result in total virus eradication to each virus as the antibodies encounter them, not halfway-measures which might leave half-functioning viruses which might self-repair in mutagenic ways.
> since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate
We might get more mutations from unvaccinated people, but since the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission we'll get much more virulent mutations from the vaccinated people.
Hence the need to isolate the unvaccinated, to protect them so they don’t get these new breeds and don’t make new ones based on them that reinfect the larger population.
> and don’t make new ones based on them that reinfect the larger population
The new breeds made by the unvaccinated are necessarily less dangerous and virulent, just based on the relevant evolutionary pressures (the more dangerous breeds that make people bedridden don't spread).
The new breeds made by the vaccinated, on the other hand - those have zero evolutionary pressure to become less dangerous, and can just as easily become more so (someone with a mutation that would make an unvaccinated person bedridden feels no effect and spreads it everywhere they go).
If COVID becomes less deadly but more widespread, and becomes part of the yearly flu season, blame that on the unvaccinated. But if COVID mutates to become more deadly and resistant to vaccines, blame the vaccinated.
> The new breeds made by the unvaccinated are necessarily less dangerous and virulent,
This is not a given. The virus is known to mutate more in unvaccinated hosts and this can make either more contagious or more lethal variations. There would be an advantage to have a longer incubation period.
On the vaccinated the same things are beneficial - longer incubation periods and the ability to infect others who are vaccinated. With a lower viral load, there will be fewer variations in vaccinated hosts, translating into fewer differences from the baseline virus.
> The virus is known to mutate more in unvaccinated hosts and this can make either more contagious or more lethal variations.
Of course vaccinated and unvaccinated can produce largely the same mutations. But that's not the point.
As I said, it's the evolutionary pressure which is the problem. If two people, one vaccinated and one not, get the same mutation, then maybe it's a strain which is dangerous enough for the unvaccinated person to go be sick in bed for a week. (Yes, incubation period - but that's the same both ways so it doesn't change the probabilities.) In this case, then because the vaccine mitigates the symptoms, the vaccinated person can go on with their daily life while sick with that more dangerous strain.
The fact that both groups produce similar mutations isn't the point, it's that the people have different reactions to the virus which changes how the mutations are able to spread.
It's not that there's a lower viral load. It's that the vaccinated are transmitting at all which is the problem, because there's no pressure for them to go be sick in bed when they're carrying around a mutation which could kill someone.
> and since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate
If you understand natural selection, then this assertion makes zero sense. Where in the genome do we see the accumulation of mutations in all covid variants seen so far? In their S-protein. Where does Omicron have 30+ mutations? In its S-protein.
What is the single protein that the mRNA vaccines code for??
Yes, if you reason from first principles, it is trivial to see that it is in fact the throngs of the vaccinated who are driving the evolution of SARS-CoV-2!
groups of people who know just a little about a subject tend to cease questioning their reasoning, and a dunning kruger is born. groups of people with more knowledge tend to ask more questions before accepting a new position. therefore, a dunning kruger is born more frequently among the former group. however, migrating pesky dunning krugers then tend to persist in either group.
Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.
Do you have a citation for that? I haven't seen any high quality studies which directly compare long term R0 for vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. While I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, it seems to have only a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission.
If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach. Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time. Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the cognitive dissonance of being obviously lied to "for the greater good".
I assume you read the comment I'm responding advocating for 100% vaccine rates to drop transmission rates below R0 1. If politicians (aka "Science Advisors") claimed this was the requirement from the git go it would have been an obvious non-starter.
Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no "non-covid" wards anymore, because no ICU turns a patient needing it now away to "reserve space" for some potential future patient.
This has been going on for nearly two years and governments were unwilling or unable to increase capacity in any meaningful way? What a total failure of government / medical system if this is true. The Spanish Flu lasted 3 years, it's not like we don't have a fairly recent example of how long this would probably last.
I realized the wording wasn't good, so just to clarify: "fill the capacity" should be read as "fill up the remaining capacity", not "fill the entire capacity" (that's indeed quite unlikely, simply because of non-covid baseload that will be around). Point remains: a covid patient doesn't get turned away just because a potential car crash victim might need the bed later (and vice-versa), as far as I know there's no reserved non-covid spaces, if there's more covid patients more parts of the ICU get run under covid protocols.
Part of the problem with ICU capacity is that is has to be local: for many things, "an hours drive further away than normal" is annoying but solvable, if you need an ICU now it's a problem. Bottom-right here is a district-level map of Germany, showing free capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich... (there's some arguing how precise that data actually is, in both directions - for starters its only updated once a day afaik). Plenty places where e.g. transporting a few people from a car crash gets challenging. There's also pretty drastic statements/protests from the emergency departments and people working there, so yes, this currently sadly is an issue in some regions and the threat of it becoming worse is what finally caused some things to happen (after way to long of German politics wanting to deal with anything but this, despite it being long-predicted by the health authorities - it's extremely frustrating because it's been kind of obvious for weeks that something will have to happen at some point, the earlier the better for everyone).
Something that would be interesting data-wise would be deaths during or waiting for transportation - one would expect an increase, but I'm not sure if there even is baseline data available, given rules around who is allowed to pronounce death and how it is recorded.
I thought we already knew that two shots give you 6 months of immunity, assuming people with boosters are the 39.5%, wouldn't the 60.5% be just as susceptible
Gibraltar's economy is tourism- and travel-centric. Just using the population of people who live there full-time doesn't capture anything about the disease spread or vaccinations with temporary visitors (upwards of five million per year).
The argument is that herd immunity for covid cannot be attained via vaccines. Not even 100% vaccination.
The comparison with measles, another contagious airborne disease, is instructive. The threshold for herd immunity is estimated at 94%. This is possible because the vaccine effectiveness against infection is also 93-97%. Unfortunately covid vaccines have waning effectiveness against infection, estimated at about 50% after 6 months, and possibly waning even further.
"Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible"
"For example, the measles is a highly contagious illness. It's estimated that 94% of the population must be immune to interrupt the chain of transmission."
"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."
A bias towards very positive claims in the presence of little data does, though. All of our expectations around covid would have benefitted from the health agencies being capable of communicating what they know for certain and what they don’t, but unfortunately they decided to make strong claims in the hopes of getting strong compliance.
To a degree, but I've also found that people love to ignore caveats that are presented, or never look at more than the headline version. The amount of times you hear "but risk X is never mentioned" when it actually is clearly addressed in the source statements or "but the data shows Y" but it comes with a list of reasons why it's limited is mindboggling. (and to be fair, lots of media sucks at putting that stuff in context too)
Alternatively, lots of shouting because health authorities are make sooo confusing statements and refuse to give 100% clear cut answers.
1 year ago, we thought that people would actually get vaccinated at a reasonable rate, instead of dragging their feet long enough for multiple more-infectious variants to appear.
1 year ago, the medical establishment was saying that it's impossible to develop a vaccine for a new virus in just a year, so don't even think about seeing a vaccine anytime soon... leading people with halfway-decent memories scratching their heads about how the heck this vaccine was actually developed and getting really suspicious when it doesn't behave like a vaccine at all in that it doesn't prevent you from getting or spreading the disease. And has rare but serious side effects.
> how the heck this vaccine was actually developed
mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses have been in progress since the 70s. This just happens to be when they finally got to the point of being production-ready. It's a useful coincidence, but without it mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses would have been showing up in the near future anyway (at a slower rate without all the emergency COVID funding).
> doesn't behave like a vaccine at all
Sterilizing immunity isn't an inherent property of vaccines.
> And has rare but serious side effects.
All vaccines do that, and as with all widely-used vaccines the rate of side effects is much, much lower than the rate of side effects from the actual disease.
Note how all of the variants which health authorities said just needed a reasonably high vaccine rate are now effectively eradicated. It is only the new 'delta' (and upcoming 'omicron') that remain, and these are known to have much lower vaccine efficacy.
Sober people sometimes cause car crashes, but that in itself is a pretty poor reason to permit drunk driving.
I'll also point out that simply driving under the influence is a crime, even if you don't actually cause an accident. The statistical propensity of impaired drivers to cause accidents is sufficient cause to imprison people for this sort of thing.
1. incentive - if everyone is locked down, there is no incentive to get vaccinated.
2. lack of contribution to hospital admissions - although some vaccinated people do get ill, once the elderly are boosted voluntarily the burden of this segment will be very low
3. credibility - the government promised and I quote "vaccination is the way back to normality". If they break this promise, they lose future credibility.
You should concentrate on the "can". Vaccinated folks are less likely to develop Covid in the first place, and as such, aren't as likely to spread it. And if they do develop it, it is less likely to be serious and require hospitalisation. This keeps us from having to decide who in the hospital lives or dies and takes the stress of of the medical system, workplaces, and families.
Another reason, at least initially, was to motivate people to get vaccinated. Still makes sense when vaccinated people transmit less, less likely will get infected and are much less likely to get infected.
As a double vaccinated German, I am very disappointed and angry about this move.
Our politicians have failed to prepare the country for the Winter (who could have known...). We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.
And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.
Genuine question: given the current situation, what's the alternative? A lockdown for everyone? Vaccine mandate? Doing nothing and removing restrictions? Something else?
In the part of Germany where I live, 7-day incidence among the unvaccinated is 1726, which is much worse than last winter, and it's 112 among the vaccinated. Hospitalisation tells a similar story: The unvaccinated are suffering.
If that 1726 would rise as it did last winter, a lot of unvaccinated fools would die. A hundred thousand dead in three months, perhaps.
Increase hospital staff? Encourage social distancing? I don’t know, anything other than creating second class citizens in a country with a horrible history of it?
Increasing staff won't add more beds to already full hospitals, though. And social distancing has been encouraged for a while, even for the vaccinated, and it hasn't seemed to help.
Then build new hospitals. Or learn to live with it.
Authoritarianism isn’t somehow justified because current actions “haven’t seemed to help.” That’s the playbook of every oppressive regime since the beginning of time: this is an emergency so we don’t need to follow laws or respect rights.
You can't simply increase hospital staff - these are highly trained people. That's an investment that takes years to pay off. Encouraging social distancing doesn't work, people are tired of it and many either didn't care in the first place or don't care now that they are fully vaccinated.
Many western countries messed up big time by not investing enough into their health care systems or into properly educating their population. So now they're out of options.
The hospitals have been hiring nonstop. Unfortunately medical staff is also leaving the hospitals that treat corona patients. As one said, speaking to a journalist, the current patients are a "potpourri of difficult personalities", so the nurses apply for jobs at things like eye clinic and the hospitals can't even operate the beds they have.
A possible answer to your question of what we could do if we do not want to force people to get vaccinated is the same as what we could do if people could not be vaccinated.
You said it was your ‘genuine question’. So I’m not sure why you need to see the argument. It’s an answer to your question, not an argument.
So basically lockdown for all, because restricting the rights of everybody is better than restricting the rights of some. Good luck convincing the courts that that's the minimal necessary restriction.
That’s for the courts to decide. Is a lockdown not allowed because forcing people to vaccinate is an option? Or is forcing people to vaccinate not allowed because lockdown is an option?
Forcing people to vaccinate is not really a tool to control infections right now, and more of an independent (also currently hotly debated) longer-term question. (I'm fairly certain its going to come for some jobs at least)
And if applied as here, I doubt many would argue that "forcing people to vaccinate" is a weaker measure than "impose some restrictions on unvaccinated" (although the former is of course going to be a strong form of the latter)
Use my immune system, like people did for millions of years.
Unfortunately everyone can’t but the vast majority will be fine after having covid and will have built up immunity.
Yes! Indoor humidity helps in at least two ways: 1) Humidity prevents aerosol transmission 2) Humidity helps the cillia in your airways function better and remove foreign particles, including viruses faster before they have a chance to infect you.
Probably not much. All KPIs are heading down now anyways, just look into the RKI dashboard [1]. Doing a quick math exercise underscores this: 70% are vaccinated, 6 million had it (at least, the number is probably higher), so in total 80-85% of the population already had it or is vaccinated by now. Numbers should go down now from now, which they actually start to do, if you look in the dashboard.
It's not great, and I do wish that the current coalition had prepared a bit more for this winter, rather than assuming 1. enough people would get vaccinated, and 2. that it wouldn't come back seasonally like last year. They really should have prepared months ago.
I can't think of a better alternative given the current situation if the end goal is to get people to reduce contact and get vaccinated, short of a full lockdown for everyone (which I think is a lot less preferable). Whether this form of lockdown will have any effect remains to be seen.
It’s absurd to believe that this will actually do anything additional to reduce infections on the short term. People don’t get infected while shopping. This is just meant to pressure the unvaccinated to get vaccinated which might help next year.
Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and get infected. It’s just the wrong move at the worst possible time.
The same force that prevents covid from spreading while you are sitting down at a restaurant but can get you as you walk in and when you use the restroom
Mask wearing is well adhered too, and shop visitors stay only a short time, leaving less droplets in the air than maskless visitors to, say, a restaurant or bar.
While shopping, people wear masks, talk (and breathe and cough) less, and are generally not packed into small spaces breathing a lot of the same air, so the risk is lower than at a house party or bar or dance club.
Results are still somewhat preliminary and it isn't formally approved for that use but I know that many physicians are prescribing it off label and report positive results. The safety profile is good as a temporary acute treatment so there's little reason not to use it.
Control the media to stop the panic, that only worsens things with a nocebo effect. Gradually remove restrictions since numbers are going down anyways.
Not only are they forcing the unvaccinated to get the shot, they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to get booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future. When the vaccines were first introduced their validity was fixed at 12 months and their was talk about extending it ("because they are so incredibly effective").
Not sure what to say without being labeled an anti vaxxer...
I was very sick for a week after each shot. I'm 30, I work from home, I work out, I'm lean and only go out when running in the forest and buy food.
I can't possibly know what would happen if I caught covid, but I wish the vaccination (I'm already vaxxed, but I mean the boosters) was my choice. With my reaction to the vaccines, it's two weeks a year guaranteed sickness vs a very low chance of getting covid with an even lower chance of getting very sick from it.
The pros and cons just don't make vaccination every six months an obvious choice for me.
Yes I had a horrible reaction to the 2nd dose. So did everyone I know. Yes it's possible the real thing might be worse for me but I'm going to take my chances. I will not be taking a booster. I'm healthy, exercise regularly and I'm not in the age group that's high-risk.
There are studies showing the vaccine isn't even effective at 3 months. There's no way I'm dealing with that shot every 3-6 months.
It looks like it possibly starts waning at 2 months. So if we're requiring everyone needs to be fully vaccinated with mandates then boosters start at 2 months to be safe. By that measure large portions of our population are not fully vaccinated at this point. No thanks...
This is the same argument my Germany friends made (and used to get fake vaccination certificates). The studies say it’s not effective after 3 months!! People that are vaccinated get infected again!! I’m young and healthy!!
Yes people get reinfected but how many die from it or run into serious conditions? Vaccines don’t block the virus from entering your body, but they help with you not dying or using up ICU beds, even after those 3 months.
Please do your part of the swarm and get vaccinated. If you know you’ll have a odd reaction you can prepare in advance. Also Germany has sick-leave from work everywhere.
I'm already vaccinated. I'm not getting the booster. My age group has like a .0007% chance of dying from COVID. A booster isn't necessary. Stop with this anti-science cultish behavior. It's weird. COVID is not going away, getting boosters indefinitely is not a sound plan. I'll take my chances and get the natural immunity which is better and longer lasting.
I don't want advice from Germany. You'd think after what your country did they'd be less inclined to go down the authoritarian route....
I'm not in a high risk group. I do not need to worry about COVID. Until like a few weeks ago there was no one telling me I needed a booster no data backing up anyone taking it in a low risk group.
I had no reaction to the first 2 or boosters, nor my friends. The plural of anecdote is not data.
What I can say is the Corona I had between the 2nd and booster lasted 1 day, the fastest cold I've ever had. That I had a light infection being due to my vaccination, is backed up by the data.
I didn't say it was data for anything. I said personally I won't be taking a booster for those reasons. Data for what it does on average to everyone else is not data for what it does to my system.
Your anecdote is also not data. It's entirely possible you would've experienced the same light symptoms even without the shots. After all, plenty of people who have contracted covid were completely asymptomatic.
I think the key issue is hospitals being swamped. Once that happens, death rates will skyrocket even among people not at-risk. Until that point however young and healthy people don't really benefit themselves from the vaccination. It's essentially a tragedy of the commons situation.
My story is very similar to yours. As a result, I am also reluctant to get the booster because I do not have a support system whereby I can have another severe reaction that causes me to be incapable of helping the people who depend on me every single day.
I am working on getting my mother in law to be on call to stay with us for a 10-14 day period, if need be, so that I can get the booster. It's quite ridiculous.
All of that having been said, I know that I need it.
The vaccine is not the virus? If you are under 60 without serious health issues COVID is indeed no worse than a bad flu for the vast majority of people. Certainly not a guaranteed death sentence, let alone guaranteed hospitalization. Especially if treated as soon as detected instead of letting people sit around and get worse until they have to be hospitalized.
okay, i get that mRNA vaccines are not introducing weakened versions of the actual virus like a conventional vaccine, but what explains the sometimes severe side effects people receive? those symptoms aren't related to covid at all, and there's zero relation between how one reacts to the vaccine and how one would react to covid?
i understand things are very politicized now, so to be clear, genuine interest. i thought there was some relation just based on how regular vaccines operate.
While I don't know the connection between the two, we also need to be realistic and not expect everyone to read 50 papers and be a disease and vaccination expert.
Honestly, I don't know, but it's interesting that when I say I had very bad side effects to the vaccine, some people are convinced that it is because I would also react to covid similarly.
Will those people say to a 70 years old obese smoker who didn't get any reaction after the vaccine? I know many like that. Should I tell them "oh you didn't get a severe reaction to the vaccine, so I guess that's how you would react to covid, too"? Of course not, it's nonsense.
One of the more common causes of vaccine related injury is allergic reaction to one or more of the adjuvant or carriers, rather than to the antigenic load.
i see. some people get really severe reactions though, like the people here talking about a week long; does that explain those cases? is there no relation b/w vaccine reaction and reaction to the actual virus?
Well, I personally had a >2 week long reaction, and after the second shot, was informed that yes, it probably was some sort of allergic reaction. What was it? We still don't know
Regarding correlations between the two, it's a bit difficult to tell. After all, you can't really get a correlation between the intensity of vaccine reaction and actual virus exposure for... obvious reasons.
However, (I'm a bit rusty on my allergy and autoimmunity, so if someone catches a mistake, please call me out on it) allergic reactions and the viral reactions tend to present themselves differently. The common image of swelling and inability to breathe are almost completely associated with allergy, while the fever, tiredness and so on tend to be more standard.
I was also very sick after my first dose. Completely fine with the booster. Don’t assume you will react the same with the booster as you did the first dose.
Not the GP, but I also had a severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. All in all, I felt ill for 8-9 days. It was the most unusual illness I have ever felt, though I should say that I do not get sick very often.
It started in my head and progressed it's way down to my legs. The day after the shot, it started with headaches and eye strain with a tremendous amount of head pressure, not dissimilar from an ocular migraine. That developed into a full blown head cold of congestion, coughing, stuffy, runny nose, and continued headache. The headache went away and it began to feel like strep throat, the coughing fits, while not excessive, were pretty rough and were burning my throat. From there it went into my chest and I felt like I had bronchitis. This was the worst phase of it. That burning sensation in your chest cavity when you have bronchitis? It felt exactly like that except I was also extremely, extremely tired. I slept for almost 2 days straight while this was going on. I took time off of work during the throat and chest phase of this. After that, I had stomach cramps and diarrhea. Then, after all of that wacky bullshit ended and I started to feel like a human again, I was left with cramps in my legs.
I was also extremely tired the entire time. Just the simple act of walking both hurt and made me more tired. It was fatigue like I've never experienced before. I'm a veteran and I've gone through some sleep deprivation training and that was nothing like the fatigue that I experienced from my reaction.
My wife was 5 months pregnant while all of this was going on and our twins were about 22 months old. It was, honestly, complete fucking bullshit. Being sick coupled with the fact that I had so many people reliant on me really stressed me out. I was able to get my mother-in-law to lend a hand but we went from thriving to surviving until I was on the tail end of the thing.
But what bothered me the most was that I couldn't even report the fact that I was having a reaction. I called up the UC medical system where I received the shot and they told me to follow up with my GP, except that at the time I didn't have one. I called them back a couple of days later and I could basically hear the person shrugging their shoulders.
Goodness! I'm so sorry to hear that. I also had a terrible, week-long illness after the same second shot, which is why I'm extremely apprehensive about our governor mandating boosters for myself and others working in this particular industry. They've become extremely draconian about not allowing exemptions, and in your case at least, I hope you'd be eligible for an exemption for a following shot. But the way things are going, the powers that be want to force everyone to get a new shot every 6 months. I want to opt out of that system entirely.
I'm in the same boat, except I had Covid in the spring. Got my second shot a month ago.
I didn't think I would get a large benefit from the vax, since I had covid, but did it mainly because of pressure (family, employment, government). But I think I draw the line here; I'm not going to take any boosters. Getting horribly sick for several days, running a high fever... that can damage you. It's not as bad as Covid, but my threat from Covid is also greatly diminished already.
Would you fight for your country in a war if conscripted?
I always think about this. If you were born at the wrong time, your government was essentially sending you off to die against your will at the age of 18. It's pure luck that this is not the case.
Compared to the 1 in a million risk of dying from a vaccine, I couldn't imagine what my ancestors would think of me.
Although funnily enough, many in the military and police are antivax. I really can't get my head around this one.
I am still not back to normal after my second shot. I have shortness of breath and horrible headaches I didn't have before.
I can't imagine getting another shot especially when access to doctors is very limited currently and they have been generally useless for my problems.
Something like this being mandatory is crossing the line for me. I would take measures to never take it, even if it means fleeing the country or finding other ways if the borders were shut.
you experience isn't the same as 99.999% of the population though. I'm old and fat and the vaccine didn't do much more than make arm sore any of the 3 times I was injected. However I took the shingles vaccine and felt like crap for several days, not once did I complain about it. I consider it part of my duty in sharing the ups and downs of living in a society.
When you get a COVID vaccine you are getting COVID. That’s literally all a vaccine is: a copy of the disease you want protection against, so that your immune system can gear up to fight it.
The only difference is that the vaccine will not multiply out of control in your body the way the live virus would.
So it’s crazy to think that you’ll have “an even lower chance of getting sick from” live COVID. You already got sick from it, and that was only the limited version.
This is like complaining that a punch from a 5 year old hurts, and you’d rather risk getting punched by a heavyweight prize fighter.
I’m not trying to put a label on you, I’m try to explain how things work. Having such a strong reaction to a vaccine is a warning that you could risk more serious complications from an infection by the live virus.
> When you get a COVID vaccine you are getting COVID. That’s literally all a vaccine is: a copy of the disease you want protection against, so that your immune system can gear up to fight it.
Whoa, hold on there buddy.
You might want to look up the difference between mRNA vaccines and traditional ones.
> That you are used as the factory for the protein with mRNA doesn't make a big difference IMHO.
I'd beg to differ, or at least make a slight distinction. The mRNA vaccine targets the spike protein specifically, which is the important target in the virus, at least now, but not the only one. The actual virus is more complex than that, and it can mutate. From this POV natural immunity is better. But natural infection obviously comes with the downside of added risks (depending on your immune system) and it's tough to guess how you'll react the first time (although you can make educated guesses) you get infected. Later infections will be milder though. And a clear upside being not having to run for jabs a couple of times per year.
mRNA COVID vaccines use the organelles in your cells to make partial copies of the novel coronavirus, which is exactly how the live novel coronavirus grows in your body.
The big difference is that the copies cannot make copies of themselves (they are only partial copies) so the viral load does not grow geometrically within your body.
Again: if the small viral load of a vaccine makes a person sick for a week, that person likely has a higher risk for severe illness from the (much larger) live viral load from a full infection.
Science does not yet understand why some people have more severe COVID illness than others, but it is an observed fact that some do. In some cases, even if they are otherwise fit and healthy.
If you took Moderna or J&J, it's possible the initial high dosage (100mg for Moderna) is the main cause. Their booster is now 50mg and Pfizer's is 30mg. If you did take the lower dosage, there's still hope that newer ones from Novavax or Inovio coming out later which is very different from MRNA vaccines won't produce so much side effects on you.
Well, thank you for the encouraging words (though I didn't have the vaccines you mentioned)... I will get back to this comment and try to convince myself that you are 100% right, when the German government makes me an outlaw / outcast when they decide to go with the vaccine mandates, and I can't go shopping, to the gym, to restaurant...
It's so strange how that differs so much. I'm not as healthy as you and the vaccine didn't bother me at all. Ok the second time it felt a bit like I had bumped my arm a bit.
Sorry to hear it gets so bad for you though. I understand that makes it a much harder decision.
Twice-vaccinated people will have to get a booster shot and there are discussions about a six month expiry date if you don’t get the booster shot.
What happens beyond that we do not know right now since can’t look into the future. We do not know how effective the booster will be in terms of long-term protection.
All of that is not surprising. A bit annoying but not surprising.
Other vaccinations are also given three times (second dose after a short interval, third dose after a longer interval), so it might well be that this vaccine turns out to be one of those, we just do not know. That’s the point.
> they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to get booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future.
There is no obligation (or force) to get a booster shot. It is available and recommended but not forced. Some groups like older age and immune-compromised people are highly recommended.
You sound dismayed that vaccines don't work in a more simplistic manner. These CDC charts on vaccine schedules may provide a better picture of the general complexity of immunization.
I'm Czech and we wish here we would be as prepared and forward thinking as your representatives are.
If it was not for one of the highest rate of ICU beds per capita in the world and all the high quality nurses and doctors we export to Germany, our health care would have already crumbled.
Yet still the toll this is taking on the doctors and nurses in Czech hospitals is so sad. And to add insult to injury hardly anyone from the outside thanks them anymore & the antivaxers they often take care about are often very rude or even aggressive - often literally on deaths bed.
Sorry, but it counts as both unsubstantive and flamebait here, and certainly not a "fact". We need you to stop posting like this if you want to keep commenting here.
The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
Nah. Germans love to complain but not as much as they love having things decided for them decisively and following the rules begrudgingly. There will be no uprising. People are going to complain, as per usual, no matter what the change, and then fall in line without any upset that could begin to rival the downside of them not doing so.
> And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.
You could say this about any law that enforces some uncomfortable behavior change. Anyone who remembers when seat belt laws became real, sees history repeating itself, down to the exact same arguments about effectiveness and rhetoric about choice and tyranny and government overreach.
COVID has been a challenge for the same reason Climate Change is challenging: They both require collective cooperative action from people, and you can't rely on everyone having a natural desire to do the right thing. Laws can't make people want to do the right thing--they can only provide incentives or disincentives for specific actions or behaviors.
You can take the seat belt off when the car ride is over. Also if you are caught without one you get a small fine, but you don't lose your job and the ability to participate in society.
Because your refusal to wear a seatbelt presents no risk to others. But vaccine refusal does present a risk. So the stakes of the game are not the same.
Refusing to wear a seatbelt does, in fact, present a risk to others because in a crash, you can become a lethal projectile should you fly and hit someone else.
Every time someone is unbuckled in a car crash, there is a high risk they will hurt others. Someone in the back seat could fly forward and hit the driver, for example.
"X poses risk to others therefore you have no choice" is a statement that can be made for nearly any scenario. To wit:
Uncontrolled flying bodies pose additional risks when there are multiple people in the vehicle. There's also the risk of driving to begin with, for people both in and outside the vehicle.
The risks of harm to you _and_ others from crashing a car are probably higher at this point than that of a vaxxed person getting seriously ill from covid.
But anyway the point I was making was to refute GP's statement that seat belt laws and the pushback around them are the same as for the vax mandates. They are not, because the vax is permanent, and the consequences for non-compliance much higher. The fact that you can't "take the vax off" is part of these stakes that are not the same.
> COVID has been a challenge for the same reason Climate Change is challenging: They both require collective cooperative action from people, and you can't rely on everyone having a natural desire to do the right thing
No, it's challenging because people know they're being manipulated and taken advantage of.
As with COVID, as with climate change. Mayor of SF enacting mask mandates while dining/partying unmasked. Elites flying private to Davos to discuss climate change.
Resistance exists because politicians refuse to implement obviously sensible, effective and, most importantly, fair policies - no lockdowns (Sweden style) & care/protection targeting the vulnerable for COVID, and revenue neutral carbon tax for Climate Change.
Ironically, this probably proves their point of "this being a slipper slope", since now the fact that we agreed to wear seatbelts is used to force us to do other things.
It’d be nothing strange about a road company demanding seat belts on their roads. Currently that business is run by a state monopoly, and only then do seat belt mandates become an issue to discuss.
As a German resident, I know anti-vaxers. They use fake paper certificates and they are accepted everywhere no problem. Unless it becomes mandatory to ONLY scan QR codes, they will not be stopped (I assume QR codes cannot be faked atm).
There are also lots of people checking who don't care and don't check properly. As 2/3 are unvaxxed, I imagine there are a lot of people who are anti-vax that check. I have been waived through without a thorough check most times.
On one side, I'm angry at them for being dumb. But on the other side, I respect their freedom of what to do with their body. Many of them resist because they don't like the government telling them what they must do to their body, or they come from countries where they don't trust their government. There are so many occasions in life where you don't want to do something, even though it may be for the best, because you don't like the person or group of people telling you what to do. Like when someone tells an angry person to "just calm down".
I think it's fair to place restrictions on them as long as the ICU beds are at an unacceptable level of capacity. But we should face the reality that unvaccinated people will always be among us.
That's not a strategy, that's wishful thinking. We have a vaccination rate of not even 70%. AND: forgot to booster the old and still don’t manage to booster them effectively. That's a huge failure. Every manager would get fired for this.
And then add to this that we have reduced capacities in hospitals compared to last year...
Why aren't you angry at the anti-vaxxers instead? If they would have gotten the jab, this would be mostly under control.
> We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.
Getting everyone vaccinated is the only strategy, everything else is either worthless or swaps COVID deaths with mental health an economic casualties.
> And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two.
It was already divided, it's just that the government stopped caring about the side that doesn't care and fails to listen to the actual professionals.
> This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections
Look at literally any statistics or read any paper made by any credible person.
> it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.
They'll cave eventually and accept that their stubbornness is not above other people's well being.
This is not just a stupid debate about which politicians each camp likes, anti-vaxxers make everybody's life miserable and even kill people for exactly no benefit, they have no arguments other than Facebook conspiracy theories and other fake news.
Fauci funded gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab and repeatedly lied about it to Congress which is a federal felony. His own agency admits this.
What are the major root causes for the surge in Germany? Low humidity/temperature? New variants? Something else?
IIRC last winter in the US at least, health officials and the media were quick to blame irresponsible citizens and social gatherings – but the major root cause seemed to be a new, more transmissible (delta) variant.
Delta emerged in late spring 2021 though. You must be thinking about Alpha. However, it became dominant in the US only in late March 2021 according to Wikipedia[0]
Another factor is that the German government tried to keep infection rates low at all times, leading to very little natural immunity in the population compared to other countries.
We have 57 million fully vaccinated [0] people and 6 million infected/recovered [1] out of 83 million inhabitants. The recovered even have to get a shot later to keep their status as recovered/vaccinated (which exempts from the restrictions that are imposed now), so they might even be considered as a subset of the vaccinated group. More infections therefore would not have increased the total number of immune people but only cost more lives.
Beside that we can vaccinate a multiple of the number of newly infected people per day just fine. It's been about people being unwilling to get the shot, not availability of vaccines for quite a while now. Example: one day of vaccinations like yesterday (~1 Mio) [0] equals two weeks of new infections at levels like today (>73000).
I disagree, over the summer they aimed for low infection rates, explicitly coupling openings to certain infection rate thresholds, knowing full well at that time that the virus was going to be endemic and without any good reason at all believing that sufficiently many people would be vaccinated in order to contain the pandemic in the winter. Other countries such as France or the Britain simply didn't care about high infection rates over the summer and face a smaller wave this winter.
This is not logical. More infections in the younger age groups would have boosted the defense systems of many while keeping lethalities low. This would have helped tremendously.
Would love to know the effect if any of being surrounded by countries with lower vaccination rates. Germany may have 70% vaccinated but how much does it help them when Poland has only 50%? Is there enough mobility between Poland and Germany to make it matter?
Of concern to a Californian who is surrounded by other states with lower vaccination rates. Even internally in California there is a steep gradient between the coastal counties with 80-90% and the inland counties as low as 50%.
Overrun healthcare system and lack of ICU beds is serious cause for concern. No, the vaccine is not sterilizing but it will improve your chances of not getting seriously ill / dying. simple
Scary stuff. I think all of the authoritarian actions over the last two years can be traced to a single event: the fall of the Soviet Union. Without an enemy to compare itself against, the Western world has forgotten the value of freedom.
If East Germany had implemented this forty years ago to fight X disease, it would have been painted as evil, something we don’t do in the free West.
Edit: flagged in 8 minutes. I guess this website isn’t the place for intelligent debate and discussion anymore. That’s disappointing.
Your comments are correctly getting flagged because you're taking the thread further into generic ideological flamewar. That's off topic here and clearly against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you'd please review them and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: actually, it looks like you've been using this account primarily for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've therefore banned this one. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
"Idealogical flamewar" a.k.a. any non-leftist talking points so downvoted into oblivion. You are a terrible human being and there will likely soon be consequences for people supporting this non-logical persecution.
Everyone with strong passions on a topic feels like the mods are against them, the moment they see any sign of a post that they agree with getting moderated.
In reality, we ban accounts that do ideological flamewar from the other side in just the same way, and they feel like we're just as biased against them. They agree that we're terrible human beings though!
The striking thing is how the passionate partisans and ideologues resemble each other more than they resemble the rest of us. They see each other as bitter enemies, yet from my perspective they're close to isomorphic. (Edit: no, that's not a centrist defense of the squishy middle ground. It doesn't work that way.)
What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.
The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then. Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.
FSJ is a year-long volunteer program for young people typically organized and funded by NGOs like the Red Cross and similar. I worked with small children, plenty of the other volunteers I met regularly worked in hospitals and nursing homes. They all talked at length about how atrocious the working conditions were and how they were asked to do things they weren't legally allowed to (e.g. taking blood, handing out medication) because the staff shortages were severe enough that people didn't have enough time to adhere to very reasonable safety rules anymore. That was 17 years ago.
This is a well known, widely publicized[0] and not at all new problem, and the unvaccinated are not to blame for it. Let me repeat, we're talking about one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of 83M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients.
I don't know why you are voted down. This is very much true for The Netherlands as well. Ever since the year 2000, possibly before, ICU beds have been scaled down.
Diederik Grommers, one member of the Dutch Outbreak Management Team (OMG) states: "it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not; 60% of the beds are occupied by vaccinated people; the problems we will encounter in the coming weeks are caused by the fact that we totally hollowed out our health care" [0].
The Netherlands has about 6 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens. Germany has almost 30 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens [1]. Now I know Germany did accept patients from The Netherlands on their ICUs and perhaps Germany is doing the same for other countries, so perhaps that is causing a capacity problem in Germany as well.
Thanks, that was an interesting video. I had to rely on auto-translated subtitles but from the little Dutch I can understand, it seems like they got the gist across.
Yeah, Germany has a ton of ICU beds in comparison, and yet, we're struggling exactly the same as any other country. I find it strange, too. In early 2020 I expected we'd see big differences between different countries based on ICU capacity, but we saw the same story everywhere (regional overload around the peak of a wave), with a few minor differences (whether some patients are transferred within the country or to other countries). Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.
High total number notwithstanding though, our ICU capacity actually decreased during the pandemic, see:
The graph under "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten" shows total capacity (light blue) + emergency reserve (green), dark blue is occupied beds. There was a pretty sharp drop-off in the total capacity a year ago, and a slower decrease all throughout 2021. Apparently, that's mostly due to nurses quitting in droves since the pandemic made their already bad working conditions even worse.
Our politicians didn't lift a finger to prevent or revert this, and now they're blaming a minority for this massive, massive failure. Just makes me really angry, I'll take downvotes for that if I have to :)
> Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.
There's different standards in different countries for sure. In The Netherlands there's a focus on quality of life. If a patient cannot have a decent quality of life after staying on ICU, there's a preference to provide the patient with palliative care instead. In (e.g.) Italy this approach would not be accepted.
The number of ICU beds may have been inflated. At the start of the pandemic, hospitals had to report available ICU beds, and they received money for the number of beds they reported. I know of two hospitals that reported all of their beds (the physical objects) when the intention of the law / regulation was to have only those beds reported that could be operated / staffed.
Privatization of infrastructure in Germany has always led to a, at least perceived, decline in quality. This has been true for postal service, railway, telcos and now health care.
It sounds like you read that off the government shill brochure.
The decline in public healthcare quality has nothing to do with the lack of government oversight but it's due to the lack of funding and personel (which is also funding related). Ask any overworked healthcare worker in the public system.
Counter argument: Medical personel is hard to find and expensive, as is IC infrastructure. Why would we've needed to keep spare IC capacity for decades only to find out we need it in case of a pandemic? The German argument could be re-constructed into an argument that any country will run into IC shortages regardless of the level of IC availability. In an exponential curve it's only three or four cycles (8-12 days?) away, regardless of capacity. Hence, keep your IC capacity at regular efficient rates and use vaccination to get out of the hot seat. IC's save some but lose many. Vaccinations save many.
I can't say that I like the Dutch approach to covid in general, but in my first job I was deep into governement budgetting of hospitals (just before the introduction of the current Dutch reimbursement system) and it was a whole lot about 'keeping beds' and keeping patients in them to fulfill the budget. That was not what I'd call a generally efficient system. Even the health outcomes were worse since outpatient treatments usually have fewer side effects. What I've learned in that job is that doctors are like people. They respond to incentives. If that incentive is to have beds filled with people, you get just that. Beds with people.
You can’t throw a stone without hitting a nurse in the US, but I’m guessing they’re paid far better here as well just as doctors are.
I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me that socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes care. The increase in costs in the US is also unsustainable. There might be a happy medium in there but it might be too early to tell.
> I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me that socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes care.
You can see this happening in Canada too. We have a hybrid system in healthcare where the majority of critical care is paid for via taxes/government subsidies however secondary/tertiary stuff is either out of pocket or through insurance agencies (prescriptions, out-patient care like physiotherapy, etc).
Over the past 20-30 years, our system has seen the typical government thought process of throwing more money at problems but not actually having someone be accountable for the actions of the government over decades. You end up with a bunch of overpaid, under-worked management at the top while the actual front-line workers suffer with low staffing, not enough beds, budget cuts for the front line but raises for management etc. etc.
Not to mention the number of students coming here for health education (doctor, nurse, specialist) - then immediately saying sayonara for another country like the US or in the case of foreign students, their home country.
I don't understand why we keep cutting healthcare budgets - one possible reason could be because corporations have slowly been taking over every aspect of society as they move faster and make smarter decisions than government officials.
This is accurate. The socialized health care system in Germany worked fine for multiple decades, until a few years ago our government decided to reimburse hospitals not based on days a patient spends there (which created perverse incentives, agreed) but rather based on diagnosis. So, a hospital earns X euros for every patient with condition X, creating other perverse incentives, and resulting in less money for the hospitals, which of course trickled down to nurses.
The same happens here in Sweden. Since the implementation of more neoliberalist policies on healthcare, allowing more private clinics and paying clinics based on diagnosis created a perverse incentive to overdiagnose patients.
There was a case of a clinic that performed unnecessary surgeries and procedures just to rake in more tax money.
The problem isn't socialised medicine per se, it's trying to mash a socialised medicine system with "market forces", it's the ideology of the Third Way [1] to appease to these neoliberalist policy desires that is crumbling the Swedish healthcare (and welfare) system for the past 2 decades.
There is no easy answer to that question to my knowledge. All of what hospitals do is translated into the Dutch equivalent of diagnosis-related groups. Those DRGs are standardized across the hospitals doing procedures. Insurers bargain with hospitals (usually on a higher level) for price-setting. So while there are DRGs that probably have a large IC-component, most have only a little. So the costs of IC are reimbursed via all treatments that have an average IC-component.
A hospital with a good cost based activity system could probably tell you more, although that would require a very high measure of control.
Dutch press just reports the general direction of (internal) prices for IC-days (about € 3k / night). That really is nowhere close to the proper answer to the question "How much would expansion cost?" The sum based on that € 3k would be: €3k * 365 * 65% * 1200 = about € 850 million for the whole of IC-care. That is a low figure for the Netherlands (€ 25 billion total medical specialist care), so I expect a lot of the IC-costs are absorbed by other DRGs or the other way around: that price doesn't include all of the fixed costs and is a marginal price.
Germany has "only a few thousand" ICU beds (and while this nber has trended downward over time, it was never more than 10,000). It's misleading to not phrase this as a percentage, which is something like a sudden 50%+ spike in need for ICU capacity.
Of course that will overwhelm the system.
(Also paradoxically, an improved healthcare system should need fewer ICU beds, so the decrease is probably a good thing)
Thanks for the insight. I'm curious; is the problem staffing, "beds" (which I assume means actual physical beds, or is this a term of art?), or a combination?
Also curious how one squares the resource constraint issue with the exceptional nature of the events of the past couple years. What I mean is, did anyone think it made sense to massively increase capacity before the pandemic began? I'm not in health care so I don't have any special insight here; i.e. I'm asking, not challenging. From an outsider's perspective it seems like it would've been a tough sell to advocate for what was, in the "before times," an unnecessary increase in capacity.
I’m getting 24,949 beds for today, 27,543 as the year ago number (in both cases including a couple thousand ICU beds for kids which were later split out in the more current DIVI reports since ICU beds for kids aren’t helpful for this pandemic).
That’s a difference of 2,594.
Also, as the DIVI themselves explain: “Consequently, several factors play a role in influencing the number of beds that can be operated. A deliberate reduction of beds during the pandemic cannot be assumed. The reduction in available beds can be explained by the various points mentioned above, among others, and is supported by other data collected. The decisive factor for the operability of a bed is the medical staff.”
Staff themselves being affected by COVID-19 and becoming unable to work is just one of them.
The others are changes in how much staff is allocated per patient (this was increased), hospitals being more precise in their reporting and only reporting beds that can actually be staffed, changes in the criteria for a bed to be actually countable and the high effort ICU therapy of COVID-19 patients requires.
Thanks for the clarification. (I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this spelled out before, considering how much ink has been spilled over this issue, but I digress.)
Staffing, mostly. There are a lot of "beds" still available, just nobody to tend to them.
But another thing that always gets scrambled in the newspapers is the "level" of ICU beds.
The ICU at my town's hospital (and it's not small) has patients that would lie in a normal station at a big university hospital.
ICU bed != ICU bed. In smaller hospitals, ICU means "post-op, needs surveillance" or "gets oxygen".
At a large hospital ICU means "ECMO" or similarly severe conditions.
So when you're reading that there are x thousand ICU beds still available in the country: most are not really up to the task when it comes to a severe covid case, and furthermore, an ICU bed at the other end of the country doesn't help you much.
Analog phone networks break down (you get no dialtone) if everyone in the service area picked up their handset and want to dial-out, they have much fewer lines than handsets, because they calculated what capacity they might need (how many calls would be ongoing at one time) and just have that many lines, plus maybe a safety margin.
I'm guessing it's the same with ICU beds... And now we have a situation where a high percentage of people have picked up their handsets...
Yes, but do you really think we should manage our health system like a windy cell phone network provider? By the way, the cell phone networks and internet connections in Germany are on the level of some 3rd world countries.
So true and not mentioned enough by the media. The fact that we lost more than 4000 ICU beds over last year (during the Corona pandemic!!) because of personnel shortage is mind-boggling.
Instead of rewarding those who worked these horrible jobs and maybe attract new workers with better conditions (e.g. more holidays), better pay or tax reduction, our politicians did campaigning and ignored the upcoming winter.
Now they blame it on the unvaccinated and want to force high-speed vaccinating as many people as possible. But it won't help now. And it won't work either because they also messed up the whole vaccine supply chain.
I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress.
I might be working from old info here but my understanding is that vaccination reduces the ICU burden. Assuming that's still good info, is it totally unreasonable to blame the unvaccinated for ICU overload?
No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease.
The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.
Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.
Vaccines reduce severe courses of the disease by about 90%. The number vary depending on what you look at exactly, and for elderly people boosters are really mandatory to keep the vaccine effective.
Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is very from from not working.
>Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.
What "narrative"? What are you even talking about?
No-one, including the person you responded to, has claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer duration.
You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.
True, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized at a higher rate and for a longer duration.
