> - What is the average level of risk to someone taking reasonable personal precautions?
Depends on how full hospitals get. We all get into accidents. We fall and hit our heads, we might get a heart attack, a pregnancy might suddenly go bad and a C-section (or worse surgery) is needed.
As COVID19 fills up hospitals around the country, the risk isn't from Omicron itself anymore, as much as it is from an overburdened health care system.
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The big example was the Montana train derailment last summer. It was difficult (but possible) to get all of the injured to an appropriate hospital, many being forced to go to hospitals hours away because the nearby hospitals were full of COVID19 patients. But this new wave of Omicron is even worse than the summer of 2021 by any measurement.
> - What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
While the health care system of the USA is technically a free market, with a mix of for-profit hospitals (and charity / religious hospitals, and a few state-sponsored ones for groups like veterans)... people expect hospitals / health care systems to be functional.
Since the state is ultimately responsible for the health care of its local population (whether they want to be responsible or not), its important to take actions needed to keep our hospital open.
The state will pull in the national guard, they will call in Navy hospital ships, they will declare emergencies to help. From that perspective, asking everyone else to get vaccinated or booster-vaccinated is just more of the same, its another action to minimize hospitalizations. Forced vaccinations are far more effective than national guard in this situation.
> Governments and societies have been acting out-of-control and it needs to stop.
I know someone who went to work while testing positive for COVID19. The amount of apathy and callousness the "individual" has in this situation knows no bounds.
"Individualism" is now selfishness. Its more important to save a few hours of PTO / leave rather than protect your fellow customers or coworkers from the disease.
People have lost their goddamn minds over this. They ignore the hospitalization stats, they ignore the overflowing morgues. They focus on selfish self-centered action rather than community.
How many of the COVID-19 patients currently in hospitals really need to be there, and how many would be triaged out if more urgent cases presented? If a hospital has bed space, why would they not admit a COVID patient? It's money, and they are a business for the most part that wants to maximize revenue.
Hospitals in my area have cut 20% of surgeries (ie: triaged out care to make room for COVID19). The governor has deployed National Guard to the hospitals to help out with tasks.
Are you just blind to the issues happening right now? This is happening, this is happening now. Take off your blindfolds and talk to a damn nurse or doctor. This is happening all over the place as far as the eye can see.
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Just call up your local-clinic and ask them for a flu-shot. Stand in line for 4-hours for things _COMPLETELY_ unrelated to COVID19, and come back and tell me that its fake. Go ask the receptionist "why is the line so long", and they'll tell you: COVID19.
I know because I done it. (Well, not for a flu-shot but for a TDAP. Nearly the same thing)
yeah, but... you know... of course they're prioritizing all the COVID patients first, before anyone else, because they get more money from the government for 'COVID' patients!
/s
That was an actual exchange I had with someone a few weeks ago with this same scenario. They'd gone from 'it's all faked' to "well, yeah, there may be people there now, and they're taking resources from non-covid patients, but the govt wants it that way, that's why they pay hospital more for covid patients! they're incentivizing people getting covid!"
I don't think it makes any sense at all, but interactions like these are more signs to me that it's harder to have meaningful interactions 'across the divide' these days.
> Just call up your local-clinic and ask them for a flu-shot. Stand in line for 4-hours for things _COMPLETELY_ unrelated to COVID19, and come back and tell me that its fake.
Note that this varies by where you are. Locally, there is no health care crunch: it's easy to get a flu shot or other vaccine with no wait, and ICUs still have capacity despite a huge increase in cases. We're probably screwed in a few weeks since there's only about a 60% vaccination rate here and the most recent surge didn't start until maybe two weeks ago.
"Triaged out" doesn't mean "doesn't need to be here". It just means "less likely to die tonight if not in ICU", if it is at the point where you are talking about "triage".
A good way to address your point would be to compare the situation to Canada.
In the province of Quebec, where we have a highly vaccinated population, the intensive care units (ICUs) in all hospitals will be full within two weeks, if the rate of transmission and hospitalization continue this way. Demand greatly outstrips supply.
In Canada, the financial incentives for hospitalization and discharge are very different. Physicians get paid by a complex mix of hourly pay in addition to a fee-for-service schedule, both paid by the government. Hospitals get paid by the type of patient they admit, and their length of stay, but not always in a straightforward way.
In Canada, because of the remuneration system, physicians are the most influential decision-makers in deciding who gets to use the ICU. Roughly, no one doesn't get admitted "because they can't pay", and no one gets admitted "because they have money" .
Since hospitals are overwhelmed in Quebec, physician's incentive would be to discharge patients rather than admit. Their hourly wage wouldn't rise if they got more patients. Indeed, there is some evidence that as ICU capacity drops, physicians start discharging patients from the ICU earlier.
I should be fair to physicians in Quebec: their behaviour reflects a deep concern about the public health emergency rather than their financial gain.
I believe that, in Canada, all hospitalized patients in the ICU really need to be there.
Source: I have been studying hospitalizations due to COVID-19 illness in Quebec, Canada, and providing forecasts to the local government since the start of the pandemic.
> But if the system is still crashing under load in five years? Ten years? At what point is it my fault?
The Maryland hospital system can support a bit over 10,000 hospitalizations. Over 3000 of those hospitalizations are COVID19 right now, and our cases continue to grow exponentially.
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Our hospital systems don't _normally_ get hit with 3000+ cases of a singular disease. Compared to other parts of the country, we have more hospital space, nurses and more, and we're still feeling stressed from all of this.
You _cant_ have enough hospital space during a pandemic. You just can't. The disease grows too fast, you get hit with way more cases than you've ever seen in the past 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years. It doesn't make sense to design a system with 100-years worth of slack. It makes more sense to ask the public to do actions to cut back on hospitalizations during these rare 1-in-a-hundred-year situations.
Also, chances are we’re going to exit this pandemic (whenever that happens) with a severely reduced medical system. We’re burning through medical personnel at an unsustainable rate, and we’re all going to suffer a diminished level of care until replacements can be retrained and hired.
From what I understand most of the insurance covering COVID regardless of deductibles was a voluntary thing, and some have started billing for unvaccinated hospitalizations (within the constraints of the plans of course).
Let's do the same with every other risky behaviour then. Smokers, drug addicts, overweight people, people doing lots of outdoor sport, people who don't wear the appropriate personal protection at work,...
I believe that is how car insurance works is it not? And yes there are different tiers of insurance for those who need to cover more things and those who cover fewer things. If the feedback mechanisms are completely detached from your premiums then you'd have no incentive to actually improve anything.
> - What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
This is the line I'm responding to.
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You know damn well that libertarians do this bullshit when playing with "use of force" language in these discussion.
A fine is "government use of force" to a libertarian. I'd rather not get stuck in the weeds over such details. But you're trying to pin me from the other side, and I don't appreciate it.
OK, so now people are framed as fighting against history. What does that change?
Everything is just as controversial and the issues are the same.
Jacobson v. Massachusetts said the solution to compulsory vaccination is democratically repealing policy and law. This is exactly what these people want and are fighting for
> OK, so now people are framed as fighting against history. What does that change?
Are you complaining that I'm using rhetorical techniques against you? The smallpox and 1918 flu pandemics from 100 years ago are guidance for what is going on today.
We can look at how our grandfathers solved the issue in their time, and compare-and-contrast with what worked today. As you mentioned, it was controversial back then. Both you and I have arguments we can borrow from them.
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How about instead of arguing against history, you actually take those arguments and use them for yourself? Or perhaps you recognize that the arguments said 100+ years ago weren't actually that strong or powerful.
> Jacobson v. Massachusetts said the solution to compulsory vaccination is democratically repealing policy and law. This is exactly what these people want and are fighting for
Cool.
Now explain how you'd get rid of smallpox in the early 1900s.
> It seemed like you felt including that case precedent somehow reframed the discussion. I don't see that it adds anything
You're welcome to add whatever you think adds to the discussion.
Or do you just sit around and counterpunch in discussions, never actually contributing directly? There's a reason why sitting around and just countering arguments is called the "fallacy fallacy" / "Argument from fallacy".
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I bring up smallpox and "Jacobson v. Massachusetts" for a few reasons.
1. We defeated smallpox. It took decades, but it was soundly defeated.
2. Legally, there's a strong set of arguments that prove that these measures are constitutional.
3. There were big controversies in the early 1900s over these arguments, and we can replay those arguments again if you so desire. In effect, we know that the state's right to protect our health care system trumps the individual's choice on whether-or-not to get the vaccine.
News flash: hospitals are businesses, and like all businesses, they are most profitable when running at close to capacity, therefore they're at close to capacity most of the time because staffing is sized accordingly.
You imply that running any enterprise (public or private) at near capacity is a bad thing, but in fact it's an economic necessity. You also imply that making these public enterprises would make it possible to run them at less than near capacity, but it's pretty clear from rationing in, e.g., the UK, that this is not so. The reason public health care is run at near capacity is the same as private healthcare: wasting resources is silly.
Yes, I referred to profit, because profit is what "not wasting resources" translates to for the capitalist, but the real underlying moving force is economic and real regardless of ideology.
We largely imply that Denmark's hospitals are more efficient than US hospitals. In terms of cost, in terms of how much they can handle, in terms of number of COVID19 cases, etc. etc.
Even if we cut down to highly-developed parts of the USA, such as New York vs Denmark specifically (rather than including all of the lesser-developed rural areas which puts the US at a disadvantage), we're clearly not as good at health care as Denmark.
Efficient or not, they must run at close to capacity. The comment I was replying to said "Depends on how full hospitals get", and, my response is that they're always close to full, and that is true regardless of whether they are public or private institutions. Please don't interject points that are not on-topic.
>If people don't want to take personal precautions, they should be at liberty to assume the additional risk.
I agree to a point. If their personal choices endanger others, then it's less about their liberties and more about how their choices impact others negatively.
Another part of the problem is more human in nature. People are tired of others crying about their own freedoms in regards to vax, but declaring other's freedoms are their choice as well. You know the political party I'm speaking of.
Getting people fired from their jobs because they didn't want the vax is a form of state power. State power is ultimately backed up with police and prisons, where violence by them on you is legal.
> What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
@oauea:
> What violence?
torstenvl was specifically referring to state vaccine "mandates". Any state mandate must be enforced through violence or it has no effect.
Lest you believe that state mandates do not require violence, consider what happens if people refuse the vaccine. You can order them to get daily tests, but what if they refuse that? Eventually physical force (violence) will be required.
> Any state mandate must be enforced through violence or it has no effect.
I don't see how that is really true. The state can, for example, refuse to provide you services if you're not vaccinated. If you're not allowed to enter a government building while unvaccinated without a justification, so as not to endanger the civil servants in that building, I'd hardly call that "violence".
> - What is the average level of risk to someone taking reasonable personal precautions?
How much risk to others is acceptable? Even though someone who follows reasonable personal precautions, but decided not to vaccinate and, therefore, has a higher risk of being a carrier and infect someone else who also followed reasonable precautions but cannot vaccinate for medical reasons. That second person now faces a 3% risk of dying a horrible death. Even if the second person is fully vaccinated, the chances of dying are non-zero, and increased because another person decided not to be vaccinated.
If we could contact-trace perfectly, would it be fair to charge person A with reckless endangerment, because person A didn't take all available measures to prevent further deaths? If person B dies because of person A, should we call it manslaughter?
> If people don't want to take personal precautions, they should be at liberty to assume the additional risk.
I agree, the problem is no one is making them assume the risk. If they truly assumed the risk of not getting vaccinated, one of a few things would happen:
1. The risk of not getting vaccinated would be priced into their health insurance premiums and their costs would skyrocket.
2. If they require hospitalization, they should be turned away at the door if there is insufficient capacity. Alternatively, they can be hospitalized but discharged the minute their presence begins to strain resources. They could even be refused assistance generally.
3. If I can suggest that my infection came from person X (e.g. I was around them when they had the virus), then they should be liable for damages.
None of those things will happen, because people don't want to assume the risk that comes with their choices, they want to offload it onto other people. They want to be able to not be vaccinated then scream for help when they get in trouble and have the healthcare system ride to the rescue.
The risk is now "priced in" to our consciousness. Back when it first started, covid was a big scary unknown risk to take for simply going outside and interacting with people. Now, it's a well-known risk, and people are willing to take that risk, along with other well-known risks for going outside, like the risk of getting into a car accident or slipping and falling.
Yes it's sort of like the alarming scourge of preventable automotive deaths, except that it's over 10 times worse. Also like slipping and falling, but about 20 times worse.
I am confident permanent paralysis is up there if not worse than long COVID. My argument is that you cannot just put a blanket statement of which one is worse by looking at a single metric. Also, people are still performing a calculated risk, wether the risk is greater or smaller.
But very few people injured in car accidents are permanently paralyzed.
There are only 17k people per year who receive any kind of spinal cord injury, from all sources, not just cars.
That means you could even count all spinal injuries as a death!! If every person with a spinal injury somehow just died, it would still be a smaller problem than COVID deaths.
COVID would still be 7 or 8 times worse than these theoretically extra-deadly roads. Even if Long COVID didn't exist, the deaths alone would blow it out of the water.
Some people were in the "willing to take that risk" from the beginning, and were relentlessly demonized. Now it's OK though if everyone feels that way.
Being willing to take on the risk yourself and being willing to inflict it on others aren't the same thing.
If you could drive drunk without risking other people, it'd be more societally acceptable. Similarly, now that vaccination is widely available for at-risk groups, it's a bit more acceptable to take actions that spread the virus that puts those folks at risk.
> Similarly, now that vaccination is widely available for at-risk groups...
It was widely available a year ago. The most at risk groups were the first and most comprehensively vaccinated. What gives? If the conditions for re-opening were met a year ago why were we wearing masks outdoors and whatnot this whole time? Comments like these seem like little more than mental gymnastics to justify having held an opinion that didn't age well w.r.t. the various degrees of covid measures we've endured.
Edit: Fine then, call it 6mo. Regardless, I'd be very interested to see someone provide in a "better than just saving face" quality defense of why businesses have been at reduced capacity, government services have been limited in their accessibility, etc, etc. beyond the point at which the vulnerable were vaccinated and why we're continuing to have this debate. I know information was less great then but we have it now. How do people oppose re-opening wholesale-ish. I foresee nursing homes keeping some precautions but the DMV, using covid as an excuse for why I can't register a car at a certain service location, being masked at outdoor venues, come on.
Who makes the decision that covid is over and no one has to wear masks any more? There's no central authority here. Business and government offices are closed not because of any mandate, but because people don't feel safe going there. Rightly or wrongly.
You're acting like there's someone who can just declare a national preoccupation to be over. As always, your problem isn't the government. It's that the majority of your fellow citizens do not agree with you.
Well, they demonized for doing so on the back of the current medical system, which was very close to being completely overwhelmed. Omicron has made this the case again, though what changed in the meantime was the messaging after the vaccine. It was true that while you were immunized you could take these risk, but Omicron changed that and the messaging didn't change.
I can't help but feel that the state of US politics from 2016 onwards plays a role in this. Many early COVID skeptics who pushed for a more laissez faire style of government intervention were also Trump supporters. After the events on 1/6/2020, Trump supporters were even further entrenched as the nation's new bogeyman, and any views they hold as a collective have been systematically cut down the last several years.
This is further evidenced in the article, in which literally the _very first line_ is a mild dunk on the GOP. Why do Americans do this? Why must literally any policy decision be chiefly looked at through the lens of Red vs. Blue?
This is coming from a Canadian whose frequently frustrated that one can't voice any concerns about COVID policy without being lumped in with a crowd which I otherwise share almost nothing in common with.
In the first year of the pandemic, the people you're talking about were okay with the personal risk, which is fine, but also ignoring, downplaying, or refusing to care about the risk to others who couldn't protect themselves. Which is less okay in my opinion.
But now, the vast majority of people still at risk have chosen not to protect themselves. So vaccinated individuals choosing to live life normally are increasing the chances the virus spreads, but not increasing the risk of serious injury or death to the defenseless and vulnerable.
Taking the risk to spread it after two years of the virus not going away is questionable; taking the same risk at the beginning when nobody had any idea how bad it could become is pure lunacy.
It was never just a personal risk, so yes, those people were rightly scolded. Now that there are effective vaccines (and effective treatments here now/coming soon), it is more like a personal risk.
I think the big question is whether deaths were front loaded. IE, in future waves, far fewer people will die, because people most predisposed to death had already died. This is my guess, but it's decidedly non-scientific.
One, we've greatly reduced the risk of COVID through vaccines. This is the primary thrust of the article; if you've vaccinated, you're very unlikely to have serious consequences.
Two, we're fatigued. You just can't be constantly vigilant for two or three years without something breaking. This compounds point one. We don't, as the article mentions, know what kind of relationship Omicron has to long COVID, but at this point, many are too tired to care. "I'm safe enough" is all we have the capacity for.
Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero.
You are forgetting that there really is not a 1% chance of dying of covid across all risk categories.
The numbers are very clear on this:
There are people who have a 1% or greater risk of dying if they catch it.
Most people do not fall into that category, not even close.
Let's start with the fact that the 1% IFR is calculated using a faulty denominator. Due to the high prevalence of asymptomatic infection, the denominator is far smaller than it should be.
I was the only one in my household to have a single symptom when I caught it in February. My wife and two children did not have any symptoms and would not have been tested if I had not gotten myself tested. Wow this is an anecdote, it is directionally aligned with seroprevalence surveys.
Omicron is even less symptomatic and therefore, we still have a denominator that is far too small.
To put it into perspective, school children at the elementary age are actually at higher risk of death from an influenza infection than they are from a covid one. Obviously this does not apply to children who are immunocompromised or have comorbidities. They are the only age group that has a higher death rate from the influenza than from covid. But it is still notable. We have been sending our kids to schools without masks for decades even in the midst of various influenza epidemics.
Over time populations in the US that are less sensitive to media reporting, especially working class people, have formed their own intuitive risk calculations based on their anecdotal experience. Your average taxi driver has a pretty good understanding of who is at high risk and who isn't. I experienced this in Vegas when a woman driving my taxi stated to me that the people she knew who had died were all old or "really really fat". Her words not mine lol.
The people who are under 50 years of age who round 1% down to zero are more accurate than you are in their assessment. I hope I don't sound rude when I state that but based on the numbers it is accurate.
Minor correction: it's actually nearly a 2% chance of dying (1.7%), after Delta became the dominant variant. Folks never really upgraded their talking points but subjectively 2% feels _much_ higher than 1%.
Source? You are claiming that the IFR for COVID doubled between alpha and delta. You also didn't expand upon the numbers. Is the 2% death rate for fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, unvaccinated? The three groups aren't remotely at the same risk. So which group has a 2% IFR from delta? Which nation released these stats? Where are they? And what about the asymptomatic cases which go undetected and are therefore not present in the denominator? Seroprevalence surveys have always indicated a gross underreporting of cases due to asymptomatics not pursuing tests.
I don't intend to be rude, but what you are stating is a huge deal, and should have been earth-shattering news in the media. A doubling of fatality for a pandemic is not something that fails to make it into talking points when governments across the world are struggling to convince people to get vaccinated.
Additionally, I live in the US state of Colorado. A few days ago, a post on HN's front page showed that Colorado's cases are now 100% omicron. That's not being addressed in your statement. Eventually, omicron will crowd out delta in other places as well.
> Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero.
I don't think you and I differ much in our broad conclusions on covid, but I don't think it makes sense to compare "chance of dying every time you drove a car" with "chance of dying if you catch covid"--basically this is a type error, you're comparing apples and oranges. The proper comparison operand for "every time you drove a car" would be "every time you interact with one or more people in person". Of course, you don't have a 1% chance of dying by covid every time you interact with one or more people in person because each interaction has a relatively low chance of contagion. Moreover, if there's a 1% chance that the average person would die from covid, that doesn't imply that a healthy person (i.e., no co-morbidities) has a 1% chance of dying from covid, so it's perfectly possible that the cohort who are risking covid exposure also have a lower risk of dying from covid than the average person (of course, I'm just responding to your framing of self-preservation--there's a good moral argument that healthy people should also be concerned about their contribution to spreading the virus irrespective of their own risk).
This is an excellent distinction because it denies all-encompassing judgement in the instance where one individual sees another who isn't taking as much precaution ("oh typical anti-masker"; judging others for interacting when you have been self-isolating - but probably not as well as you think).
An obvious example of this is that the CDC numbers on COVID deaths by age. It's blatantly obvious, yet people on here wave their hand and say "1%" as if most HN readers are remotely close to 1% death rate, when it's a community composed of software engineers, a profession that skews young as a whole.
Here's the stats. Bear in mind that the distribution of CASES skews young.
Even if you're not vaccinated, you're extremely unlikely to have serious consequences unless you're elderly and/or have comorbidities. The infection fatality rate of COVID19 (which can only be estimated) is something like 0.20%. "Long COVID" is extremely rare and severely overstated.
Show your math on 0.2%. This does not appear to hold true for any country I can think of off the top of my head. US and Canada are somewhere around 1.3-1.5% last I checked.
Case Fatality Rate = confirmed deaths / confirmed cases
Infection Fatality Rate = total deaths / total infections
Total infections can only be estimated, and is much higher than confirmed cases because most people who get COVID-19 don't get tested for it (either because they're asymptomatic, unable to get tested, or don't see see a point since they already know they're sick). Thus the infection fatality rate is substantially less than the case fatality rate.
Also worth noting that deaths could be overestimated since anyone who dies having tested COVID positive is counted as a COVID death, and pretty much all patients who enter a hospital these days are tested for COVID.
i think i'm done with current level vaccines. I've had 3 mrna. The second and third each took me out for 2 days. I don't see any reason for more unless a better one comes out. I do think 3 are important though.
From what I've seen so far the antibodies don't really last long enough. I'll rely on long term t-cell protection. At least that's what I think so far.
"The current crop of Covid vaccines" all of which are engineered based on the original variant. Ignorance like this has contributed to the virus mutating, and obviously the newer variants have increased fitness against whatever immune response the original one provokes - otherwise it wouldn't exist.
If you look at the history of vaccinations against other diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, etc. you won't see untying like what we're seeing now - those were all able to be largely or completely eradicated.
What we appear to have with COVID-19 is akin to influenza - endemic, will never be eradicated, and thus it will mutate regularly and require new vaccines/boosters. Given that, people understandably want to treat it like the flu and get back to normal life.
> Ignorance like this has contributed to the virus mutating
Ignorance contributes nothing to the virus - it doesn't care if you have knowledge or not. This virus was going to mutate faster than we could produce vaccine no matter what we did.
It's always been understood that antibodies wane over time. That's why other cells in our bodies 'remember' viral infections and essentially are primed to create antibodies again when infected (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z)
Yeah, after contracting COVID in January 2021, and now 3 shots (including a booster), I'm just tired of the whole thing. If I'm not immune "enough" after all that, so be it.
I'm the exact same as parent comment. For me, I was a bit pressured into getting the booster. I also thought it was 3 and done, it wasn't clear that it could potentially be recurring. I also thought maybe the reaction wouldn't be as bad as after the 2nd shot, but it was. Also, I've read more about myocarditis and don't really want to keep exposing myself to that risk.
Is having your heart hurt a normal side effect? A lot of anecdotes mention it as a symptom. How many of them actually go to get diagnosed?
I actually believed we'd be able to go back to having normal mask free existence with 3. As of now that's not proven to be the case so I'll continue to wear an N95 as I have family to protect. Hope it will burn itself out and my under 5 child and older family can have a better idea of the risks in time.
My favorite part is where the referenced document doesn't say that. It literally shows that a third shot of Pfizer-Biontech is still 90+% effective against the Delta variant after 10+ weeks. And close to 50% against Omicron after 10+ weeks. The only significance of 10 weeks is that was where their data ended, because boosters haven't been generally available that long.
I'd definitely consider 50% efficacy against the most prevalent variant
(by far) after 10 weeks to be "waning".
That might change if we ever get a booster targeted toward Omicron specifically, but we don't have one, and by the time we do, I'm sure there will be other variants around.
From the linked article, the vaccine effectiveness of 10 weeks factoid you mentioned is a bit incomplete. It only talks about effectiveness against symptomatic infections. The effectiveness is dropped to about 40% around 10 weeks for people with AstraZeneca and then Pfizer or Moderna booster, or Pfizer and then Pfizer booster, and to about 70% around 9 weeks for people with Pfizer and then Moderna booster.
There was insufficient data to estimate the effectiveness against severe disease.
I’ve gotten my flu shot yearly for my entire living memory. I don’t really understand why a booster vaccine for a pandemic that’s killed an order of magnitude more people than the flu does per year is some serious burden.
If you didn't get sick from it (current formulation or perhaps new ones in future), would you just take it and move on?
Known downtime of a day or two (and not feeling well) is, to me, still a tradeoff to make compared to the potential of being intubated in an ICU. Each Pfizer shot I've had I've had somewhere of 8-18 hours of being really knocked out, usually starting around 24 hours after injection. I usually have milder (but some) reaction to flu vaccine each year (usually up to 8 hours of fatigue/headache/etc) within a day or so.
if I didn't get sick or there was a new one that's better of course I would take it. I think t-cells are still robust long term so I'm safe from severe disease. That's what I've read so far in the news but I'll keep monitoring.
> compared to the potential of being intubated in an ICU.
Comments like this are only intelligible if one considers the probability of each outcome.
Deterministically (probability 1) getting unpleasant vaccine side effects vs. deterministically ending up intubated in an ICU? Sure, give me a booster every month. But that's not actually the relevant calculus -- your probability of ending up in an ICU is already extremely low after two shots.
Because there's no evidence more boosters have any efficacy. And there are side-effects, despite people trying to downplay them. My SO had a legit allergic reaction to an mRNA vaccine...
"no evidence". The first round of boosters have shown strong efficacy. Why would a second round of boosters not have any efficacy? It seems that you've chosen the wrong null hypothesis.
Show a study, any study (and not just a news article that links to another article claiming 'studies' show blah) where they reduce the risk of serious infection or transmission versus only 2 doses.
Simply pumping up antibodies for a couple weeks isn't the same as efficacy.
First off, I need to point out that you are committing the logical fallacy of selective rigor. An increase in neutralizing antibodies is not the same as a clinical trial proving efficacy, but I'm pretty sure that increases in neutralizing antibodies STRONGLY correlate with vaccine efficacy, across different diseases. So you've already called out your own bias.
So, here is a pre-print that does show real-world effectiveness (as opposed to efficacy). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.21266341v... And of course I know that you will apply your selective rigor by pointing out that it is a pre-print. But less-biased people will realize that science can only work so quickly.
My second shot made me feel more ill than I have any other time in the last half decade or so aside from a bout with dengue. It’s likely I’ve also had COVID within that stretch and it barely registered (had a slightly sore throat for a few days after confirmed exposure).
I’ve also had the flu shot most every year, even though I really have never been seriously ill from the flu, because it’s an easy preventative measure without side effects. If the booster for COVID regularly makes me more sick than the disease it protects against that’s definitely a burden, a rather large one. Just because it’s killed vulnerable people doesn’t mean the calculus for me or others with strong immune systems is the same.
The lethality of influenza is grossly overexagerated to sell vaccines. This started in the 90s when pharma realized there was an untapped market of aging Americans they could scare into creating demand for their product.
Flu shot never made me more than uncomfortable for a day. Second shot of Moderna took me out of commission for 5 days. 2 of them being with 38C fever. I am done with the these shots. Did not get booster but did get Omicron over the holidays, it was like a weak cold that dragged on for a few extra days.
the reasoning is 3 provides robust long term immunity due to the several month gap between 2 and 3. While 4 won't add much benefit except to boost antibody count for a short while.
I'm double vaxxed and boosted and just spent 4 days in the hospital with Covid.
I actually entered the hospital without Covid and got it while I was in there. They had the entire place divided into separate wings and I had to be transferred between them. 103 degree fever, pulse 130, was pretty awful but came out of it fine.
I, too, am done with all of it. Let the chips fall where they may now.
at this point I want better public health evidence from CDC etc that "the vaccine may have kept you out of the ICU". I need better quantification of the various risks before continuing to live an extremely inconvenient lifestyle to ostensibly save other's lives.
There's a clear difference in hospitalization and death between the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. You don't have to take the CDC's word for it - other countries can see the same thing in their numbers.
Calling getting the vaccine "an extremely inconvenient lifestyle" is silly.
At this point I don't really think that pointing at CDC public health releases is going to convince a scientist like me. Also, the data you pointed at doesn't directly answer what I said (nearly all data is ambiguous, there are a ton of confounders, etc).
Getting a vaccine isnt inconvenient, except that it was: I spent an entire week unable to use my left arm and feeling very sick (and my doctor didn't care). But also there's a ton of other issues, like my kids not being able to go to school, stores closed, having to greatly limit travel, etc.
I don't disagree with the directionality you describe but look at the case rates and hospitizalization numbers- even the most highly vaccinated areas of the country are still heavily impacted. Omicron changed everything and our reporting hasn't caught up.
The best way to think about CDC press releases is that they not intended to be read by scientists. They are intended to guide good behavior and may not be 100% accurate in terms of medical/scientific knowledge.
Thus far, every indication we have is that there's a successful decoupling of cases and hospitalization/death. Omicron's been in South Africa long enough for the lagging indicators of hospitalization/death. They remain low.
I don't think that disproves anything. First, I question their stats. IE I think they are straight-up fudging their numbers. Second, there are more people being hospitalized in my area (which has high rates of vax) than there are unvaxxed people. I would have agreed with you until omicron, but it's clear this is hitting vaxxed people are similar rates to unvaxxed, and that the hospitalization rates are similar.
I wasn't talking in proportions, I meant absolutely. I mean, it's extremely improbable that the huge jump in hospitalizations could be explained by massively more vaxxed people, because there aren't actually enough physical people in the state to explain it otherwise.
Just be aware: you're arguing with a scientist who worked for decades on medical biology who has, until recently, generally been quiet when seeing huge amounts of misleading medical knowledge trotted about to justify one procedure or another. I am always open to data and my "feelings" don't matter- except that most of the time, when I dig into the underlying claims, I find that they are misrepresented (usually unintentionally). So I use my own priors, and frankly, all I can say is that finding stats on a government page or a news article and using those to justify policy isn't convincing to scientists (and, it appears, the vast majority of the american public).
Ultimately, our public health people lost the PR war, and they did so through muddled messaging. Literally everything about vaccines has turned out to be less effective that public health leadership predicted, or claims. I'm not really surprised; I've commented many times on HN about how deeply challenging it is to do public health with a noncompliant population.
> Just be aware: you're arguing with a scientist who worked for decades on medical biology...
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
(I'm also glad the CDC employs more than just biologists, as statistics seems to be a fault here more than biology.)
> I wasn't talking in proportions, I meant absolutely.
Cool, so entirely pointless.
This popped into my inbox today: average daily cases, per-capita, for Seattle and NYC. Another clear distinction between the two populations. https://imgur.com/a/mjVxIhB
You can dismiss it as faked or rigged or manipulated again, but there's plenty of information out there to validate this sort of thing, and you don't have to take the US's word for it; other countries publish the same sort of information.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...
Table S3 has what you want, it's much closer to useful than any CDC press release with the major caveats that it was done in a Kaiser population (which could be non-representative) and is very new and totally unvetted.
Ultimately I think you're not completely incorrect and I agree with teh directionality of what you're saying, but taken generally, the reality is that omicron does a much better job of infecting people (who were previously infected and have natural immunity, or who were vaccinated) and so much of this entire vaccine exercise has shown that we either need to move quickly/plan for regular 4-month updates (can you imagine trying to get everybody in the world to vaccinate every 4 months?) or maybe acknowledge that vaccination isn't the solution it was pitched as.
yes, exactly. I am getitng tired of people citing CDC facts that don't answer (quantitatively) which of any of actions are actually useful.
Note that many people who end up the hospital either didn't know they were infected, or got infected there. And probably many of the people with COVID who go to the hospital don't actually need hospital levels of treatment. We have a tendency to overtreat with technology.
Here is where the details of COVID matter. Is it just a respiratory disease where once you are past the acute phase you are fine, or is it a multisystem disease where the long term consequences (kidney, heart, brain, blood clotting issues) we be on the rise for years and decades to come? The long term consequences (WHICH NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE) are frightening.
I am not sure if your assertion is true. I am completely unvaccinated and at times also ran a heart rate above 120 (involuntarily) and a fever above 102.
However the difference for me was that I was at home and all I needed to do was take my inhaler if I felt short of breath and take advil quite religiously for the fever.
So I don't feel there is any difference between their symptoms and mine, and I am an asthmatic and also a bit overweight.
Just a note for anyone reading this but if you want to take a pain reliever for covid infection, apparently aspirin is an ideal one because the feature of preventing blood clots is very useful in preventing the fairly rare but serious covid complications caused by microclots.
But maybe not if you're young. Aspirin is associated with Reye Syndrome in children with viral infections. Not sure I've seen whether this has been shown to be the case or not with COVID, but basically nobody gives their kids aspirin anymore so I'm not sure if it's been an issue.
When I caught Alpha variant in February, I took advil/ibuprofen as well on the advice of my doctor. Didn't really have a headache more than a day though. I didn't know about aspirin's side-effect blood-thinning benefit pertaining to micro-clots.
But as stated elsewhere in the thread, I should have qualified my statement with "don't give aspirin to kids" due to Reyes syndrome. Totally spaced that detail.
Different people have different reactions to Covid. That's true of both unvaccinated and vaccinated. But the data has been pretty clear that vaccinated has resulted in a lot less hospitalizations and death for those that take it.
I'm glad you made it through okay, but statistically your risk was higher by being unvaccinated when you caught it.
Also if I was short of breath, a heart rate above 120 randomly, and had a fever of 102 (at the same tmie) during this pandemic, as an overweight asthmatic myself, I wouldn't have risked staying home and would have headed straight to the emergency room. Especially if I checked my Oximeter and it was in the lower 90s.
You can never know if the vaccine made it less bad. If you don't like anecdotes about how tame covid was w/o vaccines, don't say things like "it would have been worse w/o the vaccine".
But statistically it is. Unvaccinated people die more. Vaccinated people die less. You can't _know_ in a meaningful sense in your specific instance, but your risk is what it is no matter what. I'm not sure what's hard about this.
I'm not going to prove to you that vaccines work, sorry. Do your own homework, but remember that you're (probably) not an immunologist. Do what thou wilt.
Had you gone to the emergency room in lower areas of New York, you would have been accepted through triage (but not "admitted overnight"), given an EKG, given an albuterol nebulizer treatment, told to continue these treatments every 2 hours at home until feeling better. If the nebulizer fails to help your breathing at that interval, you would be told to return. And if you developed pneumonia, you'd be given an antibiotic.
How do I know? This is exactly what happened to my wife.
That sucks for sure, and I'm sorry that happened to your wife, although at least you got a little information from that and hopefully if your wife was in worse shape they would have identified that at that time and admitted her.
I would have also used the nebulizer before going in, most likely (I have one at home), so I would know ahead of time how well it was working out. Also I did say I'd check the oximeter I have first, and if my blood oxygen level was low then according to that I probably need to be in the hospital and they'd hopefully take that measurement and react appropriately (Hopefully. I know hospitals have been overwhelmed at times, especially New York's)
I am a bit lucky in that the hospital closest to me, so far, hasn't run out of hospital beds this entire pandemic (currently has 80 regular beds and a dozen ICU beds available), and my state has, with a little luck and some decent policy decisions, has mostly kept things under control.
Risk after-the-fact doesn't work like that. Probabilities cease to be probabilities after the event happened. Plus, don't forget about all of the dead people who are unable to write posts like this. I'm glad you're okay, but as the sibling comment said, your risk was higher, especially being overweight and asthmatic. If you win a slot machine one time, it doesn't mean everyone else will also win the slot machine. Getting lucky doesn't mean there was never any risk, it just means you got lucky this time.
He/she didn't deny that the vaccine kept him out of ICU.
But once vaxxed+boosted, what more realistically can we do? I mean sure, let's maybe avoid coughing into each other's open mouths. But apart from that, Omicron seems to be so contagious, we're all bound to get it eventually unless we literally lock ourselves at home for the next 3 years.
The big question right now is if we should push button#3. Many of us hoped it wouldn't be necessary, but things really are that bad now that we're contemplating pushing the button.
Lockdowns are themselves staged. We can lockdown schools (already happening in many colleges effectively. I have cousins who are off of college because they've extended their winter break, to minimize COVID19 spread).
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There's also lesser actions: I work in technology. All in-person meetings have been canceled. Schools are "sometimes online" in my area, depending on local conditions. Testing has gone up significantly, we try to catch the disease and encourage people to stay home asap to minimize spread. Etc. etc.
There's plenty of actions we can do, even if we decide against lockdowns.
Except there are so many options in between Nos. 2 and 3. Reduced capacity. Outdoor dining. Testing requirements. As well as the wide, wide gulf between total lockdowns and selective ones.
I think my overall point is that we're well into discussing options between 2 and 3 now. This Omicron surge is truly ferocious, and far worse than people predicted (or really, hoped for).
There's also the evidence that Omicron subsides rather quickly (at least, in South Africa it did). So any such emergency measures would truly be temporary, more so than the original strain or Delta-surges of the past. Under these statistics / calculations, it makes more sense to perform bigger actions.
I'm still pissed that in California we handled the possible in-between steps so clumsily.
My 2020 Roger Waters concert was canceled. Sure, that made sense -- 15,000 people all packed inside the venue. But at the same time, my hairdresser was shut down, not even a single customer at a time allowed. Made no sense to me.
> The countries that have locked down the hardest (eg Australia, Canada) have seen no improvement relative to those with no lockdowns (e.g. Florida, Texas).
This is a laughable assertion.
Florida has 650 deaths per 100k people. Australia has 9.4 deaths per 100k people.
What is the demographic difference between Florida and all of Australia? When I visit Florida it seems like half the population is at least 80 years old, but maybe that's just my impression.
I put myself firmly in the camp of “vaxxed, boosted, and done”, and I’d say that’s the attitude of more people than we all might think.
I think you have the theoretical game plan right, but I’d say that #3 is no longer within the realm of possibility in the US. There’s just no public support for it amongst anyone but the tiny percentage of the most cautious among us.
On #2, I’d even say that yes, masks still make sense in crowded indoor non-optional settings - meaning places we all have to go like public transit, grocery stores, and hospitals. But I’m already past the point of ever wearing a mask outdoors, and I’d also argue that it shouldn’t be a requirement for vaccinated individuals in optional spaces like gyms, bars, restaurants.
Plus of course in bars and restaurants they are pointless theater- wearing a mask to walk to your table, then taking it off to eat, drink and talk loudly for several hours, does precisely nothing.
Except at a restaurant, the unmasked time is closer to 95%-99%, depending on how long it takes to get a table, and then how long you're there.
My wife an I recently went out for breakfast. There was no wait for a table, so the masked time was basically less than a minute, but let's call it a full minute. Then, we were there for about 40 minutes unmasked.
That's a 97.5% time unmasked, talking or eating. You cannot possibly convince me that the 1 minute I had my mask on made ANY difference.
That said, the alternative to the "mask until you're seated" policy was never going to be "no masks", it would end up being "no indoor dining".
Or were you socializing for 30 minutes after actually eating for 10? And during the socializing period, you didn't feel like wearing a mask?
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Surely, when you were seated, you didn't have food yet. You had some time to place an order. It takes a few minutes to even fetch drinks from the back sometimes, depending on what the drinks are.
Literally no one is doing this. I'm not arguing that what you're describing isn' safer -- but seriously, no one is doing this. They could, they definitely could.
But everyone who is going to a restaurant in a "mask to the table" kind of area is wearing it for about 30 seconds til they sit at their table. Maybe on the way to the bathroom.
I know a few states had tried to pass mandates about wearing your mask when you were being waited on or when you were socializing/not actively eating. I don't think those stuck though because they are impossibly hard to enforce.
I don't always practice what I preach, but I've done so on multiple occasions. (IE: I've kept my mask on for the "social" phases of the Restaurant, and only took it off for the eating phase).
Given that we're currently facing an unprecedented hospital shortage _RIGHT NOW_, its certainly a behavior worth revisiting and advocating.
We can't stop all restaurant visits or family gatherings. But we can lessen the spread of COVID19 while we do gather.
So what? Why is Covid the single only thing that matters. Covid is endemic. Mandating masks says “Covid is literally the most important thing for you”.
No. I’m boosted. I’ve got plenty of other problems that are far higher in priority than Covid or the spread of Covid. Nobody should be required by law to wear a mask indoors at this point.
Keeping a mask off your face while indoors is that important to you?
Why? No one has ever been able to tell me why a mask on a face was so terrible, to the point where I'm pretty sure that its just partisan bickering / political theater.
Were smiles banned or something? I've smiled to my niece and she smiled back to me last time I checked.
