"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earlier this summer is any indication, this transition to endemicity might be psychologically rocky."
Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist.
Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. We, the natives of that village, have vaccines and advanced medical care in finite quantities, plus a better understanding of how to reduce transmission rates. That's gone a long way to soften the blow. The transition from pandemic to endemic usually kills a lot more people in a given area, and the area effected right now is everywhere.
The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic. Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. Until we've built up immunity to several different strains of COVID-19, every new strain has the potential to overwhelm our medical systems, and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility.
It's not as simple as flipping a switch from "life threatening pandemic" to "quotidian endemic". There are shades of grey in between that cause varying strain on hospital ICU's, and the transition isn't one-way.
Our village will be hit far less hard if we behave intelligently about disease prevention. Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
“Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.”
It’s truly maddening. My wife (very on the right) refused to get it and instead talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, vitamin D. All of which she got from conservative media. Right now she is lying in bed wracked with COVID. Ate up with fever and a cough that sends jolts of panic through me when i hear it echoing down the stairs. It breaks my heart, man.
God help us and God bless all of you out there with sick loved ones.
Sorry for the sappy post. It’s been a rough few days.
What people with this mindset need to hear is "even if the vaccine has terrible side effects, we will take care of you as well as we can and as well as you could wish, even if the side effects are exctremely rare".
In my country at least, if you get any of those vaccines and get Capillary leak syndrome as in some cases, a thrombosis that leaves you mentally incapitated as in some cases, a retinal detachment issue that may leave you blind as in some cases, a myocarditis that may leave you dead in some cases --- then you've lost. You will be a pauper for the rest of your life, as you will have to use up all your assets to pay for care cost until social insurance kicks in. The privilege of getting appropriate financial relief for not being able to work in your profession anymore is reserved for civil servants for life. You're finished. In the UK at least they're planning care facilities for those who suffer from long covid -- here it's not even a formally acknowledged disease, you're treated as any other handicapped person or worse, as a patient with a mental problem rather than phyiscal illness.
If you leave people who are afraid of a virus and a vaccine both the choice and tell them taking or not taking the vaccine is their responsibility alone together with the consequences, it's easy to fall into decision fatigue and just do nothing, and ratinalising that behaviour.
> "even if the vaccine has terrible side effects, we will take care of you as well as we can and as well as you could wish, even if the side effects are exctremely rare"
I don’t think this will work, because if it did then people would be taking the vaccine right now.
The issue is multi-faceted of course, but the discussion of “extremely rare events” is a red herring and a wink wink to vaccine skepticism.
It’s like why would we even talk about these extremely rare events and taking care of someone if those events happen, when instead they’re millions of times more likely to suffer from Covid-19? I mean why aren’t you saying “if you drive to the clinic to get a vaccine and get in a car wreck we’ll take care of you” when that is far more likely to occur? Let alone any number of other things like walking outside and getting struck by lightning.
The probabilistic case for the vaccine is well beyond settled and even if there was some long-term unknown boogeyman vaccine issue that for some reason causes this vaccine (even the “natural” JnJ one) to behave unlike any other vaccine you would still get the vaccine because of the known probabilities of contracting and suffering/dying from Covid-19 versus an unknown and unknowable probability of some unknown thing occurring at an unknown future date.
I think the problem is that 1) we don't know the long-term effects 2) There is no FDA approval (although there is now!) and 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.
2 & 3 are easily fixable and we should do it now. We don't have hold pharma liable, but we can setup funds for people with side-effects.
1 is an argument from ignorance. There is no long-term data so we can't refute it. It's literally an unfalsifiable premise. I don't know how you fix this one.
> 2) There is no FDA approval (although there is now!)
Which is just a matter of bureaucracy. The emergency authorization and deployment is a de-facto approval.
> 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.
And? There's also no recompense for many things.
> but we can setup funds for people with side-effects.
The problem is that this makes no sense. Why would you set up funds for people with side-effects? What about funds for people who die in car wrecks on the way to get their vaccines or trip and fall down a flight of stairs?
> 1 is an argument from ignorance.
Ain't that the truth. Can you articulate the exact long-term effects that you're worried about or that anybody should be worried about? Why are you (or anybody) concerned about these specific unknown and unknowable long-term effects? What's the likelihood of those effects and how do they compare against the likelihood of contracting and dying from COVID-19?
It's like all of a sudden there's these spooky and mysterious "but what about the long term effects!1!" without any scientific justification. Even if there were potentially long-term effects, those effects are equally likely to be of no-consequence as they are to have us all turned into zombies or something. The search space of "effects" are unknown and have an unknown probability distribution.
The only purpose of talking about "long-term effects" by any pundit or layperson who can't even describe the mechanics of an mRNA vaccine (why not take the JnJ one if you're worried about that anyway?) is to introduce fear, uncertainty, and doubt either out of ignorance or malice.
If you're a virologist, by all means educate us. If not, stop spouting bullshit and hurting people.
We have a reasonable idea of the likelihood of dying of covid: the estimated IFR is between 0.14% and 0.2%. That means for every 10000 people that contract it, roughly 16 to 17 of those people will die.
Of those 16 to 17 deaths, the vast majority will be people with comorbidities. People with comorbidities don't have as many years to live as healthy people of the same age, with or without Covid.
On the other hand, we do not know how vaccinated immune systems will interact with an evolving virus. There is a study suggesting that ADE might be a higher risk with the Delta variant ("However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants may tip the scales in favor of infection enhancement. Our structural and modeling data suggest that it might be indeed the case for Delta variants": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8351274/)
If ADE becomes a significant issue with Delta, or the next variant to emerge we will have a scenario where people vaccinated against the Alpha ("Wuhan") strain will develop more serious illness. Imagine the shit that will hit the fan if that happens XD
It's irritating when people post these studies as though they're somehow evidence of anything.
> In conclusion, ADE may occur in people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors) and then exposed to a Delta variant. Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines6, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to mediate infection enhancement in vivo has never been formally demonstrated. However, although the results obtained so far have been rather reassuring1, to the best of our knowledge ADE of Delta variants has not been specifically assessed. Since our data indicate that Delta variants are especially well recognized by infection enhancing antibodies targeting the NTD, the possibility of ADE should be further investigated as it may represent a potential risk for mass vaccination during the current Delta variant pandemic. In this respect, second generation vaccines7 with spike protein formulations lacking structurally-conserved ADE-related epitopes should be considered.
This isn't saying anything other than "hey maybe this should be something to look out for though it looks like it was accounted for in the original vaccine development".
Leave the science to the scientists, virologists, and medical professionals. Stop insinuating that there is some sort of scary unknown danger here.
You don't know what you're talking about, there is 0 evidence suggesting that ADE will be an issue, and even the study you cited states "Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines..." which, big surprise, means the pharmaceutical companies creating these vaccines have anticipated this exact thing.
> Of those 16 to 17 deaths, the vast majority will be people with comorbidities. People with comorbidities don't have as many years to live as healthy people of the same age, with or without Covid.
Ok? And? So don't get a vaccine because you found some study that says something that Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and the entire global health community somehow didn't notice or account for and it'll cause some big scary serious illness problem? Die 5 years prematurely because the vaccine has some unknown and unscientific probability of killing you when we know for a fact that the vaccine will reduce the severity of symptoms occurring due to COVID-19 if you even contract the disease?
But let me guess. You're just "asking questions" right?
The alternative of getting a vaccine and getting the new strain isn't not getting the new strain. The alternative is getting the new strain without the vaccine.
And, to use your phrasing, we do not know how _unvaccinated_ people will react to the new strains either. We do, however, know that the vaccines seem to offer a high degree of protection.
It absolutely is possible: If New York has a high proportion of obese and/or elderly people with comorbidities, it will have a higher IFR than places with a lower proportion.
I’m trying hard to have a positive interpretation of your comments here but it really sounds like you’re saying something to the tune of “who cares they are old or fat” as if their lives don’t matter to prove some statistical point about COVID-19.. And that’s ignoring that the vaccine costs basically nothing, and taking it not only prolongs their own lives but also the lives of others with no meaningful downside. It’s like you’re trying to do some sort of cost-benefit analysis, and thinking the vaccines have some sort of gigantic cost, when they don’t.
> Also Cuomo literally sent people infected with coronavirus into care homes.
Funny the Democrats actually impeached one of their own unethical asshole “leader”. Wonder when the Republicans will catch up and show us those family values.
> It's like all of a sudden there's these spooky and mysterious "but what about the long term effects!1!" without any scientific justification.
Are you being serious?
Without studies about long term effects of anything, there is no information about long term effects of anything. The scientific justification for looking for long term effects is to look for long term effects, so we know if there are any!
I think there's a misunderstanding here about what parts of the study process got fast forwarded, leading to speculation that "long term effects" did not get tested in the way they would normally during vaccine development.
Vaccinations do not get long term effect testing like drugs do because your immune system typically finishes responding within 5 weeks of inoculation. The reason the covid vaccines were approved so quickly is because there was political will to fast forward the funding bureaucracy, none of the clinical investigation takes a long time here.
So when we developed new vaccines over the years you sit on the sidelines, refuse to get them until it's been "long enough"?
C'mon. Nobody was questioning any vaccines for any reason except some fringe leftists until COVID-19 all of a sudden and now that is the vaccine you want to wait for to see if it's ok? How long is long enough? How do you determine it's been long enough? What scientific process are you using?
In exactly what way are these COVID-19 vaccines "different" enough for you to question them versus other routine vaccines that you're getting?
And now compare these made up scary boogeyman "long term effects" versus the actual boogeyman right outside your front door that has killed at least half a million people in the United States alone.
Sorry, I'm going to listen to the entire medical community and the heroes that work at these pharmaceutical companies. Ya know, the people who actually know and understand how these things work and who have also taken them.
Being unreasonable is sitting around from the comfort of your home talking about some nebulous made up "long term effects" bullshit. You weren't worrying about that in October of 2019, why start now without any evidence or reason to?
> 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.
There are a couple of government funds, but they rarely pay out. They require you to prove your issues are the result of a vaccine, which is extremely difficult to do. Did this person have a thrombosis because of COVID or because of some other genetic or environmental reason? It's really hard to rule out "everything that isn't the vaccine".
Doctors who recommend these medications aren't recommending them in isolation, but in combination. Check out the AAPS Guide to Home-Based COVID Treatment for more info. You have to ask yourself why doctors aren't treating people with covid until they can't breathe.
According to Wikipedia, "the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association that promotes medical disinformation, HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections, and homosexuality reducing life expectancy."
In that context, I strongly suspect, "liberal bias" is just a code word that means "intellectual bias" or at least "non-idiot bias".
As in, "we have a non-idiot bias; please think about not contributing here if you suspect you might be an idiot".
In that context, it does not mean anything like socialist, let alone Marxist-Leninist. However, those who think so might be discouraged, which is a good thing.
By liberal, I mean a smug, entitled elitist who dismisses those who disagree with him as idiots, without engaging in argument, and subscribes to Official Opinions.
You're literally saying that the verifiable, external citations that constitute the rational evidence for the claims of a Wikipedia article should just be dismissed with a "LOL" because the site's co-founder has opined that the site as a whole has a liberal bias.
The user didn't cite any external citations (or verify anything), he cited the first few sentences of the Wikipedia summary. You didn't cite anything either, you just asserted that the article was well sourced, as if you're a god and should be believed automatically. You're "literally" dismissing an association of licensed medical doctors because of a Wikipedia article citation, which is laughable.
I'm not following this. From the top; which claims in the article are you saying are specifically not true? Based on what not being well-cited?
Can you explain why someone should not be able to quote a sentence or two from a Wikipedia article (that anyone can easily find and read in its entirety) or anywhere else without being obliged to duplicate all the citations?
So you can dismiss opinions out of hand because of a "non-idiot bias", and I have to exhaustively dismantle the entire Wikipedia article along with its citations? I'll do that right after you do so with the AAPS, all of its member MDs, and all the research cited in its reports on covid.
All I did was laugh at someone citing Wikipedia as if it carried any weight in itself.
By the way, the section the user referenced doesn't contain a single external citation.
> I have to exhaustively dismantle the entire Wikipedia article
Oh, far from that. Just point out one thing, maybe two, that has struck you as being off or wrong that's all.
> the section the user referenced doesn't contain a single external citation.
That's not how the document structure works. That introductory section makes some general remarks like the one that was quoted: "the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association that promotes medical disinformation, HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections, and homosexuality reducing life expectancy."
These claims are discussed in other sections below and those have citations.
For instance, let's pick the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis topic. There is a section about that:
"In the fall 2007 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Patrick Carroll hypothesized that abortion for women who have never previously given birth to a child is a risk factor that most predicts the likelihood of breast cancer. [19][20]"
The article is just saying that the AAPS person wrote this and that, and here are the links.
A document doesn't have to have citations in its paragraph.
E.g. academic essay:
1. You tell them what you're gonna tell them.
2. Then you tell them (in more detail, with citations).
3. Then you tell them what you've told 'em.
It doesn't make sense to find fault with 1 or 3 for not having citations.
It's all dandy that the AAPS is made of doctors (appeal to authority). Well some doctors are idiots, and they are the ones who get the attention. Now, the article entirely negative; it provides no information about anything good having come from the AAPS or any of its members. It's just a laundry list of the controversies. So there is an obvious bias there; but the laundry list has external citations.
The number of members is large, and the organization has a long history. There is no reason to believe, from that article, that it's entirely defined just by the controversies.
You'd be a fool not to read the article with a critical mind, and just get the information from it, without forming some belief about the AAPS that may be distorted.
Still, it doesn't look good. It looks like they don't care about the controversies; they don't see that as a blemish to clean up.
Did she take Ivermectin & HCQ? Did she test for Vit D? Or is she unhealthy, and simply contrarian? At least she will be immune once she gets over it. I doubled my Vit D and my doc prescribed Ivermectin lest I risk getting sick. Still no vax for me (philosophical reasons).
I want to reply to this because I want you to know that I hear your views and I understand them. She is very healthy, 40 years old, good Vitamin D levels (she checked them often). She took HCQ for a while, but then stopped.
I also would hug you if I could because I've seen first-hand what's coming your way if you don't get vaccinated. This is so contagious; it's going to get to everyone. You probably won't die, but you are going to be sick in an extreme that is hard to describe. I don't want you to go through this. God bless you my friend.
Thank you for your genuine concern. I am in exceptional health metabolically & hormonally. I don’t think the CCP virus will do much harm to me, and would rather get natural immunity than risk the side effects of the mRNA vaccines. To each their own. I hope your wife gets well soon. I am surprised that the Ivermectin didn’t cut the symptoms dramatically, based on what doctors I follow have been saying.
Does the AZ vaccine not appeal either? It is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (adenovirus) from chimpanzee which has then been modified to contain genetic material from the coronavirus itself. Thus exposing your immune system to the same viral genetic material it would see if you were infected by COVID naturally, albeit in a much weaker dose.
I'd wager the problem with ivermectin and other treatments is that Trump mentioned them. I can't stand the guy, but I also can't stand the Sith attitude that you either take a stand 100% against anything he says or 100% in favour. Unfortunately for those in the first camp, there are peer reviewed studies showing promise for some repurposed medicines. Ivermectin for example has been shown to be helpful both as a prophylactic and as a treatment (which I'll try to explain below).
Here is the highest quality meta-analysis of ivermectin for COVID treatment, fully published in a highly respected journal [1]:
"Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally."
Another paper reports a very lucky event. As COVID swept through French care homes in March 2020, an outbreak of scabies led to an entire care home being prescribed ivermectin. Almost nobody died of COVID. Here's a DeepL translation of the results, shortened for brevity:
"Sixty-nine residents and 52 staff received [ivermectin]: median resident age 90 years (84-94), 78.3% female, 98.6% at least one comorbidity at risk of severe COVID-19. 11 subjects had probable or definite COVID-19 (7/69 residents and 4/52 staff, frequency 10.1%). Among the residents, 90.9% (10/11) had minimal COVID-19, no oxygen or hospitalisation, no deaths. Among the [77 care homes with COVID outbreaks], 45 were included as controls, i.e. 3062 residents (median age 86.2 years, 77.3% women). Among them, 22.6% [95%CI 16.3-28.9] had COVID-19 vs. 1.4% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed] with an attributable mortality of 4.9% [95%CI 3.2-6.5] vs. 0% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed]."
On the balance of probability, ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 both before and during the disease. I've seen anecdotes that it helps with long COVID symptoms in some too, but not read any proper studies, so we might one day add an "after" to "before and during" too. What's more, it's almost as cheap as sugar pills, and among the safest drugs ever invented in terms of side effects (read the quote from the first paper above again). That we're not even trying this in the rich west is the crime of the century. Studies of ivermectin only began in the UK a few months ago, when we already had evidence early last year that it's potentially interesting. You've got to wonder why conversations over repurposed medication are being suppressed.
I haven't analysed ivermectin too closely, but a number of national health boards, including the USA, UK, and Brazil, have said that the evidence at this time is insufficient. I trust them more than I trust my ability to identify methodological flaws in medical studies, particularly when my judgement is clouded by wishful thinking. I must therefore politely disagree with you about the balance of probability.
However, you are correct that the second Trump touches anything, it seemingly becomes impossible to have a rational conversation about it. I can't see any reason for you to have been downvoted, for instance.
Thanks, I respect your viewpoint; indeed I can relate to it having held that view for a long time too up until a few months ago when I started to ask trusted colleagues for their thoughts and started to read beyond the headlines. I now differ from you in that I believe governments are a lot less on top of the science than we thought, and seem to misunderstand its purpose, which to me as a scientist is a very upsetting and uncomfortable position to find myself living under. This video [1] makes in my view a good attempt at trying to explain how this all got the way it did, without invoking conspiracy. Worth a watch for anyone with an open mind. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it's good to understand the arguments of the other side, we're not all loonies.
Starts by challenging social distancing & quarantine mandates, because no one had first done a cost benefit analysis. What? Who is this guy?
"Nick Hudson on PANDA:
Panda started off as a conversation, really. A group of four friends, professionals – an economist, a doctor, a lawyer and a little actuary. What we shared was an observation that the data and the facts – the reality – of Coronavirus was far away from what the media and public health institutions were presenting to the world. We saw in that problem the seeds of a great tragedy."
That was the session opener for the conference, setting the stage. The conference itself (linked from the channel page) has presentations from scientists backing up the claims he makes there.
The first lecture in the session for example is from Dr Clare Craig, an epidemiologist, discussing how the virus actually spreads, and presents evidence for the remark you highlighted about social distancing and quarantine [1].
As I said in other comments here, rejecting arguments based on (lack of) credentials is not constructive. I encourage everyone to open their mind and engage with what people have to say. You can always disagree with them and you're then at least more familiar with the arguments of the other side. I am always trying to find a way to justify the behaviour of governments with regards to COVID-19 - it would sure as heck make my life easier right now to fall in line - and I do this by reading and hearing the arguments in favour of restrictions and mandates from all corners.
Well, apparently you won't read this but thanks nonetheless for engaging with the arguments from the supposed "other side" further than most people do. I still respectfully disagree, and hope you find time to reexamine the claims being made here and elsewhere. Rejecting claims out of hand is not the way we get out of this mess.
You may be referring to Elgazzar et al. as discussed here [1]. That was not a meta-analysis, it was just a single study; the paper I linked was a meta-analysis of many such studies. The withdrawn paper was included in the paper I linked above, but it's been shown that removing its results from the meta-analysis does not change the conclusion (i.e. that ivermectin is likely an effective treatment and prophylactic against COVID-19). Instead it just changes the efficacy and error bars slightly. See e.g. this interview with evidence based medicine researcher Tess Lawrie [2] - they actually recompute the values during the interview using the software used in the study.
For the record, it's worth pointing out that the reasons for withdrawal are disputed by the authors. I have not looked closely at the arguments for and against so can't comment.
The trouble with arguments like that are that they rely entirely on faith in the person stating them.
As with all science, it's not the volume of studies one way or the other, it's the quality. Consensus on a topic only comes over time, especially for contentious issues with public interest. The good thing about science is that it more or less always converges on the truth over time, but some are not willing to wait and make snap decisions on policy without stating that it's not backed by scientific consensus.
It's entirely unconstructive to make comments like yours without sharing your sources. As I said above, there is this toxic attitude exhibited by many where there is an assumption that those who disagree with you are idiots and you need not waste time explaining your arguments. This gets us nowhere. For what it's worth, take a look at the results discussed here [1] which show that those refusing vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 are both the least and most academically qualified. Not everyone on that "side" is an idiot, and you may not have read everything they have (and nor might they have read everything you have).
All of those are literally one google search away so I don't think providing them inline is all that necessary. People interested in them can find them with no trouble and others won't read them even if provided.
Thanks for the links, I will take a proper look later. However, I have to repeat my point about scientific convergence because your links, in contrast to what you said earlier, demonstrates it is yet to happen. Popp et al. acknowledges the presence of the meta-analysis I linked above, and that it has a different conclusion to itself. It acknowledges that the approaches were broadly different, and that the criteria for inclusion of various studies in the meta-analyses were different. Future papers are going to have to continue to refine and agree on biases in individual studies that rule them in or out of subsequent meta-analysis.
Or, to put it more succinctly, science has not yet converged.
Yet, COVID is killing people, so we can't wait for science to converge before doing something about it. It therefore makes most sense to use educated guesses and conduct evidence based medicine with appropriate weighing of risks versus rewards. What ivermectin has going for it is that it is an extremely safe drug with a long history of use as an antiviral. Repurposing existing drugs is also far easier (and quicker) to get approval for than new vaccines. Even if the papers you linked are eventually proved right, and ivermectin is not beneficial, the evidence from ivermectin's use over 40 years suggests that it does very little harm - deaths caused by ivermectin intervention are essentially in the noise. What's more, it's out of patent so we're not paying $20-40 a pop like we are with the vaccines. It's got so much going for it that any level headed risk versus reward calculation should include it in the arsenal to fight against COVID.
Hey when you say there have been no high quality large studies perhaps you are unaware of the 63 studies, 42 of which were peer reviewed and 31 were randomized controlled trials. Please look at ivmmeta.com and let me know what you think of these are high quality large studies and if not why.
I'm just merely repeating the conclusion of linked meta-analysis that found 14 RCT studies regarding ivermectin.
As for the studies you linked to. I am no expert at doing meta-analysis but it seems to me that many RCT studies listed there are really small, at least some were done in very remote places. Most of them have single digit number of participants with adverse outcomes. I'm not sure but I think none of them showed no effect which is a bit odd. I suspect that many studies of similar size and quality done globally were exucluded from this list. There might be some general bias against publishing studies that show no effect too.
All the RCTs on this page mentioned together have the same order of magnitude of number of participants as the most recent study that showed no effect that I mentioned. I think one large study done carefully is many times more convincing than tens of very small studies done in highly loaded political climate.
This might indicate that studies on this site are to some degree cherry-picked by the authors so it's not so much meta-analysis of all RCT studies of Ivermectin, but rather meta-analysis of the Ivermectin studies someone likes.
Scotty here is the thing I can’t get over maybe you can help. IVM has ‘won the Nobel prize’. It is effective agains ~100 parasites and viruses and all kinds of baddies that plague humans (and as we have learned horses! And other mammals). I didn’t know this until the pandemic but I’ve been giving it to my dog for 10 years!
So it is VERY EFFECTIVE. That is a true statement. Is it effective against CV? I mean why wouldn’t we try it? Why would we assume something that works for so much not be? Why default to not try it? You get what I’m saying? It seems like when the world is melting down we should be trying everything. If there are 60+ studies showing it works why not do another 100? Or a thousand? It’s non toxic, incredibly cheap, easily produced .. it makes NO SENSE to me and stinks of malintent to silence and suppress it. Does that make sense?
That's because ivermectin is one of tens of thousands of substances we know are VERY EFFECTIVE for something, but we can't give them all to each patient. Even if all of them costed zero and had no side effects ever. They just wouldn't fit in the patients stomach or bloodstream at recommended dosage.
So we need to pick some substances. And it would be ideal if we picked based on something more than pure luck (hunch being correct is still just luck). So we actually need to measure how good any given substance is for covid. But it's not that easy, bacuse we don't have a good system for conducting randomized controlled trials quickly and in organized verifiable manner. So inital studies are just doctors trying something on few of their patients often without any statistical rigor. You can still publish this as a study. You just have to write some stuff down. It doesn't have to be all the stuff. You can take 'out of sight, out of mind approach' with patients that don't fit your hopes. It happenes all the time. And when you get no success there's not much for you as a doctor to publish.
Covid is hard to track because it's very survivable so most patients that you treat will survive regardless of what you are treating them with (if anything at all). So you may very easily fool yourself into thinking that you are helping.
That's why it's better to wait for large randomized medical studies done by medical researchers as impartial as possible. Because every medicine has some side effects at some dosage so the chance of getting any value out of random medicine is nearly zero and chance of inflicting harm when people will safe-medicate based on rumours is significant.
And even if it has zero side effects medicines fashionable in context of covid already have patients that they should be given to. The ones that suffer from all the things that we know those medicines are VERY EFFECTIVE for. So if you don't ramp up the production to give most likely non-effective medicine to people that most likely don't need it, you'll be stealing it from people (and horses!) that do.
You don't need 1000 studies. You need one that is large and good.
Why not take chloroquine? After all it doesn't hurt, right? Or amantidine, highly fashinable in Poland, because one doctor believes in it strongly and advocates for it loudly, although reporters found out his track record with it is not as good as he's saying. But what do they know, right? Or maybe we should inject blood plasma of covid survivors? Sounded reasonable, many doctors used it for treatment. Turned out it doesn't work. Or hydrocortisone, it's just a mild steroid that doctors use to treat severe covid with effect of at least few percent. Or budesonide, another steroid that I personally think they should be using instead because effect looks way stronger. Or why trials of Fluvoxamine are stuck? It was looking so perfect in few initial studies. It's actually my favorite potential covid miracle cure.
The fact that you know of one drug that might be doing something doesn't mean we should be trying it (except for controlled trials) because there are thousands of exactly as promising or more promising substances and we just can't try all of them haphazardly because of the suffering that would cause to patients that don't need the drug, and the patients that actually need it and won't be able to get it.
Why do you say “pure luck”? There are many doctors and studies testifying that it works. How are you reaching that conclusion? I’m not picking a random drug out of the Merck catalog here. We have doctors and patients saying it works at scale - why wouldn’t we do more to test and validate?
Because someone's opinion (and doctor is just someone unless he repeats something that he learned in school or from solid medical research) ... opinion is not knowledge and only knowledge can get us beyond pure luck. Knowledge is acquired through solid research. Which means large randomized studies with control group, blinded or double blinded.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't do more tests. We definitely should do more tests, and design them carefully, write results down diligently, and be ready to accept if they say that there's no effect because that's what most likely to happen with any substance that we test.
Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results:
In a few months, based on progress in peer reviews, this sounds promising. As of now, not worth the risk in my eyes for a theoretical drop in spread. I lost considerable faith in trending “hot” studies in 2020 that were rushed, not peer reviewed, or heavily altered after publication. Everyone is in such a (manufactured) hurry to get this vaccine… it’s such an obvious psyop.
People will always be sceptical of deviations from the status quo and politicians will always be there to capitalize on those fears for substantial gains of power. We have the most educated populis in human history and we're still seeing these problems. I'm not sure how you could fix vaccines becoming a political issue without major changes to the political structure.
I wonder why everyone is so convinced that Republican politicians pull the strings, FoxNews is the mouth of Sauron, and >43% of the population is fooled by their evil puppet leaders.
I think it works in reverse, like evolution. The people are the chaos machine that generate ideas. The ones that stick FoxNews latches onto. If politicians don't get in line, they don't get reelected.
It's like coronavirus for political information. It mutates in the masses, and the ideas that are the fittest survive - becoming political points for the Party as a whole.
> We have the most educated populis in human history and we're still seeing these problems
This is not really true. Maybe more educated in some areas but not in all of them. People used to be much better educated to build a garden, better educated to understand the nature. I don't think people think differently than they did hundreds of times ago, I don't feel like we are individually smarter
True! The “Literacy” rate has been increased drastically but that’s not the same thing as education. Something is wrong with the system that despite teaching basic biology and physics in high schools, you still find a significant number of high school graduates who think the vaccine shot suddenly turns you into a big magnet.
Yeah, the value of "most educated populations of all time" depends on the outcome you value: "everybody has a minimum accreditation"? "Everyone is capable of robust reflection that presumes change over time"?
Vaccine refusal has not become a major partisan political issue in any other country. It happened here because of the shameless cynicism of the Republican Party and aligned media apparatus.
Same in France: Macron, the entire government and their health advisors said the following:
- Everyone should go to the opera/cinema to fight Covid (7th March 2020)
- Lockdown for everybody (20th March) (I guess people caught it in the theaters…)
- Masks are useless, absolutely useless for the general public (June 2020),
- Masks are mandatory (September),
- Blocking borders is useless, Covid will be here,
- Borders blocked during Lockdown II and III, if I remember the dates, because it’s useful (so maybe we should have stopped the direct flights between WUHAN and Lyon earlier than September 2020?),
- The idea of Passe Sanitaire (a generalized QR code suspending entrance in public buildings) is a conspiration theory (10th May 2021)
- Passe Sanitaire mandatory on August 1st, live and enforced in all public places except offices, including outdoor restaurants and public transport.
- Trust us this time, the vaccine is the right thing,
- But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,
- Given they injected 10,000 patients with AIDS in 1989, and took 6 years to admit it, and press wasn’t under État d’Urgence Sanitaire at the time,
(and also, they didn’t know that Benalla had kept and used 6 diplomatic passports after being fired, just to show how they work).
If anything, they have taught us to doubt everything they say: They clearly didn’t know what they were doing, and did governance-by-lying.
None of these are contradictions, they are reactions to a disease we don't know much about.
- The population is panicking for only a few cases, people are even avoiding Chinese restaurants even when the owners have never been in China. The government wants people to stop panicking, the risks are still extremely low.
- Cases rise exponentially, faster than expected (possibly due to a new variant), hospitals are filling up, now we need to take it seriously
- That one is actually subtle, they told that surgical masks are for the sick and FFP2 (N95) masks are for health professionals, there was a shortage of masks and we didn't have enough for the general public. But they try to say it in a way that would limit fighting over masks, people still fought and stole masks, leaving people who really needed them without protection, I guess saying that masks are vital would have made things worse.
- Masks are back in stock
- Blocking borders is indeed mostly useless when covid is here in large numbers, it is only useful when you have a strict eradication policy and your country is not well connected, not the case of France.
- The point of a lockdown is to limit movement in general, blocking borders is part of it
- In May the situation was improving, vaccination was extremely successful, we were on our way to being mostly covid-free in the summer. There was no reason for such restrictions.
- Delta variant
- Vaccine is the right thing, it has always been the right thing, just look at the data if you don't trust the government. Even a less effective vaccine protects you.
- It is an emergency situation, no time to waste in lawyering, and I am glad they did, delta breakouts in unvaccinated areas are deadly (see DOM/TOM). It doesn't mean safety wasn't taken seriously, all vaccines available in France passed the trials.
- off topic
I am not a fan of Macron, or any political party for that matter, but without the benefit of hindsight everything looks reasonable considering the information available at that time and the specificities of the country. If you think it is bad what would you have done differently? Remember: you have no crystal ball, an unruly population, and a budget.
The budget is as large as the (perceived) danger. And there was no excuse for being ill informed, after China locked down the whole province.
And there's no better way to help the virus than lying to people about the masks. Even the Chinese government didn't lie about masks, while all the western governments did. If masks became a strategic product, then there are enough laws to regulate them (and France did so).
Let me tell you about the situation with masks in France in the early days of the pandemic.
- All mask shaped objects were quickly taken off the shelves. Including snorkeling masks that could be adapted!
- Health professionals received a limited number of masks. For example nurses had 2 FFP2 masks a day, in practice, except for those who worked with covid patients, most had only surgical masks. Pharmacists sometimes didn't have any mask at all (they should have had surgical masks)
- A lot of the masks were in poor condition and of dubious quality, they really tried everything they had. Some came from the stockpile intended for the 2009 flu pandemic.