However, we are not talking about "the unvaccinated", rather about "a tiny unfortunate fraction of unvaccinated people". There are 4,690 covid patients in ICU beds and 25M unvaccinated people. Assuming all covid ICU patients are unvaccinated, the covid ICU incidence rate within the unvaccinated population is 0.02%.
For an analogy, we could reason that because the prison population skews 90/10 male/female, all males should either undergo a vasectomy, or pay a recurring 10k euro fine. I hope this is obviously unethical.
Your prison thing is widely weird and not sure at all how you relate those two.things.
Yes the point is to make sure that those ICU capacity which is very small and normally enough would and is struggling due to covid and vaccination helps.
Vaccine mandates enforced by heavy fines and/or prison are criminalizing being unvaccinated with the number of "boosters" the authorities deem necessary. Justified by group "crime" statistic differentials. We may argue that it is done in service of a good cause, but it is still criminalizing. Our weird reality.
From all the local reporting the overwhelming majority of people in Czech ICU are not vaccinated. A few examples - listing from a hard-case ICU in Ostrava for a week in November:
The last 5 patients are those that have been released from the unit in that week.
The first two were move to less severe case ICU. The last three died...
Singapore does a great job of testing and the vaccination rate is >95% for the eligible population. Despite that, they have introduced restrictions due to ICU overload.
Look at "Proportion (%) of cases ever critically ill in ICU or died, by age and vaccination status"
Looking at the high risk group of 80+ year old (43% of all ICU cases and/or deaths), the numbers are: unvaccinated (24%), partially vaccinated (16%) and fully vaccinated (3.2%).
They don't define partially vaccinated (typically 14 days after 2nd dose). So clearly the vaccine reduces the risk of ICU/death, but the "truly" unvaccinated make up only 50% of ICU cases in that age group.
Sure, but how many vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU, compared to unvaccinated? How many are dying?
Also consider that a population of 100, and 90 of those people are vaccinated. Uf 15 vaccinated people end up in the hospital, and 5 unvaccinated people also end up in the hospital, vaccination is still clearly better for you. But people will still say "75% of the people in the hospital were vaccinated; clearly the vaccines aren't working!" Yeah, well, out of vaccinated people, only 16% ended up hospitalized, while 50% of unvaccinated people ended up hospitalized. Those are the real numbers that matter. Percent of cohort hospitalized, not percent of total hospitalized.
Training an ICU nurse takes about 5 years. The only realistic option during the pandemic would be to encourage immigration of ICU nurses from poorer countries, but that just moves the problem elsewhere.
I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if there were fewer people making excuses for those who ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit across the Western world.
A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that come from those.
Then train 3 nurses in respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, and secondary complications separately. Put them under an experienced nurse, and incentivize them to add to their skills when they're not working.
Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.
Well, mistakes by ICU personnel can easily kill - and that's on top of a significant, often >50% death chance for covid ICU patients. Better make sure the people don't get as far as getting intensive care in the first place.
>Better make sure the people don't get as far as getting intensive care in the first place.
I couldn't agree more. The only intellectually honest response Germany (and other countries) should have is to mandate the obese (by far the highest cohort of worst COVID outcomes) to strict diet, exercise, etc.
Modifying the procedures and allowing people to work before they're through arbitrary redtape does. The EUA the vaccine received is the same concept. The reason the vaccine was developed faster wasn't just the number of scientists working on it, but the amount of funding directed towards it. Increasing money to education programs would increase the amount of people they can train, allow for further optimizations to be developed etc.
How long does it take the army to train a field medic? (Serious question, I don't know if there's some extended training involved, I just assume it's far less than, say, a nursing degree.)
I think that training people to handle 90% of the issues you see in Covid-related illnesses could be done relatively quickly, if we wanted to do that. The ICU bed shortage really refers to a ICU-staff shortage, and anything we could do to relieve that burden would be a good thing.
Vaccination does reduce the proportion of people that need ICU beds, but there are pretty rapid diminishing returns on just vaccinating more; countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination. Also, vaccinating younger lower-risk people doesn't help because they're at substantially lower risk of needing the ICU even unvaccinated than someone older or higher-risk who is vaccinated and because the vaccines aren't really useful to stop the spread of the disease either. Countries have generally had significantly higher vaccine acceptance amongst older people who need it more. (Though I think one of the big problems Germany has is their vaccine uptake amongst the elderly is somewhat low compared to other countries.)
> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination
Which countries? I find it hard to get data at vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically, but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated).
Well yeah, for 80+ with a vaccination rate of 92 %.
If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 % of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest seven day average puts that number at 27 %.
I was just giving a number consistent with the 80+ vaccination rate quoted.
For the broad population is 28% vaccinated vs 57% non-vaccinated. The remaining 15% is "unknown". But Switzerland has a relatively low vaccination rate at 67%.
Edit: looking at deaths instead of hospitalisations in the broad population:
Yes, those are the numbers for _hospitalizations_ in general, but the higher percentages I've been seeing (and for which I've been unsuccessful finding official documentation) are for _ICU_ patients specifically.
Right now in my province, unvaccinated individuals make up 11.2% of 12+ population but more than 66% of hospitalizations. I don't expect the ICU rates to be more favourable to the unvaccianted than total hospitalization rates. If there is a point of rapid diminishing returns, it is not at ~90% yet.
What do you mean? The immunity doesn't kick in the second the vaccine is injected into your arm. How else should they count vaccinated vs unvaccinated? (Also note that there is a category of partially vaccinated in the stats that is people who have only received the first dose of a two-dose vaccine).
These stats do not show the difference between taking a shot but still being infected within two weeks after it, and not taking any shots at all and being infected. If you're going to blame the second group for filling up ICUs, you cannot lump them together.
Protection from hospitalization and death, particularly in under-65 or so, does not wear off. Neutralizing antibody levels naturally wane and can allow infection, T-cell and B-cell populations don't (unless you get infected with measles or have some other conditions, and assuming you form a robust T-cell response to begin with and aren't immunocompromised or just quite old).
I think the vaccine is probably as effective as two doses of a laxative.
Any 75+ year olds that survived the two doses of the laxative, will now have better outcomes against covid.
Keep in mind the effectiveness is measured in tens/100,000. An there are some very sick people given the vaccine, that die before the 14 days of the second dose.
> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination.
Which countries are you talking about? It's certainly not the case for Germany, and I don't know any other European country for which this would be the case.
Right now, young people take the "booster shots" that should be given to the elderly, first. Politicians will be very proud that "XY percent of the population are already boostered". The dying will continue.
Which country is that ? Here in Czech Republic there is clear priority for 60+ years for the third doses. Also a big vaccination drive based on volunteers to vaccinate ideally up to a milion eligible people with the third dose till Christmas.
Here in Berlin for example, in the first week of september my 85 year old grandparents received a booster shot invite letter from the Berlin senate. It said something like starting 20th september you can get the 3rd shot from any doctor or you can go without an appointment to a vaccination centre across the city.
what did they do? nothing because case numbers were low, I did push and push to finally get my grandpa to get is 3rd shot mid november while go to the doctor for something else... by coincident the rush to get the booster started 1 day after that.
I bet this happened a lot....
As far as I know just like for the 1st shot sverybody above 70 got that same letter. Meaning they had more than 2 months head start to get the boostershot.
So at least in Berlin I wont have sympathy anymore for taking away the shot from somebody else (got my appointment in january)
I dropped in to a local clinic this week to get my booster (no appointment, even) and was given the shot in about 15 minutes. Most of the other people there waiting looked relatively young. Seems that we're doing a terrible job of reaching out to the elderly to get them their boosters. Or they just don't want it.
Yes, and this is another example of the really bad management skills of our government. If you announce the wrong KPIs (XY percent vaccination regardless of personal risks) you might be performing great according to them and still fail miserably on your actual goals.
You make a good point re vaccinating lower risk patients. In the UK, not only the population has a high vaccination rate, but the rate is particularly high among the population at risk (~95% for the >70yo [1]). As a result, hospital cases and deaths are a fraction of the Jan 2021 peak, even though infection levels are high.
It is not totally unreasonable but there is a component of blind blame to it. It will become a discussion after the pandemic and I don't think this will be too beneficial for our public health care system and health insurance.
With exponential spread, the actual number of ICU beds really doesn't matter, because whatever you've got will be overwhelmed across a similar timeframe anyway. The only way to actually fix the problem is to get the R-value below 1, which requires mass vaccinations.
The spectre of exponential spread is summoned way too often. Yes, an epidemic spreads exponentially when it starts, but also it's self limiting after a while. The 4th wave is wearing of already. Every wave so far has worn off in every country, with our without measures. As a recent example, compare Latvia and Estonia in the past few months. The former imposed strict measures, while the latter didn't, and yet the two curves match very closely.
Mankind has a tendency to not accept what it cannot control. Our politicians and virologists often said something along the lines: "we need to do X to keep control of the situation".
In the end we never were in control of the situation but people cannot accept that.
Most of the measures we took were nothing more than modern day rain dances. Feeble attempts by humans arrogant enough to think they could defeat or control a natural phenomenon that is well beyond ours to control.
Yep… “There’s nothing we can do” is just flatly unacceptable to the majority of the population. That’s when religion gets invented to create rituals to ward away evil.
San Francisco has had less than 1/3 as many deaths per capita as the US national average, and somewhere between a third and half of the deaths SF did have can be attributed to one terrible policy mistake – re-opening indoor bars and restaurants in fall 2020 – which immediately kicked off 2–3 months of fast exponential growth. If the rest of the USA had been even as fast acting and careful as SF, more than half a million dead Americans would still be alive.
And there are plenty of countries around the world which have done a much better job than SF of testing, contact tracing, vaccination, etc. We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.
* * *
“We haven’t tried anything and we’re all out of ideas” is easy to sell to grumpy people tired of a really shitty year or two, on the back of an unprecedented wave of anti-public-health propaganda, but it is an absolutely terrible pandemic response.
> San Francisco has had less than 1/3 as many deaths per capita as the US national average...
What do you believe this comparison means? I'm not sure its saying much of anything. Perhaps you could come up with another similar sized city, with same socioeconomic/population-type makeup, with same latitude and seasonality profile to compare against?
I'm not familiar with SF data sources on this, but I'm curious if you can provide a source for current IFR? My state here in southeast US's IFR is .012. That includes people who died in car accidents, of poisonings, of falls and other injurious actions while having tested positive for COV in last 28 days. My county is comprised of mostly older folks (median age 44), small at 186K people, and we haven't had a COV death registered in the last 11 months.
>We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.
Can you show some data sources for this? Everything I'm seeing is pointing to Sweden's last 2 flu seasons (encompassing COVID years) showing the same or lower all cause mortality than their previous 15-20 years. With 2018 being the major outlier not just in Sweden but all around the world, for which we still have no explanation.
San Francisco has done significantly better than any other city in the continental USA, despite being one of the most internationally connected, transit dependent, and densely populated. Honolulu is the only similarly successful large US city.
> IFR is .012
Do you mean CFR (case fatality rate)? IFR (infection fatality rate) is always only speculative, because we don’t ever have complete knowledge of the number of infections.
In total throughout the pandemic SF has had ~670 Covid deaths and ~54,000 confirmed Covid cases for a population of ~880,000.
For the same population, the USA average would be ~2090 deaths and ~110,000 confirmed cases. Except those are both dramatic underestimates of the relative numbers because SF has consistently had a much lower percentage of positive tests, and hasn’t had anywhere near the US gap between confirmed Covid deaths and total excess deaths.
0.012 would be too low to be a CFR. That roughly the right number for COVID IFR (maybe a bit too low), which can be calculated in ways that make it less speculative e.g. sero-surveys. Even so CFR is also speculative because so many cases aren't reported: that's the reason IFR exists as a separate concept.
In science you're really meant to use all the data because the problem with this sort of cherry-picking is that it can go both ways. Florida removed all its restrictions and was predicted to become a bloodbath just like they predicted that for Sweden. It didn't happen, results appear to have been unaffected by the changes. Studies that look at all the data find no correlations between lockdowns and COVID mortality (but lots of correlations with other bad problems).
This is the correct take. At this point, since we've already vaccinated the only control groups we had in the trials, we no longer can draw valuable conclusions. The only statistic that we should now rely on, in order to account for all positives and negatives from government's COVID response (vaccinations, lockdowns, hysterics and tantrums) is year-over-year (preferably flu season) all cause mortality, in a specific location, for a specific population.
0.012 is the San Francisco CFR. 0.016 is the USA CFR, if we go by confirmed cases/deaths as reported by the New York Times.
The IFR should be substantially lower than either of these; many deaths go uncounted, but a far larger proportion of infections never get a confirmed positive test. I would guess IFR to be in the 0.004–0.008 range. (Which is still scary high!) I’m sure if you do a search of the academic literature you can find more careful analysis and better informed estimates. It obviously varies from place to place and is substantially dependent on demographics and availability of medical care.
* * *
Florida was a bloodbath! It has had among the worst outcomes anywhere in the USA since mid 2021. Tens of thousands of avoidable deaths after the universal free availability of extremely effective vaccines and better understanding of viral transmission. The state government not only stopped any state-level public health action, it actively prevented state/local public health departments and local governments from acting. It is hard to imagine a more complete failure of state leadership.
Florida has had something like 4x more Covid deaths than San Francisco, per capita. And if we only look at deaths after widespread vaccine availability, Florida has had >10x more.
Of course, the virus eventually burned through a large majority of the unvaccinated population, and without enough remaining hosts to infect, flamed out. Fingers crossed that future virus variants don’t have enough immune escape to burn back through the state again.
>Florida was a bloodbath! It has had among the worst outcomes anywhere in the USA since mid 2021.
Yet, despite being significantly "older" than CA, it did significantly better than CA in 2020 with regards to all-cause-mortality. 2021, seems to be a different story at this point and I'm very curious as to the 10% difference between years (certainly seems to imply the virus has not burned through the population, assuming the virus had anything to do with mortality).
You're right. I dropped a zero by mistake, I was seeing 0.0012 (0.12%) but that's not what was being written.
The usual credible figures I see for IFR are between 0.1% and 0.3% - higher figures tend to be using bad methodologies like including estimates from the very first days of the pandemic when people were trying to estimate IFRs using random Chinese media reports, etc. If you restrict yourself to more rigorous methodologies and sample sizes, IFR falls a lot.
As for Florida being a "bloodbath", lol. That word doesn't mean what you think it means. Nowhere has been a bloodbath, and if there's one thing that's been consistently true about Covid data it's that you can make anywhere seem worse or better than anywhere else by choosing what to compare against. Use all the data and Florida seems pretty good, especially as Europe is busy proving that vaccines appear to have accomplished nothing at all in terms of total numbers, despite the many claims of efficacy.
I do mean IFR. I hope you understand that the CFR numbers you're quoting, are also speculative estimates. :-) Almost certainly the number of infections is vastly undercounted as recognized by CDC's footnotes on their Data Tracker. As of middle of last year, the CDC estimates that 45-55% of all Americans had been infected with COVID.
> CDC estimates that 45-55% of all Americans had been infected with COVID.
If we take 330 million people as an estimated US population, an IFR of 0.012 and 0.44 of everyone infected (CDC estimate from 1 October), that would be 1.74 million deaths. But the number of Covid deaths in the USA is probably only around 1 million (CDC estimate is 920 thousand as of 1 October), putting the US IFR at ~0.006. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I’d estimate a US IFR somewhere in the 0.004–0.008 range. We missed counting a significant number of Covid deaths, but we didn’t miss 60% of them. (In US counties with the highest proportion of elderly people, the IFR might locally be closer to 0.012.) But that is still a very high IFR!
Covid is a scary, scary disease. Deadly, highly contagious even before symptoms, and indistinguishable from common respiratory diseases during the part of the infection when most spread happens. Fortunately we have extremely effective vaccines (if only we can convince everyone to take them), and spread takes place almost always between unmasked people indoors making it relatively inexpensive to dramatically reduce the reproductive rate of the virus by avoiding indoor spaces and wearing masks when they are inevitable.
“Covid is a scary, scary disease. Deadly, highly contagious even before symptoms…”
Getting really tired of hearing this. To a HEALTHY human, it’s like a bad cold. Me and my family have had it in the last month and confirmed with tests so I know what we had. It’s gone through a bunch of friends too and the worst they experienced was feeling miserable in bed for a couple of days.
I have no doubt that for some it IS scary, but let’s not chuck around emotive language that isn’t an accurate description in the majority of cases.
What you may be missing is just how high of a percentage of the population of most western countries are not classed as healthy by any metric. Overweight, unfit, damaged through nicotine or alcohol abuse or even simple naturally occurring diseases where our health systems are able to keep them alive but not make them healthy again.
Is unknowingly transmitting a disease that could kill someone you love (or even that you don't) without your knowledge not scary to you? Great, you have a healthy family and friends. What happens when one of those friends or family members isn't as healthy as they were the last time they caught covid? Still seems pretty scary to me.
Thats just wrong. There are more than enough healthy humans for which it is much more than just a bad cold, which end up in the ICU eventually.
To my understanding it is not possible to know upfront who is such a human and who is not, even perfectly healthy people have bad outcomes.
And yes, I am aware its just a small percentage of people in certain age groups.
> In US counties with the highest proportion of elderly people, the IFR might locally be closer to 0.012.)
Yes, I do live in one of these older counties and specifically in my region of the county. Obviously words such as 'scary' are useless and subjective. Anti-biotic-resistant strep nearly killed me 3 years back, so to me, that was a scary disease. The COVID I had was milder than my yearly flu, and this is effect on the overwhelming majority of the population even considering the obesity rate in the US. Scary is not the word I would use.
> But that is still a very high IFR!
I mean, perspective is everything. What are you comparing this IFR to? I consider this a very low IFR, especially when you realize what we in the US classify a "COVID death". We do not count deaths of any other diseases using the same methodology as we have with COVID as far as I'm aware, and I believe this is the primary reason for our inflated mortality vs. most of the rest of the world.
I think it's wrong to describe this as saving people's lives. You have only reduced one particular kind of risk for a short period of time, while other similar risks continue to arise and affect the same people.
Estonia re-imposed strict measures as well because the ICU was becoming overwhelmed. This means mandatory masks everywhere, no public activities without proof of vaccination (restaurants, gyms etc) and limits on opening hours and strong police enforcement of these rules.
The wave started leveling off about 2 weeks after and the rules are still in force.
not true - infection rate grows sigmoidal and not exponential. that's why at the moment you can observe a stabilization despite few changes in regulation as of now compared to the summer. infection spread saturates periodically after suceptible clusters are depleted.
what would make sense is a steady and controlled Durchseuchung with specific protection of vulnerable people (like old and sick) - b/c the best immunity is gained by infection.
but Durchseuchung never sounded good - that's why that term got so popular. it sounds ugly and brutal. but it's what was happening all the time with many diseases in the past thousands of years.
That's a bit misleading. As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential. That follows directly from how the R-value is defined. What you mean is that the curve will take a sigmoidal shape for a while once the number of immune people has reached a certain threshold. In that case, the R-value is slowly approaching 1 again, and finally will go below 1 (which finally results in a curve that is not sigmoidal, of course). Other measures like lockdowns do the same to the curve, as is easy to observe by overlaying the measures over the curve, just not with an initial increase of cases that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Estimated Infection Fatality Rates during the first Covid wave - where there was full hospital care available - ranged from 0.5% to 2%. So for Germany's 80M people that would be in the ballpark of 400,000 to 1.6M deaths - under medical care. Even if you take the original estimates of around 0.3% the results wouldn't have been flattering.
In a nutshell, the German government and every other country on earth is doing what you propose, except that they are vaccinating at the same time and try to keep the curves flat (but your use of "slow" also suggests this, so it's not clear what else you're suggesting).
Exponential implies a doubling of R value. Starting with an R value of 1.1 the length of time required for doubling of the infected population is longer than other factors which will lower the R value to under 1.
That’s one possibility, but there’s no reason it has to converge to 1 (i.e. linear). R(t) = 100/t is also not exponential.
Of course, the epidemic curve described by that function would indeed bounded below by an exponential function on part of its range, but the same is true of any function with positive derivative, and calling for example f(x) = x^2 exponential for that reason makes the term meaningless.
This is presumably what the OP meant by “as long as R>1, the curve is exponential”. But this is literally equivalent to saying “as long as f’(x) > 0, f is exponential” which is just not a useful concept.
You're nitpicking out of context, I didn't give a definition of an exponential function, I was talking about the spreading of the Covid 19 disease. For example, the R0 value of SARS-CoV-2 was estimated 5.8 in the US and "...between 3.6 and 6.1 in the eight European countries"[1] Obviously, it depends on many factors like population density and contacts of persons/day, but generally the disease will start spreading exponentially with R_t values approaching this number or staying constant.
The initial spreading will be exponential in the beginning - as every actual curve illustrates - if the disease is left unchecked as OP suggested, until R_t values go down again due to immunity. That's all I meant to say.
Can you explain the difference between a function being "exponential in the beginning" and "having first derivative bounded away from zero at the beginning" ?
exponential in the beginning == this part of the function can be approximated by a function ae^xb where a>0 and b>1
vs.
first derivative bounded away from zero in the beginning == any function that increases, including linear functions with constant first derivative and polynomials with linear first derivative
Or do you think all increasing functions are the same..?
Consider for example the functions f(x) = x + 1 and g(x) = e^{ln(2) * x}. Then f(0) = g(0), f(1) = g(1), and f(x) > g(x) whenever 0 < x < 1.
It is easy to show that for any function whose derivative is continuous and positive at 0, there is an exponential function (properly translated such that they agree at 0) that has similar properties.
You should be specific about what properties you're talking about. What you're saying is that any function increasing function grows faster than some exponential function on a finite interval.
Still, you can observe f(x) on x ∈ [0, 1] and see that it is growing linearly.
And you can observe g(x) on ∈ [0, 1] and see that it is growing exponentially.
I do not see the value in discussing the rate of exponential growth of f. Where as for g, there is a parameter with value ln(2).
If data looks like f, don't try to fit an exponential function to it (whether it's a least-squares fit, or any other objective f > g.
That doesn't help if you die of the infection first, and COVID is extremely lethal among the demographics that most need the direct benefits of immunity.
Here you can find linked three studies by the CDC that support the idea that natural immunity is harder to get and less effective (besides, as others have said, there's the non trivial chance of side effects or not even surviving the virus)
I don't care about what the "experts" think or say, I care about studies.
Update: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 reports many studies that claim that we should be vaccinating people after a natural infection to get "super immunity", but that is different from what the OP was claiming (natural immunity > vaccine immunity)
Even if it was, it still means risking death or permanent organ damage + good chance of passing the infection to others. Not the best value proposition & definitely not webscale.
I think it could be technically accurate, if you include that vaccination before getting infected gives better immunity than most other options. (It is almost like a booster shot, but worse in almost every possibly way)
Also probably true without the vaccine first, but the initial survival rate without vaccination is a lot lower.
> This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
People who claim that "people don't understand exponential growth" don't understand it themselves, most of the time.
They're so proud that they can answer the question about what happens to the pond that is half-covered by sea lilies the next day but never think about what happens the day after that.
tldr: There is no persistent exponential growth in nature.
The mRNA technology would let us inject omicron-specific boosters tomorrow, but then there is a lot of other safety hurdles that have to be met before it gets authorized and then distribution hurdles to convince people to take it…
Mathematically, we will get to R=1 this way, some day or another, with some percentage of people getting it via illness and some via vaccination. The choice is still ours on how and when.
At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations. Although there is still skepticism regarding duration of the protection.
> At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations.
So you say that at some stage there will be vaccines for COVID-19 that are not nMRA (Pfizer, Moderna) or Viral vector (AstraZeneca)
Why? The people who are happy with vaccines are fairly happy with these vaccines and might refine them, but not about to dump them entirely for a different technique. in fact mRNA vaccines are the new hot thing.
And the people who really aren't happy with these vaccines, will never be happy. They'll find a way to object.
So what's the incentive for such a classical vaccine? Who's going to root for it?
And those will likely also not be "classical vaccines".
Moderna and Pfizer (1) and AstraZeneca (2) are getting ready for the next round, still using their current technologies. They're not planning on going back to "classical vaccines" for COVID-19.
Are you saying that we shouldn't vaccinate, because strict lockdowns worked, against the COVID-19 original strain, for a while?
It's technically true that this worked then, but 2020 is gone, not to return. a) new COVID strains were inevitable and b) prolonged strict lockdowns unpalatable and c) mass vaccination has a huge benefit. As part of a multi-pronged strategy, of course. Depending on only one measure, be it lockdown or vaccination, is not going to work.
I can't believe people still think after 2 years we're at a point technologically and logistically that we can control nature and just make this "go away".
Delta came out of India. Omicron came out of South Africa. How do mandates in the West stop variants elsewhere?
And variants aside, the vaccinated are still getting sick and dying at significant rates [1]. This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised. Until some miracle cure comes along, R < 1 is simply not possible.
If you think full vaccination is a necessary goal despite all this, OK fine. You know what might go a long way in terms of achieving mass vaccination? Open sourcing the vaccine recipe. Not just the RNA sequence. The whole recipe.
This should be a no-brainer.
Governments have no qualms with mandating lockdowns, masks, and vaccines for the masses.. but for some reason they hit the brakes when it comes to mandates for pharma. Not only is this a good idea in terms of improving supply side logistics, but also for the sake of re-building trust.
But no, common sense is too hard and "blame and shame" is too easy.
Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.
Hospital collapse has been liminal for 2 years now, it's a manufactured crisis. Instead of bolstering our healthcare staff and paying our front line workers more, we have done.. the exact opposite. We funnel tons of money to pharma, while frontline workers have effectively had their pay cut in half.
We're quite literally being force fed lies. But I guess that doesn't matter because at the end of the day the Milgram experiment prevails and all these attempts to question the narrative and hold authority accountable is pointless.
> Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.
This is, on average over large numbers, not correct. Higher rates of disease spread harms everyone, the vaccinated included.
> This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised.
Which expert promised you that?
> it's a manufactured crisis ... We're quite literally being force fed lies ... Milgram experiment ... question the narrative
Cranks write like this. That is a shame as some of your other points are very correct, particularly around the need for Intellectual property waiver, which some have been calling for for some time, to no avail (1). BTW, they don't generally call it "open sourcing" in that field.
Hospitals genuinely are in crisis and doing difficult triaging, anyone working in them can tell you that.
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
> Cranks write like this.
Apologies I'm new to being a social pariah, being under pseudo house arrest, and psychosis in general.
I don't want hospitals to collapse. I'm afraid if we give up this freedom now, we'll never get it back. I'm afraid of the unknown and putting my life in the hands of people (our dear leaders) that really have never cared about my health before.
Even now its not about care for my own health, but for "the greater good".
I can only speak about where I am (UK) but the health care crisis is a complex topic, but there's no mystery at all to why it came about: decades of under-investment are 100% predictable given the party that has been power for a while now. It's what they always do. People should not be surprised that their votes have this obvious consequence.
But there's no easy fix to help us now, because it takes a long time to train doctors, nurses and other staff, or actually build hospitals. Yes, the crisis is entirely predictable but also entirely real. It is possible, even likely for a "liminal" crisis to persist at that level, as the safety valve that keeps it there is that patients without sufficient care just die off. These are the "excess deaths". Yes, I am appalled.
This is BTW one way how "Being unvaccinated could harm the vaccinated": If I (very much vaccinated) need urgent treatment for any reason, and can't get it because all the beds are full of unvaccinated COVID patients, then I am harmed thereby.
If your main concern right now is the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic then you have been misdirected, and should reconsider your media diet away from conspiracy-mongers.
Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others. This pandemic is making it clear to those who can see, that stubborn selfish refusal, and paranoid anti-mask and anti-vax "freedom" rhetoric harms not just yourself, but also those around you. Rugged individualism is a complete bust in this context. Collective action is what works.
Sure, this is a general problem with finite limited resources that are collectively owned. The more you have, the less I get. When demand exceeds the supply, harm is unavoidable. And yes we should do what we can to drive down the demand, but I don't see what that has to do with forcing restrictions on people that are not at risk?
This deadly pandemic is not deadly for everyone.
People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population but 93% of covid deaths. I imagine this number is roughly proportional for hospitalizations by the same age groups. We can do some handwavy math and say if everyone under 50 was unvaccinated, they would only ever take up 7% of ICU beds.
Is 7% the difference between collapse or not? "One size fits all" doesn't make sense.
Further, I'm so confident I will never get sick and be hospitalized with covid that I'm happy to forgo my right to an ICU bed. Thus I'm decoupled from the dilemma. Or at least in an ideal world I would be able to make that choice. This was my assessment the first time I got covid, and now I likely have some level of immunity, so I'm even more confident now.
And as far as your hospital scenarios go, my point is we haven't seen the things you describe materialize. I'm sure there are a handful of cases, which is a tragedy, but if it's marginal then we shouldn't hold it up as a liminal crisis like we have been.
> Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others.
Tell me the magic number for risk tolerance. If everyone self-quarantined from driving, and we switched to a delivery only economy, we could drastically reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities. Do we not owe that to the greater good? What about for climate change? We should continue living like we did in 2020 forever.
> Collective action is what works.
It always works when your leaders are competent and have your best interests in mind. My country doesn't even recognize natural immunity, which I envy the UK for.
But free choice works too. Look at Florida, Sweden, people will still choose the vaccine. You don't need a mandate.
> If your main concern right now is the "freedom" ...
I can't believe the "vaccinated" are completely unconcerned by the trends regarding freedom right now.
You know its not an either/or situation, you can be concerned about both, right?
Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt. But immunity wanes, and variants will continue to emerge.
Governments never relinquish their emergency powers once they're enacted. This is just the latest "WMDs in Iraq". I can't speak for the UK, but in the US we still have the patriot act, and we just recently pulled out of Afghanistan.
20 years later we still live under the boogeyman of terrorism. Imagine if all the money we put into the war on terror went into better healthcare and other social goods?
All of this is to say, I don't have absolute trust in the vaccine or the plan or the people in charge, I don't trust them to make good decision nor to be honest.
If you want me to be onboard with "the plan", governments need to tell me
- What's in the vaccine.
- Exactly when they'll declare this over.
- That they'll undo all of their emergency powers afterwards.
Otherwise, just like the war on terror, this will never be over no matter how much we comply.
There are so many questionable things in this rambling waffle that it's hard to know where to start.
The idea that most people "not at risk" is wrong.
The idea that collective action is all about trusting government is wrong, it's primarily abut supporting the other people in your community. it's a very USA'ian line of thinking to jump to "Imma screw over my fellow citizens because the government can't be trusted. Freedom!".
The idea that Florida and Sweden are good examples is wrong.
And as above, the idea that the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic is wrong. Do not confuse the one crisis (of democratic ideas) with the other (of infectious molecules) or your responses will not be appropriate. They operate at completely different levels of abstraction.
The idea that "we haven't seen the hospital scenarios you describe materialize" is, in my local area, wrong.
> Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt
I have no idea of the point you're trying to make, and please to make no assumptions at all about me.
I googled "Howard Springs" but I have no idea what crazy talking point I am supposed to be nodding along with now.
> governments need to tell me - Exactly when they'll declare this over
You can't vote on the virus's timeline. The only politicians who have tried to declare "it's over" are charlatans.
> governments need to tell me - What's in the vaccine.
Do I need to go into the reasons why this is paranoid delusional, confused idiocy? Governments don't design or manufacture the vaccines. Without a bio-medical background that you and I both lack it's just not comprehensible. And lastly, can you not google the layman's explainers and research papers? I understand why you didn't post this line alone in a comment - it would be flagged and deleted.
All in all, I feel like someone at a party who has engaged a stranger in conversation, and now regrets it, as they speak a lot but say absolutely nothing worth hearing.
Most people are "not at risk" in a sense that their risk is clearly much less than for others. There is no zero risk of anything, so we should not aim for that.
It would help if you explained what is wrong.
As it looks now, you just don't like what the stranger said and declare him not worth listening.
To me it is clear that vaccine passports is clearly not working and all this has become a big failure for politicians who don't know how to exit this failed strategy therefore double down on their plans.
Why doesn't the same argument apply to other corono-viruses like influenza and the common cold? And why ignore the role of asymptomatic people (who can transmit) and those with symptoms so mild they can't be distinguished from the normal ups and downs of bodily functions. How then can one be 'smart'? These diseases wouldn't be and won't be gone. We are going to have to live with them as we've lived and thrived with untold thousands of viruses throughout our evolutionary journey.
There is also a small subset of the population who doesn't build an immunity to the disease. A friend's mom caught Covid last December before a vaccine existed. Her body isn't creating antibodies so -- as of the last time I texted that friend -- she's had it for at least 8 months. She was an incredibly friendly and social woman who has basically been turned into a Typhoid Mary that does experience Covid symptoms (and has intensely self-quarantined).
I don't know how many other people this has happened to but I too have my doubts as to whether there was ever any hope of containing this.
If taken literally, how is that supposed to work? People working for the emergency service still need to work, and they certainly can't work from home. Same for most of the medical sector, nursing services etc. and of course the various bits of infrastructure. Some industries cannot be easily shut down (you cannot stop or start a steel works on a whim). Most people involved in food production, too. Maybe you can blame people for not keeping at least two weeks of provisions (although blaming them won't change anything), but expecting them to go six weeks without buying any food or other provisions is certainly unrealistic. Things break, and not all of them can be left for up to six weeks to be fixed. (If your fridge breaks, or the heating breaks or your roof springs a leak, that cannot really wait. Same if things break in any of the critical industries and services that cannot be shutdown and need to keep working). All this residual activity still needs some amount of transportation and all the infrastructure that that entails. Etc.,etc. …
But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes that acceptable for many.
With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex, you would want to quit.
It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News style lies.
You can't have people who are not vaccinated working at a hospital. This has been known for years and has been practiced for years. Vaccinations prevent the spread of disease. Surely you aren't questioning this.
Before the vaccine (less than a year ago) they prevented the spread by using n95 masks and ppe.
Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Knowing that the point of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness in the person receiving it. I struggle to understand why you would not even question how important they are in that setting unless you are worried they have dropped that extra safety component.
>Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid.
Vaccines reduce the risk of spreading the virus. People who are vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. This absolutely doesn't mean you won't die if you are vaccinated. Think seat belts in car accidents. It is all about reducing risk. On mass, at population levels, this means ICU have capacity to take in other seriously ill people. If ICUs are full and there is a plane crash or whatever where many people are seriously injured we are screwed.
People who get vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. Seriously ill people withdraw from society. Those with mild illness continue to go out into society and increasing the spread.
You could make the point that increasing the spread when everyone is protected is fine but that allows for increased mutations.
No, they really didn't. Healthcare workers got COVID in large numbers, causing severe absenteeism, a number of deaths, and many with ongoing Long Covid conditions.
It's part of the reason that bed capacity has been so difficult to keep constant or increase.
If the problem in Germany is anything like in Sweden, then the issue is not that "people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die". It is 100% a lack of funding and poor management.
In the last 20 years the standard "joke" (ha ha, only true) about the universal health system is that you need to be in good health in order to have enough energy to fight for your right to get help. The health care debt was an all time high at the start of the pandemic, and has since sky rocketed.
The faults are many. Poor wages has create many empty seats at the university programs. A lack of available personal has created a demand for labour hire employees, creating a system where many are moving to those in order to get pay rises, furthering increasing the cut that the middle men takes. An sharp increase in populations has increased demand, without any corresponding supply or funding. Employees has had an increase in paper work, with technology solutions that has caused additional work rather than optimized the work flow. Those same technology solutions has also been expensive to the point of corruptions, with some deals being actually corruptions that gone to court.
The situation is so bad that my own health clinic is sending every patient that calls them on non-mondays to the emergency department, as they are by law required to redirect the patient somewhere and all their own doctors are booked for the rest of the week, a pattern that been going on every week for the last year. Vacations has been removed as an emergency decision at many hospitals, and in one case the "compensation" for lost summer vacation was a fruit basket.
The expected time frame to raise the standard and actually train enough workers, as calculated by researchers a few years ago, was (if I remember right) somewhere around 10-20 years into the future. One pre-panedmic solution was to encourage skilled immigration directly from hospitals of nearby countries, a fix that obviously is not going to work now. If Germany is anywhere similar, then the blame isn't disinformation. It is systemic problem that has existed for decades and is now being pushed to over the edge.
I'm in a Berlin medtech company closely related to GPs and have multiple other connections to area hospitals. From this perspective I would say everything you've said is entirely accurate for at least this part of Germany, if not the whole country.
It's really a shockingly well kept secret, especially to the outside world. Much like the utterly dysfunctional rail system.
Before the pandemic, I would have said that the country's healthcare system was about a decade away from resource-crisis. Now, it may have already started. I'm terrified of ending up in a hospital, even if there's no covid-wave ongoing. I do not want my life in the hands of the overworked traumatized remnants.
The way this country treats healthcare workers is shameful.
It's quite interesting that the main tabloid here in Czech Republic is doing very solid covid reporting - still kinda in the personal stories people can relate tabloids do - just this time telling stories of people severely ill with covid, mostly unvaccinated or interviews with medical personnel about what their hell looks like. Frankly I did not expect that from them and I'm sincerely hoping it helps at least someone to stop believing in bullshit.
This is seeking someone to blame honestly, those "Querdenker" didn't influence anything else but themselves. The truth is we always had a form of triage in emergency admission rooms even before the pandemic.
Media and politics are way more responsible than the craziest idiot.
This is nonsense. The topic has been in the news almost from the beginning of the crisis. The government is being constantly criticised for that. Why do you people repeat this? It's a lie.
The fact that this topic is now being used by anti-vaxxers to cloud their anti-social behaviour and shift the growing anger of the vaccinated population away from them is ridiculous.
There are two issues here and stacking hospital beds and personal would not make anti-vaxxers better in any way.
Not locked up. My wife, and most of our friends are either RNs, MDs, PAs, etc.
We've had COVID. Now my wife is dealing directly with people who are dealing with adverse reactions to the vaccines they took (many of them nurses and doctors themselves experiencing neurological symptoms continuing for months and months at a time, and not allowed to speak about it for fear of losing their licensure).
I only ask because it seems unreasonable to me to fear a virus that only meaningfully impacts .3% to .5% of your population. So, why not answer? Why are you afraid of the unvaccinated?
This is utter conspiracy bullshit. Neither would anyone lose their license about reporting side effects nor are those in any way so prevalent that your wife would be dealing with multiple amounts of them nor are they in any way close to as severe as the effects of COVID and long COVID.
You're lying and the fact that you seriously think any sane person would believe this is both hilarious and sad as it's a very beautiful example of this covidioten movement we have to deal with.
Wow. I don't know what to say. You are delusional and have seemingly mainlined the kool-aid. You should speak directly to any close friends or friends of friends that work in the medical field. My wife's service dealt with 250K COVID cases in 2020 through early 2021. Beginning in March of this year, they started dealing with hundreds of likely vaccine-adverse-effect patients per week (many WORK for her company)! I don't know what Germany's adverse effect system is, but I suggest you check it out and compare for any irregularities. In the US the system is called VAERS, and yes, COVID vaccine reports (from patients) have set records not before seen, while setting record-lows for reports from medical practitioners.
>...nor are they in any way close to as severe as the effects of COVID...
Hmmm. I've had COVID as have many of my friends and co-workers. I would say that a mild fever and runny nose from COVID, doesn't come close to potential heart attack, blood clotting, losing vision, partial or full paralysis, etc. Don't get me wrong, if you're a relatively healthy person who's health and immune system is in highly functional order, your risk from both COVID and vaccine effects is probably the same...but then, if you're a healthy person, why would you be so afraid of such a benign virus, that you feel the need to get a fairly ineffectual vaccine?
You also broke the site guidelines egregiously. We ban accounts that do this sort of flamewar on HN, especially when it's the tit-for-tat nasty sort of flamewar like this.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and that's also a line where we ban accounts. Please review the rules and stick to them from now on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Fair enough. How do you/HN define "ideological battle" so I can have some frame of reference? I'm largely reporting on things I'm either seeing, experiencing, or that friends and family are seeing or experiencing. Often, it is in response to some ridiculous (in my opinion) mass-hysteria from other posters. I feel it's imperative to show experiences other than the 'common' one. I'm also curious why you would be willing to provide ammunition in these so-called "ideological battles" by banning accounts? By all means, this is your house, so your rules...ban if you must.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously in this thread and crossed well over the line where we would ban an account. Not only that but you have a long history of doing this.
Not only that but it looks like we've had to ban you in the past. All this is seriously not cool, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
I'm not going to ban you right now because it doesn't look like you've been doing it recently, but please review the rules and stick to them from now on, because if you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to.
This is sadly very typical behavior at this point. You don't have to fear unvaccinated people, the protection you get is from the vaccine alone. What you might want to fear is a triage for which healthcare funding is solely responsible. Perhaps unvaccinated take up more beds, I am not really sure we can trust the data though because there will be insane political pressure to keep that on the message.
I hope blaming people not at all involved in current miseries becomes a popular sport again.
Not getting vaccinated is not antisocial, assuming that those people take care otherwise.
The only people which exhibit antisocial behavior are those that don’t care about protecting themselves and others from infection. Wearing a mask, avoiding meeting others and getting tested is just as valid as getting a vaccine. Perhaps more, because those that do get vaccinated (at least among my acquaintances) seem to wrongly assume that the vaccine is enough and don’t take any other measures except what they must (masks). So they’re meeting in groups, going to restaurants without getting tested, etc.
> Not getting vaccinated is not antisocial, assuming that those people take care otherwise.
Take care like what? Be locked up for years and not meeting anyone? Because everything else is much more risky than just taking the damn jab and stfu about it.
Also: those people who still are unvaccinated are mostly conspiracy nutjobs and don't give a damn about the rest of the population around them so it's quite obvious they wouldn't give a damn about "taking care".
For someone that's unvaccinated, on the young side that works from home and doesn't (actually can't) go to bars/restaurants/etc the risk is already low. They can only get infected outside or while meeting friends.
How do you know they're nutjobs? Everyone I know that's unvaccinated are normal people. This is just what the media and politicians are saying without providing any proof.
I'm sure what you are saying is true but it doesn't really address the problem at hand. The bird has flown the coup and now action needs to be taken to save lives.
Absolutely agree with you about hospital/medical resourcing though, we have the same situation in Australia. In the name of efficiency these services get paired to the bone, and we have no capacity to respond to unusual events.
The Neo liberal worldview posits that redundancy is bad. I think Western countries in general are suffering from this Anorexia. It cripples innovation as well.
Something like 50% of the people in intensive care for COVID still die.
Even if we were able to handle the load on the healthcare system, that still would be a very large amount of unnecessary suffering and death. And even though there are some fundamental issues with working conditions and pay in this area, fixing them would not be enough to be able to handle the load that an exponentially growing viral disease could cause if it remains unchecked. If you do not stop the exponential spread, even with twice the capacity you'd only gain another 1-2 weeks until you're at capacity anyway.
The vaccines work well and are safe. The problem is that too many people didn't take them. There's plenty of problems with how this was organized in Germany, but in the we simply didn't manage to convince enough people to get vaccinated.
The problem isn’t simple and certainly not a matter of just vaccinating. A big part of the problem is that govt was confident that two jabs in the summer would be sufficient because of two faulty assumptions: that immunity would last and that fully vaccinated people would not spread covid.
The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread, were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about reducing susceptibility, not infectivity. I don't think there were any numbers available on the vaccine's effect on virus transmissibility. It was implicitly assumed that fewer symptoms would translate to fewer transmissions, but was this ever proven?
Point being, we didn't know what vaccination rate would reduce the R-value below 1, and FAFAIK we still don't know. Not even for the original Sars-cov-2 virus, and not for any of the variants.
> Cases of Covid-19 were less common among household members of vaccinated health care workers during the period beginning 14 days after the first dose than during the unvaccinated period before the first dose (event rate per 100 person-years, 9.40 before the first dose and 5.93 beginning 14 days after the first dose). After the health care worker’s second dose, the rate in household members was lower still (2.98 cases per 100 person-years). These differences persisted after fitting extended Cox models that were adjusted for calendar time, geographic region, age, sex, occupational and socioeconomic factors, and underlying conditions. Relative to the period before each health care worker was vaccinated, the hazard ratio for a household member to become infected was 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.63 to 0.78) for the period beginning 14 days after the first dose and 0.46 (95% CI, 0.30 to 0.70) for the period beginning 14 days after the second dose. ... Not all the cases of Covid-19 in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker; therefore, the effect of vaccination may be larger.1 For example, if half the cases in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker, a 60% decrease in cases transmitted from health care workers would need to occur to elicit the association we observed (see the Supplementary Appendix). Vaccination was associated with a reduction in both the number of cases and the number of Covid-19–related hospitalizations in health care workers between the unvaccinated period and the period beginning 14 days after the first dose.