But in public, its important to reduce the hospitalization rate and COVID19 rate of spread. As corrosive as you "think" masks are, I guarantee that the long-term effects of COVID19 are more corrosive.
Just 10% of this school has gotten infected with COVID19, and you can see how much of a nightmare its become. Not enough substitute teachers to watch kids. Kids mingling in the auditorium because there's not enough teachers to watch them. Spreading COVID19 further and further, causing more kids to be absent, causing more teachers to be absent, preventing school from effectively functioning as a learning environment.
Seems like a self created problem. Imagine if we simply stopped all this testing. I bet a lot of money you wouldn’t even know omicron was a thing. This would be “that thing that is going around”
I was standing in a 4-hour line to get a nurse to give me a regular TDAP vaccine (wooping cough). I decided to come back later when the line was shorter, and stood in line __before__ the clinic opened. I was then met with a 2-hour wait instead.
You can't ignore this crap. Its evidently and immediately an issue right now.
Agreed on the masks in bars/restaurants just being theater, but the alternative was never going to be masks not being required, it would be that indoor dining wouldn't be permitted.
Agreed. At least where I live (a major American city) there’s already no expectation or enforcement once you enter a bar, despite us having an indoor mask mandate that people are relatively good about following everywhere else. I’d be willing to guess that the city knows and has chosen not to enforce it in certain settings.
> The big question right now is if we should push button#3 [lockdowns].
I think a more salient question is if we can push button #3. Nobody wants more lockdowns. The vaccinated are tired of the unvaccinated fucking everything up for us, and the unvaccinated have never been open to the idea.
This is another thing pointed out by the article: there just isn't the will to do it, even if it was necessary.
This isn't being made as a medical decision, it's being made as a political decision.
You either do an orderly shutdown, or you get de-facto shutdown.
In the case of this high-school, they only needed ~10% of students / teachers to get COVID19 before chaos reigned supreme. Students are now skipping classes out of fear of their own safety, teachers are collecting students into auditoriums (because too many teachers are sick, not enough substitute teachers to watch the students 30-at-a-time anymore, gotta collect all the students together to more efficiently watch over them).
At this point, the high-school in this Reddit discussion should have just an orderly shutdown, rather than pretending everything is fine.
If people aren't getting COVID and are staying at home because of a shutdown, then this exact same situation happens again just later in time... (After the school shutdown)
An orderly shutdown is better, because all the students remain at the same point of their lessons. If you're a calculus teacher currently teaching basic integrals this week... you won't be able to teach "integration by parts" (or other advanced integrals) 1 month from now, because 10% of your students were missing.
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In contrast, a formal shutdown means that _EVERYBODY_ gets held off at this lesson. You cut your losses, formally shutdown school, and start everybody up when times are safer.
You can plan around a formal shutdown. You can't plan around a de-facto shutdown. All the students are going to have bits and pieces of knowledge and are unable to catchup, because they all randomly lost bits of information due to randomly missing class.
Where the hell are you that this is your reality? Here in Texas it is absolutely not the case that "but things really are that bad now that we're contemplating pushing the button".
Texas has much lower per capita cases and deaths than a state like New York. But I also suspect that Texas values freedom relative to safety much higher than states like New York.
Texas leadership is focused on performing for their constituents. That relegates the contemplation to progressive city/county leadership who are willing to push back on statewide policy when the numbers get bad.
A lot of this gets left to the choice of business owners and school administrators who have to balance their choices with fiscal concerns and public perception. There is no political leadership position for them to fall back on. Basically everyone's hands are tied, and some group is going to be upset whether buttons get pressed or not.
Until when? Until covid goes away (which Biden implied earlier this year, that the reason we still have covid is because of the unvaccinated)? Vaccines seem to do nothing to infections, it only reduces the risk of hospitalisation and death. In the UK the % of positive cases that are vaccinated is pretty much the same than the % of people vaccinated in the population. Covid isn't going away.
So are you suggesting vaccines, masks and lockdowns forever? I don't think many will agree to that. I certain don't.
If this is our new reality then this is our new reality.
Given that our hospital systems are being pushed to basically their breaking point, we need to do what we can to help our the nurses / doctors handle this situation.
A cloth mask is something like 30% effective. That's better than nothing, and certainly can slow down the spread if used universally. Booster-vaccines are something like 70% vs Omicron.
I don't know the situation in the US, but here in the UK, the only reason there is a strain on hospitals is not because of high hospital admissions, they aren't particularly high. It is because of mandatory self-quarantine requirement for hospital staff who test positive, which result in staff shortage. We wouldn't do that with a cold, and this variant, at least to the vaccinated, is little more than a cold.
If you are sick, stay home. Don't infect your colleagues, don't infect your patients. Its not that hard.
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The fact that you're arguing for the opposite is incredibly callous and reckless of you. Its like the pandemic has removed you of common sense.
That's literally why we have paid sick leave. Having 5% of your workforce stuck at home is better than those people coming in and infecting _EVERONE ELSE AT THE OFFICE_.
It seems like you misunderstand what people are calling for. It doesn't make sense for a triple-vaxxed, asymptomatic, positive test to be quarantined for ten days. We have rapid tests that are very good at determining whether people are actually infectious. We can use those to return asymptomatic people to work faster with minimal risk of spread.
In the USA, we've already changed our guidance to 5-day quarantines. So as usual, my words are USA-focused and based off of our current US-politics.
There seem to be people arguing for the COVID19 sick doctors/nurses to come in and work as usual, even with symptoms.
If that's not the case in UK (and if you're still on the old 10-day quarantine), then I guess your local politics are just different than what I'm dealing with here. We can blame this misunderstanding on our different local situations for sure.
The strain on your hospitals and morgues could be much higher, if only those COVID-positive healthcare workers were at work, infecting their colleagues and patients.
But this line of discussion is so bad, that I can only imagine it originated from Russian propaganda. How the hell does bringing in _PROVEN_ COVID19 positive people into a face-to-face setting with sick/immunocompromised patients a possible benefit in this situation?
The situation is sickening to think about. Its not something a rational person could ever possibly come up on their own.
Clearly if all doctors stay home sick, then it will lead to many more deaths than if they all came in with COVID.
On the other hand, if only 0.1% stay home sick with COVID, then the effect of their absence will probably be to reduce deaths if their job can be covered by others adequately.
So what we have is a question of degree: there exists a threshold at which doctors (or nurses, etc) should come in even if they have COVID. And somewhat counterintuitively the more doctors who are sick, the greater the likelihood that if they came in with COVID there would be fewer deaths overall.
Exactly where this threshold lies is an open question, and will depend on the facts.
>Given that our hospital systems are being pushed to basically their breaking point, we need to do what we can to help our the nurses / doctors handle this situation.
Our hospitals have been pushed to the breaking point for a long time. Maybe we should focus on extending our ICU capability to meet the demand better, given that this may be the new normal for who knows how many years yet. I think we need to come to terms with this and expand accordingly on a more permanent basis.
There are several ways this could end, but the scenarios that could realistically keep most people from encountering the virus have proven implausible. So while you can use maska and lockdowns indefinitely, it's not much of a plan.
Arguably boosting the entire population and waiting for the last wave to pass is a more realistic plan, even though nobody so far seems willing to admit they're planning to do this, they just are doing it.
"It's possible the deer in northeast Ohio contracted it from contaminated water, since the novel coronavirus is shed in human waste. But alternative sources — such as trash, backyard feeders, bait stations and wildlife hospitals — have to be considered, Bowman said."
What does this have to do with masks again? Perhaps you can organize a scientific experiment equipping half the deer with masks, and report back to us with the results.
It certainly seems likely that deer engage in behaviours outside that humans do not, that leads to much closer contact. I can think of at least one such behaviour. I don't think that wild animals are a good model for human epidemiology.
"A Japanese investigation of 110 cases found the probability of transmission to be 18.7 times higher indoors compared to an “open-air environment.” And a more recent study, which looked at transmission between 18 infected construction workers and 496 of their close contacts, showed that the infected individuals were nearly 25 times more likely to spread the virus to coworkers in enclosed spaces compared with outdoor settings. They transmitted the virus to 26 percent of their indoor coworkers while infecting only 1.4 percent of their outdoor workmates — this despite being significantly more likely to share meals and talk loudly while working outside."
Does it EVER spread outdoors? Sure. Is it very likely to? Not even close. We've known this for a long time, and yet we still have municipalities welding basketball hoops shut and filling skate parks with sand.
There's a restaurant close to me that's got "outdoor" seating. Its a tent with the sides down and heaters. It happens to match the legal requirements for "outdoor seating" in my county, but we all know that COVID19 is spreading everywhere inside that small tent.
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Its not like people are social-distancing at national parks. People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
> There's a restaurant close to me that's got "outdoor" seating. Its a tent with the sides down and heaters. It happens to match the legal requirements for "outdoor seating" in my county, but we all know that COVID19 is spreading everywhere inside that small tent.
> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
And yet, the declarations are also ridiculous, which is the point that OP was making (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880264). In the past (and maybe now, not sure) people have been required to social distance at national parks - or even forbidden from going to them at all.
On the other side of "ridiculous": 6 feet of "social distancing" wasn't enough to begin with. Building and elevator capacities were a sham. And, my employer (and likely many others) skirted all of these ridiculous rules in ridiculous ways - which is the point, that regardless of how people behave (which isn't relevant for this discussion, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up), some of the rules are still bad and useless.
The vast majority of covid-related rules are unnecessary, hygiene theater, woefully inadequate, or some combination of all of those - and, yet, governments and people of a particular inclination insist on following this charade anyway and using various logical fallacies (e.g. strawmanning, as you did above) and emotional attacks on those that have the audacity to question them.
> On the other side of "ridiculous": 6 feet of "social distancing" wasn't enough to begin with
Its not enough for you as an individual.
But such a rule lowers the "blast radius" of who gets infected when a case comes up. People's breath travels like 20 feet. If everyone is 6-feet apart, you only get ~3 people in front of you sick.
If people are ~2 feet apart instead, you infect 300% more people.
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There's a thing about big groups. What's good for the group isn't necessarily what's best for the individual.
Read the quote I pulled: outside = "open-air environment".
> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
And this is being obtuse about "these declarations" to avoid acknowledging the fact that the person at the top of this thread is correct: COVID, statistically, almost never transmits outdoors. It's been studied, multiple times, all coming to the same conclusion.
This is a pretty blatant strawman - OP's exact words were "COVID-19 doesn't effectively transmit outside" (emphasis added), not that it doesn't transmit at all.
COVID19 is _effectively_ spreading to the entire Ohio deer population.
> The investigators said the prevalence of infection varied from 13.5% to 70% across the nine sites, with the highest prevalence observed in four sites that were surrounded by more densely populated neighborhoods.
Furthermore, it seems like we humans are spreading it to deer, with the deer in higher-density human neighborhoods reaching ~70% infection.
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I don't think we humans are sitting around talking to deer indoors. Any reasonable application of Occam's Razor is that humans are spreading COVID19 to deer through some kind of outdoor setting.
> The number of deer who've caught COVID19 in Ohio seems to suggest otherwise.
It doesn't suggest anything.
You're conflating two uses of the English word "effectively". One means "efficiently", which is the only one in use in the thread above, and the only one under debate. The other means "functionally" or "the effects are the same as", which is what you used in this single comment - but not even correctly. 1/3 of the deer population is not "effectively" the entire Ohio deer population in the sense that you meant it.
Furthermore, COVID19 does not spread effectively (in the sense of "efficiently") outside, as a comment that you've already read has pointed out[1]. 18 to 25 times less likely to spread to co-workers in an "open-air environment" (which kind of implicitly is still not like being in a park) fulfills the definition of "ineffective".
> Any reasonable application of Occam's Razor is that humans are spreading COVID19 to deer through some kind of outdoor setting.
Nobody claimed that there were no cases of outdoor human-to-deer infection - you were suggesting that the virus spread effectively outdoors in [2], which Occam's Razor does not support in the slightest.
You also moved the goalposts from "The fact that there's a bunch of infected deer means that covid effectively transmits outside" to "There's some outdoor transmission", and those two positions are completely different.
So, yes, Occam's Razor does support your (silently) revised claim in this comment, but definitely not the comment you originally invoked the Razor in.
> You also moved the goalposts from "The fact that there's a bunch of infected deer means that covid effectively transmits outside" to "There's some outdoor transmission", and those two positions are completely different.
The deer samples were anywhere from 14% to 70% COVID19 infected.
You're grossly underestimating the amount of COVID19 we have spread to the deer population (and likely, that deer have spread to each other). All of which happened outdoors.
I mean, I can't really imagine a world where the deer have mostly be infected by humans. It would seem more likely to me at least that there were a few human-deer transmissions, but way way more deer-deer transmissions.
The GP isn't really arguing in good faith - they didn't even fully read (or purposefully omitted sections from) one of the articles that they linked, in which one of the authors of the study says that there is no documentation of deer transmitting the virus to humans or vice versa[1].
> The deer samples were anywhere from 14% to 70% COVID19 infected.
...with an overall rate of 36%, which is given in that very article that you linked. It doesn't matter if 70% of the deer at one site were infected, if the average is significantly lower than that.
...which isn't even relevant, because again, you're moving the goalposts, as stated above.
> You're grossly underestimating the amount of COVID19 we have spread to the deer population
I'm not underestimating anything, as one of the researchers said: "there is no documentation of deer transmitting the virus to humans or vice versa"[1] (another article which you have linked but apparently failed to read).
...and, as a previous study found[2], the virus does not spread effectively outdoors.
You're literally fabricating claims from thin air. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for effective human-deer or deer-deer COVID transmission.
OP's exact words were "COVID-19 doesn't effectively transmit outside". Read the "effectively" - he's clearly not saying that it doesn't transmit at all (obviously it does if you go outdoors and then cough right into someone else's face from two inches away), just that it doesn't do so effectively.
Deer don't do social distancing. They sleep together, and move around in herds for most of their day. COVID can both spread terribly outdoors (which it does) and lots of deer can get it exclusively outdoors.
Let's be clear on this: The majority of humanity is not okay with the idea of wearing masks full-time in all public places, and shutting down densely populated activities forever.
Masks make sense locally, temporarily, and as circumstances warrant. Such as a hospital or pharmacy during a flu outbreak, or when someone thinks they may be sick (cough or sneeze fits).
There doesn't seem to be much we can do to stop this in the near term. The idea of stamping out COVID quickly like we thought we could do in the spring of 2020 is gone.
It is time now to understand we live with it, to be cautious when we feel ill and isolate ourselves, and to get the preventative measures that help best (vaccines).
Stay away from people who don't take the pandemic seriously, and take every precaution you know you would take if this virus was any more serious. We all knew what to expect. Sure it sucks, but would you rather catch the virus?
In many countries in Asia it was already considered polite to wear a mask if you got sick. Got a cold and coughing everywhere? Wear a mask so your not spewing droplets all over your coworkers and people at the store.
I am hoping that trend continues in the western world but who really knows
TBH, I consider wearing a mask to be so low-effort, I take it for granted. I know for many other people in this country that's not the case at all, and wearing a mask to the grocery store for them is somehow akin to wearing a 20-pound iron ball chained to their ankle. But to me (and my family), a mask isn't a big deal.
By "what more realistically can we do" I'm really talking about shutdowns, lockdowns, and capacity reductions. I'm ok with continuing WFH for people who can... so I suppose my stance is inconsistent: I want to get back to "normal" but I'm ok with WFH and masks.
Overall, I'm frankly at a point where, double-vaxx'd and boosted, I really want to go back to not having to second-guess my decision to go out for a bowl of ramen.
You can't reasonably maintain social-distance at the hospital. Pretty much by definition, you're in contact with several nurses and doctors per day, plus orderlies and various other staff. And that's the baseline. Add guests, other patients, and over-crowding (in some locations).
It's not a new phenomena [1]. I do not think "hospitals are incapable of keeping people safe from Covid" is the best expression. I think "encountering any humans bears increased risk in Covid times", regardless if those humans work in a hospital (although, arguably lower risk) versus a shoe store.
A) Covid is probably airborne and refusal to admit as such and this upgrade hvac is potentially an ignored reality
B) why aren’t we testing and segregated people in hospitals? If society is expected to segregate unvaccinated people why can’t hospitals test and segregate healthy patients from anyone with Covid?
C) what expression is appropriate for a hospital that was incapable of preventing a patient free of Covid from contracting Covid in the hospital? Unwilling perhaps? Uninterested?
It calls into question the effectiveness of all the Covid countermeasures. A triple vaxxed person, following all masking and distancing requirements, in a highly controlled environment still gets Covid. It makes you feel a bit like... What's the point? Do we realistically have any tools that slow the spread of Omicron?
The standard response is "Just imagine how bad it would be without all the restrictions!". Which is exactly the problem, perhaps. You're using imagination and not a quantitative approach. You can say that about literally anything. "Just imagine how much worse we would have lost that game if I wasn't wearing my lucky socks!"
Of course hospitals are incapable of keeping you safe from an airbourne respiratory virus. Nothing can, short of a respirator.
The follow-up question is - if we can't stop infection in hospital buildings, where the most vulnerable are literally cooped up together for days and weeks at a time, what's the point of the rest of the restrictions? If you follow the logic used to set guidance and law where I live (ie, closures of various categories of business at various times, and ongoing), then logically we should also have shut down the hospitals...
In mid 2020 in the UK, The National Health Service (NHS) began introducing "green" and "ultra-green" pathways, and designating zones or entire hospitals as 'green' (CoVid-19 free) sites. 'Green' and 'ultra-green' refer to CoViD-19 prevention measures in the 14 days preceding non-emergency admissions and the status of zones (or entire sites) at the hospital during and after treatment.
This was to ensure non-emergency admissions could continue without risking infection.
wow, you just had a really awful covid experience despite having all preventive measures in place, and now that you're "done" it's time to take off the masks for everyone?
thanks for "letting the chips fall where they may" on everyone else who still would much prefer not to get sick and risk long covid but I will keep the mask on for now, thanks
There's a lot of people that like masks, staying home, a lot of people that like that others are being forced to do things ("political enemies"), etc. I think it's more than most suppose, and they are vocal, too.
ive liked to stay home for decades and because of that i tend not to travel much. covid has nothing to do with that? why would i wish a certain lifestyle on other people? also "political enemies" who disagree with covid restrictions arent forced to do anything, they are walking around unvaccinated, unmasked, filling up the hospitals and crushing the healthcare system with abandon. Nobody is coming after them.
The jump from "some people aren't as bothered by masks and are more ok with staying home" to "these same people wouldn't mind if a disease that already killed millions just lingers forever" is... baffling.
It’s absolutely based on reality. I invite you to live in any major west coast city. Dudes have lost the plot.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with being “anti mask”. Covid is endemic. I’m boostered. Why should I continue to be forced to wear a mask? Is Covid still the only problem I can ever focus on?
There is a significant portion of the population that enjoys telling others what to do. Nobody can argue this. Therefore, given the fact that COVID restrictions is the hottest-button issue of the past several years, and dealing with it involves telling people what to do, through force of law no less (usually), it only follows...
After COVID, what are the media and these people going to do? The gravy train is going to run out, everything else will be boring for them in comparison.
name any evidence whatsoever of this. this is a toxic viewpoint that conservatives seem to hold which is that liberals/antifa/others somehow "like" covid, or that governments somehow "want" to shut schools down. I see this viewpoint quite a bit and it is completely insane and not based in any reality at all.
for example, I have relatives who watch FOX news all day. they are convinced covid vaccines were created to kill people, for the purposes of "thinning the herd". the reason for this "thinning the herd", which they seem to believe is happening? despite most everyone they know including their whole extended family shaking their heads at their crazy facebook posts being vaccinated without any issue? is so that this would somehow pave the way for "communism". that's their whole worldview. so those are folks who think we're somehow all on board with covid being great, or something.
People's stances should change as reality and conditions on the ground change, not based on some arbitrary number of months/years pulled out of the sky. What makes 3 years special, or 5 years? We may be at the very beginning of a COVID decade or even century. Do you know for sure how long this will last? Does anyone? Part of why we can't get past this thing is politicians declaring "We must be back to normal in [TIMEFRAME X]" where TIMEFRAME X was arbitrarily chosen and has nothing to do with reality.
I picked arbitrary time frames in my question because at some point people are going to give up, regardless of the conditions on the ground. A massive amount of people have already given up.
I wanted to know if they were prepared to go on for 1, 3, 5, 10, 20 more years of mask wearing in public, travel restrictions, remote learning, testing, etc. if things stay the same.
I see. Yea, I mean the only answer that really makes sense is "when it's over"--by some arguable definition of over. If they say "Well, I'll deal with it for 3 years but on year 4, that's it--I'm just going to give up, and pretend it's over." then I would: a) question where they got that number 4--what it's based on, and b) ask, if you're willing to ignore reality and just pretend it's over, why not just start pretending now?
> Yea, I mean the only answer that really makes sense is "when it's over"
I wouldn't say that. On the extreme end, if I found out that this thing was not going to be "over" during my lifetime, I'd say it doesn't make sense to continue doing this for my entire life. What kind of life is that?
And to be fair, I'm from the perspective of the Bay Area which has some of the strictest restrictions in the US. If you live in a more red area then you're more likely to already pretend it's over.
> ask, if you're willing to ignore reality and just pretend it's over, why not just start pretending now?
That's what I've been asking myself. I don't know the answer.
I mean, my stance on seatbelts is never going to change even if car accidents never stop happening. I have no idea how I'll feel about masks and everything else in 3 years, but for the moment it's not crazy to say "I think we should keep taking precautions as long as the problem still exists".
I have to cover my face every time I talk to someone. That's in no way inconsequential. It's depressing and antisocial.
I have to wear a mask while at the gym. That's in no way easy, particularly for cardio.
I'm lucky that I can work from home, otherwise I'd be wearing a mask for nearly my entire day at work.
And of course masking is just a part of the overall Covid restrictions that we still have to deal with.
To be clear, I'm in the bay area and fully follow local mask guidance. I can do that while also trying to figure out how long we can do this for, and acknowledging that I can't do this forever.
> I have to cover my face every time I talk to someone. That's in no way inconsequential. It's depressing and antisocial.
Is it? Why?
> I have to wear a mask while at the gym. That's in no way easy, particularly for cardio.
Of course it isn't at first. If society was such that we already used masks all the time I suspect people would just get used to it.
> I'm lucky that I can work from home, otherwise I'd be wearing a mask for nearly my entire day at work.
And...? We also wear clothes all day long at work. I suppose some people would call it bothersome or depressing or antisocial, but mostly we're all so used to it we don't even think about it.
I'm not opining on whether or not society can keep intermittently locking down forever, but we can certainly keep masking forever.
> Huh? You don't just get used to a soggy, restricting mask. I tried running with a mask for like 3 months and it sucked the entire time.
Sure you do, the same way you get used to soggy clothes. You're telling me you ran with a mask for 3 months with no major issues other than "it's soggy and it sucked". Of course, but soggy clothes suck.
> I don't think my belly button would contribute as much to building connections with people as my facial expressions do.
Plenty of ways to build connections with people without them seeing the entirety of your face. Heck, I've plenty of internet friends who have never seen any part of it!
> I can't. Period. And I don't think I'm a minority here.
What I'm saying is: yes, people could, as in, they won't die or be permanently injured by it. At most there would be a few minor inconveniences, particularly during the time it takes for people to adapt. People say they can't, in general, to mean that they won't and as a way to feel less guilty about it.
Apart from the fact they make it harder to breathe, speak, hear people, are uncomfortably warm in the summer, become completely wet from water condensation in the winter, are hard to put on/off if you're walking with stuff in you hands/have a hat, make it impossible to read lips so fuck deaf people and make it harder to communicate non-verbally.
I can understand people who say it's worth it, but not those who say it's inconsequential. Especially compared to seat belts.
That is absolutely not true. Aside from the consequences of people not seeing each other’s faces, there are dumb things like having to wear a mask in a gym. Wearing a cloth mask while working out is not easy or inconsequential.
The ideas that masks are new and the need for them doesn't have a clear end-date are the major reasons why the opposition is so insistent. After drugs and terror, the West and especially the US have run out of appetite for endless, unwinnable wars.
(Edit: seat-belts address a threat that ought to be persistent, because it's inherent to driving, so they're easier to accept. Covid is, at least allegedly, temporary.)
I get it, I'm just trying to explain that my reaction to "this is lasting longer than we thought it would" is "I guess the precautions will have to last longer as well", and I believe that is a reasonable reaction. I don't find it difficult to accept that nobody knows when it will end. That's just how it is, we're in a pandemic, it sucks. I don't have any more appetite for it than anyone else, I hate it.
Covid also happened at the same time as a bunch of other political/media holy-wars, which is why it's so bizarrely an us vs. them issue in the US. If seat-belts had been advocated by people half the country considered untrustworthy for unrelated reasons, they wouldn't be so universal today.
I wasn't alive in the 80s, but honestly it seems pretty similar. A lot of people hated the laws, there were public fights and court challenges for a while, and then eventually society got over it.
I guess you might be right, although I consider it a little unpalatable that the side I would have agreed with lost so thoroughly. The pre-Fox-News media were the media who declared the Vietnam War lost and salivated at being the fourth branch of government during Watergate.
So you’re saying forever then, because Covid is not going away. Do you honestly think people should be forced to wear masks for the rest of their lives?
it's not possible for things to "stay the same" because long covid will have been studied for years and there will be tons of data on it regarding what effect vaccines have upon it, what different variants do as far as long covid, etc. hopefully it will be well established that long covid is preventable by vaccines and/or new treatments have been developed and/or more evidence that "long covid" is not actually permanent will have been reached.
right now almost nothing is known about long covid except for the very terrifying pathways by which the virus causes it takes effect, directly attacking organs, cardiovascular, lungs, immune system, and brain with long term, extensive damage in some cases. no thanks
so the plan is "wait and see" until more is known. if indeed it's established that long covid is much too dangerous to be risked (in the same way that lyme disease is currently considered to be too dangerous to be risked) then hopefully they will work towards producing newer vaccines that keep the initial antibody wall up against variants, and oral antiviral drugs that stop the virus much more quickly will also be commonplace. as well as that the global population will slowly (very...slowly) be getting more and more immunity from vaccines and re-infection, hopefully reducing the rate at which new variants emerge.
so in 3-5 years there will be lots of things improving the situation. we are not there yet.
> so in 3-5 years there will be lots of things improving the situation. we are not there yet.
Uh yeah sorry, I'm already losing it less than 2 years into this thing. There's zero chance I'm making it another 3-5 years. It's just not possible mentally for me. I don't know exactly what my time frame is, but 3-5 years is certainly beyond my limit.
You’re the only one talking about forcing anyone to do anything with masks. If you want to wear it fine, but not forcing people to is not the same as forcing people not to.
That's an uncharitable reading of it. A charitable reading of it might be "We've done everything we can do, there's nothing left to do now but roll the dice"
But there's a lot we can do concerning vaccinations, mandates and social distancing. I'm not sure why it's on the reader to fish for a charitable reading of a comment devoid of any nuance.
Because those social distancing and other mandates don’t acknowledge that Covid is here forever. We cannot continue to live under these kinds of mitigations for a virus that will be here forever.
How does anything he does from here on out have any consequence on other people's decisions?
Did you just entirely dismiss what he said about catching it?
It is not his responsibility to protect you or anyone else. YOU can stay home and isolate if you can't handle being out. Stop putting your burden on everyone else. You (and your ilk) have no right to demand protection from others while putting yourself in harms way.
"I can't handle my own health anxiety so I'm going to make sure everyone makes ME feel better regardless of how it affects their lives"
Im typing this from an airport so im not sure what you mean about not being able to handle going out, or who my ilk is (people haven’t had Covid yet?). The selfish part of his statement is this - because he is no longer personally at risk, he no longer supports any measures to protect those who still are. How hard is that to understand?
It is super selfish to except society to continue to cater to the fears of fully vaccinated individuals. If people are scared, they can double mask up, wear protection and go outside or not. It’s not cool to expect society to continue playing this game. Vaccinations were the end of the road.
>he no longer supports any measures to protect those who still are.
Who are we protecting? What measures? Why is he responsible for the health and actions of others? Who exactly is he helping by getting more boosters?
Why is it hard for you to understand that a free society doesn't put the onus on others to keep you or anyone else healthy. You are free to boost the shit out of your system, quadruple mask, and lock down all you want for the end of time. No one will force you to go out. Leave the rest to freedom of individual choice.
> Why is it hard for you to understand that a free society doesn't put the onus on others to keep you or anyone else healthy
Eh? We restrict activities that have negative externalities on the people around you all the time. To name a few: anything that creates pollution, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, even having ridiculously bright headlights in your car.
A disease that you may or may not be infected with, may or may not be spreading, and may or may not exhibit symptoms is FAR outside any of those things you mentioned. You're grasping at straws to push your strange authoritarianism.
Most of those things are restricted when they actually harm people NOT before. You are not restricted from consuming alcohol unless you go out and drink or do something else under the influence. You are not restricted from smoking unless you do it in a place where the smoke cannot be avoided. In this scenario you'd be demanding someone stop smoking while walking towards the smoke.
Lastly, I'm sort of done convincing people like you. I no longer care what you think. I and many others are going to move on with our lives. What are you going to do to stop us?
That’s the most American-possible sentiment, so what’s wrong with it?
In this country we typically don’t care how our actions and policies affect broader society, from NIMBYism to faux-meritocracies to non-universal healthcare.
I really can’t fault anyone for not caring how their actions affect others, it’s been engrained in our culture/laws/policies as long as I’ve been alive.
Let the strongest survive. We do it in every other facet of our lives (well it’s more let the strongest take all and let the weakest suffer for decades).
I’m vaccinated, boosted, and wear masks when needed. I do that for me, not for society. Personally, I’d love 20-40M Americans to kick the bucket with this pandemic, free up housing, decrease the labor supply, lower carbon emissions. Sounds wonderful.
One of the many reasons we had hospitals before covid? I'm not the person you asked but I don't see why it matters what their specific health concern was. There are many reasons to go to a hospital both emergency and not.
I'm just trying to understand, they went to the hospital for a totally unrelated reason to Covid or even suspicion of Covid, and then contracted Covid at the hospital.
Yeah catching a different infection while you're at the hospital for something unrelated was pretty common even before covid. It even has a fancy medical name and everything.
I don't hear much about it these days but a few years ago MRSA was talked about commonly in this context. I think that was the big fear there as well. You go for a minor surgery or whatever and come out with a bone infection you'll never completely shake.
"For more than a year, I did everything that public-health authorities told me to do. I wore masks. I canceled vacations. I made sacrifices. I got vaccinated. I got boosted. I’m happy to get boosted again. But this virus doesn’t stop. Year over year, the infections don’t decrease. Instead, virulence for people like me is decreasing, either because the virus is changing, or because of growing population immunity, or both. Americans should stop pointlessly guilting themselves about all these cases."
Yes, indeed. It's time for people to resume critical thinking regarding this, and not be guided by "lizard brain" level fear responses. The virus has evolved, we've learned more, we know who to protect the most -- time to adapt.
There is also this weird fixation on being the single person who will infect another who for whatever reason is at high risk either due to obesity, not being vaccinated despite being in a high-risk group, etc. As if you're very presence in some public location is going to be the only way another person encounters the virus.
It's just not realistic. Every single person will eventually catch a cold just like every single person will eventually catch the omicron variant or whatever one surfaces next.
This fixation that we, or the government, is capable of isolating human beings in a manner to prevent them from ever being exposed to an endemic virus is utterly absurd.
Does a comment like this actually contribute to anything? I don't want to be mean, but this is a comment that would probably be more appropriate on Reddit or 4chan.
That said, a fatalistic viewpoint is valid enough philosophy, but I am still in the camp of "even if I don't like them very much, the unvaccinated are still humans and we should still try and minimize how many of them get sick."
NOTE: I'm vaccinated and boosted, and wouldn't have a problem getting another booster if the WHO or CDC recommends it.
It's not a fatalistic viewpoint and it does contribute. This disease will always be with us and the sooner we find a way to return to semi-normalcy rahter than osciallting around every time a new variant with different properties shows up, the better.
It really didn't. It reads like something I'd see in a JPG compressed meme you'd see on /r/forwardsFromGrandma.
Are you saying that we shouldn't do anything if we see a new variant?
> This disease will always be with us
That sounds fatalistic to me, at least with the more colloquial use of the word.
To be clear, I don't necessarily think you're wrong. It's a valid viewpoint, and I think it's not unreasonable to say "the sooner we find a way to return to semi-normalcy rahter than osciallting around every time a new variant with different properties shows up, the better."
It contributes in the sense that we comment here to manipulate the opinions of others, and at this point, the best and most important message to communicate is "this isn't going away no matter how much we science it, so we better start planning for the endemic nature".
As for fatalism about a virus- I grew up during HIV/AIDS. It's still here (I went into biology and got a PhD and almost became a professor to work on anti-HIV drugs). Is it fatalistic for us to assume HIV will be with us even though we know how to completely abolish transmission, but people still do things that lead to transmission?
best to be realistic about the future and plan for it than hope vaccines are going to magically solve problems for us.
> As for fatalism about a virus- I grew up during HIV/AIDS. It's still here (I went into biology and got a PhD and almost became a professor to work on anti-HIV drugs). Is it fatalistic for us to assume HIV will be with us even though we know how to completely abolish transmission, but people still do things that lead to transmission?
I don't know anything about the specifics of HIV so I cannot speak to it, but we have eradicated one virus completely (barring some frozen samples in labs): smallpox.
Obviously it's an apples to orange comparison since smallpox isn't nearly as transmissible as COVID, but my point is that I'm sure that there were people in 1900 that said "we will never get rid of smallpox".
yes, that's true, we have eliminated smallpox. I don't think that's in any way some sort of evidence that vaccines are generally successful at eliminating diseases.
I think what we've seen is that there is likely no chance that even 100% vaccination would have permanently eliminated the disease, and total lockdowns aren't super-effective either, given their heavy societal costs.
It's short and curt, but it seems to present some good ideas that can be discussed. If COVID is endemic, then it seems mostly pointless to continue COVID restrictions indefinitely. I've never bought the "we need COVID restrictions to protect unvaccinated people" argument - being vaccinated should protect them enough, and unvaccinated people (who won't be following restrictions) present a much greater threat to each other.
I think the parent comment is relevant to the extent that controlling spread is a consensus problem.
E.g., if I knew that a variant will be endemic unless 90% of a community follows certain practices, but 40% state they won't comply, that matters. If nothing else, it makes it seem pointless for me to bother wearing a mask for others' protection.
I'm fully vax'd and boosted. I'll probably continue to get boosted in the future. All that said? I feel like the government did a really bad job communicating who needs the booster and when.
First, they gave vague recommendations to immunocompromised folks. They said everyone else probably didn't need it. Then they said well, ok for older folks. Then this new omni variant comes out and they're badgering everyone to get boosted NOW or your no longer considered fully vaccinated.
There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start, and did a phased rollout of the booster just like they did with the original vaccine.
Edit: My point is that they knew there was reduced efficacy of the vaccine back in September. They knew the general public would eventually need a vaccine. They should have had a plan to gradually get the population boosted. If they had, most who wanted a booster would have had one before omni existed.
This is effectively a disconnect between science and public policy. Science teaches us to keep our minds open to new data, so we can make new conclusions as we go. People just seem to get pissed when public policy changes in light of new data, lending to the narrative that scientists don't know what they're talking about.
I don't object to policy changes in light of new data, but do object to policy made based on preliminary data, knowing full well that we don't understand everything yet, and then changing every few months or even more often, and just shouting "SCIENCE!" if anyone questions any of it.
What's the alternative to setting policy on preliminary data? Are you proposing something like "government should never react to anything until 12 months have passed since it started happening." So something like COVID just cannot be responded to initially?
It has been nearly two years and government MSHA hasn't mandated anything to specifically change for workers. The inspectors did reduce the small group chats, which I suspect is going to be counter-productive for injury counts in the medium term.
Someone senior in MSHA has big stones for not getting on the safety theater bandwagon like OSHA did.
In an emergent situation, you'll never understand all the data in time. Imagine a loved one that's hurt who calls you for help after a crash. You could spend time trying to figure out their symptoms and their feelings, probing them for more information to make an accurate decision so that you don't have to actually waste the time to go over to them physically. Or you could just go over immediately and potentially waste time when it turns out your loved one would have been just fine without you. Most people choose the latter.
There's a reason emergency services dispatchers have such a stressful job, they're making these decisions all the time based on very limited amounts of data. Unfortunately we're all living in a situation right now where we're making emergency decisions as new information emerges.
> Not me, but you seem to be hooked on fear. May you find some peace in life.
This is an unnecessary insult. You could have left it with "I'm comfortable not treating this as an emergency situation." I'm not sure what you gained from this post. Hopefully you got the performative internet points you were looking for.
People are getting pissed that public policy and messaging is changing WITHOUT new data.
In the past week:
- The CDC director acknowledged and downplayed the severity of omicron by stating the vast majority of hospitalized patients have multiple comorbidities. This has been true since the start of the pandemic, but is only being addressed now.
- CDC and several states are making the distinction between "hospitalized from" and "hospitalized with" COVID. This has also been a point of contention for the past 2 years. For some reason we're changing that now. Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd bet it has to do with the omicron spike making govt. middle manager KPI graphs look bad.
If I've learned anything through this pandemic, it's that people are always much more enraged than I could have imagined. It seems like everyone's looking for something new to focus all their rage onto.
Public policy and science are not the same thing. Public policy has a goal, science doesn't. If your goal were simply "stop human transmission of the virus", well science could help you come to a policy of exterminating all human life - it's scientifically provable that it's the best way to meet that goal.
"Trust the science" is a nonsense term. We're being asked to "Trust the policymakers". Why should we? Ok, so they're informed by science. But if the scientific consensus is obviously in rapid flux and can't be used to predict anything, then why should we trust the policies or their makers?
It's not policy change that is the problem, the problem is that nobody can figure out what the current policy is because the CDC is bad at making announcements.
Furthermore, there is now widespread suspicion that the CDC's current recommendations are not based on science anymore: for example, the 5-day vs 10-day isolation period.
What's especially bad is the advice not to use tests after 5 days, followed a few days later by advice that tests are optional after 5 days -- everyone knows that advice would be different if there were not test shortages. That's not science, that's pragmatism, and that's fine and they ought to just say so, but the CDC continues to make the transparently false claim that their advice is based purely on science.
That really hurts the CDC's credibility -- now, when they make an announcement, we all have to ask ourselves whether it's truly based on science. Smart people of all political stripes now realize this. Even the liberal cable TV talking heads are attacking the CDC over this.
I think that sums it up pretty well: people would be more tolerant of the CDC changing their minds on things if it was clear how they arrived at their decisions in the first place and they say what data they base their decisions on and what the trade-offs are.
People will put up with just about anything if they think there's a good reason for it, but if instructions seem arbitrary then people tend to stop giving officials the benefit of the doubt.
Transparency can go along way towards maintaining public trust. I'd rather the CDC err on the side of over-sharing than the reverse.
> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start
I think it's worth considering a different framing:
> "There would have been so much less confusion if COVID variants and transmission/hospitalization/death rates remained consistent from the start"
It's easy to call out the communication, and don't get me wrong, it surely could have been better. But I often see this sentiment without acknowledging that the communication problems are a symptom, and driven by a very unpredictable situation, and very appropriate changes in policy based on that evolving situation.
Exactly. It’s quite an unfair criticism, and it keeps being applied retroactively to thinks like masking, lockdowns, etc. It’s like people expect a government to have completely knowledge from day 1 of a new virus and all of its mutations across all of time.
Throw in politicization of it, tons of non-mutual “facts” going around, a heap of anecdotes, and you’ve got a communications nightmare.
> It’s like people expect a government to have completely knowledge from day 1 of a new virus and all of its mutations across all of time
No, that's not what is being said. In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment."
Of course there's multiple problems with this: you don't sound on top of things, media will extract the most definitive quote from it anyway, hard to imagine the worst case scenario, etc. But it does seem that most government are messing up the communication badly (either sounding very paternalistic, blaming the citizens, never showing uncertainty despite the situation, changing measures before the previous ones can show an effect, etc.), at least for what I would consider a good, mature way to communicate with citizens. I'm no expert, tho.
Given that you know all the downsides of "wishy washy" communication, as well as the downsides of "overly certain sounding" communication...
isn't the rational thing to do to start ignoring some of the "meta-policy" framing and just treat it as "this is the best idea people have at the time, but I expect it's subject to change."
Truthfully, we should be more open to all sorts of policy changing over time. Every other entity in the world is expected to evolve.
I'm just disappointed by the (as I said in another reply, Italian or Dutch) governments treating people like kids, washing away the complexity and nuances in communication with the public, expecting them not to understand that they don't have all the answers and that decisions might change in light of new (possibly even contrasting) information.
Is that wishy washy, or treating the population as adults? For me it's the latter.
