> The UK government has been urged to update its list of symptoms for covid-19, after early data showed that cold-like symptoms were the most commonly reported by people with the new omicron variant.
That would be tyranny and be exactly what I feared. That would mean anyone with allergies, a bad nights sleep, a headache caused by many other things etc is classed a persona non grata and denied travel and entry in to their place of work, pubs etc.
Well, at my company at least, a negative test does not trump symptoms. Coming in with any COVID symptoms will get you sent home and do that a few times and you’ll attract a disciplinary.
And Ryanair make you declare you have no symptoms when checking in (change of taste, smell, diarrhoea, high temperature, sore throat, headache etc etc)
> Well, at my company at least, a negative test does not trump symptoms. Coming in with any COVID symptoms will get you sent home and do that a few times and you’ll attract a disciplinary
Who comes in actively sick with symptoms?? Spreading disease at the workplace was never a good idea, even before Covid.
> Good. Now: when are governments going to lift restrictions?
Obviously the set of "commonest" systems is not the thing to base such a decision on (e.g. for a hypothetical disease where 90% get a mild cough and 10% drop dead, cough is the most common symptom, but the death symptom is what should drive policy).
> Then we shouldn’t be allowed to drive… or just go out altogether. Too many dangers out there, you see.
No, and don't be ridiculous. Do I have to explicitly spell out every piddling nuance of an idea for you to get it? There's obviously other factors involved, but my point was "most common symptoms" (if they're mild) is not one of them.
> The omicron outbreak at an Oslo Christmas party seen as "the biggest in the world outside of South Africa", is so far only causing mild disease, with Norway's state epidemiologist expressing hope it might mark the beginning of the end for the pandemic ... They have symptoms like fever, cough, headache, muscle pain, fatigue, but for now, none of them has become severely ill, and none of them have been treated in hospital ... one of his agency's three scenarios for omicron was that it would be both very mild and very transmissible. "That is the hope. That is the best scenario we can have," he said. "That it's getting minder, most people will get it, and they will get a natural immunity."
> wastewater samples show that the new omicron variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the Florida county that is home to the nation's largest theme park resorts ... It's a different story when it comes to people seeking treatment for COVID-19, officials said. “Those who are hospitalized are being primarily infected by the Delta variant,” Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Wednesday.
Everybody at the party was fully vaccinated. It takes a couple of weeks for hospital arrivals to track infections, so even if omicron was as bad as delta, you wouldn't expect significant numbers for a week or two. Hopefully, you're right.
Because in lots of countries all over the world, hospitals are still at or over capacity, making live miserable for those lying there, waiting to get there for other treatments and last but not least, for those working under enormous stress there.
1) Where? Where specifically are patients being turned away today from care due to overcrowding due to COVID-19?
2) If there are clear answers to #1, why in tarnation isn't our response, "OK, we need to improve the health care systems in these marginalized communities?" Why instead would we even consider repeating the failed, class-based horizontal interdiction efforts which have terrorized these same communities and cut them off from their centers of support (eg, schools)?
2) Because you can't improve health care systems within a short time frame. People are quitting their health care jobs in Europe in big numbers due to being overworked due to the pandemic.
1) Yes I'm seriously asking this. And administratively delayed 'elective' surgeries are orthogonal to patients being turned away after presenting with illness. I don't deny the former is happening, but it is not clear that it is related to capacity.
2) Yes you absolutely can; it has been done with great success many times in epidemics, including this one. Moreover, longer-term improvements to health care remain an imperative if indeed a completely predictable respiratory pathogen can so easily overwhelm capacity in marginalized communities.
1) in Italy it’s happening already. Northern Italy, mind you. Non urgent hospital activity is basically suspended, and even some urgent surgeries are being postponed because there’re not enough doctors and nurses.
It’s a mix of covid and antivaxx philosophy though, not just covid, some doctors and nurses who haven’t vaccinated have been suspended and it’s hard to find replacements right now.
> Not all hospitals are there yet, but all are tearing their hair out to deal with the situation because it is such a headache. A Chinese puzzle, or a tetris, except that it is not a game. “We have already been making an effort to smooth out the programming for a few weeks,” explains Fabrice Chariot, anesthesiologist, and coordinator of the operating room of the CHR of the Citadel, to avoid having too many operations on the same day. We are now starting to postpone cases. ”
> 2) If there are clear answers to #1, why in tarnation isn't our response, "OK, we need to improve the health care systems in these marginalized communities?" Why instead would we even consider repeating the failed, class-based horizontal interdiction efforts which have terrorized these same communities and cut them off from their centers of support (eg, schools)?
As far as I can tell developed countries largely aren't dealing with hospital overcrowding. If I don't go to an in person event in a large American city, will this prevent cases from occurring in say, eastern Europe? In the aggregate and at the margin, maybe, but this is a highly dubious claim.
Cough... Omicron being “mild” refers to the double or triple vaccinated.
Even then, the problem is it’s so damn contagious that even a small percentage of severe cases puts pressure on health systems already at breaking point.
> Why do we still have these silly mandates?
That's hardly specific. There’s plenty things governments can do at this stage, some good, some bad.
For example, I’m not a fan of criminalising private mixing of individuals. I think governments should be funding healthcare, UBI or furlough, and mandating decent ventillation.
> Covid patients infected by the Omicron variant, whether vaccinated or not, usually experience mild symptoms, though in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer, said Dr Angelique Coetzee, who is among the physicians who first flagged the highly mutated strain in South Africa.
> A small study of seven COVID-19 cases in South Africa shows the Omicron variant can break through booster vaccine shots, one of the scientists involved said on Thursday.
Thanks, the text below is consistent with BMJ article:
> He said private hospitals reported that most patients were unvaccinated and many were initially admitted for non-covid-related illnesses. There was less evidence of respiratory infections in omicron-infected patients, compared with the other variants, with fewer patients requiring oxygen, Noach added.
and hospitalization is down across the board, even before the additional benefit of vaccination:
> Adults are experiencing a 29% lower admission risk relative to South Africa’s first wave of infection, dominated by D614G, in early 2020. Furthermore, hospitalised adults currently have a lower propensity to be admitted to high-care and intensive-care units, relative to prior waves.”
No, it does not just apply to the vaccinated because South Africa is largely unvaccinated but yet are not experiencing any increase in hospitalizations or mortality, they are actually seeing a decline.
Agreed. But the sad state of the world now is that many are still trying to figure out how to score political points. The virus that hit us in March 2020 was bad, but it's not March 2020 anymore. We need to move on as a society.
Move on to what? Close doors at hospitals and deny help to those in need? What exactly is this place some people want to "move on to" exactly during a f*cking, unsolved pandemic?
Which hospitals in the US are overwhelmed? Keep the hospitals open, treat people who are sick, give vaccines to people who will accept them. We've had this vaccine for about a year now. Either people who are vaccinated should return to their lives or this vaccine isn't very helpful.
Massachusetts has cut routine procedures back 50% and is reserving Covid treatments exclusively for the unvaccinated+. The anti-vax crowd is absolutely dragging this out and causing measurable harm for the rest of us who want to see the end of this.
If you're willfully unvaccinated, society owes you nothing.
+: And IC people, which is effectively involuntarily unvaccinated.
The “anti vax crowd” is disproportionately people of color and immigrants who don’t trust the medical industry so your viewpoint here is highly racist and discriminatory. You have been warned.
Okay, well what I say refers to the US which has had general availability of the vaccine for a long time now. I would not argue places where people haven't had access to the vaccine should go back to normal yet.
I didn't read all of those links. The first one looked like it had to do with having to transfer patients around. I skimmed the first few paragraphs and admittedly don't understand the problem but it's hard to find the direct link to the discussion - it didn't say hospitals were overflowing. The second link was titled "anticipated omicron surge". The 3rd link says:
> “Local public health workers are burnt out from nearly two years of round-the-clock contact tracing, a massive vaccination effort, nonstop demands for information and guidance from businesses, residents and town governments, and the stress of having mask mandates become a local responsibility, and much more,” Walker said.
This article is about health workers being exhausted for having to do things that they probably shouldn't be doing anymore now that vaccines have been generally available for almost a year and the latest variant is not more dangerous than the regular flu. Again, an argument that we need to move on.
After skimming the first 3 it doesn't look like I should spend any time on the rest.
> This article is about health workers being exhausted for having to do things that they probably shouldn't be doing anymore now that vaccines have been generally available for almost a year and the latest variant is not more dangerous than the regular flu. Again, an argument that we need to move on.
Vaccines have been generally available for almost a year. That doesn't mean that everyone that could get vaccinated has done so. There are plenty of counties in the US where the vaccination rate is still below 50%. There are even plenty of counties where the vaccination rate among those 65+ is below 50%.
You are right that health care workers should not have to be doing those things anymore--we should have been at 90+% vaccination rate pretty much everywhere in the US by mid-2021. But we aren't, and so they do have to keep doing those things.
And as long as that keeps happening we can't move on, because people need hospitals for things other than COVID. Even those of us in places with good vaccination rates can be affected because the places that are overwhelmed are transferring the overflow to places that aren't.
I'll edit with a link once I'm on desktop but there was a study in 2013 that showed ICUs are at max capacity 16% of the time in the U.S. the healthcare collapse panic was and has always been F.U.D. - during peak pandemic we actually terminated tons of healthcare worker positions reversing a growing trend in that sector mid-pandemic. Now we're decreasing hospital bed capacity and some places like Colorado. The hospital's aren't overwhelmed, they're overstressed by FUD and regulations forcing them to stop elective procedures among other stressors.
Well our population is 3x higher but beyond that, I’d love to see the long term trend in deaths.
I assume (based on other countries data) that we’re basically accelerating deaths in the 80+ year old group, heavily weighed to the sick. So basically same as the flu in 2018 when 100,000 Americans died.
If 5 years from now we see a dip in deaths we’ll know we didn’t kill of a segment of health in population but rather accelerated the deaths of the morbid elderly by a year or two.
Not to say those deaths aren’t tragic but it’s very different than 800,000 deaths of people j the prime of their lives.
You seem to have fallen into a weird and frustrating space on this website. I sometimes wonder how the mentality degenerates like this on an ostensibly highly educated platform.
And what statistical features of endemic equilibrium do you view as sufficiently absent to judge that this pathogen is still pandemic rather than endemic?
I don't know in what country you reside in but where I live (somewhere in Europe), we have way too many patients on the ICU and way too many other patients in hospital care. And we have way too many operations delayed due shortage of ICU beds.
Vaccines are freely available and highly effective against severe disease. The pandemic IS solved.
Might also help to remember that NYC built 10,000 ICU beds in five days (that were never used). Our ability to surge hospital capacity is unparalleled. We put men on the moon, FFS.
> Might also help to remember that NYC built 10,000 ICU beds in five days (that were never used). Our ability to surge hospital capacity is unparalleled.
This is not what people mean by "beds". It's adequate staffing ratios. In March 2020, there were few hotspots in the country and it's not at all comparable to the situation today.
Also, you're being very obtuse and deflective in this thread, bordering on misinformation.
Then why are we forcing nurses that have already had covid to be vaccinated or face termination??? That makes zero sense during a f*cling unsolved pandemic.
> The new variant is basically a bad cold. Why do we still have these silly mandates??
Bold statement. We don’t have enough data for that. All the data is based on situation when mandates are applied. Nobody knows what happens without mandates.
Young people in Africa has still died for this, so it is still quite serious.
To add, it is easy to see biased point of view. In the modern countries there are ICUs which are getting filled already. Once they are full, everyone who is not getting there when needed, will die. If we count every person who went to ICU as dead, how this would change seriousness of Covid?
That statement ignores the fact that estimate of 80% had already caught previous mutation of the Covid. That is presumably even better than the vaccine.
>> The new variant is basically a bad cold. Why do we still have these silly mandates?? How much longer do people want to do this?
We actually don't know if the new variant is milder than Delta. And even if it is milder,
ir is spreading so rapidly that a small proportion of severe cases could still flood hospitals.
IMHO we need STRICTER covid rules in 2022 - shutdown the whole cultural sector, close bars, restaurants, criminally punish anti-vaxxers, impose penalties for unvaccinated, etc.
In Germany we now need to wait until the hospitals have capacity again to treat regular stuff like broken arm. So I presume lockdowns and/or covid rules will stay active until hospitalizations are down. Whether Omnicron causes lots of hospital cases by damaging more cells or by being highly infectious is secondary. The primary issue is that hospitals are too full.
I just find it fascinating that a country like Germany with a very well developed health-care infrastructure and a comparatively well protected (vaccinated) population is seemingly facing larger pressure on its health-care system than the US.
USA healthcare is great! You just need money to access it, and it’s not a very good value, since we spend almost twice as much of our GDP on it than Germany. Americans also on average don’t benefit from it as much, but that is just due to many not having then money to access it very well.
population density of Germany is comparable to that of the state of Maryland (from 2013 data). Can't really compare a single EU country to the entirety of the US
The truth is we basically always had triages like this in every stronger flu season. Source: Ask people that went through emergency department in the last 10 years, you can randomly pick people.
Covid is a serious disease and it does increase load. That will cause problems because the system was finely tuned to always be near to 100% workload in normal operation. That ICU beds were reduced with financial incentives! by the state no less just last summer is a complete joke.