Given that vaccination reduces asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2,2,3 it is plausible that vaccination reduces transmission; however, data from clinical trials and observational studies are lacking.
The psychology of the vaxxed asymptomatic COVID carrier cannot be left out of the equation. Whether this psychology leads one to engage in risky disease-spreading behaviour, this is for the experts to elucidate.
Do you have a source for that? This is the first time Ive heard someone call it a hoax that was an antivaxxer. Most antivaxxers are hesitant due to the speed at which the vaccines were made, the new technology used to make them, and the fact that the companies making them can’t get sued if they kill people.
There are those type too, yes, but there are also people who think Covid is a hoax, or at least that its danger has been drastically exaggerated. There tends to be a lot of overlap between beliefs here.
So no source. Interestingly if you look up the list of global epidemics however COVID is #6 of 20, and if you sort by total global population list, COVID is #11. So it seems we have actually had worse pandemics. Maybe you’re seeing people reading the actual stats?
I was under the same impression that vaccine would not reduce the spread or carrying of the virus. It would just greatly reduce the change you landing on the IC.
If your focus is on R value for transmission, then you will also need to eradicate it from every single cat and deer on the planet. Good luck with that.
Also, the government knowingly ignored warnings by the RKI (german institute for public health) saying that numbers and hospital admissions will go up rapidly in autumn.
The argument always is that there are not enough beds for non-corona patients. More beds would certainly help.
It is nonsense to vaccinate young and very healthy people, especially kids. Their risk from COVID is minimal to non-existent.
Also the spread is not stopped by vaccinating. Vaccinated still spread the virus. If it is reduced is still unclear. There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated. The sample sizes of vaccinated and unvaccinated were equal as they should be. Reports in Germany about these numbers forget to mention that vaccinated people are basically not tested.
> The vaccines work well and are safe.
They do not work well enough. First of all people still transmit the virus after only about 2 months after the vaccination. Then the protection goes down extremely between 2-6 months after the vaccination (that is why we need boosters all the time). It is still unclear if we continue to need boosters after the third shot.
While vaccinated people who get infected still spread the virus, they’re less likely to get infected in the first place, which is a necessary precursor to spreading.
Not necessarily true with the new variants, and it won’t be true for future variants either. The virus jumped to wild animals so it’s freely mutating in unvaccinated hosts outside of the human population.
>...fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.
Vaccinated people don’t transmit as much, nor are they as likely to contract the virus. Current estimates are 85-90% of transmission in Germany involves someone unvaccinated
There are many relevant parameters that the vaccines might affect. And the vaccinated people have a few parameters: number of shots, time since last shot, age, etc. People seem to focus on one or two of these questions at a time.
From your link, actually, related to duration:
"Fully vaccinated individuals with delta variant infection had a faster (posterior probability >0·84) mean rate of viral load decline (0·95 log10 copies per mL per day) than did unvaccinated individuals with pre-alpha (0·69), alpha (0·82), or delta (0·79) variant infections."
Clearly it's not going to stop transmission, but it could slow it down. People on both sides of this issue seem to undervalue partial measures and tradeoffs.
So far I know 4 that have contracted COVID and all explained it felt like a bad flu but no where near enough to go to the hospital. But mileage will vary here for sure.
You forget one, the people that are dying have taken the risk for ther own and didn't want to get vaccinated. It's ok when they die, it's their decision that's gone wrong. Other people didn't got vaccinated and will never get covid anywhere.
This is a decision that not the government has to make for the people.
Would you support a comprehensive healthcare opt-out, where an unvaccinated person would forego right to treatment, and also not have to pay taxes for public healthcare?
No, because at the end of the day, we're not going to literally let them die on the sidewalk outside the hospital just because they can't pay.
That means that somebody has to pay for them. Given that unavoidable but inconvenient fact, basic health care and life support might as well be organized under the auspices of the state and the costs shared among all residents.
If you aren't willing to do your part to protect yourself and your community, why should your community protect you, when doing so would endanger others' lives?
those people still paid their taxes, health plan care and they should be treated. Stuff like this https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/sw/Intensivmedizin?s=... should be better investigated. I thought as German, something that we learned from our past was not "oben buckeln und nach unten treten" or something like "to crawl to the bigwigs and bully the underlings". Winter 2021, and we still don't have a plan, the schools still offline and the numbers are much worse now than winter 2020 when the numbers of unvaccinated were almost 90% of the population.
The smallpox and polio vaccines worked well. The corona shots have people still getting sick and transmitting live virus. That was not success even a couple years ago.
Very insightful but doubtful more capacity would prevent the mandates, given that state medias around the West are all now calling for mandates, two tiers, and punishment for those who don't follow. Like the next round of "war on terror" measures where states get to shift their citizen management. Don't forget to call a spade a spade.
>What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.
So I'm kind of surprised to see this. I was under the impression Germany was the opposite.
I kind of step back, how terrible is Canada doing?
>The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then.
Oh ya big time. I can't remember a time when nurses/psws/doctors weren't in huge demand here in Canada.
You can't be on one side in huge demand for nurses but also be firing them willy nilly.
Firing them for not getting the vaccine isn't true at all. They've been reducing nurses and such for long before.
>Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.
I propose that Canada and Germany probably have the same problem. That we are on the same page.
> Furthermore Bill 124, introduced in 2019, disincentivizes nurses by limiting wage increases. Many nurses have said repealing the bill would go a long way in retaining nurses. Others say removing barriers for internationally educated nurses would help fill in gaps.
Wow, why is there the wage cap when nursing has long been an issue in Ontario? I wonder who thinks this stuff up and thinks they are somehow saving money by doing this. It just generates inefficiencies and unintended side effects.
Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to be a long trail of government interference that's counterproductive.
>Wow, why is there the wage cap when nursing has long been an issue in Ontario? I wonder who thinks this stuff up and thinks they are somehow saving money by doing this. It just generates inefficiencies and unintended side effects.
Bill 124 has nothing at all to do with Nurses. The word 'nurse' does not show up even once. This bill is effectively what put doug ford into power. That is to say, he was elected to pass this one. It is more than required.
As you likely know Ontario is the highest debt subnational in the world. The mcguinty government was in power for ~10 years but did so by buying votes. They had so many gigantic scandals and might be one of the worst governments ontario ever had. Hilariously, the PCs approach was to tell ontario he was going to fire 100,000 people. That obviously didn't go well giving Wynne a majority.
However, Hudak was right, 100,000 less people in government. Because we didn't... we are in a far worse situation. Pre-covid ontario was very bankrupt. It was so bankrupt Wynne was forced to sell off highly profitable assets like Hydro1. Now that covid happened? I dont even know what will happen.
>Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to be a long trail of government interference that's counterproductive.
The consequences of decisions in either way is difficult and rarely properly assessed. As Greece knows, someone eventually ends up holding the garbage bag and has to clean up.
I'm all for reduction in the size of bureaucracies and addressing financial issues realistically. I just strongly dislike when they create inflexibility with things like wage increase caps. It's a strong hammer aimed at a few well deserved targets but hits broadly across a wide group where it doesn't always make sense. It's like a one size fits all approach.
But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.
>I'm all for reduction in the size of bureaucracies and addressing financial issues realistically.
I feel people misunderstand these issues so often, everyone just wants bigger government always. What happened during Mcguinty was well forecasted. He upon coming into power increased taxes on manufacturing. The consequence was that manufacturing dropped significantly. Ontario shed somewhere around 800,000 jobs because of that move and mcguinty trying to hide his shame increased the size of government to artificially hide abysmal unemployment. Population of Ontario was roughly 12 million at that time i believe. Labour participation was roughly 60%. Dropping 800,000 is more than 10% increase to unemployment. 10% unemployment is pitchforks at the capital.
The consequence? You converted tax paying people to tax deficit. It broke the balance by alot and it was all to hide the bad idea of raising taxes and harming ontarians.
Flipside, while this is an obvious failure, it shouldn't detract from a big government. Healthcare was obvious context above. What exactly is OHIP? It's a crappy basic health insurance provided by the government that has much less coverage today compared to years ago. It's not that we shouldn't do that, we simply don't cover everything. We know it's a good thing to cover the basics. It's just a definition of 'what are the basics'. Should diabetes meds be included? Type 1 vs Type 2? On top of that, it being single payer means most of society receives their healthcare from the rich.
>It's a strong hammer aimed at a few well deserved targets but hits broadly across a wide group where it doesn't always make sense. It's like a one size fits all approach.
It does make sense. What comes in bankruptcy? If we don't control those costs we are forced into austerity measures. Greece's Syriza is a communist party and they chose austerity out of their options. If we go into that, it will mean way more than 100,000 jobs fired abruptly. Which wasn't Hudak's plan. He was going to allow anyone who wants to keep working to keep working. Retirements, job hopping, etc being the plan.
The reason why you dont hear much of a chirp from the ultra strong unions is that they know the alternative is far worse.
>But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.
When Wynne got a majority. She took this power as her winning and not hudak losing. I called exactly what was about to happen. Wynne who was at the feet of all the scandals was going to be even worse because she would be under much more scrutiny. Not much of a prediction obviously, no future sight needed.
She actually was not bad besides the obvious corruption, she very nearly balanced the budget. Yet she made history books. She's the lowest approval rating for ontario premiers ever, and she provided the worst election result for the ontario liberals.
When doug ford got into power, I predicted exactly the same. doug ford didnt win, wynne lost. He's going to make decisions to fix the disaster of the liberals and take the blame. Flipside, he seems to be highly approved of because of covid and his response being objectively good. So I might be wrong on that front but he didnt fix the liberal corruption.
This is such a bizarre take. If the ICUs are filling up, the solution should be to prevent people from getting sick, not to make the ICUs bigger. There are undoubtedly many problems in the German healthcare system, but the current surge is clearly due to the very large number of unvaccinated people.
the two weeks were to build up health care capacity. We erected field hospitals to manage the sick and then closed them because they weren’t being used.
If this truly is an energy and hospitals truly are at risk, find a way to build more capacity even if it is temporary. Blaming the public for the failure to do this is wrong. And if you aren’t building this capacity… maybe this really isn’t an emergency?
No country in the world has the capacity to take care of more than “a couple thousand” ICU patients (well, it’s more like a couple of ten thousand ICU patients for the best equipped and richest large countries in the world, like Germany). Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times.
Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn’t be much of a help.
We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if that (simply because it’s not as though Germany’s existing ICU capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it’s quite large, actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but wouldn’t really solve the underlying problem.
And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It’s completely misguided. Not least of which because it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people for that …
Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.
We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination. However, in the very short term even that won’t be good enough, we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is necessary (and already happening).
Think about time frames.
Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks, vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.
> Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It's completely misguided
What you fail to understand is that the people who cut those bed numbers across Europe are responsible for far more death than a small percent of mRNA vaccine hesitant people. And they're fucking delighted that so many people are so misdirected.
the cynical neoliberal fuckheads didn't manage to cut ICU beds in time in austria (they tried but the epidemic beat them to it). we're still extremely close to running out though. currently, patients are transferred to hospitals across the country and surgeries are put off.
In three months, the booster efficiency might start waning again, we don't know that yet. These vaccines so far aren't looking like they are the solution to the pandemic either, better vaccines or better treatment might be. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to get vaccinated if you want to help with the situation, but I do find the way our politicians deflect blame and openly insult a not so small segment of the population completely distasteful. They shouldn't be surprised if the people they're insulting are not willing to help anymore, now or in the future.
A strategy that would make sense would include BOTH vaccination and ICU capacity, one of which could have been started in March 2020, and it would have put us in a much better position today. Letting capacity decrease while waiting for vaccines that may or may not end the pandemic is negligent. Not getting vaccinated may be seen by some as negligent also, but different standards apply for governments and citizens.
The pandemic comes in waves, we do not need to plan for endless exponential growth. A few weeks of extra capacity would make the whole thing much easier to handle, given that we might be already at the peak and cases seem to be going down again[0]. The RKI weekly report[1] currently lists 1700 ICU cases, a month ago it was 1100[2]. So the 4000 beds we lost throughout the year[3] could have made a big difference.
Fair enough, thanks for the info, I'll check it out. But let it be 2594 then, that is still too many given that we should have increased it by any means possible before starting to publically insult 20% of the population. I'm not assuming a deliberate reduction, I am assuming negligence.
20% of the population is, however, behaving stupidly and irrationally and in a very antisocial way. Insulting them is perfectly fine.
Just as with opposition to seatbelts it’s important for politics to create facts and just decide this issue. Everyone should be vaccinated and that’s just how it is.
... yeah, okay, I disagree with everything. I don't think it's acceptable for a government to insult its citizens, and I do think boundaries should be respected.
Nothing more to say, our worldviews are too far apart.
Vaccination is not a signal of intelligence or rationality :-)
There are many many reasons why one would or would not get a vaccine. For many, the reason was to go on vacation without too much hassle. Or because of social pressure. Or because they’re caring for someone who’s vulnerable.
If someone gets tested, uses masks properly and avoids groups of people they’re doing just as much as the average vaccinated. Definitely more than the truly antisocial which went into YOLO mode after getting vaccinated.
>Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times.
Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen, because we always knew that it would hit us eventually, people have been warning about this for ages, this is not some black swan.
More healthcare capacity would help, just like more supply chain capacity would help, or the ability to manufacture some masks, the entire problem is we've been running on the idiotic 80s managerial efficiency mindset for decades and now we're running on fumes on every front.
If we had any appreciation for crisis management, robustness, redundancy and had some shock absorbers in our system many people would not have needed to die. And no it's not just the unvaccinated. Plenty of countries this year, including the US, will lose more people in total to covid in 2021 than in 2020. Vaccines help but they are not pandemic ending, and our systems are deeply screwed up.
This is also about appreciation. The main bottleneck for increasing capacity is not machines, rooms or beds, those are available. It's hospital staff that's lacking. ICU beds are the most staff intensive beds in a hospital. It's a job that requires years of training, so you can't just scale it up. Also, the willingness to be a nurse has decreased during the last couple months. A lot of hospital staff has burned out during the first few waves and either reduced their contracts to part time, or quit entirely. The remaining staff has to work hard, until exhaustion and beyond, in order to fight for the patient's lives. Covid stations require proper hygiene which puts extra stress on the hospital staff. And they put in all of this work because some people couldn't be bothered to seek out vaccination, often even the patients themselves. This is the main difference to the first few waves where vaccination has not been available to everyone.
> Also, the willingness to be a nurse has decreased during the last couple months
this was entirely preventable by providing nurses and those keeping hospitals running with the support they need to do suchs jobs during a time of crisis.
In the netherlands for instance, many nurses have been running 12h shifts during the peaks, and there has been very little practical support in helping those people.
I am not even talking about monetary funds, but mainly practical stuff. (for instance, some volunteers decided to do grocery shopping for nurses during peaks).
If people are busting their ass off to prevent the healthcare systems from collepsing, maybe the goverment should have done far more in its power to prevent those people from quitting.
Buying groceries for a nurse is a nice thought but it is not going to erase the misery of working in a COVID ward for months or years.
I really wonder if any of the people here talking about massively scaling up ICU capacity have ever even been in or visited someone in an ICU. It is called an “intensive care” unit for a reason. Extensive resources are required. Putting aside the physical space, equipment and pharmacological needs, the teams of people are specialized and have extensive knowledge and training.
> Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen
You can't keep the staff and maintain the gear needed to handle 100x "once in a century" event all the time, it just doesn't work. Most health systems are already huge money sinks and on the brink of collapse in normal times... This isn't a "a bomb injured 300 people" event, we can't live 100% prepared to every single potential threats.
you don't need to 100x it, but you can keep 20-30% of slack in the system, instead of literally cutting or not even keeping up funding for one of the most important sectors of the country. Nurses and healthcare workers have been overworked for ages in Germany, and not just here. With the NHS in England it's the exact same situation. Most of the countries had higher capacity ten or twenty years ago then we have now. What's the point of getting richer and growing if your public infrastructure decays?
And the other thing you can do is, actually have a prepared and tested response plan to a crisis. Our reaction to this was to dust off some plans from the the shelves, every individual state had different systems in place, two years in we don't really have a functioning digital app, but ten different solutions none of which more than a fraction of people have adopted, and so forth. Completely avoidable chaos if anyone was actually in charge of readying the country for these situations.
The same is said in the Netherlands, but if you double the number of available IC beds, with associated staff (good luck with that), all you've bought yourself is two weeks before those are full as well – because of exponential growth.
Growth isn't exponential forever, cases appear to be going down again in Germany already. Delta waves seem to be only about 8 weeks long (check data from different countries, or here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/briefing/delta-peak-covid...), so two extra weeks would help a lot.
I agree that vaccines are part of the solution. I disagree that stripping citizens of their rights and insulting them on TV is part of literally any solution for anything. If a government feels the urge to do that, it should look for alternatives instead. Maintaining ICU capacity from one year before (decreased by 4000 in 2021, see: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihenht... - "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten"), is the lowest-hanging fruit, I'm sure there are additional alternatives that I'm not qualified to comment on.
Edit: It was pointed out to me that the DIVI numbers have some complexity that I did not account for. So grain of salt on the actual ICU number, but I've not yet seen anyone deny the trend. Here's a fact check that confirms that beds were lost: https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-praesident...
I’ll not take a stance on the correct number of free ICU beds as I do not feel qualified to judge these numbers without more insight on the intricacies of what would qualify fully operational beds, but regarding the stalling case numbers I feel confident enough (after looking at some raw numbers from the municipalities themselves [1]) to dismiss the apparent trend as a statistic artifact.
PCR test units and hospital bureaucracy are past their limits - e.g. regions like Bonn, Essen or Recklinghausen reporting zero cases on multiple consecutive days (Nov 29, Nov 30), which is _very_ unlikely w.r.t. the case numbers of the surrounding regions and those very regions reporting more than one hundred cases today.
The published indicators do not count cases that are reported late [2], which leads to apparently stalling case numbers. Growths may not be exponential forever but given that roughly one quarter of the population is not vaccinated, I would not take bets that the virus runs out of hosts before the health care system collapses.
I agree to the sentiment made that the balance between economic efficiency and damaging austerity for profit margin gains in the German health care system (especially for worker’s loans) has been tipping way too far to the latter in the past decades.
Yeah, it's possible. I tried to word it carefully. There seems to be a trend in Bavaria though, Saxony maybe, but it's too soon to tell. Those two were the first to be hit by the current wave, and some areas of Bavaria had the highest incidence for a decent while I believe, so that might be an indicator of having reached the peak at least in some parts of the country. But you are correct, it's absolutely not clear yet, and could be due to lack of testing capacity.
> What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.
Also one that collects high income taxes and high health care contributions (~14% of the income). So one can't really blame it on lack of funds.
Is this the ventilator fallacy? You know, it's march 2020, and everyone is rushing to make more of those damn ventilators?
If you end up on a fucking ventilator in an ICU bed, the damage is long done. The goal is not to maximize the number of people we can have on ventilators. That is an absurd idea on the same level of the "natural immunity is better than the vaccine!" insanity we got in 2021.
No, it's not the goal. The goal is also not to split society in two and create a group that'll hate everyone forever, just because our leaders can't own up to their mistakes. The goal is to get through the pandemic best we can, and keeping societal values and principals intact should be an important part of that.
what values? half the population doesn't value science, rationality, wisdom, progress etc. I don't wanna be governed by science deniers. I also don't wanna spend years in lockdown because people are refusing to get pricked by a needle
They value all those things just as much as you do, they call some of them different names.
And they don't believe that 'the other side' actuals exemplifies or actually values those things. Every lie they see coming from people in power (masks don't work, two weeks to stop the spread, the vaccine will fix this all) makes them less trustworthy.
Values such as politicians not insulting a group of people on television, not taking their rights away because they might potentially get sick eventually, generally not judging before proven guilty, not forcing someone to put something in their body that they absolutely do not want, not punishing one person for another person's crime. Last one is what they're doing to you if you feel like unvaccinated people are holding you hostage.
Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them, there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances, or to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.
> Values such as politicians [...] not taking their rights away, [...] not forcing someone to put something in their body that they absolutely do not want
Vaccine mandates have been a thing for well longer than I've been alive. I wasn't allowed to attend public school as a kid without having been given several vaccines.
Sure, there were anti-vax people and people with religious exemptions then, but the vast majority of the people who are up in arms and crying foul about COVID vaccination mandates didn't blink an eye when told they had to vaccinate their kids against the measles as a condition for sending them to school.
Why the hypocrisy?
> Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them
We have lockdowns because we think they slow the spread of disease and save lives, not "just because". That's like saying "birthday parties end when we stop having them". Well, yeah, but that's a tautology and not a very useful point to make.
> there is no reason [...] to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.
That seems like a straw man, though. Who is saying we have to lock everything down until everyone is vaccinated? What country has even tried to implement something like this? Some areas have certainly tied the relaxation of restrictions in some ways to vaccination rates, but the main concern for restriction levels is mostly other metrics, like new-case rates, hospitalizations, percent of ICU capacity used, death rate, etc.
> there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances
Everyone who gets sick is a host for the virus to mutate in. Everyone who gets sick, or is even merely unvaccinated, runs a higher risk of passing on the disease to someone else.
I am really really tired of the "it doesn't hurt anyone else if I don't get vaccinated" argument. Yes. It. Does. Full stop.
Dude, where have you been. The viral load is the same in the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The virus is mutating in the vaccinated as well as dogs, cats, deer, goats, llamas, bats, and likely most mammals. Ireland is 92% vaccinated in 12 and older population, and their cases are higher than they were when most of the country was unvaccinated. The vaccines don't appear to work as intended. Also, I'm from a generation and place where measles were no big deal. We all (including myself) had it, and got over it in 7 days. Many of our neighbourhoods had organized measles parties. Mass vaccinating for a disease that was already on its way out due to natural immunity, backfired spectacularly.
I was under the impression it was not the needle but the solution that is injected into the body through the needle that they were objecting to.
Let me know when they have a vaccine that lasts longer than 6 months and doesn't give young men heart attacks -- actually, don't, because I still won't take it because I'm just... not... afraid... of... the... virus...
By the way, when do you reckon the former Chief Scientist at the megacorp that produces the science juice that you probably had shot into your body stopped valuing science? https://www.bitchute.com/video/FPehpfdTleDo/
Assuming you’re in Germany, you’re governed by people which managed to screw up every single aspect of handling this pandemic. From masks don’t work, to masks availability in healthcare, vaccine availability, to booster availability to making tests fee-based and much much more.
The health minister was throttling Biontech/Pfizer deliveries just as demand started to go up for crying out loud!
It could always be worse, but I’m not at all surprised about lack of trust in the government.
You will spend years in lockdowns because that’s the only thing they’re capable of. See Portugal or Denmark for the vaccination happy case. Better than Germany but nowhere near life-as-usual.
Finally, if half the population doesn’t value all those things… Germany is proper fucked. You're exaggerating by a lot, which tells me you don’t value science and rationality.
im not from germany. in my country the vaccine uptake is less than 50%. at this point everyone who wanted the jab could have gotten it. so im not exaggerating at all actually
You’ve replied to a guy who is in Germany on a topic about Germany and then made some claims without specifying you’re from somewhere else though. That was very confusing…
Only for the last 300 years or so. But ya know, at least the CDC has edited their website, so, poof, no such thing as natural immunity now. :-P
Seriously, natural immunity is reactive to all 4 major viral proteins, vs vaccine's one. I recently saw a study from Sweden where vaccine effectiveness goes negative after 7-8 months! :-O
Did you know that the immune system reacts to more than just the spike protein? It will create a dozen or so antibodies against all the different parts of the virus.
If the spike protein mutates like it did in Omicron, most of the other antibodies will still continue to work while new spike antibodies are created. In contrast, if the vaccine-induced antibodies are avoided, immunity in vaccinated people drops to zero.
This leads to another consideration. As I understand it, antibody tests only check for the spike protein antibodies. This implies that if there are 10 other antibodies not being tested, then actual protection is 10x higher than the test indicates. Any antibody count falls over time because the body is efficient. If the disease enters the body again, it will just start pumping out the antibodies again as long as it knows how to make them.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People with just natural immunity in Israel are 10-15x better off than people who just got the vaccine. As this is the largest such study and encompasses pretty much the entire population, you can eliminate common sample size and selection bias issues that happen when you hand-choose a couple hundred people to look at.
It's such a dumb take because natural immunity requires you to contract real Covid. I wish this was obvious, but it seems required to state it outright? I feel you should take this revelation straight to the vaccine makers and tell them they wasted all their effort and should have hosted infection parties instead.
On this topic, it's worth noting that most vaccine side effects -- which are largely "your immune system kicked into high gear and exploded" type problems -- are an order of magnitude worse when fighting an actual infection than when responding to a vaccine.
E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.
> E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.
In relation to what? An average Covid infection? We don't even know how many go undetected to know what that average even is. Or the average out of hospital cases? Or simply confirmed cases? What are the numbers when comparing young healthy people vs old people with co-morbidities? What about children?
For what it is worth, in the UK there were similar concerns.
They set up "Nightingale Hospitals" (reference to Florence Nightingale) - basically convention centres were converted into field hospitals with ventilators. One in London had 4000 beds, and there were others elsewhere in the country. It took 9 days to build the London one (I was impressed!)
After all that, the 4000 bed one in London treated 20 patients during the first wave: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214 Most are now shutdown or being used as vaccination centres from what I know.
If the UK can pull this off in 9 days, I am sure other more sophisticated countries can do the same if they need to.
Those hospitals were a joke. Ask anybody who worked in the NHS and they would have told you no way in hell could they have found sufficient numbers of staff to actually run them. A publicity stunt. The country went crazy thinking people were dying in the street and we needed emergency hospitals/morgues
Same thing happened here in Italy especially during the first wave. They started building these temporary hospitals that hosted very few patients and some of them even finished during the end of the wave when there was no need for extra beds anymore.
this!! It's unbelievable that these wealthy western countries find "cheaper" to stop their economy than to build few more hospitals, beds and employ / pay more these guys running this. It's hundreds, maybe thousands, of billions wasted in Germany alone, versus. no idea but definitely not hundreds of billions to increase the ICU capacity to keep the economy open no matter what.
That's not really the problem though. See, no matter how many ICU beds you have, the people going to the ICU are about 40% or so likely to die from COVID and the remainder will recover but will take a very long time to do so and have a significant chance of having long term residual effects and/or complications.
You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always the case).
That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of countries that stripping your health care system is probably a bad idea.
Yeah, but then the unvaccinated would only be risking their own lives. The most prominent argument for compulsory vaccination right now is that they're taking away scarce ICU beds.
It's a factor, but not the whole story. A lot of people are immunocompromised and for them just getting infected immediately raises the risks to unacceptable levels. We all owe the weaker people in our societies (from a health perspective) to take care of them, and if that requires us to get vaccinated to create a cordon of safety then so be it.
That there are a bunch of egoists that would rather have us all fend for ourselves doesn't change that, and usually those are exactly the people demanding we take on their burdens when the situation is reversed. It's called a social contract for a reason: taxes, vaccination against communicable diseases where possible, compulsory education and so on, it's the flipside of the coin, you get a lot of rights, but you also have some (sometimes moral) obligations.
> We all owe the weaker people in our societies (from a health perspective) to take care of them, and if that requires us to get vaccinated to create a cordon of safety then so be it.
The dead comment is unfortunately correct, there will probably be no herd immunity with these vaccines. That's what I hear from every virologist/epidemiologist lately anyways, and the real world data with highly vaccinated countries having record surges appears to confirm it.
I agree that it would be a much stronger argument. However, I also find it cruel to force people into an injection that they do not want, and would probably still oppose a universal vaccine mandate for that reason. I'd be okay with a mandate that allows people who really don't want the vaccine to opt out. I'd even be okay with that for the COVID vaccines if it wasn't for the 2G stuff and the awful rhetoric against unvaccinated people that preceded it. Enacting the mandate now makes the whole thing feel too much like "we'll get you somehow". Like I said, I find it cruel. It's not my idea of a humane society.
Vaccines by themselves won't do miracles. But vaccines combined with some reasonable level of restrictions can get us through this to the point where we've caught up with the virus to a degree that we have other means to reduce the number of serious cases.
Keep in mind that there is plenty of precedent for mandatory vaccinations, in almost every developed country and in plenty that are not young children are vaccinated against a whole raft of diseases that would otherwise cause serious problems. The only people that are exempt are those that do not want any vaccinations for religious reasons because it apparently interferes with 'gods plan'. If you want to deal with this at the same level of ignorance then that's fine with me but I personally have absolutely no problem with a mandate and I also would not have a problem with rescinding the exemption for religious purposes.
While I don't disagree with what you are saying in the abstract, there are limits and the demands really should be rational.
I don't see that with this series of vaccines. They do not stop transmission. The ICU issue cannot be addressed fairly without addressing the other causes that put large numbers of people in ICUs.
We pay every year as a society in deaths for the assumption of some risk. We manage it, make laws, or just leave it alone and some people die (for example, we don't ban cars or eating too many calories or swimming pools).
In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection, most especially when it appears the health authorities either didn't understand or didn't communicate the effectiveness over time of the injections.
There's a point were everything can't be all about what someone at the top proclaims is for the social good. Otherwise we wind up in corruption and dictatorship.
> In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection
This was the same with every vaccine in the past, very few vaccines have received as much scrutiny as these, the biggest risk is the long term one and even there we have a fairly good idea of what the possibilities of materializing are.
None of these weigh up against the damage that a COVID-19 infection does.
If you think mandatory vaccination equates corruption and dictatorship then I am not sure we are on the same wavelength regarding the meaning of those terms.
I think, (or hope rather) that the mandates are well meaning, no I don't think this is dictatorship, rather I'm addressing your more "meta" point about social responsibility and the perils of one group being able to dictate to others without input.
As in, we can't just say "We have some social responsibilities so you must XX per the authorities" when XX is self serving, counterproductive, useless or harmful. We have an individual right, and responsibility, to weigh the dictates we are given at some point, perhaps not on all issues, but on some.
Other vaccines were not taken in to market in this manner. It is a novel vaccine.
> the perils of one group being able to dictate to others without input
This is pretty much the norm in any country that is a democracy but that does not have coalition governments. You get a kind of see-sawing effect where one group will enact a bunch of stuff and then when the tables are turned it all gets undone. It's stupendously inefficient.
Democracy is quite flawed but it still is the best mechanism for government that we have that is sustainable over a longer period of time.
Democracy in itself is nothing more then the dictatorship of the majority. It certainly doesn't constitute a just society, alone. In addition, you need at least fundamental, untouchable civil rights, protection of minorities and the rule of the law.
I don't understand why this batch of vaccines is being compared to vaccines for other diseases as if they are the same thing. Other vaccines are generally mandated for children with extremely high efficacy, have an extremely low chance of adverse events, prevent community spread perfectly or almost perfectly, have an exactly known quantity of doses required and are deployed as prevention (not in the midst of a pandemic). Importantly, they treat diseases that cause extremely bad outcomes in children at very high rates. This current generation of covid vaccines is more like a drug that works well for some and not so for others, doesn't prevent transmission, aims at moving target, requires an unknown amount of doses, only modestly discourages continued spread and represents one of many ways for society to treat, tackle and prevent the disease. This is a disease that is trending downwards in its mortality rate, while being of fairly low risk for the majority of the population, with the lowest risk found for young people. The diseases we mandate children to get vaccinated for are not declining in their disastrous health effects as far as I know. The risk of adverse events from the current set of covid vaccines is lowish but not particularly low. All that doesn't make the vaccines we have for covid any less important, but the comparison really does not wash and is a highly dubious way of engaging around the topic of body sovereignty.
There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.
Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.
Thank you! Every crazy axe murderer receives more empathy then the people who simply stopped trusting the system after being lied to one time too often.
Two things drive me crazy:
1. How easy it is to dehumanize a significant percentage of the population.
2. How willingly politicians embrace that in order to find a scapegoat for their own failures.
Many immunocompromised people have made personal choices that led to that situation. I do not see why people should be forced to take experimental non-sterilizing vaccines that don't even provide herd immunity, just to pretend that it saves this group.
If you take a forced vaccine and get a vaccine injury, no one will care about you. You'll end up in Hartz 4 and that's it. There won't be any HN thread in support of you, because it isn't mainstream.
I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, however in the long run that won't protect the immunocompromised. The virus is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect. Everyone will be exposed eventually.
That's true. We missed our chance to contain it early on, thanks to those that tried to spare the economy at the cost of 'a few lives' which has now harmed our economy for a much longer period than an initial effort at containment would have caused, not to mention that at that time we didn't know exactly how bad it would get (it could have been a lot worse than it was).
But reducing the amount of active infections does have a beneficial effect because even though everyone will likely be exposed that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will also get the disease (even the the worst diseases viral do not necessarily spread to 100% of the population), and there some chance that later strains may become milder. And if fewer people are ill at the same time that should increase the level of care available.
> We missed our chance to contain it early on, thanks to those that tried to spare the economy at the cost of 'a few lives'
Illusion of control. The chance was never there. Even countries who are way more suitable for isolation like australia didn't manage to keep the virus out. Attributing that to "those that tried to spare the economy" is just another toxic blame game.
They didn't manage because the rest of us fucked up.
It's like a fire. If your house is the only house in a row of houses that is well prepared against fire then you're going to go down, in spite of all of your preparations.
The fatalism that many people exhibit is a self fulfilling prophesy: we won't be able to do it so we're not even going to try. But you know what? Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and China showed that it is possible.
The reason people are even mentioning ICU beds are because they're trying to shift the vaccination argument from "do it for yourself, if you want to" to "you have to do it for others".
If we had enough ICU beds, there would be NO argument to force people to get vaccinated, just like there is no argument to force people to not smoke or not be fat.
If we had enough ICU beds there would still be an argument because it will cause a bunch of people to die. If you don't care about that then that's your problem, but personally I'd like those old people to stick around for a bit longer, and keep in mind that one day you too will be old.
The arguments for vaccination go a lot further than just a lack of ICU beds.
Right, maybe we should stick them on an island somewhere so they don't have contact with the rest of society then. Really, the degree of selfishness here is incredible. Don't you have parents or grandparents? Would you want them to be isolated from you and the rest of your family, their friends and neighbors for the foreseeable future just so you can pretend that there is no problem?
> To be frank, I'm in favour of mass cryogenics. Build mausoleums under mountains and fill them with the frozen heads of the dead, to be revived later.
Science fiction has no place in policy determination.
So, we have a climate crisis, uncontrolled health care and college costs, decades of pointless war, mass incarceration, and a variety of other crises that cause a lot of death and suffering.
Yet isn't it strange that the one crisis we have chosen to pull out all the societal stops for, to radically reorient all of society and put it in stasis for, is COVID-19. Odd coincidence that most of the first list affects young people, COVID-19 primarily affects old people, and the political leadership of the developed world happens to be comprised of old people.
And the subset of old people responsible for handling the pandemic hasn't even managed to do that properly. This is the same category of people who hollowed out unions, induced globalization, and generally kicked out the ladder beneath them in a variety of ways.
I do care about my parents/grandparents, I've been vaccinated, and I'd wear a mask around an old person. That's the absolute maximum I'm willing to do voluntarily and feel fine about that. I'd even venture to suggest that if someone has a problem and demands that all of society radically realign itself to fix/prevent it in a way that's disproportionate to society's other needs, it's not society that's being selfish.
Same story in UK (and about bed numbers in general).
"The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly." [0]
The egregious part is that they reduced ICU beds last summer, they even had monetary incentives to reduce them.
Meanwhile vaccinating anyone < 60 has a very small benefit and it should be up to choice. Myokarditis side effects from the vaccine are probably bullshit, you can get it from almost all infections, so I expect it to see for every vaccine. We probably have no data since we lack operation of this scale.
But people here are afraid (typical) and even demand harsher policies. They also seem incapable to hold political leaders to account. Politics basically failed to prepare for the next wave, which was known to be happening quite a long while ago. Instead we had an embarrassing slap-fight between different states. One more stupid than the other.
Also you cannot just get a vaccine, you have to actively search for places that administer them. Pretty sure that I won't renew mine again, since this is just not acceptable.
I would advise you to ask a doctor, even if those aren't too keen to get another patient with vaccine trouble, but getting a vaccine in an active wave might not be the best health recommendation.
>Also you cannot just get a vaccine, you have to actively search for places that administer them. Pretty sure that I won't renew mine again, since this is just not acceptable.
Very true, last month for the booster there was only one place in Stuttgart (large city for German standards) offering appointments within the year. It's gotten better again, but it's not like they didn't know that there would be a new wave of vaccinations once the first people are 6 months in (or had J&J).
The numbers of people dying from Covid. Germany has 100,000 dead people and ~5000 are under the age of 65. But you cannot stop there, you need to incrementally look at age correlated data to see a picture.
Meanwhile vaccinating anyone < 60 has a very small benefit and it should be up to choice. Myokarditis side effects from the vaccine are probably bullshit, you can get it from almost all infections, so I expect it to see for every vaccine. We probably have no data since we lack operation of this scale.
This isn't exactly true. People under 60 have a smaller risk to get to the Hospital/ICU but it's definitely not 0. There is also still a very real risk for Long-Covid and other complications from it. This gets even worse when said <60 person has obesity, smokes or other underlying health issues.
For your reference, in the Netherlands about 89% of 18+ people have been fully vaccinated. Yet the 11% unvaccinated make up 50% of Hospital beds and more than 70% of ICU beds. Looks at this image from our Minister of Health: https://twitter.com/hugodejonge/status/1466482208995164175
It's in Dutch but you'll get the message.
Furthermore, even if you are somehow not at risk of Covid, and you would magically know this about yourself it is STILL a good idea to get the shot because it reduces your chances of getting it (and passing it on!) and even if you get it your viral load is lower so the chances to spread it are reduced.
Stop making up arguments and get your bloody shot.
I'm terrified by the fact that there are so many antivaxxers in Germany that they're showing up here too, as supposedly educated and intelligent peers. It is absolutely the fault of unvaccinated that they're unvaccinated and putting society at risk. It doesn't matter how many ICU beds and staff you have, an unvaccinated population would quickly overwhelm it simply by virtue of how incredibly long it takes to recover and how quickly new strains would develop.
Vaccinated people get the disease and transmit it about as well as unvaccinated people.
This means the virus is busy making copies of itself in their body. Those copies not only have a chance to mutate, but have evolutionary selective pressure to mutate around the vaccine.
If you don't have the vaccine, it has no pressure to mutate around the vaccine.
This is imo not true. Ofcourse there could be more ICU beds, but the real problem is something called exponential growth. Doubling your ICU capacity only will give you a week or two until you need to have restrictions again. Failing to include the concept of exponential growth is cherrypicking facts.
In Denmark we have now reached 90% vaccination rate. We have more infected, the same number of admissions in hospital and a 15% higher death rate than all of 2020. I really fail to see why we are blaming the unvaccinated and not Pfizer/Moderna.
Don’t get me wrong. I fully support everyone getting vaccinated, and requiring it broadly. But your statement is just not true.
Omicron is thought to have evolved in an immunocompromised person. Vaccinating that person would not have helped. COVID-19 is also known to cross easily between humans and other animals. An alternate theory is that the startling number of mutations in the Omicron variant evolved in an animal host.
This variant appears to defeat previous immunity both from prior infection and vaccination. The willfully unvaccinated, while idiots and selfish assholes are not to blame in our current troubles and vaccinating every person on earth would not have prevented the Omicron outbreak.
Furthermore we need to take a global view. Just because we have sufficient doses to fully vaccine everyone in Europe we’re not protected unless everyone everywhere gets vaccinated. (And even then pockets of virus can mutate and overcome the vaccine) I’ll worry more about idiot Texans (who are frankly mostly hurting themselves and their families) when we provide enough doses to Bangladesh to vaccinate their whole population. (And rinse and repeat for every developing nation)
Why you think this?
People that are unvaccinated will have harder covid symptoms that are earlier found and in best case quarantined. With a cold maybee without the knowledge about covid they just stay in the bed for some days.
Vaccinated people are more the ones with no symptoms and run everyday through the city and infect other people without knowing that they do it.
The 90% figure has sometimes been quoted in Denmark but it doesn't include people not eligible for vaccination. Now that smaller kids are offered the vaccine this ratio has decreased and really shouldn't be used at all. The percentage of people in Denmark that have started vaccinations of the total population is 78% with 76% having completed their vaccinations.
Total admissions and death rate numbers don't tell the whole story - breaking them down by vaxxed/1shot/2shot will help unpack "who to blame".
In fact, you can dig deeper. My province doesn't release the numbers but from what I can tell the 2-shot people who die are generally older and/or infirm. So I believe the 2shot numbers are being thrown off by an atypical population... which means the general population has less to fear from covid if they're double vaxxed. My co-founder informed this is an example of "Simpson's Paradox"[2].
What kind of vaxxed/unvaxxed breakdown are you seeing in Denmark?
The other thing that doesn't show the whole story is using a data set starting in March when there was a quite low percent vaccinated but comparing totals of unvaxxed vs. vaxxed deaths over the whole period, when fully vaxxed in March was only a few percent.
It'd be much more interesting to see a straight comparison over Oct-Nov, say, when the vaccination rate was stable and get the unvaxxed vs 1 shot vs 2 shot vs 2 weeks after 2nd shot vs booster numbers.
This is exactly simpsons paradox. It is a shame so few people have heard of it!
This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on hospitals. That is, if you have 80% vaxxed, a mere 10% increase could halve the number of hospital beds needed. No wonder governments are going so hard on vaccinating the hesitant and antivax.
No, this does not imply that going from 80% to 90% vaccinated could halve the number of hospital beds needed - that reasoning would only work if the vaccine completely prevented Covid-related hospitalizations, in which case zero vaccinated people would be hospitalized and Simpson's paradox wouldn't apply. What it actually implies is that at much less than 100% vaccination, you hit a point where vaccinating the remaining population does very little to reduce pressure on hospitals because most people who're hospitalized have been vaccinated, despite the fact that the vaccines do reduce the risk of hospitalization. That is, the benefits of vaccinating the last few percent of the population actually diminish rather than increasing like they would do with a more effective vaccine.
>This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on hospitals.
This ignores the demographic differences between the vaxxed and the unvaxxed. The elderly and those with conditions that made them high risk have a much higher vaccination rate as one would expect.
If you cut the number of vaccinated in half you won't cut hospitalizations in half because subgroups of the population being hospitalized are not present in the same ratios in the unvaxed.
> We have more infected, the same number of admissions in hospital and a 15% higher death rate than all of 2020
Another really, really important piece of context is how human behavior has changed. In 2020, many people were very cautious about covid. For example, in liberal US cities like Seattle and Portland, many indoor activities were restricted pretty hard until 2021. People didn’t dine out in person, or didn’t attend the movies. In 2021, people have more or less returned to normal, less-cautious behavior. While masks are still worn, people are comfortable dining out and going to the movies and all sorts of activities.
My point is that this change in behavior is likely to “blame” for the increased cases. If people were behaving the same way a year ago as they are today, cases would have been significantly worse then.
In other words, vaccinations have allowed us to return to a mostly normal life while stopping cases from rapidly increasing. At the very least, anecdotally, in places with lower vaccination rates, a return to normal life has been accompanied by more covid scares.
Your numbers are very similar to Ontario's, and in fact Canada in general as a whole.
But what's strange is out the US doesn't seem to reflect this.
There are states with fairly high vaccination rates where vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU at rates many times ours, and are only showing up as 2.5 or 3 times better protected than the unvaccinated for hospitalization.
I don't know how to explain this other than length of time since injection. But we're heading into 6-7 months here now in Ontario and I'm still not seeing this trend. Boosters will certainly help, I'm sure, but I don't feel it can be the sole cause.
It's so ridiculous just driving across the border... look at Vermont or New York compared to Ontario or Quebec in terms of daily case rates and hospitalization. (Or Maine compared to New Brunswick, etc.) The only way I can explain it is by masking, which is still rigidly followed here in most of Canada, but not as much in the US.
PS congrats on having perhaps the most competent governments in North America in terms of managing this disease. It's not the first time I've found myself browsing for real estate in Nova Scotia, but it certainly became more serious this past year...
My guess is that obesity plays a bigger role than many people realize.
Perhaps obese people who are vaccinated are still at a substantially elevated risk?
This also explains why Africa is doing pretty well in terms of low casualties: Young people and fewer obese.
Most developed countries have populations with high proportion of elderly people, just look at their population pyramids. Their population is generally older on average, as the country has long life expectancy, a low death rate, but also a low birth rate.
In Canada, we had a longer gap between doses, which may be a factor in extending efficacy. There is also a robust booster strategy, though it does not get much attention here. Not sure how it compares, though.
Edit: I think I misunderstood the graph. It is actually already normalized by the size of each population (Unvaccinated, Half-vaccinated, Fully vaccinated).
If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.
When taking the vaccination rate into account, the likelihood of hospitalization still seems to be a fifth after vaccination.