It does, however, assume a certain degree of scientific literacy that is lacking in many people (including politicians?), so maybe that's an answer for why it's not like that.
In the beginning I feel like communication was very much about how they’re learning more and don’t much yet. That was pounced on for its non-information, and the uncertainty was ignored in the great mask debates in early 2020.
I don’t think you can be wishy washy, and the lack of respect for science and science education in the US certainly doesn’t help.
I like to say "I believe in science".
However, what I've seen in the last 2 years is only science by name and by fiat.
We've been fed wrong information after wrong information "for our own good", which has caused the population to lose confidence as the article perfectly explains.
This is terrible, as trust and confidence take a long time to build. Now we have a wonderful new technology (mRNA vaccine) that could be helpful against many ailments, but that the population has learned to fear.
The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first, how hands washing was so important... for airborne virus (!!!): because air filtration was too expansive, how the old vaccine is so important against omicron: because they haven't adapted the vaccine so hey let's give a 3rd, a 4th shot and so on, sending people known to have covid in retirement homes full of vulnerable people: because they hadn't built adequate facilities...)
I believe in science, but I can hardly blame people who now subscribe to weird ideas: in their defense, they have noticed some of the lies so in a Bayesian setting they have adjusted their priors: by default they now distrust every official message, and unfortunately for them they may not have the proper scientific knowledge to better adapt their probability distributions.
I seriously hope there will be official inquiries about a level of mismanagement that borders criminal negligence, and that will have cost human lives.
The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first
This isn't what the government said. The government said that masks were inefficient at preventing the wearing from contracting Covid, which is true to this day. They didn't want people to hoard masks at everyone else's expense, especially healthcare workers.
Two things to note: I'm not in the US, so my comments are based on the communication standards of IT and NL, which I follow more closely.
While in NL the scientific advice and communication has been simply ridiculous (mandatory masks introduced at the end of last year, with still the idea that "science doesn't know if they work, but we are gonna make them mandatory" from the government, and "we're against that, they don't work" from the head of the CDC-equivalent), in Italy it does contain the cautious wording that I advocate for.
However, this is the official communication that is written in "legalese" and not passed through the people by means of interviews and press releases. The media of course bears a lot of responsibility for the dilution of the message, chasing scoops and making headlines that leave no space for doubt; but the communication of the government to the public ends up using similar headlines, which I see as the problem in this case.
>In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment.
Could have? Yes. Should have? $20 says 90% of the population simply ignore communication worded this way, and that "GET BOOSTER NOW, YES YOU" is more effective.
> For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options
Oh no no no.
This is probably the absolute worst possible wording. Any time a government agency has had to chance their stance on something, they get accused of lying.
They have to be careful with how to present preliminary information. If they state anything "may" be true, then news outlets will treat it as true, and then hells breaks loose when they discover it was wrong.
Of course, if they wait until they're absolutely certain of something, then until then, they get accused of incompetence and of doing nothing, while some news outlets just make up bullshit.
I agree overall, but I do think the CDC should’ve known better with masking, at least not to discourage it like they did originally in spite of lots of experience in Asia.
Discouraging is one thing, but they discouraged with a false made up reason (masks don't work). Supposedly their real motivations were: if we say to use masks, then people will just distance less and spread more; and healthcare workers need the masks that do work right now. It would have been better if they simply admitted the true reasons at the time.
Remember that in the beginning there was an enormous shortfall of the masks that were known to be effective in preventing respiratory disease. The CDC (and others) were very worried about medical personnel not being able to get them, very justifiably in hindsight. Just imagine how much worse the (already bad) panic buying of masks would have made it if the CDC had told everyone to mask up.
We absolutely did not know that cloth masks would help. We (incorrectly) thought that anything less than a N95 mask would not help at all, and so that is what was communicated. Since then we have done a lot of science and have learned that while N95 masks are a lot better than, say, double-layered cloth masks, the latter are still much better than nothing in slowing down infection rates.
We also were very focused on the effects for the wearer of masks. We were not focused on the effects of a possible spreader wearing the masks. Part of this was that all of the previous pandemics had diseases that people were symptomatic when they spread the disease. With Covid-19 we have a disease the mostly spreads when people are a-symptomatic. So the potential spreaders are the ones who most need to be wearing masks, and since we can't tell them apart, we need everyone in masks.
All of these things are things we learned along the way. Harping on the CDC (or others) for not knowing them is just wrong. For some of the references here please see:
No, it's absolutely right to harp on the CDC for this. If you intentionally tell a lie to people in order to manipulate them into doing something for what you think is the greater good, you set your own reputation on fire. The truth about what you did will come out, and for everything you say from that point on to pretty much a generation of people, everyone will constantly second-guess whether you are once again telling a lie to serve what you might think is some greater good. Getting a semblance of that reputation back is a slow and painful process.
Haven't the horrors of history given enough examples? The ends do not justify the means. Lies like this have most definitely already backfired hard. Anyone who thinks they are some special elite who is entitled to lie to the public for the greater good is wrong, evil, and unfit to hold any sort of power.
The problem is that if you communicate to the public at the level of normal scientific certainty -- with all the methodological and statistical caveats -- it's very hard to generate the moral authority needed to push sweeping mandates on a population.
Political and scientific leaders knew this, and they made a decision to exaggerate the level of confidence they had or should have had in several of these matters. No one seriously expected leadership to have complete knowledge from day 1, but that's not the criticism. Nor is the criticism that facts change on the ground in fast-moving situations. Of course they do.
The criticism is that they knowingly overstated their factual case at the time so that they could implement their chosen strategies, even to the point of suppressing legitimate scientific dissent, and are now unconvincingly trying to use "facts on the ground change", "science learns over time", and "of course we couldn't have been expected to know everything" as excuses for those decisions.
If you're making very confident policy-guiding assertions to the public on behalf of Science (TM), and when you're right, it's evidence of how great Science is, and when you're wrong, it's because Science is a process of continual revision and uncertain information, that creates a bit of moral hazard. It works internally in science, where there are no consequences for being wrong other than wasted time, but not in the real world where there are real consequences for being wrong.
The impossibility of this is embedded in your opening paragraph.
> during unpredictable situations
Unpredictable: adjective - "not able to be predicted"
> it makes it MORE important to be consistent in communication
Consistent: adjective - "unchanging in nature, standard, or effect over time"
If you wish to deliver a message that is accurate during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and remain consistent without starting to misrepresent the truth.
If you wish to deliver a message that is consistent during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and deliver current/accurate information.
In essence, your options are:
1. Be accurate/informative, but the message will change as the situation changes.
2. Be consistent, but the message either a) cannot contain any meaningful guidance or b) will be wrong
it all depends on what particular detail wasn't able to be predicted. in this case the need for boosters.
we knew by late june boosters would be needed. so all messaging after june should have been consistent. it wasnt.
what wasn't predictable was when precisely we needed to issue boosters and to whom. because we simply didn't have the data on that until around september. However since september it was very predictable that we needed them for the holiday season. I got mine in early november because it was fucking obvious. omicron wasn't 100% assured but it was in the news and most sound bites were 'more contagious'.
its entirely possible to be consistent in the face on unpredictable events.
1. outright say 'we don't currently have the information needed yet check back later' or 'worst case scenario would be X, we're going to start with those assumptions'
2. repeat step 1 until you have the data or know you never will
3. once data is acquired adjust statements.
this is being consistent and clear. another example of this is masking and viral spread.
1. assume worst case for viral spread (airborne)
2. message masks are necessary until more is known about how the virus spreads.
3. if results come back disproving airborne spread, say so.
instead we got:
1. masks not necessary. virus doesn't seem to be airborne.
2. OOPS VIRUS IS AIRBORNE.
the first case is consistent, assume worst case and then ease restrictions.
the 2nd case is completely inconsistent.
It's also true that most governments have not been very clear about what they actually wanted to achieve or perhaps more accurately have changed the goals over time. There's a big difference between eliminating COVID vs coping, for example.
Temporary local eradication was an option for a while, before delta: see Australia and New Zealand.
However these countries were always going to have to open up and accept the virus eventually as it became endemic in the rest of the world. They were just delaying the inevitable. As it happened, the evolution of the virus made the decision for them. However if Delta had not happened they would still have had to make the decision to open up at some point, probably after a significant proportion of the population was vaccinated.
Not necessarily; the first few carriers don't seem to have successfully seeded outbreaks, in general it takes a few attempts to get a disease like Covid established, and almost all countries seem to have stopped it spreading directly from China including closely-linked ones like Taiwan but also places like the UK and US. As far as I can tell something just went really badly wrong in Italy that no-one is interesting in examining too closely, and when this spread Covid to other countries it was spun as proof the other countries had screwed up and failed.
It's easy to blame changing science. Science always changes.
But let me ask you this. Are we going to need a fourth shot / second booster in 2022? I'd say it's almost certain. Find me a public health authority who is saying this in the United States. I can't.
There's some legitimately changing facts. But there's also nonsense, like health officials saying masks don't help with a respiratory disease, that has nothing to do with changing facts.
The government said, at first, that nobody needed to go out and buy masks, because they won't do any good. And then the government said you had to wear a mask or you couldn't enter into buildings.
Now, the reasoning for the former was that they were concerned about PPE supplies, but that doesn't change the fact they reversed themselves very shortly, and expected people to forget the earlier messaging.
The government didn't need to be an oracle with a perfect track record, but I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that they should have been honest. If you can't see how the pandemic was used for political purposes, I don't know what to say.
It is the they don't do any good communication that is irresponsible. There was already evidence otherwise that they ignored, and the rest of the statement was based on zero evidence.
This was the medical community's censuses at the time. Turns out now we know that this hinged on a few misunderstandings and generalizations, and have turned that corner. But at the time it was the best information we had:
Everyone thought that covid spread via touch back then. remember all the hand sanitizer and UV lights? then we learned that it was mostly airborne
This goes back to the comment you replied to. The government can't give perfect hindsight advice at the beginning of any situation. it seems like your complaint here is "science isn't perfect"
I think you are reading way more into my response than I wrote. I literally rephrased a position specifically about the government's communication of booster shots in the form of a question highlighting the illogical portion of the position.
* I have not made and continue to not make any statements regarding mask communication, nor about reports on reasoning for that.
* I am not engaging in nor countering absurd conspiracy theories
* I am not broadcasting my feelings and thoughts on political purposes and what I do or do not see to you, so I don't know why you think you are capable of surmising what I can and cannot see.
* I do find hilarious how very angry you are that I pointed a logical inconsistency.
Your response inferred something from the OP that was clearly never implied. Nobody expects perfect knowledge of the future, and suggesting the OP was asking for that is (charitably) a snarky way of pointing out a logical inconsistency.
But pointing out the the messaging from the government has been, at best, muddled--and at worst, misleading, if not downright dishonest--you interpret as "anger"? I find that pretty disingenuous. You are again inferring that which is not implied.
Nope. The government knew the vaccines were getting less effective back in september. They knew everyone would eventually need a booster. If they had put in a plan to get that done, I wouldn't have had a problem.
As things stood? The CDC basically said 'you should get a booster only if you're high risk'. They went back and forth over whether to recommend it to the general public for the longest time. This lead to a lot of confusion, and a lot of folks essentially shrugged and went on with their life. If they had been consistent with messaging a much higher percentage of the population would currently be boosted.
I'd appreciate if the government could just predict the future as well as hacker news. It doesn't need to be perfect. Look, they're gonna tell us to get booster again in 2022. I know it. You probably know it. Everybody knows it. Why haven't the CDC said it?
> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start.
While that's true, I don't think it's reasonable unless, like a sibling suggested, the disease would be consistent from the start.
What would be nice is if they contemplated and acknowledged that the recommendations would be changing. Rather than saying 'others don't need a booster', they should be saying 'at this time, based on current understanding, etc, others don't need a booster'. In some situations, they can probably suggest what conditions might cause a change in recommendations.
> What would be nice is if they contemplated and acknowledged that the recommendations would be changing.
But they do. E.g. go through https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000000*/https://www.cdc...., it's always wrapped in "We are monitoring the situation. High-risk populations first. Recommendations will be adjusted as needed." disclaimers. But we have a strong tendency to only remember the short head-line version, even if we looked at the full statement at the time. And if you go by headlines or equivalent short news, it's likely you haven't seen the disclaimer, but good luck getting the details into headlines. It's a pattern that repeats over and over in discussions of this.
I'll wait until the booster actually becomes specific to the current strain. Ideally I'd also like the vaccine to not make me sick for 2 days, since most other common vaccines don't (e.g. influenza). But maybe that's just not possible.
Not having increased risk of heart inflammation and rare dangerous thromboses would be nice too, but then again it seems like Covid causes those anyway. So maybe we just need to update our base rates for those conditions and move on from the way things used to be.
Plus, if I can still spread Covid and make grandma critically ill even after I have the booster, whereas I'm at super low risk for serious illness, is the booster even doing anything to reduce hospital utilization?
I had what I think was omicron, and it seems like I don't really need a booster on top of it... or do I?
The point is that I have no idea what the right thing to do is.
I feel like there's no public health response in the USA anymore. The President is just telling people to f*cking "Google it", everyone seems to be either a paranoid wacko anti-vax Covid denier Bill-Gates-is-coming-for-your-body-fluids-and-children cultist or a "trust the science" cultist, and the big pharma companies (Pfizer, Moderna) seem to be just raking it in hand over fist with all these vaccine doses.
Seems like everyone has to brush up on their statistics and start reading the research, because the news and government agencies just aren't worth a damn anymore when it comes to communicating. It seems that the Trump legacy of "abject societal dysfunction" is here to stay.
That's fine but the booster has shown that it likely incurs much longer term stability to immune resistance to all current strains that we know about, including omicron. If you look up the history of vaccinations you will see similar results and why some are carefully spaced apart at certain intervals as they train the human immune system
> I'll wait until the booster actually becomes specific to the current strain.
By the time the Omicron-specific vaccines are approved by the various government health bureaucracies, Omicron will have run its course. Unless you want to live like a hermit for the next few months, it's probably best to get a booster and live your life. All of my friends & acquaintances who've contracted omicron have had a booster shot and all of them said that the worst part was isolating. Their symptoms were extremely mild- just a sore throat or cough for a few days.
It would be nice if one could choose a lower dose of vaccine. The second shot (and booster) of Pfizer were absolutely brutal for me. A baby aspirin version of the vaccine would provide most of the protection without the days of debilitating pain and fever. When I got my booster I asked the guy giving the shot if he could inject a partial dose because my previous reaction was so bad. He just laughed, emptied the syringe into my arm, and told me to drink lots of water. :(
Consistent messaging from the start in a situation where information and knowledge is very limited in the start = not learning.
The problem here is that we have a lot of internalization of changing your mind is bad in the political arena. "Flip flopping," etc. Inquiry is discouraged.
The article is actually much more interesting because it's about how views are changing differently for different groups even inside the same partisan grouping. It shows that conversation and messaging is an ongoing thing.
Changing your mind because of new evidence is good. Changing your mind because the evidence is pretty much the same, but the previous conclusion has become inconvenient for you, is not good.
the bigger problem is that their initial selling point for the vaccine was "get your 2 shots and everything goes back to normal". Many people grudgingly got it despite some hesitancy and now have even less trust of the government now that the goal posts are shifting yet again
If enough people had got their shots worldwide that would have worked. However enough is at least 80% of the world population, and maybe as much as 95%. There wasn't enough supply in the world. If the 95% number is correct kids young enough still are not approved to reach that, mutations keep making the number higher, though we might need to get a new vaccine that covers new variants.
>If enough people had got their shots worldwide that would have worked.
One of the theories on the origin of omicron seems to be that it evolved in animals for a while before jumping back to humans (the weirdness being that it's not evolved from Delta, and it has a number of mutations all at once). [1]
And even if it's not the origin of this variant, it could easily be the origin of a future variant (that's why they're considering it).
And it's quite unlikely we could vaccinate every animal on the planet, so this idea that if we had just gotten all our shots this variant would have never happened is pretty ridiculous.
I don't think that's a realistic expectation. If millions of people have a highly infectious disease, then it's very likely to spread to any wildlife (that aren't naturally immune) in the same general area as those infected humans. By the time the vaccines were available, Covid was basically everywhere.
With the Alpha variation of the virus that would have been good enough. The study numbers showed someone vaccinated and exposed to Alpha had such a low risk of spread that even while fighting off the virus they were still safe 'enough' to be around.
If we had gotten 80% (some magic number between 70% and 95% I pulled out of nothing) of the US adult population vaccinated, and quarantine locked down the borders we could have snuffed covid out and been in a bubble paradise like New Zealand managed to do with just hard and long enough quarantines.
We didn't get there, and Delta and Omicron did get to us; two variations that are each insanely more viriliant and spread despite the vaccinations which are now only good enough to prevent serious infection and death most of the time.
In my adult lifetime I have legally crossed a northern border by car; they checked ID on the way back. Canada mostly only cared that I had sufficient ID to go back home. In both cases there was a controlled crossing that law abiding citizens used. During much of the pandemic that crossing was closed (mutually).
Yes, physical borders are long stretches that are difficult to secure, and I have seen the TV footage. Doesn't mean that a policy can't be _sufficiently_ effective to make a difference.
Also, reflexively speaking of borders; effective policies probably involve a mix of carrot and stick. The carrot being a legal path to do what people are going to do anyway, but in ways that are documented and regulated. Exact details of either side of that are far, far off topic in this thread.
It COULD have been "get your 2 shots and everything goes back to normal", but vaccine adoption stalled at about 60%. That's not nearly high enough.
The virus stuck around and we got Delta, and now Omicron.
And we're STILL at less than 70% vaccinated. I don't know what's required for herd immunity, but it doesn't take a Ph.D in virology to know that 70% isn't it.
It doesn't take a Ph. D in virology to know that 100% isn't it either, now that omicron is in the picture.
So I'm not sure what the intended end game of the people trying to limit the spread is. "Flatten the peak so hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed" may or may not be realistic, but at least it's a coherent goal. "Keep vaccinating and closing things until COVID goes to zero on its own" just seems like denying the reality that COVID is endemic at this point, so any non-acute mitigation measures we want to take now had better be mitigation measures we're willing to keep taking forever.
To a certain extent, I blame the use of the term "reaching herd immunity" instead of "reaching an endemic state" for giving people unrealistic expectations.
> Keep vaccinating and closing things until COVID goes to zero on its own" just seems like denying the reality that COVID is endemic at this point
At this point, yes.
But last year? In Spring and early summer? Look at COVID cases compared to vaccination rates. Case counts were dropping fast, but then vaccination stalled. A couple months later, Delta began ripping through and we got our second wave.
I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.
I'm undecided if we should still continue masking and any restrictions at this point. I want to say "Fuck it. Everyone who wants a vax can get one, if you don't, I will have zero pity if you get infected.", but the fact is, ICU's are still being overrun.
> I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.
It would not have made a difference.
Singapore, Israel and a large chunk of Western Europe had very high vaccination rates before they got pummled by a Delta wave.
And for anyone wondering if boosters are enough to quell Omicron: Israel is the perfect case study as they're currently being pummled by Omicron after having finished their booster campaign (they're onto their 4th dose now).
Are lockdowns the answer to Omicron? Well the Netherlands went into a preemptive lockdown several weeks BEFORE Omicron took off and I think their case trajectory paints a very clear picture now that Omicron has taken off (they are still in lockdown).
To me, it looks like the vaccine's efficiency in terms of reducing transmission wanes after 3-5 months and it's quite clear when you look at the different waves countries are experiencing around the world.
> I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.
All omicron cases in the US can be traced back to infections from outside of the country. Getting 95% of eligible people vaccinated and getting cases within the country to zero prior to omicron being introduced would have been nice, but that alone would not have stopped the current omicron wave. We'd be in a somewhat better place now, but since a significant factor in hospitals being under load now is vaccinated medical personnel being out with covid, we'd still have a hospital load problem.
I can see maybe some justification in instituting restrictions to try to flatten the peak of the omicron wave, until such a time as case numbers start to decrease again. But such restrictions, if put in place, should be done with the understanding that all we're doing is shifting infections in time, not changing the total number of infections.
> I want to say "Fuck it. Everyone who wants a vax can get one, if you don't, I will have zero pity if you get infected.", but the fact is, ICU's are still being overrun.
This is basically where I'm at, except at this point it doesn't seem like there's any coherent idea of when the inevitable infections that occur won't overrun ICUs, and I don't particularly think it's worse to have ICUs overrun for a few weeks right now than it is to have ICUs overrun for a few weeks a month from now.
'I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.'
Do you understand it crosses between humans and animals such as deer and even house cats? You can sincerely believe in the Easter Bunny along with sincerely believing all animals can be vaccinated on approximately the same week, but sincerely believing in something does not make it possible.
In the U.S. it's mostly kids that aren't vaccinated at this point. Among people over 18 years of age, 73.3% have at least 2 doses and 86.4% have at least 1 according to the CDC. Two shots and a booster is obviously better, but the number of adults that haven't been vaccinated at all and haven't gotten Covid at least once is dwindling.
Covid seemed to be on track to have be almost entirely wiped out in the U.S. until Delta and Omicron came along, and now it's not clear that even 100% vaccination rates would be enough.
> Then this new omni variant comes out and they're badgering everyone to get boosted NOW or your no longer considered fully vaccinated.
Currently the CDC still considers someone fully vaccinated after the two dose series. As far as I can tell there aren't any booster requirements at the national level.
> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start, and did a phased rollout of the booster just like they did with the original vaccine.
The problem is: science is continuous discovery of and adaptation to new facts. In a society where significant amounts of the population have such a low respect for science that they seriously believe that Earth was created by God 6000 years ago, it is obvious that these people literally cannot grasp or cope with the fact that new discoveries come in timespans of single-digit weeks... Omicron was discovered at the end of November, barely a month later cases worldwide reached Delta records and now they went through the roofs.
I agree that there have been communication fuck-ups by politicians and the media, but basic science education in schools (and scientist staff in mass media) would have lessened the impact dramatically.
> There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start, and did a phased rollout of the booster just like they did with the original vaccine.
Biden called for a booster dose for everyone in September. The CDC and the FDA didn't agree.
I think the CDC did as good as you could when you design by committee. I didn't have any trouble following their recommendations or logic. It was an ongoing problem with incomplete knowledge on their part. It's certainly better than what Fox News was spewing. Science is ugly, but it is self-correcting, Fox and antivax people are not. At least that's how I see it.
Because when the recommendations change, it's usually a "we were wrong all along" change, not a "the recommendations were right before, but now circumstances have changed" change.
I think a lot of this depends on the typical severity of Omicron (and future variants).
I'm vaccinated and boosted. I wear a mask in public. I don't go out much. I do travel fairly regularly (fly maybe 1-2x per month). I finally got Covid last week, likely on a flight. I had ~3 days of mild cold-like symptoms (sore throat, runny nose, congestion, very low grade fever that approached 101F). It was far less severe than any flu I've ever had. I extended my trip by a week to meet how I read the CDC guidelines (which are clear as mud for mildy symptomatic cases).
If the severity for everyone was that mild, then I'd say we're done. However, I worry about the unvaccinated and the unboosted. I wish there was better data on the severity of Omicron for different categories of people.
I personally worry about the availability of medical services due to attrition among medical staff and ICU load due to the unvaccinated. I also have taken precautions, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t get into a car crash or suffer a random medical incident requiring urgent care.
Yes, attrition of hospital staff is terrible. I was hospitalized last fall for a non-covid issue, and a volunteer came into the room who was a retired nurse. She told me that the current patient loads for nurses are about 2x what they were pre-covid. I checked on the nurses salaries (via job ads), and they honestly did not seem terrible competitive.
Exactly - Delta had a reputation for being both prolific and extremely virulent. Long COVID, loss of smell & taste, heart and lung problems, etc. A terrible illness.
Omicron seems to carry far fewer of those risks from what data we have, especially if you are vaccinated.
My hope is that we're approaching a similar point the Spanish Flu did after this amount of time: Spanish Flu eventually lost its lethality and became symptomatically indistinguishable from your run of the mill flu, and hopefully COVID will eventually do the same and be symptomatically indistinguishable from your run of the mill cold. Obviously we ain't there quite yet, but with Omicron being both wider-spreading and more mild, hopefully we'll get there soon.
Interesting. Here in the UK, Delta wasn't too much of a concern. I suspect because the public messaging was much more focused on getting everyone vaccinated.
This is anecdotal, but I'm the only one in my family who is vaccinated (which took me catching swine flu years ago to convince me), but my elderly mom and younger brother and sister had omicron and all had the same symptoms while be unvaccinated.
I was in the house but didn't catch omicron due to the vaccine (I guess?).
Yup, I took a test every other day until 5 days after. This was in GA where there is plenty of vaccine and tests to go around due to non-compliance (I guess?)
If Omicron is as mild as it initially appeared, we're back to normal by summer 2022. My wild assed guess is that if death rates don't spike by February it will be increasingly difficult for the government and health officials to justify a continuation of current recommendations.
I am triple vaxxed and will happily wear a mask for the rest of my life, but we are in the midst of a slow moving train of economic turmoil brought about by COVID and the resulting decisions(which I'm not arguing with. some were stupid but hindsight is 20/20). We will soon need to get the world back to as normal of a state as we can because we will need the economic benefits. We will need to get our kids back in school and socializing. I know many people are scarred and will not want to emerge from their caves but without compelling justification(such as a new variant which is actually dangerous) we will return to normal soon.
I think the message of "vaxxed and done" is the right way for us to be moving, but I think it's incomplete.
To get vaxxed insulates you from the risk of severe disease. It reduces the risk to the point that going out and living life is an acceptable risk, just like any other. However, it doesn't protect you from infecting others. To that end, I think that indoor mask mandates continue to be justifiable and should continue until we either evolve a COVID-19 variant weak enough that moderate disease isn't disruptive, or it fades away.
In order for us to continue to have freedom, it requires collective sacrifice. We have seen a large swath of the US population unwilling to make relatively simple sacrifices to ensure that we have freedom of mobility. This is disappointing to see.
I would agree with this but add continuous testing to the mix, and actually quarantining if you have a positive test but no symptoms. It seems like the most reasonable comprimise between the individual desire to return to normal.
Unfortunately this is a large individual responsibility, both in behavior and in the costs of getting enough tests. PCR tests are mostly impractical for continuous testing while going out and about becuase of the large time lag between testing and results, made worse by spiking demand and limited lab capacity, and buying rapid tests can add up as a real cost to the average family.
I agree with the continuous testing requirement, too. I’m lucky enough to live in Colorado with an at-home test kit program. I’ve been able to regularly test about once a week, or more frequently if I have clinical symptoms.
We need a program like that on a national scale. I know countries like the UK are doing really well with at-home testing programs, but here in the US, we’re still experiencing both PCR and rapid test shortages. We shouldn’t be seeing this so far into a pandemic.
Fully agree on the individual responsibility to quarantine regardless of clinical symptoms, too. There’s been a huge failing, this entire pandemic, at the individual level. It’s why the lockdowns were marginally effective — folks didn’t stay at home like they were asked to. It’s another symptom of a lack of collective sacrifice for the greater good.
That's not true of the immunocompromised, the rare few who actually couldn't get the fully vaccine because of a reaction to the first dose, the elderly and others with co-morbidities they might not even know about. Those people, along with the unvaccinated, are still going to overwhelm the hospitals if everyone doesn't attempt to limit the spread with measures like masking and testing.
Why should everyone in society be forced to bend over backwards to accommodate elderly people or those with comorbidities who decide to go out in public?
COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of something like 0.20%. Let's move on from these draconian restrictions and get back to reality. The flu has been overwhelming hospitals since before COVID [1], governments and hospital systems have had 2+ years to deal with the supply-side of the healthcare equation here, at this point if they still haven't figured it out it's on them.
I'm not saying we should lock everything down and stop going outside. I am saying COVID is still infectious and lethal enough to warrant small countermeasures like encouraging masking indoors and regular testing / quarantine if you have it to limit the spread. These are small, proportional measures to the danger I think.
Flu is also dangerous to these people but we never wore masks. This is an edge case and it is the responsibility of these people to protect themselves.
This is significantly more dangerous to significantly more people than the flu so the extra masking / testing is warranted for the time being. That being said, this is probably where we will end up, with a milder and endemic COVID that we treat like the flu.
If they are eligible for vaccination and choose to refuse it, that's one thing. But there are people who cannot be vaccinated, and I still worry about how my actions might affect them.
Anybody except the elderly - a responsibly vaccinated septuagenarian or octogenarian has a very different, much worse risk profile compared to a responsibly vaccinated young adult. This group is about 3 out of every 100 people.
And anybody except the immunocompromised - you probably know at least a couple older family members, but may not immediately think of anyone immunocompromised, but again they're around 3% of the population. It includes those suffering from or using immunosuppressive drugs to manage type 1 diabetes, HIV, arthritis, cancer, organ transplants, lupus, IBD, and many other conditions.
Even before the vaccine, I - a 30 year old in good health - had what I personally consider to be an acceptable risk profile to contracting the vaccine. For me, it's never seemed an issue of personal safety, I've always been deferring plans, wearing a mask, isolating, been vaccinated, and been boosted to protect others. There are a few faces of elderly and immunocompromised people in my life that I can recall to help my emotional processing.
But it's becoming harder to run the emotionally-loaded math and feel morally culpable for the harm caused by my potentially transmitting it to the three of my coworkers who are vocally, rabidly antivax (all 60+, two with comorbidities) and then worry about their transmitting it to their unknown peers I'm sure they associate with who may be vaccinated but might be harmed.
Personally I'm completely sick of mask mandates. First off the effectiveness of masks is even questionable except for k95 masks, which are hideously uncomfortable and look ridiculous.
In any case, I firmly believe that people should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want to wear them. I was in Copenhagen a few months ago where no one was wearing masks anywhere including indoors, and it was so refreshing seeing life as usual again, smiles on peoples' faces, etc.
I've been wearing KN95 at every outing for the past year+ and .. uhh.. it's not a problem at all. Why wouldn't I wear a mask like that to protect myself and others? The useless cloth and surgical masks are no more comfortable. Personally I bought a massive box of KN95 and give packages of them to family and friends so they can similarly stay safe.
I disagree with this language of "collective" sacrifice. A group can't sacrifice or suffer. Only individuals can sacrifice and suffer. Lockdowns are a sacrifice paid strictly by individuals.
Call me crazy, but I thoroughly enjoy the unrestricted flow of oxygen into my mouth during inhalation and the unrestricted flow of carbon dioxide out of my mouth during exhalation.
I wonder if sociologists can explain the americans obsession with politics in everything. This is not normal, there seems to be something exceptional about how it is normalized to discuss natural phenomena with political lingo
Because anything with two sides can be advantageously leveraged if it correlates with political alignment. An apolitical question is an opportunity to create and align a political question.
I'm vaxxed and mostly done. Already contracted Covid, have 2 vaccines, I'm down to get a booster every year or two, at my own leisure. Having vaccines mandated every 6 months is not something I'm OK with and to be honest, it feels a lot like the government trying to deflect from the fact healthcare isn't OK (at least in my home country, Canada).
There's always been risks to life and this feels more like governments are trying to convince people the risk should be zero so they can be the heroes while at the same time expanding their powers...
Early on in the pandemic, I used to be in the camp that wanted mask mandates and vaccination passports. I see how dangerous and ineffective this is now. Governments are not good stewards.
The virus will keep evolving to evade our vaccines. This is never going to end. We will never eradicate Covid, and we'll never reach vaccine-mediated herd immunity.
The administration forcing a purge of unvaccinated US soldiers, government workers, and employees of companies that do business with the government is obscene. Not only is this government overreach, it's a political witch hunt. It's disemboweling of dissent from the ranks, which is chiefly undemocratic and un-American.
I'm so angry at how this has been handled by both the Trump and the Biden administrations. Give people tools and understandable science (which Trump botched), but stop trying to become Big Brother (which is what Biden is doing). And above all, stop turning this into a political matter that toys with people's safety and employment.
> The administration forcing a purge of unvaccinated US soldiers, government workers, and employees of companies that do business with the government is obscene.
The one that seems odd in this list is soldiers. It's my understanding that soldiers already were mandated vaccines when put into areas where the particular diseases were common. I'm not sure why mandating covid vaccines for them during a global pandemic is different.
Maybe there's context I'm missing, but when I first read about the backlash I was confused.
Not even solely "when put into areas where the particular diseases were common", the soldiers are mandated quite a few vaccines even before they leave basic training to everyone, no questions asked - https://usarmybasic.com/about-the-army/army-shots
Yeah people like you who spread this myth is how we nearly had an insurrection here a year ago. Stop it. At the moment there is only one party working actively to dismantle democracy itself. Don't vote for it.
lol, we did not have an insurrection a year go. Stop spreading that myth. The FBI has found no evidence of an insurrection, no one has been charged much less convicted of insurrection. It was a "mostly peaceful" protest... and no one there was attempting to over throw the US government.
Labeling it an insurrection is political non-sense that further serves to divide the nation, and is the real act of "dismantling democracy"
>>At the moment there is only one party working actively to dismantle democracy itself
Ahh Yes, Voter ID... I need to show my ID and Proof of vaccination to eat but showing ID to vote is threat to democracy. Spare me
The military has required vaccinations for decades, it is an operational hazard for them. In 1950 you would get booted for refusing your vaccines too. This would have happened Biden or not.
Blaming the government for overreach when it seemed likely that the vaccine prevented further spread makes no sense, and certainly masks and distancing made total sense before the vaccine was fully rolled out. It seems awfully early to conclude that vaccines have zero impact on transmissibility. How many millions of cases are completely unreported because the immune system (with help from the vaccine) fought off Covid before symptoms onset?
At some point we should (not) start charting and obsessively reporting all the other endemic viruses. I’m curious how anxiety inducing they are compared to Covid
I'm also curious. For the last several years some kind of enterovirus has been paralyzing hundreds of children in the US. Articles get written once in awhile, but no one ever talks about it. Yet COVID shuts down schools.
Are you asking because you work in a gain of function lab :D? It's going to be hard for a virus to come from nature that can spread like the Flu and be as deadly as Ebola. The biggest societal threat besides a meteor or nuclear war is gain of function.
> The biggest societal threat besides a meteor or nuclear war is gain of function.
Nah, internal conflict is a bigger threat than even a meteor or nuclear war. A civil war happened once in the US, it could happen again. If not a civil war, a complete governmental collapse. All you have to do is keep polarizing and polarizing the sides to further and further extremes and eventually reap the consequences when the government collapses.
I guess maybe I mean human race threatening? Civil war isn't going to wipe humans out completely I suppose.
To answer the parents question though what does it take, well of course if people are seeing their neighbors bleed out of their eyes everyone is going to sign up for vaccines even if the vaccine could possibly kill you.
Tangentially, I recently moved to Canada and was surprised by the lack of quality healthcare..
Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.
Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
(And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess).
In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
Honestly? I don't want the medical system to be "modernized". The advantage of paper files is it's much harder for a security breach at a single facility to lead to everyone's records being leaked to every bad actor out there.
"Modern" industries like social media tend to leak personal information like a sieve.
I'm Canadian, east coast. Our Health Care system is garbage and a lot of people end up going to private hospitals because the public sector can't handle the load, even pre-covid.
People have repeatedly died waiting in hospital halls waiting for care that never came.
Our healthcare system has almost nothing to be taken example of
A friend got a head injury (kid kicked her on the ear pretty hard) and had to wait about 5 hours in the ER before they could see her, they sent her home saying it would be nothing bad. Two days later she went back and they concluded she had a concussion..
A man recently died of a heart attack in my local ER’s waiting room 10 minutes after showing up complaining about heart pain. The only reason he died is they didn’t have enough staff on hand. This was a couple of months ago, in the US. A few nurses walked out crying and never came back when it happened. My sister used to work at the hospital as a nurse and she quit because of similar things that were a regular occurrence. It’s all about saving money. “Just In Time” healthcare.
Is there really a "Canadian health care system"? I feel like it heavily differs between provinces/territories. It also depends on whether where on the spectrum from urban to rural you live, don't you think?
Well... not really paper files. As of a few years ago, it was mandated that provides maintain digital records. They could still send paper, but most seem to use disc and myChart stuff. And yes, fax is still prevalent as well (mostly legal compliance reasons in my opinion).
I can see any specialist (almost any GP) and they'll get limited time access to my entire patient history. I don't have to worry of getting a second opinion from someone who "doesn't have my history".
Plus, I get insight into this data myself through an app (or web platform), where I can view the scans and take them to someone outside of the network if I want to.
Pharmacies will also start sharing data, so a GP can enter the data in a system which any Pharmacy can then enter (with your electronic ID), so no need for paper subscriptions either.
I guess I’ll provide a counterpoint that I have been incredibly impressed with the quality of Canadian healthcare after my sister had kidney failure, was on dialysis for a year, then received a timely transplant from me and neither of us paid a dime. This was in Manitoba. She still has to pay for her medication, though - hopefully pharmacare passes in the near future.
Meanwhile down here in the US I was charged $150 after going to an urgent care clinic for strep throat. They couldn’t tell me how much it would cost ahead of time.
Also, due to a temporary billing error in the Manitoba hospital (everything was supposed to be charged to my sister's insurance, but some things weren't by mistake) the hospital's billing department half-assedly pursued me for payment for a renal ultrasound. The bill was fifteen (Canadian) dollars.
> Meanwhile down here in the US I was charged $150 after going to an urgent care clinic for strep throat.
To be honest, I don't think it is unreasonable to pay $150 for a nurse's/doctor's time to examine you. I've gone to urgent care and the ER a few times, and they're always filled with people who are there for non-issues. If it was totally free, you'd have them filled with people with things that should really just be handled by a regular doctor's appointment.
Hell, my local hospital had to make a public statement for people to stop going to the ER just to get COVID tests.
Sucks that it's so difficult for you to find a family doctor but it does depend on where you live, for sure. Personally, I don't care if they have paper files, as long as, in the case of BC, the data ends up in Health Gateway [1] somehow and is accessible by whatever doctor I'm seeing. Generally I must say though that I'm quite happy with the quality of health care here where I live which is small city-ish.
Seeing specialists can take a long time that's right. I had a torn achilles tendon and it took almost 3 months to see a specialist with couple of days notice and no communication in between. That sucked. For my elderly parents in law it seems to be going much faster to see specialists so it might depend on severity.
>Tangentially, I recently moved to Canada and was surprised by the lack of quality healthcare..
This is very complex and absolutely hilarious when American democrats think of Canada as a better solution.
>Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.
We have very good laws in place protecting health information. $10,000 tort damages for leaking health infos and then much larger fines for more problematic issues.
Some hospitals try to do the right thing and will have high security maturity. The other hospitals basically do the opposite. They forcefully will not secure their systems and save the money and put it in a fund to pay out the inevitable breach.
>Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
Canada's healthcare system is tiered. You have the public single payer which is trash at best. Virtually all employers pay for health benefits which bring you to the 2nd tier. This gets you into a ward and such. There's a 3rd tier where you get good service, private rooms, skip lines. If you work in public sector or a big union you most likely are on this 3rd tier. The final tier is for the people whose names are on the wards. The "Such and such family ward" because they donated significant money to the hospital. These people get immediate access to everything you might expect. Nicest rooms. everything.
>(And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess).
85% of Canadians live in urban areas near to the US border. If you choose to live somewhere else, you know you're living far from civilization and already accept the lack of service.
>In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
dont get me wrong. I dont mind our tiered system. ohip covers the basics which everyone should get coverage for. Break your arm? taxpayers/rich pay to fix it. 2nd tier is plenty for most people. 3rd tier is nice but most people dont realize it exists. Ive had a lady talking to me about how she has to wait many months to get in to a specialist, the same specialist that I waited a whole 3 days for. Also yes, the billionaire folks are going to get the best treatment, it's no surprise.
The only reason US doctors all have computers/etc is because of the feds gave health care providers a big tax credit towards electronic record keeping during the Obama years. And then medicare basically made it really hard to continue to get paper reimbursements/etc.
I'm pretty sure the vast number of smaller clinics/etc would all still be on paper if not for those incentives because it was a pretty noticeable change over just a couple years.
Yeah, I've grown up hearing constantly how good our (Canada) health care is. The reality is less than stellar. There are so, so many stories from literally everyone in my family of just straight up negligence and permanent adverse effects of malpractice.
My friend's mom lost her legs because the hospital didn't keep her in the right position after a surgery and circulation was cut off while she was recovering from the surgery. Huge lawsuit, but that doesn't take back the irreversible damage and lifelong disability.
Recently a doctor lied to our face and said there's no alternative to surgery, then lied to our face again when he said "that medication doesn't work for that", until we cited multiple studies and how the medication is used worldwide for the purpose we are asking for. It's just disgusting and unacceptable.