- Masks regularly "disappeared". As an anecdote from a nurse, she worked in a psychiatric hospital and they didn't have masks (again, a mysteriously lost package). A guy came in, the leader of a big company and was appalled by the situation. He came back with 3 boxes, full of masks and told the personnel "this is for you, these will not got to the director's office, I will come back in a few days and if I don't see the masks, someone is going to have problems!".
- A friend of mine, a pharmacist, was constantly harassed for masks by random people. She had (not enough) masks available for doctors, but she was lucky when he could have one herself. And people had the nerve to ask for her own mask. And on a side note, at one point, they didn't even have enough ethanol for hand sanitizers!
Internationally, China kept most of the masks for themselves, and the ones foe export were sold to the highest bidder on the airport ground. Some countries had local factories, but were lacking in material, especially meltblown fabric, but sometimes even the metal nose strip.
It was bad, really bad. Things started to improve when volunteers started to make fabric masks. Initially, we were dubious about the efficiency of fabric masks, there was a fear that they would make droplets finer and more airborne, we still are, but it seems that they are better than nothing.
I want to think that the deception was a bad thing and that people deserved the whole truth, but I am glad I wasn't part of the government during that time.
It doesn't matter if masks were hard to source at the beginning, every single country found itself in the same situation. Korea is one of the biggest producers of what you call FFP2 masks in the world yet we had a severe domestic shortage here too (the reason for the shortage, after a government investigation, was that suppliers exported most of their production because China was ready to pay x10times the regular price; old dear capitalism at work), forcing the government to nationalize the supply (basically buy all the production) and take over distribution under a strict rationing scheme, until supply stabilized. Nowadays a KF95 (FFP2 equivalent) mask costs less than KRW 500 and supply is plentiful. In early March last year, I had to line up once a week for the chance to buy a maximum of three masks for KRW 2500 each. Sure, the government should have anticipated all of this and establish an export ban early, after all "gouverner c'est prevoir". But what's more important is to be honest with the people who elected you and fix things as soon as possible.
None of what you mention can excuse or justify the blatant lies of the French government. A democratically elected government should not lie to its population, under no circumstances. You don't send a spokesperson on national TV to tell the population that masks are useless, and that the general population wouldn't even know how to use one(!!!).
I suspect the French population will be far more forgiving of a government fuckup followed by an apology and visible and effective efforts to fix the situation, than an outright lie that was only necessary in the first place because of arrogance, complacency and incompetence.
> But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,
What does that even mean? You're in France, you'll be treated no matter whether someone is responsible or not. I don't think you can be liable of something going wrong if you did everything properly (which is the case).
Everyone, governement and research companies, followed all the laws. Legal responsability exist only if you didn't respect the laws. If they didn't follow the laws, they won't be exempt from lawsuits.
So. What does "But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines," mean?
It means that no one wants to take responsibility for any side effects. And it obviously creates mistrust.
If the state is practically mandating you to be vaccinated for covid they (or the companies that make the vaccine) should be held responsible for anything that happens to you.
You can't have it both ways; either there are no distinctions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people (no measures that only affect unvaccinated people) or someone can be held responsible for any resulting disability or death.
> It means that no one wants to take responsibility for any side effects. And it obviously creates mistrust.
Ok, but noone ever took responsibility on anything, except what's in the law. I mean, I've never witnessed anything like that.
Did Bush took responsibility when going to Afghanistan? Did Obama took responsibility when enacting ObamaCare? Did Trump took responsibility when embargoing Huawei? Did Raoult took responsibility when recommending Hydroxychloroquine?
I can go on. But really, if you want someone to take responsibility for something beyond laws and contracts (which implies compensation, a contract can't be one-sided. What you suggest would be one-sided), I think you're not in the right universe altogether.
It seems to me that the state can mandate vaccination if they determine that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, full well knowing that there may be (probably will be, in fact) some rare side effects.
How is this different than the state drafting people into the military, knowing that some of them will die?
In both cases, the state is obviously responsible for the outcomes. But that doesn't mean that there is a liability on the behalf of the state, or that you can hold an individual functionary working for the state responsible.
You must be joking? As bad as (some) Republicans are let's not forget Biden, Harris, Schumer, etc saying they wouldn't take the "Trump Vaccine." Not only did that put distrust into the hearts of people on the left, it also gave ammunition for the people on the right. It should have never been a political issue. Unfortunately this is a bipartisan problem (though right now it's more prevalent on the right, I suspect if Trump had won the number on the left would balloon,) a lot of people on the West Coast you'd otherwise call "liberal" are anti-vaxxers and have been for decades. It's a weird coalition of people on the left and right.
Now outside of the US, anti-vaxxers are in every country including Germany, Australia, the UK. It's a global problem. It's actually the "third world" that seems to have less vaccine hesitance. Probably because they've seen the recent benefits of vaccines and they have less access to misinformation.
No, definitely not joking. As https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... notes, there is essentially zero correlation between any European government's policy at one time or another. They all adjusted to what was happening with COVID, no matter what other political alignments those in power had. (Yes, even Sweden.)
By contrast in the USA, and ONLY in the USA, COVID became a partisan issue so state policies didn't change much.
What is that supposed to mean, except don't trust the product being rolled out?
The factcheck word twisting is getting out of control.
But if anything, this distinction is worse, because instead of saying don't trust a controversial product, it's saying don't trust this controversial product because you shouldn't trust the/this government promoting it.
And that's largely what made this, or magnified it, as a political issue: the broader acceptance of saying it's ok to distrust the government depending on what politician is speaking.
That's absolutely not what anyone was implying. And at best is a distinction without a difference.
They were responding to being asked if they would take a vaccine developed/released under the Trump administration.
Not: "What's wrong with how this administrator is handling the vaccine?"
Or, "Do you have a problem with how it's going to distributed?" Which didn't significantly change from one administration to the next, and is an impressive logistical feat in it's own right.
Even if, the same logic stands. Sowing distrust in distribution -or any other aspect- is either implicit distrust in the product or distrust in the government pushing it.
What good is expressing distrust in any part of it, except to discourage people from trusting the quality/safety/efficacy of the product itself?
No, the presumptive question was "If Trump delivered, would you take it?"
Not "Do you trust that Trump will deliver in time?"
Or anything about reliability being affected by "rushing" things, because when it did arrive in the timeframe Trump promised, no one was concerned about the speediness compromising any quality or reliability.
> let's not forget Biden, Harris, Schumer, etc saying they wouldn't take the "Trump Vaccine."
Could you point me in the direction of a source on this? I have done my own research and pulled up absolutely nothing. Actually that's inaccurate. I pulled up a BUNCH of 2020 articles where Biden talks about inadequate vaccination orders, etc. But I'd be interested in seeing the basis of your claims.
"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."
Kamala says she would not take a vaccine recommended by Trump, even if recommended by scientists. There is no way in the US for a vaccine to be publicly available without FDA approval so the only interpretation that makes sense is one where even if the FDA approved it, if Trump also approved it she would not take it.
Biden:
"Look at what’s happened. Enormous pressure put on the CDC not to put out the detailed guidelines. The enormous pressure being put on the FDA to say they’re going, that the following protocol will in fact reduce, it will have a giant impact on COVID. All these things turn out not to be true, and when a president continues to mislead and lie, when we finally do, God willing, get a vaccine, who’s going to take the shot? Who’s going to take the shot? You going to be the first one to say, ‘Put me — sign me up, they now say it’s OK’? I’m not being facetious."
Biden says he does not trust the CDC and FDA (at the time) because of political influence.
> Kamala says she would not take a vaccine recommended by Trump, even if recommended by scientists.
This is not what she said. She specifically said that if public health professionals and Dr. Fauci recommended it, she would take it. The "if Donald Trump tells us" has an implied 'solely' and that is not hard to figure out given context, where in the same statement she says she'd take it if the public health professionals recommended it.
> Biden says he does not trust the CDC and FDA (at the time) because of political influence.
Not what he said. He was asking for more transparency, and suggesting that that needs to happen for public opinion to sway in the direction of getting the vaccines; in particular, during the Trump administration when the public was repeatedly fed lies about all sorts of things.
Both are more nuanced than you are suggesting, imho.
How did Nixon get Archibald Cox fired? He fired everyone in the line of succession for the Attorney General until he found someone who would do what he asked. It is not inconceivable that the same thing could have happened with the FDA.
With the history that Trump had for firing people who did follow unreasonable orders (e.g. Rod Rosenstein), it becomes entirely plausible that he would fire any FDA head who did not support a vaccine, regardless of the science behind them. As things turned out, the studies did support the vaccine, but it was not unreasonable to draw a distinction between unbiased experts and experts under threat of firing.
We should stop with the "it's just the Trump supporters" thinking. Yes them, but various other groups including PhDs. A Carnegie Mellon study identified the groups with the most vaccine hesitancy.
"independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...
Anecdotally, my unvaccinated roommate is Chinese, holds a PhD degree in a very difficult field, and works as a researcher in a FAANG company.
I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.
more than 93% of the faculty, staff and students at my research institute are vaccinated.
Having a PhD is pretty conflated with both race and political affiliations. Who knows what the effect would be after attempting to control for those things.
More like a polling one. I routinely astroturf all surveys because I hate surveys. I am both a PhD holder, I am under 21 and I am LGBTQ, A veteran, and everything else at once
Being a PhD and researcerh, dont you see surveys as a vital way of collecting data? So why would you intentionally throw off the data many researchers use to reach conclusions?
People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.
I'd love to hear the alternative then? How would you gather data on how people feel about policy without a survey (aka just asking them), as an example?
It’s definitely not just Republicans but note that they’re the only one of those groups with bullion-dollar companies pushing a constant stream of messages downplaying they risk of COVID and hyping any plausible concern about vaccination or masks. If Rubert Murdoch gave the word, the amount of energy pushing antivax messages would go down by an order of magnitude overnight.
I'm not sure it's a guarantee that the power is flowing from the top down. It seems more likely that the big players are just going where the money is, i.e. where their voters already are.
It’s both: the big finders definitely will embrace any culture war issue which keeps people voting for the politicians who serve their interests but they also reliably push any issue which goes against certain topics relevant to their business. Even if something isn’t their industry they’ll push it if it cuts against the legitimacy of government regulations or is critical about science (e.g. the tobacco companies’ guys like Steven Milloy were trumping up those “DDT bans mean that millions of Africans die of malaria” stories a decade or so back because they wanted to lower trust in the same public health agencies who were leading anti-smoking campaigns).
Additionally, medical debt is such a massive burden to many lower income households that there’s this additional layer of distrust, a feeling that you should steer clear of any medical establishment otherwise they’ll try to pin something on you and charge you mountains of money (even though the vaccine is free).
We've done some pretty f'd up stuff to folks of color in the past.
One of the most notable examples is that of the Tuskegee study on untreated syphilis, where we denied effective treatment w/o informed consent.
PoC have higher infant mortality rates, and the myth that PoC have more tolerance to pain (and therefore require less anesthesia) is still quite prevalent.
I think making a comment like yours is exactly how things become politicized or at the very least contributes to it being so. It creates a climate of mutual distrust which in turn can feed paranoia on both sides and create a hostile environment where propagandizing and skepticism fuel a downward spiral in discourse.
Vaccine refusal is a major partisan political issue on Brazil. Current president didn't want to take proper action and pushed for "herd immunity". And created, shared and supported the craziest conspiracy stories with his alienated supporters. Like Trump but worse.
And still, 95% of the population intends to take the shot anyways. What's happening in the US is really curious and can't be attributed solely to politics. I would love to hear a more comprehensive explanation for why antivax ideas could proliferate to such a large extent in the US.
Vaccine refusal has gotten pretty close in Japan. The LDP has been capitalising on this to justify their incredibly poor COVID response and their "nothing could be done and nothing can be done" mentality.
You can have a strong and vocal anti-vaccine population and yet not have a strong divide on party lines. One factor is that not all countries have such a strong two party system that polarizes every single thing.
Do you have a link to the most recent data? I recall The Netherlands having some severe resistance to masks etc, but I haven't seen a breakdown of vaccine uptake by country in recent months.
"The largest decrease in hesitancy between January and May by education group was in those with a high school education or less. Hesitancy held constant in the most educated group (those with a PhD); by May PhD’s were the most hesitant group. "
That is pretty hard to interpret still. It could be that people with "some college" respond with oh 100% I'm getting it or 0% I"m not getting it. Where as somebody with a PHD is like yeah. I have concerns so I'm 20% worried, but I'm still planning on getting it. Also I would expect the more educated to 1) be more skeptical, 2) not change their mind when the information hasn't changed much.
Looking at the link that was posted, people who said “probably not” or “definitely not” to taking a vaccine, if offered one today, were considered to be vaccine hesitant.
Right the 20% hesitant in that be in the "waiting to see more data how safe it is camp." Or it could be on the "I don't trust the government camp." It would be interesting to see that breakdown.
:). Now I am sure that people haven't read the article or parts of the survey before commenting.
> Participants were asked if they had received the COVID-19 vaccine, and if not, “If a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 (coronavirus) were offered to you today, would you choose to get vaccinated.” Participants were categorized as vaccine hesitant if they answered that they probably or definitely would not choose to get vaccinated (versus probably or definitely would choose to get vaccinated or were vaccinated). Those who had already received the vaccine were coded as not hesitant in order to reduce bias from differential access to a COVID-19 vaccine among subgroups over the time studied.
PS The author states that Facebook funded the survey, which is an interesting datapoint.
The one thing that still bothers me is that we don't yet know how quickly this coronavirus evolves, and from what we know it very likely escaped from a gain-of-function laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses. I didn't see Delta coming. I want to believe that this is the worst of it. But this coronavirus has so far kept us on our toes so it may well have a few more surprises in store
Do you have a source for “very likely”? I’m at “plausibly escaped from” so far and would be interested in evidence that changes that in either direction.
There has been some evidence of how the handlers of that laboratory's research went out of their way to shame anyone who'd suggest it emerged from there in the beginning, followed by mainstream articles noting that we simply can't rule this option out, and that the likeliest scenario is that some workers got accidentally infected and became patient 0
My "very likely", however, doesn't come from there. It's more of a statistical statement. What is the likelihood that a quickly mutating virus will appear next to a laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses and not have originated from there? The world is big. The chances of that happening are very low. Therefore it's very likely that it comes from the lab
Maybe not "very likely", but Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the 13 member team at the WHO investigating the origin of COVID-19, recently said [1], "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human. This is a hypothesis that we consider to be likely."
Further, from the article, "But the WHO scientist pointed out that none of the types of bats suspected to have been the reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 lives in the wild in the Wuhan region.
"'The only people likely to have approached these types of bats are employees of the city laboratories,' he said."
The WHO is on China's payroll, so I would be very suspicious of conflict of interest.
Peter makes this assertion with zero evidence. They've already made up their mind, and are searching for evidence to prove their global international extortion.
Everything about covid-19 has no evidence behind it. Just like the common cold, any virus is impossible to cure (and therefore the symptoms can be alleviated through natural and allopathic methods), and that is a fact.
> Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist.
You may be confusing chickenpox and smallpox? Chickenpox is generally considered a pretty mild disease (many countries still don't routinely vaccinate against it), and was so historically as the infectiousness ensured essentially everybody would be infected as a child.
WHO guidelines are actually to only vaccinate if rates can be kept above 80% consistently, otherwise it'll likely hit older populations with much more dire consequences.
Chickenpox _seems_ like a mild disease, until it develops into shingles, decades later. I sure wished I had gotten the chickenpox vaccine after I nearly lost my eye from shingles.
If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood. If introduced in a new population, the consequences to adults would be much different.
> If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood.
Sort of. I got shingles (early 40s) this year. Completely knocked on my ass for a week and maybe 2-3 months to be mostly back to normal. I recommend the shingles vaccine to anyone who will listen.
I just got the shingles vaccine this year (two shots about 3 months apart). That vaccine knocked me down from hour 6 to about hour 54 both times. Worse than any other vaccine experience, including Pfizer C19. Still recommend it, but schedule it wisely.
Sorry. I had relatively strong reaction (weakness, soreness, slight fever, and overall malaise) starting about 6 hours after the shot and lasting for two full days.
Get the shots, but if you get them on a Friday, you might be writing off the weekend.
Second, I couldn't read a book. I couldn't do anything but sleep (in pain) If you are into being completely knocked out for a week, well ... you'd love this! I have met someone else who got this in their twenties and had to be cared for by their brother for a month!
Third, I'm "close" to being back to normal. It's been four months. That sounds acceptable to you?
Finally, there are other complications. It may have led to an increase in ocular pressure increasing my odds of blindness in one eye. I have a scar from the bumps that formed on my forehead. In some cases it is a lifetime affliction that requires consistent medication with antivirals. In some cases it can cause organ damage.
Yeah, sounds fine to me. Immune system working as intended. I've been bedridden many times in my life, for weeks on occasion, still alive. Never been vaccinated. Every time society goes apeshit over "swine flu" this, "avian flu" that, I get a fever and sweat it out. I expect the pattern to repeat with "bat flu" now.
If organ failure, blindness and not feeling 100% for months is you're thing, have at it.
The problem with "the immune system doing its thing" is that against some pathogens it doesn't do a thing at all.
I don't give a shit if you don't want to get vaccinated but you're obviously trying to downplay my very real, very painful and very avoidable issue to support your stance.
Yeah, sorry, I don't think being ill for a bit warrants such dramatic recount. You are absolutely fine. You suffered very little in the grand scheme of things. Stop ballooning it out of proportion. If this is the worst you'll endure, 90% of humanity would swap places with you in an instant.
I know a lot of things can ding your immune system enough to allow zoster to make an opportunistic comeback. In my case i blame a lack sleep + stress from having an infant.
> There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients.
In slovenia, by some estimates of our expert group, half the country got infected by covid (~1mio), 4450 died, almost half of them in old age/nursing homes, and out of all that, only 4 were under 35yo, only one (out of those 5) under 25, and we count every death within 28days of infection as a covid death (even suicide or a car crash).
For a large percentage of the population, it already is common and mild.
This seems like first order thinking. What about the repercussions of the infection? Mutations? And what is the tradeoff with the vaccine? Is the vaccine "higher risk" with all of the other second order questions taken into account?
> True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms.
Citation needed. The delta variant is the prime counter-example with higher R0 and slightly higher mortality. SAGE admitted SARS-CoV-2 will very likely mutate to defeat all build-up immunity. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS and MERS) showed the potential to have very high infection fatality ratios.
There is no reason at all to suspect COVID will suddenly become mild.
Lots of misinformation in the parent comment as well as yours. I’m not going to correct it - I think discussion on HN has been on a large spectrum - interesting policy discussions, technical debates to insane upvoted misinformation and scaremongering.
We need to pay attention to virologists, not HN armchair experts.
Ok, instead of some handwaving from economist, I'd rather have Nature [1] with loads of good references and no paywall.
My point is that we simply do not know. The word 'usual' is deceptive here. Usual for the viruses we studied? Usual for all viruses? Usual for viruses which recently have made the jump to a new species? We do not know. We simply have no idea.
No virologist or epidemiologist will say it is 'usual' that viruses tend to mutate to become less virulent. Perhaps, and even that is contentious, an expert could make a claim for a specific type of virus.
This type of reasoning is based on an assumption that a pathogen limits its reproductive number by increasing its virulence. It is reasonable to test this hypothesis, but unfortunately we do not have enough data points to make any conclusive statements.
> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
Something tells me that this is just history repeating. The difference here is the same as your metaphor; the world is a village and now its much easier to see that one conspiracy nut every village has that gets outcasted.
The problem of course is that now those nuts can band together in the thousands thanks to worldwide communication and argue against the (still vast majority) of the village now.
The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex.
We must encourage discussions that move beyond overly-simplistic dualistic framing such as "vax versus anti-vax", "individual choice versus public health", etc.
Looking back through human history we can find numerous examples where scientific consensus was wrong, or where we created powerful new tools that backfired in unexpected ways. Diversity in opinion and choice is natures way of arriving at optimal decisions. Although it feels like friction and divisive arguments to us now, these are critical discussions that help expand everyone's knowledge and awareness.
At one level it appears to be chaos, but at a higher level it appears as harmony. We are now living in the age of the super-organism. The age where we all must become acutely aware that the separation between you and I - the separation between self and other - must be dissolved and reformulated, for the survival of our species and our planet.
> The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue"
They are a political wedge issue because some want them to be policy.
Anything that is policy -- taxes, marriage, controlled substances, international trade -- is political.
And always someone says "why is policy X political?" without realizing what "politics" is. Usually, they mean to say "why doesn't everyone agree with me?"
Also, the question of should a government force its citizens to have a medical procedure. Or de-facto forcing by requiring proof for common daily activities.
This issue was then weaponized for political purposes, and people got militant about it.
But governments have consistently lied/been wrong about this virus, so there is no trust either in their messaging about this crisis.
> "The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex."
This. Feels like the future depends on identifying the root cause of these issues and working to overcome them.
> The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex.
This seems disingenuous. We eradicated smallpox and scientific literacy just as low then. Why is it different this time?
Because public trust in institutions has been destroyed. It's also a main reason why Trump was elected. The people in charge of these institutions destroyed this trust over decades, and they have continued to do so throughout the pandemic.
Yes, calling people nuts is a sure fire way to solve this problem.
The “nuts” were also saying covid was coming and was dangerous and were called crazy xenophobes.
I’m vehemently pro-vax but there are as many idiots on both sides of this issue as there are non-idiots. Note that I need to disclose that, since the scarlet letter being handed out now has the power to prevent you from being on YouTube and in some places soon will probably bar you from your local grocery store (now that that is normalized.)
>calling people nuts is a sure fire way to solve this problem
I tried to emphasize that this is a very small slice of the population. They get kicked out of the village because there's no other way to solve the problem. Or at the very least, the village lacks the resources and talent to solve it. Human psychology is still a huge mystery. Ideally, everyone gets free, assessible mental health care, but ideally people would also wear a mask so they don't die/have others die. We're far from Paradise.
>I’m vehemently pro-vax but there are as many idiots on both sides of this issue as there are non-idiots.
I fully agree with this, and I much too often see people trying to cast this as a "all conservatives are antivaxx" issue, which is such a broad stroke that you may as well just say "anyone who doesn't agree with all my world views".
That is not who I mean when I say "nuts". Not the people genuinely misinformed (often by nuts), not the people who may have reasonable hesitations or doubts about certification of a new medical product. And certainly not "people who aren't my political party" (yes, everything is Red's fault. How productive). To be honest, not even the people high up who KNOW they are spouting BS or citizens who know the dangers but "want freedom" (they aren't crazy, that's just malicious and greedy at that point. different topic altogether).
But there are just some few people who genuinely seem unhinged and just want to latch onto something that feels relatable, even at the own health's expense. Those are the nuts gathering together. And this is far from the first time. Just the most potentially impactful.
I don't disagree about name-calling, but the responsible thing to do is to adapt your opinions as new knowledge is revealed, not everyone is doing that.
You can never convince someone by calling them stupid, selfish, irresponsible or in general blaming them. All you will do is create hatred toward yourself as well as your viewpoint and further the disagreement.
Best way to convince someone is to make them think it was their idea all along.
At this point, I figure much of the anti vax crowd may be actively hoping something would go wrong here, due to the hate they are receiving.
Why does anti vax crowd look at things like Ivermectin etc which hasn't been tested at all compared to vaccines and could potentially have more unknown risks? Because it wasn't shoved down their throat and they were able to find it by themselves.
Even those who are in the middle, vaccine hesitant for example may be feeling the hate that is coming towards them, making them avoid vaccines altogether out of anger towards the other vaccinated side.
> You can never convince someone by calling them stupid, selfish, irresponsible or in general blaming them. All you will do is create hatred toward yourself as well as your viewpoint and further the disagreement.
Who's calling them stupid? I don't recall any politicians or government health officials calling anyone stupid. Sure, there are people on Facebook/Twitter/etc... name-calling, but that's always been the case, and there's plenty of it on both sides.
If someone is telling you to do something, but demonstrates clearly they are not able to repeat your own argument back to you convincingly, they're calling you stupid, because they've demonstrated they don't think you have an argument.
The problem is, that the media is creating the wedge. Instead of a huge spectrum of pro- and anti- people, they combine them into two groups.
I'm vaccinated, and I don't care if others don't get the vaccine. Forcing people to get vaccinted is imho stupid. And we've already taken away a year from young people to "save grandma", and now grandma can get vaccinated (or possibly die, if she doesn't want to), and we're again locking down the kids, creating long-lasting problems, especially mental ones.
It is a political wedge issue because it generates fear. Anything that causes people to be fearful is going to be exploited, and amplified, by political parties in whatever way they feel would benefit them.
It's a handle they can pull, so they pull it. It can be xenophobia, it can be "look at what they're doing in country X, what if they did that here?" It can be fear of loosing jobs, fear of wildfires, sea-level change, and it can be fear of getting sick.
Conspiracy theorists said the virus came from Wuhan, then they said it had a low fatality rate, then they said COVID would be here to stay like the flu. Now the village is slowly accepting and even promoting all those “conspiracies”
> The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic.
I don't think that's possible, since I am not aware of a precedent. Meaning: the other 4 endemic coronaviruses which also started as pandemic and now are harmless cold viruses never caused a new deathly pandemic in a mutated form.
Documents from scientists in the UK government articulate in great detail that it is a "realistic" possibility that the virus mutates to be deadlier and/or more transmissive [1].
One key difference between this coronavirus and the other endemic 4 is that mass vaccination strategies were never used. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance is a realistic consequence if vaccines are used indiscriminately [2][3][4][5]. So that is one way we may be setting a new precedent here. If you take a look at what happened with Marek's disease virus in chickens, it's not pretty - none of us wants a world where it is literally impossible to survive without vaccination, because multiple generations of vaccines were undermined by viral evolution.
Then why did the "worst" variant so far come from a place (India) with extremely low vaccination rates at the time?
It's a numbers game. With chickens there are billions of chickens created and destroyed annually, and almost all of them are vaccinated in utero, so it makes sense that we'd see the disease get selectively deadlier. With Covid if you knock down the disease rate to something that's basically a few cases per month via vaccinations, you won't have enough chances for mutations to occur.
Any time you use the government to force people to do something against their will, you have made the issue political. Politics is the business of force.
> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
This is just history repeating itself, unfortunately. The Spanish flu had people protesting the counter-measures put in place to reduce transmission, as well.
How is this "history repeating itself"? A few people objected during the Spanish flu so if we have even a single person that objects nowadays it's "history repeating itself"?
What if we discriminate against a minority based on their belief (e.g. refusing a medical intervention) and don't allow them to live a normal life. Is that also history repeating itself? I can think of a few instances in history where groups were prosecuted for their convictions. Are we currently repeating that part of history?
It just boggles my mind that with modern understanding of how these things work (and we have a MUCH more complete understanding than they had during the early 1900's), we repeat this ignorant mistake.
It's not difficult to understand why there is so much confusion. Our government was and has been quite inept at its messaging in both Trump's and Biden's administrations. The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent. It's called the novel corona virus because it's new. What we think today may not be true next month or next year.
I think one of the big problems of course is the government / bureaucrats / politicians are afraid to be straight with us. They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news. I feel their elusiveness is much, much worse; now trust is pretty low which makes the already ineffective government / bureaucrats / politicians' messaging even more ineffective. The government / bureaucrats / politicians found a hole and made it much bigger.
Almost all of the statements were true. They just needed more context with them.
> "Masks aren't effective"
The point of the (non n-95) masks is not to protect the wearer. They didn't want everybody to cause a run on the n-95 masks for healthcare workers. The cloth masks may not very effective at protecting the wearer.
> "Masks are effective"
Masks are very effective when the infected wear them. Everybody should wear them because they don't know if they're infected or not.
> "Vaccinated don't have to wear masks"
Currently we don't believe vaccinated people. If you get vaccine you don't have to wear a mask.
> "Vaccinated should wear masks"
Unvaccinated people were the first to go everywhere with out masks. That carrot didn't work.. Everybody put them back on.
> "COVID is not airborne"
This could be true!
> "COVID is airborne"
But it catches a ride on water droplets!
> "COVID came from a wet market"
I haven't seen this as part of government messaging
> "COVID came from a lab"
I haven't seen this as part of government messaging
> "If you caught it, you have immunity"
For some amount of time, yes
> "If you caught it, you might not have immunity"
Yep we've got new variants that yo _might_ not be immune to.
> Almost all of the statements were true. They just needed more context with them.
You nailed the issue in the first 2 sentences. All of those things listed are technically true, as long as the context is provided and understood. But when you have the whole situation turn into a bipartisan shitshow, context goes immediately out of the window (both intentionally and unintentionally, just like nuance being lost in twitter discussions). It is you vs. them for everyone emotionally invested into this.
"CDC said COVID is airborne, and if you disagree, you are a science denier and probably a nazi too. No, I am not gonna listen to your 'context'".
"CDC said there is no evidence that COVID came from the wet markets, which means that you claiming that it is possible is a conspiracy theory".
"CDC said that people don't have to wear masks, but now they say people have to wear masks, they don't know what they are doing and are just trying to pacify the population. I don't need context, I am just reciting what CDC said."
Actually looking into the context of the official statements on COVID, there isn't really a contradiction, and their recommendations make sense. But then if you actually absorb the context, then there is no team sports fight to be had, there is no side to cheer and root for, and there are no opponents to defeat who are dumb and wrong (unlike you and your team). The intensity and excitement of the "battle" is positively correlated with willingness to omit context and refusal to consider it.
Except policies don't follow the context. Science says the old are vastly more likely to get severe reactions to Covid but we lock everyone down and still send Covid patients back to nursing homes.
> Except policies don't follow the context. Science says the old are vastly more likely to get severe reactions to Covid but we lock everyone down and still send Covid patients back to nursing homes.
Agreed, this is an issue. But I don't think that "policies tend to disregard context, which leads to poor outcomes, so we should disregard context when arguing about policies too" is a sound approach.
Your reply is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in my original comment. I couldn't have come up with a better example even if I tried.
You conjured up a greatly simplified version of what I said, threw away all the context that actually matters, and built it into something that's easy to rally against for someone who is "on your team".
Honestly at this point in the game I have no clue what is factual and isn't. I don't know who the hell to trust anymore.
> The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent
And so-called "experts"... by which I mean only the ones that say this is the worst thing ever. Any expert in the field with any objections or criticisms to what we've done immediately gets the online equivalent of being letter bombed.
The public health messaging for this whole thing has been absolutely horrific and has only been getting worse. They've managed to cast so much fear, uncertainty and doubt on what are in fact remarkable vaccines... I don't know how they will ever repair their trust or credibility.
Is this really so confusing to most people? I feel like it was pretty clear throughout that the first statement in most cases was: "We expect X is [not] effective based on history, but we aren't certain because this is so new" and the second statement was "Our initial research shows that we were [right / wrong]" followed sometimes by a third statement which is "As more information arrives we were right about Y and wrong about Z".
I agree with you that politicians are afraid to give it to us straight, but I attribute their hesitance not to how they expect the people to respond but how they expect media to respond. You get in a little trouble for being wishy-washy, but you get big trouble for giving a straight, honest well-informed sounding (described this way because its not like the announcers are the ones actually doing the research) detailed response and then finding out some of your details are wrong.
I have been thinking about this a lot, we all hate the way politicians speak (me included) but we made them speak this way because while they may not impress anyone they don't give definitive sound bites that will then be repeated over and over on the news when they happen to be wrong.
The smug confidence when the outlets assert these things is one of the most galling parts:
> Babies and young children study faces, so you may worry that having masked caregivers would harm children’s language development. There are no studies to support this concern.
There are "no studies" because you can't do studies like that on humans! I guess absence of evidence = evidence of absence now. What about on monkeys?
> The face-deprived monkeys and control monkeys were scanned by fMRI when they were six months old to measure their neural responses to faces and other visual stimuli.
> Control monkeys had face patches by the time they were six months old; the face-deprived monkeys did not. Patches for other visual categories that both sets of monkeys saw equally, such as hands and bodies, were roughly equivalent between the two groups.
> They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news.
Could it be that they've used this tactic so often just to get this effect when they so desire it, that now they fear that it will be our only reaction?
It's not just that the CDC/Fauci and the Government have been a major contributor to the disinformation out there, it's that there is a political force running at full power pushing vaccines as the one and only possible solution to COVID-19. Before Trump left the White House, the Democratic party leadership came out against the vaccine. NOw that they're in power again, every signal and message they send is Pro Vaccine and Anti Everything else, and it seems all of SV is ready to help by any means necessary, including a lot of people on HN calling anyone and everyone who even questions the safety or necessity of these vaccines as Anti-Vaxxers. We're rocketing towards a new civil war if you ask me.