But even if the remaining population got vaccinated it wouldn't be enough to drastically reduce the hospital load.
> If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Imagine if 100% of the population were vaccinated, what percentage of the hospitalized would then be vaccinated?
the point is the beds are being taken up by the vaccinated. the idea was after vaccination these beds wont have to be taken up by the vaccinated suffering COVID and will be vacant for others suffering other diseases.
At least the death stats need to be considered on an individual basis. If this is something like 30 vaccinated vs 70 unvaccinated deaths per 100,000 people. The numbers are so small that the extra 40 people might simply be people with terminal diseases like last stages of cancer, with extremely weakened state not bothering to get vaxxed and dying of the first thing that gets them, which was covid. It does not necessarily mean the vaccine would have concurred any benefit or saved their life.
If there's simply a large number of people in such situations as I suspect there are. It would be deceptive to extrapolate to the general population based on them.
> from what I can tell the 2-shot people who die are generally older and/or infirm. So I believe the 2shot numbers are being thrown off by an atypical population...
People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population and 93% of covid deaths.
The overwhelming majority of people that die from this thing are older and/or infirm. It has nothing to do with an atypical population, that's just how this virus works.
The vaccine can only do so much. We need to stop pretending it's the "slam dunk" our experts advertised it as and get on with our lives.
10% of 5,821,297 is still 58,212 people who potentially get ill (and can die and can get into hospital).
I'm not sure where you get the 15% higher death rate: any sources?
In .nl we are seeing the same numbers (but on a 3x population of denmarks). Hospitals are so full now, they are rejecting e.g. cancer-patients and other "plannable Intensive Care patients". Over half of the patients on those ICs are vaccinated; ergo, from a ratio of 10/90% the patients are 55/45%; ergo: they work. Certainly not fully and certainly less than (I) expected.
I think he's confused about the data. Based on the Google data (from the graph that's visible when searching "COVID Denmark"), there are more Danish cases now than at the previous 2020 peak (3500/day then vs 4300 now), BUT hospitalizations (920/day then vs 430 now) and deaths (32/day then vs. 11 now) are down significantly.
The vaccines, while not as effective as classics like polio vaccine or measles vaccine, are definitely a net positive and help significantly in reducing the epidemic burden. Perhaps instead of internecine finger pointing we could blame covid itself?
Please actually post arguments and not just dismissals. Nobody in this conversation is anti-vaxx, but this fantasy of "If we vaccinate X more, covid will not be a problem" simply does not align with reality. The vaccines are effective, but they are not flawless, and we are dealing with a very high R0 disease that is changing.
Except that the problem is exactly the unvaxxed. When we have 100% coverage of all age groups, with boosters as necessary (let's hope for continuing good data from Israel), then we can suppress Covid.
Vaccination is something that everyone has to do for the sake of everyone, which sadly is a somewhat alien concept in certain parts of our society.
When we have 100% coverage of all age groups.. we will still have covid hospitalizations. We will still have covid spread. We may still even sometimes need to wear masks and have lockdowns.
You should still get vaccinated and get boosters, but no vaccination rate is going to make this go away anymore than the flu shot has eliminated the flu.
The difference is that the load on hospitals will be far lower, which means better care for people that are hospitalized for covid, and people who need to be in the hospitals for other reasons.
Unfortunately, this may have been true in 2020, but at this point the rate of SNPs (mutations) creating VoCs (variants of concern), plus the break-through infection rate, strongly suggest that no level of herd immunity (even 100%) will lead to suppression. At this point we'd all be better off focusing on ways to slow the spread.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, and please especially don't post supercilious dismissals of the community. Such perceptions are nearly always in the eye of the beholder and make such comments particularly tedious and degrading. That's why the site guidelines include: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this repeatedly—can you please stop that, and stick to posting thoughtful contributions to whatever discussion is at hand?
I understand the need/temptation to posture defensively against the community/the masses/idiots/society/whatever—I don't mean this pejoratively; I think literally all of us do it—but because it's such a mechanical reaction, it makes for particularly low-quality comments.
The vaccination rate in Denmark is less than 80%. The virus does not care that vaccines have not been authorized for kids yet. An unvaccinated person is an unvaccinated person, regardless of whether the reason is bureaucracy or personal choice.
Also, the effective vaccination rate is usually lower than the average rate. Unvaccinated people tend to spend time with other unvaccinated people, and this is particularly true for kids. The people an infected individual encounters are more likely to be unvaccinated than the general population.
What people aren't typically "mathing" right is that even if you have 90% vaccinated, that's still potentially hundreds of thousands (millions in bigger countries) of un-vaccinated people who are prone to getting seriously sick.
The numbers here in Ontario are clear. Case rates among the unvaccinated are far higher, and ICU admissions are far far far higher.
I never fell for any line that said vaccination would just make the disease go away. Frankly that was never said by medical experts, only implied by certain politicians.
None of this is true. The vaccination rate in Denmark is 77%, not 90% [1]. The number of hospital admissions and the death rate are lower than during the first and second waves [2, 3] despite a significantly larger infection rate [4].
On 1: The discrepancy in percentages is usually the difference between "Entire Population Vaccinated" and "Eligible Population Vaccinated." Which, until very recently, was only people 12 and older.
Given the exceptionally low incidence of death in the 12 and under group, it's debatable which figure should be given prominence.
On 2 and 3: The case rate is spiking significantly higher than it has ever before, and the death rate is on an upward trend. It is typically delayed behind the case rate, so we can't be certain that this will be as bad as it gets. It's still very possible for this wave to be more deadly than prior waves, even though the Case:Death rate is lower.
Instead of showing 2 & 3 separately, perhaps the combined chart [1] is a better visualization.
Even if this was true (which it isn't) the main difference is that you have only minor "lockdown"-measures in Denmark right now which is very different compared to 2020. Vaccines push down the R-Value significantly so you can keep everything open while still having a manageable pandemic.
Very thought-provoking this mistreatment of the unvaccinated.
The process started with demonizing them to the point of being singled out and blamed for how the disease is impacting society. When the discrimination started, there were very few willing to speak for them.
Particularly malicious was the expansion of the term anti-vaxxer typically used for a fringe minority which “rejects all vaccines for everyone” to all of those that “reject one single vaccine for themselves”.
Now a measure that will come too late and impact the entirety of society is sold as a means of finally forcing them to conform.
From the outside, this may look like a perfectly executed propaganda campaign. One can’t exclude that the government (like the Canadian gov which actually got caught I believe) took advantage of the chaos and flexed its propaganda muscles a bit. But the more scary possibility is that a frightened and manipulated population + incompetent government in CYA mode is enough to try to override the constitutional principle of bodily integrity.
And it’s precisely this principle which seems to be the last thing preventing the state from forcing or punishing the unvaccinated too hard, limiting them to a fine.
I’m not vaccinated, this is how I feel. I am not militant or political about it. My wife and whole family are vaccinated and I helped them to do it. As a young man, the risk of heart issues does indeed outweigh the risk of hospitalisation from the virus (as I’ve weighed it, anyhow). Victoria, Australia has hit 90% double vaccinated and case numbers have not changed here. To see this underwhelming effect in light of the anxiety the mandatory vaccination has caused, it is sad. I am lucky enough to be studying remotely, and so I just stay at home, I don’t go out other than to exercise in a park. I am not able to go anywhere with my wife right now (shopping, restaurants etc.), which is difficult, but it was my choice. If I am further forced to undergo vaccination I’m really not sure what I would do. I would want to leave Australia and live somewhere that I can have my own decisions. I don’t care if you think I’m selfish. Where did freedom of choice go? I’d like to move where it’s gone.
My problem is that mandate is weighing so much on the "bad" side, that the "good" side is completely dwarfed. In other words, I'm unable to reason about the vax, as I never was able to make good decision in similar situation.
That mandates are introduced on top of previous completely useless and hostile measures like curfews, outdoor playgrounds closures, etc. and generally divisive rhetoric doesn't help to build any trust either.
Exactly. There has just been constant appeals to ‘science’ but how can I trust this science if I can’t inspect it? Even in a simple system, a small change can create chaotic consequences. I absolutely have a right to know what I am being forced to take into my body: an incredibly complex system. And I don’t care if someone calls me “selfish”, all human behaviour is selfish. There is no such thing as a completely altruistic decision. People pushing for mandates just want “things back to normal” (not realistic), which is fine, but it’s their personal prerogative that I don’t have to care for. Every decision a human makes is self-centred.
guess if u drive/ride your own transport you are set as they are gonna let only vaccinated on public transport (italy? germany? already doing it i think)
A friend works in a major hospital in Melbourne. All their cardiac, cancer patients and others are vaccinated.
The "heart issues" are a mild inflammation. You take some NSAIDs, rest for a few days, and you're completely fine. My friend compared it to inflammation of your finger if you get a cut. It's a non-issue.
I actually think unvaccinated people were treated way to well in Germany. They are a very loud minority in society and have managed to really hamper the progress against covid.
Compare this to Canada where the government implemented much bigger restrictions on unvaccinated people (no restaurants, no train travel, no air travel) and the overall vaccination rate is ~10% higher. And the current rise in cases is nowhere near Germany.
Being willfully unvaccinated signals that you simply don't care about the people you come in contact with. I'm not sure how, exactly, I'm supposed to treat someone well if they won't care if I live or die from something they can prevent.
Yes, I understand the vaccine isn't perfect, but none of them are. Yet here I am, not catching polio and other things because of them. (Polio was less lethal, btw, and some folks were fine - yet others lived out their lives in an iron lung).
71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for COVID, this is from a poll published today.
Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave, which is why we now need to take more drastic measures again when the entirely predictable course events would take this winter became apparent even to our politicians. But at a point were planned operations for other diseases like cancer get cancelled all over the place, when people requiring acute care get long delays until they find a free intensive care bed somewhere, you can't ignore this any longer.
Requiring vaccinations for non-essential activities with many people is something we should have done much earlier, it's long overdue. It's the least restrictive measure that has a good chance of doing both, reducing the spread and encouraging more people to get vaccinated.
The failure to organize the vaccine boosters is another big issue. It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care and were to some degree avoidable.
I bet on the order of 71% of Germans supported mandatory discrimination against undesirables in 1940 too, but here we are yet again, claiming that what a majority of the population supports is indicative of moral correctness.
If these measures don't work, like literally every authoritarian measure undertaken by governments so far, maybe Germany can put all the un-vaccinated into camps, too. We need to keep the unpure away from us.
Sure, the R0 value of the contagion amongst a 100% vaccinated population is still >1.0, and there are early indications that Omicron has a sufficiently mutated spike protein as to render the vaccine immune response ineffective, but why let epidemiological facts stand in the way of exercising power over one's inferiors?
It's hard to sympathize with people who still believe this series of vaccines prevents others from spreading infections and thus all measures to require compliance are fine.
Maybe. One non peer reviewed study. Reduces transmission some. For a brief period.
How does this translate into force everyone to take an experimental shot (with some number of side effects and deaths) every X months?
We see, right now, outside of "studies", I've seen in my own family and I'm not the only one, these vaccines do not stop transmission. They do not stop infection. Maybe they "reduce". They do not stop.
So parent posters histrionics about "right to infect me with disease" is just.. histrionics. The vaccinated can also infect him with a disease.
It's really hard to sympathize with people that think it's their right to force something on other people's bodies. This isn't polio.
I'm vaccinated. I stay healthy. I have no fear of un-vaccinated people and neither should you. If you are fearful you've fallen victim to your own anti-science mental health anxiety with a load of media brainwashing on top.
People saying this are being flagged, but the fact remains that COVID vaccines don't stop transmission.
The CDC themselves state that viral load is similar in fully vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
And yes, people have the right to refuse medical treament; that's a human right. It's there for very good reasons, and there is broad agreement among civil liberties experts on that point.
> However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people.
> And yes, people have the right to refuse medical treament; that's a human right.
Most states in the US require a variety of vaccinations to enter public school. New York requires it even for private/religious schooling (https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/schools/sc...). Measles, DTaP, polio, etc. have widespread existing requirements predating COVID.
Everything I stated is factual, and I insinuated nothing else.
The person I was replying to clearly inferred that vaccinated individuals don't infect others, and that's dangerously wrong.
As for schools requiring vaccines, there is a lot to take issue with there - mRNA vaccines are different, with no long term data, for a different virus. The mandated vaccines don't require biannual top ups, and are for viruses that actually threaten children themselves - school agechildren have a near-zero mortality risk form COVID.
But the fact remains, regardless of all the weeds we could get into there, and NY state law notwithstanding, **human beings have a fundamental right to not be forced into medical treatment**.
As I said, civil liberties groups have written on this at length, and been largely ignored. I think ignoring them requires a level of stupidity bordering on evil.
Vaccines still allow for transmission. That there may be lower infection rates for Delta and Omicron - may - isn't part of that fact, unless I claim to present a big picture, which I clearly fucking didn't.
If the virus were 50% fatal that would be a *250x* increase in mortality rate for 18-44 yos... That's the difference between dying in a pedestrian accident, and dying by lightning strike.
Even if I conceded that in such a situation, extreme measures might trump human rights - which I don't, because human rights are inalienable - would mandating vaccines actually help? Would people not voluntarily take them, and have wildly increased social pressure to take them?
And once people were mandated into taking a vaccine, how often would it be boosted: every 6 months? Would Pfizer be allowed to keep their contracts secret, and allowed to prevent other countries from sharing vaccines or making their own? Even when other countries have abysmal vaccination rates?
At what point would the vaccination boosters stop? When 90% of the population has been through the virus? Or never, because a new variant could come along? What if they start raising the prices, and only the wealthy can stay alive?
And this is all assuming that in this alternate universe, the vaccines actually prevent transmission. Which ours don't.
Fun thought experiment; I suggest you think about it a bit more.
Let's see if we can nail it down. If we had a vaccine that perfectly prevented transmission, and the virus had a 50% mortality rate, would your proposed human right be flexible, or does it remain a societal suicide pact?
Is it possible for two human rights to be in conflict with each other?
That's not a Gish Gallop, those are all relevant points. If you choose not to see that, that's on you. Because there is a profit motive, and there are secret contracts, and there are profound inequalities in global distribution.
But sure, let's "nail it down" in this hypothetical fantasy, where vaccines perfectly stop transmission and the virus is orders of magnitude more lethal:
You still don't have a right to put Pfizer's goop into people who don't want it. Clear?
And, if the vaccination perfectly prevented transmission, then people who don't take it would only be hurting themselves. Your argument falls apart completely.
Except for people that can't get vaccinated, which while is a minority isn't a small amount. People have rights, unless those rights interfere with other people's rights. You don't have the right to be a walking bio weapon. I don't think you should be forced to be vaccinated, but I think society has a right to place restrictions on where you can go if you choose to remain infectious.
Re those who can't get vaccinated, once again: Vaccinations do not prevent transmission. Vaccinations do not prevent transmission. Vaccinations do not prevent transmission. Do you get it?
... A walking Bioweapon?
Please, tell me - if you can - what the number needed to vaccinate (NNTV) is, in order to prevent a single case, hospitalization, ICU admission or death.
If you can't tell me that, then you have no leg to stand on to accuse people of being "walking bioweapons" (jesus h christ). And once you find any of those 4 NNTVs, I think you'll be more than a little surprised, if you have any intellectual honesty at all
> the hypothetical was: "where vaccines perfectly stop transmission and the virus is orders of magnitude more lethal".
As I said: "if the vaccination perfectly prevented transmission, then people who don't take it would only be hurting themselves".
- The argument already caved in on itself. The logic fail was hilarious. And you're still arguing? Pfffft, feck off.
> way to move the goal post. Why is the requirement to stop a single case?
Because you called unvaccinated people "walking bioweapons", and I'd like you to try and quantify that for yourself. Don't you like knowing what you're talking about? The NNVT exists for that purpose.
Please don't come back at me with more poorly thought through accusations; at my limit for the day.
You seem to be letting your emotions rule and not following the thread you started.
Your point was: vaccines don’t prevent infections. Even if vaccines were hypothetically 100% effective at preventing infections then there is still no point in putting restrictions on the unvaccinated since those vaccinated would be perfectly protected.
My question was, given the above what about people that can’t get the vaccine for various reasons? We’ll have “walking bio weapons” that are dangerous to them.
Basically how far does individual freedom extend with you? Does it go so far as putting other people at risk?
How did you and a whole bunch of other people apparently hear "95% efficacy against severe disease" and somehow decide that meant "100% efficacy against infection"?
They did loudly proclaim 100% efficacy against infection when vaccines were firstly introduced. Like many other such proclamations that turned out to be wildly incorrect. No surprise people learned to discredit all such claims and their sources.
> Primary efficacy analysis demonstrates BNT162b2 to be 95% effective against COVID-19 beginning 28 days after the first dose;170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group
> This first interim analysis was based on 95 cases, of which 90 cases of COVID-19 were observed in the placebo group versus 5 cases observed in the mRNA-1273 group, resulting in a point estimate of vaccine efficacy of 94.5% (p <0.0001).
> Thirty-two cases of severe disease, as defined by the CDC, were observed in the placebo group versus none in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group, indicating that the vaccine was 100% efficacious in this analysis against severe disease by the CDC definition (95% CI, [88.0,100.0]). Twenty-one severe cases, as defined by the FDA, were observed in the placebo group versus one case in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group, indicating 95.3% efficacy by the FDA definition (95% CI, [71.0, 99.9]).
They've been clear since the very beginning that vaccinated people could still get infected, and that efficacy was regarding severe disease.
I stand corrected, the number I had in mind is indeed about 100% protection from death and severe disease [0]. That was back when people were potentially waiting for more effective vaccines.
>It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective
Looks like you are really a optimist. I would say, 'It's clear now that the vaccines require one dose every 5-6 months to be effective against hard covid symptoms'.
Additionally I would not say 'Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave', instead I would say 'Our governments failed hard during the complete pandemic'.
We simply don't know. There are other vaccines that require a delayed third dose, so I don't think it is that unlikely that the boosters could cause a much longer-lived immunity. But it could also be that we'll need yearly boosters, or maybe only for the elderly.
I'll accept "Our governments failed especially hard this wave", the problems were more predictable this time and the responses were worse.
Our governments should have done nothing. People, doctors and clinics would have taken care of this easily. Also, it would be a good community building exercise.
But no. Once the Governments stepped in, it was all lockdowns, prohibition and ban of repurpose drugs, soldiers marching through streets, 80 years of ethics preaching tossed out the window in a heart beat.
While I do feel the restrictions have been widely overzealous, to say "People, doctors and clinics would have taken care of this easily." is an absolute falsehood. The failure of the healthcare system to keep up in many places is what caused many restrictions to become a necessity in the first place.
Sorry, but what healthcare system has even tried to keep up? Instead of adding capacity and implementing targeted, fast training programmes they have been firing healthcare workers, and letting the rest get burned out. In most areas of life companies that suddenly face a surge in demand would come up with dozens of creative ways of meeting that demand - instead, governments enforced lockdowns which pushed hospitals deep into the red.
Just today there is a story about how the NHS in the UK bought all the private sector health care capacity at the start of the pandemic, and then didn't actually use any of it!
In neighbouring Switzerland the healthcare system did in fact add lots of emergency ICU capacity in March 2020. They spent the next 1.5 years getting rid of it again because it wasn't necessary. Look at their dashboard to see this.
Healthcare management is the failure nobody dare name in all this. They've had 18 months to find ways to add capacity, for a disease with no cure and that doesn't even require surgery. Instead they expect all of society to become slaves to the god of hospital beds.
>71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for COVID, this is from a poll published today.
From the article:
>Germany, much like Austria, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in western Europe, with 68.4% and 65.6% of eligible adults vaccinated respectively, according to the ECDC.
More Germans support mandatory vaccinations than are actually vaccinated? Seems like it should be the opposite. There are many vaccinated people (like myself) who oppose mandatory vaccinations, but are there unvaccinated people who support vaccine mandates? If so, I haven't met one.
>It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care and were to some degree avoidable.
That's not clear at all. In fact, all the data shows that incidence of mortality and severe illness among those with 2 vaccine doses and 3 is virtually nil. Reducing your chance at mortality while fully vaxxed from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000 is hardly significant, even though its technically correct that your chances of dying are "double" without the "booster". Nor is there any data that multiple shots reduce transmission rates.
The 68.4% number is wrong or outdated or maybe relative to the whole population including minors. Currently, 79.3% of German adults are vaccinated. This is according to official numbers with actual numbers estimated to be up to 5 percentage points higher.
Your own link puts it at 79,3% of eligible adults with at least 2 shots, from this I would strongly presume that the poll was mostly asking adults and excluded (pre)-teens.
The daily death rate is at around 100 people per day and that's "100 people dying within 28 days of a positive COVID test" - a meaningless statistic that does not tell you a single thing.
Plus, the stats only show deaths with covid on the certificate. That means they could have died from something else.
This whole thing is a farce. A charade.
Make no mistake: they're coming for your children.
Also, there are approximately 450 deaths per day from cancer - where is the government push to fix that?[1]
I would be very happy if my government did the same. What a relief it would be!
It's a public health measure, like public sanitation requirements, and driving a car that meets safety requirements. Unvaccinated people should be free to do whatever they want, short of risking infecting other people. Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.
If your goal is exclusively to prevent transmission in itself vaccines aren't always they best way to do it. Isolation or biohazard suits are the way to go there.
If you require society to still keep working and for people to not die vaccines generally do a pretty good job of that.
If your goal is to prevent mutation of dangerous new variants vaccines are wildly effective.
Vaccines generally DO prevent transmission, just not this one, coronaviruses mutate too fast, and the vaccines only target the spike.
This vaccine can spark new mutations since vaccinated people can get it and the virus would mutate to attempt to work around the vaccine immunity.
GPs main point was people's freedoms should be restricted to stop the spread. My point was it doesn't stop the spread. So why restrict freedoms?
Vaccinated people will continue to spread the virus, whether it's slower or faster doesn't matter in the end, it will spread until it's endemic. (I believe it already is)
>whether it's slower or faster doesn't matter in the end, it will spread until it's endemic.
I'm not sure this is reasonable to assume. Below a certain threshold of transmissibility any virus (including this one) will die faster than it spreads, leading to eventual extinction of the virus.
Passing a driver's test doesn't fully prevent all car accidents, and yet we still require potential drivers to pass a test. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
There is no “freedom from being injected” or “freedom from spreading a virus” or “freedom from denying a vaccine, getting sick and straining the healthcare system”.
> There is no “freedom from being injected” or “freedom from spreading a virus” or “freedom from denying a vaccine, getting sick and straining the healthcare system”.
Actually, any authority not explicitly given to the government in the US Constitution is implicitly a right. See the Tenth Amendment. Also, wouldn't those fall under the right of privacy used to justify abortions or the right to due process protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments?
Possibly yes, in principle.
If it is non-punitive, like most of the licenses in existence. For this a few points will need to be satisfied though, which, in my opinion are not, at present.
- It needs to be shown that significant difference exists in the degree of risk/harm reduction between "licensed" and "unlicensed". That reduction must be measured and quantified or qualified beyond reasonable doubt. The threshold of significance also must be socially agreed upon.
- Likewise, the very risk/harm to be reduced needs to be shown as being worth an essentially society-divisive measure. Again, the agreement needs to be reached on where exactly the the tolerance threshold is. Such that it is clear why the same mechanism is/was not applied to other things. Like, why we don't enforce it for seasonal flu, why we don't have blanket 10km/hr speed limit, and why when throwing a BBQ for friends one must not apply for permission and provide proof of recent "food handling safety" certificate.
- At the same time the requirement must be universal, no exception on any grounds, medical or not. Just like blind or mentally deficient person is unable to get PPL or DL, under any circumstances, even though the disability is not due to their choice.
- The latter must be recognized and "unlicensed" people must not be shamed or vilified. Conversely, creation of the alternative infrastructure must be encouraged, in order to bring these people back into society. Just like we do for people with other disabilities.
Otherwise it is just petty punitive crap. Like in Victoria, where "unlicensed" aren't allowed into KMart, but can run wild in Coles across the floor. Or not allowed into restaurant but happy to mingle in the food court. And honestly, so many measures for the last two years were just hostile and punitive and useless otherwise, it is not surprising that they tend to be rejected as a package, even when you can, arguably, sift one or two reasonable things from it.
I would be okay with it if the unvaccinated are still allowed to go places given they can provide a negative test. But ideally, they shouldn't be barred.
I like to think of the covid vaccine as a potentially forced evolution of humanity, of which a certain subset of its constituents favor reducing the rights of those whom refuse it - a group that they were apart of not so long before.
> You might have a point if the vaccine fully prevented transmission or infection, but it doesn't.
No health or safety measure is perfect. By that standard, we wouldn't have any at all - we can't prevent all contamination of the food supply, so we would prevent none?
> Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.
I see this used every time, if you pay close attention to the phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time by every party.
There will be people thinking that you can't limit their "freedom" because a vaccine is out there at this point and those who fears for their lives can take it and forget about the virus (in most cases).
There will be people thinking that unvaxxed people should loose their "freedom" because they apparently have an increasing probability to infect others (which in most cases are vaccinated and would get a mild infection in most cases?).
I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".
> There will be people thinking that you can't limit their "freedom" because a vaccine is out there at this point and those who fears for their lives can take it and forget about the virus (in most cases).
I don't understand this statement: Who is talking about limiting the freedom of vaccinated people and in what way?
> if you pay close attention to the phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time by every party.
I don't see it at all. If I'm standing still and you punch me in the nose, how could both parties use that argument?
> I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".
Your personal choice and 'respect' are irrelevant. You can not care about and 'respect' them choosing to drive the wrong way on the freeway with you in the car, but so what? They are still risking other people's lives.
> Who is talking about limiting the freedom of vaccinated people and in what way?
Vaxxed would like to limit unvaxxed "freedom" even though they are not threatened at all by them, this is what science has been telling us for at least 5 months: vaccines work, they drastically reduce breakthrough infection and death, I don't think I need to show you the data on that.
> If I'm standing still and you punch me in the nose, how could both parties use that argument?
The fact is that they are not punching your nose at all. If you don't want to get punched you have a free effective vaccine that will put a giant steel wall in front of you and protect your nose from punches. If you don't want to get vaxxed it's your responsibility to consider that you will get a punch in your nose sooner or later.
> Your personal choice is irrelevant.
I strongly agree with this, that's why I will never limit others based on something I want or think, ever.
> You can not care about and 'respect' them choosing to drive the wrong way on the freeway with you in the car, but so what?
Nobody is driving the wrong way, getting vaxxed is not mandatory at the moment so they are doing so legally.
> They are still risking other people's lives.
Let's pretend this is true (in my useless opinion it is not since everybody can take the vaccine and be safe), as far as I know vaxxed can still spread the virus. What we also know is that vaxxed people seems to get _less_ infected, but they could very well be infected too (recent UKHA data shows that on average vaxxed people will get infected with 60% less probability than unvaxxed). Since this is a matter of getting infected or not, I don't see why vaxxed (according to your phrase) are exempt from risking other people's live just because they have a 60% less probability of getting infected and spread the virus. Me and you could very easily spread the virus and risk other people's lives as an unvaxxed.
Well said, I agree with your points. Anyone who want the protection conferred by the vaccine in developed countries likely already has it. At this point, the unvaccinated are just used as scapegoats for why the pandemic isn't over. It's a great way for politicians to shift blame regarding criticisms of how they've been handling covid.
> Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.
I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Can you give a clear and fair number? Obviously people will never fully stop getting sick, but how low exactly before we're content?
As a foreigner living in Germany I could live with it if there were otherwise sound measures, but it's mostly been a bunch of wishful thinking. There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over". Even this I could understand, but this year they do the same thing again! Surprise, surprise that there is a record wave now. People have mostly given up and follow no rules other than the most basic ones (masks etc).
I am also starting to think this country is not really built to work in a crisis like this. Regulations are maybe good in general, but this tendency to regulate every possible detail does not work when you have to change the rules every month because almost nobody really knows how to fix this.
"open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early"
It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the effects of covid-lockdown measures, they show a small increase in total mortality. So we should have done as the Swedes and kept everything open from beginning to end.
Persistence of various symptoms in people who recovered from COVID-19 (collectively called Long COVID) is a major health issue worldwide. It could be due to various mechanisms such as post-intensive care syndrome, post-viral fatigue syndrome, permanent organ damage or others. Proper clinical evaluation will help identify the etiology, and to customize treatment. As the disease is new, it is too early to know the true long-term outlook.
I think mask mandates and ratcheting up the pressure to get vaccinated is a far better use of the "restriction budget" than full lockdowns on the entire population, yes. Lockdowns on people who aren't yet vaccinated by choice seem pretty great to me.
Because all of these things work at population level, not necessarily at an individual level.
Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in any given situation.
As a side benefit some masks protect the wearer to an extent, particularly N95s, but the main purpose is to reduce spread from infected people in the first place.
Vaccines, similarly, are not a magic shield that protect you from even getting COVID. Instead, they dramatically reduce your likelihood of getting severely ill and being hospitalised and reduce the duration of disease therefore also reducing transmission. But that only works if enough people are vaccinated that the cumulative effect of that reduced transmission can meaningfully bring down the R0 value.
This pandemic has exposed how few people are able to consider issues or questions at a broader community level versus merely how it affects them directly.
And lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a doctor has determined are required medically, some are elective but England doesn't do many electives because of cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil.
There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).
Isn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none, and media has instead shifted to infection rate.
If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
This is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation.
"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
No, I'm providing what you asked for: A measurement of excess deaths.
That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average.
If those excess death calculations are perfectly acceptable to calculate the effect of bad flu seasons and other mortality-affecting events, why are they suddenly not okay now?
Yeah like every other article they use a formula to calculate what is "excessive" which is not explained at all, and is used as the whole basis of the article. I took a peak in the github repo and I can't really read R well enough to make anything of it, but from a quick look and reading the article "take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years" it could be a well defined prediction, or it could just be an average. It's unclear as the method section here is completely unknown, and I'm sceptical how you could ever calculate a fixed number prediction without obscuring the standard deviation.
Why not just show standard deviation, median, average, percentile. Show the standard deviation in the graph.
You know that's just an article providing an overview, right? It's not the official source of excess mortality statistics.
For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records when preparing statistics. The figure I quoted, for instance, is from the South African Medical Research Council, who publish their methodology. There's also EuroMOMO and many others.
Did you really think that statisticians and scientists have just magically forgotten about how to do basic statistics, for decades, when preparing these reports?
Why should I put any weight to statistical results that are made with some unknown "formula" and is not presented in a standard way.
Instead of using the normal measures of mean, average, standard deviation and percentiles, we just used "formula" and voila, here is answer. Ok I'm going to continue to be sceptical of such results..
Excess death tracking is hardly a new thing, most countries have been doing it for decades to measure the effect of things like flu outbreaks. Therefore when those same statistics being done using the same approach suddenly show huge climbs in 2020 and 2021 it means something.
Stop trying to minimise the pandemic. If your arguments about how to deal with it are rational they should stand up to the reality of how serious it really is, rather than a pretend reality where people haven't been dying in large numbers and filling up hospitals for two years.
I'm not trying to minimise the pandemic, I'm pointing out obvious ways that it is exaggerated, such as lacking basic statistical scrutiny and throwing around huge scary numbers with no comparison or explanation.
Another example from the media (now I am shifting goal posts, but defending my point of proving that it's exaggerated and manipulative): Why are they reporting running totals of number of deahts? And making big headlines of when they reach "new grim milestones"? How is that not a completely irrelevant manipulative misinterpretation? A running total of deaths, really? When will that ever go down? And using that to support a case that "things are getting worse" somehow.
Nope. You may think you are, but in reality you're ignorant of how these statistics are calculated and you that's why you think you're smart for finding what you think are mistakes. This has, actually, all been taken into account, and more, for excess mortality statistics.
I'd recommend you spend some more time learning how the scientists and statisticians calculating these figures actually work, and maybe speak to a few, before commenting further.
It's not my job to find out how they made their secret calculations, it's up to them to show it if they want to present credible results, otherwise it should be ignored.
> Isn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none
It isn't reported because it takes more explanation than the media likes to give, and direct COVID-19 death counts are less complicated, not because “there is none” which is just false:
Direct covid-19 deaths are irrelevant in relation to deciding about lockdowns, that's deliberately making an issue more complex than it is, in order to obscure it. If covid deaths are simply a proportion of expected death, which are not higher than usual, then there is no need for any measures at all.
Again, as stated in GP (with supporting data) in neither Germany (the context of the article) nor the US (the context and source of much of the political debate in the thread) is it true that actual deaths are not higher than expected from pre-pandemic experience.
That doesn't say anything, it only counts death during one single year: 2020. And concludes that the death rate is excessive during the flu season, compared to not in the flu season.
It expects death rate to be constant over the year, which is wrong.
You need to take the total number of deaths per capita, for 2020, and compare that to the same number for 2019, 2018, 2017 etc. And look at the standard deviation.
What on earth are you looking at? The default view is US weekly excess deaths for 2018 through October 2021, and uses historical estimates from 2013 to present to estimate per-week thresholds: it's most certainly NOT using a single threshold per year. Go read the methodology section, please!
You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous years, but because flu season happens every year since before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-Covid measures these last two years.
You are correct, I looked at it again, it's actually using historical data.
But I'm still not sure what I'm looking at, overlaying a single year over an average is always going to look "excessive". I want to see previous years as well, why not just extend the graph? That's the one single most important number that you never get so see. Here they have buried it in a complex algorithm which looks honestly suspicious at first glance, upper bound for excessive death is basically the same as average. Is standard deviation really that low?
EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?
> EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?
Because that statistic makes the whole thing seem very mellow. Same thing as average life expectancy by year; the change from 2019 to 2020/21 is very slight.
Yeah but then the whole thing is very mellow, and showing that to people is the right thing to do, and not misinterpreting to blow something out of proportion to spread panic. But I guess it doesn't get enough clicks, and it's too late now to point out that the emperor is naked...
Based on your earlier misreading of the data, please notice that you have a conclusion that you're projecting into the data. As they say, you can torture the data until it speaks. But it's very easy to look up yearly flu deaths (~40k, up to 60k in the exceptional 2017-18 season), and see that there's an order of magnitude difference between that and what we see here.
In other words, Is the emperor actually naked, or are you simply fishing for the conclusion you want to hear?
I don't think you need to outline a number in advance (if you are familiar with the UK's response, one very big problem has been that forecasts of deaths has consistently undershot estimates even when England wasn't in lockdown and had no mask mandate). We had excess mortality around 10k/week in April, that probably did require a lockdown (to be clear though, if the govt had handled the care home situation better than maybe not necessary) but the bump in December last year was very minor. I am not sure what you mean by who...whoever gets Covid.
Yes, no issues at all. I support lockdowns and have had relatives who became very ill because of lockdowns (delayed/ineffective hospital treatment, I am actually not well myself either for the same reason). I think trying to argue that someone should only support/oppose something because they have something to gain personally is the reason why politics in some countries is totally fucked (the UK is probably the worst for this, somewhere around 2017/18 most of the media became tabloids and every politics story contained some hyperbolic bullshit from some random person claiming their life would be destroyed by X minor policy change...it is just a waste of time and energy for all involved).
Right, and how do you explain what has happened in Scotland then? The SNP gave ample rope to the NHS, and they promptly hung themselves with it. I agree there are structural issues but those aren't separable from the funding issues. A few months ago, the Tories said the NHS was getting £20bn in extra funding, and journalists were being briefed by NHS lobbyists/BMA that weekend that it wasn't enough...at some point, the public has to recognise that the resources problem isn't separable from the structural problems.
My comment about electives was for the US audience. The US does a huge amount of quality-of-life, elective surgeries that don't happen in the UK (i.e. giving an 85-year old a knee replacement). So when you write something like: the waiting list is long, people from the US might not understand that the mix of surgeries in the UK is very different from there, and it largely represents people who need prompt care (for example, I have a relative who is a high bowel cancer risk and needs a regular screen, in the US this would likely happen annually but hasn't happened for about three years now because they were overdue in early 2020 and then everything stopped).
You should add Mortality + mortality in the following year. Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.
> Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.
I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected".
I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health.
Hm, I think that article references this paper[1]. It looks like their "control group" was patients who were tested for COVID-19 for any reason. They then checked whether the age distributions and distributions of Charleson Comorbidity Scores were the same for people who tested positive vs those who tested negative (of positive tests, 65.3% were under 65 vs 64.5% of negative tests, 53.5% had a comorbidity score of 0 or 1 among positives vs 49.4% among negatives). However, they then checked the age distributions between mild and severe cases, found very large differences (54.5% of severe cases were over age 65 vs 20.3% of mild cases, and 74.2% of severe cases had a comorbidity score of 2 or more vs 26.4% of mild cases)[2]. And then if I'm reading correctly, they just decided that was fine and they'd calculate the hazard ratios for mild vs severe COVID without adjusting for underlying confounders anyway?
Their methodology doesn't look super sketchy when it comes to COVID vs no COVID, but I am not sure what they're trying to do by comparing mild with severe COVID without even controlling for counfounding factors.
Yeah because people who get severe covid are immune compromised, and that means they get are at high risk for severe illness/death from any infection, not just covid. And remember that most people who "die from covid" are old and frail and more or less at end of life. Median age for covid deaths in germany is 85.
Even if I use your position that people were to die without being infected due to their health already being somewhat compromised (which isn't the case here but I will suppose it for your trollish statements) - the point is that COVID-19 has serious and significant impacts on the cardiovascular system beyond your immediate infection and more so than we previously thought.
If the plan is to continue lockdowns until every last hypochondriac stops complaining about 'long covid', then lockdowns will never end. There needs to be a cutoff somewhere.
As far as I know, the latest research says that more than half (!) of people experience fatigue and other symptoms after 6 months. I don’t know if lockdowns are the right solution, but if the modal outcome is chronic fatigue than it seems a little flippant to call someone a hypochondriac.
When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And anecdotally, every last person I personally know that claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a hypochondriac.
I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.
> When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place.
> There is a widespread perception that people either die, get admitted to hospital or recover after two weeks. It is increasingly clear that for some people there is a distinct pathway of ongoing effects. There is an urgent need to better understand the symptom journey and the clinical risks that underlie that. People, their families and healthcare professionals need realistic expectations about what to expect.
It appears that this is from October 2020 with some links updated in January 2021. So, it's nearly a year old. My citation is from November 2021. Surely we've learned a significant amount about COVID in 2021.
Of course, these days, anyone can link to a "study" about anything that says anything you want it to say.
I mean, i just took that study from the Wikipedia page on long covid.
What you linked may be valid, but so far has zero citations and various critical discussion going on in the comments. Is this already published at all or is it a preprint?
I don't have enough time or knowledge to assess the validity of the claims, but based on that, the study I found on Wikipedia seems more trustworthy to me.
There was a study recently published that showed that long covid was correlated with personal belief of having had covid and not having actually had it (antibodies), in other words, vast majority is psychosomatic which is frankly what you'd expect in the current climate of hysteria.
Conversely another very real phenomenon is fear induced immunosupression, to which all of these overreactive measures and constant media bombardment are greatly contributing.
Parasmia, phantosmia, chronic fatigue, and narcolepsy (and I am an incredibly stubborn person when it comes go "keep on keeping on"). It's always an interesting new day when I'm sitting at my desk at the office and don't know whether I'm going to smell diesel fuel, dog shit, burnt toast, or one of another random smells. Also, tap water tastes like ditto paper used to smell, so that's fun.
We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.
And by 'Sweet Spot' we mean a materially higher death rate than immediate peers ...
The lockdowns were imminently effective.
In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we cloistered again and the numbers came down.
If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down drastically.
Here you go [1]
In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down.
Lockdowns in Canada were ridiculous, particularly in Ontario. People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. My parents couldn't drive to their cabin up north in fear of being ticketed.
My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband who resented her for going to work because he thought she was going to get him killed.
Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to disregard rules later on?
> People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes.
If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).
> During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering.
to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside
> Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.
I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup could be much worse than in the US.
It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just because those particular places have an increased risk of infection but also to stop people from traveling to and from those places.
I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk.
I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.
So shut down the trains. If someone is driving to their cabin, there is no reason to stop them. It was always completely irrational to prohibit solitary or family-oriented outdoor activities. They did that around here for a while, in a largely rural state in the US Pacific Northwest region.
Senseless "do something!" edicts like that give a lot of rhetorical ammunition to the denialists and antivaxxers, while doing nothing to address the spread of COVID.
Another reason to keep people from traveling is to make sure they stay where there's available healthcare.
If everyone traveled to their cabin and got sick, the local hospital wouldn't be able to handle all the cases.
Not anymore, as the virus is already anywhere. But there absolutely was a reason to stop potentially infected from travelling large distances and carry the infection into other regions.
It's a tiny bit glib to lament 'science denialism' in a pandemic for which we do not have any living memory of dealing with, a new kind of disease for which there are many unknowns, serious concerns with equipment and personnel shortages, high mortality, time constraints, a state of emergency, and most evidently the very low social cost of 'not gathering in groups' outdoors.
In hindsight, they probably didn't need to go that far, but that's hindsight.
Along with the vaccine denialism, the other thing that has surprised me among the concerns of the plebes, is how they have difficulty grasping what an emergency implies.
There is a term called 'Fog of War' that military people are aware of, hinted at in the term 'No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy'.
Running government is like running a company - it's operational. But governing in an Emergency is more like running a startup but where all your personnel are 9-to-5 functionaries not used to such situations. It's managed chaos at best, nothing will be optimized.
Nobody has ever dealt with these problems before in living memory there are far too many unknowns, and there are very serious consequences i.e. death, hospitals overflowing, staff shortages, it's a very real emergency.
If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers, it's visceral.
It's managed chaos at best.
Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same time encouraged people to 'get out'.
But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but if we can bring a national emergency down to something more bearable, so be it.
If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to get outdoors).
>" People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes"
This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns. What was discouraged is big companies having party in the parks.
I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking from experience.
I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were). And that was my point -- such people may be less inclined to follow certain guidelines in later phases of the pandemic.
> The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm.
I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't been locked down at all with zero mandates since last June and while it's certainly not rainbows, it's not nearly "untold harm" either.
Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?
"I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were)"
'That you can't visit some parks' is not material in the face of the fact that you 1) cannot go to work 2) cannot gather with people 3) must wear a mask 4) cannot go to restaurants or cinemas 5) numerous other restrictions and especially 6) Must stay at home unless you have a reason to leave.
Most of those restrictions are legitimate in the fact of a drastic spike in COVID cases, which makes the 'Don't Go To A Park' a footnote in that context.
"The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes" -> "But Florida didn't have Lockdowns"
"Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"
Every situation is a bit different, and the data is not perfectly clear, but the evidence points to 'the total social changes due to lockdowns' do actually work, moreover, none of that was known in May 2020.
We had no examples but the crisis in China and Europe back then.
Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason even if they erred a bit too much on the side of caution here and there. 'That we cold not go to parks' just isn't very relevant. If we have to do another lockdown, we will probably be able to go to the park.
> That you can't visit some parks' is not material
Disagree. Being in California I was grateful to comfortably meet with friends to go for a hike. The risk was trivial and I value social interaction. The fact that I cannot go to work or gather with people made things that you regard as immaterial in this context a lot more important to me.
> Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason
Certainly, but it was clear within a few months (Jul 2020) that being outdoors was reasonably safe, especially if you are decently distanced. But you still had places restricting people from laying on a beach, or swimming in a beach. There was no scientific support for either of these stupid policies.
> "Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"
this is a silly analogy because health policies have multivariate outcomes, it's just about deaths, etc. and it's not something you can readily experiment on scientifically; these are people's livelihood, wellbeing, and prosperity. Optimizing for a single variable is foolish.
The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though.
That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population - but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden.
The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population.
The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates
That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure how effectively a nation's health care system treated infections.
Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors:
At times, yeah. The closer you get to capacity the more the staff are overworked, the more likely you are to be attached to the old/cranky/unreliable ventilator, the more likely you are to be seen by fill-in staff pulled from other departments, the more likely it is that your hospital will run out of some medication and have to substitute, etc...
So all other things being equal, you'd expect CFRs to rise with case load. Probably not linearly, but measurably.
Sweden indeed has a worse z-score compared to Norway or Denmark, but better compared to France, Netherlands or Belgium (or Germany, for that matter). And much better than Italy or Spain. I say they indeed found a sweet spot and escaped lockdowns.
People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter. I think that has a big impact on how sick people get
Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, north of France and Germany had a closer climate (and more accustomed to heating), that's why I looked up their z-score first.
Yeah, and in germany using the heating in your home is basically considered an unnecessary luxury, while in Sweden it's always included in the rent, and always on.
Every country had to find some balance between freedom and health. I don't think Sweden is to blame more than anyone else. They had less death than most European countries.