Dig deeper on this. At least in the US, a big part of "full hospitals" isn't sick people, but a lack of staff due to vaccination requirements and people quitting.
The truth is that Germany's government is to blame for this problem in the first place; if you are losing infrastructure during a prolonged crisis instead of bolstering it, you are failing/losing/incompetent. To put restrictions on the population instead of addressing the problem might as well be criminal.
It doesn't follow from the problem or situation being unfair that there is no problem.
For the last three days I have been seeing more and more bad faith or distorted arguments like this on HN regarding Covid. And way less comments from professional virologists or epidemiologists weighing in.
It's kind of tiring after 2 years. The same has been said of Spain, France or Italy, though they rank among the top countries in healthcare.
While no country is perfect, and many governments made mistakes, you just can't fight an exponential problem (viral epidemic) with linear means (more hospitals). More beds doesn't help, you need the personnel, the training, and upkeep all of that when there's no pandemic. It's unfeasible.
Without restrictions in place, and with the current omicron spread we're seeing, doubling hospital capacity magically, with doctors and nurses and ventilators, lasts you for an extra whooping 3 days. 10 times? You'll have around 10 days more before it collapses.
What are you talking about? In WW2 Germany took over the majority of Europe in like 3 months. They completely transformed their industry towards their goals before anyone even lifted a finger.
You're saying they can't mobilize themselves to solve this comparatively tiny problem now? They can't build a few dozen field hospitals for Covid patients with basic therapies, like providing oxygen, which is what the vast majority of those patients need? None of the Western European countries have the capability for this? Is this some kind of joke?
It does not matter whether the curve is exponential or not. What matters is whether sick people get adequate care and whether hospital personnel gets adequate rest and pay. With more covid specialized hospitals, both restrictions could be weaker and more people could be saved.
Many governments just do not want to put effort and money towards that. Some of them even talk about reducing hospitals and let thousands of doctors and nurses quit (Slovakia). It is disgusting and reveals what kind of people are in charge.
I know you're insinuating that the restrictions work. That's a very bold claim. Two things I'd like to know about the restrictions:
1) Do they actually work
2) Are they worth it (cost/benefit)
You say "the end of each wave aligns neatly with restrictions" - can you prove that it's not just that the restrictions follow the waves? You know, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. I haven't seen any real discussion of this by governments, they just claim it works.
Obviously each country does restrictions their own way, but I feel like the concept of "lockdowns" is pretty ubiquitous, and if you're going to do something that seems stupid, you should have a lot of supporting evidence for its efficacy. So far I haven't seen much persuasive evidence in support of lockdowns or masking, but people keep throwing it at me like it's gospel. They don't seem to think Sweden or Florida are real, or any of the other places that never did lockdowns.
Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that lockdowns are putting millions of people into starvation. I haven't seen any governments put out cost/benefit analysis, probably because it wouldn't look very good.
I wonder honestly whether you, and others like you, are arguing in good faith. The truth is I'm not necessarily against many of the restrictions - if it turned out they were actually appropriate and worth it. The problem is that the way you argue, the incentives involved, and the reality of the outcomes, I don't believe a fucking word you say. You'd have to provide indisputable evidence at this point, and you'd have to really make me want to hear it.
France has bolstered ICU beds, with a lot ( there are no concrete numbers, and everything is measured in pre-Covid capacity, but we've had ICUs at 180% during one of the later waves).
But they can't scale to infinity, there's always a limit on the number of medical personnel you can actually train. At some point you will hit that limit with unchecked exponential growth.
> We have all the data one could hope to have, vaccines, treatments
It's still going to be at least 8 months before everyone in the US can get vaccinated. And that's assuming the Pfizer vaccine gets approved for those under five in January, which seems less and less likely given that we haven't seen any updates on that in weeks.
What matters is how much pressure it puts on the health system. There are 3 things to consider here:
1. how many people end up in ICU (which for Omicron we don't know yet), and at what point ICU becomes overwhelmed in a given region. Once the ICU capacity is exceeded, the mortality rates for bad cases goes way up.
2. How many illnesses unrelated to Covid go untreated due to load on the health system, and subsequently how many excess deaths this causes.
3. After 5-6 months, a lot of vaccine immunity starts dropping off. A regions capacity to get booster doses delivered makes a difference here.
It is not an offensive comment. It is an accurate observation that differentiates this pandemic from others. HIV causes misery for a decade or more before finally visiting death on a person who otherwise might have 60 years to live.
Surely you can see that public health responses need to take this into account?
What is the duration of a "natural life"? For someone with a disability? For someone born with an autoimmune disease? For anyone except the young and fit?
The comment was offensive because it defines a segment of society who the author feels does not deserve to live.
It seems that your qualm is not actually with the author, whose phrasing is not unusual at least to my eye, but with the very concept of age-adjusted mortality as a metric.
Public health in concerned in part with:
1) Giving years to life
2) Giving life to years
In order to be able to draw conclusions about the relative risks of particular epidemics (whether caused by an infectious pathogen, or lifestyle, or many other causes), it is necessary to determine how much life the epidemic is taking (via projections of age-adjusted mortality in the subpopulations in question), and the degree of detriment in quality of life that occurs beforehand.
Generally speaking, if an intervention can save lives of a cohort who is likely to life 50 more years on average, it is viewed as more valuable than an intervention that can only save lives of a cohort who is expected to live 5 more years on average.
These are absolutely reasonable and mainstream discussions that happen all the time in the relevant fields.
This conversation is not about an abstract trolley problem of years to life / life to years. It's about reality today.
The post I was quoting ended with "Why do we still have these silly mandates?? How much longer do people want to do this?"
The issue at hand is whether a person is willing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, observe local mandates and do various other things for the benefit of others - particularly those who are clinically vulnerable. It really is offensive to refer to someone who is clinically vulnerable as "at the end of their natural lives anyway".
If, as a society, we can do a few unselfish things, this will reduce the burden on health systems so people who need care can get it. An over-burdened health system is one that can't service anyone, regardless of the source of their problem.
> The issue at hand is whether a person is willing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, observe local mandates and do various other things for the benefit of others - particularly those who are clinically vulnerable
You are incorrect that this is the issue at hand, at least with respect to policy decisions about interventions. Public health decisions are not made to facilitate a fantasy world of perfect compliance, but with controls and adjustments made for real-world levels of compliance. I don't mean to sound rude, but this is not some specialized piece of knowledge imparted after years of study; this is basic high-school civics stuff.
So, instead of bizarre wishful thinking with respect to compliance with half-assed measures that never even really had substantial support among public health professionals, let's look at the actual, pressing issues of life-and-death here:
Horizontal interdiction efforts come at an enormous cost, and their effects even to add years to lives are dubious and unproven.
Outside the bubbles of affluence and privilege, hundreds of millions - perhaps over a billion - children have lost nearly two years of education. Very few serious experts ever advised this, and every accepted pandemic plan crafted prior to 2020 advised against it.
This is only one example; there are many. This organization, founded by several of the top echelon of experts in this field at the elite institutions of medicine, has begun tracking them: https://collateralglobal.org/
> It really is offensive to refer to someone who is clinically vulnerable as "at the end of their natural lives anyway".
Offensive is asking children to make dramatic, life-altering sacrifices to shield adults. Offensive is labeling those already marginalized in society as "essential workers" and asking them to be biological shields to protect wealthier people without regard to their stratified risk level. Offensive is closing schools, playgrounds, parks, community centers, gyms, places of art and music, without evidence and without a plan to achieve more acute spread in the low-risk tier so as to hasten endemic equilibrium (you know, the consensus written pandemic plan at CDC and WHO prior to 2020).
If you are so tidally offended by basic, established, well-founded, evidence-based stratification inherent to compassionate public health responses, then perhaps it's better to make decisions based on outcomes rather than your personal sensibilities of what is or isn't offensive.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out that delaying exposure to SARS-CoV-2 for any given individual is unlikely to save many years of life. And there is nothing wrong with using this knowledge to craft policy which maximally saves lives and quality of life instead of optimizing for being unoffensive in the face of the brashest takes the internet has to offer.
We in the west are mortgaging our future to help people who are 80+ lives a few extra months or maybe years largely in isolation, how is this a better alternative than letting them see their families and enjoy doing the things they want to do? Why are we putting kids, who basically are guaranteed not to die through the COVID wringer to save old people. These kids are the future.
Besides plenty of people warehouse their parents in nursing homes, is that a better option?
This is the view of an individual who has no disabilities, no health issues and who is under an arbitrary age that they've decide feels far away for them. What does it mean to be a human if we cannot care for the people around us?
> The new variant is basically a bad cold. Why do we still have these silly mandates??
In the case of more serious disease (which the Alpha, Delta, and other variants perhaps were), the "mandates" (assuming you're referring here to horizontal interdiction like lockdowns, school closures, etc) make even less sense. They stratify spread acuity by socioeconomic status instead of risk.
Achieving a vertical stratification, where the low-risk cohort (which is enormous in the case of all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and easy to identify by age and comorbidities) experiences a highly acute spread, is a much faster path to endemic equilibrium, and is only disrupted by what you rightly call silly mandates.
Your desire to return to "normal" is counterproductive to preventing the spread of contagious disease. A lot of the country has already turned back to normal, and it shows in the fact that we have 140k cases a day and thousands of deaths per day. When 9/11 happened, we vowed to "never forget", but with Covid, it seems that self-induced Amnesia is what people are actually fighting for.
Lets not go back to a world where it was normal to show up to work sick and we had very little in the way prepared for when a deadly disease was spreading. The culture around sickness and disease has to change. This is vastly more important than "getting to Mars" to save humanity.
> We have all the data one could hope to have, vaccines, treatments, we know how to care for those that are sick, and the vast majority of people that are dying are basically at the end of their natural lives anyway.
Really? In the US We have politicians of all stripes actively subverting data from being gathered and distributed. I could write a whole book on how the US failed during this Pandemic.
Please describe with specificity your goal for Covid and how masking, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, or any other coercive policy is going to get us there. Be sure to first review infections and deaths per capita in free states like Florida (lower) versus Covidistan states like New York and California (higher). Vaccines are freely available and remain effective against severe disease. That’s all there is.
> Your desire to return to "normal" is counterproductive to preventing the spread of contagious disease. A lot of the country has already turned back to normal, and it shows in the fact that we have 140k cases a day and thousands of deaths per day. When 9/11 happened, we vowed to "never forget", but with Covid, it seems that self-induced Amnesia is what people are actually fighting for.
Because once government takes power (and this is a taking — precisely zero of these measures are subject to votes and it’s all done pursuant to governors’ emergency powers) it does not easily give it up.
Our politicians and medical system executives have completely failed to do the one thing that would have actually made a difference: increase hospital capacity to care for COVID patients.
All these mandates and lockdowns are just performance art to distract from their abject failures.
Unfortunately you can't rank up the production of nurses like you would rank up production of ammo or masks. It takes to time to either educate a new nurse or divert and re-educate an operational nurse to a new function (pulmonary and respiratory syndrome surveillance and care) and then you miss a nurse for `regular` care.
> made a difference: increase hospital capacity to care for COVID patients.
Why would they have ? They've been told it's just a cold last year and they are told or tell omicron is just a cold.
I am hoping that as the picture of Omicron becomes clearer, if this initial perception proves accurate, we will seriously look at lowering restrictions. But I don't think impatience is called for.
It's been less than a month since Omicron was discovered. It's not easy to know exactly what the ramifications are in such a short time, and it's frankly impressive that we even know as much as we do.
As one comedian put it: "Give it a second! It's going to space!"
That's where I'm at. Good data needs time. Good policy needs good data. Deaths are a lagging indicator and not even SA has really had enough time to clearly define the threat in that regard. I'm neither ready to burn my mask nor start wiping down grocery bags.
Also, my spouse and I quote that Louis CK bit all the time. It's a classic.
Why would we downvote rationality friend? We are living in madness.
New data out of South Africa showed that the risk of hospitalization from Omnicron was 29% less than the original strain which was already pretty unlikely for young, healthy people . And another study just showed that this new strain multiples faster in the airways than in the lungs, which would contribute to less severe outcomes. But yet, there are talks of more restrictions, more panic, and more fear due to omnicron.
> New data out of South Africa showed that the risk of hospitalization from Omnicron was 29% less than the original strain which was already pretty unlikely for young, healthy people
Did they account for previous immunity from other strains when they said Omicron is 29% less severe than original strain? How did they study this? Magically find people who (1) Never had a strain of Covid and (2) Aren't vaccinated at all.
> And another study just showed that this new strain multiples faster in the airways than in the lungs, which would contribute to less severe outcomes
How does the part after the comma follow from the part before the comma?
"I've not got a bigger pile of dry leaves next to my shed than the big pile of dry leaves next to my house, which should contribute to lower risk of my house burning down".
"I was only using log4j on systems that weren't customer facing. Now I'm also using it on customer facing systems, which should contribute to lower risk of getting hacked".
Health care overload is mentioned by others and the main reason. I hope you don't have a heart attack when the ER and ICU are filled with people who don't need to be there. It is heartbreaking that someone made this health crisis a political issue. I've lost two uncles before the vaccines were available and I can assure you that they didn't want to die just because they "only had 10 good years left". Your selfish comments are why we are in this position. God forbid humans do something for the greater good. Masks (e.g.) have been popular in Asia for a long time and help stop the spread of colds and flus. I wish our western culture had honor.