> and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility.
Is this not the case with other existing virus' like the flu?
Yet people choose to go on with daily activities, even bringing it to the office just to feel (self?) important ...
agreed in the early days, and i'm not scientician, but my understand was that once you've had it you become increasingly immune (or unlikely to require hospitalization).
I was more thinking about the future, than the immediate response.
Seems like someday Corona virus will be something we just get like a cold or chicken pox?
There is a chicken pox vaccine. It reduces risk of shingles later in life compared with natural infection. My parents intentionally infected me early. I still got the pox a second time as an adolescent. Both times were painful.
“ When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either.”
There is no reason to believe this. Many top experts, like Yaneer Bar-Yam, believe there is a real chance it continues to mutate to be worse.
> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
Sadly, there is one thing worse: health "authorities" and "experts" completely disregarding therapeutics, e.g., Ivermectin, which is as safe and as cheap as Aspirin, and which reduces the risk of serious illness and death by up to 86% [1] (which brings the death risk to about 1/4 of the flu... aka a low enough level to not even warrant a news story), all because a politician said it works.
I recommend listening to episode #1671 of the Joe Rogan podcast, in which he interviews Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein. Once you listen to this, if you are not absolutely astounded by what you learn, please let me know (unless the reason is because you already knew this stuff).
Edit: imagine being so ignorant and deranged as to down vote these well studied and cited (see below) facts.
This all sounds well and dandy, except the best data we have for covid-19 shows a .2% - .3% infection fatality rate, about 2x or 3x worse than the seasonal flu, which is still -- as we learned in May 2020 -- highly gated to people with severe age- and weight- related comorbidities.
In short, comparing this to chicken pox or other epidemics with "massive body counts" is flatly asinine. It's a slightly worse version of the regular flu; always has been, seemingly always will be.
Fwiw, I've been saying the same thing for 1.5 years now, which is what the original data reflects, which hasn't changed since then. Whenever we get new data that changes our understanding, we should reevaluate at that point.
> Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next.
I'm really hoping we can reduce the intermixing by some degree by banning lineups at airports security screen and customs/immigration lines, but I'm not holding my breath.
Why would you reply with such confidence in something you clearly know nothing about?
Chicken pox is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which can certainly be fatal if contracted as an adult (i.e shingles) and never been exposed to it as a child. _Now_, most people are exposed to it when they're children, when it's much less serious, but vaccination is still the preferred method because it can still be deadly in children in certain cases.
FYI, ~6.4K people still die every year to chicken pox and shingles. It may seem comparatively small, but that's still people who die. Before a vaccine was created, it was around 4x that.
Vaccination has empirically been shown to reduce the number of major hospitalizations and deaths as a result of the virus. It's an injustice to undermine _any_ number of lives potentially saved or thousands in hospital bills avoided because you believe science is "quackery".
So those people aren't worth taking into account and can be written off? The number of Americans with an autoimmune condition is in the single digit millions.
That's not how Cause of Death works. The specific complications of the zoster virus that typically lead to death are pneumonia and encephalitis. In other words, it's typically from inflammation of the lungs or brain. HIV/AIDS, cancer, etc. won't do that on its own. It's specifically from the virus due to a compromised immune system. If an underlying condition compromises the immune system, it's not that condition that killed them, it's the actual disease that happened to be more effective as a result.
For example, if someone dies from the zoster virus due to a compromised immune system from chemotherapy, you wouldn't consider that person died from chemotherapy or from cancer, you'd consider that person died from the virus _due_ to a compromised immune system from chemotherapy.
This discussion is absolutely bonkers. How can one person be so dense and not practice critical thinking? Your arguments don't even work on surface level intuition.
You're right. They wouldn't report your death as suffocation because that'd be a symptom, not the underlying cause. Just because a cause is more fatal because of something else, that doesn't mean that something else killed them.
Using your own analogy, you're arguing that the speed of the car killed them because it made the accident more effective in killing them.
Using your logic, it could be an indefinite number of causes. If someone died of encephalitis from zoster, you could say that their brain killed them with as much equivalence as the chemotherapy or cancer. In other words, it could be anything.
If you died tomorrow, someone could say that this comment caused it because it influenced the chain of events that lead to your death. It would be just as absurd.
> Speak for yourself. I would consider them killed by the chemo/cancer.
Thank god you're not the FDA. Otherwise, we wouldn't have any type of medical procedures or medications. There'd be no difference between going to a doctor or your pastor for that brain tumor.
And what triggered the allergic reaction if not the shrimp that you ate? If I have allergy to peanuts and eat in a restaurant and the cook slips some peanut in a food that is tagged "nuts free" and I die, can the family of the diseased press charges to the restaurant?
The answer is yes. A restaurant can be liable for food allergies. Whether a restaurant has legal liability or harm caused by a food allergy depends on whether the restaurant was negligent. Because it's the ingested food that caused it.
Everybody has pre-existing conditions, whether they know it or not, the cause of death is typically reported to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. People with chronic conditions often does due to acute causes, like contracting a virus. We often call this the cause of death.
If you're living with cancer and not terminally ill in hospice and die 2 weeks later after contracting COVID, you likely died of COVID.
What quackery? A quick google confirms that chickenpox has been speculated to have caused a serious epidemic among Native Americans. We know that European diseases wiped them out, it just isn’t necessarily clear which ones due to the lack of record keeping and medical knowledge at the time.
> In the years before English settlers established the Plymouth colony (1616–1619), most Native Americans living on the southeastern coast of present-day Massachusetts died from a mysterious disease. Classic explanations have included yellow fever, smallpox, and plague. Chickenpox and trichinosis are among more recent proposals. We suggest an additional candidate: leptospirosis complicated by Weil syndrome.
Your case would be stronger if you linked an article that argues that chickenpox was the culprit. The article you quote suggests that the disease was leptospirosis.
This is a statement that cannot be substantiated with any confidence. In particular, the Native American side of the Columbian exchange saw massive body counts due to a mixture of diseases and my understanding is that chicken pox is among the suspects.
It isn't "quackery" just because you don't like it.
It's not a 0.1% death rate. Over 1.6% of US confirmed covid cases have resulted in death for example. To get a 0.1% death rate you either have to assume there is 10 times more unreported cases (in which case everybody in the US has had covid once or multiple times already at this point) or claim stupid shit like people with comorbidites were going to die then anyways.
You are spreading misinformation because you are not telling what age group is the most endangered and with what comorbidites.
For example mortality rate in Mexico is 7.8% and in Peru 9.2% but in Denmark it is 0.8% and in Netherlands 0.9%.[0]
You are not taking age of the group, health status and medical history of the group and quality of the health care and quality of the treatment they received in consideration.
Good article, but doesn't mention the other reason that covid-19 is never going completely away: animal reservoirs. We know that dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, white-tailed deer, a gorilla, and a tiger have been found to have been infected with covid-19. It is implausible that it will ever cease to have an animal reservoir, especially given the finding in Canada of 30% of white-tailed deer having it.
Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs, I don't believe there is any case of eliminating it. But, like vaccines can teach the immune system how to respond more intelligently (and less self-destructively) to covid-19, hopefully society can learn to respond more intelligently, and less self-destructively, to the fact that it's always in circulation.
People aren’t scared up. Concern is around ICU usage and that elective surgery in hot areas are put on hold which include critical cancer removal surgeries.
Also we have a large group of unvaccinated group which are under kids under 12. With life going back to normal, the standard diseases are back like RSV, paraflu and others. Get two at the same time and it’s a emergency room visit. Get 3 at the same time and it’s life threatening. Two at the same time isn’t uncommon before covid. Now my pediatrician says 3 is happening and it’s a kid killer. It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.
> It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.
It really shouldn’t if you’re an educated person who is following what scientific authorities are saying. The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...
> At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools… Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
> In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms.
How is "the science here is still uncertain" an argument against masks in schools?
If it turns out they are useful, wearing them will have been a good idea.
If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?
(I'm aware that there are people out there who think wearing masks for a year or two will scar children for life, but for the most part I don't think those people are arguing in good faith. The biggest harm I see is to children with hearing problems who are prevented from lip reading.)
This is as an article by medical professors at USC and Stanford:
> At the same time, the long-term harm to kids from masking is potentially enormous. Masking is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning. Covering the lower half of the face of both teacher and pupil reduces the ability to communicate. In particular, children lose the experience of mimicking expressions, an essential tool of nonverbal communication. Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit. Overall, it is likely that masking exacerbates the chances that a child will experience anxiety and depression, which are already at pandemic levels themselves.
I don’t know if you have young children, but facial expressions are a huge part of communication. My kids are constantly looking at my face to for “is this okay” signals. Kids learn to look at facial expressions of peers to understand what they’re thinking and feeling. There’s just tons and tons of research on this.
Masks for kids isn’t like masks for adults, where you can say “well even if they don’t work there’s no harm.” What we don’t have is research showing that wearing masks has persistent negative effects on kids, but based on what we do know that’s a real possible harm that has to be weighed against the possible benefits of masking.
Where is your data that they don’t have long term developmental effects from wearing masks and missing facial cues? Eh?
It isn’t my job to prove anything. Y’all want to force my daughter to wear a mask to attend a public school you better have a hell of a lot of evidence and data to back it up. You need to address each and every criticism and support it with solid research conducted over years of time.
None of that exists and all criticism no matter how valid is met with gaslighting, being called a right wing fool, and name calling. Which says to me there is no solid justification for kids wearing masks besides partisan politics and tribalism.
Y’all are signing my kid up to be your unconsenting laboratory experiment, which is highly unethical and straight up immoral.
I’m not the one pushing kids to forcefully wear masks. You are. It’s disgusting and one of the worst things we’ve done. Almost no European country masks their kids. A handful of blue states are basically alone in forcing kids to wear masks at school. Which really underscores what is really going on, and it ain’t “science”.
>Where is your data that they don’t have long term developmental effects from wearing masks and missing facial cues? Eh?
Asking someone to prove a negative when they indicate there is no positive evidence pointing towards the assertion you're making isn't a 'checkmate' retort.
Negatives are much harder to prove than positives. You aren't being gaslit.
Maybe take a step back and calm down. Saying things like:
>I’m not the one pushing kids to forcefully wear masks. You are. It’s disgusting and one of the worst things we’ve done.
Is probably too emotionally charged to result in a good dialog, if that's what you're looking for.
Damn right I’m emotional. Y’all are gaslighting me and trying to bully my daughter into wearing a mask at school. I love my daughters smile. She should show it and not hide it behind a mask. You better have proof it doesn’t fuck her up. It’s so morally disgusting I’d rather not say exactly what I think of people who gleefully want to force kids to wear a mask and write it off as “no big deal” or “my kid doesn’t have a problem”. Suffice so say let’s go with “monster”.
The entire burden of proof is on you people trying to make this massive deviation from normal. Not me. You have to support your arguments with more than telling me I’m emotional or blowing it out of proportion. Because I have a right to be massively emotional and pissed off. I am fully within my rights to defend my daughter from what I perceive as a great harm. And y’all have no right to tell me how to feel.
Seriously. It’s abuse. You mask people are super abusive. Giant bullies using your loud voices, mockery and name calling to drown out anybody with valid criticisms.
So to the “force kids to wear masks” people here, put up or shut up. Show me proof it won’t fuck my daughter up and show me proof it is actually going to benefit her. And if you can’t provide that proof than go bugger off, I’ll yell at you, the administration and my dumbass governor and his unelected health “experts”. My daughter is more important than any of y’all’s unfounded mandates.
Because near as I can tell there is absolutely no benefit for the actual child wearing a mask. It’s all for giving the appearance of protecting adults, who have a choice to be fully vaccinated. Which is so immoral and so wrong, again, I’ll refrain from stating exactly what I think of the people pushing for it.
>Damn right I’m emotional. Y’all are gaslighting me and trying to bully my daughter into wearing a mask at school.
No one is gaslighting you, nor is asking you to discuss things in a civil manner 'abuse'.
If you assume everyone discussing this with you are doing so in bad faith despite their best efforts to be reasonable, you don't really keep the door open for any new perspectives.
Yes because your way is the correct way, right? Anybody who disagrees is a dirty, alt-right mis-informed trump fucker. Right? Might as well just say it.
We made dramatic, massive social changes virtually overnight and continued them for more than 1.6 years. Why is it so hard to imagine that smart, well intentioned people might have a difference of opinion from the narrative we’ve all had shoved down our throats? Eh?
Just magically every single person who is smart and well meaning obviously has to support masks, lockdowns, school closures, and everything else. Otherwise they are a dumb stupid misinformed “them”.
It’s absolutely absurd thinking. The arguments made to force this nonsense on people represent some of the worst attributes of humanity. Gaslighting. Abusive. Bullying. Shaming. Narcissistic. Unscientific and completely intellectually dishonest.
Seriously. Knock it off. Y’all should be ashamed of yourself.
>Anybody who disagrees is a dirty, alt-right mis-informed trump fucker. Right?
Not at all, but that doesn't mean everyone who disagrees is discussing the matter in a civil manner.
I've only posted to bring attention to a flaw in your logic, as well as to comment on the emotionally hostile manner in which you've been replying.
Just take a step back and calm down; people don't seem to agree with your positions and you're taking it as a personal attack. Engage with people in good faith and discussions will be more fruitful and less emotionally taxing.
A year of a kids life is an eternity for them. Two is forever! You are stealing their childhood away from them to protect who, exactly? What is even the point of masking them.
Teachers have been vaccinated. Parents have been vaccinated. Kids aren’t at risk. Why this obsession with reducing cases if we took the sting out of covid?
Kids need to be children. They aren’t human shields for adults. Adults are expect to sacrifice for kids, not the other way around. Kids deserve their one and only childhood. They don’t deserve to be treated like disease vectors that need to be muzzled to make frightened parents and educators feel safe. Double so when all those adults can get a free, highly effective vaccine.
Making them mandatory is even worse. The state has no right to force my kid to wear a mask at school in order to have an education. Parents should be making that call for their own kid.
As a former kid (lol), I can't say having to wear a mask would have had any adverse effect on my school experience. It sucked anyways. I hated being there and hated wasting my life every day being shown material that was of zero benefit to me, and being treated like crap by people who don't even know me.
Honestly back then I would have felt the same thing that I do now: that I am happy to wear a mask so I and/or my parents/grandparents or other people around me don't die of a completely preventable virus, and that people who refuse to wear masks are idiots for not doing the most simple, effortless thing to help prevent the needless spread of the virus.
Wearing a mask doesn't steal anyone's childhood. Does wearing glasses steal your childhood? How about braces? We do A LOT of uncomfortable things in our life for our health and future. Wearing a mask is one of those things, due to the ongoing pandemic.
I mean, added bonus, I haven't had a single cold or flu or anything like that in over a year and a half. I'm guessing you (and anyone reading this) can probably say the same, if you strictly masked up, used hand sanitizer, etc. Yeah I've been sick for other reasons, but not a single time have I been sick from something transmitted by another person. First time in my decades of life that I've gone this long without any transmissible illness.
Honestly, all of your stuff sounds like rationalization. Rationalizing putting masks on kids despite there being little evidence they work, are something society wants, and won't have any negative impact on kids. Don't forget, kids have agency. Has anybody asked them what they want?
And it isn't my job to provide proof or data. I'm the critic. I'm the one that wants things to operate as normal. All the burden of proof is upon those who wish to force my child to wear a mask her entire school day 5 days a week. Thus far, all I hear is "OMG CASES", "kids are resilient", and a bunch of weak rationalizations. Nobody has made a case who or what we are protecting. Nobody has provided an end game. Nobody has proven it won't harm kids. Nobody has even asked kids. It's disgusting, really.
Aren't we protecting our health systems? Mississippi is out of ICU beds[0]. As in, if you are in critical condition for ANY REASON, you're just out of luck. Kids are gross. They're going to spread disease. Why not take a (relatively simple) precaution that can save lives, including people who didn't even catch COVID.
It's like how I look both ways before turning onto or crossing a one-way. Sure, it probably doesn't help much, but there's a chance that it could save my life and another driver's.
From everything I've read Mississippi is out of ICU beds because they test everybody for covid and if you are covid positive, regardless of symptoms, you get the "covid protocol" treatment. Said protocol adds significant overhead to everything. Perhaps they should revisit testing every individual for covid or maybe stop freaking out over every positive case.
Also, they had 1.6 years to build infrastructure to deal with this. That was the entire damn point of this in the first place. "Flatten the curve for two weeks to make sure healthcare systems can handle the load" There is literally zero excuse for society to suffer because no capacity was added. Zero.
You cannot even blame staffing shortages... they could have thrown truckloads of money at doctors and nurses to get them onboard. It would have still been cheaper and more effective than the nonsense we are doing now.
In short, yeah it sucks hospitals might be "full" but that ain't societies fault and we shouldn't be punished for it.
Judging by your stance across this thread I doubt it will matter, but I'll share it anyway for the readers. Take it for whatever you think it's worth.
My anecdotal experience via my SO who is an ICU nurse is that what you've read is not accurate. In the ICU I'm familiar with they do not have fewer beds available due to the covid protocols. The protocols do make their job more difficult and time consuming, but they have more beds than ever. Still, they're at capacity across our state due to an extreme influx of severe covid cases since delta made its way here over the past 6 weeks. Previous to that this particular ICU was ~20% covid, 60% capacity. Now it is ~90% covid, 110% capacity. This is not just because they tested positive - these are people on various levels of oxygen. They are intubating covid patients in the ER because there's no room anywhere else.
I'm in arguably the reddest state in the US where most people share your views. I'm not sure how you can say apathy toward spreading a contagious virus is not societies "fault".
PS: they are throwing truckloads of money at doctors and nurses, luckily for us.
> I'm not sure how you can say apathy toward spreading a contagious virus is not societies "fault".
Moralizing spreading an airborne highly contagious respiratory virus is one of the most toxic, dangerous things we’ve done. It’s absurd. It’s a virus. It does what it does. People catch it. It’s nobody’s fault.
The people living in your red state are perfectly fine holding their beliefs.
Opposing governmental mandates is one thing, but eschewing personal responsibility is supposed to be the antithesis of these folks worldview. It's a bit baffling, though sadly not surprising.
And to be clear, the majority of the conservatives I know personally are vaccinated and wear masks, by virtue of their belief in personal responsibility.
Stealing their childhood away, really? It's an article of clothing. My kid objects to wearing pants a whole lot more than he objects to wearing a mask. He still needs to wear pants.
Come to think of it, maybe that's why this is such a huge deal. People have come to think of clothing as a marker of your tribe, and not wearing the expected clothing as social deviancy. That's why wearing a hajib is so triggering for so many Americans, or why guys wearing skirts is an affront against nature (but strangely not in Scotland!), or why folks get killed over wearing gang colors, or why I desperately wanted a denim jacket when I was in 1st grade in the 80s.
And if that's the case, sure, you can have your tribe and I'll have mine, and my kid will wear a mask because that's what the people around him do, and yours won't because that's what the people around her do, and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't. Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.
Stealing their childhood away, really? It's an article of clothing.
It's an article of clothing which covers of the faces, the facial expressions, the smiles of all their friends and teachers. A typical modern preschool for two working parents is what, 50 hours a week? You are sending your child to a place where they are spending the bulk of their waking hours, the bulk of their socialization, and not allowing them to see smiles. I can still remember the faces of my preschool friends, I am still friends with some. If I had never been able to match smiles with them, would it still be the same? And even if they are fine in the long run, you are still making a year of their life (or more? what is the end game exactly?) significantly worse. It boggles my mind that smart people like yourself are so blase about this.
and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't.
Masking kids at schools isn't going to have anything to do with this. Denmark has done just fine keeping schools open with no masking ( https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/denmark-schools-covid-19-pande... ). If ICU's are within two or three doublings of filling up, then shut down the gyms and concerts and indoor dining for adults. If all such things are open, as I believe they are in California, then protecting ICU units is clearly not an imminent concern.
Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.
What? Until coronavirus hit, there has never been a society that kept it's children masked among children from other families at all times. No kid has "grown up" under such conditions.
Don't kids in Singapore and Taiwan only wear masks when they're sick? (Rather than the entire class at all times; at least, up until the start of the pandemic.) If so, it seems like a mistake to use that as any precedent for how kids in California will grow up under the present regime.
Great just don’t force my kid to wear a mask at school. That’s all I ask.
I find forcing kids to wear masks at school so morally bankrupt I am at a loss for words. And all I get from the people who push it is rationalization and gaslighting.
I have a right to object to my daughter wearing a mask at school. You have no right to force that on me and my family.
Oh, come on. I couldn't wear shorts to school in elementary school. Principle's rules, and it didn't matter how hot it was.
Nor could I wear things that showed shoulders, among a slew of other things. I wasn't allowed to take a same-sex love interest to proms, nor anyone from another school (and it didn't matter that they lived in the same neighborhood). Blue hair? Go home until you fix it. We were told that the homecoming "powder puff" game was their legal girls football.
Heck, we had people watch us enter toilet stalls in elementary school to 'make sure' we peed during break.
These things happen all the time for both children and adults. Some were just stupid rules and some really freaking unfair, but most didn't ruin childhoods. And yet, folks are asking to wear masks to protect others because we think it helps is somehow ruining childhoods?
Pretty much all I hear from the pro-mask at school club are rationalizations. Your rebuttal is nothing but gaslighting me and rationalization. No facts, no science, no data.
It’s honestly abusive. How dare the government force my child to wear a mask at school against my objections.
So, instead of explaining literally anything, you come back saying you are victim (without explaining how), upholding your right to possibly put your child in danger (because I doubt you are a disease expert), and everyone is lying without facts - facts that you yourself didn't offer?
I'm okay with that. Think it's dumb but it's your school, not mine. My 3-year-old's preschool requires masks and it's fine. Was a bit of an adjustment (they were not required to wear one last year, as 2's) but over the first 2 weeks of school you can see the whole class going from 1 little girl who wore one last year (even though not required) to about half the class wearing them at the start of this year, to everyone just doing it automatically. My kid will even ask for his mask if we're going out to the playground now.
and if my kid asked to wear a mask I’d tell them it is unnecessary, they aren’t gonna die of covid and just because everybody else does it doesn’t make it right. Peer pressure isn’t always good.
I'm vaccinated. I can still catch it - I'm much more unlikely to end up in hospital, but it's still an unpleasant illness to have, with a small chance of long-term complications that are not at all well understood.
And if I do catch it I can still spread it to others, who may not be vaccinated.
I very much care about not killing someone else by spreading Covid to them, even if they deliberately chose not to get the vaccine. I'm furious with them (and with the information sources they consumed that lead them to that decision) but I absolutely don't want to contribute to their suffering or death.
It's obviously perfectly fine for you to feel that way about Covid, but in my opinion the correct thing for you to do would be to isolate yourself and try to minimize the chance of being infected instead of wanting further damaging restrictions to be forced on other people (I don't mean relatively non-intrusive measures such as mask wearing, but any form of lockdowns).
Judging by how many of my well thought out comments got downvoted… lots of people here are living in fear still.
It’s son intellectually dishonest to downvote people who express valid criticism. It’s pure tribalism… which is what is just about 40% for all our actions the last 1.6 years.
I think the most economical way of thinking about it is that we're stuck with a percentage of refuseniks and have to deal with them continuing to spread covid.
I am of a certain population that is more succeptable, and I just accept that there are people who would welcome my death from covid if it would save them from the slightest inconvenience.
I admire you for making reasonable arguments, you have more patience than me by far.
I hate to be blunt but sometimes life is unpleasant, even more so now. Do you think that it's fair to demand people change their way of living because you don't want an unpleasant illness? I think it's unpleasant when people eat seafood (I don't like the smell) but I don't demand everybody stop eating seafood.
Manners change over time. Maybe masks will join normal etiquette with other polite things, which benefits everyone around.
(such as: closing your mouth when coughing, washing hands after going to the toilet, wearing at least shorts)
I advise you don't go into forests to enjoy nature, there is a small chance you'll get bitten by a tick and contract chronic lyme disease which happened to my brother in law. It could happen to you too, there's a chance. Better not risk it.
You say the vaccine doesn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus, it just stops you from getting as badly sick. If that's the case then why do you care whether others are vaccinated or not? If it doesn't change the chances of them passing it on to you, and just changes how sick they'll get, then surely it doesn't make any difference to you?
> Who cares? If you and your loved ones are vaccinated y’all are good to go.
The effects of COVID complications aren't somehow magically isolated to the patient. Good luck to anyone who's young, healthy, and COVID-vaccinated, but has a bike or car accident, gives birth in a hospital, falls down some stairs, or otherwise requires inpatient care.
Remember the endlessly repeated mantra to "flatten the curve" from circa March 2020? The "curve" refers to ICU occupancy. Max that out and suddenly the effects of COVID spill beyond just sickening and killing its direct victims to complicating your health system.
I never considered this argument. Glad this comment thread hasn't descended into silly name calling and people are actually putting their arguments forwards
You are forcing children, who are entirely dependent upon the judgment of adults, to wear a mask every day of school--indefinitely. That is a pretty big ask. Especially with almost no proof that it is required, works, and doesn't harm children.
The fact that we've let one disgusting abuse to creep up on us is not an excuse to green light all of them. Uniform may not be the hill to die on, but a pretty awful thing nonetheless. In ex-USSR during early 90s, when many rules around school discipline were effectively spayed, what went out - let me tell you - red ties first, and uniforms the close second. Despite all the scolding from principals and teachers.
Unlike a uniform masks cover the most important way humans express emotion. That alone is enough reason to not require kids to wear them.
The justification for kids wearing masks is so paper thin with so little attention paid to what emotional and development effects it has on the kids… it boggles my mind. Supporting kids in masks is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
And to the people downvoting me and gaslighting me… you are part of the problem. I have a right to feel the way I do, which is reason enough to never, ever force parents to mask their kids in order to get public education. It should be the parents choice, period.
Exactly right. The parent poster you replied to is another in the long list of people that flippantly disregard the harms of masking. Good luck dealing with a generation that has developed unhealthy phobias and has severe emotional attachment issues that's also unequipped to enter college.
It seems obvious that wearing masks all day would hinder social and verbal development in toddlers and small children, at least to some extent. I think everyone can agree that they wouldn't help in these areas?
You might think the public health benefits outweigh this concern, but it's disingenuous imo to just assert that there are no conceivable negative effects for a two year old having their first social experiences.
Not to mention the effects on children who struggle with their hearing and need to lip-read, from a disability rights point of view I don't think it's quite as simple as "masking kids is great, end of story".
This is a good answer. I've not been thinking in terms of two year olds - I've been assuming this debate is mostly about children who are elementary school and above.
> If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?
If masks are ineffective, wearing them amounts to theatrics/fiction.
If that fiction creates a false sense of safety, it can encourage people to take risks like interacting in closer proximity than they would otherwise.
I have no knowledge or expertise on if masks are effective nor have any children, this is just an observation of what seems like an obvious potential harm.
One possible harm I've seen postulated is moral licensing, i.e. wearing a mask makes people feel safer and thus makes them more willing to be indoors in close proximity for longer.
A counter-argument says that wearing a physical thing can act as a constant reminder of covid, causing people to act more responsibly.
Back on the harms side again, there's a possibility that teaching kids "just do this and don't ask questions" can have negative consequences. Again, the counter argument of letting them ask questions and carefully explaining what we do and don't know can be a positive.
I wonder if there has been research that attempts to answer the question of whether masks encourage less safe or more safe behaviour - it feels to me like something that would respond well to a well designed study.
In addition, several of the "masks don't work" studies I saw had to do with people touching or messing with their masks undoing any benefits of actually wearing a mask.
The article discusses a few of the potential harms to young children. At that age, children are learning how to read social cues, and they do that by observing faces. An indefinite mask mandate that lasts for years could have developmental consequences for these children.
If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?
Socializing in masks is massively inferior. It sucks talking to other people and not being able to read facial expressions or to see smiles. Right now American health officials are asking children to an spend the majority of their waking hours for an entire year of their lives (or more??) around friends and teachers without that essential human experience of seeing smiles. That is harm in an of itself. Even if the kids bounce back, and you can't find a developmental difference in any statistic, that year of their life, a year they will never get back, will still have been a year of being deprived of essential human connection.
I've worn a mask for probably over 1500 hours in a restaurant that never closed and I and my coworkers have gotten along just fine. I just don't understand why so many people are resisting them so and acting so put upon.
For the same reasons, I think that lucky rabbit’s feet should be mandatory. Also, horoscopes should be consulted prior to attending schools. If you can think of anything else that didn’t work for this or any other illnesses in history, then I think that you should demand schools make them mandatory, just in case.
Exactly this. This is why the vaccines have been rolled out. If somebody doesn't want to wear a mask now they shouldn't have to if the vaccine has been offered to everyone in their country.
I have a neighbor that has only one lung due to a genetic defect. She is at much greater risk of dying even after vaccination. Your fee-fees are not more important than her life.
Have you looked at the actual report and not the anti-vax site summation of the report?
>. The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.
I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.
Other stand out qualifiers from same report
>This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements. Mask use requirements were limited in this sample;
>The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations.
> * First, many COVID-19 cases were self-reported by staff members and parents or guardians, and prevention strategies reported by administrators or nurses might not reflect day-to-day activities or represent all school classrooms, and *did not include an assessment of compliance* (e.g., mask use).
>* Second, the study had limited power to detect lower incidence for potentially effective, but less frequently implemented strategies, such as air filtration and purification systems; only 16 schools reported implementing this ventilation improvement.
> * Third, the response rate was low (11.6%), and some participating schools had missing information about ventilation improvements. However, incidence per 500 students was similar between participating (3.08 cases) and nonparticipating (2.90 cases) schools, suggesting any systematic bias might be low.
>* Finally, the data from this cross-sectional study cannot be used to infer causal
relationships.
Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.
> I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.
Statistical significance has a specific meaning in the context of hypothesis testing. It is a measure of likelihood that the observed result occurred due to a real difference between groups (rather than random chance).
It seems that they are adding up the margin of errors for 82/1461 and 87/1461, (schools responded divided by schools surveyed), giving a total margin of error of ~20% for these optional vs. mandatory masked student statistics. This is a problem with using surveys with a low response rate.
In their own words in that section, by the incident rate ratio it is statistically significant, even after having been adjusted for county level 7 day incidence.
You can try and figure it out on page 4 of the cdc report, it does not appear to be a null hypothesis test.
> did not include an assessment of compliance (e.g., mask use).
This is not a rebuttal.
If you establish a policy, and people do not follow the policy, that's on you, not on the people. You don't get to compare your intervention against an ideal world and claim that "it would have worked, if only for those darned humans!"
> Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.
A great many of the pro-mask papers in 2020 that claimed to "prove" that masks work started from self-reported data (the infamous "hairdressers" CDC report comes to mind...if a customer was asymptomatic, they were ignored; there was no control, so it's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise; etc.) The standards for "proof" across the pandemic have been dismally low, and tribalism and politics have supplanted science.
The difference here is that we actually have examples from across the globe where kids weren't masked in schools, and no matter how you look at it, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. If we're going to be skeptical (we should!) let's be skeptical of every claim, and demand proof of effectiveness for our medical interventions before imposing them across all of human society.
It depends what you are looking at. "Do antibiotics work?" is a slightly different question than "Is prescribing antibiotics effective?".
Of course you'd want data on how people actually take them, because to make decisions you'd like to know if the result means "prescribing antibiotics just doesn't work" or "we need to figure out how to make sure people actually take the prescribed antibiotics effectively"
Looking at the authors listed contributions to that site, he specifically appears to have a distinct bias and railing very specifically on something near and dear to him.
I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.
1) Is your government adopting a comprehensives and realistic plan to achieve zero covid? (Such a policy must include 100% international travel shut-down, zero exceptions. If there are exceptions, your government does not have a zero covid policy.)
2) Is ICU or hospital usage approaching capacity in your area?
If the answer to those questions is both "no" (as it is in my jurisdiction which is requiring school kids to mask) then your statement is not true. A 21% lower incident rate is not helpful at all, everyone will still all get exposed to covid eventually.