Also recently another family member nearly died in hospital as they let his weight get down to ~80lbs. They incorrectly thought he had cancer (he didn't), and they were just going to let him die because his time was limited, suggesting to the family not to bother with a feeding tube. The family insisting on trying the feeding tube saved his life, _against_ the suggestions of the doctor(s). He would be dead right now, and a family would have lost their dad, if they hadn't insisted on doing it. I'm pushing the family to sue the hospital and report this malpractice because his health is so badly harmed by having gone to such a low weight and nearly dying from it.
Honestly I can just go on all day. When I got in a car accident my broken wrist/finger were secured in place with a fucking tongue depressor and some gauze. This was the official solution because they didn't have time to put my wrist in a cast, so I went numerous days with this ridiculous solution, reducing the quality of my bone/joint healing. My pinky finger is still, forever, crooked. Really nice for someone whose career requires typing (programmer).
Similarly, another family member of mine has a permanently-deformed arm because they didn't cast the arm correctly and the bone healed crooked.
> plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.
> Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn't say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
> In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
I hope you can at least deduct it from your taxes else it means you end up paying what, 60% taxes on top of having to purchase private insurance with your post-tax dollars?
That's ridiculous. Here I pay a much lower tax rate and it took me a few clicks to just get a GP.
Oh I'm beyond done with the pandemic itself. Honestly, have been since I got Covid (first wave). I went along with some things because I'm not a sociopath.
The mostly part is that I'm open to get a vaccine now and then. The evidence shows they do seem to prevent serious complications when you do catch Covid. I'm not down with all the bullshit restrictions and government overreach that obviously isn't effective at anything except destroying the economy.
I'd be glad to take boosters on any schedule, if only for said boosters we were using the mRNA advantage of short lead time and quick iteration to target the ACTUAL strain, not the one from 2 years ago...
Pandemics are likely to happen more regularly now that global travel is widespread, so I imagine a future where all the major viruses get tossed into a 6-12 month mRNA "antivirus update".
These pandemic-halting benefits seem to be illusory with delta and omicron. The drug companies seem to have no particular motivation to release updated vaccines.
If I'm going to be forced to keep current on a shot if I want to be employed or enter buildings, it should come with some form of justification that is periodically evaluated. If it doesn't work, the inconvenience should not exist. If the virus mutates and risk falls below some standard, the inconvenience should not exist.
I have been taking off my shoes for 20 years at the airport. I understand that you can never eliminate the possibility of someone putting a bomb in their shoe, so we just have to do this forever. But viruses change, and I'd at least like someone to acknowledge there should be a goal that I won't be forced to do this also in 20 years.
Yet people who pay TSA a couple hundred bucks for PreCheck, and the elderly, don't take off their shoes. Like a potential shoe bomber can't figure it out. More theater and safetyism.
If you had an adverse reaction to any of the vaccines, every booster is a scary prospect, more so if they are more frequent. People would rather take an occasional risk over a frequent risk.
Getting a booster every 6 months vs every 24 months is a 4x difference in the number of boosters you have to take. That's 4x the potential complications (mistakes can happen in science, e.g. thalidomide) and 4x the cost.
And no boosters are not free. I can't wrap my head around how many people believe that boosters are free. No they are not free. If you are not paying for it directly, the government is paying for it with taxpayer money. And tax money doesn't fall from the sky. It comes out of your wallet.
Or the government can print the money and risk higher inflation, which is just an indirect tax on your money.
Are you me? Same here. Fully vax and picked up omicron. 2 days bed. Every single flu I've ever had was worse than this covid.
>Already contracted Covid, have 2 vaccines, I'm down to get a booster every year or two, at my own leisure.
I will go get the flu shot. I don't know, nor care, what strains they are going for in the flu shot. I do know they tend to target different strains every year. They can mix match as much as they like. If coronavirus is the one they want to target this time, fine whatever.
>I'm OK with and to be honest, it feels a lot like the government trying to deflect from the fact healthcare isn't OK (at least in my home country, Canada).
2 weeks to flatten the curve was only to prevent healthcare system from collapsing. But for whatever reason they switched to 'lets eradicate all illness by staying home and wearing masks.
>There's always been risks to life and this feels more like governments are trying to convince people the risk should be zero so they can be the heroes while at the same time expanding their powers...
Makes me wonder. why in history did we never try to end the flu season? there's clear starts and ends to the flu season. Mandate wearing mask in public stores seems like it eliminated flu and cold.
Though you touch on an interesting thought. Has covid really been all about government expanding their power? I dont think covid was created for this purpose, but I certainly suspect they all jumped on board to using it as an excuse to expand their power.
Covid is now endemic. I have yet to see any expert analysis to contradict this. Endemic means that your probability of catching the virus eventually is 1. Covid restrictions at this point are a joke. I'm vaxxed and done.
Every viral replication is an event that could yield a new variant. A new variant can lead to new problems. It is therefore of interest to limit viral replications. This, in addition to the health care system capacities, are crucial targets to address.
Fortunately, vaccines can improve both targets due to the reduced (though now less effectively so) infection rates, shorter infection periods, etc. This makes me personally hopeful that Omicron will become the final "pre-endemic" variant. However, while I too feel tired and sympathize with the described "vaxxed and done" mentality, I know we must stay vigilant and continue to reduce opportunities for this virus to find new ways to remain a pan- rather than an endemic. Acceptable costs of this vigilance, and the nature of it, i.e. the measures we take, need to be updated just as everything else.
How can you simultaneously say that Covid will become endemic, and also that we need to try to control its mutation rate? Ongoing mutation is a fact of (viral) life.
Why would you have empathy for them? They have fought the vaccines for close to a year now and if they haven't gotten it they probably have a pretty good reason. Shouldn't the vaccine protect vaxxed people from everyone?? I seriously do not understand vaxxed people who care about other people's vaccination status, especially when those people aren't their elderly friends and family.
I don’t think you need to lack empathy or patience to desire a return to normalcy with an understanding that if someone decides not to protect themselves they may experience negative consequences.
We all have our choices and risk tolerances, people can make their decision and move on with their lives. I don’t stay off roads just because some people might not be wearing seatbelts.
If you are one of the lucky few that doesn’t get unpleasant side effects for 24-48 hours afterwords, this may be true.
I am not, and anecdotally nobody close to me is either. It’s not a pleasant experience that I want to repeat ad infinitum. Particularly if it’s not even going to stop the current C19 variation.
10 minutes to get it, anywhere from 0 days to a week to get over the side effects. Source: personal experience. If the calculation changes from “one and done” to “do this every few months on a schedule”, I’m leaning towards taking my chances with the virus. I’ll reconsider if there’s a newer, broad spectrum vaccine available though.
Bullshit, I spent hours trying to get an appointment for a booster, just like I spent hours last spring trying to find a vaccination appointment (which was 90 minutes away). And I lost a day to the 2nd shot, and another day to the booster, as both wiped me out for 24 hours.
You might have a point if I could have walked in to any pharmacy, knowing that I could get a walk-in vaccination. But that hasn't been the case in Redmond, WA. So while you say "non-event", I say "what a pain in the ass (and arm) that was".
- One of Biden's major election point was combating Covid and curbing infections.
- This has largely been a catastrophic failure. More Americans have died from Covid under Biden than under Trump (not that it matters)
So, the left media will now begin a year long campaign down playing domestic covid severity, and make sure that Covid will NOT be a major talking point for the 2022 elections.
Edit: republican will 100% pull a "i-told-you-so" move in their campaign trails. I'm Canadian and our government (even conservative learning province/state government) is still using the partial lockdown as a mean to curb infection, it's very very obviously NOT working.
What will be really interesting is just how the medical community is so detached from the political community. I understand you shouldn't bring politics into science, but you also can't blind yourself and optimize for only one metric.. everything is a trade-off.
> This has largely been a catastrophic failure. More Americans have died from Covid under Biden than under Trump (not that it matters)
True, but Trump only dealt with Covid for about 9 months at most, and that was starting from 0 cases in February, meanwhile Biden has dealt with it for 13 months at this point, and also took office in the middle of the major winter wave, and then the Delta wave in mid 2021, and now the Omicron wave at the end of 2021, which were much more infectious and mostly affected those that could not or refused to be vaccinated (once vaccines were widely available in April at least).
Biden didn't create those waves, by the way. This is a global problem, and judging by how the US got the variant spikes after most of the rest of the world did, likely didn't originate here. He could have been like China or Australia and enforced hard indefinite lockdowns, but it was clear after the one Trump agreed to a partial two-week lockdown that the US public wouldn't even comply to that, so good luck Biden imposing any future lockdowns.
Yes, the majority of people were vaccinated in 2021, but I'd argue a good chunk of those same people (waves hi) were self-isolating as much as possible until they got vaccinated anyway and were much less likely to be included in the deaths of 2020 anyway.
Biden definitely could have done a better job managing Covid (ordered increased home tests made and ship them to citizens before Omicron became a thing, for one idea), but there's a good amount of the population that wouldn't have listened to him no matter what measures he tried to push.
I also disagree with you that Democrats are going to downplay covid (the media might, but it sounds like it's just to force people to go back to work and kids to stay in school because they're too afraid of the economy getting worse).
About the only thing Biden can point to as something good he's done, is the vaccine rollout, so if they downplay it they don't have much to go on.
But I agree it won't matter in the long run because the Democrats are going to lose the midterms, big time, and probably the presidency in 2024.
Well, the vaccine rollout was planned under Trump and execution was in full force when Biden took office (1 million jabs a day).
Biden didn't really do much after he took office, other than annoy people with inconsistent communication, federal over-reach and always singling "the others" as the root of all evil - which made them more reluctant to anything he proposed.
Trump had to scale out testing, respirators, PPE, the vaccines etc. 2020 looked much more busy than 2021, and then we got Omicron and we're completely unprepared.
I am vaxxed and boosted, but I don't want to be forced to get a shot every 6 months.
I'm trying to figure out why it took so long for the emergency OSHA mandate to become an emergency mandate. If it was so important to protect people at work then this mandate should have been figured out 9 months ago and already have been in front of the Supreme Court. One has to have realized that any such mandate would be challenged and have quite a delay before it could be ruled on in the courts and possibly put into effect.
Biden has indirectly blamed all COVID deaths during the Trump administration on Trump, so it's fair to blame Biden for COVID deaths during his administration on him, too. Biden has had office for longer, but the vaccine has also been available for about that long, too.
I don't even blame Trump for all the Covid deaths that happened during the Trump administration. There were a bunch of factors involved, and state governments and the attitudes of US citizens had a lot to do with it as well.
Trump made several colossal fuckups, especially when it came to his public communications, but he made some good decisions as well (letting the early shelter-in-place orders happen, stimulus checks, freezing student loans, pushing the vaccine program, etc).
All I'm saying is that of course Biden would have had higher deaths while he was in office than Trump, unless he managed to convince ~95%+ of the public to get vaccinated right away, which was never going to happen, and unless the whole world got Covid-19 under control in about the same time period as Trump was in office while the pandemic was in the US, and if there were no other more infectious variants that happened during that time.
If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this: Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain President of the United States." Joe Biden
And his predecessor did not have the vaccines available to combat deaths. So they are in a tough spot to be sure. The only thing they can do now is to downplay and reframe:
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75% percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with." CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
It’s amazing how much of what is being said was something that got you banned, ridiculed and yelled at by people… almost like the skeptics were right all along…
> So, the left media will now begin a year long campaign down playing domestic covid severity, and make sure that Covid will NOT be a major talking point for the 2022 elections.
Good luck with that. When the CDC decreased the isolation time to five days, all the talk was about how they were corrupted by capitalism.
As someone who was painted hard with the "science denier / conspiracy theorist" brush for my objections to mandates, it's a very deep level of schadenfreude to see the very same people devolve into conspiracy theories of their own that put them at odds with "the science".
The government has created a dangerous foil for the "anti-vaxxers" -- people who are terrified to leave their bubble of presumed safety. Perhaps we can come up with a pejorative term for them... "Pro-hypochondriacs"?
> What will be really interesting is just how the medical community is so detached from the political community.
Regretfully, I don't think this is actually true anymore. I can only speak for the US. Maybe it was never true, but we're just now seeing it. The health insurance industry is heavily political, lots of money is spent drafting business friendly regulation. The pharma industry has an incestuous relation with the regulatory bodies that are supposed to keep it in check. So, it's note exactly red vs blue politics, but in my mind, there is a degree of green politics, and the actual politicians are simply clamoring for scraps of political capital during the crisis, while big pharma and unelected bureaucrats are spending tax payer dollars and controlling the medical community.
> More Americans have died from Covid under Biden than under Trump (not that it matters)
It matters enough to write it, and it struck me as weird so I looked it up. Kind of hard to put the numbers together, but it seems we're at 830k[0] deaths now; 350k were in 2020[1] (though most cases started being reported in April) which is indeed less than half of current total. I also looked up Jan. 2021, curious if it changed anything in a meaningful way and there were 77k through Jan. 26[2]; it puts the total deaths at roughly 50/50 between presidents, though one presided over ~9 months of deaths and the other over 12.
I guess that means the rate of deaths is slowing down, but not by much.
I've gone through cycles with this. Mostly I am done arguing. I hate arguing about this. It's just more of the culture war shit that so many different media sources love pushing to keep people amped up.
I double vaxxed and boosted. Stopped wearing a mask for the most part, but with Omicron I started wearing a mask again because I just don't want this stupid virus. I'm healthy and would probably not have a symptomatic infection. But I still don't want this stupid virus, and I don't want to spread it.
I think for 2022 I am going to try to argue less, and focus more on my areas of personal expertise. I've done a lot of arguing and feel like I'm generally worse off for it.
I don't notice myself getting sick any less now that masks are required on planes. Recently took 3 back-to-back flights and got sick afterwards for a few days. Maybe COVID, maybe not (hard to tell because other than loss of taste/smell there are no real distinguishing features of COVID symptoms from the flu or common cold).
I wonder how much of this is the mask-wearing in the airplane and how much is simply now nobody travels with a sniffle anymore (maybe a slight exaggeration, but pre-covid you few would stay home with respiratory symptoms if they could physically manage it).
The airport is more risky than the airplane. In an airplane you are sat next to a fixed number of people and you have top down insertion of clean air, exactly like in an operating theatre.
Meanwhile in the airport you are in a large building with many other people, you might come into contact with 100s of new people from a wide variety of places.
I don't want to discourage you but it appears to me like with this variant (and probably even more with further variants), it will be impossible to avoid infection whatever you do (and I mean, mitigation strategies will have probably no effect). Look at the numbers we're suddenly getting without anything changing in the landscape (actually, despite a very high number of vaccinations). It looks like the virus has become so contagious that it has rendered our mitigation measures moot.
This reminds me of people who say that "duck and cover" is useless in the face of a nuclear strike.
Obviously mitigations won't help if you're blasted in the face by an airburst (nuclear or biological), but it seems like it could still help if you're on the fringe of exposure.
I don't know how useless that would have been but in the case of Omnicron it does seem basically useless. I don't know, I don't have studies on hand or anything like that, but when you look at the numbers you have to wonder...
[edit]: maybe some of the more "extreme" (n95 masks, etc) have some decent level of protection, but I'm not sure anybody knows, at least with this variant. Even for previous variants all I've seen so far are models, which as we all know have a lot of assumptions.
I don't see why that would be true if you just wear an N95 (or equivalent) mask indoors, or whenever you're in close proximity to others. Eventually, the spike will subside.
Vaxxed, wearing n95s inside and avoiding crowds outside, wfh, and not having any close personal contacts over the past few weeks, I just tested positive. Omicron is incredibly infectious and all my mitigation strategies from the past 2 years stopped working.
It’s not that they stopped working - it’s that they reduce risk to a low amount, but over time, you have more and more opportunities for something to break through that low amount.
Booster was scheduled for last week, 8 months post Moderna. Based on stronger Moderna immunity vs Pfizer and since I am careful, healthy and young, I decided to stretch a few more months out. Once I saw study that Moderna offered at least 10 weeks of moderate protection against Omicron, I scheduled booster. Could not get it due to symptoms.
It's really hard to see the big picture when you're literally sitting there with a verifiable data point to the contrary (your own experience), but do you think your experience is a guaranteed outcome for everyone, or is it possible your specific situation (testing positive for COVID despite taking precautions) is either an outlier, or at least not the most common outcome?
I'm sorry you're sick, that really sucks. I hope it's asymptomatic and you can get back to living your life soon.
I think this is going to be a common outcome. I read a contact tracing case of Omicron from a Hong Kong quarantine hotel. They have a strict 21 day 0-contact quarantine for entering the country and only 4 cases a day in a city of 7 million. One positive traveler infected another traveler. The positive traveler opened the hotel door at the ordained time to retrieve food and the virus migrated to the hallway, then the other person opened their door hours later and was infected. Our previous sanitary regime is no match for something that spreads as easily as measles and that is evident in the skyrocketing case counts. How many people do you know who are positive at this moment?
"Airborne transmission across the corridor is the most probable mode of transmission."
For reference, this case is described here:
Gu H, Krishnan P, Ng DYM, Chang LDJ, Liu GYZ, Cheng SSM, et al.
Probable transmission of SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant in quarantine hotel, Hong Kong, China, November 2021. Emerg Infect Dis. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2802.212422
> Which families own the press? Or is it verboten?
It is not verboten, it is dumb. Putting a large trend on religious/ethnic group of millions of people is just nonsensical. Do you really think millions of "jews", from gas station attendants to doctors to CEOs are somehow collaborating on pushing media a certain way?
If bunch of dudes are colluding on shaping the public discourse from wealth inequality to something else, is it more likely it is because of their ethnicity or because they are on the "winning" side of the wealth inequality divide?
Musing: Though considering the complaints about "they are now writing about systemic racism instead", it seems like very left-wing message (wealth inequality) packaged for hardcore right-wing people, so I guess complaining about "the jews" makes sense.
Even if it's true that infection is inevitable (it's not true), delaying infection is a good idea, to reduce the immediate strain on the hospital system.
Thank you. Cannot agree more. Let's live out lives. Do what we love, grow in it and stop dividing.
Our office director is scared and has closed down again (were doing 3 days a week in person) due to Omicron. I don't personally think it was necessary and I liked working there in the quite (away from kids).
But, whatever. I am done with the fighting and with the political division over it.
Agreed... I may not agree with what everyone says but I like how [generally] civil the communication is, in stark contrast with, well, nearly anywhere else :)
I've vaxxed and boosted and will continue to get boosted as often as is recommended. I follow the local regulations, which in NYC mainly involve masking up and showing a vax proof for indoor activities like dining, concerts, and riding the NYC subway. I'm not stopping my life though. I've travelled internationally in the past few months, both to see family and sight-see. Seems like not a bad compromise. The one thing I don't as much is masking up outdoors, which is more common now in NYC than it was a month ago. I'd say 70% of people are doing that in Lower Manhattan.
Great article! Just a week or two ago on this forum there were people willing to treat me like a far right conservative or a general anti-vaxxer from the facebook troll factory, just because I didn't like a private institution’s booster mandate.
There isn’t continuity between user names, for most users, so nobody can tell if the person they are responding to has demonstrated different behaviors or ideologies before
but it is still interesting how some people would parrot Q1 2020 rationale in Q1 2022 as if everything is the same for everyone else
Welcome to the internet. Some of it stems from exhaustion. People sense any sort of deviation from the official dogma and they assume you're another idiot who they'll end up arguing with. It's sad. There is a lot of nuance to many of our cherished positions and discussion strengthens the truth but many people just get offended by genuine curiosity.
I remember in the early days of the Internet, people were saying how the Internet would encourage critical discussions and open fruitful debates.
Now I think the Internet actually enforces groupthink and eradicates opposing narratives. Platforms like Twitter allows people to dox those with unorthodox ideas and behaviors and cancel them, which is basically a modern day version of "burnt at the stake". It seems that the Internet also ended up give an even more effective podium for authoritarian regimes to push their narrative, best example of this being the Chinese government.
At the root of all this is human nature. Perhaps technology won't help humanity transcend, but it will only reinforce what's already there.
I have to give Hacker News a thumbs up here. I think Hacker News is much better than a place like Reddit for open-minded discussions. Reddit has become a place where subreddit are often times moderated by a group of mods who act like a single-party state.
It's now very easy to find someone across the planet that agrees you on 99.9% of things and talk to them instead of have that conversation with your neighbor who only agrees with you on 80% of things and might actually challenge your thinking face to face.
I'm not sure vaccine or booster mandates make sense anymore because they're not effective enough against stopping the spread of omicron. Charging more for insurance for the unvaccinated still makes sense, though.
I am one of those, triple vaxxed and done. CDC has now said that the majority of those that died had 4+ co-morbidities. They have also indicated that getting vaccinated does not reduce your ability to spread the virus. So if that is the case, there is no longer a real need to vilify the unvaxxed. CDC statement appears to indicate that the primary reason for people dying is poor physical health prior to infection. With that said I do think vaccines likely reduce the severity of the infection but I don't buy all these people saying they would have died if not for the vaccine, how do they know? This has motivated me to start working out again and to try and lose weight. Going to make sure my kids are physically active now as well. Omicron is essentially impossible to avoid at this point short of locking yourself in a room and having everything delivered to your front door. The risks are known and its time to trust people to weigh those risks and make their own decisions.
I think the issue now is a political one. The democratic party has hung their hat on how bad covid is and how important it is to get vaccinated and to state at this point, NVM lets just get back to normal would be a loss of face. Instead of just saying that the virus has evolved and is less lethal now they have continued to double down on the vaccine mandate which I don't agree with. I am a democrat so I am not coming at this as a republican. I am not downplaying the severity of the virus but at this point it is here to stay. Even if we locked down for 3 months, once we were released someone from another country would come in and re-infect everyone again. Also during lock down do we once again tell the poorest among us that while they are 'essential' that they are also worth less and must continue to work and face the risk alone so as to ensure the rest of us can isolate in safety at home.
Edit: I said "does not reduce your ability to spread the virus" I meant to say "does not remove". My fault.
> CDC has now said that the majority of those that died had 4+ co-morbidities.
This is in reference to a specific study that followed 1.2M fully vaccinated individuals and found that 28 of the 36 deaths had at least 4 high-risk factors (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm). They are not referring to the unvaccinated who still have a much higher risk of hospitalization and death.
Back in 2020 when everyone was unvaccinated the CDC issued this statement: “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.”
Your quote is from the end of a sentence that began with someone explaining that they were triple-vaxed. Seems like the perfect study to help them make decisions.
The unvaccinated are unvaccinated. They know what they're getting into (even if they deny it), and they don't believe studies anyway. Once they catch it a couple of times, they'll be as good as vaxed anyway.
edit: if there's anything that should be done about the unvaccinated, it's to make sure that vaccines and tests are convenient and free. There are still plenty of people who aren't vaccinated because it's too much of a hassle.
> Your quote is from the end of a sentence that began with someone explaining that they were triple-vaxed. Seems like the perfect study to help them make decisions.
The quote was the whole sentence. And the following sentences implied they meant everyone. The clarification was important.
The only hard question is hospital triaging. Who gets treatment if there's only room for 50% or 20%? Who can even decide? Does anyone volunteer to be excluded from medical care? This affects more than just covid patients too.
Any way we choose, it amounts to sacrificing XYZk people so we can go back to living a normal life. I don't think that's an exchange most people are willing to take.
And yes, lockdown measures are usually in response to hospitals filling up. Check for example [0] against the timeline of lockdowns for that area. If you know any counter examples I'd like to hear about it.
> As viruses can remain active on surfaces, unless you irradiate the deliveries with a UV lamp (and do it again after unboxing them, since there may be viruses on the actual item) even that would not be enough.
Covid does not spread in any meaningful way via surfaces. All of the cleaning and disinfecting nonsense that is still going on is pure theatre.
> Any way we choose, it amounts to sacrificing XYZk people so we can go back to living a normal life. I don't think that's an exchange most people are willing to take.
It's an exchange everyone makes every single day in order for society to function.
> Covid does not spread in any meaningful way via surfaces. All of the cleaning and disinfecting nonsense that is still going on is pure theatre.
It's a reasonable precaution take, at least until we know precisely how the virus could get to the isolated Belgian Antarctic base, where everyone was isolated for weeks and tested and retested prior to being sent there.
It was a reasonable precaution to take in March of 2020. But enough studies have been done by now to show that it's no longer a reasonable precaution in general. We may never know how it got to that base, and even if we find out that it was via surface contamination, that doesn't invalidate everything else we know now.
> Covid does not spread in any meaningful way via surfaces. All of the cleaning and disinfecting nonsense that is still going on is pure theatre.
You may be correct about covid, but cleaning surfaces helps to prevent other illnesses from spreading anyway. In a situation where hospitals are impacted there's a strong argument that such behavior and precautions leads to better healthcare outcomes.
I was under the impression that this was already a solved question in the medical community (essentially boiled down to: who will benefit the most from treatment)
Or are you talking about other considerations like vaxxed/in-vaxxed?
You may be right. I guess there is a risk that even the number of people dying from treatable conditions exceeds capacity. The spectrum you mention seems more geared to handle broken arm vs heart attack situation, not "We have 100 people dying and 20 beds".
This takes place daily in any ER on a low intensity basis (broken arm can wait for the heart attack), but hospitals specifically consider the 100 people dying 20 beds situations when they train for mass casualty events (with specific doctors and nurses tasked with triaging incoming patients)
Unfortunately we could have made this exchange in March 2020. Mostly older people in exchange for younger people. It would have been over in a few months. June/July of 2020. Now we make the exchange but this time it's everyone. Someone younger having heart attack, cancer etc. So we're mostly worst off had we just let it rip through society back then.
> The only hard question is hospital triaging. Who gets treatment if there's only room for 50% or 20%? Who can even decide?
The voters should decide. A jurisdiction could simply decide to allocate capacity based on vaccination status (ie, if 20% of the population is unvaccinated, they get 20% of available beds for COVID). Completely fair.
Perhaps we should incentivize recruitment of, and reduce restrictions for, medical professionals. Things like residency availability, overhead from various requirements and restrictions, and a ton of upfront investment followed up with long hours and potentially decades to pay of debt.
Something has to be done around capacity issues, or we'll be in the same situation indefinitely. Or even worse when the next pandemic hits.
Probably not realistic, but I would love to see more personal involvement in care. One level could be prevention, and not just the vaccine. Lose weight, exercise, eat right. It's hard to change people though.
Another is care after the fact. Short staffed? Give me a procedure card and let me do the less skilled stuff. Most of nursing is really basic and many things are handled by machines (when's the last time a nurse took your BP with a manual sphig?). Maybe that's beyond many people's abilities, but there are some who are used to wearing respirators, practicing aseptic techniques, and following procedures. The artificial constraints of regulation and law prohibit it. So I guess that's another way society might be making the choice to sacrifice people.
It probably comes down to other things such as costs for medical equipment, legal medical malpractice liability, costs for training, investment in more facilities and equipment, etc.
I wonder if they have looked into it- not a new idea, China famously built a hospital early pandemic.
I do have the same questions as you though. How can we make this happen?
In a scenario where people are left to die or risk malpractice, I would hope the system sees this as an extenuating circumstance. I would think on the brink of collapse many of the tedious red tape rules will be ignored.
The question is of degree. Is "covid overwhelmed" meaningfully the same as "yearly flu season overwhelmed"? Based on Government actions, it seems like covid is much worse.
(I wish I had the epidemiological understanding to look at data and understand that conclusion, but I don't.)
> Omicron is essentially impossible to avoid at this point short of locking yourself in a room and having everything delivered to your front door. The risks are known and its time to trust people to weigh those risks and make their own decisions.
As viruses can remain active on surfaces, unless you irradiate the deliveries with a UV lamp (and do it again after unboxing them, since there may be viruses on the actual item) even that would not be enough.
> Even if we locked down for 3 months, once we were released someone from another country would come in and re-infect everyone again.
That's if you assume away animals, as viruses that affect mammals are rarely limited to humans (ex: chicken flu)
> Also during lock down do we once again tell the poorest among us that while they are 'essential' that they are also worth less and must continue to work and face the risk alone so as to ensure the rest of us can isolate in safety at home
Agreed. It's time to accept we're not immortals, viruses exist, and yes it's a shame that covid is now endemic, but it's even worse to perform lockdowns of dubious efficiency that only have one guaranteed effect: hurting the economy, and the "poorest among us".
> As viruses can remain active on surfaces, unless you irradiate the deliveries with a UV lamp (and do it again after unboxing them, since there may be viruses on the actual item) even that would not be enough.
Cases of COVID-19 spreading through fomites (particles on a surface) are extremely rare[1][2] and COVID-19 has a short lifespan on cardboard[3]. Just leaving deliveries somewhere for a day is probably enough to stop transmission.
Vaccination makes you much less likely to get sick in the first place and probably reduces how long you are infectious if you do get sick. Neither of those things fit with 'does not reduce'.
> Vaccination makes you much less likely to get sick in the first place
Do you have a reference for this claim? Nearly everyone I know that has caught it and has gotten sick in the past 2 weeks has been vaccinated, sometimes boostered as well. I don't think this claim is true with Omicron.
Vaccination makes you less likely to end up on a ventilator.
I have seen much discussion of vaccines being less effective at preventing infection with omicron but no indication of them being 0% effective. Of course, it will probably be at least a few more weeks before we have good overall data on this (e.g. December/January case rates among vaccinated vs unvaccinated).
And in a big storm, even everyone being 25% less likely to get infected impacts rate of transmission, which is the big one for resource constraints and such.
But there is no data to indicate that it's >0% effective either. So until we have data to back things up one way or the other, talking about it just creates more science disinformation.
Early studies suggested that vaccine antibodies were much weaker but boosted individuals still had antibodies that had some effect on omicron, and gave no reason to believe that non-antibody parts of the immune system would have 0% effect. So based on that, and high level of protection against previous strains, my default assumption would be "some, but much lower, protection."
Then, as of Dec 26, being vaccinated in CA still resulted in a much lower case rate per 100K: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status That likely isn't 100% omicron data, but the ratio looks the same as what it was before, so still not reason to drop my belief to 0%.
It is quite the leap to say "new strain, I should restart my assumption at 0% effectiveness."
Not saying restart all assumptions. I am saying that whatever you say should come with the "based on the previous..., it may or may not apply to current..." proviso.
The problem is that it doesn't show in the stats in practice. In the UK, the % of positive covid tests that are vaxed pretty much follows the % of people vaxed in the population (by age). If vaxed people were less infectious, you would expect the virus to circulate much more in the unvaccinated population. Particularly given that vaccine hesitancy isn't homogenously distributed in the population.
What exactly do you mean by "% of positive covid tests that are vaxed"?
In the US, with the delta wave, case-rate-per-100k-people very much showed that the vaccinated were less likely to catch Covid. For instance: "From December 20, 2021 to December 26, 2021, unvaccinated people were 3.9 times more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people." (with a chart showing the trend similarly for months). https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status
I expect the omicron wave to be less dramatically tilted, but that there will still be some difference.
For instance 79% of the people >18yo who tested positive in December were vaccinated. And that's pretty much the % of people over 18 that are vaccinated in the UK. You get pretty much the same result for each age tranche:
Positive of which % pos test % population
Age Tests vaxed vaccinated vaccinated
<18 395,335 57,284 14% 35%
18-29 257,526 181,705 71% 60%
30-39 254,435 193,623 76% 65%
40-49 230,670 195,908 85% 77%
50-59 147,033 129,440 88% 85%
60-69 58,233 51,037 88% 90%
70-79 18,858 16,263 86% 95%
>80 9,067 7,658 84% 95%
Total > 18 975,822 775,634 79%
Ah, yes. That's not a very useful stat compared to something like case-rate-per-100K since the denominator could be all over the map.
What's the case rate per 100K at the population level there?
Edit: actually, didn't find exactly that table, but did find a section in the doc you link, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/..., on page 14, that shows vaccine effectiveness remains against symptomatic disease as a result of a study against delta and omicron both. But I would love to see the overall case rate to know about asymptomatic disease too.
Not sure what you mean by denominator? The denominator for vaxed positive cases is all positive cases. The denominator for vaxed in the population is total population (within the age range).
The % per 100k is available p40 of the same pdf. But I find that much harder to read given that the size of the vaxxed and unvaxxed populations vastly differ.
In "percent vaxxed among positive tests" you're only looking at those who got tested and were positive at a snapshot in time. At the very least, you also need to include all the people who tested negative. You complain that the size of the vaxxed and unvaxxed populations are vastly different but then use numbers where you look at just positive tests, ignoring counts or negative counts. That gives you numbers with even more potential sources for skew!
The table on page 40 is consistent with US data, where case rates at the population. It says to read in conjunction with pages 32 to 34, which basically says "stats won't be as accurate as formal assessment of vaccine effectiveness, please see the formal data." The formal data suggests effectiveness against transmission. The raw cases-per-100k numbers agree. Yet you latch onto a different number - another one that the report says isn't authoritative for those purposes either - to claim the data shows ineffectiveness! That seems backward.
The CDC is a bought voice of the corporate ruling class whose only interest at this point is getting working people back to work, with the exception of the pharmaceutical companies who want people to get vaccines. This is why the government has no consistent position on anything.
I get your point as a summary judgment, but it lacks evidence, not veracity. The CDC has multiple entities, some of which are non-governmental, and supported by business interests. Some would say that a little yeast spreads throughout the loaf.
If we want to get rid of vaccine mandates I think the give and take has to go both ways. For instance: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/sta... : "Unvaccinated individuals at the highest risk of severe disease (anyone aged ≥75 years or anyone aged ≥65 years with additional risk factors)." in Tier 1 for priority usage of new, hard-to-get treatment.
Those who don't want to get vaccinated should take personal responsibility for that, not expect society to take as much care of them when they're choosing not to help take care of society (even in terms of "reducing burden on healthcare system by getting a likely-less-severe case", even if transmissibility isn't affected as much).
This sounds like a wonderful idea. Drop the vaccine mandates, and drop the mandates to treat the unvaccinated. If people don't want treatments that work, they should be free to explore the full space of treatments that don't.
If you have ethical qualms about this, I'd like to point out that ethics go both ways. It's unconscionable to take a hospital bed away from someone who needs it, because you refuse to take your medicine, with predictable consequences.
You can't expect those who are unvaccinated taking up beds (potentially or not) to think about ethics. For a good part of our country it's a race to the bottom of "I got mine, f u" and those folks seem largely represented in the group that's currently stressing our hospitals.
I do agree however. And, I think it's an ethically defensible position to not treat people who refuse to get vaccinated... even though it will never happen.
If you open that door, should treatment also be denied to smokers, motorcycle riders, obese people, uninsured people, etc., etc.? It's about as slippery as a slope can get.
Will be put at the end of recipient lists, or outright denied for organ transplants if you're an active smoker of the last 6 months.
> uninsured people
Will only be stabilized in the ER and sent home - actual treatment is only to stabilize the patient to get them back out the door as-per law.
---
On motorcycles and obesity those are a bit harder to get into - but I will say that yes... for 2/4 of those we do actively deny medical treatment for better or worse. That makes me feel like we're already on the "slippery slope" - especially in regards to those without insurance... We literally have no problem denying life saving treatment to the uninsured here.
And hell - even as an ex-smoker I agree with the places that don't allow active smokers on their transplant lists. Ethically that makes perfect sense to me.
Not getting a transplant isn't comparable to being denied a hospital bed.
"Will only be stabilized in the ER"
In other words: they will be treated.
No one is saying we need to give the best treatments, or any kind of treatment that is scarce and competitive (like transplants) to unvaccinated people, but you're talking about refusing people any treatment and sending them out to die at home or on the streets. That's extremely cruel and certainly is not done anywhere in the US currently.
Sorry - you brought these things up in regards to a slippery slope being denied treatment. I responded to you in good faith to say that half of those do have some sort of denial of treatment, specifically citing what is denied. I do not agree that stabilization of a patient is treating any underlying disease or cause.
Splitting hairs? Which one of us is referring to various forms of medical treatment as "denying treatment"?
You're advocating for sending unvaccinated people away with zero treatment. None of your examples are remotely comparable. If you were really discussing in good faith, you would admit it.
> If you were really discussing in good faith, you would admit it.
Right and that's why I'm out. I have made my arguments, and I don't appreciate you implying that I am discussing these things in bad-faith. If we disagree that is fine.
You’re trying to claim stabilizing someone in the ER isn’t medical treatment. You are transparently arguing in bad faith and you know it. But sure, take your ball and go home since you can’t defend your arguments.
I'm talking about you saying they claimed something they didn't. And accusing them of bad faith.
They were wrong hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated patients. They were right withholding treatment someone needs to live months and withholding treatment someone needs to live days aren't 100% different.
They’re 100% different in the sense that withholding treatment completely is not done in the US currently for any reason. We've drawn a line there as a society.
I think all of us understand the present US law. Most Americans say everyone should have access to national insurance actually. And legality and popularity don't settle ethical questions.
First, thank you. I feel like this is an opportunity to clarify in a thread of rationality vs. getting accused of bad faith...
I never made the claim that they shouldn't treat unvaccinated patients:
> And, I think it's an ethically defensible position to not treat people who refuse to get vaccinated... even though it will never happen.
And specifically to the parent comment I was agreeing to the following (quoting parent):
> It's unconscionable to take a hospital bed away from someone who needs it, because you refuse to take your medicine, with predictable consequences.
Although maybe it's not my best self showing here - but I do feel angry toward people taking those hospital beds away. And I was very specifically agreeing that "It's unconscionable to take a hospital bed away from someone who needs it [...]" I have friends/family who are suffering real consequences of hospitals being overrun with largely unvaccinated people...
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Overall, I don't think "ethically defensible position" is equivalent to "they should not treat unvaccinated people" - yeah I guess this can be seen as "walking it back" but overall I did not mean to outright state we shouldn't treat the unvaccinated.
Sure - it comes from a place of frustration. But I don't think I'm alone in thinking about these things.
> Overall, I don't think "ethically defensible position" is equivalent to "they should not treat unvaccinated people" - yeah I guess this can be seen as "walking it back" but overall I did not mean to outright state we shouldn't treat the unvaccinated.
Thanks for clarifying. They also said "Drop the vaccine mandates, and drop the mandates to treat the unvaccinated." And you said "I do agree however." But I can believe you just meant the last sentence. Feeling frustrated is natural when your friends and family are harmed. I hope they can get what they need.
Absolutely - and thanks for providing the communicative space to clarify myself. I didn't feel it was going to be productive trying to clarify to /u/danenania when bad-faith was being harshly implied. I agree I was not clear in my comment as to what I was agreeing with - but I felt like I was being pushed to a position that I had not intended to take.
100% we need to treat people regardless of anyone's attitude (mine included), and 100% we need to continue to mandate vaccines.
Thank you again for giving me the space to clarify =)
> Will all of these people get their health tax and insurance money back when they are denied?
No, just like how if I need surgery, and the hospital is full of anti-vaxxers with COVID, and I can't get treatment, I currently don't get my money back.
> Those who don't want to get vaccinated should take personal responsibility for that, not expect society to take as much care of them when they're choosing not to help take care of society
Unfortunately as much as I agree with this it will never be the case. Hospitals are hurting for blood too - sucks. These spikes are largely unvaccinated folks from everything I'm reading. They're stressing the system but I guarantee you they don't care outside of their own selfishness.
> Those who don't want to get vaccinated should take personal responsibility for that, not expect society to take as much care of them
How would that work practically though? They still end up in the hospital, they're not going to test if they're vaxxed and put them at the end of the line if not.
No, I would argue for exactly that. If ten patients arrive at the ER and it's full, the unvaccinated-without-a-medical-condition-preventing-vaccination COVID patient gets a bed last, after the vaccinated COVID patients and any non-COVID patients. For people in CA, at least, there are digital records of this, not much testing needed.
This would be called "heartless" on the individual scale, but towards a group that I believe is being heartless on a societal scale.
Honestly, it's a capsule of where we are as a country: Here we have a government entity whose suggestions are rejected by these people still suggesting to prioritize them in order to get them the best treatment possible. I don't see anything like the same consideration for others being made by most of the unvaccinated. One side is trying to do what's best for everyone, the other side doesn't really give a shit about thinking things through.
If they don't conveniently arrive at the same time, needing the same amount of care, would you advocate pulling the unvaccinated off ventilators and out of beds to be replaced by the vaccinated?
If two do arrive at the same time, an unvaccinated person with far worse sickness faintly mumbling about ivermectin who waited until the last minute to come in, and a vaccinated person who is suffering but nowhere near the danger zone - do you put the unvaccinated person on the sidewalk outside?
Long answer: you'd probably come up with a protocol around "ok, we have this ventilator available, give it to the unvaxed patient, but if we have other patients who end up needing one and they haven't improved in X hours/days, we will reallocate" and similar for all the various ways people can present, but "conveniently"... if the health system is that overloaded, you're gonna have ERs with a lot of patients all arriving at the same time.
Hell, even pre-COVID, I got stuck waiting in an ER in December for days because the hospital was full once.