> People who want to protect themselves have and those that don't aren't going to.
That's not really true. Here in Germany there's plenty of people who tried to get a booster shot but were turned away because it hasn't been 6.00 months since their last shot[1] (including me, tried to get it before Christmas and the inevitable o'micronwave). Other countries might be more reasonable, Germans gonna German I guess. Come to think of it, that probably explain things like people being turned away on the 25th because they're only eligible for the shot on the 26th and stuff like that.
[1] The "STIKO" says it has to be >=6 months, and >=5 months only in "special cases", EMA says >3 months, federal health ministry says >3-4 months, state health ministries say anything between four weeks and six months. My state says three months. Which one is applicable is basically impossible to know.
In all fairness to people who want mandates, we still need to prevent hospital overruns from unvaccinated people who show up with serious symptoms expecting treatment, thus putting a life threatening strain on medical resources to handle routine health emergencies. But this is something we can monitor and do incrementally, of course.
The new variant is basically a bad cold if you're already vaccinated against the existing variants. In general it seems to be about as dangerous as the alpha and delta variants, though the data isn't completely in yet. So it's still a serious threat to non-vaccinated people, and anyone that's immunocompromised, whether they're vaccinated or not.
From a public health perspective, non-vaccinated populations are a petri dish for new variants to develop in, and those future variants could potentially be more dangerous.
Depending on where you're from the answer differs greatly. But a very simple (and most likely a wrong one) is that no matter the circumstances, it takes a preponderance of bad outcomes to shift quickly on policies.
And the policymakers for the most part, have not shifted in the past several years. In the USA, Biden has pretty much carried forward the policy from Trump and Dr. Fauci is still the director of the CDC during this time. If national policy and sentiment were to change the biggest sentiment would be to change the CDC director.
The election was just last year. Now, regardless of the reason why individuals voted for them, politicians feel as if their winning means to move forward on all parts of their agenda. One of the biggest reasons for Trump's loss is how COVID was handled. So the direction that this administration has is to handle COVID differently than Trump, which means, do more to combat COVID.
In the USA, I would not expect anything major to come out at the national level with regards to COVID. VA just had a shift happen with the governor's race (I live in VA) and VA might be a barometer for what changes can happen at a local level.
And sadly, I do think I have to tie my expectations more with politics than science or data.
HN in particular seems to have quite a noticeable "skeptic" bent about it, so I wouldn't worry!
The new variant is basically a bad cold
This is what I was worried people would start inferring from that headline – it's not really an accurate representation, since this article is just talking about how the UK government describes "symptoms".
Initial data from South Africa does suggest it's possible this variant may be less severe than we saw in previous waves. We don't really have enough data to come to a clear conclusion on that at this stage, because of the pace of change and the number of confounding factors, such as previous infection. The Discovery Health study suggests that hospitalisations may be up to 30% lower than in South Africa's initial Delta wave – if that does turn out to be the case, it's positive. However, the same study also points out that the risk of reinfection is higher, as is the risk of hospitalisation (from a very low base level) among children.
We can also see evidence from the UK that Omicron appears to be significantly more transmissible – the number of cases is currently doubling every 48 hours. Of course that won't continue, but my understanding is that we are likely to see up to about 1m cases a day in the UK by the end of the year. At the moment (very roughly) about 1% of positive (confirmed by test, so lower in practice) in the UK result in hospital admission. So it's not hard to see that a rapid increase in the number of infections could result in a significant spike in hospital admissions, with all of the knock-on effects that this causes – even if the severity of each individual case is much lower.
I'm sure everyone hopes this isn't the case, and that it turns out that this wave spikes and subsides quickly with minimal harm – but it definitely seems way to early to be drawing conclusions like "this is just a bad cold". I'm personally a little bit confused about the number of posts I see which seem to want to twist any data they can find into an existing narrative they've already settled on.
We're not going to stop omicron - that's pretty clear. We may need to spread the wave over a longer time period though. The current models are predicting a UK wave peaking in early to mid january with hospital admissions between half and double the previous highest peak. If it's half, we're probably OK. If it's double, the hospitals will not cope and many people will die unnecessarily, both from covid and from everything else you need emergency treatment for. The growth rate is so fast at the moment - less that 2 days doubling - that we could easily end up with 25% of healthcare workers (and delivery drivers, etc) off work at the same time. It looks like Denmark and the UK will provide the test case everyone else needs to decide whether stricter measures are needed to spread the wave. Personally, I'd prefer we weren't the test case - I think a little more caution at the moment on behalf of the government would be warranted.
I think I'd like a version of the famous "cloud-to-butt" browser plugin that changes Omicron/COVID/etc. to "common cold". Then headlines like, "The Omicron variant will spread quickly through the U.S., experts say — the threat it poses is less certain." will read, "The common cold will spread quickly through the U.S., experts say — the threat it poses is less certain."
Then a) I won't feel as stressed out, and b) I won't read the article, since it sounds ridiculous.
This plugin would only make sense for people who are vaccinated of course, since for those people, like myself, COVID has been defanged. Isn't it time for those of us who have had two doses, or even three (I have yet another one scheduled a week from now...), to stop worrying and start enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived?
> Isn't it time for those of us who have had two doses, or even three (I have yet another one scheduled a week from now...), to stop worrying and start enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived?
Yes, and I would add, time to stop worrying so much about what other people are doing. People are getting really worked up about how so-and-so hasn't been vaccinated or so-and-so doesn't wear a mask properly. It's one more newly promoted category upon which we can focus our vehement, irrational tribalism.
Yeah it's brought the moral busybodies out of the woodwork like nothing else, I'd bet a fair amount that the people snitching on their neighbours for breaking lockdown rules or harassing strangers in public about masks would be exactly the same people siding with things like witchcraft trials or McCarthyism in ages past. Some people identify very strongly with the established norms of the day and will be aggressively conformist towards them because that's who they are, regardless of how much merit those norms actually have.
One social impact of the pandemic is that nobody can mind their own damn business any more, and the reason is because we decided basically overnight in March 2020 that catching an airborne virus now has a moral dimension it never had before. You catch a cold, you catch the flu, you catch norovirus, it's just something shitty that happens to you by chance rather than being anyone's fault. When it comes to other diseases people do attach moral judgements; someone gives you HIV or clamydia or syphilis so it automatically has to be someone else's fault that you got sick. Because of the way society has come to see COVID, that disease has been put in the latter category rather than the former which is incorrect in my opinion.
Society will never heal from the wounds of this pandemic until COVID is just something shitty you happen to catch rather than something someone gave to you because of a moral failure.
Where did I say that? It's literally this ridiculous jumping down people's throat the second they mention anything slightly negative about 'COVID culture' that I'm criticising.
> regardless of how much merit those norms actually have
Isn't that the whole point? Persecuting a neighbour as a witch has no merit. Limiting contact with your neighbour as a pandemic restriction does.
> One social impact of the pandemic is that nobody can mind their own damn business any more
If "mind their own damn business" means "go about daily life as if there weren't a global pandemic" then yes, this is indeed an expected impact of public health crises.
You can't catch something without someone else spreading it. Please wear a mask to lower the chance of covid infections and help out the society you live in.
I literally only brought up masks in the context of people harassing strangers in public about them, from the responses I'm getting here you'd think I'd posted some sort of anti-mask polemic. It's not masks I was criticising, I'm criticising the kind of profoundly obnoxious person who goes up to strangers in public to shriek at them about masks and then acts like a victim when they (quite reasonably) are told to mind their own business. It's never acceptable to harrass people in public like that regardless of how scared you are of COVID in my opinion.
Do people really struggle to understand why acting like that particularly unpleasant brand of judgemental Puritan evangelist might put people off from their message? It's like any discussion around COVID has to come packaged with buckets of tedious moralising or it automatically gets dismissed as conspiratorial.
I would just like my (young) children to not have to wear masks at school - that’s really hard on them and they have been doing so for 2 years now. How does that make sense - especially if they are vaccinated?
> This plugin would only make sense for people who are vaccinated of course, since for those people, like myself, COVID has been defanged. Isn't it time for those of us who have had two doses, or even three (I have yet another one scheduled a week from now...), to stop worrying and start enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived?
I want to tell my short story with COVID so far, as a double vaccinated individual (last dose 2021-08-18) who took all the precautions and got infected due to an irresponsible person (older than me, didn't get vaccinated simply due to their own laziness and lack of empathy towards others).
I tested positive a couple Tuesdays ago (2021-12-04) on an antigen test, I took the test after waking up with a runny nose.
I didn't experience much of the physical symptoms, no cough, barely had fevers (one instance it broke through 38.3C, otherwise hovering on the lows 37C), no fatigue.
Instead I've been experiencing quite a few cognitive issues, I lost my smell and taste last Thursday, so about a week ago, and since then I've noticed that my thoughts aren't on the same level as before.
It started when I was playing chess with my girlfriend a week ago, I noticed that I simply couldn't string thoughts together, they became "loose" and it was hard to get continuation. I'd start thinking about a strategy and would experience a "brain fart" where it didn't make sense what I was thinking about, then I couldn't figure where my pieces could move and my thought would start spiraling. It is really, really strange.
When I tried reading books I felt similarly to what some of my friends with ADD/ADHD described how their thoughts wander away. I simply couldn't focus enough to finish a paragraph without having to re-read parts of it. Sometimes it would take me 4-5 times reading the same sentence to finally settle it. I don't understand or know the mechanism behind this but it's happening.
I've been also experiencing bouts of anxiety, physically, I do struggle a little with anxiety but never happened this way. I learned to cope through the last week and noticed these bouts come in waves so I just endure the few seconds or minutes while it's happening.
Today was my first day back at work, as a SWE my job is basically to mentally juggle multiple things and considerations about them to find a solution or a way forward. I simply cannot do that at the moment, I still feel these waves of brain fog creeping up where I simply can't make sense of something that was said or shown. I've been trying to pair program but it's been mostly pointless as sometimes I can't finish my train of thought, or remember why I started one.
I believe the same way as you, that my double vaccinated status would protect me from the worst case and it's definitely protected me from the worst (as well as my girlfriend, also vaccinated and who endured the whole quarantine/isolation period with me and never got infected). I didn't feel shortness of breath or other dangerous symptoms but I feel a tight chest and sometimes a burning sensation. Still, it's not all fine and dandy, I cried multiple times from panic attacks (some induced by my psyche, some from COVID); the brain fog is lingering and making me question how and when will I ever get back to "normal", if it stays for long it will impact my job and expectations on me.
Bottom line is: yes, we are protected from the worst, it is still something I don't want to go through again, it's still something I would have avoided as much and for as long as possible because medical research is still in its infancy about long-term side-effects. I have no idea if I will experience issues with clotting later in life (brain aneurysms are one of my worst nightmares), the symptoms on my chest are pretty weird and uncomfortable.
I'm a pretty healthy individual, low 30s, always commute by bike (averaging around 4000 km/year on...
You got pretty bad covid (on average worse than unvaccinated for you age) in spite of getting vaccinated and still think the problem lies in not enough vaccinations? At least your anecdote would lead an unbiased person to question how effective really was the vaccine for you.
> You got pretty bad covid [...] your anecdote would lead an unbiased person to question how effective really was the vaccine for you
If it was this bad with the vaccine, imagine how much worse off he would have surely been without it. He likely suffered the viral equivalent of seatbelt-shaped bruises on his body after a car crash that would have otherwise killed him.
> still think the problem lies in not enough vaccinations
The rarity of death in less than 30 year old without comorbidity would be like someone his age falling down the stairs and randomly breaking their neck. To compare this to an unseatbelted car crash is super disingenuous.
He's blaming his sickness on the unvaccinated guy he got it from with no hint of irony that he got it despite being vaccinated and potentially spreading it as well.
> He's blaming his sickness on the unvaccinated guy he got it from with no hint of irony that he got it despite being vaccinated and potentially spreading it as well.
Yes, because all the data shows that infection between vaccinated -> vaccinated is lowered, there is no irony in there. Also because the person in question didn't isolate the moment they felt sick, they continuously wandered around the house and I forced them to isolate after they showed up in front of me, coughing and announcing they "felt sick". So fuck off.
I caught it at home, I stayed home, the person lives in the same house, and so I didn't infect anyone else.
You have a pretty annoying and uncivil attitude, not sure what triggers you about the vaccine talk but you have an axe to grind and you are piling on my anecdote to push whatever view you have without backing it up, I will stop engaging because I surely don't see any point in trying to hold civility towards you.
Have a good weekend, hope you find better ways to spend your energy.
I don't think I got pretty bad COVID, I know at least two people who died from COVID back in my home country (Brazil), one around 50 years old, another one was 35.
I didn't have any cough or shortness of breath, there was nothing in the sense of "pretty bad COVID", this was a very mild infection. Even more when I compare to the person who infected me, 4 years older than me and still coughing their brains out after 2 weeks with it, including blood in their cough for a couple days.
So I'm not sure where you are drawing this conclusion from... The vaccine was effective, I didn't infect my girlfriend whom I shared rooms, bed and so on, and I attribute that to both me and her being vaccinated, hers was a month later than mine so I believe she has a higher antibodies count going on.
I really, really don't understand what point you are trying to make out of my anecdote, nothing in there draws to your conclusion.