The net-benefit of the vaccine in kids is likely to be borderline at best. That is because 1) kids are already at very, very low risk from covid 2) the side effects of the vaccine seem to be as bad or worse in the young in healthy 3) actually getting the virus allows the immune system to see a much more complete picture of the virus which may lead to better long term immunity. The kid who actually gets the real thing may end up having a better chance of being protected at age 25 or 45 than the kid who just gets the vaccine. See this article for some discussion of this issue: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58270098
Notable is that the article is referring to a pre-delta study of elementary aged school children (elementary school normally caps out at around age 11 in the US). Young kids have long been known to be less prone to infection, less prone to suffering ill effects from infection, and less prone to spread the disease. Delta doesn't really change much of that, they are not the primary victims nor spreaders.
It's the older kids (who could have received the vaccine but opted out) who will have more "adult-like" patterns of transmission and should be more of a concern (not for their own health, really, but they might infect their elderly or infirmed unvaccinated relatives). One would expect masking to help prevent spread from these people.
But of course... these kids and their families likely already self-select and associate closesly with other anti-vaxers outside of school to begin with, so school seems like the least of their worries. At a certain point you kind of have to ask whether it's worth trying to protect people from themselves.
Right, but the CDC guidance recommends masking elementary-age children (2+). We’d be having a different conversation if the CDC guidance was 12+ like several European countries.
> Delta doesn't really change much of that, they are not the primary victims nor spreaders.
And yet, in some parts of the US, government guidance requires masks from age 2.
My own suspicion is that it does probably help on the margins with young kids and delta, but we obviously don't have data on it yet. On paper, erring on the side of caution is desirable even if it proves needless eventually, since there's no direct health downside.
Unfortunately, since this is also a political issue, erring on the side of caution with mask requirements and being wrong generates more mistrust amongst the older people who have opted out of the vaccine (i.e. those already distrustful of the CDC and at risk of serious illness just have one more reason to dig in and ignore the advice to get vaccinated).
It's possible that such mask mandates for young children may prove harmful because they further entrench anti-vax sentiment (even if is ultimately proven that they have marginal benefits in reducing spread).
This is a fascinating and complicated issue indeed...
> On paper, erring on the side of caution is desirable even if it proves needless eventually, since there's no direct health downside.
Being treated like a toxic disease vector for two years surely has direct health downsides. Not learning to read faces surely has direct health downsides. Breathing god knows what those masks are made of every day surely has health downsides.
And it isn’t even my job to prove any of that. People that want to force kids to wear masks at school need to prove those aren’t something to worry about. They can’t just shrug they crap off and say “yeah well covid”. We are well beyond being able to simply use covid as an excuse to enact some restriction. Prove kids need masks and prove they won’t suffer long or even short term effects from wearing masks all day. Then and only then can you even dream of forcing kids to wear masks.
So the CDC are not educated nor intelligent, I guess?
"Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status."
Also, the very study NYMag talks about still recommends:
"Because universal and correct use of masks can reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission (6) and is a relatively low-cost and easily implemented strategy, findings in this report suggest universal and correct mask use is an important COVID-19 prevention strategy in schools as part of a multicomponent approach."
The CDC's public guidance during this pandemic is going to end up in communications classes alongside New Coke and the Osborne 1. They're so lucky they were bailed out (mostly) by vaccines. They opened by saying masks didn't work (a straight up lie, even if a well-intentioned one) and stuck to that line for at least a month. Then they did a 180, deleted their tweets, and spent the rest of 2020 saying masks were necessary. Then it was no masks for the vaccinated. Now it's masks for everyone again. Along the way they've somehow managed to lag and jump ahead of the actual research on masks and public trust in the CDC, their greatest asset, is now around 52% - poetically the same as the US vaccination rate.
CDC doesn't make public policy. Nowhere did you mention what the harms of this forced mask use could be on kids. Even if masks offered some protection it has to be balanced against all manner of long term social, language and developmental effects caused from wearing a mask.
Long-term we should just adopt the practice of wearing one if you're symptomatic. It helps reduce spread. This is what Asia started doing after SARS. It's considered a courtesy, just as we consider it a courtesy to cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing.
Unfortunately, given that 1910s America and 2020s America both had significant (and in my mind, unwarranted) resistance to wearing face masks; I would not be surprised if "wear a mask if you feel sick" fails to make it into common understanding in America a second time.
Yes, scientific uncertainty is a thing. It would be great if we instantly had tons of studies and replications showing exactly how effective different measures are, but that is just not how it works. I can cite many models that show masking works, if you're curious.
This same line of argument was used to question climate change for decades and to support the argument that we should not take any aggressive measures to avoid it.
There's a good chance wearing masks in schools makes the community safer from serious illness. And the risk in wearing masks if they prove to be useless is...what exactly? That masks are a little uncomfortable?
I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek's story about Niels Bohr having a horseshoe above his door:[0]
"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[1]
Zizek wagers that a new form of communism decidedly distinct from pre-COVID way of doing things can emerge from the socio-political experience of COVID, he may not be on your side here.
Probably helpful bias calibration for those unfamiliar with Zizek. Interesting that perceived sides and the not content of the message should carry such weight. A person with differing views and conclusions on some issue can still convey information, and I do not immediately see much relationship between uncertainty in the Bohr apocrypha and ulterior motives(? beliefs?) of the philosopher who relayed it.
> Interesting that perceived sides and the not content of the message should carry such weight. A person with differing views and conclusions on some issue can still convey information, and I do not immediately see much relationship between uncertainty in the Bohr apocrypha and ulterior motives(? beliefs?) of the philosopher who relayed it.
Except we're talking about Zizek! This is not Michel Foucault ("Everything I say is just a toolbox, you can use what you like, discard what you don't"). He does not share your rather postmodern outlook on discourse and language, if he did, if his work was meant to accede to any notion of "Oh, words and statements are free-floating, unbound to their context, meaning is indeterminate, there are only different perspectives", etc, his whole platform would fall apart; he intends the opposite of what you're talking about with his speech. He literally defines the work that he does as partisan without ambiguity. There are pages spent in his books and multiple reminders given at his in-person lectures on this point that anything such is an objection to his platform.
It's either fidelity to his meaning, which, to be clear, is not some smarmy, one-off that misapplies his example to make a silly point about not continuing to wear masks (which, by the way, is a perfectly quantifiable question rather than a 'merely ideological' one), or the information conveyed means nothing at all. You either get that he deploys examples like these, and he has a billion over the course of work (it just so happened this one had language useful to grandparent's intended meaning), to illustrate his interpretation of commodity fetishism, the basis for his critique of ideology, or you've rendered all of his meaning bankrupt. So, yes, in his case, its either/or, and that's by design!
You are responding to a conservative commentator who is trying to muddle and make non-scientific conservative positions more palatable and less non-sensical.
I have noticed that wealthy, educated, conservatives (for tax benefits) work hard to justify and provide some vaguely scientific and logical grounding to all kinds of weird conservative talking points. This might be by punching hard at some corner of the liberal/scientific consensus on an issue that is not quite well developed or the audience lacks full detail on. This equalizes both liberal and conservative positions as some what unscientific, while the reality is quite opposite. You will never find rayiner attack conservative talking points, only liberal ones.
You think you are in a scientific discussion, but you are actually participating in a political one.
Serious illness, bad as it is, is a lot more predictable than fear/security driven social engineering, and when cover-your-smile is rolled into cover your cough, I'd expect unintended consequences, socially, developmentally. You must realize there are other problems than COVID, and some are much more important. Your Pascal's Wager about masks is a bit revealing vis-a-vis any certainty about the evidence.
Would note that the report found 21% reduced risk of infection in required mask use for students vs optional. Not considered statistically significant because the confidence interval included 1.0. (CI was 0.50 - 1.08)
One could argue that an increased sample size would yield a statistically significant result, and on the flip side another could argue that the effect size would be minimal if you need a larger sample size.
The rebuke, of course, is that even one extra case could kill a loved one that the kid would spread disease on to.
Personally, perhaps reframing the argument that one should wear a mask at school so that they shouldn't have to wear one at home would be a more compelling argument, but I suspect many would disagree..
This makes it sound like there was some groundbreaking CDC study that got hidden for political reasons.
It was a study of a single month in Georgia before Delta. Aside from the narrowness of the inputs I highly doubt school policy and ground truth were aligned.
The evidence for cotton and surgical mask--as used in actual practice--being effective at reducing the spread is pretty weak in general.
Most I've seen cited by mask proponents either don't use control groups (and thus can't really distinguish btwn other factors that correlate with mask wearing) or are laboratory tests just testing what % of particles are blocked by masks--which ignores almost every relevant question about mask mandates and relies on suspect theoretical models about how covid actually transmits between people.
I'm mystified why people on both sides are so up in arms about masks, but nobody gives one shit about uncontroversal and more effective mitigation techniques like air filtration and circulation.
An infected kid in classroom without proper air circulation could fill the classroom with enough virus to cause a super spreader event--mask or no-cotton/surgical mask.
I know that our teacher's union and the district we work for negotiated for almost a week about air filtration and circulation.
The HVAC is continuously circulating air from the time it is on until after school when it turns off. There is some time before school and maybe 20min after school when it is on.
They have settled on only pulling air from the outside instead of recycling the warm or cool air in the room.
And having some kind of agreement on the merv rating of the filters. It may be merv 7(but I'm not sure.)
The riled-up anti-mask parents get all the attention but in every district there are also parents pushing for more ventilation, testing, vaccinations, etc. In my school we've been able to get the ventilation upgraded with MERV-13 filters.
Some years back I had a professor who was doing research on the lack of air circulation leading to CO2 buildup in classrooms. CO2 has pretty deleterious effects of student achievement. Turns out oxygen is important for cognition, who knew? I can only assume it's worse with face masks.
Surgical masks are designed to stop droplets, not aerosols so they're pretty loose. The mask is not form fitting around the nose. OR's also have dedicated filtration/HVAC systems with HEPA filters. I researched this when I was looking for a filter system for wildfire smoke.
Billions in the US and it's part of the infrastructure bill and alot of investment right now. This is a multi-year effort (although IMHO functioning windows should be more normalized instead of going all in on HVAC).
The default policy should be a normal non-masked school year. People pushing masks need to produce a hell of a lot of evidence that masks work and are worth all the negative effects they might have on kids. In addition they need a clearly defined exit strategy. They should also articulate what problem masks on kids are trying to solve.
“masks need to produce a hell of a lot of evidence” vs “all the negative effects they might have on kids”
Those are some wildly different standards. You can convince yourself of anything if you assume it’s correct and raise the bar high enough for counter evidence.
Depriving kids of seeing facial expressions, depriving kids of seeing the smiles on the faces of their friends and teachers, for an entire year (or more?), during most of their socialization hours, is in and of itself a direct and terrible harm. It's one thing to require masks in the grocery store and at the doctor's office just to be on the safe side. Not much harm in that. But all-day, every day at school, a place which is the primary place to make friends, and not being able to see friend's smile? That is a horrible thing. If covid was actually so dangerous that we needed to worry about kids dying, then the proper response would be shutting down the schools entirely. If it is not dangerous, then we should allow kids to attend mask free and have an actually fully human experience.
If covid was so dangerous to children that they were dying all over the place, they’d have been first in line for vaccines way back in December.
Also it sickens me that people downvote your valid concerns. Kids need facial expressions. They need to hear and see each other to learn. I don’t know why that is so controversial.
Yes, the emergency order for vaccines is generally for the higher risk population. But using a not very broadly tested vaccine that was given an emergency order first in kids doesn't seem like a good idea I guess.
Covid is extremely dangerous in kids. Long covid in kids isn't something I would ever want to expose my kids to if I had kids. If I had kids I would want them to wear a mask. I don't want to get covid from them if they happen to be a vector. I don't want them to develop a full-blown case. I don't want them to get it and then infect their mother or their friends or me or their teacher. I don't want anyone to get covid.
I've been reading all of your replies and you are an very emotional parent and I respect that and I understand that.
Kids might need facial expressions but kids 100% do need to be healthy and they aren't as resilient as you have said.
Okay, so your child gets covid isn't vaccinated and you end up finding out when they are in their mid-20s that they are developing some sort of a brain disorder that was brought on by long covid that we are completely unaware of because we don't know what's going to happen with this.
This is what's wrong with a lot of these short-sighted arguments is that... I might be afraid of covid and I might want zero covid but that is because I have the imagination to envision what could end up happening. and it's not far fetched it's not fear tactics it's not gaslighting.
While we know that kids need certain things for their developing brains, positive stimulus visual things and all of that... I don't know how you're not more afraid or more concerned about the unknowns about this virus.
Now I'm going to get a little opinionated here and it might be a little jab and I apologize for being rude... Are you sure that your actually not just worked up about this because you have a job you need your kids to go someplace during the day you're stressed about other parts of your life just crap like that?
Like for me personally, I'm disabled I stay at home all day I go out maybe once a week to get groceries and I double mask and I've been vaccinated since April 20th with Pfizer. Before this pandemic I didn't go anywhere.
I might be a little bit maladjusted but I'm not going to be rolling the dice on a virus that could potentially affect me my entire life when the life that I'm already living right now already has problems and I don't need people who are all "think of the children" acting short-sighted about all of this and putting people like me at risk putting people at risk putting themselves at risk.
I wish people would take this more seriously. Yeah we could have an entire year or two of no social encounters or deprived extroverts but think long-term on how we could have a whole slice of humanity that's getting this virus that is basically just messing up how their DNA is going to unfold how all of their proteins are going to unfold basically turning into a whole new research sector.
We have all of the knowledge and the ways to avoid all of this but we have people that just give up and accept that oh we're all going to get it so just buck up old chap.
No it's not. Death rates are less than 1 in 50,000. Death and hospitalization rates are similar to the dangers of the flu or RSV or riding in a car. It's a 100X less dangerous than owning a pool. It's the type of risk we have to be able to live with. And as for long covid, I don't have the study on hand, but there was a study where there was no difference months later in symptoms like fatigue or runny nose in kids that had covid versus did not have covid.
Okay, so your child gets covid isn't vaccinated and you end up finding out when they are in their mid-20s that they are developing some sort of a brain disorder that was brought on by long covid that we are completely unaware of because we don't know what's going to happen with this.
Or maybe they get vaccinated but the vaccine causes some prion disease that does not show up for 10 years. Or maybe a new mutant strain causes ADE in the vaccinated. Life is full of dangerous, speculative unknowns unknowns. But worrying about this kind of speculative, zero-evidence risks is the route to hypochondria.
I don't want anyone to get covid....Yeah we could have an entire year or two of no social encounters or deprived extroverts but think long-term on how we could have a whole slice of humanity that's getting this virus that is basically just messing up how their DNA is going to unfold how all of their proteins are going to unfold basically turning into a whole new research sector.
Based on current U.S. government policy, why is it going to just be a year or two? It's already been a year and a half. What is going to change to make covid magically go away? It's not going away, covid is endemic. You either will have to isolate and wear P100 masks for the rest of your life, or you will get exposed to covid eventually.
That isn’t how this works. It isn’t my job to provide that evidence. Y’all want to force my 4 year old to wear a mask at her preschool. Prove it is necessary and won’t cause long term development issues.
It isn’t my job to prove it isn't necessary. I’m the one that needs to be convinced, not the other way around. Y’all are the ones trying to force this, not me.
If it's full then risking developmental issues for your child should probably be a less important to you than risking a highly contagious illness with the complications that entails (complications include death, permanent cognitive, neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular damage).
Ideally every responsible* parent could choose how they want to manage the risk for their child, but that's not always practical. With limited daycare and schooling facilities, there's a strong push to follow the more ~conservative~ (cautious) approaches. And this is at it should be. As they say "Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my face", so to should your freedom to choose the level of risk you are comfortable with be limited by the freedom for others to choose their level of risk.
*A responsible parent considers the welfare of the child first and foremost, not using children as tools to make points or demonstrate a commitment to a particular ideology or to otherwise serve their own interests.
Hospitals aren't full. ICU's will never fill up with kids having covid. It just won't happen.
Kids aren't at risk. We have more than a year and a half of data to support this.
> A responsible parent considers the welfare of the child first and foremost, not using children as tools to make points or demonstrate a commitment to a particular ideology or to otherwise serve their own interests.
Correct. And I'd argue almost everybody in favor of forcing kids to wear masks at school forgot this.
> leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it.
The problem is that we're dealing with "if it save even one child's life it's worth it" (for any "it") reasoning, which is impossible to argue against.
The author of the article doesn't understand science:
"Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective."
No! If you cannot find a statistically significant benefit, perhaps your experiment design is flawed. Perhaps your sample size is too small. Perhaps you have too many confounders. But you cannot conclude the measures are not effective!
It gets better! Read the article. It says:
"COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required teachers and staff members to use masks and 39% lower in schools that improved ventilation. Ventilation strategies associated with lower school incidence included dilution methods alone (35% lower incidence) or in combination with filtration methods (48% lower incidence)."
In other words, the study actually found many significant interventions in schools, among which masks. Unbelievably bad reporting from Intelligencer.
> No! If you cannot find a statistically significant benefit, perhaps your experiment design is flawed. Perhaps your sample size is too small. Perhaps you have too many confounders. But you cannot conclude the measures are not effective!
You’re misreading the article. He’s not saying they’re not effective. He’s saying that a high-powered study couldn’t prove them effective, which is the same thing you’re saying.
The measured difference in community transmission between masks required and masks voluntary was 21%. This was not statistically significant because it was underpowered, as GP correctly stated. Saying that no statistical significance means null hypothesis is a kind of type 2 error, which was difficult to make given that the point estimate did not even support his claim.
I'm frankly surprised that Zweig made such an embarrassingly simple public mistake that any statistician could have pointed out to him had he bothered to ask. His readers might not have that kind of access, but he certainly could get this answered in five minutes.
He didn’t say that no statistical significance meant the null and expressly addressed the point you’re making:
> It’s also important to underline that just because the Georgia study did not find a statistically significant benefit doesn’t mean that a larger, more statistically powerful study might not find one, said Hoeg, the epidemiologist. But since this study had 90,000 students, then the question becomes: If you need 500,000 or 1 million people to find a benefit, how marginal is that benefit?
You seem to be misreading his conclusion. He’s not saying “masking children doesn’t work.” His point is that the practice carries significant potential downsides for children, and the best real-world study we have failed to provide affirmative support that those are outweighed by statistically significant reductions in COVID transmission.
It’s the same thing the FDA does—if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.
When Zweig says, "If you need 500,000 or 1 million people to find a benefit, how marginal is that benefit?" that means that he doesn't realize that a 21% point estimate in that study with 0% in the error bar means that 42% is also in the error bar. This is not marginal! The point estimate is not marginal either, so when Zweig says that requiring a larger study size means that the effect is marginal, he is either being intentionally deceiving, or he does not understand statistics. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
> if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.
He doesn't make that point, but that one is also rather silly. If all of our evidence suggests mask effectiveness among elementary school students (some by mechanism, some by simulation, and some by evaluating mask policies on other groups), including the study he pointed to, the correct decision is to require masks for elementary school students. The harms are negligible, and the benefits for reducing community spread are large. The risk for approving an ineffective drug is far larger.
Elsewhere, you made the point that we don't know if masks should be required for toddlers. That I agree with, but that isn't a point that Zweig has made.
> The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it
The science is uncertain but leaning towards masking children at schools being worth it. The fact that a study that included mask intervention in Georgia schools showed a double digit percent reduction in community transmission but was underpowered to be statistically significant by itself should not cause us to update beliefs very much, let alone update them in the direction of the null hypothesis, let alone update them all the way to the null hypothesis as Zweig has done, given that our priors are informed by CERN simulations, mechanistic experiments, and adult transmission studies that demonstrate effectiveness. That just demonstrates Zweig's poor understanding of statistics terminology.
There's an intuitive model that makes some sense of this finding: Masks, air filters, and distancing are effective at preventing transmission by reducing -- not eliminating -- viral load. What suffices to prevent infection from a 15-second encounter with a stranger in line at the supermarket, may not be enough when kids are in the same room breathing the same air 6 hours of every day.
We now know what it takes to protect a person from COVID in an environment where they are likely to be exposed to significant virus concentrations; unfortunately, getting kids to scrub up like COVID ward nurses is probably not realistic.
Not entirely true. Switzerland is starting to mandate masks for kids in schools again because current numbers show that kids (again) are a thriving factor for infections.
Well I can’t speak for other countries, but in France mask is mandatory in schools from age 6. It’s been like this for a year and will most likely continue in september for the new school year.
Critically, this is all pre-Delta. It seems common sense to me that kids should wear masks at school, and I don't think we have science that can dispute that common sense at this point.
Of course, the problem is, and always has been with COVID, that my common sense is different from yours and vice versa...
> It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.
It doesn't really boggle my mind, it's just that the conclusions it suggests about fellow Americans are really hard to swallow. There is a lot of political polarization in the US and cranking through the implications and reasons for ostensibly pro-COVID policies and attitudes is really disheartening. It's a schism that isn't healed easily.
If anything, an impersonal virus, an implacable, impossible-to-anthropomorphize, zero-upside health hazard could have easily been something for the entire world to unite against. Instead, we got more and deeper division and louder and more extreme and more destructive arguments. And we lost a lot of people and maimed even more. And the reason that couldn't happen: Money. The economy. Me. Freedumbs!
COVID exposed people's real priorities and objectives and showed how craven and myopic our political leaders really are.
Here's one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS.
TLDR: To get the sort of protection people imagine that cloth masks provide, you would need to be wearing an n95 mask, tightly fitted to your face so no air leaks in through the sides.
But what's the actual effectiveness of most people wearing their normal cloth masks?
It doesn't have to personally protect you at high effectiveness from getting infected to reduce spread at a population level.
Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.
>Needless to say, masking is political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health.
At the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.
When you actually look at face cloth coverings, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.
Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking can do or not do.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
The bottom line though is by telling people that in fact just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is simply not true.
I'm just asking if we have info on population spread effects for masks / no masks.
"Masks won't protect you" isn't an answer to that question. I don't wear a mask when requested by local guidelines or businesses as some kind of guarantee that I don't get COVID.
And yes, having kids not all go to school and then return to their families on a daily basis would probably have a much bigger affect on community spread. But if we can't get political will for masks or vaccinations then I don't know where we're going to find it for another round of kids staying home.
>Amid COVID-19 pandemic, flu has disappeared in the US
NEW YORK (AP) — February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.
Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.
A 50% reduction and we still all get covid. It is actually binary -- either we have a realistic and obtainable plan for zero-covid (which we do not) or everyone gets exposed to covid eventually.
A 50% reduction in spread might be helpful in certain areas where the hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed (in which case just close the schools for a few weeks), but in the United States there are a lot of mask mandates in schools being pushed in areas where the hospitals are not under any significant pressure. That is nonsense.
One issue is that with exponential curves it's often difficult to make these big policy changes as local conditions change.
Sure in an ideal world as soon as hospitalizations or case rates went above some metric we'd introduce stricter local procedures, hopefully fast enough that the wave of hospitalizations 1-2 weeks later isn't too bad.
But so far it seems like we're too slow on that. Things get bad, then we start changing our behavior. Time matters and it's not binary. That's been the whole principle of managing this thing in the US at the beginning. If you let the spike get too big too quickly then it gets bad before we can take corrective action.
And how would we even manage changing these guidelines on a week-by-week basis in every zip code? How do you even disseminate that information to all businesses, citizens, parents?
Of course I don't think all restrictions make sense in all places, nor do I want them to go on forever. Vaccinations for a large majority of eligible individuals would go a long way to reducing spread and hospitalization load.
In theory we are trying to bide time until we get there (manageable COVID, not zero COVID) but in the US at least we're not heading towards "large majority" very quickly, and we are still having those exponential local spikes.
Something like 30% (of expelled particles) when we’re talking about face-to-face contact for a few minutes.
Probably pretty close to zero when we’re talking about being in a classroom with 30 other kids for a few hours. The mask protects against things going straight ahead, not against slowly filling up a room with aerosols.
I guess masking up might mean everyone gets slowly infected over the course of days though (through aerosols), instead of getting a full dose of virus straight in the face. I presume that affects the severity of the subsequent disease.
I appreciate the simplicity of the message to mask up, since it’s almost certainly better than nothing, but it’s no panacea.
Masks is too broad of a term as being used. There are OSHA environments where proper N95-type masks can protect you from aerosol risks for 8 hours a day.
The likelihood that a cloth mask can do that in a classroom however…
Best mitigator would be good HEPA room air purifiers, ideally multiple per classroom.
> Best mitigator would be good HEPA room air purifiers, ideally multiple per classroom.
They can be too loud to run while class is in session, especially if they move enough air to be worth a damn. Double-especially if you're also masked (so speaking is already a bit muffled).
I've got a couple of Coway HEPA purifiers, and they can be quiet enough for a classroom. At low speeds, the closest to inaudible that I've ever heard, and at higher speeds a very even and tolerable white/brown noise.
I'm sure some that are good-enough and not loud exist, and some classrooms probably have them, but I can also say for a fact that some schools that have managed to get ahold of good purifiers for every classroom haven't also managed to get ahold of quiet good purifiers, which is why those schools only run them part of the time. It's another hurdle to the solution of "just filter the air", which isn't per se a bad idea—but, whoever's procuring them must think to look into the noise when choosing which to buy, must have the budget to buy quiet ones that move as much air as appropriately-effective louder models (I assume there's a cost premium for "quiet and also effective"), and if someone's already bought purifiers and they're too loud, you're out of luck on getting anyone to pony up cash for a second set of (maybe even more expensive) purifiers.
We seem to be forgetting something here: the aerosols we are protecting from are from other peoples nose and mouth, which are covered by a cloth mask which vastly reduces how much makes it into the air.
There is no "best" here, mitigations all mitigate different things and work together to provide a safer environment.
> which are covered by a cloth mask which vastly reduces how much makes it into the air
Where do you think the extra air goes?
It still makes it into the air, just in different directions. Some of the viral particles are probably caught in the mask, but I’m not sure how much of the total we can count on.
Edit: Allow me to clarify - the research everyone is citing that says masking is effective in teachers and ineffective in students (the 37% number) predates both the delta variant and widespread infection in Southern states. Further, masking is understood etiologically as a prevention method and has been used successfully in other outbreaks and in other countries. Clinicians and policy makers as a rule work with incomplete data in an emerging situation, so unequivocally stating that masking kids in schools doesn't help is a very bad misrepresentation of both the data/research and the implications to policy.
When a novel situation presents itself, sometimes we do not have all of data we would like and clinicians have to make judgement calls to the best of their knowledge.
We may not have trials or studies (these things take time) to back a very certain and/or specific claim such as "do masks prevent the spread of Covid 19?" What we do have, is fundamental knowledge and common sense and so typically, in a clinical setting we ask these questions when any new situation arises (as it happens often in medicine):
- Does this reccomendation cause more harm than good?
- is there even a slight chance that this clinical decision would increase the percentage chance of survival?
- is it worth the inconvenience it could cause?
This is called Clinical Reasoning. Thinking critically and clinically is a core tenet of the field.
I don't disagree with anything you said, and I'm certainlynot an anti-masker, but was skeptical of the parent claim which seems to be
"Research shoes masks are still effective even when spending the whole day in the same room"
I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case and I worry that people are putting too much stake in masks when really social distancing is much more effective than masks ever will be.
Keep in mind the initial dose is highly relevant to the impact of the virus in your body. There's a big difference between getting a single virus, enough to cause an infection, and enough to be highly overwhelmed before your immune system kicks in.
There is no real scientific evidence that disease severity is correlated with initial viral dose. It's a plausible hypothesis but so far due to ethical concerns no one has done the human challenge trials that would be necessary to settle that issue.
This is a common attribute of infections and is really more of a math issue than anything SARS-specific. The bigger the initial dose, the sooner it will get to the impact stage, and the less prepared your immune system will be at that time.
Key paragraph: Between Nov. 16 and Dec. 11, researchers found that infection rates were 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff members were required to wear masks. The difference between schools that did and did not require students to wear masks was not statistically significant.
Many countries in Europe have decided against masking for any students in K-12 schools because it is unclear that the harms outweigh the benefits. The idea there is some "simple" scientific & research consensus on this is wrong.
Is it worth the cost? That’s a different question.
I’m not really opposed to masks in a classroom as a mitigation method, but if people believe it will significantly alter the trajectory of the infections I have a bridge to sell them.
We have been on and off masks here in Denmark, and it seems to have no effect on spread. Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one.. from a family member or a friend..
> Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one..
The conclusion I would draw from your own beliefs here is that we should be wearing masks all the time, especially around family... not that masks don't work.
Personally while I wear a mask most of the time when out, I do feel that we really don't know as much as we'd like to think about mask efficacy. The trouble is your own reasoning here is inconsistent. Either masks don't work as well as we think and risk of infection is equally likely in public or at home, or they do work effectively but we don't wear them at important times.
The argument you should have from your own beliefs here should be for more mask wearing not less.
"Compared with a baseline of 1-foot separation with no masks employed, particle count was reduced by 84% at 3 feet of separation and 97% at 6 feet. A modest decrease in particle count was observed when only the receiver was masked. The most substantial exposure reduction occurred when the aerosol source was masked (or both parties were masked). When both the source and target were masked, particle count was reduced by more than 99.5% of baseline, regardless of separation distance or which type of mask was employed."
We no longer believe that Covid is spread by large droplets that will fall to the ground within six feet of being sneezed or coughed out. Cloth masks catch those droplets just fine.
We now know that Covid is spread by minute particles so small that they float on the air for hours. Cloth masks do not filter the air you breathe from particles of that size.
You would need an n95 mask or better to do that job.
Remember that mask wearing almost completely did away with last year's Flu season while we simultaneously had a huge Covid surge.
Indeed. If you need to filter out tiny particles from the air you breathe, you can't allow unfiltered air to leak in and out through the sides of the mask.
>Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
All the pro-mask studies are like this: Some simulated situation that doesn't take into account whether spread actually happens like that in real life.
They can simulate blowing stuff through various types of filter material all they want, it doesn't change that none of the epidemiological curves reacted to mask mandates anywhere.
They do work great as an ideological symbol though, thanks to the topic's polarisation.
I think this works like condom statistics, where the statistic is that they are 98% effective, but that statistic includes people who go "we normally wear condoms, but we didn't that one time and she got pregnant" as a condom failure.
So basically, the masks are effective, but people take the masks off around family and friends and if one of their friends or family has COVID they will pass it on during the unmasked time.
Can you help me understand how “catching COVID while not wearing a mask” is meaningfully different from “catching COVID from a family member while not wearing masks” in the context of whether masks are effective in preventing the spread of COVID? Seems an irrelevant distinction to me.
You’re not catching covid in situations where you’d typically wear a mask (regardless of masking), rather where you typical don’t wear a mask, like from family member.
I’m not really saying I agree, but I think that is the context.
The case count for Germany atm is very impressive, but we ditched masks in June, and cases actually plummeted after that, and only started to rise with the delta variant. We still compared to most have a low infection rate.
There is nothing to support the theory that shops are hotspots for spread, if that was true alot of supermarket employees etc, would have been infected, at a larger rate than average. However this has not happened anywhere.
You can cite 100 counterexamples when using this simplistic kind of reasoning. Covid numbers are quite high in South Korea and Japan which both have sky-high mask compliance, for example.
Isn't that part of the scientific process? Is there some other way to come to the truth aside from observation and examining variables related to the observed outcomes?
We wore them for a year. Covid is still here. It won't go away if we wear them for another year. It won't go away if we wear them for another ten years.
That sounds like an argument against bullet proof vests. People still die while wearing them. LEO have been wearing them for years. Obviously, they don't work.
You don't understand the actual goal of wearing masks: protected people and reducing the spread of covid. It's not going to magically eliminate covid when half the country doesn't actually wear them.
And it might be a shocker to some, but there is more to life than myopically focusing on slowing the spread of exactly one disease. We have the rest of our lives to worry about. Expecting society to live a covid centric lifestyle where all that matters is “does it slow the spread” for 1.6 years and counting is does not make for a mentally healthy population.
There remain differences of opinion among scientists on how effective non-medical masks are in reducing COVID-19 transmission.
However, on the question of medical-grade masks, there is clear research that now shows some masks (e.g. FFP3 masks) are effective in stopping COVID-19 infection.
