Most of us have been giving it careful thought all along. Something about your phrasing suggests to me that your views are outside the mainstream? (In which direction I don't know because you seem cagey about actually stating your view)
1. What's the horrifying precedent?
2. Assuming we can another pandemic one day which is more severe, how would you handle restrictions to protect public health - assuming you would at all?
(I think a lot of the debate around Covid stems from the unfortunate fact that it's too severe to ignore but not severe enough to get everyone on the same page. I can respect "we didn't need to this time" but I'm curious about people who argue "we should never do this")
The horrifying precedent is small numbers of people who do not always stand for election making highly consequential decisions for large numbers of people.
Stipulate that the current crop of names all have noble intent. Not taking swipes at anyone in view.
You've no guarantees of such going forward.
The current situation is Checkov's Gun[1]. At some point, if we don't enjoy a collective think on where this is going, there will be dismay.
>The horrifying precedent is small numbers of people who do not always stand for election making highly consequential decisions for large numbers of people.
Nothing new there, beaurocrats and public health officials have long had the power to make highly consequential decisions for large numbers of people.
Yes we could do with some debate about the power they exercise and about how to handle the next pandemic, and there will be a next pandemic. However your dramatic tone is unwarranted and unhelpful.
> Nothing new there, beaurocrats and public health officials have long had the power to make highly consequential decisions for large numbers of people.
I'll yield on the kind, but the degree with the Covid is off the charts for peacetime action.
Was this wise? Were the across-the-board outcomes worth it?
Those who made the decisions may be biased in their reflections on the matter.
> but the degree with the Covid is off the charts for peacetime action.
Actually, no. This is exactly the level of heavy handed, indiscriminate beaurocratic/government control that poorer people have always had to deal with - see for example how large scale city planning has tended to distribute its most disruptive consequences among the poorest neighbourhoods, or how public health systems have judged most harshly and intruded most forcefully into the lives of the poorest.
So again, nothing new.
The only new thing is that middle class and wealthy people - such as you and I - suddenly experience this and react in shock.
> Were the across-the-board outcomes worth it?
Lives saved, lives disrupted, jobs lost... I don't know.It's a complex calculus, requiring a dispassionate and objective inquiry, which you clearly are not in a position to make
> Those who made the decisions may be biased in their reflections on the matter
> Actually, no. This is exactly the level of heavy handed, indiscriminate beaurocratic/government control that poorer people have always had to deal with - see for example how large scale city planning has tended to distribute its most disruptive consequences among the poorest neighbourhoods, or how public health systems have judged most harshly and intruded most forcefully into the lives of the poorest.
Once again: kind, not degree. Short of wartime mobilization, there just aren't examples of bureaucrats ordering wrenching economic changes on this scale.
This. The PT one annoys the F out of me... but otherwise I'm over it. On PT though, I don't understand how people can't just put a mask on. SE Asia learned from SARS 1 and kept it up out of common sense, but nope, that's too much to ask here.
I'm triple vaxxed and had covid in December. I'm going to nightclubs, pubs, restaurants etc. because why not? Who knows what the next variants etc will bring, but really does feel like Omicron is a gift of some sort.
With a super contageous aerosol spreading virus, pretty much they only way masks on PT will make any difference at all is if everyone wears well fitted N95 or better masks.
The cute cloth masks and disposable paper ones simply aren't going to make a difference in an enclosed space like a bus or subway. It is the worst kind of security theater, in that it makes people feel safer when they are not, and so more willing to take risks than they would have been otherwise.
Asking people to wear cloth masks on PT during covid is like asking them to wear a bandana while riding a bicycle.
UK is pretty much doing it, Especially England. The Omicron peak is over, hospitalisations never reached the numbers feared, indeed there were more people who tested positive that were hospitalised for other reasons -- something miles away from reality in earlier waves.
In this wave, case:hospitalisation ratio about 1:80. Last year it was about 1:13
I think this is the new normal. Either open/close as soon as a more dangerous variant comes along (can happen with most of the Earth population unvaccinated). Or just let it be and get used to health system being on its knees on peak seasons and more vulnerable/unvaccinated dying of.
Also accept the reality that hospitals being at capacity is the normal and not a anomaly. Just part of our hyper-optimized JIT economy. Near 100% utilization rate has been reality at flu-seasons for long time. And economically it is just not realistic in general to keep excess capacity.
Yeah according to news headlines health care have been overwhelmed for as long as I can remember. Population increases as well. Obviously the solution is to increase capacity, not to ban dancing, lol
I wish that people who say things like "learn to live with it" actually meant it. We do indeed need to learn from the past two years, and that will result in something quite different from pretending that we're still in 2019.
I'm quite sure it will be much more like 2019 than you think. People will learn to live with the deaths if it continues as it was in 2020/21. Prolong the lock downs more and most of the population will go crazy.
I'd argue a lot of people have already gone crazy and will do anything to avoid going back to normal and letting people live their lives. The obsession with the need for a "new normal" amongst some is really terrifying. There needs to be some targeted campaign to "deprogram" the people that have become obsessed with covid and make them move on. I'm serious about this, if we just pretend it will get better on it's own, there will continue to be these lingering theatrics - I don't want to see the world end up like air travel did.
No improvements to ventilation standards? No changes to work culture that encourages "working through it" instead of briefly isolating?
Like we have massive infrastructure in place to prevent diseases like cholera from being a problem. We should do more to mitigate airborne transmission.
Most of the hospitals near me are near capacity for ICU beds due to people refusing a free vaccination.
If I have a heart attack or car accident tomorrow, I’m at serious risk of not getting a bed and treatment.
If the anti-vac morons weren’t taking up so much space at the hospitals, I’d agree. But with numbers the way they are, “return to normal” is a pipe dream.
People have different situations. I'm severely immunocomprimised - while I get and understand that the world can't remain locked down indefinitely for a small segment of the population, I'm absolutely going to advocate for my own survival, and that doesn't make me "crazy" or that I need "deprogramming". It's not irrational to not want widespread transmission of a virus that has a 20% CFR for people like me.
It's unfortunate for you, I understand. But where do we draw the line? I'm severely allergic to birch tree pollen, should I start advocating to burn down all the birch trees in the world?
One lesson learnt is, shutting down the borders does not help. It can at most delay the inevitable by a few weeks. If you don't have a vaccine ready to be administered to all your population in 3-4 weeks, shutting down the borders is pointless.
Another one, politicians need to stop using science for propaganda. The mistrust in scientists has cost us dearly.
Shutting down borders works if and only if you're successfully implementing an elimination strategy. In North America and Europe it was pretty pointless, but it was absolutely useful in New Zealand, Australia, China and Hong Kong.
It always bothered me growing up, the lack of elbow-operable doorknobs and other measures for what would seem to be basic hygiene in public spaces. Cities are disease kettles, it never was appropriate to design them with the same low hygiene standards as our homes.
Polio and smallpox vaccines were non leaky. That's why we were able to eradicate it. COVID can't be eradicated until a non-leaky vaccine is developed. Google "leaky vaccines" if you don't know what they are.
I spent a good chunk of last year in a developing country that locked down.
The economic consequences are still being recognized. Drive around the prime tourist areas and all the storefronts are empty. Factory workers are going back to their small towns and waiting it out, so factories can’t find workers. Western companies are canceling orders, etc.
They are learning you can’t turn chunks of the economy on/off. Every change of rules mean investors and customers eventually just “sit and wait it out”. Plus the cost of restarting factories, bringing tourism back, etc isn’t small, so when countries go back and forth the smart move is to just sit back and wait.
They are expecting a spike in infections as a result, and the rules around self-isolation on positive tests and wearing masks in most contexts remain. But Ireland has had one of the longest lockdowns in Europe, and one of the best vaccination rates. Both have paid off, but not without cost.
It is not clear to me that low incremental death rates are due to lockdowns (or, for that matter vaccination rates). Balkans had low rates with no lockdowns (and vaccination rates of under 35% throughout last summer).
I am not claiming that your statement is wrong, just that the causal relationship is not at all clear to me. It is probably much easier to show for vax rates, but lockdowns -- I have not seen a convincing proof.
Canada and the U.S. might be a better comparison (particularly prior to vaccination, since the US has a notably lower vaccination rate). Canada largely had stricter lockdowns than the US and had about a third of the death rate. The populations aren't identical but fairly comparable, and the most notable differences in 2020 were degree of restrictions, along with better support for people unable to work due to COVID in Canada.
A large part of the mask compliance IMO was due to having consistent mandates and messaging around masking, so it's tied into the overall approach to restrictions.
Canada being sparse is a bit misleading. While yes, it's a very large country with relatively few people, 90+% of people live within 150 km of the US border, and the population density in major population centres (Toronto / Vancouver / Montreal) is comparable to US metro areas.
Vaccination rates you're correct, but the lower impact of COVID was observed pre-vaccination as well.
General health is a good point though, I'm sure it's a factor - I don't know if it explains such a large difference in death rate though.
I'd hestitate to draw conclusions by comparing countries, there is not enough data.
If we could compare different local areas that had different policies, we might be able to get somewhere. Even then, it's not easy. The locales who are happy to lockdown are probably also composed of people happy to wear a mask and happy to vaccinate. There is also an ugly reverse causality thing going on where lockdowns are a response to growing community spread, which makes it look like they don't work when maybe they actually do.
It's not an easy question to answer empirically. I'm happy to do the finger in the air approach of assuming they work based on common sense. That doesn't mean that they should be implemented, which is a related but different question.
I do not see it this way. Lockdowns have significant costs (medical, mental, economic). If we implement them, it should be based on strong causal relationship to health outcomes which should be observable on most countries.
I can understand a quick reaction for a week or two as we plan a strategy; maybe for a month. But two years is ridiculous. This seems to be driven by politics more than health. Which seems to be agreed to by most people in many countries who largely ignore it (except for countries like Australia and NZ, which imposed real, hard lockdowns). In the Eastern Europe in the summer where masks were required inside, most people wear them on the chin (even at the airports). And say "cannot wait when those jerks from the EU stop pushing those rules down our throats".
And last but not least: I know well two people who are immunocompromised. Their care took a definite turn for the worse, because in many countries there is at the moment a single disease worth fighting and everything non-COVID becomes a distant second. Whew. That turned into a rant. Sorry!
Am I fucking crazy for not knowing what's going on any more?
US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?
I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.
What's your assessment of the vaccines ability to reduce severity of infection and reduce the number of people who need hospitalization or even length of hospitalization?
What if your body incubates the mutation to the next Greek letter and it is highly transmissible, our vaccines don’t work on it, AND it is more deadly?
Sure but if you need to get hospitalized due to Covid it's absurd that the rest of us need to bear that financial burden via increased insurance prices or increased taxes
what if they're actually much healthier than average (because of other personal choices)? and what about all the other bad decisions people do wrt. their health (which is what causes the vast majority of healthcare expenditures)?
Those other situations should also be factored into the price they pay for healthcare. That being said, many of those other issues (addiction, obesity, etc.) are much more difficult to "prevent" than getting a vaccine. If there was a vaccination for those issues, then I would put them in exactly the same class.
That's coming from someone who is working from home, isn't it? There's also those of us who have exposure to the public and are reaching old ago, and we have lost all patience for the sunshine-and-unicorn crowd.
I mostly WFH, but have to visit government offices and construction sites. I have 2 kids in daycare though, so I might as well be living in a petri dish of viruses.
Stop with this shit. It's not true. Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated. This is not an indictment against the vaccines, they prevent hospitalization, but the sheer number of vaccinated people still means they're the majority in the hospitals and ICUs, and the unvaccinated are a minority across the board.
The report you just linked doesn't show the raw numbers of people in the hospital, it shows the proportionate rates, which is exactly what I just addressed.
Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated.
And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
> Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated.
Again, the fact that the numbers don't reconcile still stands, and without clarifications, that table and any references are meaningless.
From page 7:
- Rates Admitted to Hospital per 100,000: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 39.0
- Northern Ireland population: 1.9 millions
Expected admitted in the whole N.I: (39 * 1900 / 100) = 741
- Total admissions: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 493.
The numbers 741 and 493 don't match.
The rest of the table is inconsistent as well; for example, the proportions between fully and non vaccinated, between the rate per 100k (right), and the absolute values (left), are inconsistent between each other.
Futher, on the second page:
> During this 4 week period there were 790 hospital admissions, 36 (4.6%) of which had received a third dose.
The number 790 and 36 are other two who add to the pile of inconsistency. Until everything is explained with exactness, that report is essentially garbage.
> And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
In absence of correct data about N.I., the CDC report is a reasonable source, also by mean of being considerably larger scale. It can be acceptable to refute it when referring to Northern Ireland, but in this case valid data is required.
---
Additionally, about this:
> Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated. This is not an indictment against the vaccines, they prevent hospitalization, but the sheer number of vaccinated people still means they're the majority in the hospitals and ICUs, and the unvaccinated are a minority across the board.
This is a common mathematical mistake; see conditional probability notions.
To explain the mistake using extremes, if all the population except one was vaccinated, and one not vaccinated, hospitals would have 100% of vaccinated people, but the conclusion that because of that being vaccinated is less effective than not being vaccinated, is wrong; one needs other variables to make this conclusion.
You're grasping at all sorts of straws here. Never said being vaccinated is less effective than not being vaccinated, an absolutely insane takeaway from what I've said. Now the official government data from the UK is bullshit, and the CDC is a better source to explain what's happening in Ireland? Are you kidding me?
The issue is that if you're gonna try to blame unvaccinated people for your problems, they should actually be the source of your problems - which they're not.
That is a good point, but I would like to know hospital length of stay for unvaccinated vs vaccinated, as a proxy for how many resources / man hours of hospital staff they are taking up. A single unvaccinated ICU patient could be taking 10x the resources is a non ICU patient.
The data on page 7 also shows hospitalization is overwhelmingly for populations aged 60+ and up. Which is unfortunate, but I think people, parents especially, are having to decide between tradeoffs of prioritizing elderly versus benefits kids get from ending restrictions.
I had to deal with a family member not being able to get a place in the hospital this week, even though they would have otherwise(covid unrelated) - taking care of them at home is nearly impossible.
We have the same issue, but the person chose not to get vaccinated. Hopefully she makes it because she is otherwise a wonderful person but if it happens, well, we tried to tell her.
Not the poster you replied to, but: The very very few, of course I’d feel sorry for her but I’d not have made a different decision in pushing for vaccination. Any treatment could have adverse reactions, it’s just how it goes.
I think there's a difference in feeling bad for someone with good intentions who got unlucky (vaccine adverse effect) and someone who active tried to make to world a worse place, fucked around and found out (antivaxxe).
This whole pandemic made me realize that Paradox of Tolerance is much more general - there is also Paradox of Empathy and Paradox of Kindness and bunch others.
While many don't care until it affects them, that is not even close to universally true.
I was surprised at the number of people who didn't care, and it seems to be about 50%, but characterizing everyone that way is incredibly unfair to all the people who worked tirelessly to try to convince people to get the vaccine.
By telling them the president has lost his patience like a grumpy pater familias scolding children. That’s paternalism right there.
If the self righteous cared about peoples lives instead of pushing people with relatively lower risk to get a vaccine they would have sent those vaccines to the third world to vaccinate the vulnerable there.
Instead the WHO complained in early 2021 that we gave our vulnerable a double dose
In the summer of 2021 WHO complained when we vaccinating our healthy young
In the fall of 2021, the WHO was shocked when we rolled out boosters
By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
> By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
Sorry about your family member, but you really must specify where this occurred.
As bad as US health care system is (and it is bad), it is ridiculously over capitalized. Compared with Canada, the US normally has 50% more ICU beds. More Dr. per capita (slightly) and a ridiculous larger number of nurses and secretaries.