EDIT: I believe you have an axe to grind, don't come soapboxing over my anecdote with your own made-up conclusions about what I said. It's dishonest and crummy.
FYI, it's normal for people living together to not infect each other even without vaccines. SAR has only ever been in the range of 10%-20% ish. Also vaccines haven't managed to alter that.[1] When my girlfriend got COVID (pre-vaccines) she was unable to infect me despite that we were quarantined together for 10 days in close contact, made no effect to reduce contact and she was even cooking for me whilst coughing over the food.
[1] "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)"
That quote is slightly misleading. It only looks at the SAR of vaccinated index cases. That makes sense because the letter is about the epidemiological relevance of vaccinated people, but it's incorrect to say vaccines had no effect on SAR: The study those figures were taken from also states that "The SAR in household contacts exposed to the delta variant was 25% (95% CI 18–33) for fully vaccinated individuals compared with 38% (24–53) in unvaccinated individuals."
A study based on data from Singapore found a similar effect[1].
On the contrary, I find it odd that a case where vaccine did not prevent serious illness (neurological symptoms) is presented as a positive for the vaccine.
If you really find this odd then you are either being dishonest and intentionally spreading FUD or dense. I chose to believe you are not stupid. Unfortunately it means you are not yet in a place where you can reassess your beliefs and any rational arguments or facts will only strengthen those beliefs by the sheer need for the psyche to secure itself.
johnchristopher says "Vaccines aren't 100% effective. They are still necessary."
Why are vaccines necessary?
A cure would be just fine; some drug that stopped covid immediately would be very nice.
For example most forms of malaria _had_ a cure with the discovery of quinine. Newer drugs have taken quinine's place. It's a race between the organism and man in any case, whether cure or vaccine.
> A cure would be just fine; some drug that stopped covid immediately would be very nice.
> For example most forms of malaria _had_ a cure with the discovery of quinine. Newer drugs have taken quinine's place. It's a race between the organism and man in any case, whether cure or vaccine.
So we don't need vaccines because cures - which we don't have so far - are better. Okay.
johnchristopher says:>"So we don't need vaccines because cures - which we don't have so far - are better."<
I didn't say that.
What I'm saying is that we should research treatments (non-vaccine cures) as well as vaccines.
After all, of our current medical solutions that do work for various ailments, what percentage are vaccines and what percentage are treatments found by experiment or accident (like quinine for malaria)?
Thing is vaccines protect from one kind of worse: landing in the ICU, most of the time.
Long covid, another kind of worse, as in if 10% of the infected population gets it then we'll have a massive generational disability problem, is facing even more denial from people.
Mine? Because I'd be very surprised to see any comment in my history where I opposed the vaccine for any reason, much the opposite I've been always supportive of them and taken quite a bit of flack from vaccine deniers.
Sorry, my bad. I misinterpreted TT-392's comment and thought he was referring to another person's comment and being too charitable with this person's intentions. I didn't realize he was referring to you.
piva00 says >"I want to tell my short story with COVID so far, as a double vaccinated individual (last dose 2021-08-18) who took all the precautions and got infected due to an irresponsible person (older than me, didn't get vaccinated simply due to their own laziness and lack of empathy towards others)."<
You blame someone specific, but we don't really know where you caught it. It could just as well have been passed to you by your girlfriend, your neighbor, etc. Yours is a "just-so" story and may be true but likely is not.
> You blame someone specific, but we don't really know where you caught it. It could just as well have been passed to you by your girlfriend, your neighbor, etc. Yours is a "just-so" story and may be true but likely is not. If you want to publish there are blogs where you can publish and add supporting facts.
I know exactly how and from whom I caught it, I don't need to go into details to gain some kind of "cred" from you to believe me.
On the other hand, you know absolutely nothing about me, my living situation or any aspect of my life to be able to infer anything about if I know or not how this came to be, or to question my anecdote.
Please, don't jump into conclusions because you want to. My living situation is pretty unique and so makes it completely possible to trace back the original infection.
Note that this means a PCR-test will have no meaning other than you came in contact with Covid-19 somewhere between now and up to 3 months ago.
The PCR-test measures the existence of virus RNA. Not when you were infected, if you are sick of that virus and also not if you are contagious.
Because the symptoms are now similar to almost all other virus infections there is no way of knowing if you are sick of Omicron after a positive PCR-test.
Edit: For some confused people an example.
You came in contact with Omicron but didn't get sick of it.
2 weeks later you came in contact with the RS virus and this time you got a runny nose so you get a PCR-test. The result is positive from the Omicron contact 2 weeks earlier. So they say you are sick of Omicron. But in fact you are sick of RS.
Not all Covid PCR tests target the S-gene. The cheap RT-PCR test I took recently in London (for travel) targeted only the E-gene and ORF1ab sequences, so if it had been positive it wouldn't have told me if it were Omicron or not.
> asymptomatic people may test positive for 1-2 weeks, while those with mild-to moderate disease often continue to test positive for a week or more after this.
With previous waves you were likely to become PCR negative around 2-3 weeks after initial infection, though it was longer for some people. We don't have data for omicron yet on this.
As for whether you have omicron - that depends on the precise test the lab runs. Many UK labs test for three covid genes - S, N and Orf. Delta was S-gene positive. Omicron is S-gene negative but N and Orf positive. If the test is S-gene negative (often reported as S-gene target failure, SGTF), you can be pretty sure it's Omicron at the moment. Alpha was also SGTF, but isn't really circulating anymore.
I am trying really hard to make sense of the past two years and constantly giving the benefit of the doubt, but it's really not easy. So many banal things have become news worthy and it's like all of a sudden everyone completely lost their memory. If someone has told me years before that I will be reading such articles on the news I would probably tell them that they need psychological evaluation. Have people forgotten about respiratory viruses all of a sudden? Do we really need an article to tell us that respiratory viruses cause runny nose, headache and fatigue? And I'm in no way downplaying the past two years but are people forgetting that respiratory viruses have always been a serious thing? Deaths from respiratory viruses have always been in the top of the statistics, every year.
Well, it's more notable how the symptoms are evolving. Used to be that fever + cough + loss of smell / taste were the most commonly reported symptoms (probably in part due to how noticeable they are, and unlikely to be confused with, say, allergies or stress).
I suspect this is in part driven by more acute cognizance of even minor potential symptoms, combined with greater testing capacity, but if the strain is in fact causing different, less visible (but still highly contagious!) symptoms, that's somewhat concerning (although may be balanced out if it is actually accompanied by much less severe disease).
For reference:
Omicron (from the OP):
> the top five symptoms reported in the app for omicron infection were runny nose, headache, fatigue (either mild or severe), sneezing, and sore throat.
Delta [0]:
> the most commonly reported covid-19 symptoms were now headache, runny nose, and sore throat and not fever, cough, and loss of sense of smell or taste, as listed by the government.
People are not used to a cold that spread that fast and far and does so much damage. It's wrecking havoc on our health infrastructure. Usual procedures aren't working for now obviously.
So yes, if the symptoms are now different from before then it's news worthy.
Also, why complain that an article about covid deals with covid?
Well if the point is to curb the spread, yeah, it's hard to beat a lockdown. It has consequences ( mental, physical, economical, educational, etc.) but it'd be stupid to ignore its effectiveness.
At this point I assume it's clear to everyone that all humans will be exposed to COVID. Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out.
The biggest story of COVID that no one is talking about is the absolute failure at all levels (political, medical establishment, etc) to increase hospital capacity.
We are in year 2 of a global pandemic and, at least where I am, there has been a reduction in ICU staff, beds and hospital capacity more generally. Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.
Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.
> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Also, you fail to understand that capacity is down because of burnout, so advocating against vaccination, especially for health care workers, is hypocritical in the most cynical way. You are advocating for the onset of chaos.
...and mandates. The stories in the media only capture the firings, but a ton more left before getting fired, simply because they had no desire to be fired.
> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.
OR, we've filtered to the people that actually believe in medical science, ones that are willing to do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of contagious disease.
> Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.
Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
Devils advocate: If these are people that work around sick people all the time, couldn't many of them have already contracted and defeated Covid before the vaccines were available? Doesn't that offer a decent level of immunity (something close to what the vaccine offers)? And don't those people already have a good understanding of how Covid affects them individually? It's hard to argue such people need vaccines or else they don't "believe in medical science".
Its going to affect how people view entering into the medical workforce when they effectively sign up for whatever the fuck medical experiments the government is pissing themselves about at the time.
What medical experiments are you referring to? RNA vaccines didn't happen overnight, billions were spent to accelerate clinical trials, millions have been vaccinated and we don't see much of secondary effects.
mRNA vaccines did basically happen overnight, yeah. As recently as 2017 they couldn't progress beyond animal trials because all mRNA based drugs became toxic after multiple doses. Better hope they nailed that problem, right?
As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain". The trial participants had to report adverse events using an app that had a pre-set list of possible side effects, with no way to enter any others. The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market. The trials didn't measure hospitalization and couldn't show any improvement in mortality. Etc.
Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.
Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
> mRNA vaccines did basically happen overnight, yeah. As recently as 2017 they couldn't progress beyond animal trials because all mRNA based drugs became toxic after multiple doses. Better hope they nailed that problem, right?
> But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
> “It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,” said one former Moderna manager. “Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”
Considering work on mRNA vaccines started in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#Early_research I'd say you are wrong. 2004 and 2008 saw the first use in a humane body of mrna transfer into the cell. Moderna may have hit a roadblock for their cancer therapy in 2017 but that doesn't mean they started working from scratch on mrna vaccines in 2017.
> As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain".
I am surprised antivax aren't running with this story. I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?
> The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market.
Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there ?
> Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.
> Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
I don't know what track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it you are referring to. Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?
Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies.
That's the right source, but I don't see how you conclude it's in Moderna's favour. The reason they switched to vaccines in 2017 (no evidence they worked on them before) is because after many years of effort they couldn't solve the multi-dose toxicity issues. Their prior drug efforts were all for treatments that required ongoing doses. In contrast the assumption pre 2020 was that vaccines were a one-or-two dose and you're done thing, so the toxicity issue could be dodged.
Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.
"I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?"
No, one case that you know of. But as you just realized, information about such people is systematically suppressed. The media refuses to cover it (outside of Fox), tech companies systematically erase mentions of it and ban people who try to link to it. And the worst is, doctors deny any connection.
The reality is, nobody has any idea how many people like that girl are out there.
"Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there?"
No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.
"Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?"
This one. Vaccination of children. Or really, people under 55 or so. That seems to be a common threshold at which the cost/benefit ratio goes negative.
"Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies."
None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.
> That's the right source, but I don't see how you conclude it's in Moderna's favour. The reason they switched to vaccines in 2017 (no evidence they worked on them before) is because after many years of effort they couldn't solve the multi-dose toxicity issues.
Because it doesn't mean they didn't work on them. RNA platform has been in the making for decades, the fact they used it for vaccines and not for something else doesn't mean it's completely unsafe.
> Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.
I disagree, we have big numbers:
> Researchers reviewed data from 728,321 individuals aged 12 or above who had received the third dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. These individuals were carefully matched 1:1 with 728,321 individuals who had received only two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine at least five months prior. The matching was based on an extensive set of demographic, geographic and health-related attributes associated with risk of infection, risk of severe disease, health status and health seeking behavior. Individuals were assigned to each group dynamically based on their changing vaccination status (198,476 individuals moved from the unvaccinated cohort into the vaccinated cohort during the study). Multiple analyses were conducted to ensure that the estimated vaccine effectiveness was robust to potential biases. The study included a total of over 12,000,000 person-days of follow-up.
> No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.
That's really unfair. There's no way you could have taken at face value that first generation covid vaccines would protect against any future variants of covid, especially variants with so many changes as omicron. Even so they still hold against severe hospitalizations. Dismissing vaccines entirely on that is like refusing to wear a seat belt because it doesn't always work. There also always were talk about how long would the protection against mild symptoms hold. Now we know.
They never promised magic pills (if you listen to scientists, not politicians, which is another conversation we should also have).
> None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.
Well, that I don't have anything to say. We didn't have much choice in my country (although if you tried to reschedule or chose a specific vaccination center you could increase the odds of getting what you wanted) (I know I did).
Are you implying these workers have done more harm than good? Right after they bore the brunt of the pandemic and were applauded as heros? All its filtered for is compliance and those fearful to lose their jobs.
> Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Diseases are not free license for governments to do whatever they want for as long as they want.
20 years after 9/11 we still live with the consequences of the "war on terror". Let's make sure that doesn't happen again.
> Diseases are not free license for governments to do whatever they want for as long as they want.
Excuse me, but governments have the power to suspend individual rights during major disasters, like war, insurrection, terrorism, etc... oh wow, look, epidemics too!
Feel fortunate, at least they didn't decree martial law, or better, hefty fines.
It's a public health issue, not the British invading USA. There's zero need to introduce politics into a worldwide health disaster.
If you so love human rights and freedom, you could start by supporting real government overreach like abortion outlawing, inhuman treatment of immigrants, offshore prisons where human rights are ignored, gerrymandering to twist votes towards a single party, insider stock trading from senators, and a long etc.
Fighting vaccines and hygienic measures during a global pandemic won't make you an American hero.