Following you reasoning, how many more death did the US have compared to China? would you advocate to lock up people like China did?
Did china get less freedom because of covid lockdowns? That is, surely people faced absurd restrictions, but given the length of the restrictions, which is better for people?
I know that I would prefer 1 month hard lockdown than 1 year soft. But idk how it actually went there (curious to know!)
Talking to friends in China, they've been mostly open since the initial lockdowns. Every once in a while there are hard localized lockdowns, but majority of people majority of the time is life as normal.
And not just freedom, but more important things such as a functioning society in general with regards to childrens education, babies being born, the economy doing well etc etc. It's not like lockdowns are only affecting some dude's ability to go and drink beer. And they are actively harmful to people's health too, so actually it's about finding a balance between everyone and everything, and the immune compromised people at risk from cold viruses.
A sweet spot, were the elderly first were not properly protected, and then euthanized instead of given at least a treatment effort? Not even C-Pap, just panic-relieve and pain-medication. Not even given a choice, just scratched out of the book by politics.
Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And far worse then the neighbouring countries.
I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the policies were not worse than other bad policies.
Such a relief to live in Sweden. No one is pretending to wear masks and we're doing just fine. If i wasn't reading the news i wouldn't even know there was a pandemic.
As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending to wear masks but only as chin diapers.
You get used to wearing masks very fast and it's no big deal. They can be inconvenient. So what. Independently of the question whether masks are needed or not, it's bizarre and unreasonable that people still get heated about this topic. There are plenty of things worth discussing other than minor inconveniences like wearing masks or washing hands.
Is tattooing a religious symbol on one's forehead "a minor inconvenience"? How about less visible part of a body? What if said symbol is a Hindu swastika? What if it's just a washable decal of a Hindu swastika? What if it is mandated under threat of a fine and imprisonment?
Maybe we have to agree to disagree on "inconvenience" of mask wearing. It is, clearly, an irrational but very powerful standoff. Masks have a marginal effect on protection (11% relative reduction in transmission, according to best recent study? So the abs risk reduced from, say, 20% to 18%) while having an enormous symbolic meaning, made even bigger by turning into political token. Washing hands is not even in the same league of religiousness. We'll see how it goes when it is made mandatory with govt-appointed "hygiene inspectors" at every workplace and fines up to a few grand...
Surely, fogging glasses and alike are minor things, but instinctive revulsion, panic, "brain shutting", "blood boiling" and suicidal tendencies aren't something to dismiss. I'm not particularly proud to be having such reaction, and I honestly tried to rationalize myself out of it, but to no success. At this point I also try to avoid seeing masked faces. I close articles or posts where author's photo is masked, blacklist YT channels and switch off TV when masked reporter or anybody pops up. That's the only thing I can do to keep some sanity before it overcomes me. And it will, because the mask mandates are looking to be with us for years...
The analogy you don't have to accept, but may help to illustrate how we (people, resisting "minor" inconvenience for "greater good") feel. Consensual physical intimacy is a great thing, very pleasant, absolutely harmless if practiced with proper care and contraception. People always sought it and it is still very much a driver of life, and will be forever. In wild nature our close relatives, bonobos, practice it widely and casually for stress relief, and it works great for the cohesion of their society! They known to have much less aggression than their bigger bros or humans. Surely the solid rational case can be made that adopting such practices could improve human society as well, maybe in major way. How would you feel if such "minor inconvenience" is mandated, with proper rules and protocols, of course? It must bizarre and unreasonable that the foolishness of "muh freedumb" standing in the way to "Greater Good"? How foolish it is of humans to make non-consensual intercourse a crime, sometimes worse than murder!
Why would you get vaccinated for something that you're not in a risk group for anyway, it doesn't make any sense. And even double vaccines and boosters. If you did this pre-covid the doctor would have diagnosed you a hypochondric
Do you know that it's very normal for people not in a risk group for the flu to not only get double vaccines but to actually get a new one every single year? OMG, doctor's must be going crazy with all the hypochondriacs doing that.
No I've never heard of anyone doing that, and I have never read anything about it or seen it in the media. The only thing I've ever heard is that elderly people over 70 has the option to take one dose of flu vaccine per year
We certainly got vaccinated, but it could be better. But masks are few and far between. There was a recommendation to wear them on some public transport for a while (and might come back, due to Omicron), but my very unscientific anecdata I'd say less than 1% of people I see wear masks. Going through the central station in Stockholm in rush hour, seeing hundreds if not thousands of people, and you can probably count the number of mask wearers on your fingers.
I would follow any mask mandate, but the experience here (from my point of view) is that they don't seem to help that much. Otherwise we should have an absolute explosion of cases right now, compared to other European countries. My personal theory is that people don't use them properly; look at people on tv, constantly adjusting them, or wearing them under the chin, reusing single-use masks, etc.
There's been an uptick in cases during the last week or so[1], but compare it to eg. Germany[2] that have had a strong mask mandate for a long time. I don't understand it either.
And everyone always forgets those politicians who had to resign after making millions on the mask deals, and pretend that this corruption has nothing to do with why Germany has the mask mandates...
The VAST majority of deaths there are people over 70, and Sweden like the US warehouses old people in cramped retirement homes where the virus can spread rapidly regardless of the public health approach outside. Their deaths fell off precipitously once vaccines got to the old.
The lesson here seems to be that nursing homes probably cause some amount of excess mortality, and need special attention during epidemics/pandemics.
Yes, very different. Starting in the 90's Norway started transitioning from large crowded buildings with long corridors to more home based care and other approaches that seek to keep people out of settings that look like nursing homes. In southern Europe more people live with family when they're old. This is common in lots of Asia as well. In the US it varies a lot regionally and by income.
The crowding can cause a lot of morbidity before anyone knows what's going on or how to treat the new infection. This is what happened in New York, the pandemic ripped through nursing facilities killing thousands of seniors well before any treatment was available.
If things unfold more slowly, you have more time to develop treatments. A lot of the deaths in NYC occurred before we figured out that just laying people on their sides reduced the risk of dying significantly.
Moreover, now that we have the ability to rapidly produce vaccines, it isn't a forgone conclusion that everyone will necessarily "get the virus eventually anyway."
The numbers in Russia cannot be believed. My entire extended family (in Moscow) caught what was almost certainly COVID (Most of them twice, my grandfather was at death's door over it), and not a single one of them got a positive diagnosis.
Sweden did worse than the other Scandinavian countries that enacted stricter Covid restrictions, including lockdowns. Sweden had roughly 5-7x as many deaths per capita as its immediate neighbors of Norway and Finland. Germany had less deaths per capita as well:
What is this obsession with limiting comparison of Sweden with "other scandanavian countries"? Is there some sort of special risk factor that only applies to scandanavia? Does COVID know what people look like? Why not compare stats of major metro areas with other similar metro areas in the world?
Because the density of the metro areas are similar. Stockholm is not comparable to Paris or London when it comes to density for instance.
Culture is also very similar between Scandinavian countries and much different from western Europe, with people much more isolated (which is tough to adjust to for immigrants there actually).
Sweden has much higher ethnic & cultural diversity than Norway & Finland, and hence more people passing through it's borders potentially bringing in new infections from abroad. It also has fewer hospital beds per population, and higher population density.
All these factors and more need to be taken into account when doing country comparisons. We won't really know how much effect the difference in policies had until someone has done a proper causal analysis using some regression model or other econometric technique.
For the same reason that their vaccination rates and wealth and gini coefficients and all types of other metrics closely resemble each other more than some random country like Ethiopia or Peru.
We’re talking about Germany and France. Right across the water. Sweden had lower deaths in earlier years than their neighboring countries and this was a reversion to the mean. Speaking as a Norwegian people in this country like to look smart but they’re not getting the last laugh this time.
Because they have similar risk factors, which are much, much lower than the other countries people are noting Sweden appeared to have fared better than. The UK, which imported a lot more cases, has more crowded commuter trains and bars and probably a less sensible population tried the Swedish strategy for a few weeks, but gave up because the deaths were mounting.
Yeah and avoiding looking at the statistics for mortality to see if it's actually higher than usual, which it isn't. I looked at the statistics of mortality for sweden, 2020 was high but well within standard deviation, and there were several more deadly years in recent history, 2008 and much more deadly years in the 1990s, without this ever even making headlines.
What stood out the most in the statistics, actually, was that 2019 had an unusually low death rates, if you add up 2020 and 2019 they basically even out to an average death rate.
I bet mortality has been abnormally low during 2021 so now we have a bunch of dry tinder again which will cause another "crisis" and lockdown as soon as weather is cold and viruses making the rounds again. Never ending cycle of panicking when old people die.
It's always cherry picking to deliberately misinterpret statistics to make the most dramatic headline, it has been during the whole pandemic. Nobody is even trying to make accurate and relevant conclusions with the numbers, quite the opposite it's like a sport now who can lie the most with statistics.
A lot of that can be attributed to a relatively huge early spike in deaths at nursing homes.
Rightly, Sweden decided it was a bad idea to do go about business as usual at nursing homes. After this, their relative difference to other Scandinavian countries is much smaller.
And are those spikes in deaths at nursing homes not normal? Is that not how things always and usually work? Do people at nursing homes not die mostly in the winter and flu season, since forever? What are the statistics of excess mortality, is it higher than usual or not. Old people die. I read headlines in the papers "10 people have died since moving into a nursing home" That's what nursing homes are for. Everyone who moves into a nursing home dies...
Doesn't say anything, death rates are not constant, it always varies a lot ever year by year. Did 2020 have excessive mortality per capita compared to other years or not? No it didn't. It doesn't matter if you find some anecdote.
Everyone knows death rate was high in peak covid. As it always is in peak flu season, so what, the year was well within standard deviation
It doesn't make any sense to compare it to neighboring countries, you need to compare the same country to previous years. That's the real interesting statistic, and the one that nobody is showing you. Because it's not dramatic enough..
I looked at it again, it's only comparing to the average, without knowing the standard deviation it doesn't really say much. "2020 was above average" yeah we know that, but was it higher than a "usual" year? No it wasn't, and you can't draw that conclusion by comparing it to the average.
Also it looks like they are doing the comparison month by month which doesn't make much sense since this will vary a lot of course...
This data is compiled by professional statisticians.
Deaths aren't evenly distributed throughout the year. High-traffic seasons will cause a spike, very cold or hot weather, etc. So month-by-month comparison is reasonable. Doing that also shows in the graphs when the waves hit various countries.
I agree, it's missing the standard deviation though. (But again, look at the graphs, you'll see a difference of 10, perhaps 20% fluctuating around zero, and then suddenly a wave of 60,80,100% more deaths. It's unlikely a coincidence.
month-by-month doesn't make sense because the flu doesn't happen at the same month each year, and yes without at least also the standard deviation, it doesn't say anything.
Just seeing that the temperature is below average outside doesn't say anything about the question: do we have abnormal weather? Is there a crisis? And even if this years winter is colder than the last three years, still doesn't mean that it's abnormal.
It needs to be a statistical outlier to be abnormal, it needs to be statistically significant. Why are they not showing previous years? Why are sample sizes deliberately small when we have more data? Why don't we see basic required numbers such as standard deviation, median, percentiles? It's all clickbait bullshit
This is all public data. If you think there’s some big conspiracy you can look it up yourself, calculate how the data show COVID is no big deal and then share the results.
Yeah I already looked at the public data and did the calculations, and I am sharing the results as I've said in other comments, and I challenge anyone to disprove me with another opinion that holds up to normal basic statistical scrutiny, and not some misleading clickbait bullshit
You don't even need to make any calculations really, just take a quick look at the table to see that the death rate was unusually low 2019 and only slightly high in 2020 (Edit: sorry, almost compensated by 2019's low numbers, not completely). And if you go back in time, you can see that in fact every single year between 1999-2012 had a higher mortality rate than 2020.
Yes, I see that. I calculated the mortality rate for all years, then the average and standard deviation for the last 10 years preceding 2020.
The average is 0.92%, standard deviation is 0.03%. The mortality rate in 2020 was 0.95% or exactly one standard deviation above the average for the last 10 years.
There is also another clear trend from the data which is slowly but steadily declining mortality rates. Obviously since 1749, but this trend is especially noteworthy during this century (since 2000). Then only one year has increased mortality (by more than one least significant digit) which is 2020.
2020 saw 10% higher mortality than 2019.
So to conclude: I'm by no means a statistician but I'd say this is probably not a random fluke.
> Counts of deaths in the most recent weeks were compared with historical trends (from 2013 to present) to determine whether the number of deaths in recent weeks was significantly higher than expected, using Farrington surveillance algorithms (1).
I just want to know year by year death rate per capita, and average, and standard deviation. That's the only way I can draw the conclusion "is there anything abnormal going on"
And what is expected deaths per capita? That relative measure is irrelevant unless you compare it to some kind of normal death rate in the past. Are you expecting deaths per capita to drastically drop and be kept much lower from 2020 and forward, compared to the past?
Sweden is just barely worse than other Scandinavian countries (definitely not 5-7x). Germany is 50-100% worse than Sweden.
So while you might use "total deaths" as an argument that the Swedish "no lockdowns" strategy was worse at the beginning of the pandemic, it's clearly superior now.
The linked graph shows Sweden at 7x norway's rate, 5x finland's rate and 3x denmarks rate. Am I reading that right? How are you concluding that Sweden's strategy was clearly superior?
To paraphrase you: it was great to have all those vulnerable people in care homes die immediately from Covid in 2020 since it avoids a few of them dying in 2021.
You realise how nonsensical (and callous) that sounds?
What exactly do those studies compare? How countries without lockdown coped in the same wave?
Lockdowns were called because hospitals were at capacity and immediate risk of failing to keep up service - as is currently again the case e.g in Germany.
Remember, the first lockdowns in Europe were mandated after hospitals in Italy were forced to conduct triage. (The "who do I have to let die" kind of triage)
Why did that not happen in whatever control groups the studies were looking at?
If Swedish hospitals exceeded capacity as has happened in other nations (like the US) then there would have been more severe restrictions. The name of the game is and always has been "don't let this very contagious virus collapse our healthcare systems".
The "we should have never shut anything down" contingent doesn't seem to understand this.
It is worth remembering the "let people get on with it and they will work out" viewpoint within Europe was widely discredited by April 2020 (and ignoring the fact it worked in countries like Japan that have quite significant constraints on govt power).
My conclusion from this is that, in this area, regulations are path dependent. In some countries, people will make the right choices themselves. In others, they won't. I am in the UK, in 2020 it was evident that the hands-off approach really wouldn't work. But it did work this year.
Also, I don't think there is any question about fixing it. You have to test (most countries still don't test enough), you have to give people the information to make a choice, and you have to keep vaccinating. Imo, and I thought the opposite in 2020, lockdowns/heavy regulations aren't a long-term strategy (outside of China).
I think in general, the gap between what regulations say and what people will do anyways will be small (as long as the regulations are more strict than "default" behavior).
At the beginning of the pandemic, where I was, people mostly stopped going to restaurants before regulations said they couldn't. When restrictions have been relaxed, I couldn't really observe any changes in behavior.
Japan didn't "let people get on with it and they will work out". The immigration policy is one of the strictest in the world. We've had numerous "lock downs", which weren't legally enforceable, but when the government makes a request of businesses and people, the compliance rate is very high, and though it's not enforceable, the government will publicly shame companies, and companies take their reputations extremely seriously.
People's willingness to comply with lockdowns over time has waned, because the government's response to covid has been pretty incompetent. The thing that has finally started turning things around is the high rate of vaccination.
There was a paper recently circulating the media which shows the immense amount of "esoteric" people in German speaking countries. Those people are responsible for the staggering vaccination numbers and spreading of conspiracy myths around this crisis. It's so prevalent, I can't remember anyone who at least once spread some unscientific bullshit in the last 2 years here.
The handling of those people in the media and the way their opinions are presented equally with scientific facts result in this reluctance politicians displayed in this crisis. Now we all have to suffer because of it. I hope we finally mandatory vaccinations...it's overdue.
We still have homeopathic pills and "treatments" which are being paid by the health insurance. Something which goes back to some politicians wife who believed in it and was able to influence the political process. The huge Steiner tradition in here is catastrophic. We just recently had COVID running wild in a Waldorf school. Turns out, faked vaccination certificates were very popular...
It's quite embarrassing and it's actually the first time the side effects of this madness come up in public discourse.
The problem with this claim is that vaccine fanatics spread vast amounts of misinformation themselves, and often rely on it for their core arguments.
Just in this thread alone, we can find people saying:
1. Vaccines would let us wipe out COVID (wrong).
2. Even harsher lockdowns would let us wipe out COVID (wrong).
3. Vaccines stop people transmitting it (wrong).
4. Vaccinated people don't end up in ICU with COVID (wrong).
5. Sweden had unusually bad outcomes (wrong).
6. That it's "very normal" for people to take yearly flu shots (wrong, only ~35% uptake amongst at risk patients in 2019).
And that's not even a full list. There's not only a large set of factually incorrect beliefs amongst vaccine mandate fanatics (and that's the only word for you guys now), but also a generalized incorrect belief that it's the other side who are badly informed.
On the other side we have anti-vaxxers here too. Who's more harmful?
While most of those points you made here are just overblown generalisations (and probably not even stated in this fashion), none of them are completely wrong. On the anti-vaxxer side we have claims which are not only completely wrong, people literally die because they or others around them believe in them. So again: what's your point?
By causing hospitals to be overloaded so I or people close to me can't be treated in an emergency? Not to mention all the hospital personnel having one more wave of hell to endure. By giving, possibly repeatedly so much viral lead to old people I know that they might end up in a hospital even when fully vaccinated? By being essentially a petri dish for creating new harmful variants?
The only potentially valid point here is hospital overload. Everything else you listed applies to the vaccinated as well.
Let's start by agreeing that hospital overload is definitely a bad thing.
Vaccination should help reduce the load, but has anything else been done? Hasn't staff in hospitals decreased over the course of the pandemic? Aren't we funneling tons of money to pharma instead of Frontline workers? What about setting up field hospitals? What about altering the priority access to emergency health care of the unvaccinated?
Hospital overload has been a liminal crisis for the past 2 years, but has yet to materialize as a real issue.
Have we just been getting lucky? narrowly avoiding disaster each wave?
Because this is almost starting to look like a boogeyman that pops up on a regular basis that reminds us that we need to live in fear.
> Vaccination should help reduce the load, but has anything else been done? Hasn't staff in hospitals decreased over the course of the pandemic? Aren't we funneling tons of money to pharma
People can go and get a jab. This is easy. Can be done in minutes. No harm done.
You can't build a hospital like that or get personal cloned from some pool of educated personal. Even if we'd have started 2 years ago. Wtf do you want with a field hospital? Those people don't need bandages...what are you talking about??
I know this smokescreen it just came up all over the anti-vaxxer scene. It's a hilarious attempt to cloud their own responsibility and divert the anger away from them. It won't work because it's so cheap and stupid. Especially coming from people who refuse to accept the easiest and fastest solution.
And NO, hospital overload is the only valid point. By spreading and keeping the pandemic running you also ruin peoples lifes economically. People who depend on crowds coming to their store for example or doing sports with them. Than there is long COVID...
Man...this topic is not new. All those ways this is harmful has been presented in the media over the last years. How can you still be so ignoran December 2021????
Field hospitals were proposed early on in 2020, they even sent the medical ship to NY up the Hudson. Its not my idea and it's not a new idea. If you're not aware of that, then I'm sorry for assuming the extent of your awareness.
We don't have to clone anyone. We can do 2 very easy things:
1. Rehire the unvaccinated that were let go.
2. Pay our front line workers more.
Everyone should support this. It's an easy win.
As someone who's unvaccinated and had covid, I honestly don't know what long covid is or why we should be afraid of it anymore than the long term effects of the vaccine.
Though if you fell for one boogeyman, it makes sense that you'd fall for another.
Covid is out of the box, economic damage is inevitable. How much is up to us. If you look at Florida, Sweden, or even the Amish, it's clear lockdowns do more economic harm than covid does.
Last but not least, I'll say it again.
Hospital collapse has been a liminal crisis for 2 years.
We have more vaccinated than ever before yet were still somehow on the brink of collapse. Nothing has been done about it except to scape goat the unvaccinated. People are going to be unvaccinated. The vaccine is going to wear off. Try doing something about it instead of dehumanizing people you disagree with.
> Field hospitals were proposed early on in 2020, they even sent the medical ship to NY up the Hudson.
So this ship was manned by robots or where is the connection to what I wrote?
> We don't have to clone anyone. We can do 2 very easy things: 1. Rehire the unvaccinated that were let go. 2. Pay our front line workers more.
Why would you hire somebody who is unable to do the most basic stuff to protect their patients (get vaccinated). Those people are obviously not suited for their job and I'm happy they are gone. There should be a list so those people never ever end up in a responsible job like that or at least need to get some MPU before they attempt it.
@2 you still won't magically conjure them out of nothing just because you pay them. You need to learn that stuff. It takes time.
> As someone who's unvaccinated and had covid, I honestly don't know what long covid is or why we should be afraid of it anymore than the long term effects of the vaccine.
I can't imagine how somebody can write such a thing December 2021 and still expect to be taken seriously.
I have zero expectations about people's ability to take the right thing seriously.
You've made up your mind. You have complete confidence and conviction in the vaccine.
That's fine. I respect your right to choose based on your own risk tolerance.
So of course you and other fanatics won't take these points seriously, you think the alt premise is completely illegitimate.
It's a fool errand to try to change the mind of someone who's certain they can't be wrong, so I'm not going to try.
What I am trying to do is explain that after 2 years of worrying trends, events, and numerous unknowns.. it's reasonable to believe we're not getting the full story about the vaccine.
But you know what, I hope I'm wrong. Let's chat again in 5 years, and then we'll know for certain.
I wonder if you didn't get the point or intentionally play stupid here because long COVID is a thing already. You don't have to wait 5 years for it. It's happening. It's documented. You can google it up. It's easy. Everybody can do it.
Just because YOU didn't have it, doesn't mean nobody else didn't.
I've seen zero convincing evidence of "long covid".
Mostly I see it defined as vague psychological effects .. hard to imagine any universal confounding factors that might result in everyone having a poorer psyche in general in recent history.
The effects last a few weeks on average, 3 months in rare cases. While its odd an ominous for the effects to last that long, there's no reason to believe it will last for years.
And while there are some real permanent effects, like loss of smell + taste, these are extremely rare. Like vaccine induced myocarditis rare, maybe even more so.
Meanwhile, "all cause of death" rates are on the rise, despite ATH vaccination rates. Is that definitely because of "long covid", and definitely not because of the vaccine? That doesn't make sense to me.
You're taking extreme talking points on this and making it seem like it's the norm.
Vaccines don't stop being from transmitting, but it reduces the length of infection by about 2 days, it drastically reduces the likelihood of infection, which drastically reduces the transmission rate, and recent studies have shown that it does also reduce the likelihood of transmission directly.
Vaccinated people with breakthrough cases may end up in the ICU, but the rate of hospitalization, admittance to the ICU, and cases of death are considerably lower than those who haven't been vaccinated.
Using the extreme example, and pointing out that each argument is wrong, rather than extreme, while not discussing the facts is just another form of misinformation.
I think what he/she is saying is that there are fanatics on both sides, and platforms, parties, and people tend to side with one over the other when it aligns with their agenda. Trust and truth are the casualties.
The reasonable choice is to disallow all fanatics, but the world is too polarized on this topic. The center cannot hold.
It would be nice if they're extreme talking points, but these are routinely presented by the media and public health agencies. For example up until very recently claim (4) was being made in Germany, and claim (3) is basically the claim underlying any implementation of vaccine passports - of course, we may suspect they are in reality merely means of extra-judicial punishment, but governments officially deny it.
Regardless, whilst these claims are "extreme" in the sense of being phrased in absolutes, they aren't "extreme" in the sense of being rarely believed, are they? Not only do they crop up all over this thread but in the very article the thread is about, Angelas Merkel, not exactly famous for being the Queen of Extreme, says "The fourth wave must be broken and this has not yet been achieved" which is simply another way of saying (3) and strongly alluding to (1) and (2).
Also:
"it drastically reduces the likelihood of infection, which drastically reduces the transmission rate, and recent studies have shown that it does also reduce the likelihood of transmission directly"
Let's break this down:
1. Infection rates. Health agencies claim it reduces the likelihood of infection, and at first it genuinely seems to, but the only one that is willing to show the actual raw data before they wildly alter it using statistical techniques, is the UK HSA. Their data shows that by now the rate amongst vaccinated people is actually a lot higher than among the unvaccinated for some large age groups! This sounds like it should be impossible, but it turns out to have been observed in pre-COVID times with other vaccines.
They have been reduced to claiming that comparing case rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people isn't a valid way to determine if the vaccine works, due to vague behavioural differences that they speculate must exist but have no proof for.
2. Rate of transmission. Not for the first time, we find that epidemiological studies aren't worth much. Can you cite yours, so we can see when it was written? Because once again UK data contradicts it (or it does now at least):
"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."
No real difference in transmission at all. Actually slightly higher for vaccinated people but let's assume that's not really significant.
Germany had elections at the end of September, and I feel that this is the main reason for the catastrophy that is unfolding now. It has prevented the ruling parties from imposing stricter vaccination requirements more early on. They could have easily required everyone to be vaccinated by November first, and this current situation would have been spared. Now the government still has to do it, but they need to rush it, and they impose unrealistic goals like 30 million vaccinations until christmas.
After Macron's speech in July to put vaccination requirements for the medical industry, there was a major surge to the vaccination centers. Meanwhile Germany was in pre election mood.
You can see the effect of Macon's speech clearly on this graph: it led to a major surge in per-day vaccinations in mid July 2021 while Germany stayed in steep decline, and the "corona is over" mentality spread. Germany has reduced its distance to France in the last few weeks, but France still has more vaccinations than us, and it's far away from european leaders like Portugal.
At the start of covid, everyone in europe admired Germany for its good covid response. They flew ICU patients from Italy to Germany as the italian hospitals were way beyond their capacity. Now we might have to fly Germans the other way.
Yes, you can say that there has barely been public support for vaccination requirements up until the start of the current wave. And indeed it's been quite unpopular in the autumn. But if politicians had been more courageously trying to sell vaccination requirements, maybe it'd have worked out.
This current wave moves from the east to the west. In fact, Germany has probably peaked, we have 4 days in a row of declining number of infections. France is at the beginning of the next wave, their number of today's infections is approaching German numbers.
Note that German infrastructure is at its limits in terms of how many tests can be done or whether the health office can track down the people a known covid case has been in contact with. Due to the sheer size of the wave, the percentage of unknown covid cases has increased.
I'm not so sure how valid the argument about test capacity limits and underreporting is. While laboratories for PCR tests might be above capacity the 2G+ requirement (recovered or vaccinated AND tested) must have increased quick antigen tests dramatically, which also get registered and positive tests reported. E.g. to enter a public pool I had to get tested and they had a test tent right next to the entrance. The week before I could just enter with my vaccination certificate. Many people have to get tested more extensively now for work or travel. So I would be very surprised if the test coverage hasn't actually increased and declining numbers with more tests certainly looks like a good sign.
Everyone will get this virus. Countries that do good now will do bad later and countries that did bad now we do good later. It's all inevitable. All you can do is take it on the chin or delay it. Every country has predetermined number based on their population demographics and health, that they will hit and there's no thing we can do about it.
Yes they do. But total deaths will always be the same over x amount is time. For instance instead of a 5 year old just getting COVID and never worrying about it again we delay it so they get it when there 80 and die from it. We’ll never have a good enough vaccine. We’ll cure most cancers before this thing. Lol
History will show that the only right choice was to let this thing rip. Come to this thread in 10 - 20 years. Unless an actually deadly virus hasn’t wiped us out by the
The wisest words on this thread that I've seen. Unfortunately, the vaccines only reduce absolute risk in a small elderly population (60+), for everyone else, its a risk/reward that doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, not many understand that often doing nothing is best.
No democratic country is built to handle something like a pandemic. That much became clear the last two years. You need to be able to mandate strict laws that take away a lot of liberties that we have learn to consider as standard.
Absolutely not, have you seen Fox News. Us over here in Australia are absolutely needing to be liberated by the US. I can't wait till the Marines roll in.
Its terrifying, over here in Brisbane, Queensland. We've had one locally acquired case from Covid in the last few months.
We're going to pubs, no masks, No Covid. But we're sorely missing our freedom. /s
While I don’t believe this was true across Australia at certain points in the pandemic, your point is definitely taken and I would agree with the message.
However, I don’t understand the US-centric (satirical) perspective in a comment like this. The article is about Germany, the person you replied to made no specific mention of the US as far as I can tell, and their view is not unusual in many other regions of the world (such as the one I live in). Does the radicalism of Fox News really need more attention or notoriety?
No they are not. If you can declare a state emergency in the name of public health without quantifying it in any way, and bypassing any forms of debates or elections or votes (one expert said something), that's for sure not a democracy.
> No democratic country is built to handle something like a pandemic. That much became clear the last two years.
Much of the measures have been justified by saying they're temporary in place under the emergency. Two years of temporary measures, and now people are saying they need to be permanent.
We had to have stricter rules from day one. Also make vaccination mandatory. Take the hard decisions in the start instead of let this thing dragging for years before you decide to take the political cost. I live in Europe and watching this thing unravel it has been one clusterfuck after another. Lockdowns which weren't actually lockdowns except for closed shops, mandatory masks without any supervision so it's all comes down to personal responsibility, summers where all rules were suspended so we can welcome tourists, and so on and so forth. I'm sick and tired of it all. We need politicians to act like adults.
> There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over"
I totally agree. Last week saw a dentist and this morning (10:02) two sales ladies at a baker's embedded in an EDEKA supermarket with no mask, one of them coughing. When pointing out politely that they should really put their masks on, my comment of mine was ignored. The unfair thing is that it won't be these people dying, but likely third parties that did nothing wrong (like the elderly couple behind me in the queue).
There is a huge debate focusing on vaccination, about forcing people to do it etc., but schools are open, kindergardens are open (every parent knows that's where stuff spreads), people shop, socialise, eat together, work together almost if there was nothing going on.
The government failed to point out that vaccinated people can still get CoViD because they were afraid it would stop people from getting the jab, so they assumed they were safe and went back to pre-CoViD behavior patterns. The government is reducing the testing regime, so future numbers will be less reliable.
Public TV station ARD/Das Erste started to lose credibility with me when they claimed on Twitter that medical masks don't protect. That is false/"fake news": the truth is they are designed to protect the patient when worn by staff, so their protection is asymmetric and biased against the wearer and in favor of the person talking to the wearer. But they do provide a little protection even for the wearer, as the larger droplets get caught by them, and catching a virus also depends on the amount and concentration of viral material exposed to.
(The reason the posted the tweet was because at the time, there was a shortage and they did not want that non-medical staff buy them up so there was enough of a supply for medical staff. It's okay to ask people to stop buying them for that reason but not feeding them with false information to make them stop.)
The new government put a general in place to run a task force and instead of saying "fantastic, why didn't the previous government think of that?" the press questioned why leaders who all declined military service on the grounds of conscience appointed a military man (the candidate seems to be a supply chain expert, so not a bad choice - although I personally would pick a paramedic because pandemic training is part of one's education, at least it was back in the 1990s when I did mine).
Despite all of this, in fairness the situation in Germany is much better than in other countries (I can only say that from personal knowledge about the UK, France and the US), and I would say that at the beginning, the government did a good job in absolute and relative terms.
1.) We just had our federal election so politicians were super cautious not to alienate anyone with though measures. Because we didn't have the transition of power to the new chancellor yet, this is still holding us back.
2.) If vaccination rates would just be another 5% higher (meaning 20% less unvaccinated people), the speed of the 4th wave would have been so much damper that we would have gotten through this winter without any hard restrictions (see France). I think there was a lot of wishful thinking involved that thought that those 5% would come around eventually.
Its a global pandemic where a small percentage follow antiwax conspiracy. I mean an iduvidual choice might endanger others. Thus its induvidual choice versus the good for the masses.
Would love to see stats on what parts of society this is going to impact? In the UK, the govt would have had to produce stats on the impact on minority groups. Based on what is happening on other countries, this looks like an outright assault on the poor, disabled, and recent migrants. History tends to repeat...perhaps the unvaccinated should be forced to wear badges? To protect the vaccinated ofc.
I am in the UK, in a part of the UK that has a badly malfunctioning health service. Waiting time for ambulance two weeks ago was twenty minutes (and that was just travel time), no issues at ICU (not for me, it was a relative the ICU was precautionary), no issues getting a bed...strangely, the experience was much better than the pre-Covid...significantly so. Germany has the same vaccination rate, Germany has a better health service...it is strange. No-one places any value on their freedom because it is something that is freely given to everyone today, our ancestors shed blood for it but we didn't...is this worth it? It is a huge change in freedoms for something that is unlikely to change things (I am not sure how this kind of thing is legal, if it is legal for a govt to essentially quarantine citizens in their own home if they refuse to have a medical procedure...that is alarming).
No no, it's because you're all in the same boat...
It's your choice to bring a life jacket or not. You know that you risk drowning if you don't bring one, but you also know that the risk is low for where you are going, are allergic to the material that PFDs (personal floatation devices) are made of, think you know better because you can swim, or have some other ideological reason for not wearing one.
But on this day, your little crew encounter some unexpected rapids that cause your boat to capsize. One person was a guide who knows how to treat this, and quickly gets as many people as they can onto the flipped boat. Despite this, there isn't enough room on the upside down boat for everyone to fit, so some people are left grabbing the edges of the boat.
Those who can hold on survive, as do many with life vests and those on the boat. Unfortunately, since the boat was so small and the rapids so strong, some were swept away - some with life vests and others without - never to be seen again. The rapids eventually calm down and you are able to flip the boat right-side up again. Now, you are joined by another boat coming in from another river that didn't experience the same rapids as you did.
Now, a few of the life jacket wearers are pointing fingers saying that those who didn't wear life jackets "effectively killed" those who wore life jackets but didn't make it. Since by not wearing lifejackets, they "took up too much room" on the boat and weren't contributing their fair share for the greater good and survival of everyone. The other side counters by reasoning that this is theory-crafting much like how pundits argue that Jack could have fit onto the wooden plank alongside Rose from Titanic if they shifted their bodies in the right way. Even though the acclaimed director JAMES CAMERON says that Jack was going to die anyways.
When in reality, no one was to blame except for the natural cause that was the rapids. All the while, life jacket manufacturers line their pockets with money from the increased sale of life jackets.
1,791 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadNone of this adds up and it’s likely it all goes back to Wikileaks.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756
Edit: Another piece, specifically addressing immunocompromised + covid + vaccines:
"Studies have shown that immunocompromised people are more vulnerable to being hospitalized or dying from COVID and less likely to develop strong protection from vaccination. But there are also some hopeful signs: additional doses of some COVID vaccines, strategic timing of immunosuppressive treatments and prophylactic COVID treatments may boost protection among some immunocompromised individuals—and restore at least some of the freedoms they have lost."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-immunocomprom...
The more you know! :)
Can we at least agree that if infected, as a vaccinated and asymptomatic carrier, there is a higher chance of transmission than if I were unvaccinated and symptomatic? This seems like common sense to me, but I recognize it goes against the Covid orthodoxy.
Also, when you say “inconvenient,” what do you mean exactly? To me, total restriction on movement and segregation from society based on medical status seems like more than an inconvenience. Maybe I’m just an anti-vaxxer, a victim of misinformation… if only I could think for myself.
That situation doesn't obtain with SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths but don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. And most mammal species can transmit the virus; cases have been confirmed in dogs, cats, minks, deer, tigers, etc.
This is a fact vaccine-zealots never address (I am double vaccinated by the way).
If the end game is 100% vaccination in human population (including the enormous unvaccinated reservoir of the developing world, since the rate in those countries is often single-digit percentages) we will _still_ get novel variants which bypass the latest vaccines. Are we really supposed to forcibly administer vaccines every n-months to the entire human population for the rest of eternity? It seems utterly absurd.
I don't see why the "just build more hospitals" commenter was down-voted/flagged in this thread. It at least seems more economically viable. Mobilize the national guard to do it if it comes to that. Treating those who develop covid seems a way better route than attempting the futile game of "prevention" via a vaccine regime.
We will never get to Covid eradication. It's just not possible. Yet, most of my vaccinated compatriots seem to buy into that delusion.
It's sad that "I'm vaccinated..." became the 2021 version of, "I'm not a racist...".
https://twitter.com/santiagokique/status/1465014078938628099
It has been shown time and again that the covid jag does not prevent infection/re-infection/transmission so your talk of eradication smacks of propaganda, not science.
At extremely low levels, we can begin to contemplate elimination/eradication.
> Historically, the vaccine has been effective in preventing smallpox infection in 95% of those vaccinated. — https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/index.html
(Other sources have numbers from about 90% to 97%). However, this imperfect protection, in enough people, was enough to do the job.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/03/hawaii-coup...
A lower viral load means a lower probability of a mutation happening, given that the number of mutations is proportional to the load over time.
There's some small chance that the opposite is true, and vaccines will mean deadly strains are more easily spread since the person is more likely to be asymptomatic or low-symptoms and will therefore not isolate.
But on net we expect vaccines to prevent variants.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15757475/
Maybe I'm missing something, but the vaccinated population is the one that has introduced an additional evolutionary pressure, so wouldn't we expect to see mutations (that affect vaccinated people) in that population? Vaccine tolerance is no advantage in unvaccinated hosts.
1. There would be fewer cases compared to unvaccinated people to give it the chance to mutate. It doesn't have any more chance to mutate among vaccinated people. It has less chance. Just a lot of mutations that still look like the current virus will get killed off by antibodies.
2. Randomly making changes to the spike protein, this virus's most important part, is likely to reduce the virus's danger.
If your immune system takes a long time to do this, because eg. you didn't have a vaccine so it hasn't got an antibody template to work from, then the virus has much longer to evolve in the host, under a bunch of weird and wonderful new types of antibodies that get thrown against it.
If there's already vaccine exposure then the body just needs to ramp up the antibody production, which is much faster and will result in total virus eradication to each virus as the antibodies encounter them, not halfway-measures which might leave half-functioning viruses which might self-repair in mutagenic ways.
We might get more mutations from unvaccinated people, but since the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission we'll get much more virulent mutations from the vaccinated people.
The new breeds made by the unvaccinated are necessarily less dangerous and virulent, just based on the relevant evolutionary pressures (the more dangerous breeds that make people bedridden don't spread).
The new breeds made by the vaccinated, on the other hand - those have zero evolutionary pressure to become less dangerous, and can just as easily become more so (someone with a mutation that would make an unvaccinated person bedridden feels no effect and spreads it everywhere they go).
If COVID becomes less deadly but more widespread, and becomes part of the yearly flu season, blame that on the unvaccinated. But if COVID mutates to become more deadly and resistant to vaccines, blame the vaccinated.
This is not a given. The virus is known to mutate more in unvaccinated hosts and this can make either more contagious or more lethal variations. There would be an advantage to have a longer incubation period.
On the vaccinated the same things are beneficial - longer incubation periods and the ability to infect others who are vaccinated. With a lower viral load, there will be fewer variations in vaccinated hosts, translating into fewer differences from the baseline virus.
True, should've said "much more likely".
> The virus is known to mutate more in unvaccinated hosts and this can make either more contagious or more lethal variations.
Of course vaccinated and unvaccinated can produce largely the same mutations. But that's not the point.
As I said, it's the evolutionary pressure which is the problem. If two people, one vaccinated and one not, get the same mutation, then maybe it's a strain which is dangerous enough for the unvaccinated person to go be sick in bed for a week. (Yes, incubation period - but that's the same both ways so it doesn't change the probabilities.) In this case, then because the vaccine mitigates the symptoms, the vaccinated person can go on with their daily life while sick with that more dangerous strain.
The fact that both groups produce similar mutations isn't the point, it's that the people have different reactions to the virus which changes how the mutations are able to spread.
It's not that there's a lower viral load. It's that the vaccinated are transmitting at all which is the problem, because there's no pressure for them to go be sick in bed when they're carrying around a mutation which could kill someone.
If you understand natural selection, then this assertion makes zero sense. Where in the genome do we see the accumulation of mutations in all covid variants seen so far? In their S-protein. Where does Omicron have 30+ mutations? In its S-protein.
What is the single protein that the mRNA vaccines code for??
Yes, if you reason from first principles, it is trivial to see that it is in fact the throngs of the vaccinated who are driving the evolution of SARS-CoV-2!
Citation?
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/experts-vaccine-immunity...
The vaccines have shown to slow down infection rates and avoid many many hispitalisations and death.
So yes, getting vaxxed helps the graeter good.
Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an accident or a stroke or heart issues.
The virus decides how much is needed, we don't.
They don't put covid patients in the same ward as other ICU beds for obvious reasons.
Is that happening anywhere now? I mean, got links? I'm generously curious. There's a lot of fear mongering going around.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/09/bogus-okl...
This has been going on for nearly two years and governments were unwilling or unable to increase capacity in any meaningful way? What a total failure of government / medical system if this is true. The Spanish Flu lasted 3 years, it's not like we don't have a fairly recent example of how long this would probably last.
Part of the problem with ICU capacity is that is has to be local: for many things, "an hours drive further away than normal" is annoying but solvable, if you need an ICU now it's a problem. Bottom-right here is a district-level map of Germany, showing free capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich... (there's some arguing how precise that data actually is, in both directions - for starters its only updated once a day afaik). Plenty places where e.g. transporting a few people from a car crash gets challenging. There's also pretty drastic statements/protests from the emergency departments and people working there, so yes, this currently sadly is an issue in some regions and the threat of it becoming worse is what finally caused some things to happen (after way to long of German politics wanting to deal with anything but this, despite it being long-predicted by the health authorities - it's extremely frustrating because it's been kind of obvious for weeks that something will have to happen at some point, the earlier the better for everyone).
Something that would be interesting data-wise would be deaths during or waiting for transportation - one would expect an increase, but I'm not sure if there even is baseline data available, given rules around who is allowed to pronounce death and how it is recorded.
I've seen early estimates of less than that, but feh. An estimate from well before the vaccines are in production wasn't going to be accurate.
https://news.yahoo.com/gibraltar-cancels-official-christmas-...
The comparison with measles, another contagious airborne disease, is instructive. The threshold for herd immunity is estimated at 94%. This is possible because the vaccine effectiveness against infection is also 93-97%. Unfortunately covid vaccines have waning effectiveness against infection, estimated at about 50% after 6 months, and possibly waning even further.
"Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2
"For example, the measles is a highly contagious illness. It's estimated that 94% of the population must be immune to interrupt the chain of transmission."
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html
"Effectiveness against infections declined from 88% (95% CI 86–89) during the first month after full vaccination to 47% (43–51) after 5 months."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Alternatively, lots of shouting because health authorities are make sooo confusing statements and refuse to give 100% clear cut answers.
mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses have been in progress since the 70s. This just happens to be when they finally got to the point of being production-ready. It's a useful coincidence, but without it mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses would have been showing up in the near future anyway (at a slower rate without all the emergency COVID funding).
> doesn't behave like a vaccine at all
Sterilizing immunity isn't an inherent property of vaccines.
> And has rare but serious side effects.
All vaccines do that, and as with all widely-used vaccines the rate of side effects is much, much lower than the rate of side effects from the actual disease.
I'll also point out that simply driving under the influence is a crime, even if you don't actually cause an accident. The statistical propensity of impaired drivers to cause accidents is sufficient cause to imprison people for this sort of thing.
Our politicians have failed to prepare the country for the Winter (who could have known...). We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.
And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.
In the part of Germany where I live, 7-day incidence among the unvaccinated is 1726, which is much worse than last winter, and it's 112 among the vaccinated. Hospitalisation tells a similar story: The unvaccinated are suffering.
If that 1726 would rise as it did last winter, a lot of unvaccinated fools would die. A hundred thousand dead in three months, perhaps.
Authoritarianism isn’t somehow justified because current actions “haven’t seemed to help.” That’s the playbook of every oppressive regime since the beginning of time: this is an emergency so we don’t need to follow laws or respect rights.
Many western countries messed up big time by not investing enough into their health care systems or into properly educating their population. So now they're out of options.
That is the alternative.
You said it was your ‘genuine question’. So I’m not sure why you need to see the argument. It’s an answer to your question, not an argument.
And if applied as here, I doubt many would argue that "forcing people to vaccinate" is a weaker measure than "impose some restrictions on unvaccinated" (although the former is of course going to be a strong form of the latter)
[1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
I can't think of a better alternative given the current situation if the end goal is to get people to reduce contact and get vaccinated, short of a full lockdown for everyone (which I think is a lot less preferable). Whether this form of lockdown will have any effect remains to be seen.
Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and get infected. It’s just the wrong move at the worst possible time.
they are anyways
What's so special about shopping that it prevents transmission of a relatively communicable disease?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=covid+fluvoxamine
Results are still somewhat preliminary and it isn't formally approved for that use but I know that many physicians are prescribing it off label and report positive results. The safety profile is good as a temporary acute treatment so there's little reason not to use it.
I was very sick for a week after each shot. I'm 30, I work from home, I work out, I'm lean and only go out when running in the forest and buy food.
I can't possibly know what would happen if I caught covid, but I wish the vaccination (I'm already vaxxed, but I mean the boosters) was my choice. With my reaction to the vaccines, it's two weeks a year guaranteed sickness vs a very low chance of getting covid with an even lower chance of getting very sick from it.
The pros and cons just don't make vaccination every six months an obvious choice for me.
There are studies showing the vaccine isn't even effective at 3 months. There's no way I'm dealing with that shot every 3-6 months.
The rest is my personal choice to not take a booster.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34706170/ https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114?query=fe...
It looks like it possibly starts waning at 2 months. So if we're requiring everyone needs to be fully vaccinated with mandates then boosters start at 2 months to be safe. By that measure large portions of our population are not fully vaccinated at this point. No thanks...
Yes people get reinfected but how many die from it or run into serious conditions? Vaccines don’t block the virus from entering your body, but they help with you not dying or using up ICU beds, even after those 3 months.
Please do your part of the swarm and get vaccinated. If you know you’ll have a odd reaction you can prepare in advance. Also Germany has sick-leave from work everywhere.
I don't want advice from Germany. You'd think after what your country did they'd be less inclined to go down the authoritarian route....
I'm not in a high risk group. I do not need to worry about COVID. Until like a few weeks ago there was no one telling me I needed a booster no data backing up anyone taking it in a low risk group.
What I can say is the Corona I had between the 2nd and booster lasted 1 day, the fastest cold I've ever had. That I had a light infection being due to my vaccination, is backed up by the data.
I didn't say it was data for anything. I said personally I won't be taking a booster for those reasons. Data for what it does on average to everyone else is not data for what it does to my system.
I am working on getting my mother in law to be on call to stay with us for a 10-14 day period, if need be, so that I can get the booster. It's quite ridiculous.
All of that having been said, I know that I need it.
https://aapsonline.org/covidpatientguide/
i understand things are very politicized now, so to be clear, genuine interest. i thought there was some relation just based on how regular vaccines operate.
Honestly, I don't know, but it's interesting that when I say I had very bad side effects to the vaccine, some people are convinced that it is because I would also react to covid similarly.
Will those people say to a 70 years old obese smoker who didn't get any reaction after the vaccine? I know many like that. Should I tell them "oh you didn't get a severe reaction to the vaccine, so I guess that's how you would react to covid, too"? Of course not, it's nonsense.
Regarding correlations between the two, it's a bit difficult to tell. After all, you can't really get a correlation between the intensity of vaccine reaction and actual virus exposure for... obvious reasons.
However, (I'm a bit rusty on my allergy and autoimmunity, so if someone catches a mistake, please call me out on it) allergic reactions and the viral reactions tend to present themselves differently. The common image of swelling and inability to breathe are almost completely associated with allergy, while the fever, tiredness and so on tend to be more standard.
> Don’t assume you will react the same with the booster as you did the first dose.
Works both ways unfortunately.
It started in my head and progressed it's way down to my legs. The day after the shot, it started with headaches and eye strain with a tremendous amount of head pressure, not dissimilar from an ocular migraine. That developed into a full blown head cold of congestion, coughing, stuffy, runny nose, and continued headache. The headache went away and it began to feel like strep throat, the coughing fits, while not excessive, were pretty rough and were burning my throat. From there it went into my chest and I felt like I had bronchitis. This was the worst phase of it. That burning sensation in your chest cavity when you have bronchitis? It felt exactly like that except I was also extremely, extremely tired. I slept for almost 2 days straight while this was going on. I took time off of work during the throat and chest phase of this. After that, I had stomach cramps and diarrhea. Then, after all of that wacky bullshit ended and I started to feel like a human again, I was left with cramps in my legs.
I was also extremely tired the entire time. Just the simple act of walking both hurt and made me more tired. It was fatigue like I've never experienced before. I'm a veteran and I've gone through some sleep deprivation training and that was nothing like the fatigue that I experienced from my reaction.
My wife was 5 months pregnant while all of this was going on and our twins were about 22 months old. It was, honestly, complete fucking bullshit. Being sick coupled with the fact that I had so many people reliant on me really stressed me out. I was able to get my mother-in-law to lend a hand but we went from thriving to surviving until I was on the tail end of the thing.
But what bothered me the most was that I couldn't even report the fact that I was having a reaction. I called up the UC medical system where I received the shot and they told me to follow up with my GP, except that at the time I didn't have one. I called them back a couple of days later and I could basically hear the person shrugging their shoulders.
I didn't think I would get a large benefit from the vax, since I had covid, but did it mainly because of pressure (family, employment, government). But I think I draw the line here; I'm not going to take any boosters. Getting horribly sick for several days, running a high fever... that can damage you. It's not as bad as Covid, but my threat from Covid is also greatly diminished already.
I always think about this. If you were born at the wrong time, your government was essentially sending you off to die against your will at the age of 18. It's pure luck that this is not the case.
Compared to the 1 in a million risk of dying from a vaccine, I couldn't imagine what my ancestors would think of me.
Although funnily enough, many in the military and police are antivax. I really can't get my head around this one.
The only difference is that the vaccine will not multiply out of control in your body the way the live virus would.
So it’s crazy to think that you’ll have “an even lower chance of getting sick from” live COVID. You already got sick from it, and that was only the limited version.
This is like complaining that a punch from a 5 year old hurts, and you’d rather risk getting punched by a heavyweight prize fighter.
I’m not trying to put a label on you, I’m try to explain how things work. Having such a strong reaction to a vaccine is a warning that you could risk more serious complications from an infection by the live virus.
Whoa, hold on there buddy.
You might want to look up the difference between mRNA vaccines and traditional ones.
That you are used as the factory for the protein with mRNA doesn't make a big difference IMHO.
I'd beg to differ, or at least make a slight distinction. The mRNA vaccine targets the spike protein specifically, which is the important target in the virus, at least now, but not the only one. The actual virus is more complex than that, and it can mutate. From this POV natural immunity is better. But natural infection obviously comes with the downside of added risks (depending on your immune system) and it's tough to guess how you'll react the first time (although you can make educated guesses) you get infected. Later infections will be milder though. And a clear upside being not having to run for jabs a couple of times per year.
The big difference is that the copies cannot make copies of themselves (they are only partial copies) so the viral load does not grow geometrically within your body.
Again: if the small viral load of a vaccine makes a person sick for a week, that person likely has a higher risk for severe illness from the (much larger) live viral load from a full infection.
Science does not yet understand why some people have more severe COVID illness than others, but it is an observed fact that some do. In some cases, even if they are otherwise fit and healthy.
Sorry to hear it gets so bad for you though. I understand that makes it a much harder decision.
Twice-vaccinated people will have to get a booster shot and there are discussions about a six month expiry date if you don’t get the booster shot.
What happens beyond that we do not know right now since can’t look into the future. We do not know how effective the booster will be in terms of long-term protection.
All of that is not surprising. A bit annoying but not surprising.
Other vaccinations are also given three times (second dose after a short interval, third dose after a longer interval), so it might well be that this vaccine turns out to be one of those, we just do not know. That’s the point.
This is the most stupid thing about vaccination plans. It's one thing to get vaccinated once, it's another thing entirely to need frequent boosters.
I expect a lot of confusion and operational carnage when people who don't get a booster become "unvaccinated".
There is no obligation (or force) to get a booster shot. It is available and recommended but not forced. Some groups like older age and immune-compromised people are highly recommended.
Now, everyone wants to get a booster and many old people I know need to wait until December or January to get a booster.
It’s the worst case that could have happened, because politicians didn’t do their job
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/index.html
I'm Czech and we wish here we would be as prepared and forward thinking as your representatives are. If it was not for one of the highest rate of ICU beds per capita in the world and all the high quality nurses and doctors we export to Germany, our health care would have already crumbled.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
You could say this about any law that enforces some uncomfortable behavior change. Anyone who remembers when seat belt laws became real, sees history repeating itself, down to the exact same arguments about effectiveness and rhetoric about choice and tyranny and government overreach.
COVID has been a challenge for the same reason Climate Change is challenging: They both require collective cooperative action from people, and you can't rely on everyone having a natural desire to do the right thing. Laws can't make people want to do the right thing--they can only provide incentives or disincentives for specific actions or behaviors.
Every time someone is unbuckled in a car crash, there is a high risk they will hurt others. Someone in the back seat could fly forward and hit the driver, for example.
Uncontrolled flying bodies pose additional risks when there are multiple people in the vehicle. There's also the risk of driving to begin with, for people both in and outside the vehicle.
The risks of harm to you _and_ others from crashing a car are probably higher at this point than that of a vaxxed person getting seriously ill from covid.
But anyway the point I was making was to refute GP's statement that seat belt laws and the pushback around them are the same as for the vax mandates. They are not, because the vax is permanent, and the consequences for non-compliance much higher. The fact that you can't "take the vax off" is part of these stakes that are not the same.
No, it's challenging because people know they're being manipulated and taken advantage of.
As with COVID, as with climate change. Mayor of SF enacting mask mandates while dining/partying unmasked. Elites flying private to Davos to discuss climate change.
Resistance exists because politicians refuse to implement obviously sensible, effective and, most importantly, fair policies - no lockdowns (Sweden style) & care/protection targeting the vulnerable for COVID, and revenue neutral carbon tax for Climate Change.
There are also lots of people checking who don't care and don't check properly. As 2/3 are unvaxxed, I imagine there are a lot of people who are anti-vax that check. I have been waived through without a thorough check most times.
On one side, I'm angry at them for being dumb. But on the other side, I respect their freedom of what to do with their body. Many of them resist because they don't like the government telling them what they must do to their body, or they come from countries where they don't trust their government. There are so many occasions in life where you don't want to do something, even though it may be for the best, because you don't like the person or group of people telling you what to do. Like when someone tells an angry person to "just calm down".
I think it's fair to place restrictions on them as long as the ICU beds are at an unacceptable level of capacity. But we should face the reality that unvaccinated people will always be among us.
Your politicians HAVE prepared the country. There is a VERY BASIC strategy: get your bloody shot!
And then add to this that we have reduced capacities in hospitals compared to last year...
> We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.
Getting everyone vaccinated is the only strategy, everything else is either worthless or swaps COVID deaths with mental health an economic casualties.
> And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two.
It was already divided, it's just that the government stopped caring about the side that doesn't care and fails to listen to the actual professionals.
> This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections
Look at literally any statistics or read any paper made by any credible person.
> it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.
They'll cave eventually and accept that their stubbornness is not above other people's well being.
This is not just a stupid debate about which politicians each camp likes, anti-vaxxers make everybody's life miserable and even kill people for exactly no benefit, they have no arguments other than Facebook conspiracy theories and other fake news.
In Austria they are arresting and throwing into prison people who refuse to get the vax.
In Australia they have concentration camps for people who are testing positive.
Anyone cheering this on is on the WRONG FUCKING SIDE OF HISTORY. You all will perish and if it is war you want - WAR IS COMING!
NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
I hope you all FUCKING DIE!
Fauci must face execution for his war crimes.
IIRC last winter in the US at least, health officials and the media were quick to blame irresponsible citizens and social gatherings – but the major root cause seemed to be a new, more transmissible (delta) variant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Alpha_variant#Sprea...
Yes, unfortunately I couldn't correct it. I wish HN allowed corrections for weeks rather than hours!
Hmm, as I understood it alpha was circulating in the US in December, but perhaps you are correct that it didn't actually surge until later?
Beside that we can vaccinate a multiple of the number of newly infected people per day just fine. It's been about people being unwilling to get the shot, not availability of vaccines for quite a while now. Example: one day of vaccinations like yesterday (~1 Mio) [0] equals two weeks of new infections at levels like today (>73000).
[0] https://impfdashboard.de/
[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e823...
Of concern to a Californian who is surrounded by other states with lower vaccination rates. Even internally in California there is a steep gradient between the coastal counties with 80-90% and the inland counties as low as 50%.
If East Germany had implemented this forty years ago to fight X disease, it would have been painted as evil, something we don’t do in the free West.
Edit: flagged in 8 minutes. I guess this website isn’t the place for intelligent debate and discussion anymore. That’s disappointing.
Edit: actually, it looks like you've been using this account primarily for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've therefore banned this one. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
In reality, we ban accounts that do ideological flamewar from the other side in just the same way, and they feel like we're just as biased against them. They agree that we're terrible human beings though!
The striking thing is how the passionate partisans and ideologues resemble each other more than they resemble the rest of us. They see each other as bitter enemies, yet from my perspective they're close to isomorphic. (Edit: no, that's not a centrist defense of the squishy middle ground. It doesn't work that way.)
The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then. Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.
FSJ is a year-long volunteer program for young people typically organized and funded by NGOs like the Red Cross and similar. I worked with small children, plenty of the other volunteers I met regularly worked in hospitals and nursing homes. They all talked at length about how atrocious the working conditions were and how they were asked to do things they weren't legally allowed to (e.g. taking blood, handing out medication) because the staff shortages were severe enough that people didn't have enough time to adhere to very reasonable safety rules anymore. That was 17 years ago.
This is a well known, widely publicized[0] and not at all new problem, and the unvaccinated are not to blame for it. Let me repeat, we're talking about one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of 83M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients.
[0]Some random articles from 2018/19 (German):
https://gesundheit-soziales.verdi.de/themen/mehr-personal/++...
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/wenn-aus-notstand-panik-...
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2018-05/pflegenotsta...
https://www.rbb-online.de/kontraste/ueber_den_tag_hinaus/bil...
Diederik Grommers, one member of the Dutch Outbreak Management Team (OMG) states: "it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not; 60% of the beds are occupied by vaccinated people; the problems we will encounter in the coming weeks are caused by the fact that we totally hollowed out our health care" [0].
The Netherlands has about 6 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens. Germany has almost 30 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens [1]. Now I know Germany did accept patients from The Netherlands on their ICUs and perhaps Germany is doing the same for other countries, so perhaps that is causing a capacity problem in Germany as well.
---
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFg78PgDgu0
[1]: https://cdn.nos.nl/image/2020/03/30/640384/3840x2160a.jpg
Yeah, Germany has a ton of ICU beds in comparison, and yet, we're struggling exactly the same as any other country. I find it strange, too. In early 2020 I expected we'd see big differences between different countries based on ICU capacity, but we saw the same story everywhere (regional overload around the peak of a wave), with a few minor differences (whether some patients are transferred within the country or to other countries). Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.
High total number notwithstanding though, our ICU capacity actually decreased during the pandemic, see:
https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
The graph under "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten" shows total capacity (light blue) + emergency reserve (green), dark blue is occupied beds. There was a pretty sharp drop-off in the total capacity a year ago, and a slower decrease all throughout 2021. Apparently, that's mostly due to nurses quitting in droves since the pandemic made their already bad working conditions even worse.
Our politicians didn't lift a finger to prevent or revert this, and now they're blaming a minority for this massive, massive failure. Just makes me really angry, I'll take downvotes for that if I have to :)
There's different standards in different countries for sure. In The Netherlands there's a focus on quality of life. If a patient cannot have a decent quality of life after staying on ICU, there's a preference to provide the patient with palliative care instead. In (e.g.) Italy this approach would not be accepted.
Weird move for one of the richest countries in the world, no?
The decline in public healthcare quality has nothing to do with the lack of government oversight but it's due to the lack of funding and personel (which is also funding related). Ask any overworked healthcare worker in the public system.
I can't say that I like the Dutch approach to covid in general, but in my first job I was deep into governement budgetting of hospitals (just before the introduction of the current Dutch reimbursement system) and it was a whole lot about 'keeping beds' and keeping patients in them to fulfill the budget. That was not what I'd call a generally efficient system. Even the health outcomes were worse since outpatient treatments usually have fewer side effects. What I've learned in that job is that doctors are like people. They respond to incentives. If that incentive is to have beds filled with people, you get just that. Beds with people.
I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me that socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes care. The increase in costs in the US is also unsustainable. There might be a happy medium in there but it might be too early to tell.
You can see this happening in Canada too. We have a hybrid system in healthcare where the majority of critical care is paid for via taxes/government subsidies however secondary/tertiary stuff is either out of pocket or through insurance agencies (prescriptions, out-patient care like physiotherapy, etc).
Over the past 20-30 years, our system has seen the typical government thought process of throwing more money at problems but not actually having someone be accountable for the actions of the government over decades. You end up with a bunch of overpaid, under-worked management at the top while the actual front-line workers suffer with low staffing, not enough beds, budget cuts for the front line but raises for management etc. etc.
Not to mention the number of students coming here for health education (doctor, nurse, specialist) - then immediately saying sayonara for another country like the US or in the case of foreign students, their home country.
I don't understand why we keep cutting healthcare budgets - one possible reason could be because corporations have slowly been taking over every aspect of society as they move faster and make smarter decisions than government officials.
There was a case of a clinic that performed unnecessary surgeries and procedures just to rake in more tax money.
The problem isn't socialised medicine per se, it's trying to mash a socialised medicine system with "market forces", it's the ideology of the Third Way [1] to appease to these neoliberalist policy desires that is crumbling the Swedish healthcare (and welfare) system for the past 2 decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way
A hospital with a good cost based activity system could probably tell you more, although that would require a very high measure of control.
Dutch press just reports the general direction of (internal) prices for IC-days (about € 3k / night). That really is nowhere close to the proper answer to the question "How much would expansion cost?" The sum based on that € 3k would be: €3k * 365 * 65% * 1200 = about € 850 million for the whole of IC-care. That is a low figure for the Netherlands (€ 25 billion total medical specialist care), so I expect a lot of the IC-costs are absorbed by other DRGs or the other way around: that price doesn't include all of the fixed costs and is a marginal price.
Of course that will overwhelm the system.
(Also paradoxically, an improved healthcare system should need fewer ICU beds, so the decrease is probably a good thing)
Also curious how one squares the resource constraint issue with the exceptional nature of the events of the past couple years. What I mean is, did anyone think it made sense to massively increase capacity before the pandemic began? I'm not in health care so I don't have any special insight here; i.e. I'm asking, not challenging. From an outsider's perspective it seems like it would've been a tough sell to advocate for what was, in the "before times," an unnecessary increase in capacity.
I’m comparing the numbers from the DIVI registry:
2020-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/7522 2021-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/9047
I’m getting 24,949 beds for today, 27,543 as the year ago number (in both cases including a couple thousand ICU beds for kids which were later split out in the more current DIVI reports since ICU beds for kids aren’t helpful for this pandemic).
That’s a difference of 2,594.
Also, as the DIVI themselves explain: “Consequently, several factors play a role in influencing the number of beds that can be operated. A deliberate reduction of beds during the pandemic cannot be assumed. The reduction in available beds can be explained by the various points mentioned above, among others, and is supported by other data collected. The decisive factor for the operability of a bed is the medical staff.”
This is under a FAQ entry where they list five different reasons for the reduction in capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/faq/18af7107-e098-43e7-a9f...
Staff themselves being affected by COVID-19 and becoming unable to work is just one of them.
The others are changes in how much staff is allocated per patient (this was increased), hospitals being more precise in their reporting and only reporting beds that can actually be staffed, changes in the criteria for a bed to be actually countable and the high effort ICU therapy of COVID-19 patients requires.
TBH I would not be surprised if the actually don't know the exact numbers. But even if it's "only" 2594 it's still too many.
You could call it deliberate however if the working conditions for people under such heavy load are not improved.
But another thing that always gets scrambled in the newspapers is the "level" of ICU beds.
The ICU at my town's hospital (and it's not small) has patients that would lie in a normal station at a big university hospital.
ICU bed != ICU bed. In smaller hospitals, ICU means "post-op, needs surveillance" or "gets oxygen".
At a large hospital ICU means "ECMO" or similarly severe conditions.
So when you're reading that there are x thousand ICU beds still available in the country: most are not really up to the task when it comes to a severe covid case, and furthermore, an ICU bed at the other end of the country doesn't help you much.
I'm guessing it's the same with ICU beds... And now we have a situation where a high percentage of people have picked up their handsets...
There is no need to insult 3rd world countries like this.
Instead of rewarding those who worked these horrible jobs and maybe attract new workers with better conditions (e.g. more holidays), better pay or tax reduction, our politicians did campaigning and ignored the upcoming winter.
Now they blame it on the unvaccinated and want to force high-speed vaccinating as many people as possible. But it won't help now. And it won't work either because they also messed up the whole vaccine supply chain.
I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress.
The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.
Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is very from from not working.
What "narrative"? What are you even talking about?
No-one, including the person you responded to, has claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer duration.
You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.
However, we are not talking about "the unvaccinated", rather about "a tiny unfortunate fraction of unvaccinated people". There are 4,690 covid patients in ICU beds and 25M unvaccinated people. Assuming all covid ICU patients are unvaccinated, the covid ICU incidence rate within the unvaccinated population is 0.02%.
For an analogy, we could reason that because the prison population skews 90/10 male/female, all males should either undergo a vasectomy, or pay a recurring 10k euro fine. I hope this is obviously unethical.
Yes the point is to make sure that those ICU capacity which is very small and normally enough would and is struggling due to covid and vaccination helps.
What is so hard to understand?
We banned toxic paint, we enforce certain vaccines (polio, measles)
It's only logical to enforce a vaccine on people.
Same as you will get reanimated when you have an accident.
We formed and created rules around our society for a long time and those limitations are here for the good of all of us.
A society can't be forced to have a medical oath and in parallel has to watch when people don't play along.
You expect us to do the best to help you in an emergency and in parallel expect total freedom?
Not how our society works. Srsly get over it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The analogy is “every house has sprinklers so no need for a fire department any more”.
https://mobile.twitter.com/VojtechGibis/status/1463608271378...
NEOČKOVÁN - not vaccinated OČKOVÁN - vaccinated
The last 5 patients are those that have been released from the unit in that week. The first two were move to less severe case ICU. The last three died...
One more: https://mobile.twitter.com/VojtechGibis/status/1465783542982...
Czech ICU occupancy - blue unvaccinated, orange vaccinated. And yes, we had several cases <30 years old and unfortunately even children on ICU.
https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics
Look at "Proportion (%) of cases ever critically ill in ICU or died, by age and vaccination status"
Looking at the high risk group of 80+ year old (43% of all ICU cases and/or deaths), the numbers are: unvaccinated (24%), partially vaccinated (16%) and fully vaccinated (3.2%).
They don't define partially vaccinated (typically 14 days after 2nd dose). So clearly the vaccine reduces the risk of ICU/death, but the "truly" unvaccinated make up only 50% of ICU cases in that age group.
Also consider that a population of 100, and 90 of those people are vaccinated. Uf 15 vaccinated people end up in the hospital, and 5 unvaccinated people also end up in the hospital, vaccination is still clearly better for you. But people will still say "75% of the people in the hospital were vaccinated; clearly the vaccines aren't working!" Yeah, well, out of vaccinated people, only 16% ended up hospitalized, while 50% of unvaccinated people ended up hospitalized. Those are the real numbers that matter. Percent of cohort hospitalized, not percent of total hospitalized.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.
I couldn't agree more. The only intellectually honest response Germany (and other countries) should have is to mandate the obese (by far the highest cohort of worst COVID outcomes) to strict diet, exercise, etc.
I think that training people to handle 90% of the issues you see in Covid-related illnesses could be done relatively quickly, if we wanted to do that. The ICU bed shortage really refers to a ICU-staff shortage, and anything we could do to relieve that burden would be a good thing.
Which countries? I find it hard to get data at vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically, but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated).
For the 80+ group the latest data for hospitalisations is 47% vaccinated, 31% non-vaccinated, 22% unkown.
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status
If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 % of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest seven day average puts that number at 27 %.
For the broad population is 28% vaccinated vs 57% non-vaccinated. The remaining 15% is "unknown". But Switzerland has a relatively low vaccination rate at 67%.
Edit: looking at deaths instead of hospitalisations in the broad population:
Edit: I can't find ICU numbers but the latest death stats for 80+ are 46% vaccinated, 33% non-vaccinated, 21% unknown.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
Keep in mind the effectiveness is measured in tens/100,000. An there are some very sick people given the vaccine, that die before the 14 days of the second dose.
Well at least people know how much weight to give your opinions.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MartinNeil9/status/14668143477626...
Which countries are you talking about? It's certainly not the case for Germany, and I don't know any other European country for which this would be the case.
what did they do? nothing because case numbers were low, I did push and push to finally get my grandpa to get is 3rd shot mid november while go to the doctor for something else... by coincident the rush to get the booster started 1 day after that.
I bet this happened a lot.... As far as I know just like for the 1st shot sverybody above 70 got that same letter. Meaning they had more than 2 months head start to get the boostershot.
So at least in Berlin I wont have sympathy anymore for taking away the shot from somebody else (got my appointment in january)
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55274833
Also consider its their tax dollars being squandered and mismanaged.
In the end we never were in control of the situation but people cannot accept that.
And there are plenty of countries around the world which have done a much better job than SF of testing, contact tracing, vaccination, etc. We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.
* * *
“We haven’t tried anything and we’re all out of ideas” is easy to sell to grumpy people tired of a really shitty year or two, on the back of an unprecedented wave of anti-public-health propaganda, but it is an absolutely terrible pandemic response.
What do you believe this comparison means? I'm not sure its saying much of anything. Perhaps you could come up with another similar sized city, with same socioeconomic/population-type makeup, with same latitude and seasonality profile to compare against? I'm not familiar with SF data sources on this, but I'm curious if you can provide a source for current IFR? My state here in southeast US's IFR is .012. That includes people who died in car accidents, of poisonings, of falls and other injurious actions while having tested positive for COV in last 28 days. My county is comprised of mostly older folks (median age 44), small at 186K people, and we haven't had a COV death registered in the last 11 months.
>We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.
Can you show some data sources for this? Everything I'm seeing is pointing to Sweden's last 2 flu seasons (encompassing COVID years) showing the same or lower all cause mortality than their previous 15-20 years. With 2018 being the major outlier not just in Sweden but all around the world, for which we still have no explanation.
> IFR is .012
Do you mean CFR (case fatality rate)? IFR (infection fatality rate) is always only speculative, because we don’t ever have complete knowledge of the number of infections.
In total throughout the pandemic SF has had ~670 Covid deaths and ~54,000 confirmed Covid cases for a population of ~880,000.
For the same population, the USA average would be ~2090 deaths and ~110,000 confirmed cases. Except those are both dramatic underestimates of the relative numbers because SF has consistently had a much lower percentage of positive tests, and hasn’t had anywhere near the US gap between confirmed Covid deaths and total excess deaths.
In science you're really meant to use all the data because the problem with this sort of cherry-picking is that it can go both ways. Florida removed all its restrictions and was predicted to become a bloodbath just like they predicted that for Sweden. It didn't happen, results appear to have been unaffected by the changes. Studies that look at all the data find no correlations between lockdowns and COVID mortality (but lots of correlations with other bad problems).
0.012 is the San Francisco CFR. 0.016 is the USA CFR, if we go by confirmed cases/deaths as reported by the New York Times.
The IFR should be substantially lower than either of these; many deaths go uncounted, but a far larger proportion of infections never get a confirmed positive test. I would guess IFR to be in the 0.004–0.008 range. (Which is still scary high!) I’m sure if you do a search of the academic literature you can find more careful analysis and better informed estimates. It obviously varies from place to place and is substantially dependent on demographics and availability of medical care.
* * *
Florida was a bloodbath! It has had among the worst outcomes anywhere in the USA since mid 2021. Tens of thousands of avoidable deaths after the universal free availability of extremely effective vaccines and better understanding of viral transmission. The state government not only stopped any state-level public health action, it actively prevented state/local public health departments and local governments from acting. It is hard to imagine a more complete failure of state leadership.
Florida has had something like 4x more Covid deaths than San Francisco, per capita. And if we only look at deaths after widespread vaccine availability, Florida has had >10x more.
Of course, the virus eventually burned through a large majority of the unvaccinated population, and without enough remaining hosts to infect, flamed out. Fingers crossed that future virus variants don’t have enough immune escape to burn back through the state again.
Yet, despite being significantly "older" than CA, it did significantly better than CA in 2020 with regards to all-cause-mortality. 2021, seems to be a different story at this point and I'm very curious as to the 10% difference between years (certainly seems to imply the virus has not burned through the population, assuming the virus had anything to do with mortality).
The usual credible figures I see for IFR are between 0.1% and 0.3% - higher figures tend to be using bad methodologies like including estimates from the very first days of the pandemic when people were trying to estimate IFRs using random Chinese media reports, etc. If you restrict yourself to more rigorous methodologies and sample sizes, IFR falls a lot.
As for Florida being a "bloodbath", lol. That word doesn't mean what you think it means. Nowhere has been a bloodbath, and if there's one thing that's been consistently true about Covid data it's that you can make anywhere seem worse or better than anywhere else by choosing what to compare against. Use all the data and Florida seems pretty good, especially as Europe is busy proving that vaccines appear to have accomplished nothing at all in terms of total numbers, despite the many claims of efficacy.
If we take 330 million people as an estimated US population, an IFR of 0.012 and 0.44 of everyone infected (CDC estimate from 1 October), that would be 1.74 million deaths. But the number of Covid deaths in the USA is probably only around 1 million (CDC estimate is 920 thousand as of 1 October), putting the US IFR at ~0.006. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I’d estimate a US IFR somewhere in the 0.004–0.008 range. We missed counting a significant number of Covid deaths, but we didn’t miss 60% of them. (In US counties with the highest proportion of elderly people, the IFR might locally be closer to 0.012.) But that is still a very high IFR!
Covid is a scary, scary disease. Deadly, highly contagious even before symptoms, and indistinguishable from common respiratory diseases during the part of the infection when most spread happens. Fortunately we have extremely effective vaccines (if only we can convince everyone to take them), and spread takes place almost always between unmasked people indoors making it relatively inexpensive to dramatically reduce the reproductive rate of the virus by avoiding indoor spaces and wearing masks when they are inevitable.
Getting really tired of hearing this. To a HEALTHY human, it’s like a bad cold. Me and my family have had it in the last month and confirmed with tests so I know what we had. It’s gone through a bunch of friends too and the worst they experienced was feeling miserable in bed for a couple of days.
I have no doubt that for some it IS scary, but let’s not chuck around emotive language that isn’t an accurate description in the majority of cases.
Yes, I do live in one of these older counties and specifically in my region of the county. Obviously words such as 'scary' are useless and subjective. Anti-biotic-resistant strep nearly killed me 3 years back, so to me, that was a scary disease. The COVID I had was milder than my yearly flu, and this is effect on the overwhelming majority of the population even considering the obesity rate in the US. Scary is not the word I would use.
> But that is still a very high IFR!
I mean, perspective is everything. What are you comparing this IFR to? I consider this a very low IFR, especially when you realize what we in the US classify a "COVID death". We do not count deaths of any other diseases using the same methodology as we have with COVID as far as I'm aware, and I believe this is the primary reason for our inflated mortality vs. most of the rest of the world.
The wave started leveling off about 2 weeks after and the rules are still in force.
Not sure where you got your information.
What expert are you? What are your numbers to determine that corona without measurements would not create a new york or Italy event across Germany?
There is probably a reason why you are not a virologist. Or do you have your own model numbers?
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
Index page: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
what would make sense is a steady and controlled Durchseuchung with specific protection of vulnerable people (like old and sick) - b/c the best immunity is gained by infection.
but Durchseuchung never sounded good - that's why that term got so popular. it sounds ugly and brutal. but it's what was happening all the time with many diseases in the past thousands of years.
In a nutshell, the German government and every other country on earth is doing what you propose, except that they are vaccinating at the same time and try to keep the curves flat (but your use of "slow" also suggests this, so it's not clear what else you're suggesting).
No, this is only true if the R value is constant in time. Not all functions with a positive first derivative are the exponential function.
Because otherwise the growth is indeed exponential, yeah?
Of course, the epidemic curve described by that function would indeed bounded below by an exponential function on part of its range, but the same is true of any function with positive derivative, and calling for example f(x) = x^2 exponential for that reason makes the term meaningless.
This is presumably what the OP meant by “as long as R>1, the curve is exponential”. But this is literally equivalent to saying “as long as f’(x) > 0, f is exponential” which is just not a useful concept.
The initial spreading will be exponential in the beginning - as every actual curve illustrates - if the disease is left unchecked as OP suggested, until R_t values go down again due to immunity. That's all I meant to say.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...
exponential in the beginning == this part of the function can be approximated by a function ae^xb where a>0 and b>1
vs.
first derivative bounded away from zero in the beginning == any function that increases, including linear functions with constant first derivative and polynomials with linear first derivative
Or do you think all increasing functions are the same..?
It is easy to show that for any function whose derivative is continuous and positive at 0, there is an exponential function (properly translated such that they agree at 0) that has similar properties.
You should be specific about what properties you're talking about. What you're saying is that any function increasing function grows faster than some exponential function on a finite interval.
Still, you can observe f(x) on x ∈ [0, 1] and see that it is growing linearly. And you can observe g(x) on ∈ [0, 1] and see that it is growing exponentially.
I do not see the value in discussing the rate of exponential growth of f. Where as for g, there is a parameter with value ln(2).
If data looks like f, don't try to fit an exponential function to it (whether it's a least-squares fit, or any other objective f > g.
Are you trying to say anything else?
That doesn't help if you die of the infection first, and COVID is extremely lethal among the demographics that most need the direct benefits of immunity.
Source? I think there's plenty of peer-reviewed scientific articles claiming the opposite.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-disease...
Here you can find linked three studies by the CDC that support the idea that natural immunity is harder to get and less effective (besides, as others have said, there's the non trivial chance of side effects or not even surviving the virus)
I don't care about what the "experts" think or say, I care about studies.
Update: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 reports many studies that claim that we should be vaccinating people after a natural infection to get "super immunity", but that is different from what the OP was claiming (natural immunity > vaccine immunity)
Also probably true without the vaccine first, but the initial survival rate without vaccination is a lot lower.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
They're so proud that they can answer the question about what happens to the pond that is half-covered by sea lilies the next day but never think about what happens the day after that.
tldr: There is no persistent exponential growth in nature.
Delta. Omicron.
Our technology sucks and is slow, we can't achieve R < 1 this way.
The mRNA technology would let us inject omicron-specific boosters tomorrow, but then there is a lot of other safety hurdles that have to be met before it gets authorized and then distribution hurdles to convince people to take it…
Mathematically, we will get to R=1 this way, some day or another, with some percentage of people getting it via illness and some via vaccination. The choice is still ours on how and when.
At this point I'm less worried about covid and more worried about the global rise in authoritarian trends.
So you say that at some stage there will be vaccines for COVID-19 that are not nMRA (Pfizer, Moderna) or Viral vector (AstraZeneca)
Why? The people who are happy with vaccines are fairly happy with these vaccines and might refine them, but not about to dump them entirely for a different technique. in fact mRNA vaccines are the new hot thing.
And the people who really aren't happy with these vaccines, will never be happy. They'll find a way to object.
So what's the incentive for such a classical vaccine? Who's going to root for it?
Moderna and Pfizer (1) and AstraZeneca (2) are getting ready for the next round, still using their current technologies. They're not planning on going back to "classical vaccines" for COVID-19.
1) https://fortune.com/2021/11/29/covid-19-omicron-vaccine-prot...
2) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/omicron-oxford-covid-a...
Vaccination is of course imperfect and cannot be the sole measure, but we can't achieve R < 1 without a lot of it.
So then what happened summer 2020?
It's technically true that this worked then, but 2020 is gone, not to return. a) new COVID strains were inevitable and b) prolonged strict lockdowns unpalatable and c) mass vaccination has a huge benefit. As part of a multi-pronged strategy, of course. Depending on only one measure, be it lockdown or vaccination, is not going to work.
Delta came out of India. Omicron came out of South Africa. How do mandates in the West stop variants elsewhere?
And variants aside, the vaccinated are still getting sick and dying at significant rates [1]. This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised. Until some miracle cure comes along, R < 1 is simply not possible.
If you think full vaccination is a necessary goal despite all this, OK fine. You know what might go a long way in terms of achieving mass vaccination? Open sourcing the vaccine recipe. Not just the RNA sequence. The whole recipe.
This should be a no-brainer.
Governments have no qualms with mandating lockdowns, masks, and vaccines for the masses.. but for some reason they hit the brakes when it comes to mandates for pharma. Not only is this a good idea in terms of improving supply side logistics, but also for the sake of re-building trust.
But no, common sense is too hard and "blame and shame" is too easy.
Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.
Hospital collapse has been liminal for 2 years now, it's a manufactured crisis. Instead of bolstering our healthcare staff and paying our front line workers more, we have done.. the exact opposite. We funnel tons of money to pharma, while frontline workers have effectively had their pay cut in half.
We're quite literally being force fed lies. But I guess that doesn't matter because at the end of the day the Milgram experiment prevails and all these attempts to question the narrative and hold authority accountable is pointless.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
page 15
This is, on average over large numbers, not correct. Higher rates of disease spread harms everyone, the vaccinated included.
> This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised.
Which expert promised you that?
> it's a manufactured crisis ... We're quite literally being force fed lies ... Milgram experiment ... question the narrative
Cranks write like this. That is a shame as some of your other points are very correct, particularly around the need for Intellectual property waiver, which some have been calling for for some time, to no avail (1). BTW, they don't generally call it "open sourcing" in that field.
Hospitals genuinely are in crisis and doing difficult triaging, anyone working in them can tell you that.
1) https://reliefweb.int/report/world/time-runs-out-break-trips...
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
> Cranks write like this.
Apologies I'm new to being a social pariah, being under pseudo house arrest, and psychosis in general.
I don't want hospitals to collapse. I'm afraid if we give up this freedom now, we'll never get it back. I'm afraid of the unknown and putting my life in the hands of people (our dear leaders) that really have never cared about my health before.
Even now its not about care for my own health, but for "the greater good".
But there's no easy fix to help us now, because it takes a long time to train doctors, nurses and other staff, or actually build hospitals. Yes, the crisis is entirely predictable but also entirely real. It is possible, even likely for a "liminal" crisis to persist at that level, as the safety valve that keeps it there is that patients without sufficient care just die off. These are the "excess deaths". Yes, I am appalled.
This is BTW one way how "Being unvaccinated could harm the vaccinated": If I (very much vaccinated) need urgent treatment for any reason, and can't get it because all the beds are full of unvaccinated COVID patients, then I am harmed thereby.
If your main concern right now is the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic then you have been misdirected, and should reconsider your media diet away from conspiracy-mongers.
Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others. This pandemic is making it clear to those who can see, that stubborn selfish refusal, and paranoid anti-mask and anti-vax "freedom" rhetoric harms not just yourself, but also those around you. Rugged individualism is a complete bust in this context. Collective action is what works.
This deadly pandemic is not deadly for everyone.
People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population but 93% of covid deaths. I imagine this number is roughly proportional for hospitalizations by the same age groups. We can do some handwavy math and say if everyone under 50 was unvaccinated, they would only ever take up 7% of ICU beds.
Is 7% the difference between collapse or not? "One size fits all" doesn't make sense.
Further, I'm so confident I will never get sick and be hospitalized with covid that I'm happy to forgo my right to an ICU bed. Thus I'm decoupled from the dilemma. Or at least in an ideal world I would be able to make that choice. This was my assessment the first time I got covid, and now I likely have some level of immunity, so I'm even more confident now.
And as far as your hospital scenarios go, my point is we haven't seen the things you describe materialize. I'm sure there are a handful of cases, which is a tragedy, but if it's marginal then we shouldn't hold it up as a liminal crisis like we have been.
> Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others.
Tell me the magic number for risk tolerance. If everyone self-quarantined from driving, and we switched to a delivery only economy, we could drastically reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities. Do we not owe that to the greater good? What about for climate change? We should continue living like we did in 2020 forever.
> Collective action is what works.
It always works when your leaders are competent and have your best interests in mind. My country doesn't even recognize natural immunity, which I envy the UK for.
But free choice works too. Look at Florida, Sweden, people will still choose the vaccine. You don't need a mandate.
> If your main concern right now is the "freedom" ...
I can't believe the "vaccinated" are completely unconcerned by the trends regarding freedom right now.
You know its not an either/or situation, you can be concerned about both, right?
Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt. But immunity wanes, and variants will continue to emerge.
Governments never relinquish their emergency powers once they're enacted. This is just the latest "WMDs in Iraq". I can't speak for the UK, but in the US we still have the patriot act, and we just recently pulled out of Afghanistan.
20 years later we still live under the boogeyman of terrorism. Imagine if all the money we put into the war on terror went into better healthcare and other social goods?
All of this is to say, I don't have absolute trust in the vaccine or the plan or the people in charge, I don't trust them to make good decision nor to be honest.
If you want me to be onboard with "the plan", governments need to tell me - What's in the vaccine. - Exactly when they'll declare this over. - That they'll undo all of their emergency powers afterwards.
Otherwise, just like the war on terror, this will never be over no matter how much we comply.
The idea that most people "not at risk" is wrong.
The idea that collective action is all about trusting government is wrong, it's primarily abut supporting the other people in your community. it's a very USA'ian line of thinking to jump to "Imma screw over my fellow citizens because the government can't be trusted. Freedom!".
The idea that Florida and Sweden are good examples is wrong.
And as above, the idea that the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic is wrong. Do not confuse the one crisis (of democratic ideas) with the other (of infectious molecules) or your responses will not be appropriate. They operate at completely different levels of abstraction.
The idea that "we haven't seen the hospital scenarios you describe materialize" is, in my local area, wrong.
> Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt
I have no idea of the point you're trying to make, and please to make no assumptions at all about me.
I googled "Howard Springs" but I have no idea what crazy talking point I am supposed to be nodding along with now.
> governments need to tell me - Exactly when they'll declare this over
You can't vote on the virus's timeline. The only politicians who have tried to declare "it's over" are charlatans.
> governments need to tell me - What's in the vaccine.
Do I need to go into the reasons why this is paranoid delusional, confused idiocy? Governments don't design or manufacture the vaccines. Without a bio-medical background that you and I both lack it's just not comprehensible. And lastly, can you not google the layman's explainers and research papers? I understand why you didn't post this line alone in a comment - it would be flagged and deleted.
All in all, I feel like someone at a party who has engaged a stranger in conversation, and now regrets it, as they speak a lot but say absolutely nothing worth hearing.
I hope you stay safe, healthy, and have a wonderful holiday this year.
It would help if you explained what is wrong.
As it looks now, you just don't like what the stranger said and declare him not worth listening.
To me it is clear that vaccine passports is clearly not working and all this has become a big failure for politicians who don't know how to exit this failed strategy therefore double down on their plans.
What if we all respected the first confinement? 6 weeks everybody at home, period.
The disease would be gone.
But no, oh no. People just can't be reasonable. So instead of 6 weeks, we've been dealing with this shit for almost two years.
And now you blame those who are unvaccinated, while vaccinated people go partying and spread the disease.
No, you should blame unreasonable people.
I don't know how many other people this has happened to but I too have my doubts as to whether there was ever any hope of containing this.
If taken literally, how is that supposed to work? People working for the emergency service still need to work, and they certainly can't work from home. Same for most of the medical sector, nursing services etc. and of course the various bits of infrastructure. Some industries cannot be easily shut down (you cannot stop or start a steel works on a whim). Most people involved in food production, too. Maybe you can blame people for not keeping at least two weeks of provisions (although blaming them won't change anything), but expecting them to go six weeks without buying any food or other provisions is certainly unrealistic. Things break, and not all of them can be left for up to six weeks to be fixed. (If your fridge breaks, or the heating breaks or your roof springs a leak, that cannot really wait. Same if things break in any of the critical industries and services that cannot be shutdown and need to keep working). All this residual activity still needs some amount of transportation and all the infrastructure that that entails. Etc.,etc. …
But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes that acceptable for many.
With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex, you would want to quit.
It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News style lies.
Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Knowing that the point of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness in the person receiving it. I struggle to understand why you would not even question how important they are in that setting unless you are worried they have dropped that extra safety component.
Vaccines reduce the risk of spreading the virus. People who are vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. This absolutely doesn't mean you won't die if you are vaccinated. Think seat belts in car accidents. It is all about reducing risk. On mass, at population levels, this means ICU have capacity to take in other seriously ill people. If ICUs are full and there is a plane crash or whatever where many people are seriously injured we are screwed.
You could make the point that increasing the spread when everyone is protected is fine but that allows for increased mutations.
It's part of the reason that bed capacity has been so difficult to keep constant or increase.
Except for all of 2020.
and this?