Are there any studies into the effects of being infected by multiple of these viruses at the same time? Or is this just what your doctor has told you? Also what do kids under 12 have to do with any of this?
> At Texas Children's Hospital in Houston on Thursday, 25 of 45 hospitalized pediatric patients were diagnosed with RSV as well as COVID-19. "A hospitalization rate much higher than for either virus alone," according to officials.
> At the moment there is little data available on the impact of contracting both viruses and whether the two together can make a person sicker. But health officials worry it could put young patients — who are not eligible for the vaccine — at greater risk.
Interesting but until there is some real data around this personally I would rather see people who we know are at risk, elderly in poorer countries, get the vaccine over under 12s in first world countries. That's just my opinion though
> At Texas Children's Hospital in Houston on Thursday, 25 of 45 hospitalized pediatric patients were diagnosed with RSV as well as COVID-19. "A hospitalization rate much higher than for either virus alone," according to officials.
Would be interested to see the exact breakdown here. If 19 children are hospitalized with RSV+Covid, 5 with just RSV, and 1 with just Covid, it could just indicate RSV is particularly virulent for children and they are likely to also have Covid given they have been exposed to RSV. This would certainly fit with what we already know about the relative risks posed to children by RSV vs Covid.
This article from the Guardian suggests that the reason RSV is having an off-season surge is because children now have an "immunity debt" from being isolated as part of Covid protocols. It would probably not be a good idea not for us to double down on the measures that have brought us to this point. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...
There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway. It's also not as if masks are themselves neutral either - constant mask wearing is associated with higher rates of bacterial pneumonia. Even medical professionals never wore masks all day (until last year), just when they were performing surgery.
> There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it
What you just described is the same thing, it's simply a matter of perspective. If you wear a mask, it helps me by reducing the chances that you spread it to me if you have it but aren't experiencing symptoms yet. It works the same way in reverse. I don't wear a mask to protect myself, I wear it to protect others in the case that I'm shedding virus and don't know it yet.
> It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway
Most of the schools that do testing due so weekly. With delta someone can be contagious up to 36 hours after infection. That means someone who gets tested on Friday morning, goes to a poorly ventilated party with a COVID-19+ that evening and returns to school on Monday could spread the disease for a week.
Even less popular opinion: fear is irrelevant. What we actually have is a cultural gap in how risk is assessed. Some only consider individual risk of death. Others also consider risk to beyond death, and beyond themselves. Casting the latter as afraid is unhelpful.
If you are a healthy person then you are low risk. If you are unhealthy (smoke, overweight, health condition) then you are at risk. I think a lot of people demanding the mandating of vaccines and mask wearing are in the smokers / overweight category and yet those people are never told to become healthy in themselves. People with health conditions have thought about illnesses long before covid. Thoughts?
I think a look at Texas shows the real danger of Covid. Near 0% ER (edit: availability).
If you’re in a car accident, you may not get the life saving attention you need, because so many someones refused to vaccinate.
That’s the cascading effects we need to deal with, here.
I’m not worried about getting covid, myself. I wasn’t too worried before I was vaccinated and I’m not worried at all, now.
I’m terrified of needing normal, emergency medical care, or so-called elective surgeries (which is almost all surgeries, even the vital ones), and being unable to get it because thousands of beds are filled with people on respirators.
The RAND healthcare study showed that drastic drops in medical expenditures had virtually no impact on mortality. Potentially even negative impact.[1]
The reality is if you're a health adult, an overburdened ER or OR poses a very small risk. Probably much less than what could be made up by eating one extra daily serving of vegetables.[2] You have far more to fear from lockdown induced supply chain disruptions that cause fresh produce shortages at the local grocer.
A person getting in a car accident is relatively low chances; but when there's a car accident, I want there to be supply for every single person that was in that car accident and not already dead to have a hospital bed.
Also, why not make being a healthy weight mandatory? I mean, other than it isn’t a patented pharmaceutical product to be sold? We already have determined that indefinite, population-wide house arrest is OK.
My thoughts are that if you’re afraid of SARS and have confidence in Pfizer and friends, then purchase their products. They’re 99% effective, right?
Casting those who have a higher risk threshold than you as "only considering individual risk", while the other, better people also consider others ... yeah, that's helpful.
I'm not young, I'm overweight, my risk is elevated. I'm also vaccinated, but chose to get it way later than I could have based on priority, because I calculated my personal risk to be minimal, and others' to be significantly higher despite lower priority.
And "I'm so wise and noble and everyone who doesn't share my opinion is a selfish ass" is still a dumb way to frame it.
I don't think that's unpopular. More precisely, once the vaccine is available to all age groups, the only people that need to be scared of it are the unvaccinated.
And they will have had every opportunity to get vaccinated, so we shouldn't optimize for them.
Alternatively: the unvaccinated are simply mistaken, and represent people's cousins and friends and children and grandparents, and their suffering and death would represent real loss and tragedy even to people who did everything right and got their shots.
The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very unhelpful.
We're all in this together. I got my shots. All my family members of age are vaccinated. All our friends and regular acquaintances are vaccinated.
I still wear my mask where I have to be near people in public, because every little bit helps. My risk is not zero, and if I get sick so might someone else who isn't as protected. I still avoid restaurants. I still work at home. I still limit travel.
We can stop this when the pandemic is controlled. Until then, it remains all of our collective responsibility. And I for one am willing to bear that.
Your compassion is noble but the reality is that few share it. Very few vaccinated people are willing to accept restrictions on their liberty to help protect people who are unvaccinated by choice.
Besides, the virus is not standing still. It is responding to selective pressure by becoming ever more transmissible. The more we try to control the virus by social distancing, the more the virus responds by becoming easier to transmit. We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing, even with perfect compliance.
> The more we try to control the virus by social distancing, the more the virus responds by becoming easier to transmit.
That is a mischaracterization. I mean, it's true, but only in a specious sense that all organisms respond to changes in their environment (including vaccination techniques!). It's absolutely not an argument that pandemic mitigation strategies are universally doomed to failure!
> We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing
Again, this is wrong. And in fact it worked to control covid (not perfectly, but well, well under what you'd expect from the early exponential curves in places like Milan and New York) for almost a year before vaccines showed up.
You're making another common mistake here, and imagining that all arguments are about absolutes. In your mind, mask wearing either Works Perfectly or Must Be Abandoned.
In the real world, you wear masks when the pandemic is at a high infection rate and growing, (like now) because marginal improvements are important ("every little bit helps"), and not as much when it's low and shrinking (as it was in June, when I even went to a few restaurants unmasked!).
Pandemic controls are already doomed to failure in the case of COVID. If you look at countries where they have had very strict and successful pandemic controls, such as Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand, they are finding it impossible to contain the delta variant. It has several attributes that make control difficult.
Would the delta variant have arisen were it not for social distancing? Perhaps, that's unknowable. But we certainly created a lot of selective pressure for it to exist.
That's not to say that social distancing was bad or wrong. It was our only choice at the time. But in a future where social distancing is much less effective and where compliance by vaccinated people will be low, the utility of these interventions is becoming ever smaller. You can of course do whatever you want individually according to your conscience.
Where do we go from here? The world needs to increase vaccine production to billions per month, and decrease response times to new variants so that if there is a new vaccine-resistant variant we can vaccinate the world again quickly.
No. No, no, none of that is correct. Stop saying things that are untrue simply because they feel like they should confirm your priors. Delta outbreaks in many places have peaked and subsided well short of saturation. Look at India, where it was first detected. They peaked in May and are now at about 9% of peak infection rate.
In fact objectively India's net response to Delta, both in width of infection wave and peak outbreak rate, has been better that the US's, despite near zero net vaccination.
And why is the US so bad at this? Largely because of PEOPLE LIKE YOU who insist on crazy pseudoscience theories like "Masks don't work" or "treat it with dewormer" or (sigh) "Pandemic controls are already doomed to failure" instead of just doing the right thing. Stop it. Stop trying to be smarter than everyone. Just get in line and do the right thing.
There's no way to get the R0 of Delta below 1.0. Period. Even the strictest lockdown regiments have had transmission far above 1.0. The only reason Delta ever subsides (like in India) is when it burns through enough of the population to lose fresh targets.
The science is settled. Virtually everyone is going to get Delta either sooner or later. There's nothing that can be done to change that fact. All we can do is slow the spread from a few weeks of wildfire to a few months of wildfire.
Good grief, stop. Stop using jargon you don't understand. Stop making medical pronouncements that are clearly wrong. STOP. That statement, if true, would mean that the entire population would be trapped in a cycle of reinfection after reinfection, coming faster and faster, forever. It is clearly not true. No disease works like that. You are using words you don't understand to describe a subject you don't understand but have strong feelings about.
> Your compassion is noble but the reality is that few share it. Very few vaccinated people are willing to accept restrictions on their liberty to help protect people who are unvaccinated by choice.
It's not about protecting those that are unvaccinated by choice. It's also about protecting those that cannot get vaccines for whatever reason and also to stop breakthrough infections.
Also the majority of UK residents at least are still wearing masks[1] so I think at least that's some evidence that people do share this compassion.
No, we aren't. Obesity is an epidemic. Nearly all of those people made a decision to make themselves more likely to contract covid, more likely to exhibit symptoms longer (thus spread it), and more likely to occupy critical healthcare infrastructure - as well as more likely to die from covid.
There has been almost 0 acknowledgement of this as well as 0 promises to fix this issue. If you're still obese (or not calling for mandatory weight loss) and upset others aren't getting a vaccine you're not fairly applying "every little bit helps".
You're picking and choosing which issues we should bear "collective responsibility" for. It's some kind of irony we're passing out krispy kremes when you get your vaccination.
This is the most annoying point. One of the biggest factors in whether you will end up in hospital is obesity and smoking and yet for some reason this is never addressed.
It literally was addressed directly, you just didn't understand the point. So I'll repeat: the people harmed by covid cases are not only the ones infected. To be blunt: I have smoking and/or fat family members and friends. You probably do too. Could they have worked harder on their weight or quit long ago? Probably. It would still be horrifying to see them on a ventilator.
Pandemics aren't about personal choice. Period. Pandemics aren't about personal choice. People who do all the right things still suffer. So... how about we try to minimize that instead of making excuses and placing blame?
Unfortunately we are not all in this together. One group is vaccinated and has done their part to protect themselves and others including those that cannot be vaccinated due to age limitations. There is another group that refuses vaccination, sees it as an impediment to their freedom and if they don't think Covid is a hoax then are quite willing to sacrifice others. There is no common ground between these groups and the vaccinated group very much sees the second group as needlessly prolonging this pandemic and engaging in a lifestyle choice that is very much a risk to their children.
> the only people that need to be scared of it are the unvaccinated
We often overlook those who were previously infected. I believe this is a common mistake that makes for inaccurate groupings, which negatively affect the common good.
Can you elaborate a bit on how they are overlooked? You can still get vaccinated after recovering (high-profile example: D. Trump), and the recovered that have been processed by health care system can for example get the same QR code that the vaccinated get in the EU (helps with travel I believe).
The most prominent example I can offer is when speaking about hospitalizations.
Headlines and policy have adopted the narrative that the unvaccinated are driving the most severe cases. Those previously infected are not acknowledged and could significantly overlap with the unvaccinated population.
Those who have previously had an infection with mild to no symptoms should be acknlowedged as a third group in evaluating public health policies (vaccinated, previously infected, and unknown exposure).
> Those who have previously had an infection with mild to no symptoms should be acknlowedged as a third group in evaluating public health policies (vaccinated, previously infected, and unknown exposure).
Do we know that this is something not currently taken into account? I wouldn't be too surprised if this is already influencing policies. The other thing is if it's being communicated to the public. Also, the data the officials have is most definitely a lower bound since not everyone with COVID was captured by the statistics. Add all that nuance and it may be difficult to send the point across in a way that is understandable to everyone...
We often overlook those who were previously infected
What aspect of them are we overlooking, and what is the impact on the common good? I know they have some resistance, though not as much as if they also got vaccinated, so it seems like the original point still stands: Unvaccinated should still be scared of it.
> not as much as if they also got vaccinated, so it seems like the original point still stands
If previously-infected had as much resistance as vaccinated, they should not be more scared than the vaccinated. Even if they would have more resistance if they were also vaccinated.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.
I'm saying that the previously infected w/o a vaccination are more likely to get reinfected that those who were infected and then get vaccinates: about 2.34x as likely. Reinfection rates are low [0]
The risk of reinfection if not vaccinates may also be higher than the risk for an initial infection if vaccinated: Reinfection rates are about 0.31% [1] and as high as 0.7% in some populations [2] while infection rates among vaccinated are about 0.18% [3]
TLDR: The CDC is dishonest and cherry-picks data to meet their narrative. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown natural immunity to work at least as well as vaccine immunity for COVID.
Previous infection provides relatively short-lived natural immunity to COVID-19.
I tested positive the last week of December 2020 (exactly three weeks before I was scheduled to get the vaccine, which I did also eventually get). When I spoke to the county health department, they said they had already seen repeat infections. They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months, which is backed up by the fact that the virus had only been in my state about 10 months at that point.
> They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months
I'm sorry about your experience. Having Covid sucks. But your anecdotal data here is inaccurate at best, especially since it was from pre-Delta variant (you said December 2020 was your time of this happening) and we do have studies from that time showing how robust immunity was for those who had natural infections:
"Available scientific data suggests that in most people immune responses remain robust and protective against reinfection for at least 6-8 months after infection (the longest follow up with strong scientific evidence is currently approximately 8 months)." [0]
No offense, but these kind of anecdotal reports that "someone said" (even a health official), which sound authoritative because of the context, are how misinformation spreads.
While my figure of 3-6 months has been revised upward to 6, 8 or 10 months, the core sentiment of my post remains unchanged: Vaccine immunity is believed to be better. Vaccines are still believed to be good for 2-3 years based on how similar vaccines for other coronaviruses have worked. That is either enough time for the immune system's natural protection to atrophy, or for the virus to change. That still means vaccine immunity is likely to be more robust protection than natural immunity, even though the general sentiment seems to be a shrug for how long protection from the vaccine will actually last. [0]
That's why they still exclusively discuss being fully vaccinated, and discount natural immunity. They believe it's better.
Furthermore, I have seen no-one in the health community that has recommended not getting the vaccine if you've already had the virus. Compare this to, for example, chicken pox, where they only recommend the vaccine if you haven't had it.
In the context of this thread where the comment I was responding to was trying to argue that natural immunity is being short-changed somehow, I think the sentiment I'm expressing is perfectly accurate regardless of how exact timelines have been shifted in the past year. You still need to get fully vaccinated even if you've had the disease. Nothing about that has changed.
On the other hand, with natural immunity, even after your antibody count wanes in your bloodstream, you still have your bone marrow and memory B cells to protect you:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34030176/
This is insane. No vaccine works better then natural protection from real stuff - simply because its less stressful to the body and more stress equals better immunity.
I have nothing against vaccines in general but this is nothing but pharma propaganda.
The vaccine will prime your immunity to one (important) protein. Natural infection could prime your immunity to up to 29 proteins. I'm not sure 'robustness' right word in the context of rapidly evolving variants.
The link is for the second sentence. To quote from the abstract:
> Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans.
As far as the reports from Israel:
> By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.
Almost certainly vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections (especially those that rely on the innate immune response rather than adaptive immune response). Asymptomatic infections (especially in the young) are extremely common and possibly in the majority for those under 30.
Should I assume that you're referring to a JAMA article or perhaps one of the Nature publications?
Those only measured patients who suffered acute symptoms. Those are unlikely to represent even a bare majority of infections although it's quite difficult to get accurate data for asymptomatic infections.
I look forward to your citation of relevant peer-reviewed longitudinal studies.
Even more interesting from a medical point of view, what mechanism do you propose for developing long term immunity, where the innate immune system rapidly controls infection?
All of the articles you are referring to are for acute/mild/moderate cases of COVID and do not cover to the significant number (particularly in younger cases) of asymptomatic and still infectious carriers, which I specifically called out in both the first and second post.
The whole point is that the adaptive immune system doesn't really ramp up for many days up to weeks, while viral load typically peaks at 3-5 days. That's why the second shot is typically delayed for the MRNA vaccines. A young asymptomatic carrier with a strong innate response who recovers early is unlikely to develop a significant adaptive immune response (e.g. test positive on an antibody serology) thus they are also then very unlikely to develop durable immunity.
Similar to the other article I sited, "we were unable to evaluate immune memory in those with the extreme presentations, both asymptomatic and severe COVID-19"
So unfortunately since I specifically and repeatedly referred to asymptomatic cases, which are relatively common in those under 30, it is not good enough.
If I could edit my original post to <B>BOLD</B> asymptomatic even more, I would, since I highly doubt you're going to find many studies on that group.
The sample size is very small and they list other limitations to their findings, but:
"In conclusion, despite concerns of waning immunity, appropriate immunoassays can detect antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at 8 months after infection in most asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic persons."
Thank you so much for a relevant article! At least it shows that in some/many asymptomatic cases there is an adaptive response. That makes me feel a bit better.
However, from my very first post "vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections"... and detectable antibodies is a far cry (orders of magnitude) from neutralizing antibody levels, which are not uncommon even 8 months out in healthy vaccinated youth.
Neither you nor the parent are paying attention to recent science. Natural immunity lasts longer than the current vaccines. And it’s likely the virus will escape the current vaccines over a long enough timeline. That’s not a problem if we can roll out new vaccines quickly enough to stay in front of new mutations. But that’s an if. This is the reason Fauci and others who understand the science are focusing on treatments.
* 13% of those with natural immunity "lost detectable IgG titers" after 10 months
* Protection durability from the vaccine is still mostly unknown, but appears to be good for 2-3 years
My anecdote is from 8 months ago, so I'm not surprised the data has been revised. I got my first dose of the vaccine less than a week after I'd recovered, which at the time was the recommendation of the CDC and health department. Less than three weeks after my first dose, they revised that to have people wait six to eight weeks.
Did your country do a staged rollout where healthcare workers, the elderly, and the infirm were vaccinated first? That's how I got mine in January. I work at a public K-12, where our staff were vaccinated in Phase 1b.
Yes frontline staff started getting them around January but the elderly are the ones getting the boosters over here and that was around March time if my memory serves correctly
The myopic focus on antibody levels is misplaced. We know that for Covid there are much broader forms of immune response which are not captured by antibody titers and are quite long lasting.
I agree. Once my kids can get jabbed, I will cease giving covid much thought. I don't want to get a breakthrough case, even if it's not dangerous, because I loathe being ill, but getting sick periodically is an unfortunate fact of life.
> there is an urgent need to collect more data on longer-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including ways the virus may harm the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as its emotional and mental health effects.
I wish this was true. Most Europe is still under various lockdown restrictions, even though in a lot of countries, there's been enough vaccine for everyone (who wanted) to get vaccinated by now.
Children under 12 are a major group that drop vaccination percentages down significantly everywhere. The hope is that once this age group can also be vaccinated, we can find the new normal and let people individually hedge their own bets.
Why vaccinate children under 12? The only good reason I can see is if they have some sort of known health condition. Is there any other reasons why you would do this?
The same reason to vaccinate everyone else: to minimize the opportunity for a more virulent strain to emerge - one against which current vaccines are ineffective.
Given the flu kills more kids than covid, we should probably require them to get that vaccine. Given more kids drown than die of covid, we should probably restrict their access to water. Given more kids die in fires, we should keep them out of structures made of wood. Given more die in auto accidents, they shouldn’t be allowed in cars.
Wearing a helmet on an airplane isn’t a perfect solution to airplanes crashing but it could potentially save your life, but we seem fine with the risk trade off of not wearing one. No decisions we make about responding to COVID will be risk free, the question is which trade offs we should accept. No matter how much pressure is put on the unvaccinated some people will refuse to get it, and unless you’re suggesting administering it by force eventually that tactic will meet diminishing returns.
You picked the wrong example. Helmets will do very little to reduce fatalities from air travel simply because the mechanics of how those fatalities occure.
Wearing a helmet while driving a car, however, has a pretty good chance of reduxing injuries and fatalities (probably even better than wearing a helmet when riding a bike on a seperated bike path.)
I don't think this is really a question of people analyzing the trade-offs. This how to do with how the risks and the activity are percieved, people are generally really at accurately assessing such risks.
Have ICU beds ready to accommodate them and not have them filled with unneccesary cases from unvaccinated individuals that have chosen freely to be unvaccinated.
But in my callousness I would simply illegalize treating people that are anti-vaccine.
Sure, there's just many fewer vaccinated people getting infected, so many fewer spreading it. And when they do get infected, they are infectious to others for significantly less time.
Either way, you're still less of a risk to your own health and the health of other people if you get vaccinated.
You seem to be trying to make a black & white argument: The vaccine isn't 100% effective, and therefore isn't necessary/people shouldn't feel obligated/it doesn't reduce risk/or something like that. But it doesn't have to be perfect in order for it to be much much much much much much much much much much better than nothing
> Either way, you're still less of a risk to your own health and the health of other people if you get vaccinated.
Both potential short and long-term side effects of the vaccines put aside for a moment and how important things like fertility and reproduction cannot have been adequately tested yet, I think the comment about risking others' health is completely backwards once you think through the logic of it. If my reasoning is in any way illogical, please clarify for me how you think it is wrong.
If the vaccines are reducing symptoms to the point that the vaccinated might not quickly realize that they're Covid carriers and are still going about their days, wouldn't they be more likely to encounter and put at risk more people than the unvaccinated who know that they're sick and far more likely to stay at home and isolate?
Once my family and I are vaccinated I assume we are protected and don't have much to worry about. Why should I care if someone else is not vaccinated? If everyone that wants the vaccine can get it, why does it matter if some people don't get it?
being scared doesn't actually do anything for anyone, but the vaccinated do not have zero risk. if the virus is always kicking around, then there will always be vaccinated people dying of it.
tens of thousands of people in the USA die every year from influenza. This does not cause most of us to be "scared" of influenza. Why not? Because (1) the individual risk is vanishing low except for a relatively small high risk demographic (2) the public health aspects (i.e. overloaded health care systems) are generally easy to control because it is not extremely infectious.
(1) is and always has been true for COVID, but (2) remains unresolved at this point.
The risk of long COVID sticking around in immiserating form long-term once you have it is unknown, but the risk of getting long COVID (defined along the lines of at least a few COVID symptoms sticking around for a few months) is much higher than the risk of death from Flu (starting from the assumption of not yet having caught either in a given year). I hesitate to post anything here on this subject that's not carefully worked out, so all I'll say is my personal back-of-the-envelope order of magitude calculation based on public data, comparing with other per-year risks such as cancer, didn't give me any confidence at all.
Vaccine efficacy isn't 100% though. People can (and are) getting infected even after (enough time has passed but not so long they'd be due a booster since) being vaccinated.
Its a reality. If you not vaccinated, you will get COVID, and you could die or end up with Long COVID for 12 months -- and we will not feel sorry for you or shutdown.
You're stating that as if it is fact when you know it is not. I don't think we should shutdown for unvaccinated and I have never said we should. I also don't think we should shutdown for those who are "at risk" but vaccinated.
The latter. I'm probably not at risk from either the virus or the shot.
Unfortunately you can't isolate a world-altering issue like this from its psychological and political context, so for me any respiratory-disease-related risk is secondary to the much bigger threat. "Live free or die" is not an empty slogan. I will be standing with the unvaxxed to the bitter end, although it probably won't go that far.
It is an empty slogan coming from you. You apply it so nonsensically here that it is obvious you care more about chest pounding faux-nationalism than the true meaning of those words. Consider the fact that right now in the US, no one is being forced to take the vaccine. No one. So your choice to defiantly refuse the vaccine is just defiance against a boogeyman you have self-servingly created, not an act of defiance against oppression.
Note: there arehalf-way decent arguments against taking the vaccine. Resisting govt oppression is not one of them.
Well to be fair there's significant 'peer pressure' (just look at this thread!) and there's debate about 'vaccine passports' for non-travel, i.e. restaurants etc.
I had my second dose today, but I'm against having to 'prove' (or comment on) that when I decide to go anywhere (within the UK, I don't mean for travel) again.
Why? As a private business I can exclude you for many reasons. If I believe you pose a health risk to me, and I demand you prove you've been vaccinated, that's my choice and it is your choice to take your business elsewhere. I might piss off or lose all my customers but that is my right. Again, no govt oppression or threat to your liberty.
I wrote another couple of paragraphs that touched on that but deleted them.. yes, as an option for individual businesses, fine, free market, fully in support of that.
I just don't want to see it mandated. (Nor disallowed.)
Almost nobody is at risk from COVID-19. The 600k+ people who died from it so far in the US represents a tiny, tiny percentage of the population. Even after every single person has been exposed to the virus, it seems likely that the individual risk will remain extremely small.
The problem with COVID-19 has never been the risk it poses for you as an individual, but the public health aspects. It is highly infectious; some number of cases require hospitalization; if too many people require that at the same time, the public health implications are substantial, much broader than COVID-19 itself, and potentially lethal.
Ergo, we have a civic responsibility to take steps to reduce the chance of this happening, and the simplest way to do that is vaccination and masks.
> Almost nobody is at risk from COVID-19. The 600k+ people who died from it so far in the US represents a tiny, tiny percentage of the population.
True for the US, sure, because of its healthcare capacity and financial resources (rapid development and deployment of potent mRNA vaccines). Peru has likely lost near 1% of its entire population due to Covid (200k deaths, 32m population, guaranteed vast undercount due to local conditions). They'll recover from that no doubt, and the population will ultimately acquire widespread immunity with or without vaccines (which would bring down the rate of deaths), however it's definitely not a tiny percentage of the population to lose so quickly.
It's going to be an incredible rolling challenge to handle the bottom ~3-4 billion people getting Covid vaccinations every year to prevent millions of people from dying annually. And that's assuming the mass propogation of Covid to all humans and a lot of animals isn't going to eventually unleash super deadly strains.
>... isn't going to eventually unleash super deadly strains.
The Guardian had an interview last week or the week before with someone who appeared to know what they were talking about. They made the point that there are dozens of known respiratory viruses already, and that although they constantly mutate and pose new challenges, we have not seen them ever mutate into "super deadly" strains.
I take some comfort from that (even though it is clearly not a sure thing).
Very curious to know, are you and your family (if you have kids) have not vaccinated for other kinds of stuff like Polio, HepA, HepB, Varicella etc. or is your objection just for Covid vaccines?
If you get Covid and are hospitalized, do you feel that your treatment should be paid for by others (meaning through your insurance or govt assistance)?
If so, doesn't that mean your decision affects others?
I hope that you would do the responsible thing and offer to pay your full medical bill in that scenario, in which case, disregard my question.
Vaccines are available for the flu and we take them... The whole anti-vaxx mindset is bewildering. Even if COVID-19 was just like the flu we would still want to get vaccinated for it
To think the unvaccinated should be scared of it reveals a perspective born of mania. I'm unvaccinated, had covid last week, it's preferable to a common cold. There is no way I will bother with the so-called vaccine, which is more of a mere remedy, when covid is so insignificant to people who are healthy. If you are so unhealthy that you need the vaccine (remedy) then you have bigger concerns.
I guess what it comes down to is this: Do you think that if most people got vaccinated, fewer people would get seriously sick & die?
If so, then your position is hard to justify. If not, then I would be interested in your explanation for that belief.
had covid last week, it's preferable to a common cold
Glad it worked out for you, but plenty of other healthy people are dying. Others are passing it on to people who then die.
when covid is so insignificant to people who are healthy.
A truly selfish perspective
If you are so unhealthy that you need the vaccine (remedy) then you have bigger concerns.
Sure, and plenty of people have underlying conditions through no fault of their own, and the unvaccinated are adding to their concerns significantly by gambling with their own health (which is alright, I guess) and by extension the health of everyone around them (which, again, is selfish)
Also what do you mean by remedy? Definitions that I see do not match your use of the term. That word may not mean what you think it means.
> I guess what it comes down to is this: Do you think that if most people got vaccinated, fewer people would get seriously sick & die?
> If so, then your position is hard to justify.
Sorry, no. For the record, I'm fully vaccinated, but that argument doesn't work. If we all stopped driving cars, fewer people would die in accidents. That's no belief etc, it's a fact. Yet we obviously don't, because cars are super convenient and relatively few people die. We're perfectly fine accepting some people dying for lots of convenience for everyone.
The same will have to eventually be accepted for Covid. We can't live in a perpetual half-lockdown because the omega-variant will kill 0.1% of seniors otherwise.
> Yet we obviously don't, because cars are super convenient and relatively few people die. We're perfectly fine accepting some people dying for lots of convenience for everyone.
Speak for yourself. There are a significant number of people on this site who are pretty vocally opposed to cars precisely due to the safety hazards. There was an article on here just the other day about how drivers of larger trucks and SUVs are twice as likely to kill a pedestrian as drivers of sedans.
I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
> There are a significant number of people on this site who are pretty vocally opposed to cars precisely due to the safety hazards.
No, they're not, otherwise they'd be on a farm and live of the land. Living in the city and being able to walk to the grocery store depends on other people with cars doing all the heavy lifting and delivering whatever they need by car to where they pick it up.
> I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
I fundamentally disagree. Plenty of people die falling off of a ladder each year. Every time you use a ladder, there's a non-zero chance of dying. But ladders are great! They allow you to reach stuff you couldn't get to otherwise, so of course they're worth the risk. So do cars.
You can go over that for pretty much any topic. Want to live in a house? Construction workers are dying. Want to eat? People die in the process. But they're few, compared to the population of country, and houses and food are great.
If risk minimization is the goal, we'll all run around like the Michelin figure so we don't hurt ourselves. But we don't, because we want to get shit done, and for most things, there's a giant area where the risk is much smaller than the cost associated with avoiding it. The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.
You analogies and argument seems absurd to me. People can believe that cars kill too many people and also not believe that semis should not deliver goods to stores. The broad solutions involve priotizing pedestrians rather than cars and designing cities and transit to make cars both less necessary and safer for other road users. Instead we have regulations that encourage car manufacturers to make and sell bigger cars that kill more people for while achieving no extra utility.
Wearing a helmet while driving would increase safety for drivers at not loss of utility. The choice not to do so is indicative of the irrational ways in which we evaluate relative risks.
Balancing risk and utility is absolutely necessary, but we do a horrible job of doing that with cars.
> The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.
What are you even going on about here? You think that encouraging healthy people to get vaccinated to help protect other people is stupid because most people are willing to accept the risk of driving? You position makes absolutely no sense to me.
> What are you even going on about here? You think that encouraging healthy people to get vaccinated to help protect other people is stupid because most people are willing to accept the risk of driving? You position makes absolutely no sense to me.
This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never stated, and probably don't hold. If you read their comments again, you will discover they said they themselves are vaccinated, and offered no opinion about encouraging other people to get vaccinated as well. That was plainly not the topic of their comment. They are simply pointing out, correctly in my view, that life is not and never will be totally risk free, and at some point the risks that covid presents to the world at large will have to just be accepted, because the costs of lockdowns as countermeasures are simply too great. We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.
As a side note, the fact that you read someone expressing skepticism of some measures of covid containment, and instantly leapt to "they must think encouraging vaccines is stupid" does not reflect well on you, and is a pretty strong indicator that you're spending a lot of time in an ideological echo chamber that's eager to "other" and strawman anyone that disagrees with its positions. Something worth reflecting on, if you're willing.
> This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never state
Ironically, that is precisely what I see you doing. You need to reread this full thread because your comment is entirely off base. The person I was discussing with was expressly arguing against encouraging people to be vacinated to help protect other people. This was justified by referencing how we accept (or in my case don't) the risks of cars in our society. There was no mention of my or anyone supporting indefinite lockdowns.
> We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.
Of course not. I support encouraging vaccines and mandating masks precisely because we need to end lockdowns and still need to keep our hospitals running.
That doesn't mean I will sit by while people make ridiculous arguments to against very good reasons for getting vacinated.
No, you are wrong, and didn't read carefully. The comment of yours that I took issue with your response to the user "luckylion", who's only mention of the word "vaccine" was to mention that he himself is vaccinated. The rest of both of his comments that you attacked based on false premises are exclusively about risk tolerance, and the fact that we can't keep focusing on covid to the exclusion of all else forever. It's possible you aren't as ideologically bent as you're coming across and simply didn't notice you were talking to different people, but either way it's not acceptable behavior, hence why I called it out.