Therefore, Ontario’s health care system gets overwhelmed during bad flu seasons.
In this scenario, Ontario’s recent lockdowns make (material) sense, but that doesnt mean that significant health care resources are being diverted in the US.
By over capitalized, I mean the US has insane medical facilities everywhere people live. I live within a 5 minute drive of three major hospitals, and who knowns how many minor medical centers
EDIT:
Please dont take this to be a judgement on Ontario’s health system. Before COVID both my parents were successfully treated in Ontario for cancer, for which Im grateful.
My comment is merely an illustrative example of how differences health care systems do and must affect government response
Pandemic fatigue + a very contagious variant that is less virulent. A lower rate of people are getting hospitalized (and often require a lower level of care), but the massive number of people getting infected is still driving high hospital utilization.
Omicron is being called 'mild', but it's not mild for a lot of people in absolute terms (even though it may be milder compared to what earlier variants might have been for that individual).
Because now there are no restrictions to speak of left and it can't go much worse. No ground for apocalyptic scenarios anymore.
Also, it's entirely up to people themselves if they want to be protected or not: Omicron is so transmissive, it doesn't matter for transmission if people are vaccinated or not - whatever impact it has on transmission is of little consequence - everyone is going to get infected, anyway (maybe a few weeks later but it doesn't matter at all).
On the other hand, vaccines are universally available, and free, for a very long time now.
Together it means that if you are unvaccinated, it's on one hand, only your own fault, and on the other hand, only your problem - effectively you no longer endanger anyone but yourself by staying unvaccinated (big difference from what it was a year ago).
Which means, there is no point for anyone but unvaccinated themselves suffering. If you got the vaccine, Omicron is about as dangerous as flu, and no one closes economy because of flu.
Almost all unvaccinated are Republicans and Democratic administration is in power...
Just two year of propaganda to be so hateful online. Do you know what hapened in history when segregation was main gonverment propaganda? Just stop it.
A statistic like this is meaningless unless qualified and supported with a link to a reliable source. All hospitals in the US, UK, European countries, South America, world?
It's also meaningless unless compared to the population.
"90% of the people in this hospital for COVID today are unvaccinated" is a very different statement when, for hypothetical examples,
- 90% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is same as general population.
- 10% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is mostly drawn from the unvaccinated.
And points in-between, and the other way (what if - for sake of example only - 95% of local people are unvaccinated?).
And then there are further confounding effects - what if unvaccinated people are younger and than average, as vaccines are given preferentially to older people who are more likely to require a hospital visit in normal times.
Is Delta still dominant in the US? First time I am checking the US Covid stats in months, and it seems like both deaths and hospitalizations in the US are rising. The opposite is true for most of Europe, where omicron cases are rising exponentiallly, but deaths and hospitalizations are falling flat.
Percent of US Population
At least Fully
one dose Vaxed Boosted
Total 75.4% 63.3% 39.5%
Population ≥ 5 Years of Age 80.1% 67.3%
Population ≥ 12 Years of Age 85.3% 72.1%
Population ≥ 18 Years of Age 87.3% 73.8% 42.6%
Population ≥ 65 Years of Age 95% 88.2% 62.7%
They say 83 million boosters given, which is ~25% of the population. They seem to be using a different denominator for the boosted number there (I guess the number of people eligible for the booster).
It's reasonable to be measuring against eligibility when evaluating progress in administering boosters, but not being eligible for a booster doesn't really make someone less susceptible to infection, so it isn't the right thing to compare across countries.
It’s definitely strange that there’s such a disparity, and I assume it’s because there are differences in what is considered a “Covid death” in the US vs elsewhere.
It might be better to look statewide for the US. I believe omicron is just getting started in some places. Cases in NJ are dipping down currently and my college is planning to open up by feb
How deaths are counted really does matter. If we aren't accounting for the fact that many people are incidentally tested for Covid prior to their death of something else then that is going to be difficult to interpret in the middle of the Omicron wave.
Well there are people dying everyday for any number of reasons. About 10k per day in the US.
If you are at risk of dying from covid and you didn't get vaccinated it is kinda your fault now. And if you are vaccinated and dying from covid, well there is not much more you could have done.
Public health has also traditionally worked in the interest of high-risk and vulnerable people. With COVID it looks like we'll largely abandon that - for not completely illogical reasons, obviously public health has a cost, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this is giving up and not business as usual.
1. This isn’t the same virus as at the start of the pandemic.
2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic.
3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity.
4. There is now a large portion of the population that has natural immunity.
5. It should be abundantly clear that case counts is no longer a meaningful metric.
6. Covid is a disease that has markedly different effects based upon the host’s age, medical condition, etc. There is no equivalent level of risk.
7. Most of the population, think working class and kids, cannot sustain continued lockdown conditions without serious mental/economic effects. They don’t have the privilege of the laptop class to just dial in from an office.
8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions.
Re hospital capacity, Hospitals run close to their limit. I have been in and out of the medical system my whole life and can assure that delays, cancellations, etc are nothing new. Is there strain during the new waves? Of course. But these are waves and they will come and pass. As well perhaps firing unvaccinated nurses wasn’t a good idea? People can choose to isolate during the waves if they want, but if they feel they feel like they have no need to (vaccine immunity, natural immunity). And as a father of small children, I cannot in good conscience continue to deny them a childhood for a virus that they themselves have extremely little risk of. The human brain is only developing during its childhood years once.
> 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity.
Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy.
As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday.
We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions.
She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.)
Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations.
There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK.
TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.
> 8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions.
China has done it for pre-omicron variants, so it is possible. You and I are not willing to accept the restrictions necessary to do it and that's fine, but you cannot say it is impossible.
Are you really accepting CCP virus counts? How gullible can people be to believe anything from a totalitarian government? We are talking about a nation that has reported zero cases for months at a time when no other nation on the planet has accomplished the same feat including island nations. I've noticed a trend where people who truly believe that if only we followed the rules they believe in harder we could achieve zero COVID hold up the CCP's policies out of pure wishful thinking. It's truly embarrassing to witness such gullible childish thinking.
In January of 2020, a Chinese born coworker of mine who is now a citizen had her father die in Beijing. Every symptom of how he died was obviously COVID, but the authorities officially classified his death as cardiac arrest. She was enraged by this but that was the common thread in Beijing.
Sure. It's an anecdote but it's not like you can get any real data about this. Who is going to collect it when the entire nation state is turned against you?
It's interesting to watch how this thread changed once people on the West Coast woke up. The branch covidians are in full force.
Please run for office wherever you are. We need a lot more common sense like this in the discussion. I fear many places have taken the opposite approach where instead of making it clear why restrictions need to end, people keep focusing on impossible to resolve edges cases as reasons we need to obsess over covid forever
This is an excellent comment regarding how unsustainable these practices are. School closures and even the isolation tactics when a asymptomatic child test positive are completely unsustainable. They are deeply punishing to the working class and to children from underclass households where every minute they are in their house versus in a school is a net detriment to their education and mental health.
I used to do work for the Democratic party many years ago. It was sort of a given back in 2014 that we were going to get the vast majority of Latino votes going into the future. These unsustainable policies have caused Latinos to shift dramatically away from the Democratic party. It is politically unsustainable and destructive. It is politically, unsustainable and destructive.
Regarding the unvaccinated nurses getting fired, should be noted that virtually all of them had natural immunity. My sister-in-law is one of these who did not want to get vaccinated because she had already contracted the virus and had attended several patients suffering from adverse events as well as friends who had their menstrual cycles disrupted. There was no scientific harm from this decision because her natural immunity was more protective than the vaccine based on multiple studies, including a CDC study that was just released last week.
Your comment on being a father is also 100% correct. People seem to think that children's brains continue to develop at the same rate between the ages of five and eight as they do between the ages of 3 and 5. That's just not how it works. You have these tiny windows of time where the brain is going through rapid development and you can't make up for these windows in a later time period.
History will likely not be kind to the policies against children that were pursued to protect unionized teachers and elderly people who will long be dead when the repercussions of this horrible policy towards children are fully felt. But perhaps I have too much faith in the people writing the history to be honest, considering that the laptop class are the most powerful and the most paranoid and frightened.
I wouldn't say I am "okay with it" but definitely "tired of it".
Myself and my family all have the boosters. As long as transmission is high and masks are recommended we will wear masks. Other than that though, my preference would be that there are few other restrictions in place. What I am tired of is waiting for everyone else to get the vaccine and wear a mask. At this point it seems like a lost cause and not worth my effort to spend energy on.
I still have a lot of sympathy for healthcare workers and really anyone else that has to work in a highly public setting where they are at higher risk of exposure.
For the most part we did stumble our way to this point, but nobody could predict the outcome.
After two years and now 4 shots being discussed it’s clearly apparent:1) people will still get infected, 2) despite the lower risk of death with vaccines, plenty will still die, 3) we can’t keep borrowing money and giving to people when we shutdown their businesses.
And I feel like the protests in Australia, Canada, US, Europe are making it pretty clear people aren’t willing to make major sacrifices for another year, or two or three.
Far smarter to pretend this was the plan all along then watch people blatantly disregard your rules.
If you look at the UK which was probably hit earlier by Omicron, hospitalisations are nowhere all time high and decreasing [1] despite covid cases having blown up previous records [2].
>US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?
Imo the only thing that really matters is the hospitalization rate of the vaccinated. If it's near bad flu numbers, then there's no more concern
Hospitalization rates for the vaccinated are an order of magnitude lower than the rates for the unvaccinated, and death rates more so.
However, even though I'm fully vaccinated and boosted so personally have no reason to fear COVID from the point of view of landing in the hospital or dying directly from COVID (and all my friends and family are in a similar position) it is still an indirect concern because the unvaccinated are taking up hospital resources that I might need.
Even in my county in the US, which has been in the bottom quarter for case, death, and hospitalization rates in my state, which has been in the bottom 5-10 states for all of those statistics for the entire pandemic, there are enough unvaccinated people in the hospital now with COVID that hospitals are almost unable to take new patients. Omicron looks like it is peaking here, so it will probably be OK to go ahead and have my heart attack or get hit by a drunk driver without worrying about whether I'll be able to get treatment, but there are a heck of a lot of places in the US right now where this is not the case.
The good news is that after omicron, enough of the unvaccinated will have some immunity via omicron that it should bring their hospitalization rates down enough that it is no longer a problem. That's when we reach the "it can be treated like a a cold or flu from a public health perspective" stage. A recent NTY covid briefing email looked at the data from places that are ahead of the US on the omicron curve, and that's what they concluded.
Sure sounds good, let's do that with obese people too. Let's see, no need to treat lung cancer for people who smoked anymore. I think we just give a check list to doctors and let them decide on who to treat based on decisions someone has made in their life. Good idea. I'm on board
Those aren't really comparable. Those conditions all can land you in the hospital but there is enormous variation from person to person in how long it takes for that happen. You make the decisions that lead to that condition and then sometime in the next ~60 years it gets you.
The effect is that these decisions result in a small increase in the steady state hospitalization levels. If obesity or smoking increases the effects of that increase on hospitalization will be spread out over decades giving plenty of time for hospital capacity to be adjusted to deal with it. (Same if obesity or smoking decreases--hospitals won't suddenly be laying off staff. Hospitalizations would fall over several years giving hospitals plenty of time to reduce capacity by simply not replacing as many workers who retire or change professions).
COVID-19 is bad for hospitals because it is short term. That's why in the US we are currently getting about 20x as many daily COVID-19 hospital admissions as we got cancer admissions before COVID-19 (that's for all cancers, not just lung cancer).
Isn’t admission for cancer relatively rare per diagnosis? (as compared to say heart attack)
I’ve learned of many cancer diagnoses in my circle of family and friends and can think of only two that had a hospital admission related to it (most were treated as outpatient procedures, including most of the surgeries).
That's the kind of thing that if you are going to do you have to set in motion well before you actually need to do it, because it would take quite a while to debate and resolve the ethical issues raised.
So no, even if those ethical questions would be resolved in favor of it, it is at best a solution during a future pandemic. It is not one for this pandemic.
I don't think you're crazy or alone in thinking that way. As I said on my other comment, not only overall deaths but the frequent serious sequelae are concerning.
Well, about that. A few governors have admitted what has been known by “conspiracy theorists” for the past two years: that included in the count of Covid hospitalizations are people who come to the hospital for something else entirely and happen to test positive [0]:
> Officials from New York City-based NYU Langone Health told The New York Times in a Jan. 4 report that about 65 percent of its COVID-19 patients were "incidentally" found to be infected after admission for other reasons. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked hospitals to adjust their reporting on COVID-19 hospitalizations beginning Jan. 4 to make the distinction between those admitted for the virus as their primary condition and those who incidentally test positive.
...
> "We have a few patients in the hospital for COVID, but not many, thank goodness," Dr. Jha tweeted. "More common on our service is folks admitted with COVID. That is, they came to the hospital for something else and found to have COVID."
So the count numbers have been exaggerated for who knows how long. An accident, I’m sure.
I believe leaders also have an incentive to muddy waters because wage shortages are causing hospital capacity to fall, but it is easier for them to claim COVID. It would be nice if we were able to see the change in how many nurse/technician hours were available over the past few years.
It also didn't help that after two years of being called "essential workers" and constantly exposed, hospital staff were told to get the vaccine or take a hike. The principle of the matter pissed off a lot of nurses my wife knows, whether they were vaccinated, naturally immune or not at all.
To top it off, healthy unvaccinated nurses can't work, but capacity is so low some hospitals are asking covid positive nurses to come back to work before they fully recover or had the full quarantine period.
How do you know that? My question, really, is how do you know what you know and are not being misled? (A la WMD to use an easy, universally understood, example?)
“2000 people are still dying every day,”
No, they’re not. According to the CDC (why do I trust them?) its currently 500/day [1]. It hasn't been > 2000 since September in the midst of the Delta spike. But even before I looked at the CDC I doubted your claim because:
- The vast majority of adult Americans are vaccinated. (>70%?). Its far greater in the vulnerable population.
- Of the unvaxxed, a great number of them are already recovered (or dead)
- You agree, this leaves a significantly reduced pool of people for the Grim Reaper to harvest.
Therefore, 2000 dead/day in January 2022 would have been far far worse than the all time high of 25 000/ week (>3000/day) we reached in Jan last year because the normalizing population was much higher then.
For your figure to be correct then, omicron would have to be, not just more contagious (it is), but a spectacularly more deadly variant than Delta instead of being relatively benign.
“and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?”
We’re not OK with it, we’ve made peace and learned to live with something that has become endemic and will never go away.
2 years of pandemic implies 1/40th of an average lifespan. Thats not insignificant. But it gets worse
2 years is 66% of my toddler’s life. A toddler that doesnt know what a peer’s smile is since she’s masked all day.
2 years is 33% of my first grader’s life. Who luckily avoided any long term school closures, but goes crazy whenever there’s a two week “virtual learning” session.
What happened is, therefore, that peoples lives cannot be put on hold indefinitely. There are worse fates than death [2]. We have the tools and knowledge to deal with COVID and we want to return to normal.
Terrible reader. Poor listening skills generally. I get disoriented when ppl talk to me except for few individuals in certain settings. At school I liked math because I could just derive the whole thing myself and ignore everybody.
Known personal flaw.
(Im also on the tail end of a week of COVID fever. I’m literally delusional?)
Now, you are an exceptional reader to have spotted that as a general trait as opposed to a once oversight. This is very rare and, despite our disagreement, kudos to you!
Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Counts by NCHS often track 1–2 weeks behind other data."
Your source itself says that it does not yet have complete data for January 2022.
It's a bit rich to go on about being misled by mysterious forces and trusting the CDC and so on and then "do your own research" and fail to understand the basic reporting methodology of the source you land on.