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccine-requir...
In the last 20 years the standard "joke" (ha ha, only true) about the universal health system is that you need to be in good health in order to have enough energy to fight for your right to get help. The health care debt was an all time high at the start of the pandemic, and has since sky rocketed.
The faults are many. Poor wages has create many empty seats at the university programs. A lack of available personal has created a demand for labour hire employees, creating a system where many are moving to those in order to get pay rises, furthering increasing the cut that the middle men takes. An sharp increase in populations has increased demand, without any corresponding supply or funding. Employees has had an increase in paper work, with technology solutions that has caused additional work rather than optimized the work flow. Those same technology solutions has also been expensive to the point of corruptions, with some deals being actually corruptions that gone to court.
The situation is so bad that my own health clinic is sending every patient that calls them on non-mondays to the emergency department, as they are by law required to redirect the patient somewhere and all their own doctors are booked for the rest of the week, a pattern that been going on every week for the last year. Vacations has been removed as an emergency decision at many hospitals, and in one case the "compensation" for lost summer vacation was a fruit basket.
The expected time frame to raise the standard and actually train enough workers, as calculated by researchers a few years ago, was (if I remember right) somewhere around 10-20 years into the future. One pre-panedmic solution was to encourage skilled immigration directly from hospitals of nearby countries, a fix that obviously is not going to work now. If Germany is anywhere similar, then the blame isn't disinformation. It is systemic problem that has existed for decades and is now being pushed to over the edge.
It's really a shockingly well kept secret, especially to the outside world. Much like the utterly dysfunctional rail system.
Before the pandemic, I would have said that the country's healthcare system was about a decade away from resource-crisis. Now, it may have already started. I'm terrified of ending up in a hospital, even if there's no covid-wave ongoing. I do not want my life in the hands of the overworked traumatized remnants.
The way this country treats healthcare workers is shameful.
Media and politics are way more responsible than the craziest idiot.
This is nonsense. The topic has been in the news almost from the beginning of the crisis. The government is being constantly criticised for that. Why do you people repeat this? It's a lie.
The fact that this topic is now being used by anti-vaxxers to cloud their anti-social behaviour and shift the growing anger of the vaccinated population away from them is ridiculous.
There are two issues here and stacking hospital beds and personal would not make anti-vaxxers better in any way.
You're lying and the fact that you seriously think any sane person would believe this is both hilarious and sad as it's a very beautiful example of this covidioten movement we have to deal with.
>...nor are they in any way close to as severe as the effects of COVID...
Hmmm. I've had COVID as have many of my friends and co-workers. I would say that a mild fever and runny nose from COVID, doesn't come close to potential heart attack, blood clotting, losing vision, partial or full paralysis, etc. Don't get me wrong, if you're a relatively healthy person who's health and immune system is in highly functional order, your risk from both COVID and vaccine effects is probably the same...but then, if you're a healthy person, why would you be so afraid of such a benign virus, that you feel the need to get a fairly ineffectual vaccine?
I WORK IN THE MEDICAL FIELD MYSELF and your ridiculous lies are embarrassing.
https://twitter.com/ZDFbayern/status/1466813138741903365
This is what a covid patient gets in intensive care. Every day!
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and that's also a line where we ban accounts. Please review the rules and stick to them from now on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25961423 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21161447 (Oct 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471378 (March 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18012949 (Sept 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17863013 (Aug 2018)
Not only that but it looks like we've had to ban you in the past. All this is seriously not cool, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
I'm not going to ban you right now because it doesn't look like you've been doing it recently, but please review the rules and stick to them from now on, because if you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I hope blaming people not at all involved in current miseries becomes a popular sport again.
The only people which exhibit antisocial behavior are those that don’t care about protecting themselves and others from infection. Wearing a mask, avoiding meeting others and getting tested is just as valid as getting a vaccine. Perhaps more, because those that do get vaccinated (at least among my acquaintances) seem to wrongly assume that the vaccine is enough and don’t take any other measures except what they must (masks). So they’re meeting in groups, going to restaurants without getting tested, etc.
Take care like what? Be locked up for years and not meeting anyone? Because everything else is much more risky than just taking the damn jab and stfu about it.
Also: those people who still are unvaccinated are mostly conspiracy nutjobs and don't give a damn about the rest of the population around them so it's quite obvious they wouldn't give a damn about "taking care".
How do you know they're nutjobs? Everyone I know that's unvaccinated are normal people. This is just what the media and politicians are saying without providing any proof.
https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/
Absolutely agree with you about hospital/medical resourcing though, we have the same situation in Australia. In the name of efficiency these services get paired to the bone, and we have no capacity to respond to unusual events.
The Neo liberal worldview posits that redundancy is bad. I think Western countries in general are suffering from this Anorexia. It cripples innovation as well.
Did you suddenly switch your job to become a nurse?
How do you think we would have been able to ramp up everything while in a pandemic?
I posit that any sane and intelligent person would choose NOT to go into politics. Because of the system we as society have created around the job.
Even if we were able to handle the load on the healthcare system, that still would be a very large amount of unnecessary suffering and death. And even though there are some fundamental issues with working conditions and pay in this area, fixing them would not be enough to be able to handle the load that an exponentially growing viral disease could cause if it remains unchecked. If you do not stop the exponential spread, even with twice the capacity you'd only gain another 1-2 weeks until you're at capacity anyway.
The vaccines work well and are safe. The problem is that too many people didn't take them. There's plenty of problems with how this was organized in Germany, but in the we simply didn't manage to convince enough people to get vaccinated.
Point being, we didn't know what vaccination rate would reduce the R-value below 1, and FAFAIK we still don't know. Not even for the original Sars-cov-2 virus, and not for any of the variants.
> Cases of Covid-19 were less common among household members of vaccinated health care workers during the period beginning 14 days after the first dose than during the unvaccinated period before the first dose (event rate per 100 person-years, 9.40 before the first dose and 5.93 beginning 14 days after the first dose). After the health care worker’s second dose, the rate in household members was lower still (2.98 cases per 100 person-years). These differences persisted after fitting extended Cox models that were adjusted for calendar time, geographic region, age, sex, occupational and socioeconomic factors, and underlying conditions. Relative to the period before each health care worker was vaccinated, the hazard ratio for a household member to become infected was 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.63 to 0.78) for the period beginning 14 days after the first dose and 0.46 (95% CI, 0.30 to 0.70) for the period beginning 14 days after the second dose. ... Not all the cases of Covid-19 in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker; therefore, the effect of vaccination may be larger.1 For example, if half the cases in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker, a 60% decrease in cases transmitted from health care workers would need to occur to elicit the association we observed (see the Supplementary Appendix). Vaccination was associated with a reduction in both the number of cases and the number of Covid-19–related hospitalizations in health care workers between the unvaccinated period and the period beginning 14 days after the first dose.
Populations where people are less likely to get infected are less likely to spread. You have to be infected before you can spread.
> Maybe you’re seeing people reading the actual stats?
What kind of reasoning is this? So because Covid-19 isn’t the worst pandemic in history, then it makes sense to believe it’s a hoax or overhyped?
It is nonsense to vaccinate young and very healthy people, especially kids. Their risk from COVID is minimal to non-existent.
Also the spread is not stopped by vaccinating. Vaccinated still spread the virus. If it is reduced is still unclear. There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated. The sample sizes of vaccinated and unvaccinated were equal as they should be. Reports in Germany about these numbers forget to mention that vaccinated people are basically not tested.
> The vaccines work well and are safe.
They do not work well enough. First of all people still transmit the virus after only about 2 months after the vaccination. Then the protection goes down extremely between 2-6 months after the vaccination (that is why we need boosters all the time). It is still unclear if we continue to need boosters after the third shot.
While vaccinated people who get infected still spread the virus, they’re less likely to get infected in the first place, which is a necessary precursor to spreading.
But yes, we’ll probably need updated vaccines, similarly to how we update the flu shot every year.
I would like to see the source for that if you have the link?
There is a lot to digest and probably it's easy to come to the wrong conclusions from this. I was referring to Figure 2.(a)
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/
* Peak viral load, GIVEN catching it?
* Duration of peak viral load, GIVEN catching it?
* Severe disease, GIVEN catching it?
* Hospital stay, GIVEN catching it?
* Death, GIVEN catching it?
There are many relevant parameters that the vaccines might affect. And the vaccinated people have a few parameters: number of shots, time since last shot, age, etc. People seem to focus on one or two of these questions at a time.
From your link, actually, related to duration:
"Fully vaccinated individuals with delta variant infection had a faster (posterior probability >0·84) mean rate of viral load decline (0·95 log10 copies per mL per day) than did unvaccinated individuals with pre-alpha (0·69), alpha (0·82), or delta (0·79) variant infections."
Clearly it's not going to stop transmission, but it could slow it down. People on both sides of this issue seem to undervalue partial measures and tradeoffs.
"beds" is a proxy for "health workers", if you put a bad covid case in a "bed" they just die, they need constant attention
I don’t think this is too far from the survival rate of those admitted to intensive care in general.
But I think the point is that COVID really increases your chances of being admitted there in the first place.
If you're in a certain age range, and have several comorbidities.
That means that somebody has to pay for them. Given that unavoidable but inconvenient fact, basic health care and life support might as well be organized under the auspices of the state and the costs shared among all residents.
So I'm kind of surprised to see this. I was under the impression Germany was the opposite.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/hospital-beds
Germany is #2 out of those reporting. Crushing Canada by like 300%.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/medical-doctors
Germany #1 for doctors, beating Canada by 100%
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/nurses
Germany #2 for nurses, beating Canada by ~75%
I kind of step back, how terrible is Canada doing?
>The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then.
Oh ya big time. I can't remember a time when nurses/psws/doctors weren't in huge demand here in Canada.
Before covid: https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/07/toronto-hospital-fraud/
During covid pre-vax: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-hospital-lays-off-97-regi...
Antivaxxers fired: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/11/28/were-on-the-brin...
You can't be on one side in huge demand for nurses but also be firing them willy nilly.
Firing them for not getting the vaccine isn't true at all. They've been reducing nurses and such for long before.
>Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.
I propose that Canada and Germany probably have the same problem. That we are on the same page.
I am curious what you think is that problem?
Wow, why is there the wage cap when nursing has long been an issue in Ontario? I wonder who thinks this stuff up and thinks they are somehow saving money by doing this. It just generates inefficiencies and unintended side effects.
Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to be a long trail of government interference that's counterproductive.
Bill 124 has nothing at all to do with Nurses. The word 'nurse' does not show up even once. This bill is effectively what put doug ford into power. That is to say, he was elected to pass this one. It is more than required.
As you likely know Ontario is the highest debt subnational in the world. The mcguinty government was in power for ~10 years but did so by buying votes. They had so many gigantic scandals and might be one of the worst governments ontario ever had. Hilariously, the PCs approach was to tell ontario he was going to fire 100,000 people. That obviously didn't go well giving Wynne a majority.
However, Hudak was right, 100,000 less people in government. Because we didn't... we are in a far worse situation. Pre-covid ontario was very bankrupt. It was so bankrupt Wynne was forced to sell off highly profitable assets like Hydro1. Now that covid happened? I dont even know what will happen.
>Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to be a long trail of government interference that's counterproductive.
The consequences of decisions in either way is difficult and rarely properly assessed. As Greece knows, someone eventually ends up holding the garbage bag and has to clean up.
These are the consequences of decisions made.
But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.
I feel people misunderstand these issues so often, everyone just wants bigger government always. What happened during Mcguinty was well forecasted. He upon coming into power increased taxes on manufacturing. The consequence was that manufacturing dropped significantly. Ontario shed somewhere around 800,000 jobs because of that move and mcguinty trying to hide his shame increased the size of government to artificially hide abysmal unemployment. Population of Ontario was roughly 12 million at that time i believe. Labour participation was roughly 60%. Dropping 800,000 is more than 10% increase to unemployment. 10% unemployment is pitchforks at the capital.
The consequence? You converted tax paying people to tax deficit. It broke the balance by alot and it was all to hide the bad idea of raising taxes and harming ontarians.
Flipside, while this is an obvious failure, it shouldn't detract from a big government. Healthcare was obvious context above. What exactly is OHIP? It's a crappy basic health insurance provided by the government that has much less coverage today compared to years ago. It's not that we shouldn't do that, we simply don't cover everything. We know it's a good thing to cover the basics. It's just a definition of 'what are the basics'. Should diabetes meds be included? Type 1 vs Type 2? On top of that, it being single payer means most of society receives their healthcare from the rich.
>It's a strong hammer aimed at a few well deserved targets but hits broadly across a wide group where it doesn't always make sense. It's like a one size fits all approach.
It does make sense. What comes in bankruptcy? If we don't control those costs we are forced into austerity measures. Greece's Syriza is a communist party and they chose austerity out of their options. If we go into that, it will mean way more than 100,000 jobs fired abruptly. Which wasn't Hudak's plan. He was going to allow anyone who wants to keep working to keep working. Retirements, job hopping, etc being the plan.
The reason why you dont hear much of a chirp from the ultra strong unions is that they know the alternative is far worse.
>But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.
When Wynne got a majority. She took this power as her winning and not hudak losing. I called exactly what was about to happen. Wynne who was at the feet of all the scandals was going to be even worse because she would be under much more scrutiny. Not much of a prediction obviously, no future sight needed.
She actually was not bad besides the obvious corruption, she very nearly balanced the budget. Yet she made history books. She's the lowest approval rating for ontario premiers ever, and she provided the worst election result for the ontario liberals.
When doug ford got into power, I predicted exactly the same. doug ford didnt win, wynne lost. He's going to make decisions to fix the disaster of the liberals and take the blame. Flipside, he seems to be highly approved of because of covid and his response being objectively good. So I might be wrong on that front but he didnt fix the liberal corruption.
If this truly is an energy and hospitals truly are at risk, find a way to build more capacity even if it is temporary. Blaming the public for the failure to do this is wrong. And if you aren’t building this capacity… maybe this really isn’t an emergency?
You know that is hard to get people? You know how long it takes to teach someone? Especially while a pandemic is ongoing?
Why not both?
Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn’t be much of a help.
We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if that (simply because it’s not as though Germany’s existing ICU capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it’s quite large, actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but wouldn’t really solve the underlying problem.
And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It’s completely misguided. Not least of which because it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people for that …
Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.
We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination. However, in the very short term even that won’t be good enough, we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is necessary (and already happening).
Think about time frames.
Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks, vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.
This satirical article from Ireland is probably applicable in every Western country that has had its health system systematically hollowed out by cynical neoliberal fuckheads: https://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2021/11/19/unvaccinated-be...
> Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It's completely misguided
What you fail to understand is that the people who cut those bed numbers across Europe are responsible for far more death than a small percent of mRNA vaccine hesitant people. And they're fucking delighted that so many people are so misdirected.
A strategy that would make sense would include BOTH vaccination and ICU capacity, one of which could have been started in March 2020, and it would have put us in a much better position today. Letting capacity decrease while waiting for vaccines that may or may not end the pandemic is negligent. Not getting vaccinated may be seen by some as negligent also, but different standards apply for governments and citizens.
The pandemic comes in waves, we do not need to plan for endless exponential growth. A few weeks of extra capacity would make the whole thing much easier to handle, given that we might be already at the peak and cases seem to be going down again[0]. The RKI weekly report[1] currently lists 1700 ICU cases, a month ago it was 1100[2]. So the 4000 beds we lost throughout the year[3] could have made a big difference.
[0]https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-infektionen-103.html
[1]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
[2]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
[3]https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
As I point out in my other comment, you cannot interpret that number in any to imply as though we ever actually had those 4,000 beds.
Just as with opposition to seatbelts it’s important for politics to create facts and just decide this issue. Everyone should be vaccinated and that’s just how it is.
Nothing more to say, our worldviews are too far apart.
There are many many reasons why one would or would not get a vaccine. For many, the reason was to go on vacation without too much hassle. Or because of social pressure. Or because they’re caring for someone who’s vulnerable.
If someone gets tested, uses masks properly and avoids groups of people they’re doing just as much as the average vaccinated. Definitely more than the truly antisocial which went into YOLO mode after getting vaccinated.
Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen, because we always knew that it would hit us eventually, people have been warning about this for ages, this is not some black swan.
More healthcare capacity would help, just like more supply chain capacity would help, or the ability to manufacture some masks, the entire problem is we've been running on the idiotic 80s managerial efficiency mindset for decades and now we're running on fumes on every front.
If we had any appreciation for crisis management, robustness, redundancy and had some shock absorbers in our system many people would not have needed to die. And no it's not just the unvaccinated. Plenty of countries this year, including the US, will lose more people in total to covid in 2021 than in 2020. Vaccines help but they are not pandemic ending, and our systems are deeply screwed up.
this was entirely preventable by providing nurses and those keeping hospitals running with the support they need to do suchs jobs during a time of crisis.
In the netherlands for instance, many nurses have been running 12h shifts during the peaks, and there has been very little practical support in helping those people.
I am not even talking about monetary funds, but mainly practical stuff. (for instance, some volunteers decided to do grocery shopping for nurses during peaks).
If people are busting their ass off to prevent the healthcare systems from collepsing, maybe the goverment should have done far more in its power to prevent those people from quitting.
I really wonder if any of the people here talking about massively scaling up ICU capacity have ever even been in or visited someone in an ICU. It is called an “intensive care” unit for a reason. Extensive resources are required. Putting aside the physical space, equipment and pharmacological needs, the teams of people are specialized and have extensive knowledge and training.
You can't keep the staff and maintain the gear needed to handle 100x "once in a century" event all the time, it just doesn't work. Most health systems are already huge money sinks and on the brink of collapse in normal times... This isn't a "a bomb injured 300 people" event, we can't live 100% prepared to every single potential threats.
And the other thing you can do is, actually have a prepared and tested response plan to a crisis. Our reaction to this was to dust off some plans from the the shelves, every individual state had different systems in place, two years in we don't really have a functioning digital app, but ten different solutions none of which more than a fraction of people have adopted, and so forth. Completely avoidable chaos if anyone was actually in charge of readying the country for these situations.
I agree that vaccines are part of the solution. I disagree that stripping citizens of their rights and insulting them on TV is part of literally any solution for anything. If a government feels the urge to do that, it should look for alternatives instead. Maintaining ICU capacity from one year before (decreased by 4000 in 2021, see: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihenht... - "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten"), is the lowest-hanging fruit, I'm sure there are additional alternatives that I'm not qualified to comment on.
Edit: It was pointed out to me that the DIVI numbers have some complexity that I did not account for. So grain of salt on the actual ICU number, but I've not yet seen anyone deny the trend. Here's a fact check that confirms that beds were lost: https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-praesident...
PCR test units and hospital bureaucracy are past their limits - e.g. regions like Bonn, Essen or Recklinghausen reporting zero cases on multiple consecutive days (Nov 29, Nov 30), which is _very_ unlikely w.r.t. the case numbers of the surrounding regions and those very regions reporting more than one hundred cases today.
The published indicators do not count cases that are reported late [2], which leads to apparently stalling case numbers. Growths may not be exponential forever but given that roughly one quarter of the population is not vaccinated, I would not take bets that the virus runs out of hosts before the health care system collapses.
I agree to the sentiment made that the balance between economic efficiency and damaging austerity for profit margin gains in the German health care system (especially for worker’s loans) has been tipping way too far to the latter in the past decades.
[1] https://www.lzg.nrw.de/covid19/download/laborbest_faelle_sar... (updated each day at 0:00 CET)
[2] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
edit: some formatting.
Also one that collects high income taxes and high health care contributions (~14% of the income). So one can't really blame it on lack of funds.
If you end up on a fucking ventilator in an ICU bed, the damage is long done. The goal is not to maximize the number of people we can have on ventilators. That is an absurd idea on the same level of the "natural immunity is better than the vaccine!" insanity we got in 2021.
Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them, there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances, or to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.
Vaccine mandates have been a thing for well longer than I've been alive. I wasn't allowed to attend public school as a kid without having been given several vaccines.
Sure, there were anti-vax people and people with religious exemptions then, but the vast majority of the people who are up in arms and crying foul about COVID vaccination mandates didn't blink an eye when told they had to vaccinate their kids against the measles as a condition for sending them to school.
Why the hypocrisy?
> Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them
We have lockdowns because we think they slow the spread of disease and save lives, not "just because". That's like saying "birthday parties end when we stop having them". Well, yeah, but that's a tautology and not a very useful point to make.
> there is no reason [...] to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.
That seems like a straw man, though. Who is saying we have to lock everything down until everyone is vaccinated? What country has even tried to implement something like this? Some areas have certainly tied the relaxation of restrictions in some ways to vaccination rates, but the main concern for restriction levels is mostly other metrics, like new-case rates, hospitalizations, percent of ICU capacity used, death rate, etc.
> there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances
Everyone who gets sick is a host for the virus to mutate in. Everyone who gets sick, or is even merely unvaccinated, runs a higher risk of passing on the disease to someone else.
I am really really tired of the "it doesn't hurt anyone else if I don't get vaccinated" argument. Yes. It. Does. Full stop.
I was under the impression it was not the needle but the solution that is injected into the body through the needle that they were objecting to.
Let me know when they have a vaccine that lasts longer than 6 months and doesn't give young men heart attacks -- actually, don't, because I still won't take it because I'm just... not... afraid... of... the... virus...
By the way, when do you reckon the former Chief Scientist at the megacorp that produces the science juice that you probably had shot into your body stopped valuing science? https://www.bitchute.com/video/FPehpfdTleDo/
The health minister was throttling Biontech/Pfizer deliveries just as demand started to go up for crying out loud!
It could always be worse, but I’m not at all surprised about lack of trust in the government.
You will spend years in lockdowns because that’s the only thing they’re capable of. See Portugal or Denmark for the vaccination happy case. Better than Germany but nowhere near life-as-usual.
Finally, if half the population doesn’t value all those things… Germany is proper fucked. You're exaggerating by a lot, which tells me you don’t value science and rationality.
Has this been studied? I have natural anti-bodies and will participate in a study.
If the spike protein mutates like it did in Omicron, most of the other antibodies will still continue to work while new spike antibodies are created. In contrast, if the vaccine-induced antibodies are avoided, immunity in vaccinated people drops to zero.
This leads to another consideration. As I understand it, antibody tests only check for the spike protein antibodies. This implies that if there are 10 other antibodies not being tested, then actual protection is 10x higher than the test indicates. Any antibody count falls over time because the body is efficient. If the disease enters the body again, it will just start pumping out the antibodies again as long as it knows how to make them.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People with just natural immunity in Israel are 10-15x better off than people who just got the vaccine. As this is the largest such study and encompasses pretty much the entire population, you can eliminate common sample size and selection bias issues that happen when you hand-choose a couple hundred people to look at.
E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.
In relation to what? An average Covid infection? We don't even know how many go undetected to know what that average even is. Or the average out of hospital cases? Or simply confirmed cases? What are the numbers when comparing young healthy people vs old people with co-morbidities? What about children?
They set up "Nightingale Hospitals" (reference to Florence Nightingale) - basically convention centres were converted into field hospitals with ventilators. One in London had 4000 beds, and there were others elsewhere in the country. It took 9 days to build the London one (I was impressed!)
After all that, the 4000 bed one in London treated 20 patients during the first wave: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214 Most are now shutdown or being used as vaccination centres from what I know.
If the UK can pull this off in 9 days, I am sure other more sophisticated countries can do the same if they need to.
You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always the case).
That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of countries that stripping your health care system is probably a bad idea.
That there are a bunch of egoists that would rather have us all fend for ourselves doesn't change that, and usually those are exactly the people demanding we take on their burdens when the situation is reversed. It's called a social contract for a reason: taxes, vaccination against communicable diseases where possible, compulsory education and so on, it's the flipside of the coin, you get a lot of rights, but you also have some (sometimes moral) obligations.
Too bad current vaccines don't achieve that.
I agree that it would be a much stronger argument. However, I also find it cruel to force people into an injection that they do not want, and would probably still oppose a universal vaccine mandate for that reason. I'd be okay with a mandate that allows people who really don't want the vaccine to opt out. I'd even be okay with that for the COVID vaccines if it wasn't for the 2G stuff and the awful rhetoric against unvaccinated people that preceded it. Enacting the mandate now makes the whole thing feel too much like "we'll get you somehow". Like I said, I find it cruel. It's not my idea of a humane society.
Keep in mind that there is plenty of precedent for mandatory vaccinations, in almost every developed country and in plenty that are not young children are vaccinated against a whole raft of diseases that would otherwise cause serious problems. The only people that are exempt are those that do not want any vaccinations for religious reasons because it apparently interferes with 'gods plan'. If you want to deal with this at the same level of ignorance then that's fine with me but I personally have absolutely no problem with a mandate and I also would not have a problem with rescinding the exemption for religious purposes.
I don't see that with this series of vaccines. They do not stop transmission. The ICU issue cannot be addressed fairly without addressing the other causes that put large numbers of people in ICUs.
We pay every year as a society in deaths for the assumption of some risk. We manage it, make laws, or just leave it alone and some people die (for example, we don't ban cars or eating too many calories or swimming pools).
In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection, most especially when it appears the health authorities either didn't understand or didn't communicate the effectiveness over time of the injections.
There's a point were everything can't be all about what someone at the top proclaims is for the social good. Otherwise we wind up in corruption and dictatorship.
This was the same with every vaccine in the past, very few vaccines have received as much scrutiny as these, the biggest risk is the long term one and even there we have a fairly good idea of what the possibilities of materializing are.
None of these weigh up against the damage that a COVID-19 infection does.
If you think mandatory vaccination equates corruption and dictatorship then I am not sure we are on the same wavelength regarding the meaning of those terms.
As in, we can't just say "We have some social responsibilities so you must XX per the authorities" when XX is self serving, counterproductive, useless or harmful. We have an individual right, and responsibility, to weigh the dictates we are given at some point, perhaps not on all issues, but on some.
Other vaccines were not taken in to market in this manner. It is a novel vaccine.
This is pretty much the norm in any country that is a democracy but that does not have coalition governments. You get a kind of see-sawing effect where one group will enact a bunch of stuff and then when the tables are turned it all gets undone. It's stupendously inefficient.
Democracy is quite flawed but it still is the best mechanism for government that we have that is sustainable over a longer period of time.
There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.
Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.
Two things drive me crazy: 1. How easy it is to dehumanize a significant percentage of the population. 2. How willingly politicians embrace that in order to find a scapegoat for their own failures.
If you take a forced vaccine and get a vaccine injury, no one will care about you. You'll end up in Hartz 4 and that's it. There won't be any HN thread in support of you, because it isn't mainstream.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
But reducing the amount of active infections does have a beneficial effect because even though everyone will likely be exposed that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will also get the disease (even the the worst diseases viral do not necessarily spread to 100% of the population), and there some chance that later strains may become milder. And if fewer people are ill at the same time that should increase the level of care available.
But it's a rearguard action at this point.
Illusion of control. The chance was never there. Even countries who are way more suitable for isolation like australia didn't manage to keep the virus out. Attributing that to "those that tried to spare the economy" is just another toxic blame game.
It's like a fire. If your house is the only house in a row of houses that is well prepared against fire then you're going to go down, in spite of all of your preparations.
The fatalism that many people exhibit is a self fulfilling prophesy: we won't be able to do it so we're not even going to try. But you know what? Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and China showed that it is possible.
No, they just moved themselves into a corner that they will be trapped in for the next 10 to 20 years.
The reason people are even mentioning ICU beds are because they're trying to shift the vaccination argument from "do it for yourself, if you want to" to "you have to do it for others".
If we had enough ICU beds, there would be NO argument to force people to get vaccinated, just like there is no argument to force people to not smoke or not be fat.
The arguments for vaccination go a lot further than just a lack of ICU beds.
To be frank, I'm in favour of mass cryogenics. Build mausoleums under mountains and fill them with the frozen heads of the dead, to be revived later.
Science fiction has no place in policy determination.
Yet isn't it strange that the one crisis we have chosen to pull out all the societal stops for, to radically reorient all of society and put it in stasis for, is COVID-19. Odd coincidence that most of the first list affects young people, COVID-19 primarily affects old people, and the political leadership of the developed world happens to be comprised of old people.
And the subset of old people responsible for handling the pandemic hasn't even managed to do that properly. This is the same category of people who hollowed out unions, induced globalization, and generally kicked out the ladder beneath them in a variety of ways.
I do care about my parents/grandparents, I've been vaccinated, and I'd wear a mask around an old person. That's the absolute maximum I'm willing to do voluntarily and feel fine about that. I'd even venture to suggest that if someone has a problem and demands that all of society radically realign itself to fix/prevent it in a way that's disproportionate to society's other needs, it's not society that's being selfish.
On the other hand, I don't care if you choose to be fat or smoke yourself to death, that won't harm anyone.
And actually fills up ICUs.
"The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly." [0]
[0] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/nhs-hospital-bed-n...
Meanwhile vaccinating anyone < 60 has a very small benefit and it should be up to choice. Myokarditis side effects from the vaccine are probably bullshit, you can get it from almost all infections, so I expect it to see for every vaccine. We probably have no data since we lack operation of this scale.
But people here are afraid (typical) and even demand harsher policies. They also seem incapable to hold political leaders to account. Politics basically failed to prepare for the next wave, which was known to be happening quite a long while ago. Instead we had an embarrassing slap-fight between different states. One more stupid than the other.
Also you cannot just get a vaccine, you have to actively search for places that administer them. Pretty sure that I won't renew mine again, since this is just not acceptable.
I would advise you to ask a doctor, even if those aren't too keen to get another patient with vaccine trouble, but getting a vaccine in an active wave might not be the best health recommendation.
Very true, last month for the booster there was only one place in Stuttgart (large city for German standards) offering appointments within the year. It's gotten better again, but it's not like they didn't know that there would be a new wave of vaccinations once the first people are 6 months in (or had J&J).
Wild statement to make without any numbers.
Here is a start:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi...
Covid is a serious disease, but we are talking of mandatory vaccination and I don't think that it can be justified for younger age groups.
Having also less risk from the vaccine itself (which got injected into over 4 billion people) in comparison to COVID?
I disagree.
Lucky for me in this discussion, experts and politics are also now more inclined to have mandatory vaccination.
Mandatory vaccination exists in Germany for other things as well. I totally think it is reasonable.
This isn't exactly true. People under 60 have a smaller risk to get to the Hospital/ICU but it's definitely not 0. There is also still a very real risk for Long-Covid and other complications from it. This gets even worse when said <60 person has obesity, smokes or other underlying health issues.
For your reference, in the Netherlands about 89% of 18+ people have been fully vaccinated. Yet the 11% unvaccinated make up 50% of Hospital beds and more than 70% of ICU beds. Looks at this image from our Minister of Health: https://twitter.com/hugodejonge/status/1466482208995164175
It's in Dutch but you'll get the message.
Furthermore, even if you are somehow not at risk of Covid, and you would magically know this about yourself it is STILL a good idea to get the shot because it reduces your chances of getting it (and passing it on!) and even if you get it your viral load is lower so the chances to spread it are reduced.
Stop making up arguments and get your bloody shot.
This means the virus is busy making copies of itself in their body. Those copies not only have a chance to mutate, but have evolutionary selective pressure to mutate around the vaccine.
If you don't have the vaccine, it has no pressure to mutate around the vaccine.
There maybe more depth in their motives. But this is the surface.
One would think Germany would have learned some lessons about that kind of thing.
Evidently not.
The number of hospitalized patients per 100K are as follows:
Unvaccinated: 24.7 Started vaccination: 10.5 Fully vaccinated: 5.9
Don’t get me wrong. I fully support everyone getting vaccinated, and requiring it broadly. But your statement is just not true.
Omicron is thought to have evolved in an immunocompromised person. Vaccinating that person would not have helped. COVID-19 is also known to cross easily between humans and other animals. An alternate theory is that the startling number of mutations in the Omicron variant evolved in an animal host.
This variant appears to defeat previous immunity both from prior infection and vaccination. The willfully unvaccinated, while idiots and selfish assholes are not to blame in our current troubles and vaccinating every person on earth would not have prevented the Omicron outbreak.
Furthermore we need to take a global view. Just because we have sufficient doses to fully vaccine everyone in Europe we’re not protected unless everyone everywhere gets vaccinated. (And even then pockets of virus can mutate and overcome the vaccine) I’ll worry more about idiot Texans (who are frankly mostly hurting themselves and their families) when we provide enough doses to Bangladesh to vaccinate their whole population. (And rinse and repeat for every developing nation)
So I think that what you say is just not correct.
Serious question. I wonder about vaxx effectiveness when I see these numbers. But the breakdown matters.
I live in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our breakdown from Mar 15-Nov 26 is[1]:
- Hospitalizations: 84.4% unvaxxed, 9.6% 1 shot, 6% 2 shots
- Deaths: 69% unvaxxed, 7.1% 1 shot, 23.8% 2 shots
Total admissions and death rate numbers don't tell the whole story - breaking them down by vaxxed/1shot/2shot will help unpack "who to blame".
In fact, you can dig deeper. My province doesn't release the numbers but from what I can tell the 2-shot people who die are generally older and/or infirm. So I believe the 2shot numbers are being thrown off by an atypical population... which means the general population has less to fear from covid if they're double vaxxed. My co-founder informed this is an example of "Simpson's Paradox"[2].
What kind of vaxxed/unvaxxed breakdown are you seeing in Denmark?
1 - https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/204d6ed723244dfbb76...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
It'd be much more interesting to see a straight comparison over Oct-Nov, say, when the vaccination rate was stable and get the unvaxxed vs 1 shot vs 2 shot vs 2 weeks after 2nd shot vs booster numbers.
This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on hospitals. That is, if you have 80% vaxxed, a mere 10% increase could halve the number of hospital beds needed. No wonder governments are going so hard on vaccinating the hesitant and antivax.
Is this true? My understanding is that the opposite is true, most people who are hospitalized are not vaccinated by a large margin.
This ignores the demographic differences between the vaxxed and the unvaxxed. The elderly and those with conditions that made them high risk have a much higher vaccination rate as one would expect.
If you cut the number of vaccinated in half you won't cut hospitalizations in half because subgroups of the population being hospitalized are not present in the same ratios in the unvaxed.
Another really, really important piece of context is how human behavior has changed. In 2020, many people were very cautious about covid. For example, in liberal US cities like Seattle and Portland, many indoor activities were restricted pretty hard until 2021. People didn’t dine out in person, or didn’t attend the movies. In 2021, people have more or less returned to normal, less-cautious behavior. While masks are still worn, people are comfortable dining out and going to the movies and all sorts of activities.
My point is that this change in behavior is likely to “blame” for the increased cases. If people were behaving the same way a year ago as they are today, cases would have been significantly worse then.
In other words, vaccinations have allowed us to return to a mostly normal life while stopping cases from rapidly increasing. At the very least, anecdotally, in places with lower vaccination rates, a return to normal life has been accompanied by more covid scares.
I wonder how did they dine out :-)
But what's strange is out the US doesn't seem to reflect this.
There are states with fairly high vaccination rates where vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU at rates many times ours, and are only showing up as 2.5 or 3 times better protected than the unvaccinated for hospitalization.
I don't know how to explain this other than length of time since injection. But we're heading into 6-7 months here now in Ontario and I'm still not seeing this trend. Boosters will certainly help, I'm sure, but I don't feel it can be the sole cause.
It's so ridiculous just driving across the border... look at Vermont or New York compared to Ontario or Quebec in terms of daily case rates and hospitalization. (Or Maine compared to New Brunswick, etc.) The only way I can explain it is by masking, which is still rigidly followed here in most of Canada, but not as much in the US.
PS congrats on having perhaps the most competent governments in North America in terms of managing this disease. It's not the first time I've found myself browsing for real estate in Nova Scotia, but it certainly became more serious this past year...
85.6% of hospitalized in Denmark are either unvaccinated or "half vaccinated". See https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/aa41b29149f24e20a40... graph 2.
This means that if the vaccination rate grew from 90% to 100% the hospitalized number would drop to very manageable levels.
Even with a 90% fully vaccinated population, the remaining 10% are still enough to fill up the hospitals.
If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.
When taking the vaccination rate into account, the likelihood of hospitalization still seems to be a fifth after vaccination.
But even if the remaining population got vaccinated it wouldn't be enough to drastically reduce the hospital load.
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Imagine if 100% of the population were vaccinated, what percentage of the hospitalized would then be vaccinated?
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination
If there's simply a large number of people in such situations as I suspect there are. It would be deceptive to extrapolate to the general population based on them.
People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population and 93% of covid deaths.
The overwhelming majority of people that die from this thing are older and/or infirm. It has nothing to do with an atypical population, that's just how this virus works.
The vaccine can only do so much. We need to stop pretending it's the "slam dunk" our experts advertised it as and get on with our lives.
I'm not sure where you get the 15% higher death rate: any sources?
In .nl we are seeing the same numbers (but on a 3x population of denmarks). Hospitals are so full now, they are rejecting e.g. cancer-patients and other "plannable Intensive Care patients". Over half of the patients on those ICs are vaccinated; ergo, from a ratio of 10/90% the patients are 55/45%; ergo: they work. Certainly not fully and certainly less than (I) expected.
> I really fail to see why we are blaming the unvaccinated and not Pfizer/Moderna.
I’d blame both the unvaccinated and new variants that seem to be more lethal than before.
If it is the case that vaccinated are still passing the virus but not dying from it, then isolation of the unvaccinated saves their lives.
- Denmark currently experiencing a massive new wave of infections
- Previous large wave of infections was last winter, with rate peaking on Dec 18
- Daily deaths peaked one month later at about 8 per 1000 daily infections
- Current daily deaths, accounting for lag, is also about 8 per 1000 daily infections
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
Vaccination is something that everyone has to do for the sake of everyone, which sadly is a somewhat alien concept in certain parts of our society.
You should still get vaccinated and get boosters, but no vaccination rate is going to make this go away anymore than the flu shot has eliminated the flu.
https://cov-lineages.org/lineage_list.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this repeatedly—can you please stop that, and stick to posting thoughtful contributions to whatever discussion is at hand?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111916
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633369
I understand the need/temptation to posture defensively against the community/the masses/idiots/society/whatever—I don't mean this pejoratively; I think literally all of us do it—but because it's such a mechanical reaction, it makes for particularly low-quality comments.
Also, the effective vaccination rate is usually lower than the average rate. Unvaccinated people tend to spend time with other unvaccinated people, and this is particularly true for kids. The people an infected individual encounters are more likely to be unvaccinated than the general population.
The numbers here in Ontario are clear. Case rates among the unvaccinated are far higher, and ICU admissions are far far far higher.
I never fell for any line that said vaccination would just make the disease go away. Frankly that was never said by medical experts, only implied by certain politicians.
The numbers in the Netherlands are similar but both a bit lower.
Source, the data on https://www.zeit.de
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-people-fully-vaccin...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Given the exceptionally low incidence of death in the 12 and under group, it's debatable which figure should be given prominence.
On 2 and 3: The case rate is spiking significantly higher than it has ever before, and the death rate is on an upward trend. It is typically delayed behind the case rate, so we can't be certain that this will be as bad as it gets. It's still very possible for this wave to be more deadly than prior waves, even though the Case:Death rate is lower.
Instead of showing 2 & 3 separately, perhaps the combined chart [1] is a better visualization.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
The process started with demonizing them to the point of being singled out and blamed for how the disease is impacting society. When the discrimination started, there were very few willing to speak for them. Particularly malicious was the expansion of the term anti-vaxxer typically used for a fringe minority which “rejects all vaccines for everyone” to all of those that “reject one single vaccine for themselves”.
Now a measure that will come too late and impact the entirety of society is sold as a means of finally forcing them to conform.
From the outside, this may look like a perfectly executed propaganda campaign. One can’t exclude that the government (like the Canadian gov which actually got caught I believe) took advantage of the chaos and flexed its propaganda muscles a bit. But the more scary possibility is that a frightened and manipulated population + incompetent government in CYA mode is enough to try to override the constitutional principle of bodily integrity.
And it’s precisely this principle which seems to be the last thing preventing the state from forcing or punishing the unvaccinated too hard, limiting them to a fine.
Everyone still laying judgement on my choice but 1) I can't go anywhere anyway 2) where is the promised herd immunity?
I'm lucky to have a big house and garden, just gonna keep waiting for this to end.
My problem is that mandate is weighing so much on the "bad" side, that the "good" side is completely dwarfed. In other words, I'm unable to reason about the vax, as I never was able to make good decision in similar situation. That mandates are introduced on top of previous completely useless and hostile measures like curfews, outdoor playgrounds closures, etc. and generally divisive rhetoric doesn't help to build any trust either.
The "heart issues" are a mild inflammation. You take some NSAIDs, rest for a few days, and you're completely fine. My friend compared it to inflammation of your finger if you get a cut. It's a non-issue.
I actually think unvaccinated people were treated way to well in Germany. They are a very loud minority in society and have managed to really hamper the progress against covid.
Compare this to Canada where the government implemented much bigger restrictions on unvaccinated people (no restaurants, no train travel, no air travel) and the overall vaccination rate is ~10% higher. And the current rise in cases is nowhere near Germany.
Yes, I understand the vaccine isn't perfect, but none of them are. Yet here I am, not catching polio and other things because of them. (Polio was less lethal, btw, and some folks were fine - yet others lived out their lives in an iron lung).
Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave, which is why we now need to take more drastic measures again when the entirely predictable course events would take this winter became apparent even to our politicians. But at a point were planned operations for other diseases like cancer get cancelled all over the place, when people requiring acute care get long delays until they find a free intensive care bed somewhere, you can't ignore this any longer.
Requiring vaccinations for non-essential activities with many people is something we should have done much earlier, it's long overdue. It's the least restrictive measure that has a good chance of doing both, reducing the spread and encouraging more people to get vaccinated.
The failure to organize the vaccine boosters is another big issue. It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care and were to some degree avoidable.
If these measures don't work, like literally every authoritarian measure undertaken by governments so far, maybe Germany can put all the un-vaccinated into camps, too. We need to keep the unpure away from us.
Sure, the R0 value of the contagion amongst a 100% vaccinated population is still >1.0, and there are early indications that Omicron has a sufficiently mutated spike protein as to render the vaccine immune response ineffective, but why let epidemiological facts stand in the way of exercising power over one's inferiors?
How does this translate into force everyone to take an experimental shot (with some number of side effects and deaths) every X months?
We see, right now, outside of "studies", I've seen in my own family and I'm not the only one, these vaccines do not stop transmission. They do not stop infection. Maybe they "reduce". They do not stop.
So parent posters histrionics about "right to infect me with disease" is just.. histrionics. The vaccinated can also infect him with a disease.
That was just a reframing you did to make them seem malicious, when they’re mostly indifferent, afraid or misinformed.
It's really hard to sympathize with people that think it's their right to force something on other people's bodies. This isn't polio.
I'm vaccinated. I stay healthy. I have no fear of un-vaccinated people and neither should you. If you are fearful you've fallen victim to your own anti-science mental health anxiety with a load of media brainwashing on top.
The CDC themselves state that viral load is similar in fully vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
And yes, people have the right to refuse medical treament; that's a human right. It's there for very good reasons, and there is broad agreement among civil liberties experts on that point.
You missed a pretty important bit of that statement.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...
> However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people.
As for transmission, the CDC actually says the vaccines do help here. (Not stop, but reduce.) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...
> And yes, people have the right to refuse medical treament; that's a human right.
Most states in the US require a variety of vaccinations to enter public school. New York requires it even for private/religious schooling (https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/schools/sc...). Measles, DTaP, polio, etc. have widespread existing requirements predating COVID.
Everything I stated is factual, and I insinuated nothing else.
The person I was replying to clearly inferred that vaccinated individuals don't infect others, and that's dangerously wrong.
As for schools requiring vaccines, there is a lot to take issue with there - mRNA vaccines are different, with no long term data, for a different virus. The mandated vaccines don't require biannual top ups, and are for viruses that actually threaten children themselves - school agechildren have a near-zero mortality risk form COVID.
But the fact remains, regardless of all the weeds we could get into there, and NY state law notwithstanding, **human beings have a fundamental right to not be forced into medical treatment**.
As I said, civil liberties groups have written on this at length, and been largely ignored. I think ignoring them requires a level of stupidity bordering on evil.
You left a pretty important bit out. Lying by omission is still lying.
> human beings have a fundamental right to not be forced into medical treatment
Thought experiment: If SARS-CoV-2 were as transmissible as it is currently, but 50% fatal, would you still hold that position?
Do human beings perhaps also have a right to life and a certain level of protection from others who might do them harm?
If the virus were 50% fatal that would be a *250x* increase in mortality rate for 18-44 yos... That's the difference between dying in a pedestrian accident, and dying by lightning strike.
Even if I conceded that in such a situation, extreme measures might trump human rights - which I don't, because human rights are inalienable - would mandating vaccines actually help? Would people not voluntarily take them, and have wildly increased social pressure to take them?