And while I hate to indulge whataboutism, you should know I do care about and have opinions on all of those things. It remains to be seen whether or not you care about rushing to judgements about others. This is a thread about covid, and the usual internet edicit is to stay on topic, so I'm not going to discuss those things here.
I'm not fighting doctors or medical science.
I'm opposing bad policies made by non experts, and/or experts with conflicts of interest.
You gave me the impression of equating governments enforcing sanitation and health measures with political manipulation. You said that diseases don't give government the right to do as they please, and later mentioned the public fear since the twin towers attack.
I completely understand that governments have eroded their reputation by their own actions, but in this case I'm supportive of vaccination and sanitation. This is not a terrorist attack, this is a very contagious disease that hasn't ceased to evolve because people keep hosting it and giving it chance to mutate. You don't have to trust the government to understand that their actions are reasonable and supported by science in this topic.
There are two views you can take of the world. You can take it at face value, or you can search for deeper meaning.
If we take current events at face value, then yes covid is a real problem, the vaccine really helps, and governments are acting in the interest of the public with health and safety measures.
But if you look behind the curtain, there is so much more going on. It remains to be seen just how much manipulation is involved.
My analogy to the war on terror is meant to have layers.
After the initial attack there was a patriotic fervor and an outcry for retribution. The "war on terror" was a justified response to the demand for national security.
It's not until years later that much of the story we were told at the time had been revealed to contain false truths.
The WMDs never existed. The Saudis were connected to the attackers. Our prolonged engagement in Afghanistan, a means to funnel billions (trillions?) to security contractors. The pentagon. Tower 7. Etc.
There's a enough information to confound the official narrative, and we still don't have all the answers. I doubt we ever will.
The pandemic mirrors this in many ways already. The global outcry, the unprecedented scale of government intervention. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" parallels today's divide. It wasn't something you could say no to then, and it's not something you can say no to now.
To say these thing simply erode trust is a pittance. This plants a seed in one's mind that there are in fact manipulators at the highest levels of our institutions. There is even more evidence of this in the world today ex. Jeffery epstein and the ongoing maxwell trials.
But maybe none of that applies to the current events. Perhaps my speculation is unwarranted. Sometimes the world simply is what it seems, and you have to take it at face value.
But more often than not I've found the world is a lot like poker, and by the time you have all the information it's already too late.
I don't think it's fair comparing the war on terror with the current pandemic handling. Back then the government attitude was "You killed 3,000 proud Americans, we will avenge them by killing 300,000 Arabs! A eye for a hundred eyes!". It was clear from day one that USA was overreacting, and doing it in a way that was suspiciously profitable.
The WHO is very different than the military industry complex, they're not taking over the world, they making recommendations based on evolving scientific data, and the governments of the world are free to ignore them because not even the UN has enough authority to force them. That so many shitty governments have accepted those recommendations to some degree is a miracle, owed much in part to the effort of their own scientists.
You call it unfair, yet don't give insight into your criteria for fairness.
No analogy is perfect. But the parallels are too strong to ignore. Studying history is about using the past to make sense of the present, and possibly even predict the future.
Saying the USA was obviously overreacting from the start is just hindsight, and not representative of the sentiment at the time. Further I'm sure years from now we'll say the same, that many things we did during this pandemic were overreactions, and that it was obvious at the time.
Comparing the MIC to the WHO is a false dichotomy. The WHO is historically an institution for the USA to project power internationally.
The question of who is "taking over the world" is the territory of speculation. I said originally it remains to be seen how much manipulation is occurring. For example, the lab-leak hypothesis, once the ramblings of a mad man, has gained traction among officials as a likely source for the disease.
> The Quebec government has announced it will provide nurses with financial bonuses of up to $18,000 as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the province's health-care network ... the plan would cost close to $1 billion
> Quebec is backtracking on its enforced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, government officials announced Wednesday. After pushing back its deadline multiple times, Health Minister Christian Dubé said the province will abandon the measure altogether, as the health-care network can’t afford to lose the thousands of non-vaccinated employees. The loss of unvaccinated staff would have had a “devastating effect on the system,” according to the health ministry.
> One nurse, who CBC agreed not to name because she is not authorized to speak to media, said the announcement will do nothing for her.
The woman works part-time as an emergency room nurse on the night shift, but says she cannot afford to take on full-time work overnight because she is a single mother.
"I'm penalized either way," she said, explaining that part-time nurses expect that they will still be forced to work overtime.
There are a lot of things involved in increasing hospital capacity. One would be increasing the number of workers.
With things like masks we were able to free up supply by allowing N95 construction masks to be used until other production can get up to speed. We don't exactly have a hidden cache of nurses and doctors that can be rallied upon a moment's notice.
Now getting rid of the ones that can, and probably contracted COVID already does make zero sense.
> Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out.
Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster.
COVID is burning out workers everywhere, especially in the medical field. A lot of the quitting isn’t related to vax status, people are just tired and they don’t feel they get paid enough for the job they are doing.
Hospital capacity will take years to increase. At least 4 to raise nurse/doctor class sizes, probably longer since you need to expand the training programs as well. We also already spend 18 percent of our GDP on healthcare, going to 30 percent is going to hurt, but if people don’t want to get vaccinated, maybe we can just charge them higher insurance premiums to make up for it?
No, not really. With trillions of dollars and 2 years there was absolutely plenty of time and resources to train more people and find new COVID-specific spaces. Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster.
The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
> Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster.
Nursing programs were already at capacity before COVID started, and doing a 2 year program is preconditioned on previous education (a 2 year AS degree in my state).
> The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
Arm chair generals? Well yeah - military generals have a track record of being able to rapidly train and deploy people during a crisis.
Do you think in World War 2 the generals sat around saying "there's no possible way we can increase the size of our air force, it takes years to train pilots and engineers". No, they didn't. They found ways to make it work, because it was a crisis. The absolute refusal by the health sector to do this in any way speaks volumes.
I don’t think you understand what the word “arm chair general” actually means. It’s just a term that means “someone who has no experience with the field thinking the answers are easy and that the experts doing the work are just idiots for not seeing how easy the answers are.”
I know exactly what it means. Nonetheless the term isn't really apt here, given the connotations and obvious parallels with real world military operations.
seanmcdirmid says >"Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster."
We are likely now constantly being exposed to the virus. Although we are "immune" (thanks to boosters, immunizations, getting ill, natural immunity or blood transfusion), any subsequent exposure to covid will garner a response from our immune system. So we'll effectively be "re-inoculated" against whatever variant we are exposed to.
So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.
> So we'll effectively be "re-inoculated" against whatever variant we are exposed to.
You'll be re-inoculated if you have an immune reaction, which has a chance of getting sick...and it isn't a given that you'll live to take advantage of the inoculation.
> So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.
It is just like the flu, but a bit worse. Yes, you might be able to survive getting it every year until you get old or develop co-morbidities. But getting a yearly booster is probably a smarter choice (for the flu and COVID).
Just a reminder that Pfizer's PAXLOVID's trials have been halted because the results were so positive it was unethical to keep the control group away from the real drug. The FDA is just sitting on this data waiting for a scheduled meeting to decide to do an emergency authorization. You know no rush FDA just take your time, don't want to mess up you busy schedule for this review.
I've been following the studies. I'd give it to my parents if they got ill. I wouldn't give them Molnupiravir, based on its pathway of disrupting error correcting DNA enzymes. It basically sounds like it would give you cancer and there is not enough time in the trials to identify this IMO.
We experienced a 100% infection rate super-spreader event in our circle of four close friends last weekend. A husband in our group traveled for work last week and by end of the week was sick and clearly showing symptoms. His wife felt fine and the rest of our wives still decided to go out for the long-ago planed dinner/drinks Saturday night. To make matters worse they decided to car pool into one SUV. These are all fully vaccinated and boosted adults. My son also went into car (vaccinated) for short ride to babysitter.
By Monday my wife and another one of the wives was feeling symptoms. Tuesday my son stayed home from school with sore throat and by bedtime we were rushing him to the hospital with a 103 fever. He tested positive while at the hospital. Since then every single person in that car has also tested positive through PCR.
I thought I escaped it by isolating from my wife/son in our home but I started to show early symptoms Wednesday morning waking up with splitting headache. I went and got tested that afternoon. By Thursday night I was having itchy throat, chills, fatigue and body aches. Feeling pretty crappy and a crazy symptom I also have been having is uncontrollable hiccups past 24 hours that come and go.
The test I took Wednesday came back negative but the OTC Rapid I did today was positive. I am going for another PCR tomorrow to confirm as the first one was done possibly too early after exposure with no symptoms.
IF this is the Omicron that went through our vaccinated group like butter, we are going to be in a very bad spot by mid-january.
Agreed, I was at a Xmas dinner party last Saturday with 9 people, all who were double vax'd with Pfizer and 7 of the 9 were previously infected either last year or earlier this year - in short as a group we should have been close to maximum theoritical immunity (all of us are 35 or under too). Everyone at Dinner except myself (somehow) has now contracted Covid again (confirmed via PCR and Antigen testing). Its just nuts, I am buying SPY puts ;)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadThat would be tyranny and be exactly what I feared. That would mean anyone with allergies, a bad nights sleep, a headache caused by many other things etc is classed a persona non grata and denied travel and entry in to their place of work, pubs etc.
And Ryanair make you declare you have no symptoms when checking in (change of taste, smell, diarrhoea, high temperature, sore throat, headache etc etc)
Negative test already doesn’t count for much
Who comes in actively sick with symptoms?? Spreading disease at the workplace was never a good idea, even before Covid.
> Negative test already doesn’t count for much
They're still the main thing.
The entire point of my comment was about expanding the definition to mild and non contagious things like a headache and tiredness
> They're still the main thing.
Except for airlines and a lot of companies. Are you being obtuse on purpose?
Obviously the set of "commonest" systems is not the thing to base such a decision on (e.g. for a hypothetical disease where 90% get a mild cough and 10% drop dead, cough is the most common symptom, but the death symptom is what should drive policy).
No, and don't be ridiculous. Do I have to explicitly spell out every piddling nuance of an idea for you to get it? There's obviously other factors involved, but my point was "most common symptoms" (if they're mild) is not one of them.
> The omicron outbreak at an Oslo Christmas party seen as "the biggest in the world outside of South Africa", is so far only causing mild disease, with Norway's state epidemiologist expressing hope it might mark the beginning of the end for the pandemic ... They have symptoms like fever, cough, headache, muscle pain, fatigue, but for now, none of them has become severely ill, and none of them have been treated in hospital ... one of his agency's three scenarios for omicron was that it would be both very mild and very transmissible. "That is the hope. That is the best scenario we can have," he said. "That it's getting minder, most people will get it, and they will get a natural immunity."
Dec 16, https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/wireStory/omicron-dominant...
> wastewater samples show that the new omicron variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the Florida county that is home to the nation's largest theme park resorts ... It's a different story when it comes to people seeking treatment for COVID-19, officials said. “Those who are hospitalized are being primarily infected by the Delta variant,” Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Wednesday.
2) If there are clear answers to #1, why in tarnation isn't our response, "OK, we need to improve the health care systems in these marginalized communities?" Why instead would we even consider repeating the failed, class-based horizontal interdiction efforts which have terrorized these same communities and cut them off from their centers of support (eg, schools)?
https://www.scotsman.com/health/coronavirus/covid-scotland-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/26/late-diagnos...
2) Because you can't improve health care systems within a short time frame. People are quitting their health care jobs in Europe in big numbers due to being overworked due to the pandemic.
2) Yes you absolutely can; it has been done with great success many times in epidemics, including this one. Moreover, longer-term improvements to health care remain an imperative if indeed a completely predictable respiratory pathogen can so easily overwhelm capacity in marginalized communities.
It’s a mix of covid and antivaxx philosophy though, not just covid, some doctors and nurses who haven’t vaccinated have been suspended and it’s hard to find replacements right now.
https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_coronavirus-des-hopi...
> Not all hospitals are there yet, but all are tearing their hair out to deal with the situation because it is such a headache. A Chinese puzzle, or a tetris, except that it is not a game. “We have already been making an effort to smooth out the programming for a few weeks,” explains Fabrice Chariot, anesthesiologist, and coordinator of the operating room of the CHR of the Citadel, to avoid having too many operations on the same day. We are now starting to postpone cases. ”
> 2) If there are clear answers to #1, why in tarnation isn't our response, "OK, we need to improve the health care systems in these marginalized communities?" Why instead would we even consider repeating the failed, class-based horizontal interdiction efforts which have terrorized these same communities and cut them off from their centers of support (eg, schools)?
What ?
Cough... Omicron being “mild” refers to the double or triple vaccinated.
Even then, the problem is it’s so damn contagious that even a small percentage of severe cases puts pressure on health systems already at breaking point.
> Why do we still have these silly mandates?
That's hardly specific. There’s plenty things governments can do at this stage, some good, some bad.
For example, I’m not a fan of criminalising private mixing of individuals. I think governments should be funding healthcare, UBI or furlough, and mandating decent ventillation.
Is that true? It was mild in South Africa, where vaccine rates are low.
> Covid patients infected by the Omicron variant, whether vaccinated or not, usually experience mild symptoms, though in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer, said Dr Angelique Coetzee, who is among the physicians who first flagged the highly mutated strain in South Africa.
Dec 16, https://torontosun.com/news/world/small-south-africa-patient...