(To your edit: has either smoking or obesity caused hospitals to fill to capacity and have to turn away patients? You'll notice here I'm talking about scarce medical resource allocation prioritization where they're actively competing with those more considerate of the rest of us, not something like insurance payments or coverage.)
I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated but vilifying people who make unhealthy choices is never an effective public health measure. We should have learned that from the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
You can't compare HIV/AIDS to COVID in this simplistic way, including the attitudes and public debate around them, and this comment is dangerously close to some sort of public health version of a Godwin's Law violation.
What I remember about HIV in the early 80s was that fear of it fueled a lot of homophobia from those who were ignorant about the disease, certainly to begin with. In fact I remember it originally being seen as a disease that only infected homosexuals and drug addicts - and those being the people who were vilified - which proved to be a fatally uninformed point of view for some.
But HIV is, fundamentally, a very different pathogen to COVID. In the 80s HIV was a death sentence: if you were infected with HIV, sooner or later it would develop into AIDS and you would die. However, a relatively small proportion of the population was infected, and it wasn't very transmissible (you had to have sex or other transfer of body fluids, such as a blood transfusion). Nowadays, HIV treatments have improved to the extent that in developed countries most people receiving treatment can expect to lead a fairly normal and full life, and to live a normal lifetime (ignoring other causes of death that might intervene). I'm not sure what the story is in less developed countries, but I imagine it's not as encouraging.
COVID has never close to that deadly, but is far more transmissible. It's that high transmission rate that has seen so many people die, even though these represent a small fraction of those infected. And this time, nobody is being vilified for their sexual preference, or their gender identity, or any other characteristic that is fundamental to who they are and over which they may not have had much if any agency. You might argue that drug addicts have agency but they don't have very much once they're hooked.
No, with COVID, people are being vilified for wilful ignorance, which is a choice: a conscious decision, and one that - in this case - has a substantial negative impact on their surrounding community and the world at large.
I can't tell you how effective, or not, that vilification is, but I can tell you that a lot of people - myself included - who are fully vaxxed, boosted, and will gladly accept further vaccinations (and would also welcome effective treatments for those who are sick), are getting enormously fed up of having restrictions placed on our lives which, to a non-trivial extent, are being propagated as a result of people who are spreading misinformation and choosing not to get vaccinated. I'm not old - somewhere in the middle - but the remaining count of the best years of my life is finite and even in the best possible case very limited, so I'm getting sick to death of people telling me what I can and can't do with them.
I even agree with you that pointing fingers and calling names won't change anything, but it doesn't matter. Lots of people have had their fill and the anti-vaxxers are a convenient, and frankly not entirely unjust, target for their rage and frustration, which pays to a key point: the rest of us, the "vaxxed and done", or whatever you want to call us, will eventually tire of allowing the lowest common denominator to set the agenda. That's not a threat: it's just a reality, just who we are. Eventually we'll tire of the yoke and throw it off.
"are getting enormously fed up of having restrictions placed on our lives which, to a non-trivial extent, are being propagated as a result of people who are spreading misinformation and choosing not to get vaccinated" I am assuming you are a tech worker and can find a remote job. Just move somewhere with no restrictions. There are essentially zero restrictions in states like Florida or Texas. I live in one of those states and aside from maybe 35% of people voluntarily wearing masks there are few signs of the pandemic. I am not denying that people are getting sick I'm just saying that if you dont want to deal with the restrictions then there are options.
Sure, I work in tech, but like plenty of other people who work in tech, it's not as simple as "just move somewhere else." I've only ever driven through Texas, and it's a big state, so I can't comment on what it would be like to live there but I properly detest the climate in Florida, which I'd find impossible to tolerate, and the topography there is extremely uncompelling. Still, I suppose who doesn't love a bit of Miami from time to time? But even ignoring those relative trivialities, there are a bunch of serious issues I'd have to negotiate to make any major relocation a reality:
1. I live in the UK. Sadly I can't just up and move anywhere I choose. Even more frustrating, since we left the EU I can't even just up and move anywhere I choose in Europe (not that restrictions-wise it's much better there at the moment).
2. My close family are all in the UK and, although the rules have made it hard to see them as regularly as I would have liked over the past 2 years, it's been a lot easier (and less costly) than it would have been had I "just moved somewhere else", and I want to continue to be nearish to them.
4. My girlfriend and her close family live in the UK. I'm not leaving her to move somewhere else, and especially not to move to Florida - WTF. Just as importantly I can't see her being keen on living that far from her family.
5. Most of my friends live in the UK, either close to where I live now, or close to where my parents live. I could start again somewhere else but, overall, I'm fairly content with my life. Ditto my girlfriend's friends.
6. My current employer places a 45 day limit on working abroad for tax reasons. This isn't insurmountable. I could find another job but finding another job is another barrier, and I quite like my current job.
7. I have a house that I'm part way through refurbishing. I'd have to figure out what to do with that but, whatever the outcome, that decision will require a significant investment of time, or money, or both. The reality is it would be a trade-off between the two but, in any event, would represent a substantial investment that due to the need to act quickly might well outweigh what I'd invest if I were less constrained by time.
8. I've never wanted to live in the US, though I like visiting, and I'd certainly want better employment conditions than I'm likely to find there: i.e., sensible amounts of holiday, decent employee rights, not to mention public healthcare.
Yes, if I was still 28, single, had my whole career ahead of me, and hadn't yet bought a house, I could simply up sticks and leave, as long as practicalities rather than relationships were my major driving factor. But it's not so simple, and the fact that I work in tech is basically irrelevant because the only part of the equation it simplifies is the "getting a job" part, which isn't even the most important aspect of said equation. As an aside, somebody like Joe Rogan can move from California to Texas relatively easily because he's a jetsetter and all his mates are jetsetters so he pretty much only gets the upsides from that move (not a criticism: with the kind of money he has, I might well see things differently too).
But far more important than all of that, your comment plays hard to the point I was making: why the hell should I give everything up because, in some part, of a bunch of people who won't see sense? What difference does it make whether that's because of rules and restrictions, or because I've had to walk away from my life and start again because of them?
All good points, I assumed you lived in the US, my fault. If everyone in the UK was vaccinated tomorrow would all of the restrictions go away? Iceland and Israel essentially show that the cases don't stop and Israel is experiencing a case load as high as they have ever had. I would argue that your main problem is not the unvaccinated but the restrictions put in place by your government that they in turn blame on the unvaccinated.
Fair, and no worries, I'd guess at least 50% of the readership here is from the US. Also, sorry if I came off a bit sharp: that was all written fairly hastily.
That's a great question, and it also touches on the reason I'm not only infuriated with antivaxxers: vaccines don't fully protect against illness, nor do they stop transmission. So whilst I vaccines are of substantial benefit they're clearly not a total solution to the problem of COVID, nor do I think such a total solution exists or can exist within any foreseeable timeframe.
One becomes jaded living with controls over a situation that doesn't appear to be particularly controllable; certainly not a situation that can be controlled by the UK government, or other governments in Western Europe.
I've tolerated - we've all tolerated - restrictions for nearly two years now but, if they're not making much difference, well, eff the restrictions, I've had enough. I'm not getting any younger here and I'm fed up of wasting my life away. I suppose, to some extent, I'm a bit consumed with a sort of impotent frustration.
What's the situation where you are, if you don't mind me asking?
"Also, sorry if I came off a bit sharp: that was all written fairly hastily." Nope, my fault, was a bit flippant of me to suggest you just pack up and move. I probably would have reacted the same way. I'm in Florida and its pretty relaxed here. There are no real restrictions that I am aware of, including no mask requirements. My kids go to school and no one wear's masks. Funnily enough school only opened last week and I got a call saying the county recommends but does not require that everyone wear a mask. So we sent the kids to school with masks and literally no one including the teachers were masked so masking died the first day and we have not enforced it.
Along the same lines my kid is also quarantined for the the next few days as someone at his table tested positive this past Friday (did not even make it a week). They can either do virtual schooling for 10 days or return once they have a negative test. Only the 4 kids at his table are quarantined, rest of the class is not. He has actually had a low grade fever (99 - 100 degrees F) the last 3 days so he may have it but he tested negative on a covid test, so technically he can go back to school monday. Not sure I trust the test and will hold him home for a few more days until he has no fever. Other than that he has no symptoms. No one else in the family is symptomatic.
In grocery stores about 35 - 40% of people wear masks. I am hit or miss, mainly miss on masks. I used to mask all the time and not sure there was a conscious decision to stop but it just kind of faded away. I did recently get the booster. Have not vaccinated the kids yet, go back and forth on it. Service workers are generally masked, not sure if by choice or company policy, I am assuming the latter. No vaccination or masking req. to eat at a restaurant. Feel a little bad about the almost dual class structure created where the service industry is masked while those they serve are not.
There are places in the US like NYC that check your vaccine card before they will admit you. Federal government is attempting to push a vaccine requirement for all companies over 100 employees through the courts, sitting at the supreme court right now, not sure what will happen with that.
It is very hard to get a test though here and the state government is encouraging people not to get tested unless they have severe symptoms. Not sure I agree with this.
I am very center of the road politically and politicians here are now extreme so I find myself lost in the shuffle not agreeing with most of those that represent me. Covid has been very much politicized now with Republican governors essentially removing all restrictions and many democratic governors adding much more stringent restrictions although I think most of them fall short of Euro style restrictions and are not close to Australian levels.
My kids did not do well with the isolation that came with the initial outbreak so I think I have tailored my response more to ensuring they are mentally well than any real concern for the physical risks of Covid which are generally low (not saying zero) in younger patients.
I vote Democrat usually but find myself disliking the hardline approach they have taken on vaccination but dislike even more any politician that refuses to acknowledge how egregious what happened when they attempted to overthrow the election for Trump last year. So I just kind of worry about my family now and attempt to block out the country at large.
This is really interesting - thanks. Some things are the same, some things different.
One of the things that really resonated with me is that if you're a customer of the hospitality industry, you don't have to wear a mask, but if you're a staff member, you do. It's very two tier, and they're obviously at far higher risk of contracting COVID than the rest of us.
Something that is different is that a fair number of events do check COVID passes - my GF and I went to a gig a couple of days ago, for example, where this was the case. So this is similar to NYC.
Like you, I'm pretty centrist, but I don't think COVID has become quite the political hot potato here in the UK that it perhaps is in the US. There's a lot of sniping but there's also broad cross-party support for measures that attempt to control the pandemic. That being said, there is still a notable left/right divide with, for example, some conservatives being very heavily against certain measures (e.g., COVID passports), and some on the left always being in favour of more restrictions.
There's quite a bit of politics playing across countries in Europe around travel measures as well, with the UK I think probably as guilty as other countries in this regard.
The situation with schoolchildren has been similar, but with mask wearing for teenagers now mandatory. No issues with younger kids though, which I think is good but also marginally aggravating when GF and I take her kids places, and we have to wear masks but they don't.
The quarantine/isolation rules are loosening, which I think is pragmatically sensible, with a testing regime defining when quarantine can end, rather than some sort of fixed 7 or 10 day rule. This is really an improvement because, before, you might not even realise you have COVID for a few days, then have to isolate for 10 days after testing positive, which was pretty difficult.
We are experiencing widespread disruption across the economy due to COVID related absences though. I was in a meeting a few days ago where, out of the 7 of us, 2 had COVID, and 1 was still recovering from quite a severe infection that had hospitalised him. We've never experienced that before, and clearly it's quite widespread with many people I know now having had it recent weeks.
I don't get the impression there's much appetite for further restrictions in England or much chance of further lockdowns but, across the Union as a whole, it's a pretty mixed picture, so it's hard to say how it's going to play out over the next few months. There is a sense that people are starting to care a lot less about the pandemic though.
The government, of course, have not done themselves any favours with recent revelations about parties and drinks events. The outdoor stuff I'm not so bothered about, but what I think a lot of us find tough to swallow is the "one rule for us, another rule for them" mentality that is perhaps behind it.
(Btw, sorry I was also a bit rude about Florida: it's the heat and humidity in summer that kills me but there's a lot there to like, obviously, and despite being drenched in sweat the moment I step outside in June in Orlando, I've had great times on both the trips I took there, both for business, even managing to catch a shuttle launch one evening back in 2007, which was incredible. I imagine the winters would be fine but the summers would definitely cripple me.)
> They have also indicated that getting vaccinated does not reduce your ability to spread the virus
That is not correct. Vaccination does reduce, but does not eliminate, transmission of the virus
“ We found that both the BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccines were associated with reduced onward transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from index patients who became infected despite vaccination.”
look at data for iceland, 92% of the adult population and spread is mainly among the double vaccinated.
Triple is lower but that is expected to wear off ( if Isreal is to be beleiveied ).
https://www.covid.is/data.
No, vaccination dos not reduce spread of omicron. Not even a little.
It does do a fantastic job of reducing hospitalisations among delta infected.
> look at data for iceland, 92% of the adult population and spread is mainly among the double vaccinated.
If getting vaccinated reduced your odds of spreading the virus by 90%, and 92% of the population were double-vaccinated, then the majority of the spread would be...
Among, and by the double-vaccinated. (8.28% vs 8%)
Most people that die in car crashes are wearing seatbelts, but you'd be a fool to not wear one. Just like you'd be foolish to not get vaccinated.
> Most people that die in car crashes are wearing seatbelts
Funny enough, I just recently checked the stats for that. According to the first report I found with a simple googling, 47% of people who died in car crashes were not wearing seat belts.
yeah, because the number of people getting into car accidents and surviving is much, much greater with those that wear seatbelts where if you don't wear one it's a high probability it's not survivable.
> If getting vaccinated reduced your odds of spreading the virus by 90%, and 92% of the population were double-vaccinated, then the majority of the spread would be...
> Among, and by the double-vaccinated. (8.28% vs 8%)
I don't know how you're getting those numbers.
If baseline spread is 100% unvaccinated spreading to 100% unvaccinated, then 92% vaccinated spreading 10% to 92% vaccinated amounts to 8.464% of baseline, 92% vaccinated spreading 10% to 8% unvaccinated is 0.736% of baseline, 8% unvaccinated spreading to 92% vaccinated is 7.36% of baseline and 8% unvaccinated spreading to 8% unvaccinated is 0.64% of baseline. The total sums to 17.2% of baseline, of which vaccinated to vaccinated spread amounts to 49.2%.
(It's not terribly important since the numbers are made-up anyway, but I'd like to know whether I made a mistake somewhere.)
The Iceland data is interesting and "14-day incidence per 100.000 by age and vaccination status" is different from the California data, where case rate per 100K is still, as of 12/26 numbers, much higher among unvaccinated (no breakdown for 2vax vs 2vax+booster). https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status
Iceland also has a higher vaccination rate, I would be very interested in demographic breakdowns of the unvaccinated there vs in California. Is the Iceland group much more atypical in terms of how often they leave their house, say? Is the California group possibly just much more boosted (the Iceland numbers show that the boosted group has still less Covid than the unvaccinated group stil) - but actually, that doesn't seem like it, because that ratio is still far higher than the CA one. Though... even your own link for data on boosted adults in Iceland contradicts your "not even a little" statement.
Actually I bet it's just a small number problem. Iceland has a population of 366K. 8% of that population is just under 30K. California has a population of over 39 million. Much more significant sample for unvaccinated people in CA.
90% of the eligible population there is vaccinated. If there are no unvaccinated people left, the spread would be 100% from vaccinated people. Lies, damn lies, statistics.
And you don't find that ridiculous? If a virus is spreading quickly among vaccinated people you might begin questioning said vaccine and you definitely wouldn't mandate it.
Of course not. It's not about the absolute transmission rate of vaccinated people. It's about the reduction in the transmission rate compared to the unvaccinated. Regardless of the absolute effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing transmission, it seems to me it should remain fundamental to protecting public health if unvaccinated people spread the virus several times faster.
Of course, if the effect were only marginal, that would be one thing. But that is not what the data seems to show at this point.
If one was of the belief that a vaccine needs to be either 100% or it's worthless, yes, that's the sort of assumption you might come to. Things are slightly more nuanced.
I fear you're committing the baseline fallacy. If 92% of the population is vaccinated then the virus can easily spread mainly among the vaccinated while still spreading among that population at a far lower rate than among the unvaccinated.
Think of it this way: assume that an unvaccinated person, on average, spreads COVID to 10 people and a fully vaccinated person spreads it to only 1. Then put 92 fully vaccinated people and 8 unvaccinated people (I.e., vaccination in proportion to the Icelandic population.) into a room full of people. The 8 unvaccinated people will infect 80 additional people, while the fully vaccinated will infect 92. Thus, "most" of the transmission was from vaccinated people, even though the vaccine reduced transmission by 10x.
And this is probably obvious, but its worth emphasizing that vaccinating those last 8 (percent of the) people would still have a hugely beneficial effect. If they were all vaccinated, then, in the toy example, they would infect a total of only 8 people instead of 80, leading to only 100 total cases, rather than 172.
Of course, even setting this aside, the bigger issue is that your casual parsing of one country's aggregate statistics is just no substitute for the actual scientific research that GP cited.
> No, vaccination dos not reduce spread of omicron. Not even a little.
You can't really make that conclusion based on a simple case count chart, because you don't know what those numbers would look like if the vaccination rate was lower.
i've seen some claims that the latest UK data shows negative effectiveness for the vaccine for COVID infection. This is possibly due to Omnicron or due to population differences between the vaccinated/unvaccinated. Also, it is very important to note that even though the data seems to show negative effectiveness for infection the vaccines still show positive effectiveness for hospitalisation and mortality.
I tried to find the original article about negative effectiveness in the UK but all I could find was this:
This covers Iceland, Denmark and the UK but doesn't really go into much detail about alternative explanations which I remember being covered in the original article I read.
There are a few "buts" here. The biggest one - based on transmission rates in countries with higher vaccination rates vs the ones in lower transmission rates - is that the vaccinated (at least at first, when everybody believed the vaccine is 90+% efficient against transmission) might have engaged in more risky behavior as they felt "protected".
Some of your points have validity, but three are borderline dangerous misinformation:
- The majority of those who died WITH THE VACCINE had 4+ co-morbidities. The virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated
- The vaccine does indeed reduce your propensity to spread the virus, although it doesn't eliminate the risk.
- The reason for lockdowns is not to make the virus "go away". It is to control the impact on the healthcare system. We have now surpassed the previous hospitalization record and this thing is still going exponential. You may be fully vaccinated and at low risk for a COVID related death, but if you'd like to be able to get acute treatment for appendicitis or a heart attack, we need to take steps toward a lockdown immediately.
> The virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated
Do we know this about omicron? How dangerous is "very dangerous"? As it is with pre-omicron, CFR for COVID-19 was, pessimistically, 0.5-1%, less if you're not in an at-risk group. AFAICT we have no reliable numbers on "long covid".
For the record, I am not anti-vaxx, I am vaccinated, I'm just anti-using-science-as-an-ideology.
It's probably somewhere between 75% as serious and as serious as Delta, but we can't be sure yet.
The handwaving about 0.5% - 1% is ultimately not something I can address because it is opinion. A million Americans are dead from this and more deaths are coming. Reminds me of the Stalin quote.
Just coming from a scientist that is SUPER used to reading graphs -- It's really hard to tell from those graphs because the scariness of those graphs could wind up being (horizontal) scaling artifacts, because we know in the countries that led the omicron wave it seems to burn out faster... If the number of deaths tails out just as quickly, the CFR will wind up being way lower, since total deaths are an integral under the curve, and cases are point-in-time values.
"The virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated" Absolutely, I very much agree with this but at this point in time everyone has access to the data and there is not much ore that can be done to make people choose to get vaccinated. Forcing people to choose to be vaccinated or lose their jobs when the primary person the vaccinated are endangering is themselves is not a good policy. People should be allowed to make their own choices at this point. No matter what we do the virus is here to stay.
"The vaccine does indeed reduce your propensity to spread the virus, although it doesn't eliminate the risk." agreed, but at this point Omicron is so incredibly transmissible that I think everyone is going to get it and it is impossible to eliminate all the potential infection vectors. I have to come down on the side of bodily autonomy at this point. If the virus was as deadly as ebola I would likely change my mind but at this point with the severity of omicron, I have landed here.
"The reason for lockdowns is not to make the virus "go away". It is to control the impact on the healthcare system." This is a very good point but there is no way to practically implement this in the current political environment. If we implemented a lockdown, we would still be telling the poorest among us, those we call essential that they still have to go to work to support the rest of us. In addition, there is just no way that states like Texas or Florida are going to agree to a lockdown. Are we willing to risk armed conflict over this? Personally I am not.
That is insanely low. That is just the risk of hospitalization, the % of those that are hospitalized that actually die from (not with) covid is even lower, which is a key distinction that your Reuters article doesn't make. Most hospitals are required to test patients for covid (if they are admitted), even if they are being admitted for something else (like a broken leg) if they come back positive then they show up in the stats even if they exhibit no covid symptoms and require no to little treatment from the hospital for covid.
The healthcare system is not remotely being overrunning by covid, it only appears that way because of these scary, missleading, numbers.
All I can say is that Omicron is not significantly less dangerous. This is actually shaping up to be worse than the Delta surge. If you believe Delta was serious, then this is too.
These graphs are misleading because they do not accurately reflect the change in cases. Cases in the Omicron wave are probably closer to 10x the winter of 2021 than the 1.5x in those graphs, but testing sites have been overwhelmed and rapid tests are more widely available, leading most people to either test at home or simply give up.
For reference to a Covid prevalence measurement that isn't sensitive to testing artifacts, check out the Boston wastewater analysis: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
Furthermore, a lesser-talked about side-effect of extended (semi-)lockdowns and associated measures is a general reduction in the physical health of the populace. How many of us have put on a few extra pounds? This survey [1] (which, admittedly, seems to be probably skewed by sampling bias), shows that millennials put on 40+ (!?) pounds over the pandemic.
> there is no longer a real need to vilify the unvaxxed
I very, very much disagree with this.
Unvaccinated people have a much higher rate of severe illness that requires hospitalization. Filling up hospitals unnecessarily kills people, and delays preventative care.
People who are voluntarily unvaxxed without a medical necessity are, to be clear, 1) categorically stupid 2) responsible for the injury and death of others.
> Unvaccinated people have a much higher rate of severe illness that requires hospitalization. Filling up hospitals unnecessarily kills people, and delays preventative care.
Not if they already had covid or are young and healthly. I would agree with your statement with the qualifier "unvaccinated people that are over 60 or have comorbidity".
You are, unfortunately, incorrect, at least about the "young and healthy" part.
Unvaccinated people of all ages are significantly more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than vaccinated people of the same age group [1].
12-34 year olds are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized.
Even if the absolute numbers are very low for young and healthy people – even if that's 0.01% instead of 0.001% of cases – that is an absolutely unacceptable amount of people to be putting into hospital beds when they could just get a motherfucking shot instead.
The risk of covid to healthy 12-34 is minuscule, less than the flu apparently. You can divide this risk by 10 but that will do nothing materially to the risk to this population nor to ICU usage.
Tell me it's not material when you're waiting in a rural ER for six hours because one of their two ventilators is taken by an unvaccinated 19-year-old who went to three New Year's Eve parties.
There would be a conversation to have here if getting the vaccine wasn't the easiest goddamn thing in the world.
We are talking about winning the lottery kind of tiny risks. Your 19yo could also be vaccinated. That’s also a plausible scenario. But both those scenarios are extremely unlikely.
I'd love to see a study like that breaking down the risks between seronaive and recovered people. They all seem to just talk about the unvaccinated as one monolithic group, but the difference between those with a prior infection and without is known to be huge.
I've yet to see any convincing evidence that a prior infection isn't good enough, but I see plenty of people convinced that the recovered are selfish/evil/stupid if they aren't rushing out for a vaccine.
I could use the same rationale to say people who are fat are willingly putting others in danger.
As up to 75% of C19 hospitaltizations are obese persons I could just a s easily hunt down overweights and accuse them of murder as their unhealthy habits are now clogging the medical system forcing us to shut down society to protect them.
I could call them names ,like typhoid Maries. Fat fucks.
Ban them from participating in society unless they show a proper BMI index card.
Force them into diet camps.
But I would never do that.
I happily spend my tax money for peole who smoke, overeat, drink and drive, get bothched breas augmentations, beat the crap of eachother, OD on heroin and all the amazing horrible things that make us humans.
Whatever choice you make in your life, you can NEVER EVER be threatened to have medical care taken away from you.
Unconditinal medical care is one of the corner stones of our society.
Red Cross workers in conflict areas will treat rape victims in one tent, and their rapist in the next.
Fun job, no.
But if you cannot handle it than you should not have gone into medicine.
This tendency to normalice demands of who gets medical care and who doesnt stops now.
There are not many things I will violently defend, but if society will ever hint that it is going to elect who gets medical support and who doesnt based on their personal life choices I will protest. Violenty if I have to.
This is a basic human right I am willing to die for.
Where am I saying to stop providing medical care? No one should go untreated, not even the dumbest, shit-spewing-est anti-vaxxer. Human life is precious.
But the idea that vaccination status is remotely comparable to weight, smoking, drug addiction – that's laughable.
It's a single goddamn shot (sorry – two shots for mRNA). You can get them fucking everywhere, for free, with a walk-in appointment.
We know they're safe. We know they keep people out of the hospital. We know that putting people in hospitals right now is a huge drain on a strained resource.
Again: people who are sick deserve care. Always. Regardless of their moronic views.
But the idea that an unvaccinated person is somehow free of the responsibility of their actions, when they could so easily fix them? I find that hard to swallow.
> This tendency to normalice demands of who gets medical care and who doesnt stops now. There are not many things I will violently defend, but if society will ever hint that it is going to elect who gets medical support and who doesnt based on their personal life choices I will protest. Violenty if I have to.
This is a basic human right I am willing to die for.
Perfectly expresses how I feel as well. Thank you.
Honestly, comparing people who are fat to unvaccinated people who could change their vaccination status with a few free jabs but day after day refuse to do so is more likely to tell me you despise fat people more than anything else.
I absolutely agree that no one should ever be threatened to have medical care taken away from them! That is precisely why I'm ok with villifying (note that I'm not saying "calling them names" or "refuse treatment") the unvaccinated, as that is precisely what they are doing! And no, this is absolutely not comparable to anything else: there has been no sudden explosion in the last two years of obesity or drunk driving or smoking to the point that there are no hospital beds for anyone else. Only covid has done that.
I would say that the obese in particular deserve to vilified far more than antivaxxes, because they are doing damage year after year. An estimate 20% of US healthcare costs (~200B/yr) are related adult obesity. Think of how many lives could be saved with that money. These people are essentially murderers based on the externalities they impose on the rest of us.
Hospital Costs and deaths associated with covid are easily surpassed by the obese if you add up just a few years.
Obese people have a much higher rate of severe illness that requires hospitalization. Filling up hospitals unnecessarily kills people, and delays preventative care.
People who are voluntarily obese without a medical necessity are, to be clear, 1) categorically stupid 2) responsible for the injury and death of others.
How about riding a motorcycle? It's not addictive or difficult to avoid. All you have to do is... not do it. So do motorcycle riders share similar responsibility because they're choosing to do something that also puts them at significantly higher risk of ending up in the hospital?
I'm also in favor of vaccination btw, but against the shaming.
I see the focus being solely on vaccines leads to a lost of mistrust in the agencies meant to protect our health. Everything is viewed through a lens of "will this cause more or less people from getting vaccinated". At every turn the agencies push vaccines and vaccines alone as the answer, ostracizing those who choose to live with a higher risk tolerance. Whether its true or not, a lot of people feel that coverage is skewed to push vaccines and anything relating to treatment or healthy lifestyles is downplayed.
I too am double vaccinated an boosted, but everyone has a point at which they say enough is enough and will stop getting boosters and isolating indefinitely.
For instance, take the CDC guidance on preparing for a hurricane or tropical storm:
> Instead of just saying that the virus has evolved and is less lethal now they have continued to double down on the vaccine mandate which I don't agree with.
What makes you say with any degree of confidence that the virus is less lethal now?
The data's not in yet. At this point, it's all magical thinking.
> The democratic party has hung their hat on how bad covid is and how important it is to get vaccinated and to state at this point, NVM lets just get back to normal would be a loss of face.
It actually still is important and advisable to keep your coronavirus vaccinations up to date. There's a reason why Israel marches ahead and begins to distribute the fourth shot in a year to the most vulnerable groups, and likely access will be expanded similarly like it was for the first three shots.
FWIW, it should become a normality that people visit their general practitioner once a year, get their general fitness and blood checkup done and their missing/expired vaccinations refreshed. Our societies may very well benefit from eliminating millions of workdays lost every year to the ordinary flu [1].
I'm advocating for a massive mandatory vaccination program, which goes against conventional liberal/libertarian standpoints - even though all of the vaccines have proven their efficiency and safety in militaries worldwide and up to now, no one has complained.
We are losing a lot of wealth, a lot of life simply because politicians are afraid of anti-vaxxer propaganda and because prior generations have abused minorities for medical experiments (e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis experiment) or vaccination programs for military purposes (e.g. the Bin Laden discovery).
> The democratic party has hung their hat on how bad covid is and how important it is to get vaccinated and to state at this point, NVM lets just get back to normal would be a loss of face.
During the recent recall attempt for Gov. Gavin Newsom, the ads supporting him essentially said, "The Republican candidate will remove the mask mandate and kill your grandma. Vote to keep Newsom, he'll keep grandma alive with mask mandates." so yeah I figure it's gonna be a while before California Democrats, at least, can support easing up on the masks.
It’s time we start moving on with our lives. We’re going to figure out what it takes to live with a new disease, so we may as well do it now. The damage done to the to the general mental health due to the breakdown of personal human networks will exceed the loss of life due to infection with poor physical health.
I, for one, will not go on living in fear like this.
Saying that someone has a comorbidity is not a judgement. Its simply a fact. The virus is here, we know it affects people with certain conditions. If we can reduce or remove that condition then it is on us to do so. I am probably 30 pounds overweight, 20 of which I put on over the last year+ with covid. I am now working out and trying to drop those 30 pounds because in the context of the virus it just makes sense to do so. Its not a moral judgement on anyone.
? That is very much a stretch. This is a pandemic, not a politically correct hug fest. We all must be responsible for our own health. If I am overweight and I get covid and I die because of that co-morbidity, then I bear at least some of that responsibility. To deny our own responsibility for our physical states where it is in our control is madness. Just like if I get covid and I am unvaccinated and get a severe case that is also my fault. This is a pandemic, not a woke celebration of not hurting each others feelings. This is not a moral judgement, some people are overweight and they are more susceptible to severe cases of covid, why not do what you can to reduce that risk?
obsesity is an epidemic. covid today is pandemic. while it is problematic like any diease that affects a smaller subset of the population, it lot less concerning than a pandemic. it has nothing to do with you deserve it or not.
no one is saying anyone deserves to die. 42% of americans are obese, so while it is not a majority, its not that far away either. Obesity is very much related to your odds of having a serious case of covid should you contract it. I really dont understand what you are arguing. I am saying that to reduce chances of a bad covid reaction people should attempt to reach a healthy weight. This does not in any way detract from the argument that vaccines are beneficial as well. To say it does is either disingenuous, seeks to not hurt anyone's feelings or is just plain wrong.
> So if that is the case, there is no longer a real need to vilify the unvaxxed.
This is such a bad take. Unvaxxed cause the majority of hospitalizations, deaths and complications. This is just objectively wrong that it doesn't matter that much.
Agreed. It's also likely that the unvaxxed could be accounting for a greater part of the overall spread too. They tend to be sicker for longer, and given their anti-vax proclivities, will likely not wear masks and continue about their normal daily activities spreading it far and wide.
The same people who are vaccinated are the same ones who will likely isolate/mask-up if they catch the disease.
I wish I could feel "vaxxed and done". My whole extended family is vaccinated and everyone who's old enough is boostered.
But I have three children in elementary and middle school. Like school systems across the country, ours is in chaos due to COVID absenteeism. Roughly 1/3 of the students and 1/4 of the teachers are currently out sick due to positive tests, some symptomatic, some not, and the numbers keep going up every day. Just waiting for our turn and then the kids have to stay home for two weeks! Hopefully February will be easier?
This is an artifact of the refusal to admit that SARS-2 is an endemic respiratory virus. If you have to isolate whenever you encounter a possible COVID exposure, it will always be untenable to be able to actually function as a society. We need to go back to the way it always was in pre-COVID times: you stay home when you're sick, but you don't drop everything and stop the world if a friend of yours gets the flu, or adenovirus, or any of the other 4 circulating hCoVs, etc
My mistake, the requirement is currently 10 days, not 2 weeks. But it's up to the school district, things don't change overnight just because the CDC changed their recommendations.
Nit: "Boostered" is not a word. "Boosted" is [0]. This is similar to when I hear people say "orientate" instead of simply "orient". We don't need to over-Latinize when simpler speech will do.
1,834 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] thread- What is the average level of risk to someone taking reasonable personal precautions?
- What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
Governments and societies have been acting out-of-control and it needs to stop.
If people don't want to take personal precautions, they should be at liberty to assume the additional risk.
Depends on how full hospitals get. We all get into accidents. We fall and hit our heads, we might get a heart attack, a pregnancy might suddenly go bad and a C-section (or worse surgery) is needed.
As COVID19 fills up hospitals around the country, the risk isn't from Omicron itself anymore, as much as it is from an overburdened health care system.
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The big example was the Montana train derailment last summer. It was difficult (but possible) to get all of the injured to an appropriate hospital, many being forced to go to hospitals hours away because the nearby hospitals were full of COVID19 patients. But this new wave of Omicron is even worse than the summer of 2021 by any measurement.
> - What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
While the health care system of the USA is technically a free market, with a mix of for-profit hospitals (and charity / religious hospitals, and a few state-sponsored ones for groups like veterans)... people expect hospitals / health care systems to be functional.
Since the state is ultimately responsible for the health care of its local population (whether they want to be responsible or not), its important to take actions needed to keep our hospital open.
The state will pull in the national guard, they will call in Navy hospital ships, they will declare emergencies to help. From that perspective, asking everyone else to get vaccinated or booster-vaccinated is just more of the same, its another action to minimize hospitalizations. Forced vaccinations are far more effective than national guard in this situation.
> Governments and societies have been acting out-of-control and it needs to stop.
I know someone who went to work while testing positive for COVID19. The amount of apathy and callousness the "individual" has in this situation knows no bounds.
"Individualism" is now selfishness. Its more important to save a few hours of PTO / leave rather than protect your fellow customers or coworkers from the disease.
People have lost their goddamn minds over this. They ignore the hospitalization stats, they ignore the overflowing morgues. They focus on selfish self-centered action rather than community.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/covid-19-emergency-actions-ma...
Hospitals in my area have cut 20% of surgeries (ie: triaged out care to make room for COVID19). The governor has deployed National Guard to the hospitals to help out with tasks.
Are you just blind to the issues happening right now? This is happening, this is happening now. Take off your blindfolds and talk to a damn nurse or doctor. This is happening all over the place as far as the eye can see.
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Just call up your local-clinic and ask them for a flu-shot. Stand in line for 4-hours for things _COMPLETELY_ unrelated to COVID19, and come back and tell me that its fake. Go ask the receptionist "why is the line so long", and they'll tell you: COVID19.
I know because I done it. (Well, not for a flu-shot but for a TDAP. Nearly the same thing)
/s
That was an actual exchange I had with someone a few weeks ago with this same scenario. They'd gone from 'it's all faked' to "well, yeah, there may be people there now, and they're taking resources from non-covid patients, but the govt wants it that way, that's why they pay hospital more for covid patients! they're incentivizing people getting covid!"
I don't think it makes any sense at all, but interactions like these are more signs to me that it's harder to have meaningful interactions 'across the divide' these days.
Note that this varies by where you are. Locally, there is no health care crunch: it's easy to get a flu shot or other vaccine with no wait, and ICUs still have capacity despite a huge increase in cases. We're probably screwed in a few weeks since there's only about a 60% vaccination rate here and the most recent surge didn't start until maybe two weeks ago.
In the province of Quebec, where we have a highly vaccinated population, the intensive care units (ICUs) in all hospitals will be full within two weeks, if the rate of transmission and hospitalization continue this way. Demand greatly outstrips supply.
In Canada, the financial incentives for hospitalization and discharge are very different. Physicians get paid by a complex mix of hourly pay in addition to a fee-for-service schedule, both paid by the government. Hospitals get paid by the type of patient they admit, and their length of stay, but not always in a straightforward way.
In Canada, because of the remuneration system, physicians are the most influential decision-makers in deciding who gets to use the ICU. Roughly, no one doesn't get admitted "because they can't pay", and no one gets admitted "because they have money" .
Since hospitals are overwhelmed in Quebec, physician's incentive would be to discharge patients rather than admit. Their hourly wage wouldn't rise if they got more patients. Indeed, there is some evidence that as ICU capacity drops, physicians start discharging patients from the ICU earlier.
I should be fair to physicians in Quebec: their behaviour reflects a deep concern about the public health emergency rather than their financial gain.
I believe that, in Canada, all hospitalized patients in the ICU really need to be there.
Source: I have been studying hospitalizations due to COVID-19 illness in Quebec, Canada, and providing forecasts to the local government since the start of the pandemic.
I understand that adding a doctor or nurse isn't immediate.
Just as I understand that if a production system I oversee crashes under load, it may not have been foreseeable.
But if the system is still crashing under load in five years? Ten years? At what point is it my fault?
The U.S. healthcare spending in 2020 was $4.1 trillion. I still see the same 100 ICU beds cited as capacity in our local COVID updates.
The Maryland hospital system can support a bit over 10,000 hospitalizations. Over 3000 of those hospitalizations are COVID19 right now, and our cases continue to grow exponentially.
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Our hospital systems don't _normally_ get hit with 3000+ cases of a singular disease. Compared to other parts of the country, we have more hospital space, nurses and more, and we're still feeling stressed from all of this.
You _cant_ have enough hospital space during a pandemic. You just can't. The disease grows too fast, you get hit with way more cases than you've ever seen in the past 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years. It doesn't make sense to design a system with 100-years worth of slack. It makes more sense to ask the public to do actions to cut back on hospitalizations during these rare 1-in-a-hundred-year situations.
And Chinese style hard lockdowns of whole cities are even more effective than that. Doesn't mean I want the government to have that power.
The state has a right, (7-2 decision, hardly controversial) to forcibly vaccinate its citizens against Smallpox.
It doesn't matter what you "want". There's well over 100 years of precedent on this particular issue. Go fight with history if you're really pissed.
This is the line I'm responding to.
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You know damn well that libertarians do this bullshit when playing with "use of force" language in these discussion.
A fine is "government use of force" to a libertarian. I'd rather not get stuck in the weeds over such details. But you're trying to pin me from the other side, and I don't appreciate it.
Everything is just as controversial and the issues are the same.
Jacobson v. Massachusetts said the solution to compulsory vaccination is democratically repealing policy and law. This is exactly what these people want and are fighting for
Are you complaining that I'm using rhetorical techniques against you? The smallpox and 1918 flu pandemics from 100 years ago are guidance for what is going on today.
We can look at how our grandfathers solved the issue in their time, and compare-and-contrast with what worked today. As you mentioned, it was controversial back then. Both you and I have arguments we can borrow from them.
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How about instead of arguing against history, you actually take those arguments and use them for yourself? Or perhaps you recognize that the arguments said 100+ years ago weren't actually that strong or powerful.
> Jacobson v. Massachusetts said the solution to compulsory vaccination is democratically repealing policy and law. This is exactly what these people want and are fighting for
Cool.
Now explain how you'd get rid of smallpox in the early 1900s.
You're welcome to add whatever you think adds to the discussion.
Or do you just sit around and counterpunch in discussions, never actually contributing directly? There's a reason why sitting around and just countering arguments is called the "fallacy fallacy" / "Argument from fallacy".
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I bring up smallpox and "Jacobson v. Massachusetts" for a few reasons.
1. We defeated smallpox. It took decades, but it was soundly defeated.
2. Legally, there's a strong set of arguments that prove that these measures are constitutional.
3. There were big controversies in the early 1900s over these arguments, and we can replay those arguments again if you so desire. In effect, we know that the state's right to protect our health care system trumps the individual's choice on whether-or-not to get the vaccine.
Yes, I referred to profit, because profit is what "not wasting resources" translates to for the capitalist, but the real underlying moving force is economic and real regardless of ideology.
We largely imply that Denmark's hospitals are more efficient than US hospitals. In terms of cost, in terms of how much they can handle, in terms of number of COVID19 cases, etc. etc.
Even if we cut down to highly-developed parts of the USA, such as New York vs Denmark specifically (rather than including all of the lesser-developed rural areas which puts the US at a disadvantage), we're clearly not as good at health care as Denmark.
I agree to a point. If their personal choices endanger others, then it's less about their liberties and more about how their choices impact others negatively.