I mean the world has never been a better place to live. With all medical advancements and quality of life. Every year gets better. Most people think the world is worse than when they grew up with the invention of world news and then later on social media, but it's just not true. We'll get through this time and forget about it, it's just how pandemics work. No one talks about Spanish Flu or Hong Kong flu on a regular basis until another pandemic hits us
On a more serious note, I may be misunderstanding the nuance of what you are saying/asking, but for me there is relatively little overlap between "things worth living for" and "things worth dying for". A few people in my life, that's it. There are plenty of things to live for. Seeing technology advance, traveling, experiencing things, meeting people, creating something of value and/or meaning, having a positive impact. Ultimately, none of those are things worth dying for. I'd rather not have them, than not have them and be dead.
I believe that, if not for the things that you would die for the things you enjoy in life would, eventually, become insipid. Then, we (maybe not all of is) are liable to enter into a spiral of existential despair at the realization that our lives are meaningless to the universe.
My daughters’ play, my parent’s affection, my wife of ten year’s love have never gotten old. I don't care what the universe doesn’t think about me as long as I have them (and time away from them to spend all morning on HM pontifying to strangers as if I had a clue ;)
Can you say the same for the sparkle you felt unwrapping iOS7? the sparkle of (secular) Christmas vanished when I was 13 and I realized that nothing I received for Christmas made me happy, and nothing I could ask for would. But knowing that in 10 days Id be back in school and get to see my crush… wow!
Cheers! Hearing that is a first on HN, quite the occasion. :)
> I believe that, if not for the things that you would die for the things you enjoy in life would, eventually, become insipid. Then, we (maybe not all of is) are liable to enter into a spiral of existential despair at the realization that our lives are meaningless to the universe.
I think you are spot on, and it may well be why the remark in the GP stuck out the me. Things like depression can accelerate that process and can force us to have this conversation with ourselves much sooner. To me now having a (self-assigned) purpose is only one thing: Less boring than not having one. It is quite freeing, and was the shift in perspective I needed to find some semblance of joy again in the world around me. Still, for better or worse, it has left me without things to completely give myself up for.
Also, clue or not, your comment is a wholesome read and I appreciate that you took the time to write it.
Easter of 2020 I watched my granddaughters hunt eggs in my front yard while “safely” behind a window. I cried like a baby when my 2 year old granddaughter upset and inconsolable didn’t understand why she couldn’t come in to see me.
My wife and I in May of 2020 decided that a hug from our grandchildren and children was worth way more the minimal risk we had of dying from Covid should we have caught it. We ended our exile in May day and decided to let fate be fate and not let fear consume us and prevent us from enjoying our family.
I don’t begrudge others for their own decisions, but for me, the pandemic ended for me mentally on Mothers Day 2020. Time with my family is worth dying for…so if I catch it and it kills me, so be it.
I’m just going to add, because I want the same trust in the system but it’s f’d me up.
In early summer 2020, my mom passed in hospice from cancer. 4mo before that she had a fighting chance, but faced intensive surgeries (ICU for sure based on experience) and chemo — all in isolation. Literally the hospital made it that choice - family has to leave. They basically gaslighted her out.
I was furious, and because the hospital was not overwhelmed. there were precautions obviously, but no - it was not filled with Covid or people dying from Covid. Utter bs.
> I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.
Clearly at some point, we’re going to end the pandemic-related restrictions, right? It seems a valid question to ask periodically “is now the right time to stop doing X?” Whatever X is and whether or not you think X is effective vs X’s downsides are all factors into your answer, but factors that shouldn’t preclude asking the question.
There are going to be a range of people’s answers from “YOLO!” to “but think of the children/grandma!” Society (with government as the instrument) would do well to decide based on the science and stats, not on what the extremists on either end would prefer.
At some point, we’re going to stop wasting everyone’s years all together, but that’s inevitably going to take all the years away from (kill) at least one person who would have survived if we’d stayed locked down. It’s a living Trolley Problem.
Sunk cost fallacy. Yeah we sunk two years into it but wasting another two doesn't seem worth it just to make the previous two not be a wasted investment.
> I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.
One year, not two.
There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".
A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.
But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.
Unless you’re someone with a child under 5 who hasn’t been able to get vaccinated yet. My wife and I are fully vaccinated + booster but we are still choosing to be extra careful because our 4 year old can’t get vaccinated yet.
So it’s a little frustrating to hear people talk like this when not everyone can get vaccinated yet.
Omicron has a higher propensity to infect the upper respiratory tract, which is less developed in young children.
You need to forget what you’ve heard about older variants and children. Look at the stats. More kids are being hospitalized in this wave and more deaths are occurring per capita in 0-14 year olds.
Having personally known a 2 year old who was severely ill from COVID-19, I'll do what I can to prevent that happening to my child.
Statistics mean nothing once something bad has happened to you. It's not like having been struck by lightning is less bad because the odds of happening to you were low. I will do what I can to stack the odds in our favor.
What you're doing is hearing that your friend got struck by lightning, and then deciding to never walk outside while it's raining. If you knew someone who got severe myocarditis from the vaccine, would you then become anti vax? Or does your fear only go in media approved directions?
Same goes for a child walking or using public transport to school, but almost everyone drives them. Endangering a child in a preventable way is now a socially punishable behavior
Parents may be choosing to value the benefits of the child playing with other children more than the tail risk of a viral infection.
I am not saying one is right or wrong, but I think it is valid to look at all the other viral infections kids are exposed to and cannot be vaccinated against, and realize they just have to roll the dice. In the past 4 years, my kids have had RSV, a noro or rotavirus, probably Covid at least once, and a numerous other viruses.
RSV/noro were the worst, but if they are going to play with other kids, it is all but guaranteed they will have something. I am actually most afraid of noro/rota viruses, far more than Covid. That thing tore through the entire daycare and shutdown multiple classes within 2 days, and the cleanup from all the vomit was crazy.
I see, sorry to hear that. It's better in Europe though here too the number of parent chauffeurs has definitely increased. I thought the school bus is still the US way but that's probably then just movies keeping up that appearance.
School busses are the norm for rural and suburban schools. City public transport or walking is more common in larger metro areas, but in states that get very cold, even metro areas still have school busses so that young kids don't have to risk walking to a bus stop.
TBH, I have never heard of a US school district where the majority are driven to school by their parents, though to be fair to the parent poster I can't sat that I would be terribly surprised if such a place existed.
Cool. Can you say the same for my elderly relatives that would like to spend time around our child? I’m not as worried about the child as I’m worried about him spreading it to someone who won’t be spared.
Of course not, and I never stated as such. That's why even though I'm vaccinated I still wear mask in crowded public places. From the informing of myself I've done, the studies I've seen on the topic so far do suggest reduced transmission by vaccinated individuals. If you know studies that show otherwise, please share them I'd love to read them.
We're trying to balance multiple factors: living our life normally, protecting ourselves, protecting family members we still interact with. We take some known risks: sending child to preschool, while taking known precautions: wearing masks, getting vaccinated. If being vaccinated reduces the chance that we might spread the virus to someone, then that's a marginal advantage we'll stack in our favor.
You can find "study" on everything. So it is a matter of trust. I prefer to do study offline and talk with people personaly about their experiences. Oh wait... Is it dangerous?
Living normally is probably only one thing that we can do. Vaccines, masks, lockdowns... None works. But if we are daily exposed to news with fear agenda, we will never live normally again. We shoul live, not survive and loose our time.
Btw... Reduced chance of spreading virus wont make people immune to catch it. But yet... Gonverments consider vaccinated people as immune. Why?
Even if you vaccinate your kid he will still get it and spread it. I don't understand why this fact is just ignored by people. The vaccine is not sterilizing, it does not stop transmission, only lessens disease severity. The chain of transmissions will only be broken by natural immunity unfortunately.
The studies I've read suggest reduced transmission ability by vaccinated individuals. If you know of ones that state otherwise please share them, I'd love to read them as well for a broader understanding.
If in fact vaccination reduces transmission of the virus, then that's an advantage I'll stack in our favor, among other precautions like wearing masks.
Sure https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597 shows barely any reduction in transmissibility for alpha and delta. But but just looking at the numbers in high vaccinated countries already can tell you it. If transmissibility was significantly reduced you would expect this wave to be smaller than the last but it’s bigger.
That's because the chances of serious illness with Covid in under 5s is extremely small. Here in the UK nobody under 12 has been vaccinated except those who are extremely vulnerable. The data for England[0] puts the death rate within 28 days of a positive test in the 0-4 age group at 0.8 per 100,000. I believe there are around 3 million children in that age group in the UK so that works out as 24 deaths in that age group in the UK throughout the entire pandemic. Obviously that's a tragic number and awful for the affected families, but at the same time you have to put the risk to your children in perspective for your own sanity.
My kids are 2 and 5 - they've both had Covid at least once, possibly twice and it was indistinguishable from all the other colds they've had since the pandemic hit.
Understandable. Although vaccinations have proven only partially effective at preventing you getting covid so even if he was vaccinated you wouldn’t be in a much better position in that regard.
I don't know what the parent of your comment is talking about. Vaccination shots 6+ months ago are not that effective any more, but if you got a booster shot recently, it's very effective. It reduces your chances of getting COVID by a factor of 5 to 10.
Youngest kids aren’t eligible for vaccinations yet, are they? Sure they are in a lower risk group but if you have a 3 year old you likely don’t want all restrictions lifted quite yet.
Unless your toddler has some serious co-morbidities they are in a super low risk group if they contract. The number of hospitalizations/deaths under age 18 are incredibly small.
Two things. First, low != zero. Second, it isn’t always about taking the most pragmatic approach but the most humanitarian one.
People during this whole pandemic have been very cavalier with putting others at risk to not get inconvenienced. “Your kid probably won’t die” is not a winning argument.
If you are talking about the lost economic opportunity then you truly need to weigh that against the lives lost and ones that were saved and provide a very rigorous justification why you are ok sacrificing human lives for that particular cause.
> At this point, you’re either vaccinated, have been sick or are dead, so all good.
Or you’re too young for the vaccine.
Hospitalizations among 0-1 year olds are significantly up with Omicron. Even 1-14 year olds represent a sizable portion of hospitalizations in many states, presumably biased toward those in that age group too young for the vaccine.
Being a parent of young children is not great right now as Omicron gets worse for children and everyone else in the world seems to have given up on helping you reduce your risk of your young kids catching it.
Statistically... For kids is much more dangerous to sit in car or have parents alcoholic. Just because it is not in news and we used to it, it doesn't change fact, that kids suffering and die because of other s*its.
It's not causing as many hospitalizations per infection. But it's causing far more overall hospitalizations because the increase in infections vastly outweighs the decrease in seriousness.
The problem is and always has been "what if the health care system is overwhelmed".
I'm not vaccinated, have not been sick, don't know anyone who has been sick, do know many other unvaccinated people, and I live in a normal metropolitan area.
This seems like good progress but not sure the headline is consistent with reality. You’re still required to wear a mask 100% of the time while in stores for example.
Strange timing, with Omicron going through the population like wildfire. Maybe they are accepting they can’t fight Omicron?
In any case, this experiment will inform other countries on how to proceed further. I sincerely hope the results will be good, both for Ireland and the rest of the world.
If you want to follow the Covid data for Ireland, here’s the official site:
> Strange timing, with Omicron going through the population like wildfire. Maybe they are accepting they can’t fight Omicron?
It's having very little impact on our hospitalization rates, despite massive jumps in overall case numbers. The main aim of the restrictions was to prevent the health service from becoming overrun (especially over christmas when they were already strained), and it's been deemed no longer necessary.
Frankly about time given that Omicron peaks are preceding peak number of booster shots. The magical broken product we can't sue over strikes again.
It's still not understood what pressures led to Omicron favouring lower lethality so I'll be curious if that's ever explained over the normal "that's what viruses do _shrug_"...
The evolutionary pressures that can lead to some diseases becoming less lethal and more transmissible over time are actually well researched and modelled, and has happened many times.
That this could happen with Covid has been quietly mentioned in scientific publications over the last 2 years
The transmissible factor being genetically favoured is a no brained, but frankly given 99.9% of cases did not result in death the morbidity of covid is arguably already very low, why should it favour a decrease over developing new symptoms likely to increase transmission such as stability in different environments (there is clearly a seasonal effect in the West and the virus would be more contagious is stable in the warm there).
Which leads to the question why should Omicron have become so less lethal if this is just the 4th strain with <100 mutations?
To address just one of the many many poorly thought out points you made...
This is not the 4th strain. There have been an uncountable number of mutations, and many strains (omicron is not the 4th letter in the Greek alphabet - there have been other named strains that didn't spread)
This is the strain that spread like wildfire because it had evolved traits that allowed it to spread faster that all the other traits. The number of mutations is not important, the effect of the mutations is all that matters.
I don't think you have a good grasp of the basics of the mechanics of evolutionary selection, epidemiology or whatever. Maybe spend some time brushing up on the basics of the science before starting speculation on the why's and wherefore - stuff that appears suspicious to you now is actually a logical result of natural processes
Also seeing most virological forms of research this is 'explaining after the fact' which is far from making a predictive forecast. Frankly something the WHO, SAGE and various other governments should be well aware of before even reading Report9...
People also went to the pubs much earlier, and then then went to house parties, instead of going home at 8pm, having spend the same amount of time in the pub.
Also the pubs had limits on number of people to a table, table service only etc.
On the other hand a lot of people just didn't bother going out due to the early closing time. For a lot of people going out earlier wasn't an option.
So hard to say if it was a net reduction or increase in risk.
Most COVID restrictions at this point are just medical theatre. We are at a point where people can be responsible for their own decisions and proceed into the world at their own risk. Most places with bountiful vaccine availability should just drop restrictions. I have not worn a mask since last year after being vaccinated and have suffered no ill effects, despite being around a lot of people and going to parties and nightclubs. I can’t see how rational people can tolerate such imaginary sanitation rituals.
The headline doesn't capture the remaining restrictions (although the article does). Masks are still required in shops, taxis, buses, trains. It's unclear for takeaway restaurants and chippers. All staff in those places will still need to wear masks. I assume bar and restaurant staff will also need to wear masks.
So really, the 8pm curfew on hospitality has been lifted but that was always silly in the first place.
While you can point to some successes, the Irish government has really failed with their approach to all of this. The next election will be interesting and I predict Sinn Féin will be elected.
I’m pretty proud of our overall response as a nation, apart for the anti-mask loonies. Most of us did what was asked, and as a national policy we (mostly) followed the medical and scientific advice, with obvious compromises for economic, educational and social factors. And here we are now, having mostly gotten through it without massive loss of life, without overloading the hospitals (apart from unvaccinated towards the end) and we’re removing the restrictions.
Excuse me but there have been times last year where Ireland had the highest infection cases in Europe (shamefully). To be honest I wasn't very convinced that there was a ever a real lockdown here, just people using their cars less. Now it's back to normal almost.
How would you account for happiness in relation to death tolls? Are they neutral or negative? Or maybe positive, if they're religious?
An increase in per capita infections feels like a pretty solid negative indicator of success. Happiness during this whole ordeal is often directly related to faith in science and willingness to make hard choices to ultimately strive for a reduction in infections. People who make hard choices to protect others aren't doing it to be happy, they're doing it to be right. Maybe you could convince me to agree to economics as indicator but not an immediate one. The results of our choices will take years to fully manifest and understand and the if you want to look at it in th immediate term, the US markets just took a dive and that will have global impact.
Infections alone are meaningless. The only reason to even think about them is they impact other parts of daily life. If infections are 100x higher, but everyone is healthy and happy, who cares.