> A small study of seven COVID-19 cases in South Africa shows the Omicron variant can break through booster vaccine shots, one of the scientists involved said on Thursday.
> usually experience mild symptoms, though in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer
"Usually" is key, as is "in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer".
Fact is, 2 vaccinate doses decreases hospitalisation by Omicron by 70%.
As for break through infections? Doesn't change the fact vaccination decreases the severity in people who end up infected.
Would you happen to have a reference for that South African stat?
One article mentioned that out of 43 cases documented by the CDC in the USA, only one person was hospitalized.
The 70% figure is readily available. It's in this article somebody else quoted when failing to make an opposing point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...
> He said private hospitals reported that most patients were unvaccinated and many were initially admitted for non-covid-related illnesses. There was less evidence of respiratory infections in omicron-infected patients, compared with the other variants, with fewer patients requiring oxygen, Noach added.
and hospitalization is down across the board, even before the additional benefit of vaccination:
> Adults are experiencing a 29% lower admission risk relative to South Africa’s first wave of infection, dominated by D614G, in early 2020. Furthermore, hospitalised adults currently have a lower propensity to be admitted to high-care and intensive-care units, relative to prior waves.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Move on to what? Close doors at hospitals and deny help to those in need? What exactly is this place some people want to "move on to" exactly during a f*cking, unsolved pandemic?
Edit:
This also means unsolved to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjU6zwL_4GU
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-ra...
If you're willfully unvaccinated, society owes you nothing.
+: And IC people, which is effectively involuntarily unvaccinated.
A small sample:
https://khn.org/news/article/ambulance-resources-911-demand-...
https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/2021/12/16/york-coun...
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2021/12/16/massachusett...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/health-care-workers-min...
https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-north-country-hos...
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2021/12/14/covid-sur...
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2021/12/15/covid-19-ov...
https://boston.cbslocal.com/2021/12/15/salem-massachusetts-h...
https://wsbt.com/news/local/memorial-hospital-overwhelmed-at...
> “Local public health workers are burnt out from nearly two years of round-the-clock contact tracing, a massive vaccination effort, nonstop demands for information and guidance from businesses, residents and town governments, and the stress of having mask mandates become a local responsibility, and much more,” Walker said.
This article is about health workers being exhausted for having to do things that they probably shouldn't be doing anymore now that vaccines have been generally available for almost a year and the latest variant is not more dangerous than the regular flu. Again, an argument that we need to move on.
After skimming the first 3 it doesn't look like I should spend any time on the rest.
Vaccines have been generally available for almost a year. That doesn't mean that everyone that could get vaccinated has done so. There are plenty of counties in the US where the vaccination rate is still below 50%. There are even plenty of counties where the vaccination rate among those 65+ is below 50%.
You are right that health care workers should not have to be doing those things anymore--we should have been at 90+% vaccination rate pretty much everywhere in the US by mid-2021. But we aren't, and so they do have to keep doing those things.
And as long as that keeps happening we can't move on, because people need hospitals for things other than COVID. Even those of us in places with good vaccination rates can be affected because the places that are overwhelmed are transferring the overflow to places that aren't.
Your argument framed relatively instead of absolutely: "COVID has only killed a third as many Americans as the Spanish flu"
Sauce: https://alltrendsonline.com/what-was-the-population-of-the-u...
I assume (based on other countries data) that we’re basically accelerating deaths in the 80+ year old group, heavily weighed to the sick. So basically same as the flu in 2018 when 100,000 Americans died.
If 5 years from now we see a dip in deaths we’ll know we didn’t kill of a segment of health in population but rather accelerated the deaths of the morbid elderly by a year or two.
Not to say those deaths aren’t tragic but it’s very different than 800,000 deaths of people j the prime of their lives.
What is an "unsolved" pandemic?
And what statistical features of endemic equilibrium do you view as sufficiently absent to judge that this pathogen is still pandemic rather than endemic?
I call this unsolved.
Might also help to remember that NYC built 10,000 ICU beds in five days (that were never used). Our ability to surge hospital capacity is unparalleled. We put men on the moon, FFS.
This is not what people mean by "beds". It's adequate staffing ratios. In March 2020, there were few hotspots in the country and it's not at all comparable to the situation today.
Also, you're being very obtuse and deflective in this thread, bordering on misinformation.
Bold statement. We don’t have enough data for that. All the data is based on situation when mandates are applied. Nobody knows what happens without mandates.
Young people in Africa has still died for this, so it is still quite serious.
To add, it is easy to see biased point of view. In the modern countries there are ICUs which are getting filled already. Once they are full, everyone who is not getting there when needed, will die. If we count every person who went to ICU as dead, how this would change seriousness of Covid?
Not everyone has had access to the vaccine yet. Not saying this can go on forever, but this isn't solved yet.
Has anyone died from Omicron elsewhere?
We actually don't know if the new variant is milder than Delta. And even if it is milder, ir is spreading so rapidly that a small proportion of severe cases could still flood hospitals. IMHO we need STRICTER covid rules in 2022 - shutdown the whole cultural sector, close bars, restaurants, criminally punish anti-vaxxers, impose penalties for unvaccinated, etc.
Covid is a serious disease and it does increase load. That will cause problems because the system was finely tuned to always be near to 100% workload in normal operation. That ICU beds were reduced with financial incentives! by the state no less just last summer is a complete joke.
The truth is that Germany's government is to blame for this problem in the first place; if you are losing infrastructure during a prolonged crisis instead of bolstering it, you are failing/losing/incompetent. To put restrictions on the population instead of addressing the problem might as well be criminal.
For the last three days I have been seeing more and more bad faith or distorted arguments like this on HN regarding Covid. And way less comments from professional virologists or epidemiologists weighing in.
While no country is perfect, and many governments made mistakes, you just can't fight an exponential problem (viral epidemic) with linear means (more hospitals). More beds doesn't help, you need the personnel, the training, and upkeep all of that when there's no pandemic. It's unfeasible.
Without restrictions in place, and with the current omicron spread we're seeing, doubling hospital capacity magically, with doctors and nurses and ventilators, lasts you for an extra whooping 3 days. 10 times? You'll have around 10 days more before it collapses.
You're saying they can't mobilize themselves to solve this comparatively tiny problem now? They can't build a few dozen field hospitals for Covid patients with basic therapies, like providing oxygen, which is what the vast majority of those patients need? None of the Western European countries have the capability for this? Is this some kind of joke?
This is not an exponential problem: it comes in waves. I'm sure you know what an exponential function looks like, and it's not visible here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
Field hospitals that stick around for a few months would be totally fine in handling this. That's what they're for.
Is this tiring you? I don't really know what to say to that, except that it seems there's nothing anyone can say to change your mind.
And if we want to be technical it's a sigmoid, but we only see the exponential part of it.
Many governments just do not want to put effort and money towards that. Some of them even talk about reducing hospitals and let thousands of doctors and nurses quit (Slovakia). It is disgusting and reveals what kind of people are in charge.
1) Do they actually work
2) Are they worth it (cost/benefit)
You say "the end of each wave aligns neatly with restrictions" - can you prove that it's not just that the restrictions follow the waves? You know, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. I haven't seen any real discussion of this by governments, they just claim it works.
Obviously each country does restrictions their own way, but I feel like the concept of "lockdowns" is pretty ubiquitous, and if you're going to do something that seems stupid, you should have a lot of supporting evidence for its efficacy. So far I haven't seen much persuasive evidence in support of lockdowns or masking, but people keep throwing it at me like it's gospel. They don't seem to think Sweden or Florida are real, or any of the other places that never did lockdowns.
Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that lockdowns are putting millions of people into starvation. I haven't seen any governments put out cost/benefit analysis, probably because it wouldn't look very good.
I wonder honestly whether you, and others like you, are arguing in good faith. The truth is I'm not necessarily against many of the restrictions - if it turned out they were actually appropriate and worth it. The problem is that the way you argue, the incentives involved, and the reality of the outcomes, I don't believe a fucking word you say. You'd have to provide indisputable evidence at this point, and you'd have to really make me want to hear it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0
And that's just the most cited, most exhaustive study on effectiveness of restrictions. Some work, some don't, but certainly most do.
Do you have any study at hand that indicates that restrictions generally don't work?
But they can't scale to infinity, there's always a limit on the number of medical personnel you can actually train. At some point you will hit that limit with unchecked exponential growth.
It's still going to be at least 8 months before everyone in the US can get vaccinated. And that's assuming the Pfizer vaccine gets approved for those under five in January, which seems less and less likely given that we haven't seen any updates on that in weeks.
1. how many people end up in ICU (which for Omicron we don't know yet), and at what point ICU becomes overwhelmed in a given region. Once the ICU capacity is exceeded, the mortality rates for bad cases goes way up.
2. How many illnesses unrelated to Covid go untreated due to load on the health system, and subsequently how many excess deaths this causes.
3. After 5-6 months, a lot of vaccine immunity starts dropping off. A regions capacity to get booster doses delivered makes a difference here.
Surely you can see that public health responses need to take this into account?
The comment was offensive because it defines a segment of society who the author feels does not deserve to live.
Public health in concerned in part with:
1) Giving years to life 2) Giving life to years
In order to be able to draw conclusions about the relative risks of particular epidemics (whether caused by an infectious pathogen, or lifestyle, or many other causes), it is necessary to determine how much life the epidemic is taking (via projections of age-adjusted mortality in the subpopulations in question), and the degree of detriment in quality of life that occurs beforehand.
Generally speaking, if an intervention can save lives of a cohort who is likely to life 50 more years on average, it is viewed as more valuable than an intervention that can only save lives of a cohort who is expected to live 5 more years on average.
These are absolutely reasonable and mainstream discussions that happen all the time in the relevant fields.
The post I was quoting ended with "Why do we still have these silly mandates?? How much longer do people want to do this?"
The issue at hand is whether a person is willing to get vaxxed, wear a mask, observe local mandates and do various other things for the benefit of others - particularly those who are clinically vulnerable. It really is offensive to refer to someone who is clinically vulnerable as "at the end of their natural lives anyway".
If, as a society, we can do a few unselfish things, this will reduce the burden on health systems so people who need care can get it. An over-burdened health system is one that can't service anyone, regardless of the source of their problem.
You are incorrect that this is the issue at hand, at least with respect to policy decisions about interventions. Public health decisions are not made to facilitate a fantasy world of perfect compliance, but with controls and adjustments made for real-world levels of compliance. I don't mean to sound rude, but this is not some specialized piece of knowledge imparted after years of study; this is basic high-school civics stuff.
So, instead of bizarre wishful thinking with respect to compliance with half-assed measures that never even really had substantial support among public health professionals, let's look at the actual, pressing issues of life-and-death here:
Horizontal interdiction efforts come at an enormous cost, and their effects even to add years to lives are dubious and unproven.
Outside the bubbles of affluence and privilege, hundreds of millions - perhaps over a billion - children have lost nearly two years of education. Very few serious experts ever advised this, and every accepted pandemic plan crafted prior to 2020 advised against it.
This is only one example; there are many. This organization, founded by several of the top echelon of experts in this field at the elite institutions of medicine, has begun tracking them: https://collateralglobal.org/
> It really is offensive to refer to someone who is clinically vulnerable as "at the end of their natural lives anyway".
Offensive is asking children to make dramatic, life-altering sacrifices to shield adults. Offensive is labeling those already marginalized in society as "essential workers" and asking them to be biological shields to protect wealthier people without regard to their stratified risk level. Offensive is closing schools, playgrounds, parks, community centers, gyms, places of art and music, without evidence and without a plan to achieve more acute spread in the low-risk tier so as to hasten endemic equilibrium (you know, the consensus written pandemic plan at CDC and WHO prior to 2020).
If you are so tidally offended by basic, established, well-founded, evidence-based stratification inherent to compassionate public health responses, then perhaps it's better to make decisions based on outcomes rather than your personal sensibilities of what is or isn't offensive.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out that delaying exposure to SARS-CoV-2 for any given individual is unlikely to save many years of life. And there is nothing wrong with using this knowledge to craft policy which maximally saves lives and quality of life instead of optimizing for being unoffensive in the face of the brashest takes the internet has to offer.
We in the west are mortgaging our future to help people who are 80+ lives a few extra months or maybe years largely in isolation, how is this a better alternative than letting them see their families and enjoy doing the things they want to do? Why are we putting kids, who basically are guaranteed not to die through the COVID wringer to save old people. These kids are the future.
Besides plenty of people warehouse their parents in nursing homes, is that a better option?
Wow.
The jury is still out, but data from SA indicates it might closer to a mild cold than bad cold.
And Norway, and Florida, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591980
In the case of more serious disease (which the Alpha, Delta, and other variants perhaps were), the "mandates" (assuming you're referring here to horizontal interdiction like lockdowns, school closures, etc) make even less sense. They stratify spread acuity by socioeconomic status instead of risk.
Achieving a vertical stratification, where the low-risk cohort (which is enormous in the case of all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and easy to identify by age and comorbidities) experiences a highly acute spread, is a much faster path to endemic equilibrium, and is only disrupted by what you rightly call silly mandates.
Your desire to return to "normal" is counterproductive to preventing the spread of contagious disease. A lot of the country has already turned back to normal, and it shows in the fact that we have 140k cases a day and thousands of deaths per day. When 9/11 happened, we vowed to "never forget", but with Covid, it seems that self-induced Amnesia is what people are actually fighting for.