I won't respond to the rest of your comment or any follow ups as I don't believe it would be productive.
I get what you're saying but we're seeing the virus spread through the vaccinated. Because the vaccinated aren't getting sick and ending up in hospital, they're spreading it to more people and the virus is mutating the whole way so I struggle to follow your logic.
1) The vaccinated are not getting it anywhere near the rates of the unvaccinated, so they are not spreading it at anywhere close to how much the unvaccinated spread it.
2) If they do spread it to another vaccinated person, that person is highly unlikely to get very sick at all.
3) If they spread it to an unvaccinated person, that person is much more likely to get sick and have a better opportunity to spread it to even more people.
4) People who get sick & end up in the hospital still have lots of time before they get to spread the virus before being hospitalized.
5) Vaccinated people who get COVID are infectious to others for significantly less time than unvaccinated people.
6) Current does not show vaccinated people causing new or more powerful strains. [0]
7) New strains are still significantly less infectious & dangerous for those who are vaccinated.
So I fail to see how your points are relevant from an overall risk-reduction point of view. Available evidence points towards vaccination as a superior risk reduction mechanism than the alternative (which I guess is do nothing? If not, please clarify) that you are proposing.
1) We don't know this is true. We know that people that have been vaccinated show much less symptoms and are therefore less likely to get a test which can explain the lower positive test rate.
2) Again to point 1
3) They will most likely spread it back to said vaccinated people who are less likely to get sick
4) Back to point 3
5) Has this been proved anywhere?
6) For the time being. The delta variant only mutated 12 months after the first infection
Last time I saw a number, vaccinations offer more than ~60% protection against infection with Delta altogether - did you run the numbers / see some study to arrive at "they're spreading it to more people", or is this a case of "it aligns with what I already thought / it justifies my current behavior so it must be true"?
Take out the word more and I will stand by what I said. Also you might have less chance of getting infected but you also are less likely to develop symptoms and so will most likely not isolate when you are infected.
You are trying to condense a very complex scenario into a very simple argument.
"With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7% (95% CI, 91.6 to 95.3) among persons with the alpha variant and 88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant. With the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 74.5% (95% CI, 68.4 to 79.4) among persons with the alpha variant and 67.0% (95% CI, 61.3 to 71.8) among those with the delta variant."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891
On the contrary, I'm actually tightening my estimation to "more than 67%" (95% CI @ 61.3%-71.8%). BNT162b2 is Pfizer, ChAdOx1 is AstraZeneca.
> (...) also are less likely to develop symptoms and so will most likely not isolate when you are infected.
Yup, so multiply those likelihoods and let me know what number you arrived at and what assumptions did you take so that we can compare some concrete estimations. Or share some article that tried to estimate this.
> You are trying to condense a very complex scenario into a very simple argument.
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise by some data, so far the only thing you're offering is an opinion.
What is a remedy in this context? Can you put this chicken scratch in real terms or are you simply so far into pseudoscience that you've disregarded language as well?
90% of ICU cases are people that think like you in my county. Almost all new severe cases and deaths are people who believe they are above the risk.
Tell me this, since you are a "healthy" individual do you also forego all cancer screening? Do you simply have such an attunement to your own body that you can feel any rogue cells as they form? Perhaps you rub yourself with quartz because you consider it to be a "good" crystal with healing properties.
the point of the vaccine for healthy people is to limit the spread of the virus. a virus turns your cells into virus making factories. immunized people have a lower risk of infection by the virus, so are less likely to become virus factories, and so are less likely to spread it.
Long COVID exists. Personally, it's always worried me more than the risk of death from COVID.
I think people who haven't had a chronic condition (including doctors) tend to underestimate the impact they can have on your life. Long COVID symptoms may not be "severe" or "serious" in a medical coding dictionary, but those terms in a medical dictionary are quite distinct from their everyday meanings.
The best evidence we have seems to be that somewhere very roughly around 20% of people who get infected (vaccinated or not) get it -- more if you're older, less if you're younger. Experts don't seem to be willing to say much about what fraction of those people will have symptoms forever, or to what extent (very happy to hear otherwise if somebody knows better!).
While case numbers are high again (in the UK) and with the more infectious and virulent Delta variant having replaced others, it's not totally clear to me that the risks from long COVID are even all that much changed since before the vaccines.
Yes, but, the reality is that everyone is going to get exposed to this virus eventually. Probably not that long from now, if you haven't yet. Pretending that evading it forever is possible, is not helping people to make wise decisions; I think many of the unvaccinated currently believe they can evade both the virus and the vaccine (they are incorrect). Eventually, long covid or not, we are all getting exposed. We should act accordingly.
One point is that the consequences of getting COVID are likely to become less serious over time as prevalence is controlled (via better vaccines, we hope, masks etc., if we're not fatalistic), better drugs are found.
Another important point is that currently, the risks of long COVID seem not at all well understood. "Unknown risk" is quite a different thing than "low risk" or "high risk". The lengths to which it makes sense for people to go to avoid it right now depend on those risks, so lying low seems quite sane to me.
A worse problem still is, I think, that "we're all going to get it" is a self-fulfilling prophecy: viruses have been unconquerable in the recent past, but this is 2021, we have incredible understanding of the mechanisms (no, not most of the details: they're not all worth knowing) that should give us incredible power over them at some point in the relatively near future (as in the next few decades). If the next few decades, why not the next few years? If we believe it's "inevitable", we'll make it so. (not to mention abandoning effective measures like masks)
I find it completely hard to believe with the way that I live my life that I am eventually in quotes going to get covid. I would have to go out of my way and inconvenience myself in some unfathomable change of daily routine and life for me to get covid eventually. So have fun making generalizations
As someone in a cognitive-dominant industry on an industry board, I'm baffled why more people aren't discussing long COVID-caused brain fog here. The chances of getting long COVID once infected are better than 1 in 3,000, the odds of a US residential structure fire, an insurable event. If you live in the US, then unless you have established gold-plated short- and long-term disability insurance, then long COVID-caused brain fog for an average HN participant is likely a career-altering diagnosis.
This is all I've been trying to reply to people about in this. I'm already disabled I already collect SSI I'm already basically agoraphobic and if I somehow magically get covid even though I don't put myself at risk I'm just going to be even more disabled just the odds are not in my favor for this at all and it's not my doing or my fault. But everyone here seems to just be ignoring this and I don't understand it I don't think all of the nerds on this website are actually as smart as they say they are and I think they're just good at rote memorization and repetition
People just aren't generally interested in small but severe risks like that. I've seen about as much long Covid discussion as I see carpal tunnel discussion.
Bunch of nerd programmers don't want to face reality is what that is. They want to be concerned about their kids that they can't take care of during the day because the place that they work for isn't doing remote anymore so they have to go into work or they need the kids to go to school because they can't pay attention because they are remoting. So you have that weirdness going on. So obviously the kids can't wear masks because that's just more hassle for them because they need to sit at home and they need to work and that's not their fault that they need to work it's just because we don't have basic income because no one wants basic income because everyone wants to justify themselves as needing to be productive and needing to be paid and needing to be worth something. I'm just going to go off a hacker news I'm sorry that I'm I've just been reading this whole entire thread all morning since like 7:00 a.m. EST
Perhaps because "always worried me more than the risk of death"? If so: this is because the evidence always seems to have said that the risk of long COVID has been at least an order of magnitude higher than the risk of death. Also, if you have no dependents, death involves less suffering: in the unlikely event it happens, you're out of the picture already after a short period of misery. On the other hand, chronic illness can come with a lifetime of suffering.
I'm not scared of Covid-19, I'm mostly concerned that as the numbers continue to rise and the hospitals/ICUs around me get more Covid-19 cases, it'll force the government to have to issue harsher measures to prevent the system from bursting at the seams because hospitals don't have limitless resources. People who don't want strict measures can't hand-wave that potential reality away.
At some point prior to saturation, hospitals and the public deserve to have unvaccinated COVID-19 patients (without a medical reason) turned away.
We can do one of two things as communities:
(1) Mandate vaccination for everyone, and provide everyone care
(2) Allow everyone the freedom to remain unvaccinated, and limit care
There's no other "normal" world where a highly communicable disease that causes a sufficient number of hospital cases exists and circulates in the human population.
* Where normal means "normal freedoms of movement" + "normal social interactions allowed" + "normal economic operation" + "hospitals aren't overwhelmed and have capacity for normal care"
It looks like flu (influenza) hospitalizations run at about 0.15% of total population, per year.
SARS-CoV-2, at 1-5%? Although that might be vs confirmed cases (?), which would muddle the numbers.
But suffice to say substantially higher. So I think there's an argument to be made for this being a COVID only measure (and probably measles, etc too).
IMHO, people are entitled to freedom regarding their choice to vaccinate.
But if they choose to exercise their freedom in ways that limit my freedom (via resulting lockdowns, mandatory masking, banned social gatherings, preventing businesses from operating normally, etc.), then that doesn't feel very fair.
They're externalizing the consequences of their decisions onto me, and the rest of society.
So yeah, IMHO, their decisions: their bill to pay. With their life, if necessary.
(But I may be biased, as I have family working ICU, triaging unvaccinated coronavirus deniers who show up at the ER, begging to be saved, who are then sapping care from non-COVID patients...)
I don't think anybody that's unvaccinated wants any restrictions either. So if it was proposed there would be no more restrictions on society would you still turn away unvaccinated people from hospital? Going off your logic they are no longer impacting your freedoms.
> But if they choose to exercise their freedom in ways that limit my freedom (via resulting lockdowns, mandatory masking, banned social gatherings, preventing businesses from operating normally, etc.), then that doesn't feel very fair.
You can easily make that argument for plenty of things though. Didn't care for education and wanted to party instead? No welfare for you! Overweight? Sorry, you're limiting my freedom via increased healthcare costs. Broke your leg while skiing? Sorry, you knew the risk, now live with it, insurance is for real accidents only.
All of those other examples have additional characteristics that cast the argument differently.
Education and obesity both have income and access issues. In that, if you are poor, you don't have access to the same options as those who are wealthy.
Skiing is actually the best example (Alaska aside!), given that it's a purely personal decision to engage in or not.
So hypothetical...
If hospital ICUs were filling with ski accident victims, to the extent they were unable to provide normal care to non-ski patients, and the economy was being impacted (businesses unable to operate, jobs lost, etc.) due to this ski pandemic, then you would say "Skiing is a personal choice that everyone deserves to make, and I have no problem with my tax and insurance dollars paying for skiers"?
> Education and obesity both have income and access issues.
Some, but not primarily, so it still stands. I'm sure you can find similar reasons with vaccine-anxiety. People aren't choosing to be afraid of vaccines "just because", there's something going on that terrifies them.
> then you would say "Skiing is a personal choice that everyone deserves to make, and I have no problem with my tax and insurance dollars paying for skiers"?
Yes, because that's the principle the system is built on.
I mean, I think lots of people somewhat consciously make lots of terrible decisions all the time, and the consequences of their decisions do cost giant sums of money that I have to pay lots of taxes for and that cannot be used for people who face truly accidental hardship (think extreme skiing vs walking and a suitcase dropping from a plane).
But we've generally decided that that's totally fine, and I've accepted that and I pay taxes to make sure they don't have to face the consequences of their decisions. We cannot say "that's fine for everything, but not here" if we operate on a principle. It's either "you're on your own" or it's not, but it has to be consistent.
> We cannot say "that's fine for everything, but not here" if we operate on a principle
We already say that, for smoking.
And through mandatory school vaccinations (DTaP, varicella, polio, MMR, meningococcal).
Which is a big part of my point. What we claim our system to be (Freedom! With guaranteed care! With equal rights to opt out!) and reality (We won't pay for certain dumb things you do. And we'll give you basic guaranteed care and probably not let you die) are two different things.
Which is the main thing that's shredding our health care efficiency in terms of per capita GDP spending.
"We" don't, but maybe you do. I'm from Germany, the only time smoking/alcoholism/substance abuse comes up in a relevant way is when you need a transplant and there are multiple recipients and too few donors.
And it's not a punishment for what you previously did, it's because of a prediction of what you're going to do, e.g. an alcoholic who has shown no sign of compliance will probably not get the liver if there's a non-alcoholic who also needs it and does what it takes to get/stay healthy.
Deaf people whose condition could be cured/massively improved with implants are free to choose not to, and won't lose their disability status, it doesn't turn into a choice/hobby just because there's a choice in fixing it.
I'm not sure that's what makes healthcare in the US so expensive. Again, we do it and we spend significantly less than the US. The country is much more densely populated though, university is free and physicians' income is much closer to the average than in the US.
We (US) do in that national law allows a surcharge for smokers.
States may (and some do) override and decrease this, but it's allowed as the default. Notably, that and age are some of the few factors allowed to influence insurance pricing.
Regarding transplant, my understanding is people are transplanted on (1) current health state (worse = higher priority) & (2) ability to comply with post-transplant protocols.
So someone who burned their liver out with alcolism and is very sick, but makes a good case that they'll be able to stay sober post-transplant, gets an organ over a less-ill, sober victim of circumstance (e.g. dehydration/heat injury or something).
One of the key features I've heard that allow other countries to drive down health care costs is a regulatory requirement that approved treatments (pharmaceutical, surgical, etc) demonstrate greater efficacy and/or lower cost. In the US, the FDA approves on efficacy only.
End result being that in the US you can reformulate a medicine, try your best to sell it for $1,000 a pill, even when a cheaper alternative that produces the same results is available.
Health systems operate by prioritizing, via an imperfect system, patients based on need. If you run a red light and slam into another car, but you're more injured than the other person, you will be prioritized even though you were culpable. I think that is the appropriate, ethical, and practical approach.
However, the calculus changes when the health system is at or over capacity. Now, if two people come in and both are critically ill, but you only have room for one, I'm ok with choosing the one that was vaccinated. Likewise with many other situations and illnesses. If you cause a car accident, and both you and the person you hit require the ICU, but there is only one spot open, I'm ok with the person that got hit getting the spot.
Now, I'm assuming you are jaded like me and know that actual answer is probably the person with the most money tends to get the treatment, but that's another bitter, cynical discussion.
Here's my current level of jade -- listening to repeated stories about hospital staff having to argue with a patient's family (all unvaccinated) about why they can't visit the patient (also unvaccinated) in the COVID ward, when care is being withdrawn due to organ failure.
At some point, it's like, "Jesus. Just stop talking, and please let me help you not kill yourself."
For reference, when I looked up the numbers, influenza hospitalizations (estimated, total annual US) vary from around 150,000 to 550,000, depending on the year and strain.
No. Everyone deserves medical care, even if you and I consider the decisions that led to that care to be illogical. You are proposing a slippery slope. Currently you could say that we should turn the unvaccinated away but why not the obese? If someone is obese, generally it is a personal choice much like the unvaccinated. What about homosexuals that contract AIDS. I am all for vaccines and I even support businesses requiring their employees be vaccinated. But I am very much not for beginning to play the game where your lifestyle choices determine if we provide treatment. Everyone deserves to be treated to the best of the hospitals ability.
Yes. Everything about health insurance (which is what we're basically talking about) is a slippery slope.
Our health care system is unsustainable. And it's unsustainable because of one very simple reason: we want people to have absolute freedom and an absolute right to emergency care.
I don't think those two are compatible. I don't think they've ever been, but historically that contradiction has been papered over with others' money (either in the form of your insurance premiums or your tax dollars).
Cue present situation.
We have a scenario where there is a (1) free, (2) available, (3) well-tolerated, (4) effective preventative option in vaccines.
If someone chooses to remain unvaccinated, without medical reason, that is a pure personal choice.
And moreover, unlike in normal scenarios, their making that choice directly burdens everyone else.
Economically, through damage to normal economic functioning. And medically, through consuming limited hospital capacity.
These arguments could be made for other conditions (e.g. obesity), but in a much murkier and more tortured manner. COVID is crystal clear: if you can be vaccinated, and you choose not to be, you are imposing a greater burden on society.
Last I heard, the anti-vax crowd was big on personal responsibility. So why shouldn't individuals pay that debt of their own making?
I hear what you are saying but I can see this spiraling out of control. What happens when global warming and over population is considered to be a dire threat to the continued existence of human life? Do we allow hospitals to refuse services to women on their third child or men / women that refuse to be sterilized after the government approved x children. Seems far fetched but our definition of clear and present dangers can shift over time to fit the scenario something similar has already happened in China. I am very much not for allowing institutions to make those sort of decisions regarding the care provided to people as entities don't usually relinquish power once granted.
Edit: I am ok with triaging the vaccinated over the unvaccinated in a scenario with limited space as mentioned by another poster below.
By this logic, we should also turn away the morbidly obese, all smokers, anyone who injured themselves while participating in risky activities (e.g, skiing), and so on and so forth.
Cases are more than doubling every 2 weeks. Hospitalizations are up every day.
If the numbers were flat maybe you would have an argument, but I strongly disagree that we need to "learn to live" with a situation that is rapidly getting worse. I do not want to learn to live with full hospitals and oxygen shortages, as is currently happening in parts of the US.
I think the people who don't like that opinion, although very, very loud online, are not actually in the majority. But, it sure sounds like it online though.
Maybe because the vaccines are looking like they aren't going to be be as effective as they were originally made out to be, but I still think we need to return to normal at some point.
They are as effective as we thought they were. Delta is just more virulent than previous strains and we're at barely 50% vaccination rate. We're still waiting on safe doses for children and the millions of stubborn people who think public health is a personal decision.
To be fair, expecting reasonable responses from Twitter on any subject is a bit like panning for gold in an open sewer. The platform's whole premise is compressing things to the point it's the place on the internet nuance goes to die.
That is only unpopular when it serves as an excuse for being against mitigation measures. Those same people are clogging the hospitals, diverting medications from people who genuinely need them, and raising the noise level for real advice to overcome. Everyone wants to go back to normal. The people who from the beginning were contrary just for the lulz are ruining our return to normal.
I seem to recall them walking back the conclusion that dogs do not transmit well, but don't have the reference at hand. I wonder if they were actually mistaken at first, or if the virus has simply evolved in the direction of being better transmitted by dogs?
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up concluding that pigs can catch and transmit as well, eventually. Birds does seem to be more likely to hold true, as I don't know of any non-mammals that have been found susceptible yet.
I dunno what you're on about, dogs do not realistically transmit covid. Their respiratory system is more different to humans than a cat's. Ferrets and other animals with extremely similar respiratory systems are known reservoirs and have already been culled in some countries.
>Good article, but doesn't mention the other reason that covid-19 is never going completely away: animal reservoirs.
You realize there are thousands and thousands of viruses that are circulating every day for billions of years. New epidemic or pandemic can happen anytime anywhere. You can only mitigate it not prevent it.
>It is implausible that it will ever cease to have an animal reservoir, especially given the finding in Canada of 30% of white-tailed deer having it.
>Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs, I don't believe there is any case of eliminating it.
Exactly
>But, like vaccines can teach the immune system how to respond more intelligently (and less self-destructively) to covid-19, hopefully society can learn to respond more intelligently, and less self-destructively, to the fact that it's always in circulation.
For example society and in particular Institutes of Virology should take extra security precautions when experimenting with gain of function viruses.
How does covid transmit to wild animals like deer that have almost no interactions with humans ? The transmission chain must be very long. I'd appreciate any links or resources to read more.
Perhaps we can learn to be more mindful of our interactions with other animals, wear masks in public spaces or public transport, and hopefully WFH becomes a permanent option.
It seems that I stepped on many nerves, please, feel free to disagree or argue.
It seems likely that they were drinking sewage-contaminated water. Ingestion of contaminated water is the source of a staggering variety of illnesses for both humans and animals. Souce: I work in environmental monitoring.
Which towns in Canada are dumping untreated sewage into the water? As far as I'm aware every province has an environmental ministry that doesn't grant exemptions from sewage treatment. So if it's still ongoing...
I don't think that's perfectly done. I was hiking on the North Shore in Vancouver and there's a sign over a stream warning about untreated sewage. If it's a problem in the one of the biggest and wealthiest cities, I can easily see it being an issue in smaller towns.
In very rural areas, especially on reservations, I believe water and sewage treatment is an ongoing issue.
Thanks for the info, that is genuinely surprising. And Victoria is not some poor town either. I guess there wasn't much incentive to improve given the consequences of inaction were dumped literally on someone else's doorstep.
This might be specific to very old cities, but New York City has a combined sewage and storm water system. Sewage ("black water") and rainwater from the streets goes through the same output processing. When it rains a lot, the system can't cope, and the water (sewage and all) is discharged into the Atlantic.
As to "how does covid transmit to wild animals...", I think it is an excellent question, but I don't think we have a definitive answer. Clearly there is something about the transmission we don't understand (which suggests why current measures to halt the spread such as lockdowns, masks, etc. don't seem to work well).
As for the "stepped on many nerves", I think your comment was interpreted as meaning "we should stay at home and wear masks forever", whereas the general patience for such measures is wearing thin. My guess is that part of the reason for a rising rate of violent crime in the U.S. in the last twelve months is simply more people with rising frustration, such that they are more willing to resort to violence.
The replies I received are mostly insufficient or very handwavey.
Interactions with humans transmitting the Delta variant, in very extreme (NB shortest) cases need upwards of 50-60 seconds, where common transmissions need longer. Which suggests that people need quite long 1-1 interactions with multiple animals to spread it, which to me appears very unlikely.
This belief is based on research that supported that covid was unlikely to happen until the first super-spreader event in the wet market.
Furthermore, given the symptoms observed in humans, if we are to assume similar symptoms in the wild animals, then odds are these animals become easy(er) pray, which reduces odds of mass transmission. Finally, even if wild animals spend a lot of time in 'close proximity', they are constantly out-doors and in much larger distance than humans sitting in public transport, which suggests there are super-spreader "events" or viral-sources that dump virus particles on wild animals and allow the virus to enter the population.
So I do agree that there may be something we are overlooking, perhaps related to waste-water, but this is why I am asking. Even if it doesn't matter anymore wrt covid, it matters for the future.
As for the people that misinterpret the noun 'option' accompanied with the adjective 'permanent', they need to understand that the ability for those willing to WFH, will help deal with covid, reduce road congestion, gas emissions, time wasted in commute, and ease measurements. I am not advocating for permanent lockdowns or anything alike. But it is common knowledge that flu infections have reduced significantly, and masks can help deal with smog in cities, as is done in cities in Asia.
> Furthermore, given the symptoms observed in humans, if we are to assume similar symptoms in the wild animals
I am not a biologist, nor a doctor, but I think this assumption is a little bit too much. We know that coronavirus does not create the same symptoms as the ones observed in humans for some animals (see bats for example) as their immune system is not like ours. So the conclusion: "symptoms in wild animals are similar with humans" is probably false.
Furthermore, if the corona virus does not exhibit the same symptoms which are a consequence of an infection of the respiratory tract, then transmission will be very different and probably significantly lower which does not fit the data, i.e. mass infections in the wild.
> How does covid transmit to wild animals like deer that have almost no interactions with humans ?
I've been within a few feet of wild deer plenty of times in my life. Humans have a lot more interaction with wild animals than you would think once you move outside of urban areas.
There's literally a market in Brian Head Utah where a bull moose hangs out on the front porch most of the day. I'm sure there are plenty of "wild" animals with petting-zoo-like relationships with random people. This can't be the only one.
You are assuming that it was humans that infected the deer, while it could have easily been another wild animal.
Wild animals are not commonly tested for covid-19, but those that have been have seen widespread infection. ...which means most populations of mammals and possibly birds are infected as well.
...so the deer could have caught it from any number of other animals in the wild - or more likely, from their droppings.
Think about it like online ads. Even though you've never clicked on one and don't know anyone who clicks on them, the market is worth hundreds of billions. There are so many novel pathogens floating around the world that if humans are exposed to 0.01% of them we'll still see regular epidemics and occasional pandemics.
It would only take a handful of transmissions to a community to have something like COVID spread like wildfire through the deer population. They may not interact with humans much, but only one carrier could infect several others and then that cascades to the entire population. Deer don't get vaccinated and don't wear masks.
The good news is that even if COVID is running rampant through the deer populations they shouldn't pass them on to humans very often, so if humans are good at identifying and stopping isolated outbreaks then we can live with the risk.
Animal reservoirs are also responsible for helping to breed illnesses that are able to evade our attempts to stop their proliferation, like with antibiotics, antivirals, and vaccines.
It's not the society that we need to worry about. In the beginning a good chunk of society was ringing alarms to close borders, but the economy was too important to protect.
> We know that dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, white-tailed deer, a gorilla, and a tiger have been found to have been infected with covid-19.
How do we know this? PCR test? At what threshold? Or, antigen test? Is there a guinea pig antigen test for COVID?
I'm suspicious of this reasoning due to the apparently complicated and necessary natural pathway this virus used to become infectious to humans in the first place. This apparently doesn't apply anymore?
> Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs
The contact with those reservoirs needed to be much more than casual in order for infections to pass. I'm not sure this logic applies to a SARS virus.
This is mostly irrelevant from my understanding. Of the few diseases that humanity has eradicated, one is found in wild animals. Animal resevoirs are simply not the problem.
> Airborne diseases with wild animal reservoirs cannot be eradicated, and never have been.
Only two diseases have been eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest (a viral disease that infects cattle and various wild animals). The latter had both airborne transmission and wild animal reservoirs.
In some Countries, one of the current common shouts is "vaccinate everything". It seems that in part, this is to relieve the hospitals, and in part, to reduce contagion as much as you can (the transmission rate in the vaccinated is lower or, in the exceptions emerged, resolves faster).
Now, let us suppose that cats may be vehicles. "Vaccinate everyone" and "cats do not matter" is inconsistent.
As far as I understand, MIRS is continuously reappearing in humans due to reservoirs in camel populations, and it's only able to be controlled du to vigilant monitoring in vulnerable areas.
That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK. There isn't really a next step after having vaccinated the population, it is "steady state". So do they want us to have these restrictions (countries you can't travel to, endless testing, mask requirements) forever?
Since no one under 16 has been vaccinated yet, about 70% of the population is vaccinated (44M out of 67M). That might be barely enough for herd immunity for some diseases, but the case numbers in the UK are still very high and trending back upward, showing that this isn't enough for herd immunity for Covid.
Hospitalization rates are also back up to significantly higher than they were this time last year.
And that's with the restrictions you're referring to. So, no, I don't think that it would make sense for the UK to just go right back to normal just yet, at least until the vaccinations rates are high enough that you see the case rate go back down and stay down.
I'm almost sure 100% vaccination rate with the vaccines currently available won't change much. I hope I'm wrong. But there already are cases apparently confirming this.
IMHO we should just return to normal, consider this a new kind of flu and deal with the fact it's more deadly. I always knew there is a chance a flu can kill me one day. I'm Ok with the fact the chance is higher now.
My personal (apparently risky, I don't recommend it to others) strategy is living an active social life to be in regular contact with the virus (while testing every now and then to make sure I don't spread it) so my immune system keeps on producing the natural antibodies (I also test for every couple of months).
Returning to normal is a terrible idea when COVID patients are overwhelming hospitals across the world. How can things be normal if our healthcare systems are nearing collapse?
You might be willing to accept the risk of getting sick on your behalf, but by advocating a return to 'normal' before we have the capabilities to deal with this virus, you are advocating for putting even more stress on healthcare systems across the globe already on the verge of failure. There are patients in heavily-impacted areas who cannot access healthcare for other life-or-death concerns because hospitals are crumbling under the workload of COVID cases.
The article even states this; COVID is likely to reach endemic status eventually, but we are still nowhere near that. Ignoring it will have enormous costs on vulnerable populations -- even more than it already has.
This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is. Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80%. [0]
If we look at Israel, which has a very high vaccination rate, we see that they're supposedly running out of hospital space. [1] But the article linked doesn't say _anything about their actual numbers atm_ and points to a fiscal problem rather than a manpower problem.
There was a recent Science Magazine article that states that 13% of the hospitalized-and-vaccinated group are under 60. That amounts to 39 people in a country of 9 million. [2]
I've asked this before both here and elsewhere: If these vaccines aren't "good enough," what is? At what point does this become "zero COVID" in that "nobody can ever die from this disease again?"
[0]: this may have changed -- things are changing quickly -- so I'd be curious if you have any recent (<1 week old) information on this.
Is every hospital getting overwhelmed though? I keep seeing reports of staff getting fired or quitting because of vaccine requirement. Maybe I'm getting fake news?
> I keep seeing reports of staff getting fired or quitting because of vaccine requirement. Maybe I’m getting fake news?
There are vaccine requirements being adopted some places, and there are departures related to it. But if you are seeing news suggesting that that is the major source of capacity strain (or even the major source of COVID-related causes of people departing healthcare jobs), it is, at least, distorted news.
Ok. At least somebody can exercise reason when necessary.
By the way (I believe that's is nonsensical but I also believe I am probably wrong - I am far from an expert), what's the point of force-vaccinating people who have obviously contacted the infection on many occasions and still are Okay? To me this indicates their immune systems are doing a great job and we should rather avoid teaching them (their perfectly competent immune systems) how they should do it. And I don't know about any evidence of vaccinated people being less contagious than those naturally immune.
> To me this indicates their immune systems are doing a great job and we should rather avoid teaching them (their perfectly competent immune systems) how they should do it.
This makes no sense from an immunological perspective, and sounds like one of those pseudoscientific ideas that "natural" immunity is somehow stronger than "vaccination" immunity.
A vaccine is nothing more than exposing the immune system to the antigens. If their immune systems are already geared up to fight Covid, they will simply respond to the vaccine as another Covid infection and fight it accordingly.
As for whether there is any benefit, there absolutely is. Multiple exposure events greatly increase the storage of the antibodies in the memory cells of the immune system. This is why most vaccines require at least two shots, and why the CDC is now recommending a third booster shot for some people.
Plenty of studies show that the immunity of people who are vaccinated is stronger than those who were infected naturally (e.g. [1]), and that the immunity of people who have had Covid is significantly more robust after subsequent vaccination (e.g. [2], [3]).
2. https://apnews.com/article/science-health-coronavirus-pandem... ("The survivors who never got vaccinated had a significantly higher risk of reinfection than those who were fully vaccinated, even though most had their first bout of COVID-19 just six to nine months ago.")
>This makes no sense from an immunological perspective, and sounds like one of those pseudoscientific ideas that "natural" immunity is somehow stronger than "vaccination" immunity.
> Yet data from Israel suggests that the vaccinated are six times more likely to get delta
Ok, well I've cited two studies that say the opposite, and one of those studies looked at antibody responses over time from matched individuals. The "on the ground" results in Israel are completely confounded by who is an isn't vaccinated, with at risk people (including healthcare workers) being significantly more likely to be vaccinated.
> it's been known for a while now that ...
Oh my. Did you read that study? It shows nothing of the sort. It is a mathematical Markov simulation of what happens assuming natural infection is stronger than vaccines.
The kicker is in the discussion:
> Under the plausible assumption that protection against influenza infection lasts longer after naturally acquired infection than after vaccination, we show that ...
This is literally begging the question. The authors make the assumption that naturally-acquired immunity is stronger. Then they write a model that repeatedly exposes people given that assumption. Then they "show" that, surprise surprise..... people with naturally-acquired immunity catch the flu less frequently.
> Yet data from Israel suggests that the vaccinated are six times more likely to get delta than people with natural immunity:
In Israel, as almost everywhere else (other than early in the pandemic with nursing homes in many places), implementation of and compliance with vaccination and other COVID countermeasures had been strongest among the elderly and immunocompromised; at the same time, COVID infection has been more likely to lead to death in the elderly. So, the population most likely to be infected if exposed has a higher baseline vaccination rate and a smaller rate of prior COVID infection, both due to countermeasures and inverse survivorship effects. Without controlling for that, which bare population numbers like this don’t do, you have no idea what the relative immunity effect of prior infection vs. vaccination is.
The UK: in local areas, patients had to be diverted sometimes hundreds of miles to a hospital with space. all non emergency hospital care was stopped, and some emergency routine care was delayed.
Belgium was overwhelmed.
The issue is this, we can't just not admit the over 60s. even if we did, that would only free up 50% capacity (ie you could go one more cycle of exponential growth, doubling every n weeks/days)[source https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...]
filling hospitals means that the resources used to treat both sudden hospitalizations and long term are diverted. so car accident/drinking/heavy sports/DIY injuries have worse outcomes, and cancer outcomes drop off a cliff.
if the UK manages to keep the total number of patients in hospital with covid to less than 7-10k that would be a brilliant outcome for winter. we are currently at ~6k, and its still summer.