To the extent we should care, it is because they have impacts on other aspects of our life.
If a country is healthy, happy, and prosperous, their policy was a success, even if infections are high.
Alternatively, if a country is swamped with deaths, miserable, and economically failing, it doesn't matter if their infection numbers are low and they had the harshest lock downs.
Off the top of my head.. Mask advice at the start, deploying the police to stop anyone going further than 2km from their home for one. Shutting down outdoor public spaces for another. No scientific backing on lots of decisions made for another. Media controlled propaganda throughout (this one is debatable I guess). Keeping restrictions in place for inappropriate lengths of time - e.g. could have opened up at times last year, Merrion Gate, confusing and contradicting advice to the public after nearly every announcement, covid cert delays, closing off sections of shops - you could go to dealz and buy enough sugar to become diabetic but you couldn't buy some clothes in the same shop if you wanted.
Many (I suspect most but I only follow a few) epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron. It's more contagious than measles - if you're in a room with somebody who has it, you're exposed barring a properly fitted N95 mask. All of us will be exposed by mid February.
It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta, and it's a gift that nothing at present can outcompete it. I believe it's the version that will be endemic, if not than something very similar. So as someone who has spent too many months raging against people who refused to look at the facts of Delta - my mom missed essential surgery because the ICUs were crowded with antivax people, to add emotion to the mix - I'm onside that it's the time to start opening up, at least in jurisdictions where Omicron is 95%+ of cases and where hospitalizations have peaked.
The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.
edit: In the above I say I believe all of us will be exposed - not necessarily infected though.
> Many (I suspect most)epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron.
Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time.
I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at.
Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.
I don't mean to present a false dichotomy, thank you for alerting me that I may have. Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important. In Canada I'm still doing everything I can because it's not clear that we've peaked - the government is saying we have but they've also cut way down on testing so I'm not sure. In South Africa and increasingly in the UK it looks like a different story.
Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.
> Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important.
It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.
I feel like I really started to have more empathy and better understand the world the moment in my life where I realized that black and white don't actually exist, they're unattainable ideals. It's all just shades of gray. It's so rare to find things like math where the answer is either right or wrong.
Yes. But also, in current culture, it is politically useful to pretend you have only black and white thinking.
I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront.
It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.
I kind of resent being lumped in with a politically motivated, black-and-white, feign ignorance kind of crowd. I try to assess the data as it arises, and the data about Omicron is markedly different than previous variants. I don't think I said anything in my comment that deserves this attack.
If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.
We need a mechanism to separate academic inquiry from a political tactic that disguises itself as academic inquiry. Unfortunately, the courtesy of extending good faith by default has been heavily exploited, so out of strategic necessity many assume bad faith by default. Naturally, this assumption should be revised once somebody proves that they're actually interested in details rather than fighting. If we had alternative methods of proving "seriousness" (e.g. academic credentials in academic settings), we could sidestep the requirement, but here on the internet it probably has to be this way.
It's a pity, but no, it's not the same as antimask/antivax rhetoric.
I expanded on previous comments. Yours was 3 levels up. I wanted to make the exact point I did - a lot of black and white thinking is in fact manipulative.
Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point.
It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.
Ireland is on the tail of their omicron peak ( based on cases, hospitalizations, and icu beds). Ireland has a very high vax percentage, well over 90+ in the covered groups, with high penetration of boosters as well.
The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down.
I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point.
At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.
Thanks for that site, it's very interesting and a very worthwhile project.
I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.
I don't think it is particularly inevitable. My youngest got it - was picked up on a lateral flow test on Christmas Eve, we had spent the day mucking about and gaming together, wrapping presents etc. None of the rest of the family tested positive to my surprise. Yes, she did isolate in her room over Christmas, poor kid.
I agree that "inevitable" is clearly too strong a statement. Furthermore, the odds of getting it depend on whether any of you are vaccinated and/or have previously had COVID (knowingly or otherwise).
> The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along.
I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.
Perhaps I can set you up on a call with my grandparents and aunts and uncles so you can find out what life with measles and smallpox and polio was like. A few still have scars.
I just recovered from Omicron and I was vaccinated. I am not sure what your grandparents are going to tell me. That I should get another shot of the vaccine that did not prevent the disease?
> That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case?
For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that.
Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda?
Yes, even for Omicron. Vaccinated people are far less likely to have severe cases at every age group — not being boosted means you’re less likely to avoid a case altogether but the T cell response is quite effective at helping you kick it faster.
> I am only moving the goalpost back to its initial position. Vaccine mandates are draconian - at least when the data is so weak as for SARS-CoV-2.
No, you're conflating two separate things to try to make a weak case appear stronger. Part of living in a society is accepting restrictions on your personal choices which impact those around you. Vaccination mandates are one of the big public health success stories since they reduce spread, load on the medical system, and the cost to society of having to care for people who are no longer as productive. Polio was significant asymptomatic, too — 70% of people had no symptoms and 25% had only mild symptoms, with a fatality rate under 1% — but we almost eradicated it by using public health measures like requiring vaccination to attend schools.
The key difference is that these restrictions are linked to the activities which vaccines make safer: prior to the Republican Party choosing to politicize the issue, ~95% of American school children were vaccinated against common diseases. Someone who objected to that didn't have a paramilitary squad track them down, they just had to homeschool, not travel to many countries, etc. so they bore the cost of their decision rather than everyone else. That's a pretty important difference compared to what allegedly happened in some parts of Rwanda.
No, using it as a reminder that saying a high percentage of people have mild cases isn't a valid argument for saying we should just write off everyone else. Long COVID isn't as bad as Polio but that doesn't mean that it hasn't caused problems for millions of people or that we should be cavalier about assuming no long-term or worse problems will emerge. Getting people vaccinated before we relax restrictions is a cheap, easy, and highly effective way to reduce those risks.
Have you considered that you may have had more mild Omicron due to being vaccinated? It is true that breakthrough infections exist, especially in something as transmissable as Omicron. However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.
This is called moving goalposts. The vaccines application states it will prevent transmissions, not lesson the symptoms. If it is simply "lessoning" the symptoms which has not been my experience with Omicron, but not preventing transmission then the authorizations should be pulled until they can be resubmitted.
To some reasonable level, the vaccines do prevent transmission. However, no vaccine is perfect - just look at the flu vaccine - even if the strains picked for the vaccine for the year are right, some people will still get the flu.
The vaccine helps to prepare your immune system to deal with the virus - in some cases that means it can fight it off entirely, or in other cases it will be able to fight it off quicker and your symptoms will be milder because your body is prepared.
At a lower rate and with far less severity, which is exactly what we expected based on the initial data. Omicron's arrival means that more people are getting sick but when they do, it's still considerably less severe — which is good because Omicron is sending more people to the hospital even though it's ~40-50% less likely to do so compared to Delta.
I realize that you don't want to admit having been so wrong about this for so long but the evidence is very clear that the vaccines are safe and effective:
Again, there you go quoting CDC ignoring the authorization which is for prevention and moving the goal posts quicker than QAnon. Some vaxxed people are in a constant state of Stockholm Syndrome. The evidence you speak of is unattainable at this point and VAERS is one of the only outlets which is significantly backlogged, and according to pro-vaxxers can't be trusted anymore because it doesn't fit their narrative.
Why are you continuing to misrepresent the EUA documents? They don’t support your assertion. (If you point to where in the authorization docs they specify the goal is to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection, I’ll change my mind. I linked the moderna application in another sub thread, and the pfizer one is easy to find)
Also VAERS is not the only data source we have for vaccine safety, it’s our hypothesis generation system. We have good data from the vaccine safety datalink system that let us actually quantify the risk of different side effects. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use
Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product,
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent
COVID-19 in individuals 5 years of age and older.
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.
> You are being offered the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of COVID-19.
The real question should be, why do you refuse to even just acknowledge basic facts right from the official EUAs? They are for prevention, not for lessening symptoms, and they simply are not preventing COVID-19 with Omicron.
COVID-19 isn’t the same as a positive SARS-CoV—2 test. This is what they measured, from the caption of table 10 in the pfizer fact sheet you linked:
> Note: Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 (symptoms included: fever; new or increased cough; new or increased shortness of breath; chills; new or increased muscle pain; new loss of taste or smell; sore throat; diarrhea; vomiting)
That’s kind of squishy, but I think it’s a clear distinction.
I agree that the effectiveness against symptomatic Covid is lower with omicron, but omicron also evades immunity from prior infection as well.
VAERS was never trustworthy as a raw data source, only as a source of information on what to investigate. It is the antithesis of medical research... Self-reported, no control for any known bias effects, no scrubbing for obviously erroneous data.
Reasoning from VAERS without controlled studies is, at best, like cutting the ends off a roast before you bake it because you heard your grandmother did it that way. At worst, it's like irradiating a spider and enticing it to bite you because you read once that somebody got spider powers that way.
The moderna application clearly distinguishes between Covid-19 (symptomatic disease) and SARS-CoV-2 infection, as the sibling comment says.
> On November 30, 2020, ModernaTX (the Sponsor, also referred to as Moderna) submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to FDA for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) intended to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
The vaccines application states it will prevent transmissions, not lesson the symptoms
Did you get this from an official source? I mean, no-one should have stated this because it is simply not true, nor has been for most common vaccins out there. At least in my country none of the official sources nor epidemiologists nor virologists ever said this. They'd only go as close as stating 'can prevent transmission in xx% of cases' or something like that.
> If it is simply "lessoning" the symptoms which has not been my experience with Omicron, but not preventing transmission then the authorizations should be pulled until they can be resubmitted.
Are organizations still making policy decisions based on the specifics of the original application implications? Or from observation that it only notably reduces hospitalizations / symptom severity?
If the former is the case, that would warrant clarity, but I also have no idea what a resubmission process looks like. Is that a one week turnaround? Or is it six months with no vaccines being able to be distributed?
The clinical trials for Pfizer and Moderna were testing for severe outcomes, not transmission. The vaccines got emergency use authorization based on that.
Some non-clinical studies suggested a drop in transmission (e.g. CDC study in spring 2021 which examined healthcare workers who got the jab early and were tested weekly), but it's clear now they were just picking up a transient effect, months long but wearing off thereafter.
So the mRNA vaccines are doing exactly what they were trialled to do 1.5 years ago. What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.
Have you considered that 99%+ of cases are mild or asymptomatic and that this reasoning amounts to confirmation bias? Especially with Omicron? Moreso in healthy people under 50 who are orders of magnitude less likely to suffer severe illness or complications.
The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.
This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
> Have you considered that 99%+ of cases are mild or asymptomatic and that this reasoning amounts to confirmation bias? Especially with Omicron? Moreso in healthy people under 50 who are orders of magnitude less likely to suffer severe illness or complications.
Omicron is 90% less deadly than delta for unvaccinated people and there is a 100% lower risk to need mechanical ventilation, according to this paper:
During the delta wave covid survivors had better immunization than people with only vaccination. This contradicts some of the mandates that are currently in place, such as in Germany, were people who previously recovered are still required to get a subsequent shot:
> This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
During the pandemic I looked up information about the public reaction to the Spanish Flu. It was almost exactly the same, including vaccines with unclear efficacy and anti-mask groups. However, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people while the world's population was only 1.6 billion and it only took a couple of months.
> Have you considered that you may have had more mild Omicron due to being vaccinated?
Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.
> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.
Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.
It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?
Gotta topper up once a month. That boosting is all about recharging your battery to fight whatever else is out there lurking around every corner just waiting for you. God this is ridiculous. The vaccines were approved to prevent transmission and they didn't do that, but now Pfizer and the likes will make sure that they get their money's worth and then some.
The vaccines were approved to keep people from dying, with a secondary goal of REDUCING spread. The experts were very clear that vaccinated people would spread it less than the unvaccinated, and all of the data shows that’s correct. Omicron didn’t exist when that data was being assessed, so think about it like someone in 2000 saying RSA 1024 was good encryption — they were hardly in the pocket of big crypto when they updated that to RSA 2048 a few years later after the attacks got better.
Have you? You’re just regurgitating right-wing talking points, conspicuously short on sources or demonstrated understanding.
When you do read the lengthy material at https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro... note that the approvals are based on fighting the disease. Reducing transmission — at which the vaccines were clearly highly effective prior to Omicron — is one part of that but an even more important part is preventing severe outcomes. Even with Omicron, the vaccines are highly effective at keeping you out of the hospital and even better at keeping you out of the ICU.
> The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is authorized to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 18 years of age and older.
> The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and is now marketed as Comirnaty, for the prevention of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.
Again, they were approved for prevention. The applications were for prevention. The FDA is trying to rewrite history, but if you look at the actual applications then you can verify what I'm saying is correct.
I linked to the FDA, too, since I knew you either hadn’t read or understood the documents someone else summarized for you. The part you quoted confirms that: note the distinction between the disease and the virus which causes it. Everyone knew that vaccinated people could still spread, but it takes longer to get data quantifying exactly how much and since the data showed very high efficacy against serious cases there was no ethical reason to delay protecting people waiting on that.
Everyone knew? I mean I can send videos if you'd like of Biden and left-wing politicians saying the vaccine would prevent you from getting it.
Also, prevention of the disease would mean that people are asymptomatic and/or that they aren't getting COVID. Hospitals in many areas are publishing data showing majority of people there for COVID are vaxxed. So much for prevention of the disease.
> Everyone knew? I mean I can send videos if you'd like of Biden and left-wing politicians saying the vaccine would prevent you from getting it.
If you were paying attention, note the difference between saying it will prevent all retransmission versus reducing it, which is what happened. Also, try to compare what actual medical experts said as opposed to the political entertainers whose talking points you're repeating. The actual medical experts were quite clear on this, and Biden has been pretty clear that breakthrough infections are possible — hence the interest in masks to prevent spread and vaccination to mitigate the damage for the people who we know statistically will catch it.
Biden is not a medical expert — as you might note, I tried to get you to focus on what they were saying — and that statement is clearly imprecise, which is why it was rejected by medical experts. He had at other times expressed this concept more accurately as improving the odds so this seems more like overstatement (“anyone” versus “as many”) as part of a broader point which has been quite accurate: getting vaccinated is the best way to end the pandemic.
Covid-19, the disease, is a family of symptoms up to and including death.
SARS-COV-2 is a transmissible virus that causes the disease COVID-19.
In the medical jargon, disease and its causality are separate concepts (and this bifurcation honestly makes sense... There are quite a few diseases where the treatment is to regulate symptoms without any hope of doing anything to modify the underlying active agent other than wait out the immune system to deal with it). It is entirely possible for a therapy to "prevent disease" without reducing the transmission of the underlying virus that causes the symptoms that make up a disease.
It is unfortunate that because of the conflation of these ideas in the layman terms space, people misinterpreted what the vaccine was cleared to do. But blaming doctors or the FDA for that is like blaming computer engineers when users turn off their computer and then don't understand that everything in volatile memory wasn't saved to disk. "Where's my spreadsheet go? It was in the computer's memory, it should be here."
Omicron is very resistant to the antibody response of the vaccines - the antibodies are supposed to cover the protein spikes which latch onto and enable infection of cells.
The t-cell response to infected cells learned from the vaccine, though, is very effective. Which is why vaccinated people still get infected (at a lower rate) but are many times less likely to get very sick, and almost none end up in ICU. The vaccines are effective.
It ok to be ignorant, but you should think twice about that smugness. You are wrong, and you have very little excuse for being this wrong after two years of living in a pandemic.
The comment you replied to is somewhat common factual description of events of someone who was fully vaccinated and still caught covid, which lead them to decide not to get booster shots in the future.
There’s a massive difference between COVID and those diseases, though, in terms of impact (death, crippling, etc) on the young and healthy. COVID isn’t all peaches and cream, but it’s not smallpox. The response to smallpox warrants a different level of severity than COVID.
> Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.
Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.
1 percent of the world population is 78 million people, that is many, even if you try to make it seem small by using percent. Each of those people were a member of a family, a mother, brother, father, son or similar to someone.
But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.
As of now, 5.5 million people worldwide died of Covid over the past 2 years (give or take a few million due to bad reporting).
It's an enormous loss of life, but a tiny number for a worldwide pandemic, especially given current travel technologies that would have made ancient plagues orders of magnitude worse than they were.
In comparison, we're talking about the targeted, deliberate, highly organized extermination of two thirds the entire Jewish race in Europe.
Enough with this fear mongering bullshit please, what are you trying to achieve, is it fun to spread panic? Show a proper statistically significant excess mortality, or stop talking about people dying.
Oh please stop acting like you are some genius for figuring out that 1% can seem small. Would you accept 1% of Jeff Bezos wealth? Or is that too small for you?
I am pointing out a) that some people doing fine is not proof that no one need be concerned, and b) there is separate reason for concern. If the pandemic had not initially been treated as a political problem but as a public health problem a lot of suffering would have been spared. And to call making these points "fear mongering bullshit" is to continue treating it as a political problem.
This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta.
Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.
Why on earth would you vaccinate kids? It’s not going to do anything to the spread of the virus, as the grand parent post mentioned it is extremely infectious and neither masks or the vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections. They aren’t at risk of the virus either. The energy would be better spent convincing the few >60yo who haven’t been vaccinated to get the shot. But keeping restrictions until kids are vaccinated? What is the point?
That's correct.
At some point we need to look at the real data of deaths.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
In Europe, there has NEVER been A PANDEMIC for people <45yo.
All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...).
No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.
Everyone gets sick, you can't really stop that. Restricting your life from normal activities from fear of being infected with low risk cold viruses, is the very definition of hypochondria
Vaccinated people suffer much less from a course of infection than unvaccinated, in all age groups.
Not necessarily 'long covid' stuff, just the basic injury that comes from the illness. I sure don't want to lose my sense of smell.
Even in young children, the consequences of infection appear to be worse statistically than the consequences of vaccination. It's of course not all that well understood yet, but for example, compare this syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid infection to the myocarditis due to vaccination:
My point here was death. The fact that there is no life threatening disease for 0-45yo on a statistical level in Europe. Death for this age group is lower than it was in 2017.
> Vaccinated people suffer much less from a course of infection than unvaccinated, in all age groups.
I don't know how you can measure that. And that's not how these vaccines have been sold. They were supposed to have 95% efficacy at lowering risk of getting COVID-19 compared with the control group.
We know now that is not the case as it does not help to control the epidemic (most vaxed countries with the highest cases). Transmission and contamination are not reduced with the vaccine.
So now we are told that it was never supposed to stop transmission, but miraculously, it makes your body handle the COVID better.
I don't know what data is used, but if you look for example in scotland (Page 44 https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11223/22-01-19-covid...) There is no obvious difference between the vax or unvaxed in term of hospitalization or covid positivity (p.38) unvaxed even seem to do better.
This is health, people are always going to get sick, not just from COVID. We need to fight all diseases with the best weapons we got. Against Covid, vaccines are 1 weapon, so is anti-viral drugs, antibiotics anti inflammatory and anti coagulant.
But we should let each individual choose with his doctor what treatment he wants. And not guilt young children to take an experimental drug where we don't know the long term efficacy or side effects.
And it's a mistake to evaluate the vaccines in terms of what was said about them over time versus the impact they currently have. They currently confer lots of protection to people that have received them.
Like the fact that the officials and manufacturers failed to properly communicate that it's a dynamic, changing situation doesn't actually undermine the very real value that the vaccines still provide.
Mortality rate (p.50) and hospital admissions (p.44) muddy the picture quite considerably. Would love to see similar figures for other countries in Europe.
Yes, we can see that something is different in the last months of 2021.
So either Omicron, as we now that it affects younger people as well.
Or another cause...
Either way, it is close to the 2018 high. It would be bold to qualify that as a pandemic!
>In Europe, there has NEVER been A PANDEMIC for people <45yo.
What? This is completely, wildly,untrue. See for starters Spanish Flu (killed mostly those aged under 45), smallpox (disproportionately affecting children)
This applies to all ages, but if I had linked to an ICU with adults I'm sure you would have blamed the pattern on old people.
Vaccines make a big difference, it's just that the vaccine doesn't protect people who don't take it. Even so, it kinda does: herd immunity and R are real. It's hilarious that anti-vaxxers seem to think that anything less than the vaccine somehow managing to protect 100% of people who don't take it is some kind of failure on its part.
Vaccination can be a hardship if it causes adverse events. The long-term negative health effects of COVID infection in children are isolated to the high risk comorbidity group, including COVID induced myocarditis. Healthy kids who contract COVID do not develop myocarditis later. Meanwhile, healthy kids who get the vaccines are at a small risk of developing myocarditis with the risk being far higher than developing it from COVID.
I have two children and they are not getting any COVID vaccine unless a second generation one that is not experimental is developed. I don't want any shot developed during the Trump administration in a rushed federal program injected into my kids and you shouldn't either. They've already both caught the virus and had no symptoms whatsoever. We wouldn't have even known they had it if not for the fact that I had lost my sense of smell and got tested.
Children are at lower risk from COVID-19 than they are from influenza. That is the data and it might not agree with your priors but it doesn't change the fact that that is the data.
It should be noted that the second generation of the COVID vaccine is going to look nothing like the first. They are likely not going to use the same components of the virus that they did with the first generation because the spike protein payload has unintended consequences in some human beings. I acknowledge that this subgroup of human beings is a small minority but it happened to include my mother-in-law who is now dead after suffering cardiac arrest 4 hours after her second shot.
In case you think I am a nutty anti-vaxxer I assure you I am not. I firmly believe that my father is alive today because of the vaccine. He was in a high-risk category and I just don't believe he would have survived COVID infection if he had caught it. It's a great idea for people like him and people in his age group. Hell, it was a good idea for my mother-in-law, but unintended consequences are going to happen when you have a practically untested vaccine administered to a massive population. Both of them are at high risk from the virus. My children are simply not. People seem to be unwilling to admit that a vaccine developed for a rapidly evolving virus in 2020 isn't very effective in 2022. I don't know why this cognitive dissonance is so strong, but it's just the fact. It prevents hospitalization but not spread. That's a good thing, but it's a private health effect, not a public one.
"small" is doing a lot of work here. As a society, we are generally comfortable with mandates that contain a small amount of risk. This had better be a large value of "small."
> Among more than 2.5 million vaccinated HCO members who were 16 years of age or older, 54 cases met the criteria for myocarditis. The estimated incidence per 100,000 persons who had received at least one dose of vaccine was 2.13 cases (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.56 to 2.70). The highest incidence of myocarditis (10.69 cases per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 6.93 to 14.46) was reported in male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years. A total of 76% of cases of myocarditis were described as mild and 22% as intermediate; 1 case was associated with cardiogenic shock.
Oh, it isn't. It's tiny. How many thousands of people do you have to stack on the railroad before you pull the switch on the trolley problem? Not this many. Not a hardship.
If you're going to quote the trolley problem at me, you need to explain to me the benefit of the vaccine for this age group. Risk of the virus for this age group is tiny. The primary rationale for vaccinating children originally was to prevent them from spreading the virus. With the new variants, this rationale has disappeared. It is now a private health decision, not a public health one.
I really dislike these public health studies where they wave their hands at myocarditis and treat it like it's not a big deal. There's no cardiologist that would tell you that. It's very serious and carries with it a dramatically elevated risk of lifelong cardiac problems down the road.
I will not allow the paranoia of a bunch of self-righteous cowards to put my kids at risk. Get the shot, move on with your life and leave the rest of us alone. We aren't responsible for soothing your paranoia anymore. The virus is now endemic courtesy of a lab in China funded by self-righteous arrogant scientists in the US. That's a controversial statement but it's the truth. Unfortunately, most of the people complaining about my kids not being vaccinated would rather be angry at me than angry at the people who unleashed this virus on the world.
Vaccines and masks have both been shown to be quite effective prior to Omicron. Kids are the remaining gap and that’s important because they can spread it even if they’re less likely to get sick, and that’s important because they bridge households and come in contact with high risk family members.
The other thing to remember is that kids don’t have a problem with the extremely mild inconvenience of wearing a mask — that’s mostly adults complaining for political reasons. If you ask a teacher, it’s just something they do like wearing shoes, and vaccination is no different than all of the other ones they get (95% rate in the US prior to Republicans choosing to politicize medicine).
This should all be indexed to vaccination and spread rates: relax restrictions on high risk activities like indoor dining as the former climbs and the latter declines, and prioritize keeping schools safe to avoid disruptive closures.
For the stated and proven reasons, the commonly known basis of vaccination: 1: It is much, much, much more dangerous to get COVID than the vaccine. 2: The immune response from vaccination is much more protective and much more consistent than the immune response from infection, especially with this disease.
This is known.
Also, established scientific knowledge lies counter to the statements you have as premise.
I was looking at the fully vaccinated rates since that seems to be a lot more significant with Omicron and the U.S. has substantial lags but it does look like some of the variation comes from tracking the number of doses total without accounting for the difference between some people having 3 doses. It also looks like some of them are not accounting for the percentage of ineligible kids.
Here's the one I used, which shows full vaccination on 91.7% and partial at 93%:
The thing I find most baffling is that we have very good reason to believe [1] that HEPA air purifiers can keep the air clear of the virus, and yet they are barely talked about.
In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes.
HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in.
There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open.
So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”.
Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7].
Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it.
It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters.
I think about just the common cold/flu - I also don't want to get that. If I knew that was ravaging through communities at higher than normal rates, i would take precautions because I just would prefer to not get sick!
"The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along"
Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once)
In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that.
That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system.
But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.
If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike.
I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense.
Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.
Ireland has a younger population (age structure) compared to all other EU states.
Vaccination priority was strictly based on age (oldest first). This decision is no suitable template for other countries with different age structure and vaccination status. Especially no template for US.
Next, consider Ireland is practically Dublin as capitol and single large city, and a more rural less dense populated rest of the country. Again, no template or match to other countries. It might work for Ireland.
While Ireland does have a capital that contains a higher proportion of the population than is normal for other European countries you are still overstating how rural the rest of the country is
Really?
In Germany, 79 cities > 100000
In Ireland, 3 (including Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland)
My comment was not meant to express any valuation or disvaluation of Ireland. It’s focus is about differences in age structures, population density, and vaccination strategy / execution, which makes it difficult to take Irelands approach as template for any other country.
To anyone confused about these reopenings, particularly in the US, it's actually pretty easy to understand:
1. Governments have decided that by now if you're not vaccinated it's by choice (which it is, barring actual medical conditions) it's by choice and the governments (as well as many people) have stopped caring;
2. The CDC's recent self-isolation has shown that given (1), the government cares more about keeping the economy going or has decided everyone is going to get Omicron anyway or both; and
3. The government has decided (and probably modeled) that hospitals might strain under the load but won't collapse as was a much bigger risk 1-2 years ago.
The statistics are pretty stark on this. In the US 2000+ people still die of Covid every day, 90-95% of those are unvaccinated and it feels like the government and people in general have lost patience with people who at this point are simply choosing to die.
Hopefully a vaccine will be approved for the youngest group soon, although I imagine there will still be a disparity between poor and wealthy countries.
Sure the death “rate” is lower per infection but in absolute numbers, we’re creeping towards the peak again. Kinda of sad people are thinking 3-4000 people dying per day is acceptable and an excuse that everything is ok. That’s one 9/11 event per day in terms of death.
This is Ireland, not the US. Omicron didn’t really produce a spike in deaths here; they’ve been at about 7-10 a day since October (25%-33% US rates). Notably, our vaccination and booster rate is much higher than the US, and virtually all over 65s have at least two doses.
It’s due to the peak passing without intolerable pressure on the health system. Expect restrictions to come back if this changes; we’ve wound them up and down a few times now.
What COVID-19 has taught me is people really have different levels of risk tolerance. I'm realizing I am very risk prone. Omicron never scared me and I got it. It was so mild, I would have thought I was hung over if I didn't have a home test. On the other hand we had a guest visit us from SF who really hasn't left his apartment during the whole pandemic from being terrified of the virus. His personality has changed for the worst. He is much more anti-social now and it was difficult to even have a simple conversation with him. He wears a face shield and double masks. Being so risk adverse as to become a recluse has really impacted his mental health negatively probably worse than getting COVID.
I refer to these excessively risk averse people as "branch covidians".
It's dumb, corny, and not that funny, but it helps me appropriately pity them instead of being angry at them. Isolation can foster a negative feedback loop of excessive media consumption, and the media is filled with quantitatively illiterate mid-wits who grossly exaggerated the risk for healthy, non elderly people. Fear is the mind killer indeed.
Yayyyyyyy... i guess. Now, everyone stop being arrogant and just emulate what China and the evil ceeceepee did about COVID. They did it right. You didn't. Now, get over your arrogance and do what is correct. When you are sick, you stay home. Stop coughing on everyone. Stop coughing on the world while investing in Moderna stock. Thank you.
Most of these covid discussions are generally stupid at this point. The situations are high localized and can change rapidly over the course of a few weeks. Ireland's current situation and their reaction applies solely to them.
For much of January they've had 0.4-0.5% of their population test positive per day, with 40-50% test positivity, meaning the real infections could have been 1-2% of their population per day. Very high rates of vaccines, very high rates of booster and absurdly high rates of infections means that there may not be anything left for the virus to do.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadI hope for thorough consideration of the totality of the evidence by voters and some careful thought regarding the last two years.
The moderation here is less than encouraging.
1. What's the horrifying precedent? 2. Assuming we can another pandemic one day which is more severe, how would you handle restrictions to protect public health - assuming you would at all?
(I think a lot of the debate around Covid stems from the unfortunate fact that it's too severe to ignore but not severe enough to get everyone on the same page. I can respect "we didn't need to this time" but I'm curious about people who argue "we should never do this")
Stipulate that the current crop of names all have noble intent. Not taking swipes at anyone in view.
You've no guarantees of such going forward.
The current situation is Checkov's Gun[1]. At some point, if we don't enjoy a collective think on where this is going, there will be dismay.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
Nothing new there, beaurocrats and public health officials have long had the power to make highly consequential decisions for large numbers of people.
Yes we could do with some debate about the power they exercise and about how to handle the next pandemic, and there will be a next pandemic. However your dramatic tone is unwarranted and unhelpful.
I'll yield on the kind, but the degree with the Covid is off the charts for peacetime action.
Was this wise? Were the across-the-board outcomes worth it?
Those who made the decisions may be biased in their reflections on the matter.
Actually, no. This is exactly the level of heavy handed, indiscriminate beaurocratic/government control that poorer people have always had to deal with - see for example how large scale city planning has tended to distribute its most disruptive consequences among the poorest neighbourhoods, or how public health systems have judged most harshly and intruded most forcefully into the lives of the poorest.
So again, nothing new. The only new thing is that middle class and wealthy people - such as you and I - suddenly experience this and react in shock.
> Were the across-the-board outcomes worth it?
Lives saved, lives disrupted, jobs lost... I don't know.It's a complex calculus, requiring a dispassionate and objective inquiry, which you clearly are not in a position to make
> Those who made the decisions may be biased in their reflections on the matter
Whatever
Once again: kind, not degree. Short of wartime mobilization, there just aren't examples of bureaucrats ordering wrenching economic changes on this scale.
Lot's of people are ignoring the mask mandates and going with out a mask, even on the public transportation.