Lets not go back to a world where it was normal to show up to work sick and we had very little in the way prepared for when a deadly disease was spreading. The culture around sickness and disease has to change. This is vastly more important than "getting to Mars" to save humanity.
> We have all the data one could hope to have, vaccines, treatments, we know how to care for those that are sick, and the vast majority of people that are dying are basically at the end of their natural lives anyway.
Really? In the US We have politicians of all stripes actively subverting data from being gathered and distributed. I could write a whole book on how the US failed during this Pandemic.
Which reminds me of this article: https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/1918-pandemic-compared-to-... Covid-19: We're already forgetting the best lesson from the 1918 pandemic - There are individual and collective dangers to this forced amnesia.
All these mandates and lockdowns are just performance art to distract from their abject failures.
> made a difference: increase hospital capacity to care for COVID patients.
Why would they have ? They've been told it's just a cold last year and they are told or tell omicron is just a cold.
It's been less than a month since Omicron was discovered. It's not easy to know exactly what the ramifications are in such a short time, and it's frankly impressive that we even know as much as we do.
As one comedian put it: "Give it a second! It's going to space!"
Also, my spouse and I quote that Louis CK bit all the time. It's a classic.
New data out of South Africa showed that the risk of hospitalization from Omnicron was 29% less than the original strain which was already pretty unlikely for young, healthy people . And another study just showed that this new strain multiples faster in the airways than in the lungs, which would contribute to less severe outcomes. But yet, there are talks of more restrictions, more panic, and more fear due to omnicron.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...
Did they account for previous immunity from other strains when they said Omicron is 29% less severe than original strain? How did they study this? Magically find people who (1) Never had a strain of Covid and (2) Aren't vaccinated at all.
How does the part after the comma follow from the part before the comma?
"I've not got a bigger pile of dry leaves next to my shed than the big pile of dry leaves next to my house, which should contribute to lower risk of my house burning down".
"I was only using log4j on systems that weren't customer facing. Now I'm also using it on customer facing systems, which should contribute to lower risk of getting hacked".
... for fully vaccinated people.
That's not really true. Here in Germany there's plenty of people who tried to get a booster shot but were turned away because it hasn't been 6.00 months since their last shot[1] (including me, tried to get it before Christmas and the inevitable o'micronwave). Other countries might be more reasonable, Germans gonna German I guess. Come to think of it, that probably explain things like people being turned away on the 25th because they're only eligible for the shot on the 26th and stuff like that.
[1] The "STIKO" says it has to be >=6 months, and >=5 months only in "special cases", EMA says >3 months, federal health ministry says >3-4 months, state health ministries say anything between four weeks and six months. My state says three months. Which one is applicable is basically impossible to know.
From a public health perspective, non-vaccinated populations are a petri dish for new variants to develop in, and those future variants could potentially be more dangerous.
And the policymakers for the most part, have not shifted in the past several years. In the USA, Biden has pretty much carried forward the policy from Trump and Dr. Fauci is still the director of the CDC during this time. If national policy and sentiment were to change the biggest sentiment would be to change the CDC director.
The election was just last year. Now, regardless of the reason why individuals voted for them, politicians feel as if their winning means to move forward on all parts of their agenda. One of the biggest reasons for Trump's loss is how COVID was handled. So the direction that this administration has is to handle COVID differently than Trump, which means, do more to combat COVID.
In the USA, I would not expect anything major to come out at the national level with regards to COVID. VA just had a shift happen with the governor's race (I live in VA) and VA might be a barometer for what changes can happen at a local level.
And sadly, I do think I have to tie my expectations more with politics than science or data.
HN in particular seems to have quite a noticeable "skeptic" bent about it, so I wouldn't worry!
The new variant is basically a bad cold
This is what I was worried people would start inferring from that headline – it's not really an accurate representation, since this article is just talking about how the UK government describes "symptoms".
Initial data from South Africa does suggest it's possible this variant may be less severe than we saw in previous waves. We don't really have enough data to come to a clear conclusion on that at this stage, because of the pace of change and the number of confounding factors, such as previous infection. The Discovery Health study suggests that hospitalisations may be up to 30% lower than in South Africa's initial Delta wave – if that does turn out to be the case, it's positive. However, the same study also points out that the risk of reinfection is higher, as is the risk of hospitalisation (from a very low base level) among children.
We can also see evidence from the UK that Omicron appears to be significantly more transmissible – the number of cases is currently doubling every 48 hours. Of course that won't continue, but my understanding is that we are likely to see up to about 1m cases a day in the UK by the end of the year. At the moment (very roughly) about 1% of positive (confirmed by test, so lower in practice) in the UK result in hospital admission. So it's not hard to see that a rapid increase in the number of infections could result in a significant spike in hospital admissions, with all of the knock-on effects that this causes – even if the severity of each individual case is much lower.
I'm sure everyone hopes this isn't the case, and that it turns out that this wave spikes and subsides quickly with minimal harm – but it definitely seems way to early to be drawing conclusions like "this is just a bad cold". I'm personally a little bit confused about the number of posts I see which seem to want to twist any data they can find into an existing narrative they've already settled on.
In France, 8% of those deceased from Covid (~10,000) are in the 45-64 age range, hardly the end of natural lives. That's not great.
Then a) I won't feel as stressed out, and b) I won't read the article, since it sounds ridiculous.
This plugin would only make sense for people who are vaccinated of course, since for those people, like myself, COVID has been defanged. Isn't it time for those of us who have had two doses, or even three (I have yet another one scheduled a week from now...), to stop worrying and start enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived?
Yes, and I would add, time to stop worrying so much about what other people are doing. People are getting really worked up about how so-and-so hasn't been vaccinated or so-and-so doesn't wear a mask properly. It's one more newly promoted category upon which we can focus our vehement, irrational tribalism.
One social impact of the pandemic is that nobody can mind their own damn business any more, and the reason is because we decided basically overnight in March 2020 that catching an airborne virus now has a moral dimension it never had before. You catch a cold, you catch the flu, you catch norovirus, it's just something shitty that happens to you by chance rather than being anyone's fault. When it comes to other diseases people do attach moral judgements; someone gives you HIV or clamydia or syphilis so it automatically has to be someone else's fault that you got sick. Because of the way society has come to see COVID, that disease has been put in the latter category rather than the former which is incorrect in my opinion.
Society will never heal from the wounds of this pandemic until COVID is just something shitty you happen to catch rather than something someone gave to you because of a moral failure.
So you ask for people to accept some hardships in life, but somehow make a big deal with putting mask on your face from time to time?
Isn't that the whole point? Persecuting a neighbour as a witch has no merit. Limiting contact with your neighbour as a pandemic restriction does.
> One social impact of the pandemic is that nobody can mind their own damn business any more
If "mind their own damn business" means "go about daily life as if there weren't a global pandemic" then yes, this is indeed an expected impact of public health crises.
Do people really struggle to understand why acting like that particularly unpleasant brand of judgemental Puritan evangelist might put people off from their message? It's like any discussion around COVID has to come packaged with buckets of tedious moralising or it automatically gets dismissed as conspiratorial.
your posts here that begin with a comparison to supporting witch trials are certainly a fine example of how to put people off a message!
No, I don't support people behaving like that. Doesn't change my response about spreading.
I want to tell my short story with COVID so far, as a double vaccinated individual (last dose 2021-08-18) who took all the precautions and got infected due to an irresponsible person (older than me, didn't get vaccinated simply due to their own laziness and lack of empathy towards others).
I tested positive a couple Tuesdays ago (2021-12-04) on an antigen test, I took the test after waking up with a runny nose.
I didn't experience much of the physical symptoms, no cough, barely had fevers (one instance it broke through 38.3C, otherwise hovering on the lows 37C), no fatigue.
Instead I've been experiencing quite a few cognitive issues, I lost my smell and taste last Thursday, so about a week ago, and since then I've noticed that my thoughts aren't on the same level as before.
It started when I was playing chess with my girlfriend a week ago, I noticed that I simply couldn't string thoughts together, they became "loose" and it was hard to get continuation. I'd start thinking about a strategy and would experience a "brain fart" where it didn't make sense what I was thinking about, then I couldn't figure where my pieces could move and my thought would start spiraling. It is really, really strange.
When I tried reading books I felt similarly to what some of my friends with ADD/ADHD described how their thoughts wander away. I simply couldn't focus enough to finish a paragraph without having to re-read parts of it. Sometimes it would take me 4-5 times reading the same sentence to finally settle it. I don't understand or know the mechanism behind this but it's happening.
I've been also experiencing bouts of anxiety, physically, I do struggle a little with anxiety but never happened this way. I learned to cope through the last week and noticed these bouts come in waves so I just endure the few seconds or minutes while it's happening.
Today was my first day back at work, as a SWE my job is basically to mentally juggle multiple things and considerations about them to find a solution or a way forward. I simply cannot do that at the moment, I still feel these waves of brain fog creeping up where I simply can't make sense of something that was said or shown. I've been trying to pair program but it's been mostly pointless as sometimes I can't finish my train of thought, or remember why I started one.
I believe the same way as you, that my double vaccinated status would protect me from the worst case and it's definitely protected me from the worst (as well as my girlfriend, also vaccinated and who endured the whole quarantine/isolation period with me and never got infected). I didn't feel shortness of breath or other dangerous symptoms but I feel a tight chest and sometimes a burning sensation. Still, it's not all fine and dandy, I cried multiple times from panic attacks (some induced by my psyche, some from COVID); the brain fog is lingering and making me question how and when will I ever get back to "normal", if it stays for long it will impact my job and expectations on me.
Bottom line is: yes, we are protected from the worst, it is still something I don't want to go through again, it's still something I would have avoided as much and for as long as possible because medical research is still in its infancy about long-term side-effects. I have no idea if I will experience issues with clotting later in life (brain aneurysms are one of my worst nightmares), the symptoms on my chest are pretty weird and uncomfortable.
I'm a pretty healthy individual, low 30s, always commute by bike (averaging around 4000 km/year on...
If it was this bad with the vaccine, imagine how much worse off he would have surely been without it. He likely suffered the viral equivalent of seatbelt-shaped bruises on his body after a car crash that would have otherwise killed him.
> still think the problem lies in not enough vaccinations
Where does OP say that?
He's blaming his sickness on the unvaccinated guy he got it from with no hint of irony that he got it despite being vaccinated and potentially spreading it as well.
Yes, because all the data shows that infection between vaccinated -> vaccinated is lowered, there is no irony in there. Also because the person in question didn't isolate the moment they felt sick, they continuously wandered around the house and I forced them to isolate after they showed up in front of me, coughing and announcing they "felt sick". So fuck off.
I caught it at home, I stayed home, the person lives in the same house, and so I didn't infect anyone else.
You have a pretty annoying and uncivil attitude, not sure what triggers you about the vaccine talk but you have an axe to grind and you are piling on my anecdote to push whatever view you have without backing it up, I will stop engaging because I surely don't see any point in trying to hold civility towards you.
Have a good weekend, hope you find better ways to spend your energy.
I didn't have any cough or shortness of breath, there was nothing in the sense of "pretty bad COVID", this was a very mild infection. Even more when I compare to the person who infected me, 4 years older than me and still coughing their brains out after 2 weeks with it, including blood in their cough for a couple days.
So I'm not sure where you are drawing this conclusion from... The vaccine was effective, I didn't infect my girlfriend whom I shared rooms, bed and so on, and I attribute that to both me and her being vaccinated, hers was a month later than mine so I believe she has a higher antibodies count going on.
I really, really don't understand what point you are trying to make out of my anecdote, nothing in there draws to your conclusion.
EDIT: I believe you have an axe to grind, don't come soapboxing over my anecdote with your own made-up conclusions about what I said. It's dishonest and crummy.
[1] "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)"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
A study based on data from Singapore found a similar effect[1].
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
What a weird argument you are building, suggesting the vaccine wasn't good for him because he got bad covid and didn't die.
Why are vaccines necessary?
A cure would be just fine; some drug that stopped covid immediately would be very nice.
For example most forms of malaria _had_ a cure with the discovery of quinine. Newer drugs have taken quinine's place. It's a race between the organism and man in any case, whether cure or vaccine.
Because we don't have a cure ?
> A cure would be just fine; some drug that stopped covid immediately would be very nice.
> For example most forms of malaria _had_ a cure with the discovery of quinine. Newer drugs have taken quinine's place. It's a race between the organism and man in any case, whether cure or vaccine.
So we don't need vaccines because cures - which we don't have so far - are better. Okay.
I didn't say that.
What I'm saying is that we should research treatments (non-vaccine cures) as well as vaccines.
After all, of our current medical solutions that do work for various ailments, what percentage are vaccines and what percentage are treatments found by experiment or accident (like quinine for malaria)?
Long covid, another kind of worse, as in if 10% of the infected population gets it then we'll have a massive generational disability problem, is facing even more denial from people.
You blame someone specific, but we don't really know where you caught it. It could just as well have been passed to you by your girlfriend, your neighbor, etc. Yours is a "just-so" story and may be true but likely is not.
I know exactly how and from whom I caught it, I don't need to go into details to gain some kind of "cred" from you to believe me.
On the other hand, you know absolutely nothing about me, my living situation or any aspect of my life to be able to infer anything about if I know or not how this came to be, or to question my anecdote.