Another part of the problem is more human in nature. People are tired of others crying about their own freedoms in regards to vax, but declaring other's freedoms are their choice as well. You know the political party I'm speaking of.
> What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
@oauea:
> What violence?
torstenvl was specifically referring to state vaccine "mandates". Any state mandate must be enforced through violence or it has no effect.
Lest you believe that state mandates do not require violence, consider what happens if people refuse the vaccine. You can order them to get daily tests, but what if they refuse that? Eventually physical force (violence) will be required.
I don't see how that is really true. The state can, for example, refuse to provide you services if you're not vaccinated. If you're not allowed to enter a government building while unvaccinated without a justification, so as not to endanger the civil servants in that building, I'd hardly call that "violence".
How much risk to others is acceptable? Even though someone who follows reasonable personal precautions, but decided not to vaccinate and, therefore, has a higher risk of being a carrier and infect someone else who also followed reasonable precautions but cannot vaccinate for medical reasons. That second person now faces a 3% risk of dying a horrible death. Even if the second person is fully vaccinated, the chances of dying are non-zero, and increased because another person decided not to be vaccinated.
If we could contact-trace perfectly, would it be fair to charge person A with reckless endangerment, because person A didn't take all available measures to prevent further deaths? If person B dies because of person A, should we call it manslaughter?
I agree, the problem is no one is making them assume the risk. If they truly assumed the risk of not getting vaccinated, one of a few things would happen:
1. The risk of not getting vaccinated would be priced into their health insurance premiums and their costs would skyrocket.
2. If they require hospitalization, they should be turned away at the door if there is insufficient capacity. Alternatively, they can be hospitalized but discharged the minute their presence begins to strain resources. They could even be refused assistance generally.
3. If I can suggest that my infection came from person X (e.g. I was around them when they had the virus), then they should be liable for damages.
None of those things will happen, because people don't want to assume the risk that comes with their choices, they want to offload it onto other people. They want to be able to not be vaccinated then scream for help when they get in trouble and have the healthcare system ride to the rescue.
What is this referring to? Can you say what instances of "state-sponsored-violence" have occurred in the pursuit of risk reduction?
I don’t know where you are getting the 10 times worse from.
There are only 17k people per year who receive any kind of spinal cord injury, from all sources, not just cars.
That means you could even count all spinal injuries as a death!! If every person with a spinal injury somehow just died, it would still be a smaller problem than COVID deaths.
COVID would still be 7 or 8 times worse than these theoretically extra-deadly roads. Even if Long COVID didn't exist, the deaths alone would blow it out of the water.
Vaccines weren't widely available back then
If you could drive drunk without risking other people, it'd be more societally acceptable. Similarly, now that vaccination is widely available for at-risk groups, it's a bit more acceptable to take actions that spread the virus that puts those folks at risk.
It was widely available a year ago. The most at risk groups were the first and most comprehensively vaccinated. What gives? If the conditions for re-opening were met a year ago why were we wearing masks outdoors and whatnot this whole time? Comments like these seem like little more than mental gymnastics to justify having held an opinion that didn't age well w.r.t. the various degrees of covid measures we've endured.
Edit: Fine then, call it 6mo. Regardless, I'd be very interested to see someone provide in a "better than just saving face" quality defense of why businesses have been at reduced capacity, government services have been limited in their accessibility, etc, etc. beyond the point at which the vulnerable were vaccinated and why we're continuing to have this debate. I know information was less great then but we have it now. How do people oppose re-opening wholesale-ish. I foresee nursing homes keeping some precautions but the DMV, using covid as an excuse for why I can't register a car at a certain service location, being masked at outdoor venues, come on.
A year ago today 0.4% of the American population was fully vaccinated. 3.1% had had a first dose. https://imgur.com/a/aUpVwtb
You're acting like there's someone who can just declare a national preoccupation to be over. As always, your problem isn't the government. It's that the majority of your fellow citizens do not agree with you.
This is further evidenced in the article, in which literally the _very first line_ is a mild dunk on the GOP. Why do Americans do this? Why must literally any policy decision be chiefly looked at through the lens of Red vs. Blue?
This is coming from a Canadian whose frequently frustrated that one can't voice any concerns about COVID policy without being lumped in with a crowd which I otherwise share almost nothing in common with.
In the first year of the pandemic, the people you're talking about were okay with the personal risk, which is fine, but also ignoring, downplaying, or refusing to care about the risk to others who couldn't protect themselves. Which is less okay in my opinion.
But now, the vast majority of people still at risk have chosen not to protect themselves. So vaccinated individuals choosing to live life normally are increasing the chances the virus spreads, but not increasing the risk of serious injury or death to the defenseless and vulnerable.
One, we've greatly reduced the risk of COVID through vaccines. This is the primary thrust of the article; if you've vaccinated, you're very unlikely to have serious consequences.
Two, we're fatigued. You just can't be constantly vigilant for two or three years without something breaking. This compounds point one. We don't, as the article mentions, know what kind of relationship Omicron has to long COVID, but at this point, many are too tired to care. "I'm safe enough" is all we have the capacity for.
Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero.
The numbers are very clear on this:
There are people who have a 1% or greater risk of dying if they catch it.
Most people do not fall into that category, not even close.
Let's start with the fact that the 1% IFR is calculated using a faulty denominator. Due to the high prevalence of asymptomatic infection, the denominator is far smaller than it should be.
I was the only one in my household to have a single symptom when I caught it in February. My wife and two children did not have any symptoms and would not have been tested if I had not gotten myself tested. Wow this is an anecdote, it is directionally aligned with seroprevalence surveys.
Omicron is even less symptomatic and therefore, we still have a denominator that is far too small.
To put it into perspective, school children at the elementary age are actually at higher risk of death from an influenza infection than they are from a covid one. Obviously this does not apply to children who are immunocompromised or have comorbidities. They are the only age group that has a higher death rate from the influenza than from covid. But it is still notable. We have been sending our kids to schools without masks for decades even in the midst of various influenza epidemics.
Over time populations in the US that are less sensitive to media reporting, especially working class people, have formed their own intuitive risk calculations based on their anecdotal experience. Your average taxi driver has a pretty good understanding of who is at high risk and who isn't. I experienced this in Vegas when a woman driving my taxi stated to me that the people she knew who had died were all old or "really really fat". Her words not mine lol.
The people who are under 50 years of age who round 1% down to zero are more accurate than you are in their assessment. I hope I don't sound rude when I state that but based on the numbers it is accurate.
I don't intend to be rude, but what you are stating is a huge deal, and should have been earth-shattering news in the media. A doubling of fatality for a pandemic is not something that fails to make it into talking points when governments across the world are struggling to convince people to get vaccinated.
Additionally, I live in the US state of Colorado. A few days ago, a post on HN's front page showed that Colorado's cases are now 100% omicron. That's not being addressed in your statement. Eventually, omicron will crowd out delta in other places as well.
I don't think you and I differ much in our broad conclusions on covid, but I don't think it makes sense to compare "chance of dying every time you drove a car" with "chance of dying if you catch covid"--basically this is a type error, you're comparing apples and oranges. The proper comparison operand for "every time you drove a car" would be "every time you interact with one or more people in person". Of course, you don't have a 1% chance of dying by covid every time you interact with one or more people in person because each interaction has a relatively low chance of contagion. Moreover, if there's a 1% chance that the average person would die from covid, that doesn't imply that a healthy person (i.e., no co-morbidities) has a 1% chance of dying from covid, so it's perfectly possible that the cohort who are risking covid exposure also have a lower risk of dying from covid than the average person (of course, I'm just responding to your framing of self-preservation--there's a good moral argument that healthy people should also be concerned about their contribution to spreading the virus irrespective of their own risk).
An obvious example of this is that the CDC numbers on COVID deaths by age. It's blatantly obvious, yet people on here wave their hand and say "1%" as if most HN readers are remotely close to 1% death rate, when it's a community composed of software engineers, a profession that skews young as a whole.
Here's the stats. Bear in mind that the distribution of CASES skews young.
https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true
Roughly 20,000 people between 18 and 40 died of covid.
About 35,000 between 40 and 50.
426k of the deaths were age 75 and up. 188k were people between 65 - 74.
Case Fatality Rate = confirmed deaths / confirmed cases
Infection Fatality Rate = total deaths / total infections
Total infections can only be estimated, and is much higher than confirmed cases because most people who get COVID-19 don't get tested for it (either because they're asymptomatic, unable to get tested, or don't see see a point since they already know they're sick). Thus the infection fatality rate is substantially less than the case fatality rate.
This paper estimates the median infection fatality rate to be 0.23% https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/
Also worth noting that deaths could be overestimated since anyone who dies having tested COVID positive is counted as a COVID death, and pretty much all patients who enter a hospital these days are tested for COVID.
What we appear to have with COVID-19 is akin to influenza - endemic, will never be eradicated, and thus it will mutate regularly and require new vaccines/boosters. Given that, people understandably want to treat it like the flu and get back to normal life.
> Ignorance like this has contributed to the virus mutating
Ignorance contributes nothing to the virus - it doesn't care if you have knowledge or not. This virus was going to mutate faster than we could produce vaccine no matter what we did.
If you think the 3rd shot is important, why not the 4th, 5th, ad infinitum?
Genuinely curious, not trying to be difficult.
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I was just wondering what data your "3 is important" statement was based on.
Why the first booster but not the rest, or why the first booster at all?
Is having your heart hurt a normal side effect? A lot of anecdotes mention it as a symptom. How many of them actually go to get diagnosed?
That might change if we ever get a booster targeted toward Omicron specifically, but we don't have one, and by the time we do, I'm sure there will be other variants around.
There was insufficient data to estimate the effectiveness against severe disease.
Known downtime of a day or two (and not feeling well) is, to me, still a tradeoff to make compared to the potential of being intubated in an ICU. Each Pfizer shot I've had I've had somewhere of 8-18 hours of being really knocked out, usually starting around 24 hours after injection. I usually have milder (but some) reaction to flu vaccine each year (usually up to 8 hours of fatigue/headache/etc) within a day or so.
Risks/reward still moves to me take the shots.
Comments like this are only intelligible if one considers the probability of each outcome.
Deterministically (probability 1) getting unpleasant vaccine side effects vs. deterministically ending up intubated in an ICU? Sure, give me a booster every month. But that's not actually the relevant calculus -- your probability of ending up in an ICU is already extremely low after two shots.
Simply pumping up antibodies for a couple weeks isn't the same as efficacy.
So, here is a pre-print that does show real-world effectiveness (as opposed to efficacy). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.21266341v... And of course I know that you will apply your selective rigor by pointing out that it is a pre-print. But less-biased people will realize that science can only work so quickly.
I’ve also had the flu shot most every year, even though I really have never been seriously ill from the flu, because it’s an easy preventative measure without side effects. If the booster for COVID regularly makes me more sick than the disease it protects against that’s definitely a burden, a rather large one. Just because it’s killed vulnerable people doesn’t mean the calculus for me or others with strong immune systems is the same.
I actually entered the hospital without Covid and got it while I was in there. They had the entire place divided into separate wings and I had to be transferred between them. 103 degree fever, pulse 130, was pretty awful but came out of it fine.
I, too, am done with all of it. Let the chips fall where they may now.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
There's a clear difference in hospitalization and death between the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. You don't have to take the CDC's word for it - other countries can see the same thing in their numbers.
Calling getting the vaccine "an extremely inconvenient lifestyle" is silly.
Getting a vaccine isnt inconvenient, except that it was: I spent an entire week unable to use my left arm and feeling very sick (and my doctor didn't care). But also there's a ton of other issues, like my kids not being able to go to school, stores closed, having to greatly limit travel, etc.
> You don't have to take the CDC's word for it - other countries can see the same thing in their numbers.
Any way you slice and dice the data comes up with the same answer; vaccination reduces hospitalization and death.
The best way to think about CDC press releases is that they not intended to be read by scientists. They are intended to guide good behavior and may not be 100% accurate in terms of medical/scientific knowledge.
Good examples here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2022/omicr...
Screenshotted here due to paywall: https://imgur.com/a/gk73qDy
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/covid-hospitaliz...
So, any evidence that contradicts your feeling will be dismissed?
> Second, there are more people being hospitalized in my area (which has high rates of vax) than there are unvaxxed people.
Sure. In a place with 100% vaccinated people, they would be all of the hospitalizations.
Relative proportions matter.
Just be aware: you're arguing with a scientist who worked for decades on medical biology who has, until recently, generally been quiet when seeing huge amounts of misleading medical knowledge trotted about to justify one procedure or another. I am always open to data and my "feelings" don't matter- except that most of the time, when I dig into the underlying claims, I find that they are misrepresented (usually unintentionally). So I use my own priors, and frankly, all I can say is that finding stats on a government page or a news article and using those to justify policy isn't convincing to scientists (and, it appears, the vast majority of the american public).
Ultimately, our public health people lost the PR war, and they did so through muddled messaging. Literally everything about vaccines has turned out to be less effective that public health leadership predicted, or claims. I'm not really surprised; I've commented many times on HN about how deeply challenging it is to do public health with a noncompliant population.
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
(I'm also glad the CDC employs more than just biologists, as statistics seems to be a fault here more than biology.)
> I wasn't talking in proportions, I meant absolutely.
Cool, so entirely pointless.
This popped into my inbox today: average daily cases, per-capita, for Seattle and NYC. Another clear distinction between the two populations. https://imgur.com/a/mjVxIhB
You can dismiss it as faked or rigged or manipulated again, but there's plenty of information out there to validate this sort of thing, and you don't have to take the US's word for it; other countries publish the same sort of information.
Ultimately I think you're not completely incorrect and I agree with teh directionality of what you're saying, but taken generally, the reality is that omicron does a much better job of infecting people (who were previously infected and have natural immunity, or who were vaccinated) and so much of this entire vaccine exercise has shown that we either need to move quickly/plan for regular 4-month updates (can you imagine trying to get everybody in the world to vaccinate every 4 months?) or maybe acknowledge that vaccination isn't the solution it was pitched as.
> At this point I don't really think that pointing at CDC public health releases is going to convince a scientist like me.
I just watched you move the goal posts in realtime.
Instead, we're looking at the ratio:
But, those are different types of information.Note that many people who end up the hospital either didn't know they were infected, or got infected there. And probably many of the people with COVID who go to the hospital don't actually need hospital levels of treatment. We have a tendency to overtreat with technology.
However the difference for me was that I was at home and all I needed to do was take my inhaler if I felt short of breath and take advil quite religiously for the fever.
So I don't feel there is any difference between their symptoms and mine, and I am an asthmatic and also a bit overweight.
Anecdotally, Advil worked much better than Tylenol. Advil made the body aches stay away for 6 hours, while Tylenol was more like 2 hours.
But as stated elsewhere in the thread, I should have qualified my statement with "don't give aspirin to kids" due to Reyes syndrome. Totally spaced that detail.
I'm glad you made it through okay, but statistically your risk was higher by being unvaccinated when you caught it.
Also if I was short of breath, a heart rate above 120 randomly, and had a fever of 102 (at the same tmie) during this pandemic, as an overweight asthmatic myself, I wouldn't have risked staying home and would have headed straight to the emergency room. Especially if I checked my Oximeter and it was in the lower 90s.
Please don't do that. Besides, how do you feel about Dr. Robert Malone? Is he an authority enough for you?
How do I know? This is exactly what happened to my wife.
I would have also used the nebulizer before going in, most likely (I have one at home), so I would know ahead of time how well it was working out. Also I did say I'd check the oximeter I have first, and if my blood oxygen level was low then according to that I probably need to be in the hospital and they'd hopefully take that measurement and react appropriately (Hopefully. I know hospitals have been overwhelmed at times, especially New York's)
I am a bit lucky in that the hospital closest to me, so far, hasn't run out of hospital beds this entire pandemic (currently has 80 regular beds and a dozen ICU beds available), and my state has, with a little luck and some decent policy decisions, has mostly kept things under control.
But once vaxxed+boosted, what more realistically can we do? I mean sure, let's maybe avoid coughing into each other's open mouths. But apart from that, Omicron seems to be so contagious, we're all bound to get it eventually unless we literally lock ourselves at home for the next 3 years.
1. Vaccines (most effective do it first).
2. Masks everywhere.
3. Lockdowns, if necessary.
--------
The big question right now is if we should push button#3. Many of us hoped it wouldn't be necessary, but things really are that bad now that we're contemplating pushing the button.
Lockdowns are themselves staged. We can lockdown schools (already happening in many colleges effectively. I have cousins who are off of college because they've extended their winter break, to minimize COVID19 spread).
---------
There's also lesser actions: I work in technology. All in-person meetings have been canceled. Schools are "sometimes online" in my area, depending on local conditions. Testing has gone up significantly, we try to catch the disease and encourage people to stay home asap to minimize spread. Etc. etc.
There's plenty of actions we can do, even if we decide against lockdowns.
I think my overall point is that we're well into discussing options between 2 and 3 now. This Omicron surge is truly ferocious, and far worse than people predicted (or really, hoped for).
There's also the evidence that Omicron subsides rather quickly (at least, in South Africa it did). So any such emergency measures would truly be temporary, more so than the original strain or Delta-surges of the past. Under these statistics / calculations, it makes more sense to perform bigger actions.
My 2020 Roger Waters concert was canceled. Sure, that made sense -- 15,000 people all packed inside the venue. But at the same time, my hairdresser was shut down, not even a single customer at a time allowed. Made no sense to me.
This is a laughable assertion.
Florida has 650 deaths per 100k people. Australia has 9.4 deaths per 100k people.
I think you have the theoretical game plan right, but I’d say that #3 is no longer within the realm of possibility in the US. There’s just no public support for it amongst anyone but the tiny percentage of the most cautious among us.
On #2, I’d even say that yes, masks still make sense in crowded indoor non-optional settings - meaning places we all have to go like public transit, grocery stores, and hospitals. But I’m already past the point of ever wearing a mask outdoors, and I’d also argue that it shouldn’t be a requirement for vaccinated individuals in optional spaces like gyms, bars, restaurants.
Being unmasked for 50% (?) of the time (while eating, say) you are in an enclosed space is obviously less risky than being unmasked 100% of the time.
My wife an I recently went out for breakfast. There was no wait for a table, so the masked time was basically less than a minute, but let's call it a full minute. Then, we were there for about 40 minutes unmasked.
That's a 97.5% time unmasked, talking or eating. You cannot possibly convince me that the 1 minute I had my mask on made ANY difference.
That said, the alternative to the "mask until you're seated" policy was never going to be "no masks", it would end up being "no indoor dining".
Or were you socializing for 30 minutes after actually eating for 10? And during the socializing period, you didn't feel like wearing a mask?
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Surely, when you were seated, you didn't have food yet. You had some time to place an order. It takes a few minutes to even fetch drinks from the back sometimes, depending on what the drinks are.
But everyone who is going to a restaurant in a "mask to the table" kind of area is wearing it for about 30 seconds til they sit at their table. Maybe on the way to the bathroom.
I know a few states had tried to pass mandates about wearing your mask when you were being waited on or when you were socializing/not actively eating. I don't think those stuck though because they are impossibly hard to enforce.
I don't always practice what I preach, but I've done so on multiple occasions. (IE: I've kept my mask on for the "social" phases of the Restaurant, and only took it off for the eating phase).
Given that we're currently facing an unprecedented hospital shortage _RIGHT NOW_, its certainly a behavior worth revisiting and advocating.
We can't stop all restaurant visits or family gatherings. But we can lessen the spread of COVID19 while we do gather.
No. I’m boosted. I’ve got plenty of other problems that are far higher in priority than Covid or the spread of Covid. Nobody should be required by law to wear a mask indoors at this point.
Why? No one has ever been able to tell me why a mask on a face was so terrible, to the point where I'm pretty sure that its just partisan bickering / political theater.
Masks are absolutely corrosive to society. They should have stayed off last June.
But in public, its important to reduce the hospitalization rate and COVID19 rate of spread. As corrosive as you "think" masks are, I guarantee that the long-term effects of COVID19 are more corrosive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/rxwnbl/i_am_a_new_york...
Just 10% of this school has gotten infected with COVID19, and you can see how much of a nightmare its become. Not enough substitute teachers to watch kids. Kids mingling in the auditorium because there's not enough teachers to watch them. Spreading COVID19 further and further, causing more kids to be absent, causing more teachers to be absent, preventing school from effectively functioning as a learning environment.
You can't ignore this crap. Its evidently and immediately an issue right now.
I think a more salient question is if we can push button #3. Nobody wants more lockdowns. The vaccinated are tired of the unvaccinated fucking everything up for us, and the unvaccinated have never been open to the idea.
This is another thing pointed out by the article: there just isn't the will to do it, even if it was necessary.
This isn't being made as a medical decision, it's being made as a political decision.
You either do an orderly shutdown, or you get de-facto shutdown.
In the case of this high-school, they only needed ~10% of students / teachers to get COVID19 before chaos reigned supreme. Students are now skipping classes out of fear of their own safety, teachers are collecting students into auditoriums (because too many teachers are sick, not enough substitute teachers to watch the students 30-at-a-time anymore, gotta collect all the students together to more efficiently watch over them).
At this point, the high-school in this Reddit discussion should have just an orderly shutdown, rather than pretending everything is fine.
An orderly shutdown is better, because all the students remain at the same point of their lessons. If you're a calculus teacher currently teaching basic integrals this week... you won't be able to teach "integration by parts" (or other advanced integrals) 1 month from now, because 10% of your students were missing.
----------
In contrast, a formal shutdown means that _EVERYBODY_ gets held off at this lesson. You cut your losses, formally shutdown school, and start everybody up when times are safer.
You can plan around a formal shutdown. You can't plan around a de-facto shutdown. All the students are going to have bits and pieces of knowledge and are unable to catchup, because they all randomly lost bits of information due to randomly missing class.
A lot of this gets left to the choice of business owners and school administrators who have to balance their choices with fiscal concerns and public perception. There is no political leadership position for them to fall back on. Basically everyone's hands are tied, and some group is going to be upset whether buttons get pressed or not.
So are you suggesting vaccines, masks and lockdowns forever? I don't think many will agree to that. I certain don't.
Given that our hospital systems are being pushed to basically their breaking point, we need to do what we can to help our the nurses / doctors handle this situation.
A cloth mask is something like 30% effective. That's better than nothing, and certainly can slow down the spread if used universally. Booster-vaccines are something like 70% vs Omicron.
You do what you can, with the tools you have.
If you are sick, stay home. Don't infect your colleagues, don't infect your patients. Its not that hard.
---
The fact that you're arguing for the opposite is incredibly callous and reckless of you. Its like the pandemic has removed you of common sense.
That's literally why we have paid sick leave. Having 5% of your workforce stuck at home is better than those people coming in and infecting _EVERONE ELSE AT THE OFFICE_.
There seem to be people arguing for the COVID19 sick doctors/nurses to come in and work as usual, even with symptoms.
If that's not the case in UK (and if you're still on the old 10-day quarantine), then I guess your local politics are just different than what I'm dealing with here. We can blame this misunderstanding on our different local situations for sure.
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EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/s0jaai/hey_cdc_im_...
Frankly, we're erring on the side of "too short a quarantine" right now in the USA with these 5-day periods.
I'm sure people are arguing for that somewhere, but it doesn't seem like it's anywhere I can see in this thread.
Please give the /r/nursing topic I posted in as an edit a review.
I'm not sure that's an outcome you want, though.
But this line of discussion is so bad, that I can only imagine it originated from Russian propaganda. How the hell does bringing in _PROVEN_ COVID19 positive people into a face-to-face setting with sick/immunocompromised patients a possible benefit in this situation?
The situation is sickening to think about. Its not something a rational person could ever possibly come up on their own.
On the other hand, if only 0.1% stay home sick with COVID, then the effect of their absence will probably be to reduce deaths if their job can be covered by others adequately.
So what we have is a question of degree: there exists a threshold at which doctors (or nurses, etc) should come in even if they have COVID. And somewhat counterintuitively the more doctors who are sick, the greater the likelihood that if they came in with COVID there would be fewer deaths overall.
Exactly where this threshold lies is an open question, and will depend on the facts.
Our hospitals have been pushed to the breaking point for a long time. Maybe we should focus on extending our ICU capability to meet the demand better, given that this may be the new normal for who knows how many years yet. I think we need to come to terms with this and expand accordingly on a more permanent basis.
TLDW: lockdowns are ineffective because they focus on protecting the wrong people. They can also cause harm to people.
They also touch on schools/colleges and say it makes no sense to lock them down because young people are very low risk.
There are several ways this could end, but the scenarios that could realistically keep most people from encountering the virus have proven implausible. So while you can use maska and lockdowns indefinitely, it's not much of a plan.
Arguably boosting the entire population and waiting for the last wave to pass is a more realistic plan, even though nobody so far seems willing to admit they're planning to do this, they just are doing it.
COVID-19 doesn't effectively transmit outside, so mask mandates outside are at best useless.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/01/07/deer-ohio-inf...
Are white-tailed deer commonly seen indoors? Or maybe, your assertion is full of crap.
"It's possible the deer in northeast Ohio contracted it from contaminated water, since the novel coronavirus is shed in human waste. But alternative sources — such as trash, backyard feeders, bait stations and wildlife hospitals — have to be considered, Bowman said."
What does this have to do with masks again? Perhaps you can organize a scientific experiment equipping half the deer with masks, and report back to us with the results.
Maybe the original case came from water, but we all know that COVID19 is primarily a respiratory virus that spreads by breath and air.
"A Japanese investigation of 110 cases found the probability of transmission to be 18.7 times higher indoors compared to an “open-air environment.” And a more recent study, which looked at transmission between 18 infected construction workers and 496 of their close contacts, showed that the infected individuals were nearly 25 times more likely to spread the virus to coworkers in enclosed spaces compared with outdoor settings. They transmitted the virus to 26 percent of their indoor coworkers while infecting only 1.4 percent of their outdoor workmates — this despite being significantly more likely to share meals and talk loudly while working outside."
Does it EVER spread outdoors? Sure. Is it very likely to? Not even close. We've known this for a long time, and yet we still have municipalities welding basketball hoops shut and filling skate parks with sand.
There's a restaurant close to me that's got "outdoor" seating. Its a tent with the sides down and heaters. It happens to match the legal requirements for "outdoor seating" in my county, but we all know that COVID19 is spreading everywhere inside that small tent.
--------
Its not like people are social-distancing at national parks. People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
And yet, the declarations are also ridiculous, which is the point that OP was making (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880264). In the past (and maybe now, not sure) people have been required to social distance at national parks - or even forbidden from going to them at all.
On the other side of "ridiculous": 6 feet of "social distancing" wasn't enough to begin with. Building and elevator capacities were a sham. And, my employer (and likely many others) skirted all of these ridiculous rules in ridiculous ways - which is the point, that regardless of how people behave (which isn't relevant for this discussion, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up), some of the rules are still bad and useless.
The vast majority of covid-related rules are unnecessary, hygiene theater, woefully inadequate, or some combination of all of those - and, yet, governments and people of a particular inclination insist on following this charade anyway and using various logical fallacies (e.g. strawmanning, as you did above) and emotional attacks on those that have the audacity to question them.
Its not enough for you as an individual.
But such a rule lowers the "blast radius" of who gets infected when a case comes up. People's breath travels like 20 feet. If everyone is 6-feet apart, you only get ~3 people in front of you sick.
If people are ~2 feet apart instead, you infect 300% more people.
---------
There's a thing about big groups. What's good for the group isn't necessarily what's best for the individual.
Read the quote I pulled: outside = "open-air environment".
> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
And this is being obtuse about "these declarations" to avoid acknowledging the fact that the person at the top of this thread is correct: COVID, statistically, almost never transmits outdoors. It's been studied, multiple times, all coming to the same conclusion.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/third-oh...
COVID19 is _effectively_ spreading to the entire Ohio deer population.
> The investigators said the prevalence of infection varied from 13.5% to 70% across the nine sites, with the highest prevalence observed in four sites that were surrounded by more densely populated neighborhoods.
Furthermore, it seems like we humans are spreading it to deer, with the deer in higher-density human neighborhoods reaching ~70% infection.
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I don't think we humans are sitting around talking to deer indoors. Any reasonable application of Occam's Razor is that humans are spreading COVID19 to deer through some kind of outdoor setting.
It doesn't suggest anything.
You're conflating two uses of the English word "effectively". One means "efficiently", which is the only one in use in the thread above, and the only one under debate. The other means "functionally" or "the effects are the same as", which is what you used in this single comment - but not even correctly. 1/3 of the deer population is not "effectively" the entire Ohio deer population in the sense that you meant it.
Furthermore, COVID19 does not spread effectively (in the sense of "efficiently") outside, as a comment that you've already read has pointed out[1]. 18 to 25 times less likely to spread to co-workers in an "open-air environment" (which kind of implicitly is still not like being in a park) fulfills the definition of "ineffective".
> Any reasonable application of Occam's Razor is that humans are spreading COVID19 to deer through some kind of outdoor setting.
Nobody claimed that there were no cases of outdoor human-to-deer infection - you were suggesting that the virus spread effectively outdoors in [2], which Occam's Razor does not support in the slightest.
You also moved the goalposts from "The fact that there's a bunch of infected deer means that covid effectively transmits outside" to "There's some outdoor transmission", and those two positions are completely different.
So, yes, Occam's Razor does support your (silently) revised claim in this comment, but definitely not the comment you originally invoked the Razor in.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29883621
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880284
The deer samples were anywhere from 14% to 70% COVID19 infected.
You're grossly underestimating the amount of COVID19 we have spread to the deer population (and likely, that deer have spread to each other). All of which happened outdoors.
[1] https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/01/07/deer-ohio-inf...
...with an overall rate of 36%, which is given in that very article that you linked. It doesn't matter if 70% of the deer at one site were infected, if the average is significantly lower than that.
...which isn't even relevant, because again, you're moving the goalposts, as stated above.
> You're grossly underestimating the amount of COVID19 we have spread to the deer population
I'm not underestimating anything, as one of the researchers said: "there is no documentation of deer transmitting the virus to humans or vice versa"[1] (another article which you have linked but apparently failed to read).
...and, as a previous study found[2], the virus does not spread effectively outdoors.
You're literally fabricating claims from thin air. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for effective human-deer or deer-deer COVID transmission.
[1] https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/01/07/deer-ohio-inf...
[2] https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2021/08/how-safe-ou...
Deer don't do social distancing. They sleep together, and move around in herds for most of their day. COVID can both spread terribly outdoors (which it does) and lots of deer can get it exclusively outdoors.
Here in the UK we are in a terrible position of having to eventually pay for insanely expensive lockdowns that effectively did very little.
And we are now in the exact same place, as we were previously, having the same "discussion".
Masks make sense locally, temporarily, and as circumstances warrant. Such as a hospital or pharmacy during a flu outbreak, or when someone thinks they may be sick (cough or sneeze fits).
There doesn't seem to be much we can do to stop this in the near term. The idea of stamping out COVID quickly like we thought we could do in the spring of 2020 is gone.
It is time now to understand we live with it, to be cautious when we feel ill and isolate ourselves, and to get the preventative measures that help best (vaccines).
#2 and #3 are for imminent emergencies.
I am hoping that trend continues in the western world but who really knows
ffs, wear a mask.
By "what more realistically can we do" I'm really talking about shutdowns, lockdowns, and capacity reductions. I'm ok with continuing WFH for people who can... so I suppose my stance is inconsistent: I want to get back to "normal" but I'm ok with WFH and masks.
Overall, I'm frankly at a point where, double-vaxx'd and boosted, I really want to go back to not having to second-guess my decision to go out for a bowl of ramen.
Dwell deeply on that. The hospital is incapable of keeping people safe from Covid.
All the masks, social distancing and testing, and you catch Covid at the hospital.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5414085/
B) why aren’t we testing and segregated people in hospitals? If society is expected to segregate unvaccinated people why can’t hospitals test and segregate healthy patients from anyone with Covid?
C) what expression is appropriate for a hospital that was incapable of preventing a patient free of Covid from contracting Covid in the hospital? Unwilling perhaps? Uninterested?
The standard response is "Just imagine how bad it would be without all the restrictions!". Which is exactly the problem, perhaps. You're using imagination and not a quantitative approach. You can say that about literally anything. "Just imagine how much worse we would have lost that game if I wasn't wearing my lucky socks!"
The follow-up question is - if we can't stop infection in hospital buildings, where the most vulnerable are literally cooped up together for days and weeks at a time, what's the point of the rest of the restrictions? If you follow the logic used to set guidance and law where I live (ie, closures of various categories of business at various times, and ongoing), then logically we should also have shut down the hospitals...
This was to ensure non-emergency admissions could continue without risking infection.
thanks for "letting the chips fall where they may" on everyone else who still would much prefer not to get sick and risk long covid but I will keep the mask on for now, thanks
But what's the plan? Covid is showing no signs of going away.
If things stay the same, is your stance going to change in a year? 3? 5?
Besides, there is nothing wrong with being “anti mask”. Covid is endemic. I’m boostered. Why should I continue to be forced to wear a mask? Is Covid still the only problem I can ever focus on?
After COVID, what are the media and these people going to do? The gravy train is going to run out, everything else will be boring for them in comparison.
for example, I have relatives who watch FOX news all day. they are convinced covid vaccines were created to kill people, for the purposes of "thinning the herd". the reason for this "thinning the herd", which they seem to believe is happening? despite most everyone they know including their whole extended family shaking their heads at their crazy facebook posts being vaccinated without any issue? is so that this would somehow pave the way for "communism". that's their whole worldview. so those are folks who think we're somehow all on board with covid being great, or something.
I wanted to know if they were prepared to go on for 1, 3, 5, 10, 20 more years of mask wearing in public, travel restrictions, remote learning, testing, etc. if things stay the same.
I wouldn't say that. On the extreme end, if I found out that this thing was not going to be "over" during my lifetime, I'd say it doesn't make sense to continue doing this for my entire life. What kind of life is that?
And to be fair, I'm from the perspective of the Bay Area which has some of the strictest restrictions in the US. If you live in a more red area then you're more likely to already pretend it's over.
> ask, if you're willing to ignore reality and just pretend it's over, why not just start pretending now?
That's what I've been asking myself. I don't know the answer.
I have to cover my face every time I talk to someone. That's in no way inconsequential. It's depressing and antisocial.
I have to wear a mask while at the gym. That's in no way easy, particularly for cardio.
I'm lucky that I can work from home, otherwise I'd be wearing a mask for nearly my entire day at work.
And of course masking is just a part of the overall Covid restrictions that we still have to deal with.
To be clear, I'm in the bay area and fully follow local mask guidance. I can do that while also trying to figure out how long we can do this for, and acknowledging that I can't do this forever.
Is it? Why?
> I have to wear a mask while at the gym. That's in no way easy, particularly for cardio.
Of course it isn't at first. If society was such that we already used masks all the time I suspect people would just get used to it.
> I'm lucky that I can work from home, otherwise I'd be wearing a mask for nearly my entire day at work.
And...? We also wear clothes all day long at work. I suppose some people would call it bothersome or depressing or antisocial, but mostly we're all so used to it we don't even think about it.
I'm not opining on whether or not society can keep intermittently locking down forever, but we can certainly keep masking forever.
Huh? You don't just get used to a soggy, restricting mask. I tried running with a mask for like 3 months and it sucked the entire time.
> We also wear clothes all day long at work.
I don't think my belly button would contribute as much to building connections with people as my facial expressions do.
> we can certainly keep masking forever.
I can't. Period. And I don't think I'm a minority here.
Sure you do, the same way you get used to soggy clothes. You're telling me you ran with a mask for 3 months with no major issues other than "it's soggy and it sucked". Of course, but soggy clothes suck.
> I don't think my belly button would contribute as much to building connections with people as my facial expressions do.
Plenty of ways to build connections with people without them seeing the entirety of your face. Heck, I've plenty of internet friends who have never seen any part of it!
> I can't. Period. And I don't think I'm a minority here.
What I'm saying is: yes, people could, as in, they won't die or be permanently injured by it. At most there would be a few minor inconveniences, particularly during the time it takes for people to adapt. People say they can't, in general, to mean that they won't and as a way to feel less guilty about it.
I can understand people who say it's worth it, but not those who say it's inconsequential. Especially compared to seat belts.
(Edit: seat-belts address a threat that ought to be persistent, because it's inherent to driving, so they're easier to accept. Covid is, at least allegedly, temporary.)
I wasn't alive in the 80s, but honestly it seems pretty similar. A lot of people hated the laws, there were public fights and court challenges for a while, and then eventually society got over it.
right now almost nothing is known about long covid except for the very terrifying pathways by which the virus causes it takes effect, directly attacking organs, cardiovascular, lungs, immune system, and brain with long term, extensive damage in some cases. no thanks
so the plan is "wait and see" until more is known. if indeed it's established that long covid is much too dangerous to be risked (in the same way that lyme disease is currently considered to be too dangerous to be risked) then hopefully they will work towards producing newer vaccines that keep the initial antibody wall up against variants, and oral antiviral drugs that stop the virus much more quickly will also be commonplace. as well as that the global population will slowly (very...slowly) be getting more and more immunity from vaccines and re-infection, hopefully reducing the rate at which new variants emerge.
so in 3-5 years there will be lots of things improving the situation. we are not there yet.
Uh yeah sorry, I'm already losing it less than 2 years into this thing. There's zero chance I'm making it another 3-5 years. It's just not possible mentally for me. I don't know exactly what my time frame is, but 3-5 years is certainly beyond my limit.
From your username I'm guessing you're in your fifties, that's my age and I have fond memories of EMM386.
At that age the calculation starts getting a little different. I'm also vaxxed-and-done but still a little bit cautious.
Pretty good guess :)
Late 40s though. Started programming at 8 years old on a PcJr and a Compaq "laptop" and am still at it.
Which, according to the commenter, don't work, apparently
> mandates and social distancing.
Yea lets put everyone under house arrest for the rest of their lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko
> "We've done everything we can do, there's nothing left to do now but roll the dice"
I was double vaxxed and boosted, so I essentially did exactly what I was told to do, it didn't help.
Since Covid is never going away, I don't want booster shots that don't work every few months.
This has nothing to do with harming others in society. If I end up with Covid again, I'll isolate myself.
Did you just entirely dismiss what he said about catching it?
It is not his responsibility to protect you or anyone else. YOU can stay home and isolate if you can't handle being out. Stop putting your burden on everyone else. You (and your ilk) have no right to demand protection from others while putting yourself in harms way.
"I can't handle my own health anxiety so I'm going to make sure everyone makes ME feel better regardless of how it affects their lives"
You're the selfish one in this situation.
Who are we protecting? What measures? Why is he responsible for the health and actions of others? Who exactly is he helping by getting more boosters?
Why is it hard for you to understand that a free society doesn't put the onus on others to keep you or anyone else healthy. You are free to boost the shit out of your system, quadruple mask, and lock down all you want for the end of time. No one will force you to go out. Leave the rest to freedom of individual choice.
Eh? We restrict activities that have negative externalities on the people around you all the time. To name a few: anything that creates pollution, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, even having ridiculously bright headlights in your car.
Most of those things are restricted when they actually harm people NOT before. You are not restricted from consuming alcohol unless you go out and drink or do something else under the influence. You are not restricted from smoking unless you do it in a place where the smoke cannot be avoided. In this scenario you'd be demanding someone stop smoking while walking towards the smoke.
Lastly, I'm sort of done convincing people like you. I no longer care what you think. I and many others are going to move on with our lives. What are you going to do to stop us?
In this country we typically don’t care how our actions and policies affect broader society, from NIMBYism to faux-meritocracies to non-universal healthcare.
I really can’t fault anyone for not caring how their actions affect others, it’s been engrained in our culture/laws/policies as long as I’ve been alive.
Let the strongest survive. We do it in every other facet of our lives (well it’s more let the strongest take all and let the weakest suffer for decades).
I’m vaccinated, boosted, and wear masks when needed. I do that for me, not for society. Personally, I’d love 20-40M Americans to kick the bucket with this pandemic, free up housing, decrease the labor supply, lower carbon emissions. Sounds wonderful.
I don't hear much about it these days but a few years ago MRSA was talked about commonly in this context. I think that was the big fear there as well. You go for a minor surgery or whatever and come out with a bone infection you'll never completely shake.
Yes, indeed. It's time for people to resume critical thinking regarding this, and not be guided by "lizard brain" level fear responses. The virus has evolved, we've learned more, we know who to protect the most -- time to adapt.
There is also this weird fixation on being the single person who will infect another who for whatever reason is at high risk either due to obesity, not being vaccinated despite being in a high-risk group, etc. As if you're very presence in some public location is going to be the only way another person encounters the virus.
It's just not realistic. Every single person will eventually catch a cold just like every single person will eventually catch the omicron variant or whatever one surfaces next.