The issue is there are not enough trained doctors and nurses. They take at least 8 years to train. that's the main constraint. Suitable beds can be made up in a number of weeks (see china and the "nightinggale hospitals") but if there is no staff, they are pointless
> you could go one more cycle of exponential growth, doubling every n weeks/days
I'm not sure a big percent- of people is prone to hard covid. I tend to believe the majority of people has already went through it asymptomatically/easily and so will the majority of those who still hasn't.
Exponential growth in positive tests doesn't imply infinite (limited only by the size of the population itself) exponential growth of severe cases or deaths.
> Exponential growth in positive tests doesn't imply infinite (limited only by the size of the population itself) exponential growth of severe cases or deaths.
Correct!
but when in the growth phase we can't know when it will stop. We have a fixed[1] upper bound on the number of people we can deal with at one go. so when we see we are getting close, we have to take drastic action.
We know that testing in the uk is a proxy for actual infection, it tends to favour symptomatic as its "self selecting". The ONS survey is more accurate but has a significant lag.
I really hope that you are correct about asymptomatic. but we can't be sure, yet.
This is untrue. In New Zealand we locked down a reasonable amount for the information we have on the case. With the current lockdown, there was a single case with no known link to the border which had traveled around the country while infectious. Knowing just this and that every case in managed isolation (iirc) was is the Delta variant, we went into lockdown.
Also, '5 lockdown' is misrepresentive. We can see on this page
https://covid19.govt.nz/alert-levels-and-updates/history-of-...
that while some lockdowns were very restrictive, country wide, and long (2.5 months), most were short and regional (with other regions maybe going to lvl 2 alert)
Definitely not more disruptive in New Zealand over the entire course of the pandemic and also we have suffered 600,000 fatalities as a result of the virus.
I'm virtually certain that the pandemic disrupted everyday life in NZ more than it did in Florida. Now more people died, but Florida demonstrates that even at the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic it's perfectly possible to live a lockdown free life post-Covid without society collapsing.
I know many nurses and doctors who work at hospitals in and around the NYC tristate area -- they all say capacity is well under the normal rates for them.
Note: last April (2020), they said it had exploded due to COVID-19.
This is just your bias showing, nothing more. COVID has been shown to be seasonal and to hit different parts of the world at different times of the year. Southern states appear to get hardest hit in the summer, while the colder Northern states are harder-hit in the winter.
Florida has the second-oldest population in the U.S., but it's death rate per 100,000 is average among the states. NYC and NJ are two states with the highest death rate per 100,000.
What is a covid patient? One that tested positive and is in the hospital for something else? Or one that is actually sick from covid? Because absolutely none of these articles I read clarify that tidbit and it is very important.
Positive covid tests require a hell of a lot more hospital overhead to deal with, even if they don’t have symptoms and are in for something else. It could very well be the case that this is a self made problem. We very well could be artificially overloading hospitals because we dictate that every positive test, regardless of symptoms, invokes massive overhead.
And again, every article I read never clarifies this. In fact many conflate “people with covid but there for something else” and “people sick with covid”.
I am fully inclined to believe that this hospital shortage is a self inflicted problem. If this was literally a hospital full of people choking on their own ooze, the media would be all over it like moths to a flame.
> What is a covid patient? One that tested positive and is in the hospital for something else? Or one that is actually sick from covid? Because absolutely none of these articles I read clarify that tidbit and it is very important.
The stories on the reddits I suggested are all pretty much the same. Patient comes in struggling to breath, tests positive for covid, ends up with blood clots or pneumonia which pushes them into the ICU.
Something that may be a little confusing as well is what does "full" mean. Both morally and legally, it is very difficult for a hospital to turn someone away. Rather than turn someone away, the hospital will have new people wait, attempt to make more room, and provide less care to more people. This leads to the question: Is a hospital full if they're stashing patients in hallways and providing hallway care? Within an ICU, typical care is either one nurse to two patients or one to one depending on the reason for the ICU stay. At the moment, the ratios are 3-4 to 1, which is not the standard of care, but the best they can do. Does this count as a hospital being full?
On a more personal note, my wife is an ICU physician. At the moment, I'm writing this from a hotel room because I started traveling with her to help alleviate the stress from her work. On this trip, she will do seven days of twelve hour shifts in a row. The hospital has asked us to stay for longer, but we're exhausted and have work elsewhere. This sort of thing does not happen during flu season, so I will assert strongly that we are still not close to the realm of normal.
In a direct answer to your manpower question, this hospital does not have enough staff. They don't have enough physicians and they don't have enough nurses. Recently, this particular hospital acquired multiple new ECMO units, which do absolutely help with care. They can't use them. They don't have the nurses.
As one more anecdote, a friend of my wife who is also an ICU physician called the other day with a story from her unit. She just admitted a patient who spent six days waiting in the ER with COVID. They had no available, staffed beds until then.
Now, to be sure, I am just another voice on the internet. You can choose to believe me or not and that's fine. I will say that getting news from what actually occurs in the hospital is difficult. Reporters are people too and they're not necessarily trained to understand the nuance of hospital reality. That doesn't mean what they report isn't useful, but it may be frustratingly incomplete.
Some questions that may help with any personal investigation:
1. What are the number of staffed bed available in the hospital? Beds are different than staffed beds, but they are sometimes used synonymously. Right now, with the lack of staff, it may not be.
2. Are the ICUs in the Level 1, 2, or 3 trauma centers full? Trauma center designation gives information about the number and type of staff that a hospital is required to keep available 24-hours a day. Generally speaking, the large trauma centers have better staff and better equipment. Even if there is an ICU bed available in a regional medical center, it doesn't mean it can provide the care required. Simply, they may not have the equipment or specialists required for care. As long as the large hospitals in the cities are full then transfer is not possible and overall medical care in that region is reduced.
That, I don't know. Since we've been together, prior to COVID, I never recall her mentioning they had trouble getting nurses. If there was a particularly busy night, the nurse manager had a number of nurses on-call who would then come in to staff beds. Now, that's impossible. They're not there. On top of that, the nursing staff calls out sick far more often now than before.
Are these difficulties because there are fewer nurses on the market, the existing staff are burned out, there are better opportunities to work locums, or some other factor? Not sure. Mostly, it's to say that there was never a conversation between us on the lack of nurses prior to COVID.
As far as physicians, also not sure. I will say that demand was consistent prior to COVID, but now demand for both temporary and permanent positions is extremely high. They won't stop calling. Something to understand here is that the supply of new critical care physicians takes a very long time to ramp up, four years of medical school, four years of residency, and two years of fellowship. They're not easy to replace.
As a final side note, whether they do or not, they would all like to quit. They're burned out. This has gone on too long. The families dealing with end of life care are often abusive. Virtually all of their patients are unvaccinated, which means that this is preventable. They're frustrated that their professional opinion has very little impact on the public discussion of COVID, especially when they deal with the issue so intimately and they spent a good portion of their life dedicated to understanding and treating the issues behind illness.
Those articles never define what “covid hospitalization” means. Is it people in the hospital because of covid or is it people that test positive for covid and are there for something else? There is a big difference between the two. Covid positive test results probably invoke a lot of extra overhead even if the patient has no symptoms and this could be a self made problem.
If someone is COVID positive, then they are likely contagious even if they have no symptoms. This means that they must be isolated from the other patients that do not have COVID or else there is a high risk of infection spreading to other patients. In places like the ICU, where all of the patients are critically ill, any additional infection will likely kill them.
Isolation from other patients means that they need other rooms and other nurses. It is not safe to have a nurse go from a clean room to a COVID room repeatedly if they don't have enough PPE to fully gown between rooms. Otherwise, there is cross contamination. Currently, there is not enough PPE. If a hospital has the staff, they will also isolate the physicians to either COVID or non-COVID wards to prevent cross contamination. Often, they do not have the physicians, so there is a time cost to constantly changing PPE. Time spent changing PPE means time not taking care of patients.
When a patient dies in a COVID room, the room must be cleaned. This takes time and staff. Failure to do so can also lead to increased infections.
To be clear, infections that spread in the hospital are very well studied. It's the reason why hospitals have very strict rules about things like hand hygiene. It's one of those inspections that can cost a hospital a lot of money.
That's a long way to say, it's not a self made problem. A patient that comes in for something like a heart stent who is also COVID positive is far more work than one who does not have COVID. I do not know if these news articles are referring to these cases as COVID hospitalizations. In some sense, it doesn't impact the broader issue: In a good number of states, hospitals are effectively full. The reason behind this issue is unvaccinated people catching COVID.
It is a self made problem. Imagine if we tested people for every infectious disease and put them into crazy protocol-land even if they don’t have symptoms. Nothing would ever get done!
We need to accept that vaccines exist and work. It shouldn’t matter if the dude in the hospital has a positive covid test because everybody in that room can be vaccinated if they want to.
This mass testing created a bunch more problems than it solved.
The difference between COVID and something like cancer is that cancer is not highly contagious. COVID is. Further, it's contagious and deadly. That's why it requires special care. COVID is also not the only disease where these kind of precautions are taken. Another one is TB. Now, there are other diseases that are contagious, but not right now. For example, syphilis is both contagious and deadly. However, you're not going to catch syphilis when you're sitting next to someone who is positive. With COVID, you potentially will. That's why they have to test for it in the hospital.
Now, I will agree that vaccines exist and work. In the sense that there are people who choose to refuse vaccination, I will also agree it is a self made problem. However, this affects everyone to a high degree and not just the vaccinated.
Case in point, my wife and I are vaccinated. If she gets COVID, she most assuredly won't die, but she can't work in the ICU. She would risk getting her patients infected even though she is vaccinated. That means the hospital loses a physician in short supply. They're going to test you in the hospital because they can't afford you getting their staff sick.
This also affects you. You're vaccinated. However, say you're appendix bursts, you may or may not be able to get into the ER before you become septic. Yes, the ER will triage based on need. However, if there's no beds there's no beds and you will not be seen.
However, to reiterate, the hospital will always test you for diseases that they believe will affect their staff. You come in with respiratory symptoms. You're getting a COVID test. Having surgery? They'll test you for HIV. It's a protection issue. COVID is a pain because airborne infections are hard to contain.
Stop counting cases. We already know covid is endemic and isn’t going away. Why continue to test every patient for it? What purpose does it serve? Anybody that wants to be protected can be with a simple vaccine.
Anecdotal, but an acquaintance here in Florida had to wait over 14 hours to get an emergency appendectomy (and over 12 hours to get from check-in to a bed in the ER) recently, due to both COVID protocols as well as COVID workload.
The bottlenecks here aren't total capacity, they are (in order of importance) 1. the number of vents, 2. the number of nurses with ICU level training, and 3. the number of ICU beds. The total number of hospital beds doesn't even factor in.
Vaccinated Covid patients are NOT overwhelming hospitals. LA county isn't that extraordinarily highly vaccinated. It's a county much denser and with a greater population than a lot of countries in Europe. There's been <4000 fully vaccinated people in 8 months admitted to the hospital. Only 36 have died. Not a lot more have needed ventilators.
This is a blip in the ocean of hospitalizations in LA county.
It does sound like they are on the verge of collapse...
"Tallia says his hospital is 'managing, but just barely,' at keeping up with the increased number of sick patients in the last three weeks. The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and its outpatient clinics have no appointments available.”
"Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that UAB Hospital cancelled elective surgeries scheduled for Thursday and Friday of last week to make more beds available"
“We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” says Camins. “The emergency room was very crowded, both with sick patients who needed to be admitted”
"In CA… several hospitals have set up large 'surge tents' outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat … patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.”
“Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread… Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots to triage the hordes of… patients.”
“We’ve never had so many patients,” said Adrian Cotton, chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County.”
...but then again, maybe not. These are all quotes from 2018, flu season.
> How can things be normal if our healthcare systems are nearing collapse?
Why are healthcare systems unable to scale (horizontally or vertically) to meet demand unlike every other industry in the world? That should be a red flag that you don't have a robust system when it is unable to scale. We've had nearly 2 years since the start of covid to make healthcare systems more robust. Why haven't we? Maybe we should focus on that instead of telling people to mask up from cradle to grave.
Imagine if the computer industry were the same and we asked people to limit their internet time for 2+ years because the servers and routers that make up the internet were always on the brink of collapse? Like... wouldn't we just build more servers and routers until demand could be met?
This is a pretty ignorant suggestion. It's like saying that my company should dramatically increase its software output without hiring software engineers. These are people, not robots. You must hire more skilled labor if you wish to expand the capacity which requires that labor.
If you're saying we should fill that labor requirement with low-skill medical technicians, you're misunderstanding the needs of the hospital. If you are ending up in the ER or ICU with covid, or any other cause, you are beyond the help of an at-home med tech, which is why you're at the hospital in the first place.
We get more efficiency out of nearly every sector of the economy. We grow more food despite an ever decreasing number of farmers.
The problem is that the incentives aren't aligned with health care primarily due to third party payer system and onerous regulations.
You ever wonder why there is a line of people outside of urgent care every day to get tested for covid? Presumably, there are cheap tests that be administered at home without having to see a nurse or doctor. Or if you really can't do that you can train someone how to administer tests in a few hours and have that as a service. But in the US at least, it's nearly impossible to do these things. It took until April 2021 for the FDA to approve at home covid tests, and they're still not popular or available (at least I haven't seen them)
Medicine is a field notorious for its gatekeeping.
But a lot can be done. In Italy during the height of the pandemic, they "emergency graduated" 5th (or maybe 6th ... near the end) year medical students. I really wonder if there's any data whether they provided worse care after some on-the-job training than "fully educated" practitioners.
It's not gatekeeping when you're talking about life or death emergency medical care. Taking students out of school isn't a solution, it's an act of desperation.
If I have a private pilots license and the pilot of my commercial aircraft is incapacitated, sure I'm technically more qualified than the others on the aircraft to try to perform an emergency landing. But that doesn't mean American Airlines should be expanding their routes because I could land a plane.
duuuuuuuuude do you have any idea how labor intensive care for ICU patients is? ICU patients can't move. Requires staff to turn them so they don't get bed sores and to prone them stomach down for lung function.
If the ICU patient can't breathe on a vent and are able to secure ECMO, the ECMO specialist ratio is ideally 1:1. Under a crush of patients maybe 1:2 patients. A 1:3 ratio is risking all the patients under that specialist's care because the patients are all too tenuous. Let me reiterate and restate: 3 ECMO patients are too much for a single ES to support.
The ECMO specialist isn't the only person caring for the patient. There is the ICU nursing staff, the pulmonary therapist, plus the actual pulmonary doctors, the renal doctors, plus plus plus. You are talking decades if not a hundred+ years of study just to take care of a single ICU patient.
That's not an option. Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA.
The only way to deal with this pandemic is to vaccinate as many people as possible. It's the best way that we know of to reduce spread of, and the effects of catching covid-19.
> Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA.
This has always been a systemic problem of how hard medical education and license are to get. I'm pretty sure medical personnel can be trained to reasonable (mediocre but better than nothing) skill level much faster and for much cheaper than it normally is.
Yeah, if the problem is lack of staff in COVID wards, just start COVID-specific training programs and hire COVID-specific personnel, who are only allowed to work with COVID patients. That should reduce training time a lot.
This approach might sound like some completely out of the box, untested and extreme approach, yet it’s completely standard in industries that are not as heavily regulated as medicine is. Alas, healthcare has its Rules and Procedures and Best Practices, and as a result, everyone else must adjust and implement novel approaches, so that the healthcare industrial and regulatory complex doesn’t have to.
The vast majority of COVID patients aren't just "COVID patients". They're people with comorbidities that put them in a more serious position than a regular (otherwise healthy) individual with a respiratory illness. To "specialize" in COVID you likely need to have training on diabetes, neuro, renal, cardiac and other systems. To a certain point, you just need a fully trained nurse because you can't specialize too deeply on "COVID" without needing training on the comorbidties that come along with an ICU patient.
I guess I'm bias because my spouse is an ICU RN, but the ignorance of HN comments boggles my mind. Do all the hackers try to solve domain problems they have absolutely 0 experience in? I don't pretend to have solutions for the healthcare system because I don't work in the healthcare domain. I can assure you, the red tape that exists is there for very good reasons, because we've tried "unregulated" systems and they were a disaster. We've learned from our mistakes, and that means rigor that can't be replaced by some keyboard jockey writing webdev or embedded systems for unrelated fields.
And knowing they are going to get laid off when COVID dies down, do you expect people to be stampeding to be hired to a job with no transferable skills? Have you seen the Medicaid nursing home labor pool?
> That's not an option. Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA.
How did this understaffing happen?
> More than 260 hospitals and health systems furloughed workers in the last year, and many others implemented layoffs.
As someone whose partner is a med-surg nurse, and whose extended friend circle contains a lot of current and (mostly)former nurses, that post is not really the case. That's like saying that the shortage of software engineers is down to InfoSys having a bunch of IT layoffs.
The big issues are: the job sucks, the patients suck, the insurance companies suck, the hospital administration sucks. It's a hard, thankless job, where you get shit on all day by everyone, figuratively and literally, and for not much pay. Pre-COVID, pay was maybe $30-35/hr for most floor jobs. Or you could get an hospital office job, making more than that working a basic 9-5, no shit, no working holidays, no lawsuits (due to bone-headed coworkers fucking up), no feeling like a waiter, or being groped by patients.
Hmm, who provides care at a hospital? Wow, RNs and MDs. Do you expect a janitor to intubate you? Increasing hospital capacity is hard, expensive and takes time.
I don't need a person with a doctorate degree to treat me. I just need a person who has a reasonable understanding of how does a human body work and a reasonable skill of doing particular medical procedures.
Doctors generally don't have doctorate degrees. That's a Ph.D which is a doctor of philosophy degree. A physician becomes a doctor by earning degrees as an M.D., doctor of medicine, or D.O., doctor of osteopathic medicine.
What you're describing is either an MD, a NP, or a traditional nurse/specialist.
I agree! But the issue is that where these processes exist they are not designed for the scale of the current pandemic, are too inconsistent when implemented, and rely on spare personnel that do not currently exist.
Politicians say this all the time. I doubt anything we can do can change this. Just build more hospitals. We have resolved the masks shortage, we will resolve the shortage of ventilators and hospitals also. We can even soften the shortage of medical personnel by directing the unemployed to paid full-time medical boot camps.
I understand this is much easier said than done but we hardly have a choice if we actually want to do something useful.
There was never a real ventilator shortage. Doctors figured out quickly that mechanical ventilation does more harm than good for the vast majority of COVID-19 patients. It's only used on a few percent of hospitalized patients now.
Building more hospitals is a long-term process. Training medical personnel is a long-term process. Emergency measures intended to bridge the gap are untenable politically, and people are dying because of it. Thousands of them per day.
The answer to this is not to say 'we can't fix the underlying issues right now, so we're not going to do anything'. The answer is to take measures that we _can_ implement until those longer-term solutions can come into play.
> Building more hospitals is a long-term process. Training medical personnel is a long-term process. Emergency measures intended to bridge the gap are untenable politically, and people are dying because of it. Thousands of them per day.
It's like the whole chip shortage thing. Most people ask why aren't we building more chip-building plants? The answer is we are doing that, but it takes billions of dollars and a lot of trained manpower to set up such a factory, and all of that takes a lot of time.
These are what are called in economics as highly inelastic supplies, which it seems is unknown to many commentators, who BTW have a habit of quoting Econ 101 in every discussion.
Vaccines work. Vaccinated people are far less likely to contract COVID, and when they do they are far less likely to require healthcare resources beyond the standard treatments for someone who has the flu (stay home, rest, treat symptoms as needed).
Social distancing and masking work. They reduce the possibilities for spread between people -- not perfectly, but enough to reduce it to a manageable level for our current healthcare resources.
Saying that our current measures to combat the virus don't work is disingenuous at best, and a blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst.
I have always been a vaccine enthusiast but now I see infection surging even in the most vaccinated areas.
> masking work
I have always been saying this, even when officials denied. Yes, mandatory masks in public transport and grocery stores are the only of all the deployed measures I recognize as actually working.
> blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst.
The vaccines are not failing. They are incredibly effective at preventing infections _and_ reducing severity of breakthrough infections. The Delta variant is more easily transmitted and more likely to cause breakthrough infections, but that does not account for the majority of the surge [0]. It's largely a surge amongst unvaccinated populations, buoyed by a smaller proportion of breakthrough infections. The ease with which Delta spreads, combined with relaxed restrictions on gatherings and masking, accounts for the surge in infections.
Despite the decline in vaccine effectiveness (I've seen conflicting studies of how much this has changed), they're still incredibly effective compared to any other protection we have at the moment.
None of this changes the fact that people are going to continue to die until a higher proportion of the population receives a COVID vaccine -- and that we _can_ mitigate this through other measures. None of these things lead me to the conclusion that we should return to normal and accept an increased healthcare system burden and death rate.
The reported share of COVID-19 cases among those not fully vaccinated ranged from 94.1% in Arizona to 99.85% Connecticut.
The share of hospitalizations among those with COVID-19 who are not fully vaccinated ranged from in 95.02% in Alaska to 99.93% in New Jersey. (Note: Hospitalization may or may not have been due to COVID-19.)
The share of deaths among people with COVID-19 who are not fully vaccinated ranged from to 96.91% in Montana to 99.91% in New Jersey. (Note: Deaths may or may not have been due to COVID-19.)
How is this data useful what so ever? I don't particularly care if someone in a car accident was or was not vaccinated unless Pfizer has came up with an MRNA based seat belt recently. If anything this data just muddies up the waters further.
This is an incredibly bad faith argument. There is a whole lot of room between a 6 week bootcamp and a 12 year medical program. I'm pretty confident someone would learn to treat Covid patients in 2 years.
edit: your comment did make me laugh though. So perhaps you were just going for humor, in which case you succeeded and I apologize for being a wet blanket.
Besides hardcore homeless drunkards there is a sufficient population of totally reasonable people who have just lost their jobs because of the crisis and can totally do nurse/paramedic job if taught for free and supported financially. I would steadily go for this if I had lost my job.
> My personal (apparently risky, I don't recommend it to others) strategy
This seems to be the fundamental disagreement between the ‘anti’ side (anti-mask, anti-vaxx etc) and the ‘pro’ side. The reality is that different people can have vastly different risk tolerances. Some people are ok knowing they could die from a circulating respiratory illness and some simply are not. Some people believe vaccines are risky, others do not.
The challenge is it’s very hard (maybe impossible) to change someone’s personal risk tolerance. Imagine trying to convince someone with a fear of heights to go skydiving. You can state the facts, cite safety figures for parachutes etc but you are still unlikely to get them on a plane.
A lot of people are ok with risks, until they’re bitten by them.
There are many articles (I’ve seen two just in passing) where nurses talk about COVID patients going on a ventilator, and begging for the vaccine, only to be told it’s too late.
I feel that most people that are taking risks with COVID (e.g. healthy people not getting vaccinated) either don’t have enough foresight to realize they actually don’t want to be hospitalized/die from this, or they don’t believe the risks are real.
Risk assessment is something many aren’t great at — that is striking a reasonable balance between no fear and too much fear. This is made worse by conflicting opinions and studies, and not being able to discern truth from fiction/sensationalism.
You read about it, I have heard from the witnesses. Some beg, some show fatalist. In fact,
> until they’re bitten
some do not quite realize that it is death involving slow asphyxia we are talking about... Days of drowning, not minutes.
> Risk assessment [...] is made worse by conflicting opinions and studies, and not being able to discern truth from fiction/sensationalism
Which is one of the biggest mess behind e.g. vaccine hesitancy, not to mention not convincing narratives about correct behaviour to prevent spreading.
Anyway, the communicational mess is a disaster, while this reference "fiction" is more problematic. It is not, at this level, something you discriminate easily. When Derek Lowe writes some find him credible, when Robert Malone speaks some find him credible - keys for discrimination are not easily at hand.
It's also a function of being practical. Spending a lot of time thinking and worrying about what might go wrong in various scenarios would take enjoyment out of life. This is where people differ. Some are happy-go-lucky's, some are neurotic, most are somewhere in between. Worry about Covid shines a spotlight on these differences.
> Some are happy-go-lucky's, some are neurotic, most are somewhere in between.
That is your opinion. One person’s neurotic is another person’s normal. It’s very hard, maybe impossible, to force-change someone’s perception of risk. Both sides will remain at loggerheads until they accept this.
The information up to now was a mess, but one of the early "educated opinions" was that one is more contagious in the days just before the explosion of the symptoms. So, if that holds, and if you lived an active social life and tested from time to time, you risked being a spreader.
Second, about "getting antibodies the natural way": what about a 7 points IQ drop as a risk? What about a first-level-paretian-20-per-cent risk of long consequences, "the fifth wins four fifths of the jackpot"? A few made that reasoning and could tell you it was not a good idea, some still feel damaged. I invite you: do not focus on death as a risk.
In the US through May 2021, so it might not be a good representation for delta, here were the infections, hospitalizations, and deaths per 100k for various age groups:
Unless the numbers for delta are way higher, that suggests that for under 17 getting your immunity by actually getting COVID is fine. The main reason then you want to prevent kids from getting COVID is not so much for its danger to them but rather for the danger to the adults that the kids will spread it to. Kid gives it to a grandparent, and that grandparent is 20x as likely to be hospitalized and 2000x as likely to die as the kid. If the kid gives it to their parents, the parents are 4x as likely to be hospitalized and 50x as likely to die.
If the numbers for delta are at all similar for kids, then there is a good chance that there is not much difference between a population where everybody gets vaccinated and population where all the adults get vaccinated but the kids do not, suggesting vaccinating adults should be the priority.
The long term endgame is probably a population where it is endemic, everyone gets it as a child when they are young enough that it doesn't cause serious illness, and then keeps getting it every year or so for the rest of their lives. Those subsequent cases don't cause serious illness because they still have protection from the last time.
That's what happened with the four other coronaviruses that are in wide circulations in humans. They are thought to have caused terrible pandemics when they first got to humans which were deadly in adults but not bad in children. Nowadays they are still around, everyone gets them frequently, and we don't even bother to have a separate name for the illness they cause. We just lump it in with the illnesses from a bunch of other viruses and call it the common cold. Around 20% of common colds are from those coronaviruses.
Even with your numbers it puts a kid's chances of ending up hospitalized with covid at 1 in 128. Granted we're probably way under counting infections in that age group, but I'll still feel much better when my kid is vaccinated.
There's about 50 million kids under 12 in the US, so while that percentage looks small that's still ~150,000 kids going to the hospital. I believe the real percentage is probably a bit lower due to underreported infections, but it's worth remembering that even small percentages can have huge effects in a country with hundreds of millions of people.
Yes, given a large denominator rare events will happen. So what?
The relevant argument with kids and Delta is not about whether it happens to some people, it's whether the risk rates high enough to mobilize large scale, disruptive countermeasures.
I can only find data on deaths, not hospitalizations [1], but assuming the numbers are roughly proportional here are things that are more dangerous to kids than Delta:
- Drug ODs
- Car accidents
- Cancer
- Heart disease
- Drowning
- Suffocation
Caveat of course is that the data might be out of date, at least with respect to pockets with high rates of infection
Can you help me understand why the case count isn't the denominator?
The posted numbers seem to imply that if 37k out of 100k kids had covid, 287 of them end up in the hospital. Does it not follow that if 100k out of 100k had covid that 775 kids would have been hospitalized?
> Granted we're probably way under counting infections in that age group
People get tested when they feel sick enough to be worried, there are many very minor and/or asymptomatic cases for which we won't have data. By using the positive case counts as the denominator you are using the most serious slice of cases to argue that coronavirus infections are serious.
I'm not sure that follows. That would imply that every kid has already had/been exposed to COVID and that's resulted in those per 100k numbers.
It's definitely not exact to use the infection as the denominator, but I'd argue it's much closer than using the 100k as the denominator. I think I stand by my original post.
> That's what happened with the four other coronaviruses that are in wide circulations in humans. They are thought to have caused terrible pandemics when they first got to humans which were deadly in adults but not bad in children.
Yes, this is now thought to be the case for the 1889-1890 pandemic.
for comparison, all cause mortality[0] in infants (<1yr) is ~500/100K, and for 1-19 year olds, ~100/100K. for kids, covid is not even a blip on the mortality chart, being 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller.
These herd immunity thresholds assumed that vaccinated people do not transmit the virus, but it appears that they do. Vaccines seem to be very efficient at preventing complications, which is great and good enough to neutralise this virus. But they don't seem to have made a dent into this summer's cases numbers. It doesn't look like vaccines will prevent the virus from circulating.
Hospitalisation rates have been pretty much flat vs previous waves (there was no wave last summer).
Do you know about the quality of the data? I would suspect they match the big picture by now.
But while I was looking into that, last at the beginning of the year - the quality was horrible. Even here in developed germany, it was hard to get meaningful numbers from different districts. I mean, there were lots and lots of data flying around, but most of it not solid or directly comparable in my understanding.
And here india looks interesting, if true. That would speak for a sort of herd immunity?
I really don't know what to think about India. I add it only because its so weird how quickly Delta seemed to fizzle out there, and then everyone stopped talking about it. Lots of very strange cases like that in the data.
I think most data is not really comparable across countries, only across time (and even then: discard data early on), because of different levels of data collection. So best only to compare the same country vs its own prev spikes. But this is esp true with India vs smaller countries, you may be able to compare Euro nations to each other more accurately, but would caution against interpreting small differences as meaningful.
You are comparing different variants as if they are equal. That makes no sense. If you look at the data so far available it does seem to reduce incidence of infection.
The kids weren't in danger, that appears to be changing very quickly with the new variant. Let's not be like George W. Bush standing on the aircraft carrier saying "mission accomplished", when we're still in the middle of this thing.
"Dangerous" and "fatal" are not the same word. The Delta variant is more contagious, meaning more children are being hospitalized. Even if the Delta variant isn't "more dangerous" per case the same level of danger is more prevalent because of the contagion.
There is more than death. We still don't know enough about Long Covid - depending on who you believe it is anything from normal things blamed on Covid to additional life long complications. Until science figures this out (I expect it to take years) I don't know if it is safe to risk my kids or not.
And we still don’t know the long term effects of kids breathing god knows what substances these cheap Chinese masks contain. We also have no clue what it will do to their language and social development. Yet people cheer on forcing them to wear one for an entire school day 5 days a week.
Like what? This is the first I've heard such a thing. It isn't hard to do a chemical analysis, so if there was any grounding in it I'd expect to have seen a better source then a random comment.
That said, my kids are wearing made in the USA masks.
There is no data to this effect. There are some anecdotes from hospital staff saying they're seeing more kids now, but you might expect that given that adults are vaccinated.
Until there is data that shows conclusively that Delta affects kids more than previous variants, you should not parrot lines like "that appears to be changing quickly". Substantiate your claim with data or at least say it's anecdotal. Alternatively, if you have data, please share it.
This "show me data" line works well in debates, but not in the real world. You often don't have the time or ability to wait for data to roll in, do a study, have it peer reviewed, and then make a decision. In real life you constantly have to make decisions under uncertain conditions with limited information of unknown quality. And that's the situation we're in right now.
We can send the kids back to school with no vaccines, no masks, no precautions, and say "We don't have any data that this thing is dangerous for children". The obvious problem there is that we don't have a ton of data in general with this variant. So, if we're wrong about the danger, we risk harming a lot of children while we dutifully wait for the data to roll in.
This is the same reason that most women (and many men for that matter) will cross the street late at night if they are on an empty street and see a large man approaching them. They have zero evidence suggesting that the person is a threat, but the cost of being wrong in such cases is very high. So, having limited data, they tend to take a very cautious and conservative approach and cross the street. In our case, just change, "Cross the street" to "Wear a mask".
This comparison is far from perfect, but you get the idea.
If you don’t have time to do those things, then the most reasonable thing to do is to assume that the results of those things still hold true.
In other words, whoever makes a claim that things have changed better provide a reason why it is reasonable to think things have changed. Typically that comes in data.
I can see 2035’s viral video already. Targeting people who were too young to get jabbed, some of which still living with the effects of long COVID. Others blaming long COVID for other issues. The narrator turning them against us, endless b-roll of both anti-maskers and politicians reopening cities. How selfish of us, reopening before they were protected.