And once people were mandated into taking a vaccine, how often would it be boosted: every 6 months? Would Pfizer be allowed to keep their contracts secret, and allowed to prevent other countries from sharing vaccines or making their own? Even when other countries have abysmal vaccination rates?
At what point would the vaccination boosters stop? When 90% of the population has been through the virus? Or never, because a new variant could come along? What if they start raising the prices, and only the wealthy can stay alive?
And this is all assuming that in this alternate universe, the vaccines actually prevent transmission. Which ours don't.
Fun thought experiment; I suggest you think about it a bit more.
Let's see if we can nail it down. If we had a vaccine that perfectly prevented transmission, and the virus had a 50% mortality rate, would your proposed human right be flexible, or does it remain a societal suicide pact?
Is it possible for two human rights to be in conflict with each other?
But sure, let's "nail it down" in this hypothetical fantasy, where vaccines perfectly stop transmission and the virus is orders of magnitude more lethal:
You still don't have a right to put Pfizer's goop into people who don't want it. Clear?
And, if the vaccination perfectly prevented transmission, then people who don't take it would only be hurting themselves. Your argument falls apart completely.
... A walking Bioweapon?
Please, tell me - if you can - what the number needed to vaccinate (NNTV) is, in order to prevent a single case, hospitalization, ICU admission or death.
If you can't tell me that, then you have no leg to stand on to accuse people of being "walking bioweapons" (jesus h christ). And once you find any of those 4 NNTVs, I think you'll be more than a little surprised, if you have any intellectual honesty at all
Also, way to move the goal post. Why is the requirement to stop a single case?
As I said: "if the vaccination perfectly prevented transmission, then people who don't take it would only be hurting themselves".
- The argument already caved in on itself. The logic fail was hilarious. And you're still arguing? Pfffft, feck off.
> way to move the goal post. Why is the requirement to stop a single case?
Because you called unvaccinated people "walking bioweapons", and I'd like you to try and quantify that for yourself. Don't you like knowing what you're talking about? The NNVT exists for that purpose.
Please don't come back at me with more poorly thought through accusations; at my limit for the day.
Your point was: vaccines don’t prevent infections. Even if vaccines were hypothetically 100% effective at preventing infections then there is still no point in putting restrictions on the unvaccinated since those vaccinated would be perfectly protected.
My question was, given the above what about people that can’t get the vaccine for various reasons? We’ll have “walking bio weapons” that are dangerous to them.
Basically how far does individual freedom extend with you? Does it go so far as putting other people at risk?
November, 2020: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
> Primary efficacy analysis demonstrates BNT162b2 to be 95% effective against COVID-19 beginning 28 days after the first dose;170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group
November, 2020: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
> This first interim analysis was based on 95 cases, of which 90 cases of COVID-19 were observed in the placebo group versus 5 cases observed in the mRNA-1273 group, resulting in a point estimate of vaccine efficacy of 94.5% (p <0.0001).
April, 2021: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
> Thirty-two cases of severe disease, as defined by the CDC, were observed in the placebo group versus none in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group, indicating that the vaccine was 100% efficacious in this analysis against severe disease by the CDC definition (95% CI, [88.0,100.0]). Twenty-one severe cases, as defined by the FDA, were observed in the placebo group versus one case in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group, indicating 95.3% efficacy by the FDA definition (95% CI, [71.0, 99.9]).
They've been clear since the very beginning that vaccinated people could still get infected, and that efficacy was regarding severe disease.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Looks like you are really a optimist. I would say, 'It's clear now that the vaccines require one dose every 5-6 months to be effective against hard covid symptoms'.
Additionally I would not say 'Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave', instead I would say 'Our governments failed hard during the complete pandemic'.
I'll accept "Our governments failed especially hard this wave", the problems were more predictable this time and the responses were worse.
Which is crazy, because Germany managed to do well by good organisation and mass testing, not by lockdowns.
Source: my last two years with three kids at home
Just today there is a story about how the NHS in the UK bought all the private sector health care capacity at the start of the pandemic, and then didn't actually use any of it!
https://unherd.com/thepost/the-nhs-covid-beds-that-were-neve...
In neighbouring Switzerland the healthcare system did in fact add lots of emergency ICU capacity in March 2020. They spent the next 1.5 years getting rid of it again because it wasn't necessary. Look at their dashboard to see this.
Healthcare management is the failure nobody dare name in all this. They've had 18 months to find ways to add capacity, for a disease with no cure and that doesn't even require surgery. Instead they expect all of society to become slaves to the god of hospital beds.
From the article:
>Germany, much like Austria, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in western Europe, with 68.4% and 65.6% of eligible adults vaccinated respectively, according to the ECDC.
More Germans support mandatory vaccinations than are actually vaccinated? Seems like it should be the opposite. There are many vaccinated people (like myself) who oppose mandatory vaccinations, but are there unvaccinated people who support vaccine mandates? If so, I haven't met one.
>It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care and were to some degree avoidable.
That's not clear at all. In fact, all the data shows that incidence of mortality and severe illness among those with 2 vaccine doses and 3 is virtually nil. Reducing your chance at mortality while fully vaxxed from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000 is hardly significant, even though its technically correct that your chances of dying are "double" without the "booster". Nor is there any data that multiple shots reduce transmission rates.
how does that match up with only 68.7% being fully vaccinated?
me f.x. I am fully vaccinated and do not at all support mandatory vaccinations. I doubt I'm the only one.
(https://impfdashboard.de/)
Why?
It's a poll, they didn't ask every single German citizen about their opinion, you'll always get 0-10% variation depending on the sample
The science is crystal fucking clear: no one is dying from COVID![0]
[0] - https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=over...
Plus, the stats only show deaths with covid on the certificate. That means they could have died from something else.
This whole thing is a farce. A charade.
Make no mistake: they're coming for your children.
Also, there are approximately 450 deaths per day from cancer - where is the government push to fix that?[1]
[1] - https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...
It's a public health measure, like public sanitation requirements, and driving a car that meets safety requirements. Unvaccinated people should be free to do whatever they want, short of risking infecting other people. Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.
That sounds like you're getting scammed,bro
If you require society to still keep working and for people to not die vaccines generally do a pretty good job of that.
If your goal is to prevent mutation of dangerous new variants vaccines are wildly effective.
I'd say just having the last 2 is pretty good.
This vaccine can spark new mutations since vaccinated people can get it and the virus would mutate to attempt to work around the vaccine immunity.
GPs main point was people's freedoms should be restricted to stop the spread. My point was it doesn't stop the spread. So why restrict freedoms?
Vaccinated people will continue to spread the virus, whether it's slower or faster doesn't matter in the end, it will spread until it's endemic. (I believe it already is)
I'm not sure this is reasonable to assume. Below a certain threshold of transmissibility any virus (including this one) will die faster than it spreads, leading to eventual extinction of the virus.
If you're talking about taking away freedoms and forcing injections, it better solve something, not "meh it probably helps".
-- edit --
To below, the 14th amendment. Why do you think they keep losing court cases with the vaccine mandates?
My body my choice. Ring a bell? If it's a good enough argument to kill life inside you, it's a good enough argument against forced injections.
Don't be a useful idiot, don't advocate for your own oppression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
People just love making up “freedoms”.
Actually, any authority not explicitly given to the government in the US Constitution is implicitly a right. See the Tenth Amendment. Also, wouldn't those fall under the right of privacy used to justify abortions or the right to due process protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments?
Possibly yes, in principle. If it is non-punitive, like most of the licenses in existence. For this a few points will need to be satisfied though, which, in my opinion are not, at present.
- It needs to be shown that significant difference exists in the degree of risk/harm reduction between "licensed" and "unlicensed". That reduction must be measured and quantified or qualified beyond reasonable doubt. The threshold of significance also must be socially agreed upon.
- Likewise, the very risk/harm to be reduced needs to be shown as being worth an essentially society-divisive measure. Again, the agreement needs to be reached on where exactly the the tolerance threshold is. Such that it is clear why the same mechanism is/was not applied to other things. Like, why we don't enforce it for seasonal flu, why we don't have blanket 10km/hr speed limit, and why when throwing a BBQ for friends one must not apply for permission and provide proof of recent "food handling safety" certificate.
- At the same time the requirement must be universal, no exception on any grounds, medical or not. Just like blind or mentally deficient person is unable to get PPL or DL, under any circumstances, even though the disability is not due to their choice.
- The latter must be recognized and "unlicensed" people must not be shamed or vilified. Conversely, creation of the alternative infrastructure must be encouraged, in order to bring these people back into society. Just like we do for people with other disabilities.
Otherwise it is just petty punitive crap. Like in Victoria, where "unlicensed" aren't allowed into KMart, but can run wild in Coles across the floor. Or not allowed into restaurant but happy to mingle in the food court. And honestly, so many measures for the last two years were just hostile and punitive and useless otherwise, it is not surprising that they tend to be rejected as a package, even when you can, arguably, sift one or two reasonable things from it.
I like to think of the covid vaccine as a potentially forced evolution of humanity, of which a certain subset of its constituents favor reducing the rights of those whom refuse it - a group that they were apart of not so long before.
In Alberta ICU admissions are 60x higher for the unvaccinated than the vaccinated in their 50s.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-severe-outcom...
Canada has always had very long surgery wait times:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/health-care-wait-times-hit-20-...
edit: not irrelevant, it's yet another problem being blamed on covid when it's really Canada's mismanagement of their healthcare system.
No health or safety measure is perfect. By that standard, we wouldn't have any at all - we can't prevent all contamination of the food supply, so we would prevent none?
The governments freedom ends where my epidermis begins.
The due process is the important part, you must be convicted by a jury of your peers.
Forced mandates are not due process.
Your lack of understanding of how your rights work is troubling.
I see this used every time, if you pay close attention to the phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time by every party.
There will be people thinking that you can't limit their "freedom" because a vaccine is out there at this point and those who fears for their lives can take it and forget about the virus (in most cases).
There will be people thinking that unvaxxed people should loose their "freedom" because they apparently have an increasing probability to infect others (which in most cases are vaccinated and would get a mild infection in most cases?).
I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".
I don't understand this statement: Who is talking about limiting the freedom of vaccinated people and in what way?
> if you pay close attention to the phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time by every party.
I don't see it at all. If I'm standing still and you punch me in the nose, how could both parties use that argument?
> I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".
Your personal choice and 'respect' are irrelevant. You can not care about and 'respect' them choosing to drive the wrong way on the freeway with you in the car, but so what? They are still risking other people's lives.
Vaxxed would like to limit unvaxxed "freedom" even though they are not threatened at all by them, this is what science has been telling us for at least 5 months: vaccines work, they drastically reduce breakthrough infection and death, I don't think I need to show you the data on that.
> If I'm standing still and you punch me in the nose, how could both parties use that argument?
The fact is that they are not punching your nose at all. If you don't want to get punched you have a free effective vaccine that will put a giant steel wall in front of you and protect your nose from punches. If you don't want to get vaxxed it's your responsibility to consider that you will get a punch in your nose sooner or later.
> Your personal choice is irrelevant.
I strongly agree with this, that's why I will never limit others based on something I want or think, ever.
> You can not care about and 'respect' them choosing to drive the wrong way on the freeway with you in the car, but so what?
Nobody is driving the wrong way, getting vaxxed is not mandatory at the moment so they are doing so legally.
> They are still risking other people's lives.
Let's pretend this is true (in my useless opinion it is not since everybody can take the vaccine and be safe), as far as I know vaxxed can still spread the virus. What we also know is that vaxxed people seems to get _less_ infected, but they could very well be infected too (recent UKHA data shows that on average vaxxed people will get infected with 60% less probability than unvaxxed). Since this is a matter of getting infected or not, I don't see why vaxxed (according to your phrase) are exempt from risking other people's live just because they have a 60% less probability of getting infected and spread the virus. Me and you could very easily spread the virus and risk other people's lives as an unvaxxed.
I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Can you give a clear and fair number? Obviously people will never fully stop getting sick, but how low exactly before we're content?
I am also starting to think this country is not really built to work in a crisis like this. Regulations are maybe good in general, but this tendency to regulate every possible detail does not work when you have to change the rules every month because almost nobody really knows how to fix this.
It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the effects of covid-lockdown measures, they show a small increase in total mortality. So we should have done as the Swedes and kept everything open from beginning to end.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/
Naw. Masks need to go away.
Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in any given situation.
As a side benefit some masks protect the wearer to an extent, particularly N95s, but the main purpose is to reduce spread from infected people in the first place.
Vaccines, similarly, are not a magic shield that protect you from even getting COVID. Instead, they dramatically reduce your likelihood of getting severely ill and being hospitalised and reduce the duration of disease therefore also reducing transmission. But that only works if enough people are vaccinated that the cumulative effect of that reduced transmission can meaningfully bring down the R0 value.
This pandemic has exposed how few people are able to consider issues or questions at a broader community level versus merely how it affects them directly.
There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).
Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-parent?
If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average.
If those excess death calculations are perfectly acceptable to calculate the effect of bad flu seasons and other mortality-affecting events, why are they suddenly not okay now?
Why not just show standard deviation, median, average, percentile. Show the standard deviation in the graph.
For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records when preparing statistics. The figure I quoted, for instance, is from the South African Medical Research Council, who publish their methodology. There's also EuroMOMO and many others.
Did you really think that statisticians and scientists have just magically forgotten about how to do basic statistics, for decades, when preparing these reports?
Instead of using the normal measures of mean, average, standard deviation and percentiles, we just used "formula" and voila, here is answer. Ok I'm going to continue to be sceptical of such results..
I'm now convinced you just want to be a contrarian, rather than learning about a system you don't understand.
Excess death tracking is hardly a new thing, most countries have been doing it for decades to measure the effect of things like flu outbreaks. Therefore when those same statistics being done using the same approach suddenly show huge climbs in 2020 and 2021 it means something.
Stop trying to minimise the pandemic. If your arguments about how to deal with it are rational they should stand up to the reality of how serious it really is, rather than a pretend reality where people haven't been dying in large numbers and filling up hospitals for two years.
Another example from the media (now I am shifting goal posts, but defending my point of proving that it's exaggerated and manipulative): Why are they reporting running totals of number of deahts? And making big headlines of when they reach "new grim milestones"? How is that not a completely irrelevant manipulative misinterpretation? A running total of deaths, really? When will that ever go down? And using that to support a case that "things are getting worse" somehow.
I'd recommend you spend some more time learning how the scientists and statisticians calculating these figures actually work, and maybe speak to a few, before commenting further.
It isn't reported because it takes more explanation than the media likes to give, and direct COVID-19 death counts are less complicated, not because “there is none” which is just false:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2021/10/PE21_481_12.html
Again, as stated in GP (with supporting data) in neither Germany (the context of the article) nor the US (the context and source of much of the political debate in the thread) is it true that actual deaths are not higher than expected from pre-pandemic experience.
Summer of this year was close to normal again, though it is of course easy to imagine it wouldn't have been in a zero-restrictions scenario.
It expects death rate to be constant over the year, which is wrong.
You need to take the total number of deaths per capita, for 2020, and compare that to the same number for 2019, 2018, 2017 etc. And look at the standard deviation.
You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous years, but because flu season happens every year since before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-Covid measures these last two years.
But I'm still not sure what I'm looking at, overlaying a single year over an average is always going to look "excessive". I want to see previous years as well, why not just extend the graph? That's the one single most important number that you never get so see. Here they have buried it in a complex algorithm which looks honestly suspicious at first glance, upper bound for excessive death is basically the same as average. Is standard deviation really that low?
EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?
Because that statistic makes the whole thing seem very mellow. Same thing as average life expectancy by year; the change from 2019 to 2020/21 is very slight.
In other words, Is the emperor actually naked, or are you simply fishing for the conclusion you want to hear?
Yes, no issues at all. I support lockdowns and have had relatives who became very ill because of lockdowns (delayed/ineffective hospital treatment, I am actually not well myself either for the same reason). I think trying to argue that someone should only support/oppose something because they have something to gain personally is the reason why politics in some countries is totally fucked (the UK is probably the worst for this, somewhere around 2017/18 most of the media became tabloids and every politics story contained some hyperbolic bullshit from some random person claiming their life would be destroyed by X minor policy change...it is just a waste of time and energy for all involved).
* COVID itself
* its funding and delivery model making it vulnerable to politicians acting in bad faith
far more than restrictions on gatherings.
By the way, an "elective" surgery is one that can be scheduled in advance. Most elective surgeries are not optional. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
My comment about electives was for the US audience. The US does a huge amount of quality-of-life, elective surgeries that don't happen in the UK (i.e. giving an 85-year old a knee replacement). So when you write something like: the waiting list is long, people from the US might not understand that the mix of surgeries in the UK is very different from there, and it largely represents people who need prompt care (for example, I have a relative who is a high bowel cancer risk and needs a regular screen, in the US this would likely happen annually but hasn't happened for about three years now because they were overdue in early 2020 and then everything stopped).
I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected".
I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
Their methodology doesn't look super sketchy when it comes to COVID vs no COVID, but I am not sure what they're trying to do by comparing mild with severe COVID without even controlling for counfounding factors.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/778434/fmed-08-77...
Even if I use your position that people were to die without being infected due to their health already being somewhat compromised (which isn't the case here but I will suppose it for your trollish statements) - the point is that COVID-19 has serious and significant impacts on the cardiovascular system beyond your immediate infection and more so than we previously thought.
I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.
Source?
https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/themedreview/living-with-covid19...
> There is a widespread perception that people either die, get admitted to hospital or recover after two weeks. It is increasingly clear that for some people there is a distinct pathway of ongoing effects. There is an urgent need to better understand the symptom journey and the clinical risks that underlie that. People, their families and healthcare professionals need realistic expectations about what to expect.
Of course, these days, anyone can link to a "study" about anything that says anything you want it to say.
What you linked may be valid, but so far has zero citations and various critical discussion going on in the comments. Is this already published at all or is it a preprint?
I don't have enough time or knowledge to assess the validity of the claims, but based on that, the study I found on Wikipedia seems more trustworthy to me.
Conversely another very real phenomenon is fear induced immunosupression, to which all of these overreactive measures and constant media bombardment are greatly contributing.
We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.
The lockdowns were imminently effective.
In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we cloistered again and the numbers came down.
If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down drastically.
Here you go [1]
In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband who resented her for going to work because he thought she was going to get him killed.
Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to disregard rules later on?
If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).
> During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering.
to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-ski-...
> Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.
I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk.
I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.
Senseless "do something!" edicts like that give a lot of rhetorical ammunition to the denialists and antivaxxers, while doing nothing to address the spread of COVID.
Ok, so mandating work from home and closing down public parks is too heavy-handed but shutting down all public transport is fine?
COVID spreads poorly outdoors. That was understood well before they reopened the public parks in my area.
In hindsight, they probably didn't need to go that far, but that's hindsight.
Along with the vaccine denialism, the other thing that has surprised me among the concerns of the plebes, is how they have difficulty grasping what an emergency implies.
There is a term called 'Fog of War' that military people are aware of, hinted at in the term 'No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy'.
Running government is like running a company - it's operational. But governing in an Emergency is more like running a startup but where all your personnel are 9-to-5 functionaries not used to such situations. It's managed chaos at best, nothing will be optimized.
If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers, it's visceral.
It's managed chaos at best.
Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same time encouraged people to 'get out'.
But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but if we can bring a national emergency down to something more bearable, so be it.
If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to get outdoors).
This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns. What was discouraged is big companies having party in the parks.
I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking from experience.
???
If you look at the data fro Our World in Data you see exponential spikes, implying any group facing them is on the precipice of disaster.
The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm.
That for a few weeks 'you couldn't go to the park' is relevant, but not hugely material, neither is that they caused a bit of fear.
The 'no parks' bit is maybe an excessive feature taken in an emergency context but it's not a big deal.
Whatever we want to call them and whatever the mechanism, they were mostly useful.
> The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm.
I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't been locked down at all with zero mandates since last June and while it's certainly not rainbows, it's not nearly "untold harm" either.
Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?
'That you can't visit some parks' is not material in the face of the fact that you 1) cannot go to work 2) cannot gather with people 3) must wear a mask 4) cannot go to restaurants or cinemas 5) numerous other restrictions and especially 6) Must stay at home unless you have a reason to leave.
Most of those restrictions are legitimate in the fact of a drastic spike in COVID cases, which makes the 'Don't Go To A Park' a footnote in that context.
"The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes" -> "But Florida didn't have Lockdowns"
"Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"
Every situation is a bit different, and the data is not perfectly clear, but the evidence points to 'the total social changes due to lockdowns' do actually work, moreover, none of that was known in May 2020.
We had no examples but the crisis in China and Europe back then.
Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason even if they erred a bit too much on the side of caution here and there. 'That we cold not go to parks' just isn't very relevant. If we have to do another lockdown, we will probably be able to go to the park.
Disagree. Being in California I was grateful to comfortably meet with friends to go for a hike. The risk was trivial and I value social interaction. The fact that I cannot go to work or gather with people made things that you regard as immaterial in this context a lot more important to me.
> Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason
Certainly, but it was clear within a few months (Jul 2020) that being outdoors was reasonably safe, especially if you are decently distanced. But you still had places restricting people from laying on a beach, or swimming in a beach. There was no scientific support for either of these stupid policies.
> "Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"
this is a silly analogy because health policies have multivariate outcomes, it's just about deaths, etc. and it's not something you can readily experiment on scientifically; these are people's livelihood, wellbeing, and prosperity. Optimizing for a single variable is foolish.
1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse for Sweden than its neighbors.
The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population.
The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates
Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors:
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
So all other things being equal, you'd expect CFRs to rise with case load. Probably not linearly, but measurably.
Sweden indeed has a worse z-score compared to Norway or Denmark, but better compared to France, Netherlands or Belgium (or Germany, for that matter). And much better than Italy or Spain. I say they indeed found a sweet spot and escaped lockdowns.
huh?
Really?
Following you reasoning, how many more death did the US have compared to China? would you advocate to lock up people like China did?
I know that I would prefer 1 month hard lockdown than 1 year soft. But idk how it actually went there (curious to know!)
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG
It was a reckless betrayal of the elderly population of sweden.
I'm all for the freedom of self-euthanization, if a person longs for that and no, this can not be compared with what went down.
Which can be best described as a remnant from a horrific pre-worldwar 2 "survival of the fittest" mindset being dragged into the light.
No such thing happened.
Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And far worse then the neighbouring countries.
I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the policies were not worse than other bad policies.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending to wear masks but only as chin diapers.
I really hate mask religion. Especially the branch of it that likes to gaslight and minimize the idea that masks suck.
Maybe we have to agree to disagree on "inconvenience" of mask wearing. It is, clearly, an irrational but very powerful standoff. Masks have a marginal effect on protection (11% relative reduction in transmission, according to best recent study? So the abs risk reduced from, say, 20% to 18%) while having an enormous symbolic meaning, made even bigger by turning into political token. Washing hands is not even in the same league of religiousness. We'll see how it goes when it is made mandatory with govt-appointed "hygiene inspectors" at every workplace and fines up to a few grand...
Surely, fogging glasses and alike are minor things, but instinctive revulsion, panic, "brain shutting", "blood boiling" and suicidal tendencies aren't something to dismiss. I'm not particularly proud to be having such reaction, and I honestly tried to rationalize myself out of it, but to no success. At this point I also try to avoid seeing masked faces. I close articles or posts where author's photo is masked, blacklist YT channels and switch off TV when masked reporter or anybody pops up. That's the only thing I can do to keep some sanity before it overcomes me. And it will, because the mask mandates are looking to be with us for years...
The analogy you don't have to accept, but may help to illustrate how we (people, resisting "minor" inconvenience for "greater good") feel. Consensual physical intimacy is a great thing, very pleasant, absolutely harmless if practiced with proper care and contraception. People always sought it and it is still very much a driver of life, and will be forever. In wild nature our close relatives, bonobos, practice it widely and casually for stress relief, and it works great for the cohesion of their society! They known to have much less aggression than their bigger bros or humans. Surely the solid rational case can be made that adopting such practices could improve human society as well, maybe in major way. How would you feel if such "minor inconvenience" is mandated, with proper rules and protocols, of course? It must bizarre and unreasonable that the foolishness of "muh freedumb" standing in the way to "Greater Good"? How foolish it is of humans to make non-consensual intercourse a crime, sometimes worse than murder!
They're at about the EU average. 8-10% above the US average, 5-7% above California, but a few percent below New England, for example.
I would follow any mask mandate, but the experience here (from my point of view) is that they don't seem to help that much. Otherwise we should have an absolute explosion of cases right now, compared to other European countries. My personal theory is that people don't use them properly; look at people on tv, constantly adjusting them, or wearing them under the chin, reusing single-use masks, etc.
There's been an uptick in cases during the last week or so[1], but compare it to eg. Germany[2] that have had a strong mask mandate for a long time. I don't understand it either.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ (do note that when looking at the chart for deaths, we have always been lagging a couple of weeks)
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
* Sweden: 1,485
* Denmark: 500
* Finland: 244
* Norway: 199
* Iceland (not really a neighbour, being a 1000 miles away, accross an ocean): 102
Some more random cherrypicking:
* USA: 2,414
* Italy: 2,221
* Belgium: 2,322
* UK: 2,124
* Russia: 1,901
* Peru: 5,984
Deaths per million capita, as of 2nd december 2021, from[1].
[1] All numbers from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The lesson here seems to be that nursing homes probably cause some amount of excess mortality, and need special attention during epidemics/pandemics.
If things unfold more slowly, you have more time to develop treatments. A lot of the deaths in NYC occurred before we figured out that just laying people on their sides reduced the risk of dying significantly.
Moreover, now that we have the ability to rapidly produce vaccines, it isn't a forgone conclusion that everyone will necessarily "get the virus eventually anyway."
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Culture is also very similar between Scandinavian countries and much different from western Europe, with people much more isolated (which is tough to adjust to for immigrants there actually).
I got the stats from here: https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/norway.sweden/de...
What stood out the most in the statistics, actually, was that 2019 had an unusually low death rates, if you add up 2020 and 2019 they basically even out to an average death rate.
I bet mortality has been abnormally low during 2021 so now we have a bunch of dry tinder again which will cause another "crisis" and lockdown as soon as weather is cold and viruses making the rounds again. Never ending cycle of panicking when old people die.
Rightly, Sweden decided it was a bad idea to do go about business as usual at nursing homes. After this, their relative difference to other Scandinavian countries is much smaller.
Almost ~3200 people died in nursing homes in a couple of months at the beginning of the pandemic. There's ~95k people in nursing homes. That's 3.3%...
These deaths still account for ~1/5th of all Sweden's covid deaths.
Hence, when people say 5x as many people died in Sweden - a full 1x of that is from the early nursing home no-strategy.
Everyone knows death rate was high in peak covid. As it always is in peak flu season, so what, the year was well within standard deviation
https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/17/eu-excess-deaths-in-2020...
The comparison with neighbours is to gleam the effects of their differing mitigation strategies.
Also it looks like they are doing the comparison month by month which doesn't make much sense since this will vary a lot of course...
Deaths aren't evenly distributed throughout the year. High-traffic seasons will cause a spike, very cold or hot weather, etc. So month-by-month comparison is reasonable. Doing that also shows in the graphs when the waves hit various countries.
I agree, it's missing the standard deviation though. (But again, look at the graphs, you'll see a difference of 10, perhaps 20% fluctuating around zero, and then suddenly a wave of 60,80,100% more deaths. It's unlikely a coincidence.
Just seeing that the temperature is below average outside doesn't say anything about the question: do we have abnormal weather? Is there a crisis? And even if this years winter is colder than the last three years, still doesn't mean that it's abnormal.
It needs to be a statistical outlier to be abnormal, it needs to be statistically significant. Why are they not showing previous years? Why are sample sizes deliberately small when we have more data? Why don't we see basic required numbers such as standard deviation, median, percentiles? It's all clickbait bullshit
You don't even need to make any calculations really, just take a quick look at the table to see that the death rate was unusually low 2019 and only slightly high in 2020 (Edit: sorry, almost compensated by 2019's low numbers, not completely). And if you go back in time, you can see that in fact every single year between 1999-2012 had a higher mortality rate than 2020.
Yes, I see that. I calculated the mortality rate for all years, then the average and standard deviation for the last 10 years preceding 2020.
The average is 0.92%, standard deviation is 0.03%. The mortality rate in 2020 was 0.95% or exactly one standard deviation above the average for the last 10 years.
There is also another clear trend from the data which is slowly but steadily declining mortality rates. Obviously since 1749, but this trend is especially noteworthy during this century (since 2000). Then only one year has increased mortality (by more than one least significant digit) which is 2020.
2020 saw 10% higher mortality than 2019.
So to conclude: I'm by no means a statistician but I'd say this is probably not a random fluke.
Yes, it did. The statistics are pretty obvious: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Take a look at this graph - cumulative deaths since, I don't know, start of 2021 or something.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Sweden is just barely worse than other Scandinavian countries (definitely not 5-7x). Germany is 50-100% worse than Sweden.
So while you might use "total deaths" as an argument that the Swedish "no lockdowns" strategy was worse at the beginning of the pandemic, it's clearly superior now.
You realise how nonsensical (and callous) that sounds?
Lockdowns were called because hospitals were at capacity and immediate risk of failing to keep up service - as is currently again the case e.g in Germany.
Remember, the first lockdowns in Europe were mandated after hospitals in Italy were forced to conduct triage. (The "who do I have to let die" kind of triage)
Why did that not happen in whatever control groups the studies were looking at?
The "we should have never shut anything down" contingent doesn't seem to understand this.
"Opening up" would have killed more people than it killed in the UK.
The people driving this wave, who are getting seriously ill and dying are the unvaccinated.
It is not going to be a crime to be unvaccinated just a lot more inconvenient.
My conclusion from this is that, in this area, regulations are path dependent. In some countries, people will make the right choices themselves. In others, they won't. I am in the UK, in 2020 it was evident that the hands-off approach really wouldn't work. But it did work this year.
Also, I don't think there is any question about fixing it. You have to test (most countries still don't test enough), you have to give people the information to make a choice, and you have to keep vaccinating. Imo, and I thought the opposite in 2020, lockdowns/heavy regulations aren't a long-term strategy (outside of China).
At the beginning of the pandemic, where I was, people mostly stopped going to restaurants before regulations said they couldn't. When restrictions have been relaxed, I couldn't really observe any changes in behavior.
People's willingness to comply with lockdowns over time has waned, because the government's response to covid has been pretty incompetent. The thing that has finally started turning things around is the high rate of vaccination.
The handling of those people in the media and the way their opinions are presented equally with scientific facts result in this reluctance politicians displayed in this crisis. Now we all have to suffer because of it. I hope we finally mandatory vaccinations...it's overdue.
Recently moved back from Germany after five years there, homeopathy depressingly common and accepted there, even by many medical professionals.
We still have homeopathic pills and "treatments" which are being paid by the health insurance. Something which goes back to some politicians wife who believed in it and was able to influence the political process. The huge Steiner tradition in here is catastrophic. We just recently had COVID running wild in a Waldorf school. Turns out, faked vaccination certificates were very popular...
It's quite embarrassing and it's actually the first time the side effects of this madness come up in public discourse.
Just in this thread alone, we can find people saying:
1. Vaccines would let us wipe out COVID (wrong).
2. Even harsher lockdowns would let us wipe out COVID (wrong).
3. Vaccines stop people transmitting it (wrong).
4. Vaccinated people don't end up in ICU with COVID (wrong).
5. Sweden had unusually bad outcomes (wrong).
6. That it's "very normal" for people to take yearly flu shots (wrong, only ~35% uptake amongst at risk patients in 2019).
And that's not even a full list. There's not only a large set of factually incorrect beliefs amongst vaccine mandate fanatics (and that's the only word for you guys now), but also a generalized incorrect belief that it's the other side who are badly informed.
On the other side we have anti-vaxxers here too. Who's more harmful?
While most of those points you made here are just overblown generalisations (and probably not even stated in this fashion), none of them are completely wrong. On the anti-vaxxer side we have claims which are not only completely wrong, people literally die because they or others around them believe in them. So again: what's your point?
Seriously - how?
Let's start by agreeing that hospital overload is definitely a bad thing.
Vaccination should help reduce the load, but has anything else been done? Hasn't staff in hospitals decreased over the course of the pandemic? Aren't we funneling tons of money to pharma instead of Frontline workers? What about setting up field hospitals? What about altering the priority access to emergency health care of the unvaccinated?
Hospital overload has been a liminal crisis for the past 2 years, but has yet to materialize as a real issue.
Have we just been getting lucky? narrowly avoiding disaster each wave?
Because this is almost starting to look like a boogeyman that pops up on a regular basis that reminds us that we need to live in fear.
People can go and get a jab. This is easy. Can be done in minutes. No harm done.
You can't build a hospital like that or get personal cloned from some pool of educated personal. Even if we'd have started 2 years ago. Wtf do you want with a field hospital? Those people don't need bandages...what are you talking about??
I know this smokescreen it just came up all over the anti-vaxxer scene. It's a hilarious attempt to cloud their own responsibility and divert the anger away from them. It won't work because it's so cheap and stupid. Especially coming from people who refuse to accept the easiest and fastest solution.
And NO, hospital overload is the only valid point. By spreading and keeping the pandemic running you also ruin peoples lifes economically. People who depend on crowds coming to their store for example or doing sports with them. Than there is long COVID...
Man...this topic is not new. All those ways this is harmful has been presented in the media over the last years. How can you still be so ignoran December 2021????
Field hospitals were proposed early on in 2020, they even sent the medical ship to NY up the Hudson. Its not my idea and it's not a new idea. If you're not aware of that, then I'm sorry for assuming the extent of your awareness.
We don't have to clone anyone. We can do 2 very easy things: 1. Rehire the unvaccinated that were let go. 2. Pay our front line workers more.
Everyone should support this. It's an easy win.
As someone who's unvaccinated and had covid, I honestly don't know what long covid is or why we should be afraid of it anymore than the long term effects of the vaccine.
Though if you fell for one boogeyman, it makes sense that you'd fall for another.
Covid is out of the box, economic damage is inevitable. How much is up to us. If you look at Florida, Sweden, or even the Amish, it's clear lockdowns do more economic harm than covid does.
Last but not least, I'll say it again.
Hospital collapse has been a liminal crisis for 2 years.
We have more vaccinated than ever before yet were still somehow on the brink of collapse. Nothing has been done about it except to scape goat the unvaccinated. People are going to be unvaccinated. The vaccine is going to wear off. Try doing something about it instead of dehumanizing people you disagree with.
Enough is enough.
So this ship was manned by robots or where is the connection to what I wrote?
> We don't have to clone anyone. We can do 2 very easy things: 1. Rehire the unvaccinated that were let go. 2. Pay our front line workers more.
Why would you hire somebody who is unable to do the most basic stuff to protect their patients (get vaccinated). Those people are obviously not suited for their job and I'm happy they are gone. There should be a list so those people never ever end up in a responsible job like that or at least need to get some MPU before they attempt it.
@2 you still won't magically conjure them out of nothing just because you pay them. You need to learn that stuff. It takes time.
> As someone who's unvaccinated and had covid, I honestly don't know what long covid is or why we should be afraid of it anymore than the long term effects of the vaccine.
I can't imagine how somebody can write such a thing December 2021 and still expect to be taken seriously.
You've made up your mind. You have complete confidence and conviction in the vaccine.
That's fine. I respect your right to choose based on your own risk tolerance.
So of course you and other fanatics won't take these points seriously, you think the alt premise is completely illegitimate.
It's a fool errand to try to change the mind of someone who's certain they can't be wrong, so I'm not going to try.
What I am trying to do is explain that after 2 years of worrying trends, events, and numerous unknowns.. it's reasonable to believe we're not getting the full story about the vaccine.
But you know what, I hope I'm wrong. Let's chat again in 5 years, and then we'll know for certain.
Just because YOU didn't have it, doesn't mean nobody else didn't.
I've seen zero convincing evidence of "long covid".
Mostly I see it defined as vague psychological effects .. hard to imagine any universal confounding factors that might result in everyone having a poorer psyche in general in recent history.
The effects last a few weeks on average, 3 months in rare cases. While its odd an ominous for the effects to last that long, there's no reason to believe it will last for years.
And while there are some real permanent effects, like loss of smell + taste, these are extremely rare. Like vaccine induced myocarditis rare, maybe even more so.
Meanwhile, "all cause of death" rates are on the rise, despite ATH vaccination rates. Is that definitely because of "long covid", and definitely not because of the vaccine? That doesn't make sense to me.
Sad.
Vaccines don't stop being from transmitting, but it reduces the length of infection by about 2 days, it drastically reduces the likelihood of infection, which drastically reduces the transmission rate, and recent studies have shown that it does also reduce the likelihood of transmission directly.
Vaccinated people with breakthrough cases may end up in the ICU, but the rate of hospitalization, admittance to the ICU, and cases of death are considerably lower than those who haven't been vaccinated.
Using the extreme example, and pointing out that each argument is wrong, rather than extreme, while not discussing the facts is just another form of misinformation.
The reasonable choice is to disallow all fanatics, but the world is too polarized on this topic. The center cannot hold.
Regardless, whilst these claims are "extreme" in the sense of being phrased in absolutes, they aren't "extreme" in the sense of being rarely believed, are they? Not only do they crop up all over this thread but in the very article the thread is about, Angelas Merkel, not exactly famous for being the Queen of Extreme, says "The fourth wave must be broken and this has not yet been achieved" which is simply another way of saying (3) and strongly alluding to (1) and (2).
Also:
"it drastically reduces the likelihood of infection, which drastically reduces the transmission rate, and recent studies have shown that it does also reduce the likelihood of transmission directly"
Let's break this down:
1. Infection rates. Health agencies claim it reduces the likelihood of infection, and at first it genuinely seems to, but the only one that is willing to show the actual raw data before they wildly alter it using statistical techniques, is the UK HSA. Their data shows that by now the rate amongst vaccinated people is actually a lot higher than among the unvaccinated for some large age groups! This sounds like it should be impossible, but it turns out to have been observed in pre-COVID times with other vaccines.
They have been reduced to claiming that comparing case rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people isn't a valid way to determine if the vaccine works, due to vague behavioural differences that they speculate must exist but have no proof for.
2. Rate of transmission. Not for the first time, we find that epidemiological studies aren't worth much. Can you cite yours, so we can see when it was written? Because once again UK data contradicts it (or it does now at least):
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."
No real difference in transmission at all. Actually slightly higher for vaccinated people but let's assume that's not really significant.
After Macron's speech in July to put vaccination requirements for the medical industry, there was a major surge to the vaccination centers. Meanwhile Germany was in pre election mood.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-d...
You can see the effect of Macon's speech clearly on this graph: it led to a major surge in per-day vaccinations in mid July 2021 while Germany stayed in steep decline, and the "corona is over" mentality spread. Germany has reduced its distance to France in the last few weeks, but France still has more vaccinations than us, and it's far away from european leaders like Portugal.
At the start of covid, everyone in europe admired Germany for its good covid response. They flew ICU patients from Italy to Germany as the italian hospitals were way beyond their capacity. Now we might have to fly Germans the other way.
Yes, you can say that there has barely been public support for vaccination requirements up until the start of the current wave. And indeed it's been quite unpopular in the autumn. But if politicians had been more courageously trying to sell vaccination requirements, maybe it'd have worked out.
source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
source (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-zahlen-corona-125.html
But yes, there is a strong west/east and north/south gradient in terms of incidence.
Vaccines work.
History will show that the only right choice was to let this thing rip. Come to this thread in 10 - 20 years. Unless an actually deadly virus hasn’t wiped us out by the
Can you elaborate? That does not make sense to me.
Its terrifying, over here in Brisbane, Queensland. We've had one locally acquired case from Covid in the last few months.
We're going to pubs, no masks, No Covid. But we're sorely missing our freedom. /s
However, I don’t understand the US-centric (satirical) perspective in a comment like this. The article is about Germany, the person you replied to made no specific mention of the US as far as I can tell, and their view is not unusual in many other regions of the world (such as the one I live in). Does the radicalism of Fox News really need more attention or notoriety?
Much of the measures have been justified by saying they're temporary in place under the emergency. Two years of temporary measures, and now people are saying they need to be permanent.
> There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over"
I totally agree. Last week saw a dentist and this morning (10:02) two sales ladies at a baker's embedded in an EDEKA supermarket with no mask, one of them coughing. When pointing out politely that they should really put their masks on, my comment of mine was ignored. The unfair thing is that it won't be these people dying, but likely third parties that did nothing wrong (like the elderly couple behind me in the queue).
There is a huge debate focusing on vaccination, about forcing people to do it etc., but schools are open, kindergardens are open (every parent knows that's where stuff spreads), people shop, socialise, eat together, work together almost if there was nothing going on.
The government failed to point out that vaccinated people can still get CoViD because they were afraid it would stop people from getting the jab, so they assumed they were safe and went back to pre-CoViD behavior patterns. The government is reducing the testing regime, so future numbers will be less reliable.
Public TV station ARD/Das Erste started to lose credibility with me when they claimed on Twitter that medical masks don't protect. That is false/"fake news": the truth is they are designed to protect the patient when worn by staff, so their protection is asymmetric and biased against the wearer and in favor of the person talking to the wearer. But they do provide a little protection even for the wearer, as the larger droplets get caught by them, and catching a virus also depends on the amount and concentration of viral material exposed to. (The reason the posted the tweet was because at the time, there was a shortage and they did not want that non-medical staff buy them up so there was enough of a supply for medical staff. It's okay to ask people to stop buying them for that reason but not feeding them with false information to make them stop.)
The new government put a general in place to run a task force and instead of saying "fantastic, why didn't the previous government think of that?" the press questioned why leaders who all declined military service on the grounds of conscience appointed a military man (the candidate seems to be a supply chain expert, so not a bad choice - although I personally would pick a paramedic because pandemic training is part of one's education, at least it was back in the 1990s when I did mine).
Despite all of this, in fairness the situation in Germany is much better than in other countries (I can only say that from personal knowledge about the UK, France and the US), and I would say that at the beginning, the government did a good job in absolute and relative terms.
1.) We just had our federal election so politicians were super cautious not to alienate anyone with though measures. Because we didn't have the transition of power to the new chancellor yet, this is still holding us back.
2.) If vaccination rates would just be another 5% higher (meaning 20% less unvaccinated people), the speed of the 4th wave would have been so much damper that we would have gotten through this winter without any hard restrictions (see France). I think there was a lot of wishful thinking involved that thought that those 5% would come around eventually.
I am in the UK, in a part of the UK that has a badly malfunctioning health service. Waiting time for ambulance two weeks ago was twenty minutes (and that was just travel time), no issues at ICU (not for me, it was a relative the ICU was precautionary), no issues getting a bed...strangely, the experience was much better than the pre-Covid...significantly so. Germany has the same vaccination rate, Germany has a better health service...it is strange. No-one places any value on their freedom because it is something that is freely given to everyone today, our ancestors shed blood for it but we didn't...is this worth it? It is a huge change in freedoms for something that is unlikely to change things (I am not sure how this kind of thing is legal, if it is legal for a govt to essentially quarantine citizens in their own home if they refuse to have a medical procedure...that is alarming).
Really, this analogy is too much of a stretch to be meaningful.
It's your choice to bring a life jacket or not. You know that you risk drowning if you don't bring one, but you also know that the risk is low for where you are going, are allergic to the material that PFDs (personal floatation devices) are made of, think you know better because you can swim, or have some other ideological reason for not wearing one.
But on this day, your little crew encounter some unexpected rapids that cause your boat to capsize. One person was a guide who knows how to treat this, and quickly gets as many people as they can onto the flipped boat. Despite this, there isn't enough room on the upside down boat for everyone to fit, so some people are left grabbing the edges of the boat.
Those who can hold on survive, as do many with life vests and those on the boat. Unfortunately, since the boat was so small and the rapids so strong, some were swept away - some with life vests and others without - never to be seen again. The rapids eventually calm down and you are able to flip the boat right-side up again. Now, you are joined by another boat coming in from another river that didn't experience the same rapids as you did.
Now, a few of the life jacket wearers are pointing fingers saying that those who didn't wear life jackets "effectively killed" those who wore life jackets but didn't make it. Since by not wearing lifejackets, they "took up too much room" on the boat and weren't contributing their fair share for the greater good and survival of everyone. The other side counters by reasoning that this is theory-crafting much like how pundits argue that Jack could have fit onto the wooden plank alongside Rose from Titanic if they shifted their bodies in the right way. Even though the acclaimed director JAMES CAMERON says that Jack was going to die anyways.
When in reality, no one was to blame except for the natural cause that was the rapids. All the while, life jacket manufacturers line their pockets with money from the increased sale of life jackets.