Please, don't jump into conclusions because you want to. My living situation is pretty unique and so makes it completely possible to trace back the original infection.
The PCR-test measures the existence of virus RNA. Not when you were infected, if you are sick of that virus and also not if you are contagious.
Because the symptoms are now similar to almost all other virus infections there is no way of knowing if you are sick of Omicron after a positive PCR-test.
Edit: For some confused people an example. You came in contact with Omicron but didn't get sick of it. 2 weeks later you came in contact with the RS virus and this time you got a runny nose so you get a PCR-test. The result is positive from the Omicron contact 2 weeks earlier. So they say you are sick of Omicron. But in fact you are sick of RS.
Huh? I though Omicron was particularly obvious on a PCR test (spike-negative but virus-positive).
Common symptoms being less specific doesn't make PCRs unreliable.
> asymptomatic people may test positive for 1-2 weeks, while those with mild-to moderate disease often continue to test positive for a week or more after this.
Per https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/false-negative-how-long-do...
Three weeks is a stretch in an asymptomatic case, let alone three months.
As for whether you have omicron - that depends on the precise test the lab runs. Many UK labs test for three covid genes - S, N and Orf. Delta was S-gene positive. Omicron is S-gene negative but N and Orf positive. If the test is S-gene negative (often reported as S-gene target failure, SGTF), you can be pretty sure it's Omicron at the moment. Alpha was also SGTF, but isn't really circulating anymore.
I suspect this is in part driven by more acute cognizance of even minor potential symptoms, combined with greater testing capacity, but if the strain is in fact causing different, less visible (but still highly contagious!) symptoms, that's somewhat concerning (although may be balanced out if it is actually accompanied by much less severe disease).
For reference:
Omicron (from the OP):
> the top five symptoms reported in the app for omicron infection were runny nose, headache, fatigue (either mild or severe), sneezing, and sore throat.
Delta [0]:
> the most commonly reported covid-19 symptoms were now headache, runny nose, and sore throat and not fever, cough, and loss of sense of smell or taste, as listed by the government.
[0] This paper was cited in the OP: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1654?ijkey=7f296b9905d4...
So yes, if the symptoms are now different from before then it's news worthy.
Also, why complain that an article about covid deals with covid?
just think about your life necceseties (food, water, waste, security...) who is gonna care for that?
The biggest story of COVID that no one is talking about is the absolute failure at all levels (political, medical establishment, etc) to increase hospital capacity.
We are in year 2 of a global pandemic and, at least where I am, there has been a reduction in ICU staff, beds and hospital capacity more generally. Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.
Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Also, you fail to understand that capacity is down because of burnout, so advocating against vaccination, especially for health care workers, is hypocritical in the most cynical way. You are advocating for the onset of chaos.
...and mandates. The stories in the media only capture the firings, but a ton more left before getting fired, simply because they had no desire to be fired.
OR, we've filtered to the people that actually believe in medical science, ones that are willing to do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of contagious disease.
> Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.
Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain". The trial participants had to report adverse events using an app that had a pre-set list of possible side effects, with no way to enter any others. The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market. The trials didn't measure hospitalization and couldn't show any improvement in mortality. Etc.
Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.
Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
Please, provide some sources. A quick google search led me to https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ but this excerpt is in moderna's favor:
> But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
> “It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,” said one former Moderna manager. “Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”
Considering work on mRNA vaccines started in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#Early_research I'd say you are wrong. 2004 and 2008 saw the first use in a humane body of mrna transfer into the cell. Moderna may have hit a roadblock for their cancer therapy in 2017 but that doesn't mean they started working from scratch on mrna vaccines in 2017.
> As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain".
I am surprised antivax aren't running with this story. I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?
> The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market.
Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there ?
> Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.
> Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
I don't know what track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it you are referring to. Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?
Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies.
Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.
"I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?"
No, one case that you know of. But as you just realized, information about such people is systematically suppressed. The media refuses to cover it (outside of Fox), tech companies systematically erase mentions of it and ban people who try to link to it. And the worst is, doctors deny any connection.
The reality is, nobody has any idea how many people like that girl are out there.
"Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there?"
No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.
"Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?"
This one. Vaccination of children. Or really, people under 55 or so. That seems to be a common threshold at which the cost/benefit ratio goes negative.
"Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies."
None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.
Because it doesn't mean they didn't work on them. RNA platform has been in the making for decades, the fact they used it for vaccines and not for something else doesn't mean it's completely unsafe.
> Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.
I disagree, we have big numbers:
> Researchers reviewed data from 728,321 individuals aged 12 or above who had received the third dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. These individuals were carefully matched 1:1 with 728,321 individuals who had received only two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine at least five months prior. The matching was based on an extensive set of demographic, geographic and health-related attributes associated with risk of infection, risk of severe disease, health status and health seeking behavior. Individuals were assigned to each group dynamically based on their changing vaccination status (198,476 individuals moved from the unvaccinated cohort into the vaccinated cohort during the study). Multiple analyses were conducted to ensure that the estimated vaccine effectiveness was robust to potential biases. The study included a total of over 12,000,000 person-days of follow-up.
> No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.
That's really unfair. There's no way you could have taken at face value that first generation covid vaccines would protect against any future variants of covid, especially variants with so many changes as omicron. Even so they still hold against severe hospitalizations. Dismissing vaccines entirely on that is like refusing to wear a seat belt because it doesn't always work. There also always were talk about how long would the protection against mild symptoms hold. Now we know.
They never promised magic pills (if you listen to scientists, not politicians, which is another conversation we should also have).
> None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.
Well, that I don't have anything to say. We didn't have much choice in my country (although if you tried to reschedule or chose a specific vaccination center you could increase the odds of getting what you wanted) (I know I did).
> Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Diseases are not free license for governments to do whatever they want for as long as they want.
20 years after 9/11 we still live with the consequences of the "war on terror". Let's make sure that doesn't happen again.
Excuse me, but governments have the power to suspend individual rights during major disasters, like war, insurrection, terrorism, etc... oh wow, look, epidemics too!
Feel fortunate, at least they didn't decree martial law, or better, hefty fines.
I feel gratitude for those who fought to make it possible.
I hope our descendents get to feel the same way.
If you so love human rights and freedom, you could start by supporting real government overreach like abortion outlawing, inhuman treatment of immigrants, offshore prisons where human rights are ignored, gerrymandering to twist votes towards a single party, insider stock trading from senators, and a long etc.
Fighting vaccines and hygienic measures during a global pandemic won't make you an American hero.
And while I hate to indulge whataboutism, you should know I do care about and have opinions on all of those things. It remains to be seen whether or not you care about rushing to judgements about others. This is a thread about covid, and the usual internet edicit is to stay on topic, so I'm not going to discuss those things here.
I'm not fighting doctors or medical science.
I'm opposing bad policies made by non experts, and/or experts with conflicts of interest.
I completely understand that governments have eroded their reputation by their own actions, but in this case I'm supportive of vaccination and sanitation. This is not a terrorist attack, this is a very contagious disease that hasn't ceased to evolve because people keep hosting it and giving it chance to mutate. You don't have to trust the government to understand that their actions are reasonable and supported by science in this topic.
If we take current events at face value, then yes covid is a real problem, the vaccine really helps, and governments are acting in the interest of the public with health and safety measures.
But if you look behind the curtain, there is so much more going on. It remains to be seen just how much manipulation is involved.
My analogy to the war on terror is meant to have layers.
After the initial attack there was a patriotic fervor and an outcry for retribution. The "war on terror" was a justified response to the demand for national security.
It's not until years later that much of the story we were told at the time had been revealed to contain false truths.
The WMDs never existed. The Saudis were connected to the attackers. Our prolonged engagement in Afghanistan, a means to funnel billions (trillions?) to security contractors. The pentagon. Tower 7. Etc.
There's a enough information to confound the official narrative, and we still don't have all the answers. I doubt we ever will.
The pandemic mirrors this in many ways already. The global outcry, the unprecedented scale of government intervention. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" parallels today's divide. It wasn't something you could say no to then, and it's not something you can say no to now.
To say these thing simply erode trust is a pittance. This plants a seed in one's mind that there are in fact manipulators at the highest levels of our institutions. There is even more evidence of this in the world today ex. Jeffery epstein and the ongoing maxwell trials.
But maybe none of that applies to the current events. Perhaps my speculation is unwarranted. Sometimes the world simply is what it seems, and you have to take it at face value.
But more often than not I've found the world is a lot like poker, and by the time you have all the information it's already too late.
The WHO is very different than the military industry complex, they're not taking over the world, they making recommendations based on evolving scientific data, and the governments of the world are free to ignore them because not even the UN has enough authority to force them. That so many shitty governments have accepted those recommendations to some degree is a miracle, owed much in part to the effort of their own scientists.
No analogy is perfect. But the parallels are too strong to ignore. Studying history is about using the past to make sense of the present, and possibly even predict the future.
Saying the USA was obviously overreacting from the start is just hindsight, and not representative of the sentiment at the time. Further I'm sure years from now we'll say the same, that many things we did during this pandemic were overreactions, and that it was obvious at the time.
Comparing the MIC to the WHO is a false dichotomy. The WHO is historically an institution for the USA to project power internationally.
The question of who is "taking over the world" is the territory of speculation. I said originally it remains to be seen how much manipulation is occurring. For example, the lab-leak hypothesis, once the ramblings of a mad man, has gained traction among officials as a likely source for the disease.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17047986/wuhan-lab-leak-most-l...
If this proves to be true, it will have radical implications on the past 2 years.
Sep 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-...
> The Quebec government has announced it will provide nurses with financial bonuses of up to $18,000 as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the province's health-care network ... the plan would cost close to $1 billion
Nov 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mand...
> Quebec is backtracking on its enforced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, government officials announced Wednesday. After pushing back its deadline multiple times, Health Minister Christian Dubé said the province will abandon the measure altogether, as the health-care network can’t afford to lose the thousands of non-vaccinated employees. The loss of unvaccinated staff would have had a “devastating effect on the system,” according to the health ministry.
Maybe because they set up the incentives poorly?
> One nurse, who CBC agreed not to name because she is not authorized to speak to media, said the announcement will do nothing for her.
The woman works part-time as an emergency room nurse on the night shift, but says she cannot afford to take on full-time work overnight because she is a single mother.
"I'm penalized either way," she said, explaining that part-time nurses expect that they will still be forced to work overtime.
With things like masks we were able to free up supply by allowing N95 construction masks to be used until other production can get up to speed. We don't exactly have a hidden cache of nurses and doctors that can be rallied upon a moment's notice.
Now getting rid of the ones that can, and probably contracted COVID already does make zero sense.
Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster.
COVID is burning out workers everywhere, especially in the medical field. A lot of the quitting isn’t related to vax status, people are just tired and they don’t feel they get paid enough for the job they are doing.
Hospital capacity will take years to increase. At least 4 to raise nurse/doctor class sizes, probably longer since you need to expand the training programs as well. We also already spend 18 percent of our GDP on healthcare, going to 30 percent is going to hurt, but if people don’t want to get vaccinated, maybe we can just charge them higher insurance premiums to make up for it?
No, not really. With trillions of dollars and 2 years there was absolutely plenty of time and resources to train more people and find new COVID-specific spaces. Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster.
The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
Nursing programs were already at capacity before COVID started, and doing a 2 year program is preconditioned on previous education (a 2 year AS degree in my state).
> The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
Said by every arm chair general ever.
Do you think in World War 2 the generals sat around saying "there's no possible way we can increase the size of our air force, it takes years to train pilots and engineers". No, they didn't. They found ways to make it work, because it was a crisis. The absolute refusal by the health sector to do this in any way speaks volumes.
Natural immunity is better than current vaccines for effectiveness and longevity.
Vaccines are for the vulnerable.
We are likely now constantly being exposed to the virus. Although we are "immune" (thanks to boosters, immunizations, getting ill, natural immunity or blood transfusion), any subsequent exposure to covid will garner a response from our immune system. So we'll effectively be "re-inoculated" against whatever variant we are exposed to.
So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.
You'll be re-inoculated if you have an immune reaction, which has a chance of getting sick...and it isn't a given that you'll live to take advantage of the inoculation.
> So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.
It is just like the flu, but a bit worse. Yes, you might be able to survive getting it every year until you get old or develop co-morbidities. But getting a yearly booster is probably a smarter choice (for the flu and COVID).
Here is some recent information release 3 days ago: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pfizer-s-paxlovid-...
By Monday my wife and another one of the wives was feeling symptoms. Tuesday my son stayed home from school with sore throat and by bedtime we were rushing him to the hospital with a 103 fever. He tested positive while at the hospital. Since then every single person in that car has also tested positive through PCR.
I thought I escaped it by isolating from my wife/son in our home but I started to show early symptoms Wednesday morning waking up with splitting headache. I went and got tested that afternoon. By Thursday night I was having itchy throat, chills, fatigue and body aches. Feeling pretty crappy and a crazy symptom I also have been having is uncontrollable hiccups past 24 hours that come and go.
The test I took Wednesday came back negative but the OTC Rapid I did today was positive. I am going for another PCR tomorrow to confirm as the first one was done possibly too early after exposure with no symptoms.
IF this is the Omicron that went through our vaccinated group like butter, we are going to be in a very bad spot by mid-january.