I'm triple vaxxed and had covid in December. I'm going to nightclubs, pubs, restaurants etc. because why not? Who knows what the next variants etc will bring, but really does feel like Omicron is a gift of some sort.
This might be helpful for your situation
The cute cloth masks and disposable paper ones simply aren't going to make a difference in an enclosed space like a bus or subway. It is the worst kind of security theater, in that it makes people feel safer when they are not, and so more willing to take risks than they would have been otherwise.
Asking people to wear cloth masks on PT during covid is like asking them to wear a bandana while riding a bicycle.
In this wave, case:hospitalisation ratio about 1:80. Last year it was about 1:13
Also capacity has been increasing year on year for the past 100 years in the EU, USA and the UK . Faster than population actually.
Also there is cyclical and situational capacity management. For e.g.: flu waves, new year and now covid waves.
I only know about those regions
Like we have massive infrastructure in place to prevent diseases like cholera from being a problem. We should do more to mitigate airborne transmission.
If I have a heart attack or car accident tomorrow, I’m at serious risk of not getting a bed and treatment.
If the anti-vac morons weren’t taking up so much space at the hospitals, I’d agree. But with numbers the way they are, “return to normal” is a pipe dream.
Another one, politicians need to stop using science for propaganda. The mistrust in scientists has cost us dearly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2021/08/08/joe-rog...
Refreshing to see tha even at the govt level, there is competition of ideas.
The economic consequences are still being recognized. Drive around the prime tourist areas and all the storefronts are empty. Factory workers are going back to their small towns and waiting it out, so factories can’t find workers. Western companies are canceling orders, etc.
They are learning you can’t turn chunks of the economy on/off. Every change of rules mean investors and customers eventually just “sit and wait it out”. Plus the cost of restarting factories, bringing tourism back, etc isn’t small, so when countries go back and forth the smart move is to just sit back and wait.
Look at the EU . We should be glad that bureaucratic nightmare (created with good intentions, all should be said) hasn't led to war just yet.
I am not claiming that your statement is wrong, just that the causal relationship is not at all clear to me. It is probably much easier to show for vax rates, but lockdowns -- I have not seen a convincing proof.
Canada being sparse is a bit misleading. While yes, it's a very large country with relatively few people, 90+% of people live within 150 km of the US border, and the population density in major population centres (Toronto / Vancouver / Montreal) is comparable to US metro areas.
Vaccination rates you're correct, but the lower impact of COVID was observed pre-vaccination as well.
General health is a good point though, I'm sure it's a factor - I don't know if it explains such a large difference in death rate though.
I'd hestitate to draw conclusions by comparing countries, there is not enough data.
If we could compare different local areas that had different policies, we might be able to get somewhere. Even then, it's not easy. The locales who are happy to lockdown are probably also composed of people happy to wear a mask and happy to vaccinate. There is also an ugly reverse causality thing going on where lockdowns are a response to growing community spread, which makes it look like they don't work when maybe they actually do.
It's not an easy question to answer empirically. I'm happy to do the finger in the air approach of assuming they work based on common sense. That doesn't mean that they should be implemented, which is a related but different question.
I can understand a quick reaction for a week or two as we plan a strategy; maybe for a month. But two years is ridiculous. This seems to be driven by politics more than health. Which seems to be agreed to by most people in many countries who largely ignore it (except for countries like Australia and NZ, which imposed real, hard lockdowns). In the Eastern Europe in the summer where masks were required inside, most people wear them on the chin (even at the airports). And say "cannot wait when those jerks from the EU stop pushing those rules down our throats".
And last but not least: I know well two people who are immunocompromised. Their care took a definite turn for the worse, because in many countries there is at the moment a single disease worth fighting and everything non-COVID becomes a distant second. Whew. That turned into a rant. Sorry!
Can you show where they said this? This is what will happen but I haven't heard it be stated as a official strategy.
With Omicron beating out Delta and not causing as many hospitalizations - sure, why not.
US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?
I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=30036474&goto=item%3Fi...
Unless you are staying home and getting food delivered?
Have you taken other/alternate measures to prevent yourself from becoming a risk factor to yourself and others?
If you disagree with this statement, then here's hard proof: See page 7 of this UK report (latest data) tracking the vaccination status of Covid hospitalizations and deaths: https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publication...
I've actually had a look at the document you pointed. It's very confusing. The last line of the report at page 7 states:
Rates of hospital admissions in the time range (8/nov - 5/dec):
- fully vaccinated: 493
- partially vaccinated + unvaccinated: 267
Rate per 100k admitted to hospital, same time range:
- fully vaccinated: 39
- partially vaccinated + unvaccinated: 208
I'm not sure how to reconcile the numbers above. Page 8 is a graph plotting the second metric (rate per 100k).
Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated.
And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
Page 38 https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11223/22-01-19-covid...
Again, the fact that the numbers don't reconcile still stands, and without clarifications, that table and any references are meaningless.
From page 7:
- Rates Admitted to Hospital per 100,000: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 39.0
- Northern Ireland population: 1.9 millions
Expected admitted in the whole N.I: (39 * 1900 / 100) = 741
- Total admissions: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 493.
The numbers 741 and 493 don't match.
The rest of the table is inconsistent as well; for example, the proportions between fully and non vaccinated, between the rate per 100k (right), and the absolute values (left), are inconsistent between each other.
Futher, on the second page:
> During this 4 week period there were 790 hospital admissions, 36 (4.6%) of which had received a third dose.
The number 790 and 36 are other two who add to the pile of inconsistency. Until everything is explained with exactness, that report is essentially garbage.
> And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
In absence of correct data about N.I., the CDC report is a reasonable source, also by mean of being considerably larger scale. It can be acceptable to refute it when referring to Northern Ireland, but in this case valid data is required.
---
Additionally, about this:
> Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated. This is not an indictment against the vaccines, they prevent hospitalization, but the sheer number of vaccinated people still means they're the majority in the hospitals and ICUs, and the unvaccinated are a minority across the board.
This is a common mathematical mistake; see conditional probability notions.
To explain the mistake using extremes, if all the population except one was vaccinated, and one not vaccinated, hospitals would have 100% of vaccinated people, but the conclusion that because of that being vaccinated is less effective than not being vaccinated, is wrong; one needs other variables to make this conclusion.
The issue is that if you're gonna try to blame unvaccinated people for your problems, they should actually be the source of your problems - which they're not.
The data on page 7 also shows hospitalization is overwhelmingly for populations aged 60+ and up. Which is unfortunate, but I think people, parents especially, are having to decide between tradeoffs of prioritizing elderly versus benefits kids get from ending restrictions.
No one cares until it affects them.
This whole pandemic made me realize that Paradox of Tolerance is much more general - there is also Paradox of Empathy and Paradox of Kindness and bunch others.
While many don't care until it affects them, that is not even close to universally true.
I was surprised at the number of people who didn't care, and it seems to be about 50%, but characterizing everyone that way is incredibly unfair to all the people who worked tirelessly to try to convince people to get the vaccine.
If the self righteous cared about peoples lives instead of pushing people with relatively lower risk to get a vaccine they would have sent those vaccines to the third world to vaccinate the vulnerable there.
Instead the WHO complained in early 2021 that we gave our vulnerable a double dose
In the summer of 2021 WHO complained when we vaccinating our healthy young
In the fall of 2021, the WHO was shocked when we rolled out boosters
By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
> By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
Or both.
As bad as US health care system is (and it is bad), it is ridiculously over capitalized. Compared with Canada, the US normally has 50% more ICU beds. More Dr. per capita (slightly) and a ridiculous larger number of nurses and secretaries.
Therefore, Ontario’s health care system gets overwhelmed during bad flu seasons.
In this scenario, Ontario’s recent lockdowns make (material) sense, but that doesnt mean that significant health care resources are being diverted in the US.
By over capitalized, I mean the US has insane medical facilities everywhere people live. I live within a 5 minute drive of three major hospitals, and who knowns how many minor medical centers
EDIT:
Please dont take this to be a judgement on Ontario’s health system. Before COVID both my parents were successfully treated in Ontario for cancer, for which Im grateful.
My comment is merely an illustrative example of how differences health care systems do and must affect government response
Omicron is being called 'mild', but it's not mild for a lot of people in absolute terms (even though it may be milder compared to what earlier variants might have been for that individual).
Also, it's entirely up to people themselves if they want to be protected or not: Omicron is so transmissive, it doesn't matter for transmission if people are vaccinated or not - whatever impact it has on transmission is of little consequence - everyone is going to get infected, anyway (maybe a few weeks later but it doesn't matter at all).
On the other hand, vaccines are universally available, and free, for a very long time now.
Together it means that if you are unvaccinated, it's on one hand, only your own fault, and on the other hand, only your problem - effectively you no longer endanger anyone but yourself by staying unvaccinated (big difference from what it was a year ago).
Which means, there is no point for anyone but unvaccinated themselves suffering. If you got the vaccine, Omicron is about as dangerous as flu, and no one closes economy because of flu.
Almost all unvaccinated are Republicans and Democratic administration is in power...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
I'm sure that have different opinion hurts a lot of people.
"90% of the people in this hospital for COVID today are unvaccinated" is a very different statement when, for hypothetical examples,
- 90% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is same as general population.
- 10% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is mostly drawn from the unvaccinated.
And points in-between, and the other way (what if - for sake of example only - 95% of local people are unvaccinated?).
And then there are further confounding effects - what if unvaccinated people are younger and than average, as vaccines are given preferentially to older people who are more likely to require a hospital visit in normal times.
For US probably a couple more waves and it’ll go through the unvaccinated.
Full vaccination is at about 65%, boosters are at about 25%, lower than much of Europe.
It's reasonable to be measuring against eligibility when evaluating progress in administering boosters, but not being eligible for a booster doesn't really make someone less susceptible to infection, so it isn't the right thing to compare across countries.
If you are at risk of dying from covid and you didn't get vaccinated it is kinda your fault now. And if you are vaccinated and dying from covid, well there is not much more you could have done.
2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic.
3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity.
4. There is now a large portion of the population that has natural immunity.
5. It should be abundantly clear that case counts is no longer a meaningful metric.
6. Covid is a disease that has markedly different effects based upon the host’s age, medical condition, etc. There is no equivalent level of risk.
7. Most of the population, think working class and kids, cannot sustain continued lockdown conditions without serious mental/economic effects. They don’t have the privilege of the laptop class to just dial in from an office.
8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions.
Re hospital capacity, Hospitals run close to their limit. I have been in and out of the medical system my whole life and can assure that delays, cancellations, etc are nothing new. Is there strain during the new waves? Of course. But these are waves and they will come and pass. As well perhaps firing unvaccinated nurses wasn’t a good idea? People can choose to isolate during the waves if they want, but if they feel they feel like they have no need to (vaccine immunity, natural immunity). And as a father of small children, I cannot in good conscience continue to deny them a childhood for a virus that they themselves have extremely little risk of. The human brain is only developing during its childhood years once.
Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy.
As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday.
We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions.
She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.)
Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations.
There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK.
TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.
China has done it for pre-omicron variants, so it is possible. You and I are not willing to accept the restrictions necessary to do it and that's fine, but you cannot say it is impossible.
In January of 2020, a Chinese born coworker of mine who is now a citizen had her father die in Beijing. Every symptom of how he died was obviously COVID, but the authorities officially classified his death as cardiac arrest. She was enraged by this but that was the common thread in Beijing.
Sure. It's an anecdote but it's not like you can get any real data about this. Who is going to collect it when the entire nation state is turned against you?
It's interesting to watch how this thread changed once people on the West Coast woke up. The branch covidians are in full force.
I used to do work for the Democratic party many years ago. It was sort of a given back in 2014 that we were going to get the vast majority of Latino votes going into the future. These unsustainable policies have caused Latinos to shift dramatically away from the Democratic party. It is politically unsustainable and destructive. It is politically, unsustainable and destructive.
Regarding the unvaccinated nurses getting fired, should be noted that virtually all of them had natural immunity. My sister-in-law is one of these who did not want to get vaccinated because she had already contracted the virus and had attended several patients suffering from adverse events as well as friends who had their menstrual cycles disrupted. There was no scientific harm from this decision because her natural immunity was more protective than the vaccine based on multiple studies, including a CDC study that was just released last week.
Your comment on being a father is also 100% correct. People seem to think that children's brains continue to develop at the same rate between the ages of five and eight as they do between the ages of 3 and 5. That's just not how it works. You have these tiny windows of time where the brain is going through rapid development and you can't make up for these windows in a later time period.
History will likely not be kind to the policies against children that were pursued to protect unionized teachers and elderly people who will long be dead when the repercussions of this horrible policy towards children are fully felt. But perhaps I have too much faith in the people writing the history to be honest, considering that the laptop class are the most powerful and the most paranoid and frightened.
Myself and my family all have the boosters. As long as transmission is high and masks are recommended we will wear masks. Other than that though, my preference would be that there are few other restrictions in place. What I am tired of is waiting for everyone else to get the vaccine and wear a mask. At this point it seems like a lost cause and not worth my effort to spend energy on.
I still have a lot of sympathy for healthcare workers and really anyone else that has to work in a highly public setting where they are at higher risk of exposure.
After two years and now 4 shots being discussed it’s clearly apparent:1) people will still get infected, 2) despite the lower risk of death with vaccines, plenty will still die, 3) we can’t keep borrowing money and giving to people when we shutdown their businesses.
And I feel like the protests in Australia, Canada, US, Europe are making it pretty clear people aren’t willing to make major sacrifices for another year, or two or three.
Far smarter to pretend this was the plan all along then watch people blatantly disregard your rules.
[1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
[2] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
Imo the only thing that really matters is the hospitalization rate of the vaccinated. If it's near bad flu numbers, then there's no more concern
However, even though I'm fully vaccinated and boosted so personally have no reason to fear COVID from the point of view of landing in the hospital or dying directly from COVID (and all my friends and family are in a similar position) it is still an indirect concern because the unvaccinated are taking up hospital resources that I might need.
Even in my county in the US, which has been in the bottom quarter for case, death, and hospitalization rates in my state, which has been in the bottom 5-10 states for all of those statistics for the entire pandemic, there are enough unvaccinated people in the hospital now with COVID that hospitals are almost unable to take new patients. Omicron looks like it is peaking here, so it will probably be OK to go ahead and have my heart attack or get hit by a drunk driver without worrying about whether I'll be able to get treatment, but there are a heck of a lot of places in the US right now where this is not the case.
The good news is that after omicron, enough of the unvaccinated will have some immunity via omicron that it should bring their hospitalization rates down enough that it is no longer a problem. That's when we reach the "it can be treated like a a cold or flu from a public health perspective" stage. A recent NTY covid briefing email looked at the data from places that are ahead of the US on the omicron curve, and that's what they concluded.
The solution to this is to bump the unvaccinated to the lowest priority of hospitals. If beds are full they should be removed from the hospital.
The effect is that these decisions result in a small increase in the steady state hospitalization levels. If obesity or smoking increases the effects of that increase on hospitalization will be spread out over decades giving plenty of time for hospital capacity to be adjusted to deal with it. (Same if obesity or smoking decreases--hospitals won't suddenly be laying off staff. Hospitalizations would fall over several years giving hospitals plenty of time to reduce capacity by simply not replacing as many workers who retire or change professions).
COVID-19 is bad for hospitals because it is short term. That's why in the US we are currently getting about 20x as many daily COVID-19 hospital admissions as we got cancer admissions before COVID-19 (that's for all cancers, not just lung cancer).
I’ve learned of many cancer diagnoses in my circle of family and friends and can think of only two that had a hospital admission related to it (most were treated as outpatient procedures, including most of the surgeries).
So no, even if those ethical questions would be resolved in favor of it, it is at best a solution during a future pandemic. It is not one for this pandemic.