This fixation that we, or the government, is capable of isolating human beings in a manner to prevent them from ever being exposed to an endemic virus is utterly absurd.
That said, a fatalistic viewpoint is valid enough philosophy, but I am still in the camp of "even if I don't like them very much, the unvaccinated are still humans and we should still try and minimize how many of them get sick."
NOTE: I'm vaccinated and boosted, and wouldn't have a problem getting another booster if the WHO or CDC recommends it.
It really didn't. It reads like something I'd see in a JPG compressed meme you'd see on /r/forwardsFromGrandma.
Are you saying that we shouldn't do anything if we see a new variant?
> This disease will always be with us
That sounds fatalistic to me, at least with the more colloquial use of the word.
To be clear, I don't necessarily think you're wrong. It's a valid viewpoint, and I think it's not unreasonable to say "the sooner we find a way to return to semi-normalcy rahter than osciallting around every time a new variant with different properties shows up, the better."
As for fatalism about a virus- I grew up during HIV/AIDS. It's still here (I went into biology and got a PhD and almost became a professor to work on anti-HIV drugs). Is it fatalistic for us to assume HIV will be with us even though we know how to completely abolish transmission, but people still do things that lead to transmission?
best to be realistic about the future and plan for it than hope vaccines are going to magically solve problems for us.
I don't know anything about the specifics of HIV so I cannot speak to it, but we have eradicated one virus completely (barring some frozen samples in labs): smallpox.
Obviously it's an apples to orange comparison since smallpox isn't nearly as transmissible as COVID, but my point is that I'm sure that there were people in 1900 that said "we will never get rid of smallpox".
I think what we've seen is that there is likely no chance that even 100% vaccination would have permanently eliminated the disease, and total lockdowns aren't super-effective either, given their heavy societal costs.
E.g., if I knew that a variant will be endemic unless 90% of a community follows certain practices, but 40% state they won't comply, that matters. If nothing else, it makes it seem pointless for me to bother wearing a mask for others' protection.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
First, they gave vague recommendations to immunocompromised folks. They said everyone else probably didn't need it. Then they said well, ok for older folks. Then this new omni variant comes out and they're badgering everyone to get boosted NOW or your no longer considered fully vaccinated.
There would have been so much less confusion if they were consistent with their communication from the start, and did a phased rollout of the booster just like they did with the original vaccine.
Edit: My point is that they knew there was reduced efficacy of the vaccine back in September. They knew the general public would eventually need a vaccine. They should have had a plan to gradually get the population boosted. If they had, most who wanted a booster would have had one before omni existed.
There's a reason emergency services dispatchers have such a stressful job, they're making these decisions all the time based on very limited amounts of data. Unfortunately we're all living in a situation right now where we're making emergency decisions as new information emerges.
Not me, but you seem to be hooked on fear. May you find some peace in life.
This is an unnecessary insult. You could have left it with "I'm comfortable not treating this as an emergency situation." I'm not sure what you gained from this post. Hopefully you got the performative internet points you were looking for.
In the past week:
- The CDC director acknowledged and downplayed the severity of omicron by stating the vast majority of hospitalized patients have multiple comorbidities. This has been true since the start of the pandemic, but is only being addressed now.
- CDC and several states are making the distinction between "hospitalized from" and "hospitalized with" COVID. This has also been a point of contention for the past 2 years. For some reason we're changing that now. Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd bet it has to do with the omicron spike making govt. middle manager KPI graphs look bad.
"Trust the science" is a nonsense term. We're being asked to "Trust the policymakers". Why should we? Ok, so they're informed by science. But if the scientific consensus is obviously in rapid flux and can't be used to predict anything, then why should we trust the policies or their makers?
Furthermore, there is now widespread suspicion that the CDC's current recommendations are not based on science anymore: for example, the 5-day vs 10-day isolation period.
What's especially bad is the advice not to use tests after 5 days, followed a few days later by advice that tests are optional after 5 days -- everyone knows that advice would be different if there were not test shortages. That's not science, that's pragmatism, and that's fine and they ought to just say so, but the CDC continues to make the transparently false claim that their advice is based purely on science.
That really hurts the CDC's credibility -- now, when they make an announcement, we all have to ask ourselves whether it's truly based on science. Smart people of all political stripes now realize this. Even the liberal cable TV talking heads are attacking the CDC over this.
People will put up with just about anything if they think there's a good reason for it, but if instructions seem arbitrary then people tend to stop giving officials the benefit of the doubt.
Transparency can go along way towards maintaining public trust. I'd rather the CDC err on the side of over-sharing than the reverse.
I think it's worth considering a different framing:
> "There would have been so much less confusion if COVID variants and transmission/hospitalization/death rates remained consistent from the start"
It's easy to call out the communication, and don't get me wrong, it surely could have been better. But I often see this sentiment without acknowledging that the communication problems are a symptom, and driven by a very unpredictable situation, and very appropriate changes in policy based on that evolving situation.
Throw in politicization of it, tons of non-mutual “facts” going around, a heap of anecdotes, and you’ve got a communications nightmare.
No, that's not what is being said. In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment."
Of course there's multiple problems with this: you don't sound on top of things, media will extract the most definitive quote from it anyway, hard to imagine the worst case scenario, etc. But it does seem that most government are messing up the communication badly (either sounding very paternalistic, blaming the citizens, never showing uncertainty despite the situation, changing measures before the previous ones can show an effect, etc.), at least for what I would consider a good, mature way to communicate with citizens. I'm no expert, tho.
isn't the rational thing to do to start ignoring some of the "meta-policy" framing and just treat it as "this is the best idea people have at the time, but I expect it's subject to change."
Truthfully, we should be more open to all sorts of policy changing over time. Every other entity in the world is expected to evolve.
And I'm open to policy changes as well.
I'm just disappointed by the (as I said in another reply, Italian or Dutch) governments treating people like kids, washing away the complexity and nuances in communication with the public, expecting them not to understand that they don't have all the answers and that decisions might change in light of new (possibly even contrasting) information. Is that wishy washy, or treating the population as adults? For me it's the latter.
It does, however, assume a certain degree of scientific literacy that is lacking in many people (including politicians?), so maybe that's an answer for why it's not like that.
I don’t think you can be wishy washy, and the lack of respect for science and science education in the US certainly doesn’t help.
I like to say "I believe in science". However, what I've seen in the last 2 years is only science by name and by fiat.
We've been fed wrong information after wrong information "for our own good", which has caused the population to lose confidence as the article perfectly explains.
This is terrible, as trust and confidence take a long time to build. Now we have a wonderful new technology (mRNA vaccine) that could be helpful against many ailments, but that the population has learned to fear.
The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first, how hands washing was so important... for airborne virus (!!!): because air filtration was too expansive, how the old vaccine is so important against omicron: because they haven't adapted the vaccine so hey let's give a 3rd, a 4th shot and so on, sending people known to have covid in retirement homes full of vulnerable people: because they hadn't built adequate facilities...)
I believe in science, but I can hardly blame people who now subscribe to weird ideas: in their defense, they have noticed some of the lies so in a Bayesian setting they have adjusted their priors: by default they now distrust every official message, and unfortunately for them they may not have the proper scientific knowledge to better adapt their probability distributions.
I seriously hope there will be official inquiries about a level of mismanagement that borders criminal negligence, and that will have cost human lives.
This isn't what the government said. The government said that masks were inefficient at preventing the wearing from contracting Covid, which is true to this day. They didn't want people to hoard masks at everyone else's expense, especially healthcare workers.
What would you improve in the message sent? To me it seems the parts you ask for are pretty much there?
While in NL the scientific advice and communication has been simply ridiculous (mandatory masks introduced at the end of last year, with still the idea that "science doesn't know if they work, but we are gonna make them mandatory" from the government, and "we're against that, they don't work" from the head of the CDC-equivalent), in Italy it does contain the cautious wording that I advocate for.
However, this is the official communication that is written in "legalese" and not passed through the people by means of interviews and press releases. The media of course bears a lot of responsibility for the dilution of the message, chasing scoops and making headlines that leave no space for doubt; but the communication of the government to the public ends up using similar headlines, which I see as the problem in this case.
Could have? Yes. Should have? $20 says 90% of the population simply ignore communication worded this way, and that "GET BOOSTER NOW, YES YOU" is more effective.
Oh no no no.
This is probably the absolute worst possible wording. Any time a government agency has had to chance their stance on something, they get accused of lying.
They have to be careful with how to present preliminary information. If they state anything "may" be true, then news outlets will treat it as true, and then hells breaks loose when they discover it was wrong.
Of course, if they wait until they're absolutely certain of something, then until then, they get accused of incompetence and of doing nothing, while some news outlets just make up bullshit.
We absolutely did not know that cloth masks would help. We (incorrectly) thought that anything less than a N95 mask would not help at all, and so that is what was communicated. Since then we have done a lot of science and have learned that while N95 masks are a lot better than, say, double-layered cloth masks, the latter are still much better than nothing in slowing down infection rates.
We also were very focused on the effects for the wearer of masks. We were not focused on the effects of a possible spreader wearing the masks. Part of this was that all of the previous pandemics had diseases that people were symptomatic when they spread the disease. With Covid-19 we have a disease the mostly spreads when people are a-symptomatic. So the potential spreaders are the ones who most need to be wearing masks, and since we can't tell them apart, we need everyone in masks.
All of these things are things we learned along the way. Harping on the CDC (or others) for not knowing them is just wrong. For some of the references here please see:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
Haven't the horrors of history given enough examples? The ends do not justify the means. Lies like this have most definitely already backfired hard. Anyone who thinks they are some special elite who is entitled to lie to the public for the greater good is wrong, evil, and unfit to hold any sort of power.
Political and scientific leaders knew this, and they made a decision to exaggerate the level of confidence they had or should have had in several of these matters. No one seriously expected leadership to have complete knowledge from day 1, but that's not the criticism. Nor is the criticism that facts change on the ground in fast-moving situations. Of course they do.
The criticism is that they knowingly overstated their factual case at the time so that they could implement their chosen strategies, even to the point of suppressing legitimate scientific dissent, and are now unconvincingly trying to use "facts on the ground change", "science learns over time", and "of course we couldn't have been expected to know everything" as excuses for those decisions.
If you're making very confident policy-guiding assertions to the public on behalf of Science (TM), and when you're right, it's evidence of how great Science is, and when you're wrong, it's because Science is a process of continual revision and uncertain information, that creates a bit of moral hazard. It works internally in science, where there are no consequences for being wrong other than wasted time, but not in the real world where there are real consequences for being wrong.
consistent communication could have been: boosters are recommended, we'll open them to relevant age groups in the future.
though honestly they should have opened boosters to everyone in september and called it done. we knew then everything we needed to know. which are:
1. risks of the boosters. 2. average declines in protection.
> during unpredictable situations
Unpredictable: adjective - "not able to be predicted"
> it makes it MORE important to be consistent in communication
Consistent: adjective - "unchanging in nature, standard, or effect over time"
If you wish to deliver a message that is accurate during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and remain consistent without starting to misrepresent the truth.
If you wish to deliver a message that is consistent during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and deliver current/accurate information.
In essence, your options are:
1. Be accurate/informative, but the message will change as the situation changes.
2. Be consistent, but the message either a) cannot contain any meaningful guidance or b) will be wrong
we knew by late june boosters would be needed. so all messaging after june should have been consistent. it wasnt.
what wasn't predictable was when precisely we needed to issue boosters and to whom. because we simply didn't have the data on that until around september. However since september it was very predictable that we needed them for the holiday season. I got mine in early november because it was fucking obvious. omicron wasn't 100% assured but it was in the news and most sound bites were 'more contagious'.
its entirely possible to be consistent in the face on unpredictable events.
1. outright say 'we don't currently have the information needed yet check back later' or 'worst case scenario would be X, we're going to start with those assumptions'
2. repeat step 1 until you have the data or know you never will
3. once data is acquired adjust statements.
this is being consistent and clear. another example of this is masking and viral spread.
1. assume worst case for viral spread (airborne)
2. message masks are necessary until more is known about how the virus spreads.
3. if results come back disproving airborne spread, say so.
instead we got:
1. masks not necessary. virus doesn't seem to be airborne.
2. OOPS VIRUS IS AIRBORNE.
the first case is consistent, assume worst case and then ease restrictions. the 2nd case is completely inconsistent.
The virus is mutating so the government strategy has to adapt too. Elimination was an option for a while.
However these countries were always going to have to open up and accept the virus eventually as it became endemic in the rest of the world. They were just delaying the inevitable. As it happened, the evolution of the virus made the decision for them. However if Delta had not happened they would still have had to make the decision to open up at some point, probably after a significant proportion of the population was vaccinated.
But let me ask you this. Are we going to need a fourth shot / second booster in 2022? I'd say it's almost certain. Find me a public health authority who is saying this in the United States. I can't.
There's some legitimately changing facts. But there's also nonsense, like health officials saying masks don't help with a respiratory disease, that has nothing to do with changing facts.
Now, the reasoning for the former was that they were concerned about PPE supplies, but that doesn't change the fact they reversed themselves very shortly, and expected people to forget the earlier messaging.
The government didn't need to be an oracle with a perfect track record, but I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that they should have been honest. If you can't see how the pandemic was used for political purposes, I don't know what to say.
It seems to me from this excerpt of his email to a colleague on February 5, 2020, Fauci really did not think masks were effective initially.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
This goes back to the comment you replied to. The government can't give perfect hindsight advice at the beginning of any situation. it seems like your complaint here is "science isn't perfect"
* I have not made and continue to not make any statements regarding mask communication, nor about reports on reasoning for that.
* I am not engaging in nor countering absurd conspiracy theories
* I am not broadcasting my feelings and thoughts on political purposes and what I do or do not see to you, so I don't know why you think you are capable of surmising what I can and cannot see.
* I do find hilarious how very angry you are that I pointed a logical inconsistency.
But pointing out the the messaging from the government has been, at best, muddled--and at worst, misleading, if not downright dishonest--you interpret as "anger"? I find that pretty disingenuous. You are again inferring that which is not implied.
As things stood? The CDC basically said 'you should get a booster only if you're high risk'. They went back and forth over whether to recommend it to the general public for the longest time. This lead to a lot of confusion, and a lot of folks essentially shrugged and went on with their life. If they had been consistent with messaging a much higher percentage of the population would currently be boosted.
While that's true, I don't think it's reasonable unless, like a sibling suggested, the disease would be consistent from the start.
What would be nice is if they contemplated and acknowledged that the recommendations would be changing. Rather than saying 'others don't need a booster', they should be saying 'at this time, based on current understanding, etc, others don't need a booster'. In some situations, they can probably suggest what conditions might cause a change in recommendations.
But they do. E.g. go through https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000000*/https://www.cdc...., it's always wrapped in "We are monitoring the situation. High-risk populations first. Recommendations will be adjusted as needed." disclaimers. But we have a strong tendency to only remember the short head-line version, even if we looked at the full statement at the time. And if you go by headlines or equivalent short news, it's likely you haven't seen the disclaimer, but good luck getting the details into headlines. It's a pattern that repeats over and over in discussions of this.
Not having increased risk of heart inflammation and rare dangerous thromboses would be nice too, but then again it seems like Covid causes those anyway. So maybe we just need to update our base rates for those conditions and move on from the way things used to be.
Plus, if I can still spread Covid and make grandma critically ill even after I have the booster, whereas I'm at super low risk for serious illness, is the booster even doing anything to reduce hospital utilization?
I had what I think was omicron, and it seems like I don't really need a booster on top of it... or do I?
The point is that I have no idea what the right thing to do is.
I feel like there's no public health response in the USA anymore. The President is just telling people to f*cking "Google it", everyone seems to be either a paranoid wacko anti-vax Covid denier Bill-Gates-is-coming-for-your-body-fluids-and-children cultist or a "trust the science" cultist, and the big pharma companies (Pfizer, Moderna) seem to be just raking it in hand over fist with all these vaccine doses.
Seems like everyone has to brush up on their statistics and start reading the research, because the news and government agencies just aren't worth a damn anymore when it comes to communicating. It seems that the Trump legacy of "abject societal dysfunction" is here to stay.
</rant>
By the time the Omicron-specific vaccines are approved by the various government health bureaucracies, Omicron will have run its course. Unless you want to live like a hermit for the next few months, it's probably best to get a booster and live your life. All of my friends & acquaintances who've contracted omicron have had a booster shot and all of them said that the worst part was isolating. Their symptoms were extremely mild- just a sore throat or cough for a few days.
It would be nice if one could choose a lower dose of vaccine. The second shot (and booster) of Pfizer were absolutely brutal for me. A baby aspirin version of the vaccine would provide most of the protection without the days of debilitating pain and fever. When I got my booster I asked the guy giving the shot if he could inject a partial dose because my previous reaction was so bad. He just laughed, emptied the syringe into my arm, and told me to drink lots of water. :(
The problem here is that we have a lot of internalization of changing your mind is bad in the political arena. "Flip flopping," etc. Inquiry is discouraged.
The article is actually much more interesting because it's about how views are changing differently for different groups even inside the same partisan grouping. It shows that conversation and messaging is an ongoing thing.
One of the theories on the origin of omicron seems to be that it evolved in animals for a while before jumping back to humans (the weirdness being that it's not evolved from Delta, and it has a number of mutations all at once). [1]
And even if it's not the origin of this variant, it could easily be the origin of a future variant (that's why they're considering it).
And it's quite unlikely we could vaccinate every animal on the planet, so this idea that if we had just gotten all our shots this variant would have never happened is pretty ridiculous.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-did-omicron-covid-varian...
If we had gotten 80% (some magic number between 70% and 95% I pulled out of nothing) of the US adult population vaccinated, and quarantine locked down the borders we could have snuffed covid out and been in a bubble paradise like New Zealand managed to do with just hard and long enough quarantines.
We didn't get there, and Delta and Omicron did get to us; two variations that are each insanely more viriliant and spread despite the vaccinations which are now only good enough to prevent serious infection and death most of the time.
Yes, physical borders are long stretches that are difficult to secure, and I have seen the TV footage. Doesn't mean that a policy can't be _sufficiently_ effective to make a difference.
Also, reflexively speaking of borders; effective policies probably involve a mix of carrot and stick. The carrot being a legal path to do what people are going to do anyway, but in ways that are documented and regulated. Exact details of either side of that are far, far off topic in this thread.
The virus stuck around and we got Delta, and now Omicron.
And we're STILL at less than 70% vaccinated. I don't know what's required for herd immunity, but it doesn't take a Ph.D in virology to know that 70% isn't it.
So I'm not sure what the intended end game of the people trying to limit the spread is. "Flatten the peak so hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed" may or may not be realistic, but at least it's a coherent goal. "Keep vaccinating and closing things until COVID goes to zero on its own" just seems like denying the reality that COVID is endemic at this point, so any non-acute mitigation measures we want to take now had better be mitigation measures we're willing to keep taking forever.
To a certain extent, I blame the use of the term "reaching herd immunity" instead of "reaching an endemic state" for giving people unrealistic expectations.
At this point, yes.
But last year? In Spring and early summer? Look at COVID cases compared to vaccination rates. Case counts were dropping fast, but then vaccination stalled. A couple months later, Delta began ripping through and we got our second wave.
I sincerely believe that we could have been through with this if we had reached 95% vaccination by July.
I'm undecided if we should still continue masking and any restrictions at this point. I want to say "Fuck it. Everyone who wants a vax can get one, if you don't, I will have zero pity if you get infected.", but the fact is, ICU's are still being overrun.
It would not have made a difference.
Singapore, Israel and a large chunk of Western Europe had very high vaccination rates before they got pummled by a Delta wave.
And for anyone wondering if boosters are enough to quell Omicron: Israel is the perfect case study as they're currently being pummled by Omicron after having finished their booster campaign (they're onto their 4th dose now).
Are lockdowns the answer to Omicron? Well the Netherlands went into a preemptive lockdown several weeks BEFORE Omicron took off and I think their case trajectory paints a very clear picture now that Omicron has taken off (they are still in lockdown).
To me, it looks like the vaccine's efficiency in terms of reducing transmission wanes after 3-5 months and it's quite clear when you look at the different waves countries are experiencing around the world.
All omicron cases in the US can be traced back to infections from outside of the country. Getting 95% of eligible people vaccinated and getting cases within the country to zero prior to omicron being introduced would have been nice, but that alone would not have stopped the current omicron wave. We'd be in a somewhat better place now, but since a significant factor in hospitals being under load now is vaccinated medical personnel being out with covid, we'd still have a hospital load problem.
I can see maybe some justification in instituting restrictions to try to flatten the peak of the omicron wave, until such a time as case numbers start to decrease again. But such restrictions, if put in place, should be done with the understanding that all we're doing is shifting infections in time, not changing the total number of infections.
> I want to say "Fuck it. Everyone who wants a vax can get one, if you don't, I will have zero pity if you get infected.", but the fact is, ICU's are still being overrun.
This is basically where I'm at, except at this point it doesn't seem like there's any coherent idea of when the inevitable infections that occur won't overrun ICUs, and I don't particularly think it's worse to have ICUs overrun for a few weeks right now than it is to have ICUs overrun for a few weeks a month from now.
Do you understand it crosses between humans and animals such as deer and even house cats? You can sincerely believe in the Easter Bunny along with sincerely believing all animals can be vaccinated on approximately the same week, but sincerely believing in something does not make it possible.
Covid seemed to be on track to have be almost entirely wiped out in the U.S. until Delta and Omicron came along, and now it's not clear that even 100% vaccination rates would be enough.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...
Currently the CDC still considers someone fully vaccinated after the two dose series. As far as I can tell there aren't any booster requirements at the national level.
The problem is: science is continuous discovery of and adaptation to new facts. In a society where significant amounts of the population have such a low respect for science that they seriously believe that Earth was created by God 6000 years ago, it is obvious that these people literally cannot grasp or cope with the fact that new discoveries come in timespans of single-digit weeks... Omicron was discovered at the end of November, barely a month later cases worldwide reached Delta records and now they went through the roofs.
I agree that there have been communication fuck-ups by politicians and the media, but basic science education in schools (and scientist staff in mass media) would have lessened the impact dramatically.
Biden called for a booster dose for everyone in September. The CDC and the FDA didn't agree.
I'm vaccinated and boosted. I wear a mask in public. I don't go out much. I do travel fairly regularly (fly maybe 1-2x per month). I finally got Covid last week, likely on a flight. I had ~3 days of mild cold-like symptoms (sore throat, runny nose, congestion, very low grade fever that approached 101F). It was far less severe than any flu I've ever had. I extended my trip by a week to meet how I read the CDC guidelines (which are clear as mud for mildy symptomatic cases).
If the severity for everyone was that mild, then I'd say we're done. However, I worry about the unvaccinated and the unboosted. I wish there was better data on the severity of Omicron for different categories of people.
Omicron seems to carry far fewer of those risks from what data we have, especially if you are vaccinated.
I was in the house but didn't catch omicron due to the vaccine (I guess?).
I am triple vaxxed and will happily wear a mask for the rest of my life, but we are in the midst of a slow moving train of economic turmoil brought about by COVID and the resulting decisions(which I'm not arguing with. some were stupid but hindsight is 20/20). We will soon need to get the world back to as normal of a state as we can because we will need the economic benefits. We will need to get our kids back in school and socializing. I know many people are scarred and will not want to emerge from their caves but without compelling justification(such as a new variant which is actually dangerous) we will return to normal soon.
To get vaxxed insulates you from the risk of severe disease. It reduces the risk to the point that going out and living life is an acceptable risk, just like any other. However, it doesn't protect you from infecting others. To that end, I think that indoor mask mandates continue to be justifiable and should continue until we either evolve a COVID-19 variant weak enough that moderate disease isn't disruptive, or it fades away.
In order for us to continue to have freedom, it requires collective sacrifice. We have seen a large swath of the US population unwilling to make relatively simple sacrifices to ensure that we have freedom of mobility. This is disappointing to see.
Unfortunately this is a large individual responsibility, both in behavior and in the costs of getting enough tests. PCR tests are mostly impractical for continuous testing while going out and about becuase of the large time lag between testing and results, made worse by spiking demand and limited lab capacity, and buying rapid tests can add up as a real cost to the average family.
We need a program like that on a national scale. I know countries like the UK are doing really well with at-home testing programs, but here in the US, we’re still experiencing both PCR and rapid test shortages. We shouldn’t be seeing this so far into a pandemic.
Fully agree on the individual responsibility to quarantine regardless of clinical symptoms, too. There’s been a huge failing, this entire pandemic, at the individual level. It’s why the lockdowns were marginally effective — folks didn’t stay at home like they were asked to. It’s another symptom of a lack of collective sacrifice for the greater good.
COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of something like 0.20%. Let's move on from these draconian restrictions and get back to reality. The flu has been overwhelming hospitals since before COVID [1], governments and hospital systems have had 2+ years to deal with the supply-side of the healthcare equation here, at this point if they still haven't figured it out it's on them.
[1] https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
And anybody except the immunocompromised - you probably know at least a couple older family members, but may not immediately think of anyone immunocompromised, but again they're around 3% of the population. It includes those suffering from or using immunosuppressive drugs to manage type 1 diabetes, HIV, arthritis, cancer, organ transplants, lupus, IBD, and many other conditions.
Even before the vaccine, I - a 30 year old in good health - had what I personally consider to be an acceptable risk profile to contracting the vaccine. For me, it's never seemed an issue of personal safety, I've always been deferring plans, wearing a mask, isolating, been vaccinated, and been boosted to protect others. There are a few faces of elderly and immunocompromised people in my life that I can recall to help my emotional processing.
But it's becoming harder to run the emotionally-loaded math and feel morally culpable for the harm caused by my potentially transmitting it to the three of my coworkers who are vocally, rabidly antivax (all 60+, two with comorbidities) and then worry about their transmitting it to their unknown peers I'm sure they associate with who may be vaccinated but might be harmed.
In any case, I firmly believe that people should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want to wear them. I was in Copenhagen a few months ago where no one was wearing masks anywhere including indoors, and it was so refreshing seeing life as usual again, smiles on peoples' faces, etc.
Lies and miscommunication, over public health policy, without transparency and openness.
Silencing criticism, rather than open discussion.
I’m surprised more people are continuing to follow along.
There's always been risks to life and this feels more like governments are trying to convince people the risk should be zero so they can be the heroes while at the same time expanding their powers...
The virus will keep evolving to evade our vaccines. This is never going to end. We will never eradicate Covid, and we'll never reach vaccine-mediated herd immunity.
The administration forcing a purge of unvaccinated US soldiers, government workers, and employees of companies that do business with the government is obscene. Not only is this government overreach, it's a political witch hunt. It's disemboweling of dissent from the ranks, which is chiefly undemocratic and un-American.
I'm so angry at how this has been handled by both the Trump and the Biden administrations. Give people tools and understandable science (which Trump botched), but stop trying to become Big Brother (which is what Biden is doing). And above all, stop turning this into a political matter that toys with people's safety and employment.
The one that seems odd in this list is soldiers. It's my understanding that soldiers already were mandated vaccines when put into areas where the particular diseases were common. I'm not sure why mandating covid vaccines for them during a global pandemic is different.
Maybe there's context I'm missing, but when I first read about the backlash I was confused.
lol, we did not have an insurrection a year go. Stop spreading that myth. The FBI has found no evidence of an insurrection, no one has been charged much less convicted of insurrection. It was a "mostly peaceful" protest... and no one there was attempting to over throw the US government.
Labeling it an insurrection is political non-sense that further serves to divide the nation, and is the real act of "dismantling democracy"
>>At the moment there is only one party working actively to dismantle democracy itself
Ahh Yes, Voter ID... I need to show my ID and Proof of vaccination to eat but showing ID to vote is threat to democracy. Spare me
I've lost 3 people to cancer this pandemic. Been to 20+ funerals in my life and I'm barely over 30. Never lost anyone to any transmissible disease.
Nah, internal conflict is a bigger threat than even a meteor or nuclear war. A civil war happened once in the US, it could happen again. If not a civil war, a complete governmental collapse. All you have to do is keep polarizing and polarizing the sides to further and further extremes and eventually reap the consequences when the government collapses.
To answer the parents question though what does it take, well of course if people are seeing their neighbors bleed out of their eyes everyone is going to sign up for vaccines even if the vaccine could possibly kill you.
Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.
Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
(And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess).
In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
/rant
An enormous amount of working Americans have no healthcare at all. Would you prefer that?
In theory.
"Modern" industries like social media tend to leak personal information like a sieve.
https://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/health-informatics...
I'm Canadian, east coast. Our Health Care system is garbage and a lot of people end up going to private hospitals because the public sector can't handle the load, even pre-covid.
People have repeatedly died waiting in hospital halls waiting for care that never came.
Our healthcare system has almost nothing to be taken example of
Our healthcare system is a disgrace and our governments only get away with it because they can point to the bogeyman down south.
In my home country, _most_ of the files are electronic (EMRAM stage 6 for the main hospital network, covering most of the country https://www.himss.org/what-we-do-solutions/digital-health-tr...).
I can see any specialist (almost any GP) and they'll get limited time access to my entire patient history. I don't have to worry of getting a second opinion from someone who "doesn't have my history".
Plus, I get insight into this data myself through an app (or web platform), where I can view the scans and take them to someone outside of the network if I want to.
Pharmacies will also start sharing data, so a GP can enter the data in a system which any Pharmacy can then enter (with your electronic ID), so no need for paper subscriptions either.
It just gives me peace of mind. :-)
Meanwhile down here in the US I was charged $150 after going to an urgent care clinic for strep throat. They couldn’t tell me how much it would cost ahead of time.
Also, due to a temporary billing error in the Manitoba hospital (everything was supposed to be charged to my sister's insurance, but some things weren't by mistake) the hospital's billing department half-assedly pursued me for payment for a renal ultrasound. The bill was fifteen (Canadian) dollars.
To be honest, I don't think it is unreasonable to pay $150 for a nurse's/doctor's time to examine you. I've gone to urgent care and the ER a few times, and they're always filled with people who are there for non-issues. If it was totally free, you'd have them filled with people with things that should really just be handled by a regular doctor's appointment.
Hell, my local hospital had to make a public statement for people to stop going to the ER just to get COVID tests.
Seeing specialists can take a long time that's right. I had a torn achilles tendon and it took almost 3 months to see a specialist with couple of days notice and no communication in between. That sucked. For my elderly parents in law it seems to be going much faster to see specialists so it might depend on severity.
[1] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/managing-your-heal...
This is very complex and absolutely hilarious when American democrats think of Canada as a better solution.
>Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.
We have very good laws in place protecting health information. $10,000 tort damages for leaking health infos and then much larger fines for more problematic issues.
Some hospitals try to do the right thing and will have high security maturity. The other hospitals basically do the opposite. They forcefully will not secure their systems and save the money and put it in a fund to pay out the inevitable breach.
>Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
Canada's healthcare system is tiered. You have the public single payer which is trash at best. Virtually all employers pay for health benefits which bring you to the 2nd tier. This gets you into a ward and such. There's a 3rd tier where you get good service, private rooms, skip lines. If you work in public sector or a big union you most likely are on this 3rd tier. The final tier is for the people whose names are on the wards. The "Such and such family ward" because they donated significant money to the hospital. These people get immediate access to everything you might expect. Nicest rooms. everything.
>(And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess).
85% of Canadians live in urban areas near to the US border. If you choose to live somewhere else, you know you're living far from civilization and already accept the lack of service.
>In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
dont get me wrong. I dont mind our tiered system. ohip covers the basics which everyone should get coverage for. Break your arm? taxpayers/rich pay to fix it. 2nd tier is plenty for most people. 3rd tier is nice but most people dont realize it exists. Ive had a lady talking to me about how she has to wait many months to get in to a specialist, the same specialist that I waited a whole 3 days for. Also yes, the billionaire folks are going to get the best treatment, it's no surprise.
I'm pretty sure the vast number of smaller clinics/etc would all still be on paper if not for those incentives because it was a pretty noticeable change over just a couple years.
My friend's mom lost her legs because the hospital didn't keep her in the right position after a surgery and circulation was cut off while she was recovering from the surgery. Huge lawsuit, but that doesn't take back the irreversible damage and lifelong disability.
Recently a doctor lied to our face and said there's no alternative to surgery, then lied to our face again when he said "that medication doesn't work for that", until we cited multiple studies and how the medication is used worldwide for the purpose we are asking for. It's just disgusting and unacceptable.
Also recently another family member nearly died in hospital as they let his weight get down to ~80lbs. They incorrectly thought he had cancer (he didn't), and they were just going to let him die because his time was limited, suggesting to the family not to bother with a feeding tube. The family insisting on trying the feeding tube saved his life, _against_ the suggestions of the doctor(s). He would be dead right now, and a family would have lost their dad, if they hadn't insisted on doing it. I'm pushing the family to sue the hospital and report this malpractice because his health is so badly harmed by having gone to such a low weight and nearly dying from it.
Honestly I can just go on all day. When I got in a car accident my broken wrist/finger were secured in place with a fucking tongue depressor and some gauze. This was the official solution because they didn't have time to put my wrist in a cast, so I went numerous days with this ridiculous solution, reducing the quality of my bone/joint healing. My pinky finger is still, forever, crooked. Really nice for someone whose career requires typing (programmer).
Similarly, another family member of mine has a permanently-deformed arm because they didn't cast the arm correctly and the bone healed crooked.
> Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn't say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
> In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
I hope you can at least deduct it from your taxes else it means you end up paying what, 60% taxes on top of having to purchase private insurance with your post-tax dollars?
That's ridiculous. Here I pay a much lower tax rate and it took me a few clicks to just get a GP.
What's their excuse?
Compared to lockdowns or even just mask mandates, both booster schedules seem like a pretty minor inconvenience given the pandemic-halting benefits.
Currently we have the highest case numbers ever. How can you type this with a straight face?
I'm OK with taking a vaccine for my own benefit, when I want. But don't pretend the vaccines have halted the pandemic.
The mostly part is that I'm open to get a vaccine now and then. The evidence shows they do seem to prevent serious complications when you do catch Covid. I'm not down with all the bullshit restrictions and government overreach that obviously isn't effective at anything except destroying the economy.
I'm not "antivax". I'm anti-inefficient-vaxes-based-on-the-strain-from-2-years-ago
If I'm going to be forced to keep current on a shot if I want to be employed or enter buildings, it should come with some form of justification that is periodically evaluated. If it doesn't work, the inconvenience should not exist. If the virus mutates and risk falls below some standard, the inconvenience should not exist.
I have been taking off my shoes for 20 years at the airport. I understand that you can never eliminate the possibility of someone putting a bomb in their shoe, so we just have to do this forever. But viruses change, and I'd at least like someone to acknowledge there should be a goal that I won't be forced to do this also in 20 years.
Many of us aren't done (and many others were done long before the vaccine came out), but we're not the subjects of this article.
https://youtu.be/GklHGYY8vN8
And no boosters are not free. I can't wrap my head around how many people believe that boosters are free. No they are not free. If you are not paying for it directly, the government is paying for it with taxpayer money. And tax money doesn't fall from the sky. It comes out of your wallet.
Or the government can print the money and risk higher inflation, which is just an indirect tax on your money.
>Already contracted Covid, have 2 vaccines, I'm down to get a booster every year or two, at my own leisure.
I will go get the flu shot. I don't know, nor care, what strains they are going for in the flu shot. I do know they tend to target different strains every year. They can mix match as much as they like. If coronavirus is the one they want to target this time, fine whatever.
>I'm OK with and to be honest, it feels a lot like the government trying to deflect from the fact healthcare isn't OK (at least in my home country, Canada).
2 weeks to flatten the curve was only to prevent healthcare system from collapsing. But for whatever reason they switched to 'lets eradicate all illness by staying home and wearing masks.
>There's always been risks to life and this feels more like governments are trying to convince people the risk should be zero so they can be the heroes while at the same time expanding their powers...
Makes me wonder. why in history did we never try to end the flu season? there's clear starts and ends to the flu season. Mandate wearing mask in public stores seems like it eliminated flu and cold.
Though you touch on an interesting thought. Has covid really been all about government expanding their power? I dont think covid was created for this purpose, but I certainly suspect they all jumped on board to using it as an excuse to expand their power.
Fortunately, vaccines can improve both targets due to the reduced (though now less effectively so) infection rates, shorter infection periods, etc. This makes me personally hopeful that Omicron will become the final "pre-endemic" variant. However, while I too feel tired and sympathize with the described "vaxxed and done" mentality, I know we must stay vigilant and continue to reduce opportunities for this virus to find new ways to remain a pan- rather than an endemic. Acceptable costs of this vigilance, and the nature of it, i.e. the measures we take, need to be updated just as everything else.
We all have our choices and risk tolerances, people can make their decision and move on with their lives. I don’t stay off roads just because some people might not be wearing seatbelts.
I am not, and anecdotally nobody close to me is either. It’s not a pleasant experience that I want to repeat ad infinitum. Particularly if it’s not even going to stop the current C19 variation.
They literally tell you that. Stop handing out medical advice that's wrong.
You might have a point if I could have walked in to any pharmacy, knowing that I could get a walk-in vaccination. But that hasn't been the case in Redmond, WA. So while you say "non-event", I say "what a pain in the ass (and arm) that was".
- US midterm is coming up in november.
- One of Biden's major election point was combating Covid and curbing infections.
- This has largely been a catastrophic failure. More Americans have died from Covid under Biden than under Trump (not that it matters)
So, the left media will now begin a year long campaign down playing domestic covid severity, and make sure that Covid will NOT be a major talking point for the 2022 elections.
Edit: republican will 100% pull a "i-told-you-so" move in their campaign trails. I'm Canadian and our government (even conservative learning province/state government) is still using the partial lockdown as a mean to curb infection, it's very very obviously NOT working.
What will be really interesting is just how the medical community is so detached from the political community. I understand you shouldn't bring politics into science, but you also can't blind yourself and optimize for only one metric.. everything is a trade-off.
True, but Trump only dealt with Covid for about 9 months at most, and that was starting from 0 cases in February, meanwhile Biden has dealt with it for 13 months at this point, and also took office in the middle of the major winter wave, and then the Delta wave in mid 2021, and now the Omicron wave at the end of 2021, which were much more infectious and mostly affected those that could not or refused to be vaccinated (once vaccines were widely available in April at least).
Biden didn't create those waves, by the way. This is a global problem, and judging by how the US got the variant spikes after most of the rest of the world did, likely didn't originate here. He could have been like China or Australia and enforced hard indefinite lockdowns, but it was clear after the one Trump agreed to a partial two-week lockdown that the US public wouldn't even comply to that, so good luck Biden imposing any future lockdowns.
Yes, the majority of people were vaccinated in 2021, but I'd argue a good chunk of those same people (waves hi) were self-isolating as much as possible until they got vaccinated anyway and were much less likely to be included in the deaths of 2020 anyway.
Biden definitely could have done a better job managing Covid (ordered increased home tests made and ship them to citizens before Omicron became a thing, for one idea), but there's a good amount of the population that wouldn't have listened to him no matter what measures he tried to push.
I also disagree with you that Democrats are going to downplay covid (the media might, but it sounds like it's just to force people to go back to work and kids to stay in school because they're too afraid of the economy getting worse).
About the only thing Biden can point to as something good he's done, is the vaccine rollout, so if they downplay it they don't have much to go on.
But I agree it won't matter in the long run because the Democrats are going to lose the midterms, big time, and probably the presidency in 2024.
Biden didn't really do much after he took office, other than annoy people with inconsistent communication, federal over-reach and always singling "the others" as the root of all evil - which made them more reluctant to anything he proposed.
Trump had to scale out testing, respirators, PPE, the vaccines etc. 2020 looked much more busy than 2021, and then we got Omicron and we're completely unprepared.
I am vaxxed and boosted, but I don't want to be forced to get a shot every 6 months.
I'm trying to figure out why it took so long for the emergency OSHA mandate to become an emergency mandate. If it was so important to protect people at work then this mandate should have been figured out 9 months ago and already have been in front of the Supreme Court. One has to have realized that any such mandate would be challenged and have quite a delay before it could be ruled on in the courts and possibly put into effect.
Trump made several colossal fuckups, especially when it came to his public communications, but he made some good decisions as well (letting the early shelter-in-place orders happen, stimulus checks, freezing student loans, pushing the vaccine program, etc).
All I'm saying is that of course Biden would have had higher deaths while he was in office than Trump, unless he managed to convince ~95%+ of the public to get vaccinated right away, which was never going to happen, and unless the whole world got Covid-19 under control in about the same time period as Trump was in office while the pandemic was in the US, and if there were no other more infectious variants that happened during that time.
Using what criteria? We have no way of knowing what infection rates would be like today had Biden not been elected.