If we didn’t have vaccines how much larger would the numbers be?
Well, about that. A few governors have admitted what has been known by “conspiracy theorists” for the past two years: that included in the count of Covid hospitalizations are people who come to the hospital for something else entirely and happen to test positive [0]:
> Officials from New York City-based NYU Langone Health told The New York Times in a Jan. 4 report that about 65 percent of its COVID-19 patients were "incidentally" found to be infected after admission for other reasons. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked hospitals to adjust their reporting on COVID-19 hospitalizations beginning Jan. 4 to make the distinction between those admitted for the virus as their primary condition and those who incidentally test positive.
...
> "We have a few patients in the hospital for COVID, but not many, thank goodness," Dr. Jha tweeted. "More common on our service is folks admitted with COVID. That is, they came to the hospital for something else and found to have COVID."
So the count numbers have been exaggerated for who knows how long. An accident, I’m sure.
0: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...
To top it off, healthy unvaccinated nurses can't work, but capacity is so low some hospitals are asking covid positive nurses to come back to work before they fully recover or had the full quarantine period.
How do you know that? My question, really, is how do you know what you know and are not being misled? (A la WMD to use an easy, universally understood, example?)
“2000 people are still dying every day,”
No, they’re not. According to the CDC (why do I trust them?) its currently 500/day [1]. It hasn't been > 2000 since September in the midst of the Delta spike. But even before I looked at the CDC I doubted your claim because:
- The vast majority of adult Americans are vaccinated. (>70%?). Its far greater in the vulnerable population.
- Of the unvaxxed, a great number of them are already recovered (or dead)
- You agree, this leaves a significantly reduced pool of people for the Grim Reaper to harvest.
Therefore, 2000 dead/day in January 2022 would have been far far worse than the all time high of 25 000/ week (>3000/day) we reached in Jan last year because the normalizing population was much higher then.
For your figure to be correct then, omicron would have to be, not just more contagious (it is), but a spectacularly more deadly variant than Delta instead of being relatively benign.
“and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?”
We’re not OK with it, we’ve made peace and learned to live with something that has become endemic and will never go away.
2 years of pandemic implies 1/40th of an average lifespan. Thats not insignificant. But it gets worse
2 years is 66% of my toddler’s life. A toddler that doesnt know what a peer’s smile is since she’s masked all day.
2 years is 33% of my first grader’s life. Who luckily avoided any long term school closures, but goes crazy whenever there’s a two week “virtual learning” session.
What happened is, therefore, that peoples lives cannot be put on hold indefinitely. There are worse fates than death [2]. We have the tools and knowledge to deal with COVID and we want to return to normal.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
[2] ironically, a person who doesn't understand that doesn't have much to live for.
How would you (or really anyone I suppose) evaluate whether to trust the CDC or some other equivalent?
Also, thanks for those numbers. I don't know why that breakdown isn't more widely pushed.
- Do the numbers add up? Fake numbers often don't.
- Does the narrative have a logical flow? Lies often break apart (careful! Consipracy theories are often very consistent)
- Aethetics. Lies are often repulsive to our soul (Nazism, socialism -> see nihlism). Careful again; sometimes its “the ugly truth”
- Dialectic (for lack of a better word. Not Hegel’s type. Whatever that was). Engage and hear out someone who disagrees
- Meditate. Close your eyes and release. And overlooked Truth might pop up.
- Look around you. Does the narrative fit your observed reality? Careful! There’s observational bias.
Keep tabs of who has the courage to defend positions they disagree with.
Keep tabs of those who reveal themselves sycophants
Known personal flaw.
(Im also on the tail end of a week of COVID fever. I’m literally delusional?)
Now, you are an exceptional reader to have spotted that as a general trait as opposed to a once oversight. This is very rare and, despite our disagreement, kudos to you!
Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Counts by NCHS often track 1–2 weeks behind other data."
Your source itself says that it does not yet have complete data for January 2022.
It's a bit rich to go on about being misled by mysterious forces and trusting the CDC and so on and then "do your own research" and fail to understand the basic reporting methodology of the source you land on.
Pray, do share. Polls show the (vast) majority of Americans want to know the names of reputable news organizations.
A news org that peddled WMD or Russiagate (lets be bi-partisan) doesnt count
Check your math ;)
And, seek help. Life is beautiful, but depression and deep-seeded pain (dont ask me how I know. I wont share) makes us forget this.
The lockdowns have created a mental health crisis and its important we seek each other and help
Let me assure you that they, with their back history of oppression and menial jobs, are happier than the average “privileged” person I’ve met.
What's the point of concluding with such a cynical and subjective-at-best remark?
What is worth living for that isnt also worth dying for?
On a more serious note, I may be misunderstanding the nuance of what you are saying/asking, but for me there is relatively little overlap between "things worth living for" and "things worth dying for". A few people in my life, that's it. There are plenty of things to live for. Seeing technology advance, traveling, experiencing things, meeting people, creating something of value and/or meaning, having a positive impact. Ultimately, none of those are things worth dying for. I'd rather not have them, than not have them and be dead.
Thank you, you lived up to your nick :)
I believe that, if not for the things that you would die for the things you enjoy in life would, eventually, become insipid. Then, we (maybe not all of is) are liable to enter into a spiral of existential despair at the realization that our lives are meaningless to the universe.
My daughters’ play, my parent’s affection, my wife of ten year’s love have never gotten old. I don't care what the universe doesn’t think about me as long as I have them (and time away from them to spend all morning on HM pontifying to strangers as if I had a clue ;)
Can you say the same for the sparkle you felt unwrapping iOS7? the sparkle of (secular) Christmas vanished when I was 13 and I realized that nothing I received for Christmas made me happy, and nothing I could ask for would. But knowing that in 10 days Id be back in school and get to see my crush… wow!
Cheers! Hearing that is a first on HN, quite the occasion. :)
> I believe that, if not for the things that you would die for the things you enjoy in life would, eventually, become insipid. Then, we (maybe not all of is) are liable to enter into a spiral of existential despair at the realization that our lives are meaningless to the universe.
I think you are spot on, and it may well be why the remark in the GP stuck out the me. Things like depression can accelerate that process and can force us to have this conversation with ourselves much sooner. To me now having a (self-assigned) purpose is only one thing: Less boring than not having one. It is quite freeing, and was the shift in perspective I needed to find some semblance of joy again in the world around me. Still, for better or worse, it has left me without things to completely give myself up for.
Also, clue or not, your comment is a wholesome read and I appreciate that you took the time to write it.
My wife and I in May of 2020 decided that a hug from our grandchildren and children was worth way more the minimal risk we had of dying from Covid should we have caught it. We ended our exile in May day and decided to let fate be fate and not let fear consume us and prevent us from enjoying our family.
I don’t begrudge others for their own decisions, but for me, the pandemic ended for me mentally on Mothers Day 2020. Time with my family is worth dying for…so if I catch it and it kills me, so be it.
In early summer 2020, my mom passed in hospice from cancer. 4mo before that she had a fighting chance, but faced intensive surgeries (ICU for sure based on experience) and chemo — all in isolation. Literally the hospital made it that choice - family has to leave. They basically gaslighted her out.
I was furious, and because the hospital was not overwhelmed. there were precautions obviously, but no - it was not filled with Covid or people dying from Covid. Utter bs.
The pervasiveness of dying or suffering alone has exploded in the last two years. It is one of the worst fates.
Hopefully, this pandemic will have served to shock us to take better care of our seniors who have been neglected for too long.
Clearly at some point, we’re going to end the pandemic-related restrictions, right? It seems a valid question to ask periodically “is now the right time to stop doing X?” Whatever X is and whether or not you think X is effective vs X’s downsides are all factors into your answer, but factors that shouldn’t preclude asking the question.
There are going to be a range of people’s answers from “YOLO!” to “but think of the children/grandma!” Society (with government as the instrument) would do well to decide based on the science and stats, not on what the extremists on either end would prefer.
At some point, we’re going to stop wasting everyone’s years all together, but that’s inevitably going to take all the years away from (kill) at least one person who would have survived if we’d stayed locked down. It’s a living Trolley Problem.
Some haven’t and are paying the consequences.
One year, not two.
There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".
A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.
But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.
So it’s a little frustrating to hear people talk like this when not everyone can get vaccinated yet.
Omicron has a higher propensity to infect the upper respiratory tract, which is less developed in young children.
You need to forget what you’ve heard about older variants and children. Look at the stats. More kids are being hospitalized in this wave and more deaths are occurring per capita in 0-14 year olds.
It’s not good.
Citation please? Current CDC data don’t show enough deaths in that age range to be statistically significant, let alone provide that conclusion.
Statistics mean nothing once something bad has happened to you. It's not like having been struck by lightning is less bad because the odds of happening to you were low. I will do what I can to stack the odds in our favor.
I am not saying one is right or wrong, but I think it is valid to look at all the other viral infections kids are exposed to and cannot be vaccinated against, and realize they just have to roll the dice. In the past 4 years, my kids have had RSV, a noro or rotavirus, probably Covid at least once, and a numerous other viruses.
RSV/noro were the worst, but if they are going to play with other kids, it is all but guaranteed they will have something. I am actually most afraid of noro/rota viruses, far more than Covid. That thing tore through the entire daycare and shutdown multiple classes within 2 days, and the cleanup from all the vomit was crazy.
TBH, I have never heard of a US school district where the majority are driven to school by their parents, though to be fair to the parent poster I can't sat that I would be terribly surprised if such a place existed.
If I were to guess, the vast majority of kids still get to school via school bus.
We're trying to balance multiple factors: living our life normally, protecting ourselves, protecting family members we still interact with. We take some known risks: sending child to preschool, while taking known precautions: wearing masks, getting vaccinated. If being vaccinated reduces the chance that we might spread the virus to someone, then that's a marginal advantage we'll stack in our favor.
Living normally is probably only one thing that we can do. Vaccines, masks, lockdowns... None works. But if we are daily exposed to news with fear agenda, we will never live normally again. We shoul live, not survive and loose our time.
Btw... Reduced chance of spreading virus wont make people immune to catch it. But yet... Gonverments consider vaccinated people as immune. Why?
If in fact vaccination reduces transmission of the virus, then that's an advantage I'll stack in our favor, among other precautions like wearing masks.
More studies available on https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/search?q=Transmission&restr... if you want to deep dive
If yes, then the chance of them dying is relatively low.
My kids are 2 and 5 - they've both had Covid at least once, possibly twice and it was indistinguishable from all the other colds they've had since the pandemic hit.
[0] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nati...
People during this whole pandemic have been very cavalier with putting others at risk to not get inconvenienced. “Your kid probably won’t die” is not a winning argument.
Virginia, highest wave peak recorded, including ICU and ventilations: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/see-the-numbers/cov...
New York, second highest wave peak and highest new admissions per day: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summ...
Or you’re too young for the vaccine.
Hospitalizations among 0-1 year olds are significantly up with Omicron. Even 1-14 year olds represent a sizable portion of hospitalizations in many states, presumably biased toward those in that age group too young for the vaccine.
Being a parent of young children is not great right now as Omicron gets worse for children and everyone else in the world seems to have given up on helping you reduce your risk of your young kids catching it.
Sure, it sucks, but there are a lot of diseases out there that can put your child in the hospital that we’re not imposing restrictions for.
The problem is and always has been "what if the health care system is overwhelmed".
With that reasoning you can never remove the restrictions, because you never know if that would overwhelm the health care system.
I just sat at home with no sense of smell or taste for 2 weeks.
In any case, this experiment will inform other countries on how to proceed further. I sincerely hope the results will be good, both for Ireland and the rest of the world.
If you want to follow the Covid data for Ireland, here’s the official site:
https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/
It's having very little impact on our hospitalization rates, despite massive jumps in overall case numbers. The main aim of the restrictions was to prevent the health service from becoming overrun (especially over christmas when they were already strained), and it's been deemed no longer necessary.
It's still not understood what pressures led to Omicron favouring lower lethality so I'll be curious if that's ever explained over the normal "that's what viruses do _shrug_"...
Which leads to the question why should Omicron have become so less lethal if this is just the 4th strain with <100 mutations?
I don't think you have a good grasp of the basics of the mechanics of evolutionary selection, epidemiology or whatever. Maybe spend some time brushing up on the basics of the science before starting speculation on the why's and wherefore - stuff that appears suspicious to you now is actually a logical result of natural processes
As a policy to stop groups getting COVID, it seems it encouraged the thing it was trying to prevent.
Anyway, kudos to them for going back to something like normalcy, I must go back there on vacation!
Also the pubs had limits on number of people to a table, table service only etc.
On the other hand a lot of people just didn't bother going out due to the early closing time. For a lot of people going out earlier wasn't an option.
So hard to say if it was a net reduction or increase in risk.
So really, the 8pm curfew on hospitality has been lifted but that was always silly in the first place.
While you can point to some successes, the Irish government has really failed with their approach to all of this. The next election will be interesting and I predict Sinn Féin will be elected.
They’ve lifted the vax cert requirements for going out, limits on size of gatherings, and most mask requirements are due to go in a couple of weeks.
I’m pretty proud of our overall response as a nation, apart for the anti-mask loonies. Most of us did what was asked, and as a national policy we (mostly) followed the medical and scientific advice, with obvious compromises for economic, educational and social factors. And here we are now, having mostly gotten through it without massive loss of life, without overloading the hospitals (apart from unvaccinated towards the end) and we’re removing the restrictions.
Feels good.
Success should be measured by death tolls, happiness, and economic prosperity.
An increase in per capita infections feels like a pretty solid negative indicator of success. Happiness during this whole ordeal is often directly related to faith in science and willingness to make hard choices to ultimately strive for a reduction in infections. People who make hard choices to protect others aren't doing it to be happy, they're doing it to be right. Maybe you could convince me to agree to economics as indicator but not an immediate one. The results of our choices will take years to fully manifest and understand and the if you want to look at it in th immediate term, the US markets just took a dive and that will have global impact.
So... success?
Infections alone are meaningless. The only reason to even think about them is they impact other parts of daily life. If infections are 100x higher, but everyone is healthy and happy, who cares.
To the extent we should care, it is because they have impacts on other aspects of our life.
If a country is healthy, happy, and prosperous, their policy was a success, even if infections are high.
Alternatively, if a country is swamped with deaths, miserable, and economically failing, it doesn't matter if their infection numbers are low and they had the harshest lock downs.
Curfew, masks while standing up and not when sitting down, cloth masks which data shows do nothing (from Bangladeshi RCT), etc.
It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta, and it's a gift that nothing at present can outcompete it. I believe it's the version that will be endemic, if not than something very similar. So as someone who has spent too many months raging against people who refused to look at the facts of Delta - my mom missed essential surgery because the ICUs were crowded with antivax people, to add emotion to the mix - I'm onside that it's the time to start opening up, at least in jurisdictions where Omicron is 95%+ of cases and where hospitalizations have peaked.
The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.
edit: In the above I say I believe all of us will be exposed - not necessarily infected though.
Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time.
I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at.
Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.
Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.
It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.
I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront.
It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.
If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.
It's a pity, but no, it's not the same as antimask/antivax rhetoric.
Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point.
It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.
The same applies to people who assume that unvaccinated people must be idiots.
The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down.
I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point.
At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.
I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.
I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.
Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.
For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that.
Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda?
https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/21/cdc-studies...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
As for Rwanda, that’s moving the goalposts — there are many things which the Rwandan government has done which most of us do not approve of.
I am only moving the goalpost back to its initial position. Vaccine mandates are draconian - at least when the data is so weak as for SARS-CoV-2.