If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this: Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain President of the United States." Joe Biden
https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1319446692236791814
And his predecessor did not have the vaccines available to combat deaths. So they are in a tough spot to be sure. The only thing they can do now is to downplay and reframe:
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75% percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with." CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
https://youtu.be/BhOoWGXRGb0?t=165
They are also finally trying untangle deaths "with Covid" and "from Covid": https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1480207649807507458
Good luck with that. When the CDC decreased the isolation time to five days, all the talk was about how they were corrupted by capitalism.
As someone who was painted hard with the "science denier / conspiracy theorist" brush for my objections to mandates, it's a very deep level of schadenfreude to see the very same people devolve into conspiracy theories of their own that put them at odds with "the science".
The government has created a dangerous foil for the "anti-vaxxers" -- people who are terrified to leave their bubble of presumed safety. Perhaps we can come up with a pejorative term for them... "Pro-hypochondriacs"?
They will not disappear so easily.
Regretfully, I don't think this is actually true anymore. I can only speak for the US. Maybe it was never true, but we're just now seeing it. The health insurance industry is heavily political, lots of money is spent drafting business friendly regulation. The pharma industry has an incestuous relation with the regulatory bodies that are supposed to keep it in check. So, it's note exactly red vs blue politics, but in my mind, there is a degree of green politics, and the actual politicians are simply clamoring for scraps of political capital during the crisis, while big pharma and unelected bureaucrats are spending tax payer dollars and controlling the medical community.
It matters enough to write it, and it struck me as weird so I looked it up. Kind of hard to put the numbers together, but it seems we're at 830k[0] deaths now; 350k were in 2020[1] (though most cases started being reported in April) which is indeed less than half of current total. I also looked up Jan. 2021, curious if it changed anything in a meaningful way and there were 77k through Jan. 26[2]; it puts the total deaths at roughly 50/50 between presidents, though one presided over ~9 months of deaths and the other over 12.
I guess that means the rate of deaths is slowing down, but not by much.
[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr... [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/2022/20220107/20... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/us-reports-record-number-of-...
I double vaxxed and boosted. Stopped wearing a mask for the most part, but with Omicron I started wearing a mask again because I just don't want this stupid virus. I'm healthy and would probably not have a symptomatic infection. But I still don't want this stupid virus, and I don't want to spread it.
I think for 2022 I am going to try to argue less, and focus more on my areas of personal expertise. I've done a lot of arguing and feel like I'm generally worse off for it.
Meanwhile in the airport you are in a large building with many other people, you might come into contact with 100s of new people from a wide variety of places.
Obviously mitigations won't help if you're blasted in the face by an airburst (nuclear or biological), but it seems like it could still help if you're on the fringe of exposure.
[edit]: maybe some of the more "extreme" (n95 masks, etc) have some decent level of protection, but I'm not sure anybody knows, at least with this variant. Even for previous variants all I've seen so far are models, which as we all know have a lot of assumptions.
It seems active / non-retired people will have a hard time avoiding it but after all the current wave will stop like the others so maybe I'm wrong.
https://calmcovid.substack.com/p/youre-not-doomed-to-get-omi...
A double vax from back in April or so would have substantially diminished protection by now.
At least you know you did everything you reasonably could and didn't just give up like the "vaxxed and done" crowd.
I'm sorry you're sick, that really sucks. I hope it's asymptomatic and you can get back to living your life soon.
For reference, this case is described here:
Gu H, Krishnan P, Ng DYM, Chang LDJ, Liu GYZ, Cheng SSM, et al. Probable transmission of SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant in quarantine hotel, Hong Kong, China, November 2021. Emerg Infect Dis. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2802.212422
> Which families own the press? Or is it verboten?
It is not verboten, it is dumb. Putting a large trend on religious/ethnic group of millions of people is just nonsensical. Do you really think millions of "jews", from gas station attendants to doctors to CEOs are somehow collaborating on pushing media a certain way?
If bunch of dudes are colluding on shaping the public discourse from wealth inequality to something else, is it more likely it is because of their ethnicity or because they are on the "winning" side of the wealth inequality divide?
Musing: Though considering the complaints about "they are now writing about systemic racism instead", it seems like very left-wing message (wealth inequality) packaged for hardcore right-wing people, so I guess complaining about "the jews" makes sense.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
Those staffing shortages are in turn caused by strict quarantines for people who are asymptomatic but test positive.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/COVID-San-Francisco-s...
Our office director is scared and has closed down again (were doing 3 days a week in person) due to Omicron. I don't personally think it was necessary and I liked working there in the quite (away from kids).
But, whatever. I am done with the fighting and with the political division over it.
This is the only place I have to talk about COVID issues with smart people that I respect.
HN is one of the rare places where the Culture War is still fought in a relatively chivalrous manner.
Maybe this is the place where the Future is born? The Culture War is a philosophical one, and only philosophy could stop it.
https://www.thelocal.at/20220107/explained-what-do-we-know-a...
That was fascinating.
but it is still interesting how some people would parrot Q1 2020 rationale in Q1 2022 as if everything is the same for everyone else
Now I think the Internet actually enforces groupthink and eradicates opposing narratives. Platforms like Twitter allows people to dox those with unorthodox ideas and behaviors and cancel them, which is basically a modern day version of "burnt at the stake". It seems that the Internet also ended up give an even more effective podium for authoritarian regimes to push their narrative, best example of this being the Chinese government.
At the root of all this is human nature. Perhaps technology won't help humanity transcend, but it will only reinforce what's already there.
I have to give Hacker News a thumbs up here. I think Hacker News is much better than a place like Reddit for open-minded discussions. Reddit has become a place where subreddit are often times moderated by a group of mods who act like a single-party state.
I think the issue now is a political one. The democratic party has hung their hat on how bad covid is and how important it is to get vaccinated and to state at this point, NVM lets just get back to normal would be a loss of face. Instead of just saying that the virus has evolved and is less lethal now they have continued to double down on the vaccine mandate which I don't agree with. I am a democrat so I am not coming at this as a republican. I am not downplaying the severity of the virus but at this point it is here to stay. Even if we locked down for 3 months, once we were released someone from another country would come in and re-infect everyone again. Also during lock down do we once again tell the poorest among us that while they are 'essential' that they are also worth less and must continue to work and face the risk alone so as to ensure the rest of us can isolate in safety at home.
Edit: I said "does not reduce your ability to spread the virus" I meant to say "does not remove". My fault.
This is in reference to a specific study that followed 1.2M fully vaccinated individuals and found that 28 of the 36 deaths had at least 4 high-risk factors (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm). They are not referring to the unvaccinated who still have a much higher risk of hospitalization and death.
https://acdis.org/articles/news-94-patients-who-died-covid-1...
Fortunately the vaccines and other improved therapies are now pretty effective at preventing deaths even among high risk patients.
The unvaccinated are unvaccinated. They know what they're getting into (even if they deny it), and they don't believe studies anyway. Once they catch it a couple of times, they'll be as good as vaxed anyway.
edit: if there's anything that should be done about the unvaccinated, it's to make sure that vaccines and tests are convenient and free. There are still plenty of people who aren't vaccinated because it's too much of a hassle.
The quote was the whole sentence. And the following sentences implied they meant everyone. The clarification was important.
Any way we choose, it amounts to sacrificing XYZk people so we can go back to living a normal life. I don't think that's an exchange most people are willing to take.
And yes, lockdown measures are usually in response to hospitals filling up. Check for example [0] against the timeline of lockdowns for that area. If you know any counter examples I'd like to hear about it.
[0]: https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
Covid does not spread in any meaningful way via surfaces. All of the cleaning and disinfecting nonsense that is still going on is pure theatre.
> Any way we choose, it amounts to sacrificing XYZk people so we can go back to living a normal life. I don't think that's an exchange most people are willing to take.
It's an exchange everyone makes every single day in order for society to function.
It's a reasonable precaution take, at least until we know precisely how the virus could get to the isolated Belgian Antarctic base, where everyone was isolated for weeks and tested and retested prior to being sent there.
Not at this rate though. In my country covid deaths are easily 20x that of traffic fatalities and the latter is seen as a serious social issue.
Also my friends in the medical profession are simply tired of doing 300h months.
You may be correct about covid, but cleaning surfaces helps to prevent other illnesses from spreading anyway. In a situation where hospitals are impacted there's a strong argument that such behavior and precautions leads to better healthcare outcomes.
Or are you talking about other considerations like vaxxed/in-vaxxed?
The voters should decide. A jurisdiction could simply decide to allocate capacity based on vaccination status (ie, if 20% of the population is unvaccinated, they get 20% of available beds for COVID). Completely fair.
Something has to be done around capacity issues, or we'll be in the same situation indefinitely. Or even worse when the next pandemic hits.
Probably not realistic, but I would love to see more personal involvement in care. One level could be prevention, and not just the vaccine. Lose weight, exercise, eat right. It's hard to change people though.
Another is care after the fact. Short staffed? Give me a procedure card and let me do the less skilled stuff. Most of nursing is really basic and many things are handled by machines (when's the last time a nurse took your BP with a manual sphig?). Maybe that's beyond many people's abilities, but there are some who are used to wearing respirators, practicing aseptic techniques, and following procedures. The artificial constraints of regulation and law prohibit it. So I guess that's another way society might be making the choice to sacrifice people.
I wonder if they have looked into it- not a new idea, China famously built a hospital early pandemic.
I do have the same questions as you though. How can we make this happen?
Empty beds aren’t making money for hospitals so they often run close to capacity.
(I wish I had the epidemiological understanding to look at data and understand that conclusion, but I don't.)
> They have also indicated that getting vaccinated does not reduce your ability to spread the virus
I said "does not reduce" I meant to say "does not remove". My fault.
As viruses can remain active on surfaces, unless you irradiate the deliveries with a UV lamp (and do it again after unboxing them, since there may be viruses on the actual item) even that would not be enough.
> Even if we locked down for 3 months, once we were released someone from another country would come in and re-infect everyone again.
That's if you assume away animals, as viruses that affect mammals are rarely limited to humans (ex: chicken flu)
> Also during lock down do we once again tell the poorest among us that while they are 'essential' that they are also worth less and must continue to work and face the risk alone so as to ensure the rest of us can isolate in safety at home
Agreed. It's time to accept we're not immortals, viruses exist, and yes it's a shame that covid is now endemic, but it's even worse to perform lockdowns of dubious efficiency that only have one guaranteed effect: hurting the economy, and the "poorest among us".
Cases of COVID-19 spreading through fomites (particles on a surface) are extremely rare[1][2] and COVID-19 has a short lifespan on cardboard[3]. Just leaving deliveries somewhere for a day is probably enough to stop transmission.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34136133/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95479-5
[3] https://www.sciencealert.com/how-long-does-coronavirus-last-...
> Similarly, on cardboard, no viable SARS-CoV-2 particles could be found after 24 hours, or SARS-CoV-1 after eight.
We've long known that transmission of COVID through fomites (surfaces) is very low: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
If this wasn't the case, grocery store protocol would have been very different during the early days of the pandemic.
Strangely, you can find this information in Fig 2 of this short anti-vax paper claiming the vaccine doesn't correlate with case numbers at all.
I don't blame people for being confused.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10654-021-008...
Do you have a reference for this claim? Nearly everyone I know that has caught it and has gotten sick in the past 2 weeks has been vaccinated, sometimes boostered as well. I don't think this claim is true with Omicron.
Vaccination makes you less likely to end up on a ventilator.
And in a big storm, even everyone being 25% less likely to get infected impacts rate of transmission, which is the big one for resource constraints and such.
But there is no data to indicate that it's >0% effective either. So until we have data to back things up one way or the other, talking about it just creates more science disinformation.
Early studies suggested that vaccine antibodies were much weaker but boosted individuals still had antibodies that had some effect on omicron, and gave no reason to believe that non-antibody parts of the immune system would have 0% effect. So based on that, and high level of protection against previous strains, my default assumption would be "some, but much lower, protection."
Then, as of Dec 26, being vaccinated in CA still resulted in a much lower case rate per 100K: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status That likely isn't 100% omicron data, but the ratio looks the same as what it was before, so still not reason to drop my belief to 0%.
It is quite the leap to say "new strain, I should restart my assumption at 0% effectiveness."
In the US, with the delta wave, case-rate-per-100k-people very much showed that the vaccinated were less likely to catch Covid. For instance: "From December 20, 2021 to December 26, 2021, unvaccinated people were 3.9 times more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people." (with a chart showing the trend similarly for months). https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status
I expect the omicron wave to be less dramatically tilted, but that there will still be some difference.
You had the same outcome in November, i.e. pre-Omicron.
What's the case rate per 100K at the population level there?
Edit: actually, didn't find exactly that table, but did find a section in the doc you link, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/..., on page 14, that shows vaccine effectiveness remains against symptomatic disease as a result of a study against delta and omicron both. But I would love to see the overall case rate to know about asymptomatic disease too.
The % per 100k is available p40 of the same pdf. But I find that much harder to read given that the size of the vaxxed and unvaxxed populations vastly differ.
The table on page 40 is consistent with US data, where case rates at the population. It says to read in conjunction with pages 32 to 34, which basically says "stats won't be as accurate as formal assessment of vaccine effectiveness, please see the formal data." The formal data suggests effectiveness against transmission. The raw cases-per-100k numbers agree. Yet you latch onto a different number - another one that the report says isn't authoritative for those purposes either - to claim the data shows ineffectiveness! That seems backward.
Those who don't want to get vaccinated should take personal responsibility for that, not expect society to take as much care of them when they're choosing not to help take care of society (even in terms of "reducing burden on healthcare system by getting a likely-less-severe case", even if transmissibility isn't affected as much).
If you have ethical qualms about this, I'd like to point out that ethics go both ways. It's unconscionable to take a hospital bed away from someone who needs it, because you refuse to take your medicine, with predictable consequences.
I do agree however. And, I think it's an ethically defensible position to not treat people who refuse to get vaccinated... even though it will never happen.
Will be put at the end of recipient lists, or outright denied for organ transplants if you're an active smoker of the last 6 months.
> uninsured people
Will only be stabilized in the ER and sent home - actual treatment is only to stabilize the patient to get them back out the door as-per law.
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On motorcycles and obesity those are a bit harder to get into - but I will say that yes... for 2/4 of those we do actively deny medical treatment for better or worse. That makes me feel like we're already on the "slippery slope" - especially in regards to those without insurance... We literally have no problem denying life saving treatment to the uninsured here.
And hell - even as an ex-smoker I agree with the places that don't allow active smokers on their transplant lists. Ethically that makes perfect sense to me.
"Will only be stabilized in the ER"
In other words: they will be treated.
No one is saying we need to give the best treatments, or any kind of treatment that is scarce and competitive (like transplants) to unvaccinated people, but you're talking about refusing people any treatment and sending them out to die at home or on the streets. That's extremely cruel and certainly is not done anywhere in the US currently.
We're splitting hairs - I'm out.
You're advocating for sending unvaccinated people away with zero treatment. None of your examples are remotely comparable. If you were really discussing in good faith, you would admit it.
Right and that's why I'm out. I have made my arguments, and I don't appreciate you implying that I am discussing these things in bad-faith. If we disagree that is fine.
Respectfully, I am done discussing this with you.
They were wrong hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated patients. They were right withholding treatment someone needs to live months and withholding treatment someone needs to live days aren't 100% different.
I never made the claim that they shouldn't treat unvaccinated patients:
> And, I think it's an ethically defensible position to not treat people who refuse to get vaccinated... even though it will never happen.
And specifically to the parent comment I was agreeing to the following (quoting parent):
> It's unconscionable to take a hospital bed away from someone who needs it, because you refuse to take your medicine, with predictable consequences.
Although maybe it's not my best self showing here - but I do feel angry toward people taking those hospital beds away. And I was very specifically agreeing that "It's unconscionable to take a hospital bed away from someone who needs it [...]" I have friends/family who are suffering real consequences of hospitals being overrun with largely unvaccinated people...
---
Overall, I don't think "ethically defensible position" is equivalent to "they should not treat unvaccinated people" - yeah I guess this can be seen as "walking it back" but overall I did not mean to outright state we shouldn't treat the unvaccinated.
Sure - it comes from a place of frustration. But I don't think I'm alone in thinking about these things.
Sorry if this is off-base.
Thanks for clarifying. They also said "Drop the vaccine mandates, and drop the mandates to treat the unvaccinated." And you said "I do agree however." But I can believe you just meant the last sentence. Feeling frustrated is natural when your friends and family are harmed. I hope they can get what they need.
100% we need to treat people regardless of anyone's attitude (mine included), and 100% we need to continue to mandate vaccines.
Thank you again for giving me the space to clarify =)
Perhaps they should be able to opt out of both as a package deal?
No, just like how if I need surgery, and the hospital is full of anti-vaxxers with COVID, and I can't get treatment, I currently don't get my money back.
Unfortunately as much as I agree with this it will never be the case. Hospitals are hurting for blood too - sucks. These spikes are largely unvaccinated folks from everything I'm reading. They're stressing the system but I guarantee you they don't care outside of their own selfishness.
How would that work practically though? They still end up in the hospital, they're not going to test if they're vaxxed and put them at the end of the line if not.
This would be called "heartless" on the individual scale, but towards a group that I believe is being heartless on a societal scale.
Honestly, it's a capsule of where we are as a country: Here we have a government entity whose suggestions are rejected by these people still suggesting to prioritize them in order to get them the best treatment possible. I don't see anything like the same consideration for others being made by most of the unvaccinated. One side is trying to do what's best for everyone, the other side doesn't really give a shit about thinking things through.
If two do arrive at the same time, an unvaccinated person with far worse sickness faintly mumbling about ivermectin who waited until the last minute to come in, and a vaccinated person who is suffering but nowhere near the danger zone - do you put the unvaccinated person on the sidewalk outside?
What about smokers or fat people?
Long answer: you'd probably come up with a protocol around "ok, we have this ventilator available, give it to the unvaxed patient, but if we have other patients who end up needing one and they haven't improved in X hours/days, we will reallocate" and similar for all the various ways people can present, but "conveniently"... if the health system is that overloaded, you're gonna have ERs with a lot of patients all arriving at the same time.
Hell, even pre-COVID, I got stuck waiting in an ER in December for days because the hospital was full once.
(To your edit: has either smoking or obesity caused hospitals to fill to capacity and have to turn away patients? You'll notice here I'm talking about scarce medical resource allocation prioritization where they're actively competing with those more considerate of the rest of us, not something like insurance payments or coverage.)
What I remember about HIV in the early 80s was that fear of it fueled a lot of homophobia from those who were ignorant about the disease, certainly to begin with. In fact I remember it originally being seen as a disease that only infected homosexuals and drug addicts - and those being the people who were vilified - which proved to be a fatally uninformed point of view for some.
But HIV is, fundamentally, a very different pathogen to COVID. In the 80s HIV was a death sentence: if you were infected with HIV, sooner or later it would develop into AIDS and you would die. However, a relatively small proportion of the population was infected, and it wasn't very transmissible (you had to have sex or other transfer of body fluids, such as a blood transfusion). Nowadays, HIV treatments have improved to the extent that in developed countries most people receiving treatment can expect to lead a fairly normal and full life, and to live a normal lifetime (ignoring other causes of death that might intervene). I'm not sure what the story is in less developed countries, but I imagine it's not as encouraging.
COVID has never close to that deadly, but is far more transmissible. It's that high transmission rate that has seen so many people die, even though these represent a small fraction of those infected. And this time, nobody is being vilified for their sexual preference, or their gender identity, or any other characteristic that is fundamental to who they are and over which they may not have had much if any agency. You might argue that drug addicts have agency but they don't have very much once they're hooked.
No, with COVID, people are being vilified for wilful ignorance, which is a choice: a conscious decision, and one that - in this case - has a substantial negative impact on their surrounding community and the world at large.
I can't tell you how effective, or not, that vilification is, but I can tell you that a lot of people - myself included - who are fully vaxxed, boosted, and will gladly accept further vaccinations (and would also welcome effective treatments for those who are sick), are getting enormously fed up of having restrictions placed on our lives which, to a non-trivial extent, are being propagated as a result of people who are spreading misinformation and choosing not to get vaccinated. I'm not old - somewhere in the middle - but the remaining count of the best years of my life is finite and even in the best possible case very limited, so I'm getting sick to death of people telling me what I can and can't do with them.
I even agree with you that pointing fingers and calling names won't change anything, but it doesn't matter. Lots of people have had their fill and the anti-vaxxers are a convenient, and frankly not entirely unjust, target for their rage and frustration, which pays to a key point: the rest of us, the "vaxxed and done", or whatever you want to call us, will eventually tire of allowing the lowest common denominator to set the agenda. That's not a threat: it's just a reality, just who we are. Eventually we'll tire of the yoke and throw it off.
1. I live in the UK. Sadly I can't just up and move anywhere I choose. Even more frustrating, since we left the EU I can't even just up and move anywhere I choose in Europe (not that restrictions-wise it's much better there at the moment).
2. My close family are all in the UK and, although the rules have made it hard to see them as regularly as I would have liked over the past 2 years, it's been a lot easier (and less costly) than it would have been had I "just moved somewhere else", and I want to continue to be nearish to them.
4. My girlfriend and her close family live in the UK. I'm not leaving her to move somewhere else, and especially not to move to Florida - WTF. Just as importantly I can't see her being keen on living that far from her family.
5. Most of my friends live in the UK, either close to where I live now, or close to where my parents live. I could start again somewhere else but, overall, I'm fairly content with my life. Ditto my girlfriend's friends.
6. My current employer places a 45 day limit on working abroad for tax reasons. This isn't insurmountable. I could find another job but finding another job is another barrier, and I quite like my current job.
7. I have a house that I'm part way through refurbishing. I'd have to figure out what to do with that but, whatever the outcome, that decision will require a significant investment of time, or money, or both. The reality is it would be a trade-off between the two but, in any event, would represent a substantial investment that due to the need to act quickly might well outweigh what I'd invest if I were less constrained by time.
8. I've never wanted to live in the US, though I like visiting, and I'd certainly want better employment conditions than I'm likely to find there: i.e., sensible amounts of holiday, decent employee rights, not to mention public healthcare.
Yes, if I was still 28, single, had my whole career ahead of me, and hadn't yet bought a house, I could simply up sticks and leave, as long as practicalities rather than relationships were my major driving factor. But it's not so simple, and the fact that I work in tech is basically irrelevant because the only part of the equation it simplifies is the "getting a job" part, which isn't even the most important aspect of said equation. As an aside, somebody like Joe Rogan can move from California to Texas relatively easily because he's a jetsetter and all his mates are jetsetters so he pretty much only gets the upsides from that move (not a criticism: with the kind of money he has, I might well see things differently too).
But far more important than all of that, your comment plays hard to the point I was making: why the hell should I give everything up because, in some part, of a bunch of people who won't see sense? What difference does it make whether that's because of rules and restrictions, or because I've had to walk away from my life and start again because of them?
That's a great question, and it also touches on the reason I'm not only infuriated with antivaxxers: vaccines don't fully protect against illness, nor do they stop transmission. So whilst I vaccines are of substantial benefit they're clearly not a total solution to the problem of COVID, nor do I think such a total solution exists or can exist within any foreseeable timeframe.
One becomes jaded living with controls over a situation that doesn't appear to be particularly controllable; certainly not a situation that can be controlled by the UK government, or other governments in Western Europe.
I've tolerated - we've all tolerated - restrictions for nearly two years now but, if they're not making much difference, well, eff the restrictions, I've had enough. I'm not getting any younger here and I'm fed up of wasting my life away. I suppose, to some extent, I'm a bit consumed with a sort of impotent frustration.
What's the situation where you are, if you don't mind me asking?
Along the same lines my kid is also quarantined for the the next few days as someone at his table tested positive this past Friday (did not even make it a week). They can either do virtual schooling for 10 days or return once they have a negative test. Only the 4 kids at his table are quarantined, rest of the class is not. He has actually had a low grade fever (99 - 100 degrees F) the last 3 days so he may have it but he tested negative on a covid test, so technically he can go back to school monday. Not sure I trust the test and will hold him home for a few more days until he has no fever. Other than that he has no symptoms. No one else in the family is symptomatic.
In grocery stores about 35 - 40% of people wear masks. I am hit or miss, mainly miss on masks. I used to mask all the time and not sure there was a conscious decision to stop but it just kind of faded away. I did recently get the booster. Have not vaccinated the kids yet, go back and forth on it. Service workers are generally masked, not sure if by choice or company policy, I am assuming the latter. No vaccination or masking req. to eat at a restaurant. Feel a little bad about the almost dual class structure created where the service industry is masked while those they serve are not.
There are places in the US like NYC that check your vaccine card before they will admit you. Federal government is attempting to push a vaccine requirement for all companies over 100 employees through the courts, sitting at the supreme court right now, not sure what will happen with that.
It is very hard to get a test though here and the state government is encouraging people not to get tested unless they have severe symptoms. Not sure I agree with this.
I am very center of the road politically and politicians here are now extreme so I find myself lost in the shuffle not agreeing with most of those that represent me. Covid has been very much politicized now with Republican governors essentially removing all restrictions and many democratic governors adding much more stringent restrictions although I think most of them fall short of Euro style restrictions and are not close to Australian levels.
My kids did not do well with the isolation that came with the initial outbreak so I think I have tailored my response more to ensuring they are mentally well than any real concern for the physical risks of Covid which are generally low (not saying zero) in younger patients.
I vote Democrat usually but find myself disliking the hardline approach they have taken on vaccination but dislike even more any politician that refuses to acknowledge how egregious what happened when they attempted to overthrow the election for Trump last year. So I just kind of worry about my family now and attempt to block out the country at large.
Apologies for the novel.
One of the things that really resonated with me is that if you're a customer of the hospitality industry, you don't have to wear a mask, but if you're a staff member, you do. It's very two tier, and they're obviously at far higher risk of contracting COVID than the rest of us.
Something that is different is that a fair number of events do check COVID passes - my GF and I went to a gig a couple of days ago, for example, where this was the case. So this is similar to NYC.
Like you, I'm pretty centrist, but I don't think COVID has become quite the political hot potato here in the UK that it perhaps is in the US. There's a lot of sniping but there's also broad cross-party support for measures that attempt to control the pandemic. That being said, there is still a notable left/right divide with, for example, some conservatives being very heavily against certain measures (e.g., COVID passports), and some on the left always being in favour of more restrictions.
There's quite a bit of politics playing across countries in Europe around travel measures as well, with the UK I think probably as guilty as other countries in this regard.
The situation with schoolchildren has been similar, but with mask wearing for teenagers now mandatory. No issues with younger kids though, which I think is good but also marginally aggravating when GF and I take her kids places, and we have to wear masks but they don't.
The quarantine/isolation rules are loosening, which I think is pragmatically sensible, with a testing regime defining when quarantine can end, rather than some sort of fixed 7 or 10 day rule. This is really an improvement because, before, you might not even realise you have COVID for a few days, then have to isolate for 10 days after testing positive, which was pretty difficult.
We are experiencing widespread disruption across the economy due to COVID related absences though. I was in a meeting a few days ago where, out of the 7 of us, 2 had COVID, and 1 was still recovering from quite a severe infection that had hospitalised him. We've never experienced that before, and clearly it's quite widespread with many people I know now having had it recent weeks.
I don't get the impression there's much appetite for further restrictions in England or much chance of further lockdowns but, across the Union as a whole, it's a pretty mixed picture, so it's hard to say how it's going to play out over the next few months. There is a sense that people are starting to care a lot less about the pandemic though.
The government, of course, have not done themselves any favours with recent revelations about parties and drinks events. The outdoor stuff I'm not so bothered about, but what I think a lot of us find tough to swallow is the "one rule for us, another rule for them" mentality that is perhaps behind it.
(Btw, sorry I was also a bit rude about Florida: it's the heat and humidity in summer that kills me but there's a lot there to like, obviously, and despite being drenched in sweat the moment I step outside in June in Orlando, I've had great times on both the trips I took there, both for business, even managing to catch a shuttle launch one evening back in 2007, which was incredible. I imagine the winters would be fine but the summers would definitely cripple me.)
That is not correct. Vaccination does reduce, but does not eliminate, transmission of the virus
“ We found that both the BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccines were associated with reduced onward transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from index patients who became infected despite vaccination.”
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597
If getting vaccinated reduced your odds of spreading the virus by 90%, and 92% of the population were double-vaccinated, then the majority of the spread would be...
Among, and by the double-vaccinated. (8.28% vs 8%)
Most people that die in car crashes are wearing seatbelts, but you'd be a fool to not wear one. Just like you'd be foolish to not get vaccinated.
Funny enough, I just recently checked the stats for that. According to the first report I found with a simple googling, 47% of people who died in car crashes were not wearing seat belts.
> Among, and by the double-vaccinated. (8.28% vs 8%)
I don't know how you're getting those numbers.
If baseline spread is 100% unvaccinated spreading to 100% unvaccinated, then 92% vaccinated spreading 10% to 92% vaccinated amounts to 8.464% of baseline, 92% vaccinated spreading 10% to 8% unvaccinated is 0.736% of baseline, 8% unvaccinated spreading to 92% vaccinated is 7.36% of baseline and 8% unvaccinated spreading to 8% unvaccinated is 0.64% of baseline. The total sums to 17.2% of baseline, of which vaccinated to vaccinated spread amounts to 49.2%.
(It's not terribly important since the numbers are made-up anyway, but I'd like to know whether I made a mistake somewhere.)
Iceland also has a higher vaccination rate, I would be very interested in demographic breakdowns of the unvaccinated there vs in California. Is the Iceland group much more atypical in terms of how often they leave their house, say? Is the California group possibly just much more boosted (the Iceland numbers show that the boosted group has still less Covid than the unvaccinated group stil) - but actually, that doesn't seem like it, because that ratio is still far higher than the CA one. Though... even your own link for data on boosted adults in Iceland contradicts your "not even a little" statement.
Actually I bet it's just a small number problem. Iceland has a population of 366K. 8% of that population is just under 30K. California has a population of over 39 million. Much more significant sample for unvaccinated people in CA.
Of course not. It's not about the absolute transmission rate of vaccinated people. It's about the reduction in the transmission rate compared to the unvaccinated. Regardless of the absolute effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing transmission, it seems to me it should remain fundamental to protecting public health if unvaccinated people spread the virus several times faster.
Of course, if the effect were only marginal, that would be one thing. But that is not what the data seems to show at this point.
Think of it this way: assume that an unvaccinated person, on average, spreads COVID to 10 people and a fully vaccinated person spreads it to only 1. Then put 92 fully vaccinated people and 8 unvaccinated people (I.e., vaccination in proportion to the Icelandic population.) into a room full of people. The 8 unvaccinated people will infect 80 additional people, while the fully vaccinated will infect 92. Thus, "most" of the transmission was from vaccinated people, even though the vaccine reduced transmission by 10x.
And this is probably obvious, but its worth emphasizing that vaccinating those last 8 (percent of the) people would still have a hugely beneficial effect. If they were all vaccinated, then, in the toy example, they would infect a total of only 8 people instead of 80, leading to only 100 total cases, rather than 172.
Of course, even setting this aside, the bigger issue is that your casual parsing of one country's aggregate statistics is just no substitute for the actual scientific research that GP cited.
You can't really make that conclusion based on a simple case count chart, because you don't know what those numbers would look like if the vaccination rate was lower.
I tried to find the original article about negative effectiveness in the UK but all I could find was this:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/has-covid-vaccine-effica...
This covers Iceland, Denmark and the UK but doesn't really go into much detail about alternative explanations which I remember being covered in the original article I read.
- The majority of those who died WITH THE VACCINE had 4+ co-morbidities. The virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated
- The vaccine does indeed reduce your propensity to spread the virus, although it doesn't eliminate the risk.
- The reason for lockdowns is not to make the virus "go away". It is to control the impact on the healthcare system. We have now surpassed the previous hospitalization record and this thing is still going exponential. You may be fully vaccinated and at low risk for a COVID related death, but if you'd like to be able to get acute treatment for appendicitis or a heart attack, we need to take steps toward a lockdown immediately.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-breaks-covid-19-hospital...
Do we know this about omicron? How dangerous is "very dangerous"? As it is with pre-omicron, CFR for COVID-19 was, pessimistically, 0.5-1%, less if you're not in an at-risk group. AFAICT we have no reliable numbers on "long covid".
For the record, I am not anti-vaxx, I am vaccinated, I'm just anti-using-science-as-an-ideology.
Here's the early numbers out of major cities:
https://i.imgur.com/g8tyRdQ.png
It's probably somewhere between 75% as serious and as serious as Delta, but we can't be sure yet.
The handwaving about 0.5% - 1% is ultimately not something I can address because it is opinion. A million Americans are dead from this and more deaths are coming. Reminds me of the Stalin quote.
"The vaccine does indeed reduce your propensity to spread the virus, although it doesn't eliminate the risk." agreed, but at this point Omicron is so incredibly transmissible that I think everyone is going to get it and it is impossible to eliminate all the potential infection vectors. I have to come down on the side of bodily autonomy at this point. If the virus was as deadly as ebola I would likely change my mind but at this point with the severity of omicron, I have landed here.
"The reason for lockdowns is not to make the virus "go away". It is to control the impact on the healthcare system." This is a very good point but there is no way to practically implement this in the current political environment. If we implemented a lockdown, we would still be telling the poorest among us, those we call essential that they still have to go to work to support the rest of us. In addition, there is just no way that states like Texas or Florida are going to agree to a lockdown. Are we willing to risk armed conflict over this? Personally I am not.
>the virus is still very dangerous to the unvaccinated
According to gallup (which I hope we can agree is not some sort of alt-right outlet) the risk of an unvaccinated person needing to be hospitalized if they get covid is 0.89%. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
That is insanely low. That is just the risk of hospitalization, the % of those that are hospitalized that actually die from (not with) covid is even lower, which is a key distinction that your Reuters article doesn't make. Most hospitals are required to test patients for covid (if they are admitted), even if they are being admitted for something else (like a broken leg) if they come back positive then they show up in the stats even if they exhibit no covid symptoms and require no to little treatment from the hospital for covid.
The healthcare system is not remotely being overrunning by covid, it only appears that way because of these scary, missleading, numbers.
Take a look.
https://i.imgur.com/o3DJfN2.png
https://i.imgur.com/g8tyRdQ.png
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/09/us/omicron-ci...
For reference to a Covid prevalence measurement that isn't sensitive to testing artifacts, check out the Boston wastewater analysis: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
This would be confounded by the greater viral loads for Omicron, wouldn't it?
https://abc7ny.com/new-york-hospitals-stop-elective-surgerie...
That’s overrun in my book.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1257041/average-weight-g...
I very, very much disagree with this.
Unvaccinated people have a much higher rate of severe illness that requires hospitalization. Filling up hospitals unnecessarily kills people, and delays preventative care.
People who are voluntarily unvaxxed without a medical necessity are, to be clear, 1) categorically stupid 2) responsible for the injury and death of others.
Not if they already had covid or are young and healthly. I would agree with your statement with the qualifier "unvaccinated people that are over 60 or have comorbidity".
Unvaccinated people of all ages are significantly more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than vaccinated people of the same age group [1].
12-34 year olds are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized.
Even if the absolute numbers are very low for young and healthy people – even if that's 0.01% instead of 0.001% of cases – that is an absolutely unacceptable amount of people to be putting into hospital beds when they could just get a motherfucking shot instead.
[1] Page 3 of https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/... Study published 3 days ago.
Tell me it's not material when you're waiting in a rural ER for six hours because one of their two ventilators is taken by an unvaccinated 19-year-old who went to three New Year's Eve parties.
There would be a conversation to have here if getting the vaccine wasn't the easiest goddamn thing in the world.
But it is. So there's not.
I've yet to see any convincing evidence that a prior infection isn't good enough, but I see plenty of people convinced that the recovered are selfish/evil/stupid if they aren't rushing out for a vaccine.
I could call them names ,like typhoid Maries. Fat fucks. Ban them from participating in society unless they show a proper BMI index card. Force them into diet camps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BdPKpWbxTg.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6....
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32929833/.
But I would never do that. I happily spend my tax money for peole who smoke, overeat, drink and drive, get bothched breas augmentations, beat the crap of eachother, OD on heroin and all the amazing horrible things that make us humans.
Whatever choice you make in your life, you can NEVER EVER be threatened to have medical care taken away from you.
Unconditinal medical care is one of the corner stones of our society.
Red Cross workers in conflict areas will treat rape victims in one tent, and their rapist in the next.
Fun job, no. But if you cannot handle it than you should not have gone into medicine.
This tendency to normalice demands of who gets medical care and who doesnt stops now. There are not many things I will violently defend, but if society will ever hint that it is going to elect who gets medical support and who doesnt based on their personal life choices I will protest. Violenty if I have to.
This is a basic human right I am willing to die for.
But the idea that vaccination status is remotely comparable to weight, smoking, drug addiction – that's laughable.
It's a single goddamn shot (sorry – two shots for mRNA). You can get them fucking everywhere, for free, with a walk-in appointment.
We know they're safe. We know they keep people out of the hospital. We know that putting people in hospitals right now is a huge drain on a strained resource.
Again: people who are sick deserve care. Always. Regardless of their moronic views.
But the idea that an unvaccinated person is somehow free of the responsibility of their actions, when they could so easily fix them? I find that hard to swallow.
> This tendency to normalice demands of who gets medical care and who doesnt stops now. There are not many things I will violently defend, but if society will ever hint that it is going to elect who gets medical support and who doesnt based on their personal life choices I will protest. Violenty if I have to.
This is a basic human right I am willing to die for.
Perfectly expresses how I feel as well. Thank you.
Are you British or something?
I absolutely agree that no one should ever be threatened to have medical care taken away from them! That is precisely why I'm ok with villifying (note that I'm not saying "calling them names" or "refuse treatment") the unvaccinated, as that is precisely what they are doing! And no, this is absolutely not comparable to anything else: there has been no sudden explosion in the last two years of obesity or drunk driving or smoking to the point that there are no hospital beds for anyone else. Only covid has done that.
Hospital Costs and deaths associated with covid are easily surpassed by the obese if you add up just a few years.
https://www.healthycommunitieshealthyfuture.org/learn-the-fa...
Obese people have a much higher rate of severe illness that requires hospitalization. Filling up hospitals unnecessarily kills people, and delays preventative care.
People who are voluntarily obese without a medical necessity are, to be clear, 1) categorically stupid 2) responsible for the injury and death of others.
-------------------------------------------
See how off-putting this gets very quickly?
These two things are a perfect, 1:1 analogy.
I'm also in favor of vaccination btw, but against the shaming.
I too am double vaccinated an boosted, but everyone has a point at which they say enough is enough and will stop getting boosters and isolating indefinitely.
For instance, take the CDC guidance on preparing for a hurricane or tropical storm:
Step 1: get a covid vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/features/hurricanepreparedness/inde...
What makes you say with any degree of confidence that the virus is less lethal now?
The data's not in yet. At this point, it's all magical thinking.
It actually still is important and advisable to keep your coronavirus vaccinations up to date. There's a reason why Israel marches ahead and begins to distribute the fourth shot in a year to the most vulnerable groups, and likely access will be expanded similarly like it was for the first three shots.
FWIW, it should become a normality that people visit their general practitioner once a year, get their general fitness and blood checkup done and their missing/expired vaccinations refreshed. Our societies may very well benefit from eliminating millions of workdays lost every year to the ordinary flu [1].
[1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1225629/umfra...
We are losing a lot of wealth, a lot of life simply because politicians are afraid of anti-vaxxer propaganda and because prior generations have abused minorities for medical experiments (e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis experiment) or vaccination programs for military purposes (e.g. the Bin Laden discovery).
During the recent recall attempt for Gov. Gavin Newsom, the ads supporting him essentially said, "The Republican candidate will remove the mask mandate and kill your grandma. Vote to keep Newsom, he'll keep grandma alive with mask mandates." so yeah I figure it's gonna be a while before California Democrats, at least, can support easing up on the masks.
I, for one, will not go on living in fear like this.
* People can be over 65 for decades without dying.
* People can be cancer survivors for decades without dying.
* People can have type-1, type-II diabetes for decades without dying.
* People can have heart valve issues for decades without dying.
* People can have COPD for decades without dying.
Let's quit blaming those people who are in the high risk category dying from a clearly preventable illness.
Right. That's why we need vaccines, and not an excuse for the crap your espousing to not get vaccinated.
This is such a bad take. Unvaxxed cause the majority of hospitalizations, deaths and complications. This is just objectively wrong that it doesn't matter that much.
The same people who are vaccinated are the same ones who will likely isolate/mask-up if they catch the disease.
Think about this: spreading covid misinformation like this leads to people dying earlier than they would have otherwise died.
But I have three children in elementary and middle school. Like school systems across the country, ours is in chaos due to COVID absenteeism. Roughly 1/3 of the students and 1/4 of the teachers are currently out sick due to positive tests, some symptomatic, some not, and the numbers keep going up every day. Just waiting for our turn and then the kids have to stay home for two weeks! Hopefully February will be easier?
[0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/boosted