No, you're conflating two separate things to try to make a weak case appear stronger. Part of living in a society is accepting restrictions on your personal choices which impact those around you. Vaccination mandates are one of the big public health success stories since they reduce spread, load on the medical system, and the cost to society of having to care for people who are no longer as productive. Polio was significant asymptomatic, too — 70% of people had no symptoms and 25% had only mild symptoms, with a fatality rate under 1% — but we almost eradicated it by using public health measures like requiring vaccination to attend schools.
The key difference is that these restrictions are linked to the activities which vaccines make safer: prior to the Republican Party choosing to politicize the issue, ~95% of American school children were vaccinated against common diseases. Someone who objected to that didn't have a paramilitary squad track them down, they just had to homeschool, not travel to many countries, etc. so they bore the cost of their decision rather than everyone else. That's a pretty important difference compared to what allegedly happened in some parts of Rwanda.
Like using Polio for making the case for mandatory SARS-CoV-2 vaccines look stronger?
Smallpox and measles mandates worked.
And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.
(Vaccine mandates) and (mandatory passports everywhere) have failed
> And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.
Germany, Austria, Australia, France, Italy, ...
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effective...
The vaccine helps to prepare your immune system to deal with the virus - in some cases that means it can fight it off entirely, or in other cases it will be able to fight it off quicker and your symptoms will be milder because your body is prepared.
e.g. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427
I realize that you don't want to admit having been so wrong about this for so long but the evidence is very clear that the vaccines are safe and effective:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...
Also VAERS is not the only data source we have for vaccine safety, it’s our hypothesis generation system. We have good data from the vaccine safety datalink system that let us actually quantify the risk of different side effects. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072
https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471&forma...
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 5 years of age and older.
https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/eua-fact-sheet-...
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.
https://www.fda.gov/media/146305/download
> You are being offered the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of COVID-19.
The real question should be, why do you refuse to even just acknowledge basic facts right from the official EUAs? They are for prevention, not for lessening symptoms, and they simply are not preventing COVID-19 with Omicron.
> Note: Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 (symptoms included: fever; new or increased cough; new or increased shortness of breath; chills; new or increased muscle pain; new loss of taste or smell; sore throat; diarrhea; vomiting)
That’s kind of squishy, but I think it’s a clear distinction.
I agree that the effectiveness against symptomatic Covid is lower with omicron, but omicron also evades immunity from prior infection as well.
Here's a VAERS entry about a patient turning getting abducted by aliens and turning into the Incredible Hulk after the MMR vaccine. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?IDNUMBER=221...
Reasoning from VAERS without controlled studies is, at best, like cutting the ends off a roast before you bake it because you heard your grandmother did it that way. At worst, it's like irradiating a spider and enticing it to bite you because you read once that somebody got spider powers that way.
> On November 30, 2020, ModernaTX (the Sponsor, also referred to as Moderna) submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to FDA for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) intended to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
https://www.fda.gov/media/144673/download
Did you get this from an official source? I mean, no-one should have stated this because it is simply not true, nor has been for most common vaccins out there. At least in my country none of the official sources nor epidemiologists nor virologists ever said this. They'd only go as close as stating 'can prevent transmission in xx% of cases' or something like that.
Are organizations still making policy decisions based on the specifics of the original application implications? Or from observation that it only notably reduces hospitalizations / symptom severity?
If the former is the case, that would warrant clarity, but I also have no idea what a resubmission process looks like. Is that a one week turnaround? Or is it six months with no vaccines being able to be distributed?
Some non-clinical studies suggested a drop in transmission (e.g. CDC study in spring 2021 which examined healthcare workers who got the jab early and were tested weekly), but it's clear now they were just picking up a transient effect, months long but wearing off thereafter.
So the mRNA vaccines are doing exactly what they were trialled to do 1.5 years ago. What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.
AND also my problem.
The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.
This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
Omicron is 90% less deadly than delta for unvaccinated people and there is a 100% lower risk to need mechanical ventilation, according to this paper:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...
During the delta wave covid survivors had better immunization than people with only vaccination. This contradicts some of the mandates that are currently in place, such as in Germany, were people who previously recovered are still required to get a subsequent shot:
https://news.yahoo.com/natural-immunity-more-potent-vaccines...
> This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
During the pandemic I looked up information about the public reaction to the Spanish Flu. It was almost exactly the same, including vaccines with unclear efficacy and anti-mask groups. However, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people while the world's population was only 1.6 billion and it only took a couple of months.
Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.
> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.
Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.
It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?
When you do read the lengthy material at https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro... note that the approvals are based on fighting the disease. Reducing transmission — at which the vaccines were clearly highly effective prior to Omicron — is one part of that but an even more important part is preventing severe outcomes. Even with Omicron, the vaccines are highly effective at keeping you out of the hospital and even better at keeping you out of the ICU.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...
> The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is authorized to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 18 years of age and older.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211103065325/https://www.fda.g...
> The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and is now marketed as Comirnaty, for the prevention of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.
Again, they were approved for prevention. The applications were for prevention. The FDA is trying to rewrite history, but if you look at the actual applications then you can verify what I'm saying is correct.
Also, prevention of the disease would mean that people are asymptomatic and/or that they aren't getting COVID. Hospitals in many areas are publishing data showing majority of people there for COVID are vaxxed. So much for prevention of the disease.
If you were paying attention, note the difference between saying it will prevent all retransmission versus reducing it, which is what happened. Also, try to compare what actual medical experts said as opposed to the political entertainers whose talking points you're repeating. The actual medical experts were quite clear on this, and Biden has been pretty clear that breakthrough infections are possible — hence the interest in masks to prevent spread and vaccination to mitigate the damage for the people who we know statistically will catch it.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...
> Biden said Dec. 14 that people vaccinated for COVID-19 "do not spread the disease to anyone else."
SARS-COV-2 is a transmissible virus that causes the disease COVID-19.
In the medical jargon, disease and its causality are separate concepts (and this bifurcation honestly makes sense... There are quite a few diseases where the treatment is to regulate symptoms without any hope of doing anything to modify the underlying active agent other than wait out the immune system to deal with it). It is entirely possible for a therapy to "prevent disease" without reducing the transmission of the underlying virus that causes the symptoms that make up a disease.
It is unfortunate that because of the conflation of these ideas in the layman terms space, people misinterpreted what the vaccine was cleared to do. But blaming doctors or the FDA for that is like blaming computer engineers when users turn off their computer and then don't understand that everything in volatile memory wasn't saved to disk. "Where's my spreadsheet go? It was in the computer's memory, it should be here."
The t-cell response to infected cells learned from the vaccine, though, is very effective. Which is why vaccinated people still get infected (at a lower rate) but are many times less likely to get very sick, and almost none end up in ICU. The vaccines are effective.
How's that "wrong" or ignorant?
* 70% asymptomatic
* 25% minor symptoms with a 2 week recovery
* 0.5% chance of infecting central nervous system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio
Was that already the argument?
Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.
But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.
It's an enormous loss of life, but a tiny number for a worldwide pandemic, especially given current travel technologies that would have made ancient plagues orders of magnitude worse than they were.
In comparison, we're talking about the targeted, deliberate, highly organized extermination of two thirds the entire Jewish race in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
It is another fact that excess mortality has been shown, clearly and repeatedly.
It is also a fact that there is a theory in psychology that anger stems from fear.
This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta.
Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.
All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...). No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.
Not necessarily 'long covid' stuff, just the basic injury that comes from the illness. I sure don't want to lose my sense of smell.
Even in young children, the consequences of infection appear to be worse statistically than the consequences of vaccination. It's of course not all that well understood yet, but for example, compare this syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid infection to the myocarditis due to vaccination:
https://www.cdc.gov/mis/mis-c.html
If you look at what pediatricians and epidemiologists with children are doing, they are being pretty cautious and are eager to vaccinate them.
> Vaccinated people suffer much less from a course of infection than unvaccinated, in all age groups.
I don't know how you can measure that. And that's not how these vaccines have been sold. They were supposed to have 95% efficacy at lowering risk of getting COVID-19 compared with the control group. We know now that is not the case as it does not help to control the epidemic (most vaxed countries with the highest cases). Transmission and contamination are not reduced with the vaccine.
So now we are told that it was never supposed to stop transmission, but miraculously, it makes your body handle the COVID better.
I don't know what data is used, but if you look for example in scotland (Page 44 https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11223/22-01-19-covid...) There is no obvious difference between the vax or unvaxed in term of hospitalization or covid positivity (p.38) unvaxed even seem to do better.
This is health, people are always going to get sick, not just from COVID. We need to fight all diseases with the best weapons we got. Against Covid, vaccines are 1 weapon, so is anti-viral drugs, antibiotics anti inflammatory and anti coagulant.
But we should let each individual choose with his doctor what treatment he wants. And not guilt young children to take an experimental drug where we don't know the long term efficacy or side effects.
And it's a mistake to evaluate the vaccines in terms of what was said about them over time versus the impact they currently have. They currently confer lots of protection to people that have received them.
Like the fact that the officials and manufacturers failed to properly communicate that it's a dynamic, changing situation doesn't actually undermine the very real value that the vaccines still provide.
What? This is completely, wildly,untrue. See for starters Spanish Flu (killed mostly those aged under 45), smallpox (disproportionately affecting children)
2. Reducing R flattens the curve, and pushing it below 1.0 ends the pandemic.
> vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections
Oh?
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2022011...
This applies to all ages, but if I had linked to an ICU with adults I'm sure you would have blamed the pattern on old people.
Vaccines make a big difference, it's just that the vaccine doesn't protect people who don't take it. Even so, it kinda does: herd immunity and R are real. It's hilarious that anti-vaxxers seem to think that anything less than the vaccine somehow managing to protect 100% of people who don't take it is some kind of failure on its part.
I have two children and they are not getting any COVID vaccine unless a second generation one that is not experimental is developed. I don't want any shot developed during the Trump administration in a rushed federal program injected into my kids and you shouldn't either. They've already both caught the virus and had no symptoms whatsoever. We wouldn't have even known they had it if not for the fact that I had lost my sense of smell and got tested.
Children are at lower risk from COVID-19 than they are from influenza. That is the data and it might not agree with your priors but it doesn't change the fact that that is the data.
It should be noted that the second generation of the COVID vaccine is going to look nothing like the first. They are likely not going to use the same components of the virus that they did with the first generation because the spike protein payload has unintended consequences in some human beings. I acknowledge that this subgroup of human beings is a small minority but it happened to include my mother-in-law who is now dead after suffering cardiac arrest 4 hours after her second shot.
In case you think I am a nutty anti-vaxxer I assure you I am not. I firmly believe that my father is alive today because of the vaccine. He was in a high-risk category and I just don't believe he would have survived COVID infection if he had caught it. It's a great idea for people like him and people in his age group. Hell, it was a good idea for my mother-in-law, but unintended consequences are going to happen when you have a practically untested vaccine administered to a massive population. Both of them are at high risk from the virus. My children are simply not. People seem to be unwilling to admit that a vaccine developed for a rapidly evolving virus in 2020 isn't very effective in 2022. I don't know why this cognitive dissonance is so strong, but it's just the fact. It prevents hospitalization but not spread. That's a good thing, but it's a private health effect, not a public one.
"small" is doing a lot of work here. As a society, we are generally comfortable with mandates that contain a small amount of risk. This had better be a large value of "small."
> Among more than 2.5 million vaccinated HCO members who were 16 years of age or older, 54 cases met the criteria for myocarditis. The estimated incidence per 100,000 persons who had received at least one dose of vaccine was 2.13 cases (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.56 to 2.70). The highest incidence of myocarditis (10.69 cases per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 6.93 to 14.46) was reported in male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years. A total of 76% of cases of myocarditis were described as mild and 22% as intermediate; 1 case was associated with cardiogenic shock.
Oh, it isn't. It's tiny. How many thousands of people do you have to stack on the railroad before you pull the switch on the trolley problem? Not this many. Not a hardship.
I really dislike these public health studies where they wave their hands at myocarditis and treat it like it's not a big deal. There's no cardiologist that would tell you that. It's very serious and carries with it a dramatically elevated risk of lifelong cardiac problems down the road.
I will not allow the paranoia of a bunch of self-righteous cowards to put my kids at risk. Get the shot, move on with your life and leave the rest of us alone. We aren't responsible for soothing your paranoia anymore. The virus is now endemic courtesy of a lab in China funded by self-righteous arrogant scientists in the US. That's a controversial statement but it's the truth. Unfortunately, most of the people complaining about my kids not being vaccinated would rather be angry at me than angry at the people who unleashed this virus on the world.
https://ravarora.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-vaccine-indu...
https://peterattiamd.com/why-im-for-covid-vaccines-but-again...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-vaccines-are...
The other thing to remember is that kids don’t have a problem with the extremely mild inconvenience of wearing a mask — that’s mostly adults complaining for political reasons. If you ask a teacher, it’s just something they do like wearing shoes, and vaccination is no different than all of the other ones they get (95% rate in the US prior to Republicans choosing to politicize medicine).
This should all be indexed to vaccination and spread rates: relax restrictions on high risk activities like indoor dining as the former climbs and the latter declines, and prioritize keeping schools safe to avoid disruptive closures.
For the stated and proven reasons, the commonly known basis of vaccination: 1: It is much, much, much more dangerous to get COVID than the vaccine. 2: The immune response from vaccination is much more protective and much more consistent than the immune response from infection, especially with this disease.
This is known.
Also, established scientific knowledge lies counter to the statements you have as premise.
Source? I think you are mis aggregating data.
92% [1] of Ireland Adult population has received it-least 1 dose vs 85% [2] of the US Adult population has received it-least 1 dose.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58522792 [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/who-are-the-a...
Here's the one I used, which shows full vaccination on 91.7% and partial at 93%:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-trac...
Others have it around 80% so that's probably in error:
https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/pages/vaccinat... https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=IRL https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes.
HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in.
There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open.
So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”.
Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7].
Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it.
It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2
[2]: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-ai...
[3]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study....
[4]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
[5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
[6]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...
[7]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v...
[8]: ht...
Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once)
In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that.
That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system.
But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.
If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike.
I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense.
Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.
This is misinformation.
Next, consider Ireland is practically Dublin as capitol and single large city, and a more rural less dense populated rest of the country. Again, no template or match to other countries. It might work for Ireland.
My comment was not meant to express any valuation or disvaluation of Ireland. It’s focus is about differences in age structures, population density, and vaccination strategy / execution, which makes it difficult to take Irelands approach as template for any other country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_settlements_on_the_isl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Germany_by_p...
1. Governments have decided that by now if you're not vaccinated it's by choice (which it is, barring actual medical conditions) it's by choice and the governments (as well as many people) have stopped caring;
2. The CDC's recent self-isolation has shown that given (1), the government cares more about keeping the economy going or has decided everyone is going to get Omicron anyway or both; and
3. The government has decided (and probably modeled) that hospitals might strain under the load but won't collapse as was a much bigger risk 1-2 years ago.
The statistics are pretty stark on this. In the US 2000+ people still die of Covid every day, 90-95% of those are unvaccinated and it feels like the government and people in general have lost patience with people who at this point are simply choosing to die.
It's dumb, corny, and not that funny, but it helps me appropriately pity them instead of being angry at them. Isolation can foster a negative feedback loop of excessive media consumption, and the media is filled with quantitatively illiterate mid-wits who grossly exaggerated the risk for healthy, non elderly people. Fear is the mind killer indeed.
For much of January they've had 0.4-0.5% of their population test positive per day, with 40-50% test positivity, meaning the real infections could have been 1-2% of their population per day. Very high rates of vaccines, very high rates of booster and absurdly high rates of infections means that there may not be anything left for the virus to do.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
The unvaccinated at risk have had their chance to get vaccinated. If they get sick and end up in the hospital it will only be their fault.