> That might be barely enough for herd immunity for some diseases
Also remember that herd immunity works best when those who are antibodies are evenly distributed. Schools will become major places where it's spread because of how many people without immunity are in one place.
Herd immunity cannot be measured by an arbitrary percentage. Maybe it is 70% or 80%, but only if that's a random sample of the population. Social networks determine the relevance. If you have a single homogenous group of individuals that interact with each other that is unvaccinated then there's still plenty of threats. And that generally includes children as a big intermingling block.
What restrictions are there in the UK? As far as I know in England and Wales where the vast majority live there are none except for those around international travel or imposed by private enterprise.
They're pretty much gone, there are still some mask requirements on, e.g., London underground, but 50% compliance? There is some talk of introducing a vaccine passport for nightclubs, football grounds in a month or two.
For me, the mood in London is "we've had enough, it's endemic, let's live with it".
The UK seems to have a 62% full vaccination rate with 71% having at least one dose[0]. That sounds really low to me. "Close to full vaccination" to me would imply close to 100% or, reading "full" as "reaching herd immunity" I'd think 70-80% fully vaccinated - still a very long way to go.
I hear you that we will eventually reach a point where we've hit the new normal. It's just going to be whether that point is reached because we've given up (due to people refusing to vaccinate) or because we've managed to vaccinate enough. I think many people aren't ready to give up. Personally, the restrictions are quite meaningless to me in the US, but I can imagine that that's just because I get to work from home and all that.
The UK has only just started vaccinating under-18s, who make up a significant chunk of the population, and they are not vaccinating anyone under 16 yet. This is going to skew the numbers a bit. Among older age groups the numbers get up into the 80s and 90s.
We are also lagging among BAME groups and in certain economically deprived areas. If you are a white 75 year-old in Wimbledon the odds that you are vaccinated are around 95%, while if you are a 30 year-old Pakistani immigrant in Bradford then I would put the odds closer to 50%. Still a long way to go, but constantly improving.
Due to the vaccine not being approved for children yet, the numbers will be low. Here in Canada it appears to lag by about 10% of the eligible population, so until that happens, 80% is probably the maximum limit I would expect.
However, with the high R0 of Delta taking its toll, it looks like places are starting to take the approach of making people's lives more limited if they aren't fully vaccinated without quite going to the level of mandating vaccination.
> Latest estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show 89.8% of adults in England are likely to have the antibodies, with the highest percentage of adults testing positive for them estimated to be the age groups 60 to 64, 70 to 74 and 75 to 79 (all 96.8%).
> The lowest percentage was for 16 to 24-year-olds at around 59.7%.
The 92% (91.8% cited) is presumably from this sentence?
> In Wales, 91.8% of adults are estimated to have antibodies in their system
Spread of sars-cov-2 in human populations can be stopped. It first requires intramuscular vaccination to provide IgG antibodies in the body proper to prevent serious disease and then just as importantly, an intranasal vaccination to provide resident B and T cells in the surface mucosa tissues of the upper respiratory tract where the B cells will make local IgA antibodies and provide sterilizing immunity and prevent spread from person to person.
Intranasal boosters are the one obvious thing we could do top-down to end the pandemic and only have to deal with epidemics.
ref: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... page 5, #8. "Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals."
Israel has close to full vaccination, yet cases are going up because immunity is falling again and there are new variants. It's understandable why the restrictions are back again.
But what's the end goal? Do we keep lockdown restrictions forever? The case fatality rate for a vaccinated population is really low. There must be an acceptable level - after all we don't lock down for other endemic viruses which also have non-zero CFRs. What is it? Have we reached it?
Public acceptance of perpetual lockdowns, or at least at-will lockdowns, probably is the goal. People get more tolerant of authoritarian governments when there's a high prevalence of infectious disease. Governments seeking re-election pushing a narrative that the danger from infectious diseases is high while also being seen to be 'doing something' is likely a self-reinforcing dynamic.
To be honest, until two weeks ago the official narrative has been that we'll all go back to normal once everyone has taken the vaccine. Unfortunately, the virus has thrown a spanner into the works. This wasn't planned.
Maybe you remember way back at the very beginning that it was "two weeks to slow the spread"?
The narrative has always been we‘ll be back to normal in X weeks if we are all good little boys and girls and do what we‘re told. Unless of course some other really good reason to lockdown arises, like that single case in NZ.
By single case I assume you're referring the outbreak that has spread to 100+ cases in the last week (from transmission before the lockdown and associated households). If you use a country as an example, then please represent the situation there accurately.
Covid is like roaches, there's never just one. One case turns up, but meanwhile that individual infected dozens others who are not symptomatic yet. But with a lockdown the contagion spreads less quickly, and you can do contact tracing and isolate the affected people. Indeed, the headline from two days ago is "Delta outbreak spreading rapidly as cases jump"
Meanwhile at my regional institution the students are beginning to grumble. Let's go back online, they say, too many instructors cancel lecture because they are sick with covid and too many students can't attend class because they in bed with covid. That's what excess freedom looks like.
The acceptable level is pretty much defined by when the hospitals aren't falling over again.
If everyone would just get vaccinated, we'd be there.
Instead people are for whatever reason ignoring the risks of the virus, and if the rate of hospitalization in their age category is only 1 in 50, enough of them making that choice mean that 2% of them guessing wrong is knocking the hospital system over again.
Maybe without a vaccination card or other pass that you're ineligible for the vaccine you get triaged right back out the door. That would help the hospital capacity, encourage vaccination, etc but it will probably need to get a bit more morgue capacity ramped up. Easier to train for.
That's why I called it triage. You can give steroids and O2 for home consumption? I guess it depends on the seriousness, on average, of the other people who are unable to use the hospital's services because it's overloaded and what their mortality rate is vs the unvaccinated who show up and are given some reasonable treatment to try, but not a bed. Not an easy decision or calculation to come up with.
We'll have to have some restrictions in place for the highest-risk activities. I really wouldn't want to give introductory lectures in a room that seats 250 people and has been in use all day and then find out, like the Reverend Jackson, that the vaccine protection has worn off.
>I really wouldn't want to give introductory lectures in a room that seats 250 people and has been in use all day and then find out, like the Reverend Jackson, that the vaccine protection has worn off.
Ok then don't? No one is forcing you to go out.
Let everyone else make their own decisions. I'm kinda tired of the hypochondriacs forcing everyone else to do what they want. Everyone has access to the vaccine, they can stay in and mask all they want, they do not have to go near people. There's absolutely no reason to be locking down the rest of society. The only argument to keep these restrictions in place is if the hospitals get over capacity and that's not happening.
Additionally you need to provide a strategy that would stop this. Since apparently mass vaccination and locking down for nearly 2 years didn't help. Or you can keep supporting the same thing and hoping for different results.
I'm tired of prudes telling me I can't drink and drive. Let everyone make their own decisions. Everyone else can stay home or drive sober if they want, but we shouldn't prevent the rest of society from having fun!
I wasn't aware that you could pass drunkenness through the air with no symptoms. That's new to me.
Are you suggesting we should all be responsible for stopping other people from drunk driving and also stopping anyone from getting into a car with a drunk driver? Are you also attempting to suggest that everyone else get should have their drivers' license revoked for the few that are caught drunk driving? That's essentially what masking, forced vaccination, mandated passports is.
Might wanna find a new metaphor. I'm sure you think that was an intelligent comparison but it absolutely sucks. You're comparing something that would take a deliberate act to something that might or might not be happening passively to you.
I agree it's not a great metaphor, but my point is that "let everyone make their own decisions" isn't some end-all argument. All rules and laws in society are about not letting people do whatever they want for the benefit of society at large.
Also you're trying to appeal to emotion by framing mask wearing as some sort of punishment ("revoking" people's drivers licenses) vs a precaution (like wearing a seatbelt... or not driving drunk). Furthermore, people caught drunk driving DO get their licenses taken away.
>Also you're trying to appeal to emotion by framing mask wearing as some sort of punishment
That's because I do view it as a punishment. Maybe you like wearing a mask, I do not. I got vaccinated and stayed away from big events, masked etc. for 2 years. I did my part, I'm done.
Enough with this kindergarten level discipline. It's like punishing the entire class for the one kid that can't keep quiet. Yeah the noisy kid is an ass and should be quiet but the teacher is the one you should really be mad at.
I think the analogy is that there is a small percentage of our population that cannot drive a vehicle without dying and so everyone has to stay home and not drive in order to get rid of the .06% of of the population that will die driving on the road.
Everyone can make their own decisions, but can everyone give an introductory lecture? Perhaps the 250 attendees can decide if they want to be there in person or remotely, why would you remove that choice from the person giving the lecture?
And we are not talking about locking down the rest of society. That was the extreme end of the spectrum when we were trying to get it under control. The only place still with national lockdowns are NZ and Australia because they were able to contain and control the virus earlier on.
Sounds like you are equating your experience with everyone. Not everyone has access to the vaccine, not everyone is able to work remotely, some people have to interact with the public as part of their job. Perhaps try looking at things from the perspective of people who are less fortunate than yourself.
There is an underlying current of selfishness behind everything you say.
The only people who are being selfish are the people who insist the entire human population change their behavior in an extremely negative way for more than 1.6 years for a virus that we now have remarkably effective vaccines for that anybody at risk can take for free.
Sorry. It is selfish to ask people to continue to cower away in order to assuage peoples fear.
>Everyone can make their own decisions, but can everyone give an introductory lecture? Perhaps the 250 attendees can decide if they want to be there in person or remotely, why would you remove that choice from the person giving the lecture?
How am I removing that choice? Did I say anywhere they were not allowed to host it virtually if they chose to do so? The only one removing choices is the individual that decides they don't want anyone in person.
>Sounds like you are equating your experience with everyone. Not everyone has access to the vaccine, not everyone is able to work remotely, some people have to interact with the public as part of their job. Perhaps try looking at things from the perspective of people who are less fortunate than yourself.
Every reason you listed here only supports NOT locking down. Everyone in the US does have access to the vaccine. I am looking at it correctly, you're the one that wants people not to work by locking down everything. What's your solution? Wait until everyone gets it, which will never happen?
The irony in calling me the selfish one. I'm not making anyone do anything here. Exactly how is telling everyone they must do something not selfish? Anyone supporting more lockdowns/masking at this point is only doing it for themselves and no one else.
I have not proposed a lockdown in any of my comments. I think you are looking for an argument with someone who wants another lockdown. I have not seen anyone proposing a new lockdown and think that the majority of people in the UK would neither support another lockdown or even think it is necessary.
Literally the only country that should be considering a lockdown at this stage is New Zealand due to them being a great way to prevent spread if there are very few cases in the general population and the majority of people are unvaccinated. For everyone else the only realistic solution.is vaccination for as much of the population as possible.
>The only place still with national lockdowns are NZ and Australia because they were able to contain and control the virus earlier on.
You literally supported lockdown measure with this comment. I'm not sure why you're backtracking now.
You might wanna backtrack on the whole AUS NZ thing since they've essentially become authoritarian police states over the COVID cases everyone told them they would get hit with. Turns out it had nothing to do with their measures and everything to do with the fact they're giant islands that can stop anyone coming into their country.
Oh I supported lockdown measures when they were first introduced. Because I am not an idiot. But now that we have vaccinations available they are a better option when the virus is so widespread. The UK is also an island and we could have cut ourselves off from travel and kept the virus out bit an incompetent government meant that never happened. So the best solution now is vaccination for as much of the population as possible.
Australia has gone a bit nuts but it's hardly a police state and NZ has fared very well and is very definitely not an authoritarian police state.
Of everywhere NZ has had the best handling of the situation. Of course it had everything to do with their measures, stopping international travel was one of those measures, lockdowns were another.
> Perhaps the 250 attendees can decide if they want to be there in person or remotely, why would you remove that choice from the person giving the lecture?
If the lecturer is remote, then the 250 attendees don't have the choice to be there in person.
The acheivable goal of lockdowns outside of effictively island countries is to keep hospitals open with sufficient capacity. When hospitals don't have enough capacity, any reason to go to the hospital has a worse outcome. Physical beds are one thing, but staffing is a bigger issue.
The problem is it's a tricky system to manage. We can measure hospital utilization, but that lags infections. We can mandate lockdowns, but compliance varies and too many changes risks more non-compliance.
Also, there are existing reasons leading to too many people in hospitals that reduces capacity. And systemic issues that make staffing a challenge.
It is not because of the new variants and antibody escape. Prior variants before delta, gamma specifically, actually escape antibody neutralization far more than delta does.
No, what the world is seeing is that intramuscular vaccination for respiratory diseases does not provide long lasting IgG antibodies to the upper respiratory mucosa tissues. They seep into the lower lungs and provide protection there though. This has been known since the 1960s when the first intranasal flu vaccinations were introduced to combat the problem.
It wouldn't matter what variant is going around, it just happens to be delta now. The problem is the lack of persistent IgG antibodies in the surface mucosal tissues. To get long term protection from infection of these you need intranasal vaccination to recruit resident B and T cells to the mucosa to make IgA antibodies. Intramuscular does not prevent spread, it only prevents hospitalization and death. This is also true for intramuscular flu vaccination.
If COVID is here to stay and previous lockdowns still did not stop the spread, even with vaccine rates at almost everyone, how is another lockdown going to stop it? This isn't just ignorant "muh freedoms" talking here but irrational governments playing god too much as if they could even possibly do that that without complete fascistic control.
I was at the exact same site, and I was listing one shot statistics. Right now, it shows for Portugal: 67% two shots, 81% one shot. Israel: 63% two shots, 68% one shot.
I guess it's possible that the same site shows different numbers depending on what view you use, so I include the link below.
The UK dropped all restrictions with the exception of some travel related restrictions (to prevent the import of variants that could breakthrough the vaccine).
Any restrictions you see in the UK are implemented by businesses/local government (e.g. masks on the tube, or in some shops).
No restriction? You will have a nasty surprise if you return from a red list country. Plus mandatory covid tests before and after returning to the UK. Plus mandatory face masks in public transports. Plus mandatory self-quarantine if you are pinged by the NHS app. Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal.
Not true. There is no national requirement to wear a mask on public transport. London Underground and the Manchester Metro have used mayoral powers to require mask wearing - with variable compliance. Elsewhere its down to individual choice.
> Plus mandatory self-quarantine if you are pinged by the NHS app.
Not true. The app gives a recommendation. Only the NHS test and trace service can legally require you to self isolate. And for that you need to test positive (pcr) and not be fully vaccinated.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that around 70-80% of people on the London Underground are still wearing masks. Which is to say that the "mandate" is a joke (like so many of our restrictions have been) and clearly isn't being enforced.
The percentage of people wearing masks on the tube, where masks are "compulsory", doesn't seem much higher than the percentage of people who are voluntarily wearing masks in other public places which have no mandate, so the fact that most people are still wearing masks on the Tube is probably less because of the mandate and more because of people's general sense of precaution/paranoia. I suspect if the mask mandate were lifted then most people would continue to wear masks voluntarily anyway, just as they're still doing at the supermarket.
> Plus mandatory self-quarantine if you are pinged by the NHS app.
I think you're poorly informed - it has never been mandatory to self-quarantine if pinged by the app.
And government mandated face masks on public transport went away on the 19th of July - but people are still encouraged and I think required by some individual institutions not by Her Majesty's Government.
And I don't think jet-setting around is 'daily life' so that's disingenuous.
self quarantine through the app couldn't be mandatory seeing as the app isn't mandatory
The only thing OP has a point on is travel abroad, which yeh as you say isn't really daily life for the majority of people and probably isn't too big a pill to swallow temporarily, and continued working from home, which to my knowledge is the choice of companies, not the government (though either way, I'm not complaining)
> Many companies have not returned to the office. We are not back to normal.
This is the new normal (thankfully). Government regulations or not, management will not be able to force people back in the office. Office culture was a quirk of the 20th century. A halfway house between the assembly line and the internet. Covid just forced its inevitable collapse.
Yeah my team will meet in the office for an hour once a week otherwise WFH.
I suspect once the bean counters discover that the office is only used for an hour once a week also after corona there will be pressure to remove a lot of the seats.
The only one really resisting at my company is the "office manager" for some reason ;)
Yeah, well, on the other side of the coin, people are being forced back in the office, some have never even been able to work from home and many actually like the work/home separation.
Not to mention the millions of jobs that can't be done remotely no matter how hard you try, but that's on a whole 'nother planet.
last time i tried to stay home [from a public facing food service position] due to the flu i was fired over Christmas. until you change the culture around working through illness and the punitive nature of sick days, especially for those with children, people are not gonna stay home if they think they can tough it out.
We're better than normal. My employer already decided to allow up to 60% time remote, no questions asked, forever. You can still come 100% of the time to the office if you want. Some restrictions are still in place, but the future seems brighter for the workplace.
Well in the UK we've had three separate scandals where major government officials (including the fucking HEALTH SECRETARY) were caught flagrantly violating their own rules with minimal consequence, so you can hardly blame the public for taking things no more seriously than our leadership does.
Same for Denmark. We are at 85% first dose and 78% second dose for the 5.1m people a vaccine was offered, so we are at 75% of the population with at least one dose [1]. Everything is open, there is a suggestion to wear masks in metro, no idea about buses or trains.
Aren't the vaccines still not available for those under 12? And they're emergency use only in many of those countries? Not sure how you can say any country, even Israel, is "close to full vaccination". 28% of their population is 14 and under.
1 year ago the hive mind was buzzing about protecting the "elderly/infirm" with the warp drive wunder drugs. So it shouldn't be surprising that "full vaccination" might be calculated with "elderly/infirm" pop in the denominator.
The vaccination rate in the UK is 67%. A year ago the estimate was that we need about a 75% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity, and I doubt that the new mutations have pushed that number down.
That's not strictly settled science. The truth is herd immunity / lack thereof is well within the error bars of the vaccine efficacy / R0 estimates. We don't actually know, but it looks like the delta curve is peaking in some areas so my bet is in favor of herd immunity.
> That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK
I cracked some ribs three weeks ago and coughing / sneezing are really painful. I am keeping my mask on because I really don't want even a mild cough, for whatever reason.
More generally, the vaccines are not 100% effective, the virus can still be transmitted and spread. For lots of people, getting COVID is still life threatening, even if the average case is not as bad as it used to be.
That is exactly what people are asking for and it is super selfish. Asking everybody to hunker down to assuage people who continue to be afraid.
Sorry. Life is short. I’ve sacrificed 1.6 years of it for something I’ve never been afraid of. I’ve played by all the rules, but enough is enough. It is super selfish to insist we continue to live this way. We aren’t living, we are being kept alive… life was meant to be lived.
I don't care about myself but the social isolation of kids was pretty bad. I hope we can get back to where they can fully interact with each other again.
Machismo? Dude. 1.6 years is a non trivial amount of my life. I’ve already put my career on hold because of this, sacrificed my daughters well being, and a bunch of stuff. I got the shot. I’m fully vaccinated. How much more do you expect from me in order to protect people who don’t want to get vaccinated?
The only person who truly looks after my well-being is me. I can be selfish. I deserve to have my actual normal life back. My 2019 life didnt revolve around worrying about stopping the spread of exactly one very specific disease.
If y’all want to hide under the bed at home until some undefined end date… go for it. But forcing society to do the same with you is incredibly selfish.
Totally agree with you, after both of my shots are done. I have been vaccinated, my parents have been vaccinated. A major percentage of the country is vaccinated. Even if after vaccination, I can get covid, then I am willing to take the risk of dying. What else am I supposed to do? How many years will we be in this state. Let's just accept that this is harsh truth about humanity and move on.
> That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK.
There are almost no UK legal restrictions relating to covid. There are some rules about people returning from certain high risk countries. And unvaccinated people who test positive still have to self isolate. And that's about it.
Many people (like myself) still wear masks in busy indoor locations. And many are choosing to forego foreign holidays this summer.
Life here in the UK doesn't feel entirely normal, but it's much much nearer to pre-pandemic conditions than this time last year.
> many are choosing to forego foreign holidays this summer
"Choosing" is a strange way to put it when COVID testing and quarantine requirements have added hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of pounds to the cost of most foreign holidays and the rules are changing so frequently and suddenly that it's a big financial risk to book anything more than a few days in advance.
> That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK.
Until the number needed for herd immunity is achieved, the 30% (or whatever) of your population that is not vaccinated can suffer devastating spikes in cases. Mostly having herd immunity is not a thing.
Don’t know about the UK but in other EU countries with near full vaccination rates it does seem like they want a perpetual semi lockdown yes. Directive 10-289.
Yes, yes they do. And they're even starting to be honest about it, look at the press coming out of NZ and Scotland. Many of us called this the second the lockdowns started and we were right. Coronavirus is real, but it's nothing more than another SARS, H1N1, Hong Kong flu, etc. The only difference between now and then is now governments were prepped for a full on power grab.
> Coronavirus is real, but it's nothing more than another SARS, H1N1, Hong Kong flu, etc.
SARS in 2002-2004 killed 811 people. H1N1 killed 18,500 in 2009. Neither of those had the sort of mass lock-downs mitigating their spread that we are experiencing now. I don't know about you, but I can see a big difference.
To slow the spread so that hospitals are not overwhelmed.
You can be up for letting it spread through everyone, but not think that letting everyone catch it at once is sensible.
Maybe "mask requirements" are a sign of society advancing? There was a time in human history when we didn't bathe regularly, or brush our teeth, or have sewage removal systems in cities, etc. Maybe the next step is "you know, breathing in particles that came from the other 600 people in this railcar is not so great".
I certainly don't see a reason to go maskless on public transportation in the future. And, as supply chain problems work themselves out, someone will probably make masks that actually filter out virus-size particles and fit more people's faces. (I feel like every mask I've bought so far during the pandemic has either been completely ineffective, or has been designed to fit someone that is 1/3 my size.)
> The experience may also prompt people to take all respiratory viruses more seriously, leading to lasting changes in mask wearing and ventilation.
I don't think that mask mandates will continue, but I do think that many more people will choose to wear masks in situations that warrant them. In Asia, it was already pretty common before COVID-19 and even before SARS. Walk around Tokyo on any given day and you'll see people wearing masks (mostly to protect others). I think the West now has some idea why that might be a good thing.
The world has irreversibly changed. There is no getting around that.
Is it insane that everyone should keep wearing clothes everywhere literally forever?
If I found being nude to be significantly more comfortable/freeing than being clothed, I would still be expected to wear clothing in public spaces for both politeness and sanitary (e.g. sitting on subway seats) reasons.
Well by that logic, why stop at masks? Let's make everyone wear rubber gloves whenever they leave the house. Let's legally mandate that everyone carry antibacterial handgel on them at all times and wash their hands after touching any surface. Let's ban handshaking - hell, why don't we just permanently ban everybody from ever leaving their homes? That'll be sure to stop the spread of respiratory viruses and thus totally worth it, amirite?
And why stop at respiratory viruses? Sexual infections cause all kinds of harm too - the obvious response is to ban sex. When people want to reproduce they can just use IVF - thank God we live in the modern era.
And by the way, do you have any idea how many people are killed every year in road accidents? I propose we ban cars. Let's also ban walking in case anybody trips over. And let's ban eating so that no-one ever chokes on their food.
Is there a particular reason you think that people shouldn't keep wearing masks everywhere literally forever, or is it just that it hurts your feelings?
Barely a century ago, it wasn't common for doctors to wash their hands, because it hurt doctors' feelings. Dr. Charles Meigs, an obstetrician, said, "Doctors are gentlemen and a gentleman's hands are clean."
But, of course, factually they weren't clean, factually they were full of germs, and factually Dr. Meigs was killing several of the people he operated on through his unclean hands. There was factual data that infant mortality dropped significantly in clinics where doctors were washing their hands.
But the response to hand-washing was much like yours. "You're saying society should keep washing hands everywhere literally forever? That's so insane I can't tell whether you're even serious." And in fact they sent the doctor who suggested hand-washing to an insane asylum, where he died.
This scenario [1] is a specific instance of using chlorinated lime to clean your hands after dealing with cadavers, which is a totally different scenario. In fact, he apparently references this as an alternative to "normal hand washing". The mid-19th century is not the middle ages, we knew about washing hands.
> Semmelweis's key claim was that physicians contaminated their hands with "cadaveric particles" in the morgue while conducting autopsies. He pointed out that ordinary washings with soap did not remove these particles, because the hands could retain a stench for several days in spite of such washings.
It is very important for young children to be able to see one's entire face. Facial expressions such as smiles help them understand context when communicating.
I think you should pretty much ignore voting in contentious political threads. People have it in their heads that the "side" with the most upvotes "wins", so people are reading comments to determine sides and then to vote appropriately.
All I can say is that people are going to be super upset when they go to cash in their HN karma and find that it isn't honored as legal tender ;)
I'm just happy HN is such a fringe community not representative of the general population. It's pretty sad when you reach a point where you make medical decisions to "own" the "other team".
Doctors washing their hands saves way more lives than masks do, and hand washing doesn't have negative side effects like masks do (e.g., constantly fogging up glasses, and keeping people who are hard of hearing from reading lips).
Curious what kind of design workarounds we'll see for really hot and/or humid regions -- where I live, it's pretty comfortable to wear a mask 90% of the time. But where my parents live, it's a very different story: hot, humidity 90%+ a lot of the time, often rainy, few places have A/C. Wearing a mask is a lot less pleasant there and I suspect that's part of why mask mandates have seen resistance there.
It literally says: "While most of the breakthrough cases were mild or asymptomatic, seven out of 36 workers tracked at six weeks (19 percent) still had persistent symptoms. These long Covid symptoms included a mix of prolonged loss of smell, persistent cough, fatigue, weakness, labored breathing or muscle pain."
It's certainly not great data, but it's still the best information we have as of right now.
When you have a persistent cough due to lung damage then your chances of death the next time you catch a minor illness go through the roof. It's why so many of the people who survived SARS initially are no longer alive.
I mean if you're basically paralyzed, how does that not count as being disabled? What do you think muscle weakness and fatigue actually means in this context?
> Muscle weakness and fatigue is in no way shape or form like paralysis.
Having muscle weakness in your arms mean that you can't do things like raising your hands to chest level and squeezing someone's hand. In practice it means you can't do everyday things like opening doors, or else can only do them with great difficulty.
Having muscle weakness in the legs means that if you're lying on your back, you don't have the ability to raise your legs off the ground. In practice, it means that you can't do everyday things like walking, or else can only do them with great difficulty and probably some form of assistance.
It's obviously not exactly the same as being paralyzed, but it's not that far off either. On the spectrum from "I'm not setting new deadlift PRs lately" to "I'm likely going to hospice soon", it's a lot closer to the latter than the former. There's a good chance that it means using a wheelchair, possibly indefinitely. I think you're doing people an extreme disservice by underplaying how serious this is.
With paralysis, the cause is usually traumatic spinal cord injury. Whereas with muscle weakness, the cause is usually something more like an autoimmune disease attacking the tissue around your spinal cord. But in both cases the end result is nerve signals not getting properly transmitted, and the impact on everyday life is pretty similar.
COVID doesn't cause what you just described as "muscle weakness" in anywhere near 20% of people. The thing it causes that other people describe as "muscle weakness" is much closer to "I'm not setting new deadlift PRs lately".
Muscle weakness is a standardized medical diagnosis. When you see the term being used in a medical paper, it always means the same thing. C.f.: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2005/0401/p1327.html
This is basically the same argument that gets trotted out whenever someone points out Telsa's deceptive advertising wrt "autopilot".
"Real pilots know that autopilot means you still have to pay attention - nevermind that 99.9% of society thinks that idiom means they can sleep behind the wheel while it's turned on"
This is worse than that. With that, the argument sticks with that one definition throughout. Here, one meaning of "muscle weakness" is being used to make it sound scary, and another meaning is used to say COVID causes it. It's the equivocation fallacy.
So you're arguing that the New England Journal of Medicine article is using the word "weakness" in a colloquial sense, rather than in the medical sense, in the same sentence that the words "dyspnea" and "myalgia" appear?:
In the case of the U.K., it's the population (not the government) that is holding things back. My impression is that Boris Johnson is opening things up as fast as he thinks he can get away with, without an enormous backlash that gets him removed from office. Unlike, say, France where the positions of government and popular backlash are reversed.
> That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK
Because it s not about the pandemic. It s about asserting control over population and making them obey whatever govts, ongs, big pharma or big corps come up with. A kind of a mass scale social engineering project.
Edit: this btw doesn t need to be some sort of a secret group project. It can rise naturally and decentralized among many connected decision groups(govts, academia, big corps, etc) which already happened.
A pandemic seems like an awfully long and expensive way of doing that, especially considering they already did so before the pandemic through so many means (many of which actually make them money rather than cost them, I assume you pay taxes?)
The only group who can be said to have really profited off this is pharma. Maybe they have orchestrated the whole thing, but I'd like to see some evidence first.
Well again that's not particularly new, even outside a crisis, that's part of every day life. Your hardly a nefarious actor if you're not exploiting anything.
Why is this different from other instances of governments instituting laws or regulations for the sake of public safety, of which there are already many?
Are seatbelt laws a mass experiment in social control?
Are laws mandating wearing underwear in public "about asserting control over population and making them obey"?
> Are seatbelt laws a mass experiment in social control?
For this, or other instances you might come up with, you had a large consensus between the rulers and the ruled. No one questioned the motif behind seatbelt wearing or other public safety measures.
Do you have such a consensus for vaccine mandates, lockdowns, mask wearing or covid passports? It seems not. The only consensus you have is at the top between those who hold the power, resources and influence.
When you have skeptic voices and vaccine hesitant people among medical personnel we can t really talk about a consensus. If you can't even persuade some doctor or nurse to agree with your medical decisions without using coercion what should the average joe do? What does that tell us about the motifs of those that hold the decision power?
>That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK. There isn't really a next step after having vaccinated the population, it is "steady state". So do they want us to have these restrictions (countries you can't travel to, endless testing, mask requirements) forever?
Our government loves to pat themselves on the back having 80% vaccination. Which is more than double the usual flu shot rates. Yet here we are with a 4th wave, talk about complete lockdown.
At what point do you say that our approach is no different than the usual flu season? In my opinion that was long ago.
So why? Technically don't know the answer. You can look at it from liberties point of view. That the reason these restrictions haven't lifted has nothing to do with covid.
Texas Gov. Abbott, who banned mask and vaccine mandates, tests positive for Covid
But wait... Abbott is fully vaccinated. That's a huge issue. You can't slam him banning masks and all that. Vaccination is vaccination.
Article title should be "Texas Gov. Abbott, who is fully vaccinated, tests positive for Covid"
But that's where the politics of the situation come in. It's very evident covid-19 is completely influenced by politics. Which brings you right back to liberties point of view.
The vaccine is 100% effective for healthy fully vax people. That 6% is concerning and will differ amount countries im sure.
>This is on par with "we had a snowstorm so climate change isn't real" levels of logic.
I find your analogy to be very telling. You have moved to another political issue that is quite divided along the same political lines.
>Abbott has a mild case and isn't sucking on ventilator.
Does abbott have a compromised immune system? Shrug?
Should we even discuss the possibility that covid testing has high false positive testing? That Abbott never had covid and his more recent tests only days later he tested negative.
> But wait... Abbott is fully vaccinated. That's a huge issue.
No, its not. While the rates are somewhat higher with Delta, breakthrough infections were always expected. The accines reduce the probability of getting COVID with similar exposure, they don't 100% prevent it.
> You can't slam him banning masks and all that.
Yes, you can. Even if schools weren't full of unvaccinated people, which they are, the existence of breakthrough infections would underline why banning mask mandates is a culpablr error.
That isn’t the way it was portrayed. The way that it was initially portrayed by the media is that these would be 99% effective and that after getting the vaccine you could go back to normal.
You could and lots of people have. The visibility of masks (literally in your face!) tends to distract people from this, but the vast, vast majority of Covid restrictions were revoked after vaccinations became widely available, including anything in the vein of "stay home" or "social distancing". In all of the US and I think a substantial chunk of Europe, it's considered safe as a matter of policy for vaccinated people to go wherever they'd like and do whatever they want.
I mean, that's definitely not the impression I had after getting the vaccine (first shot March 24, well before anyone came up with the "Delta" name for B.1.617.2). I stayed home and wore masks just as much as I did before the vaccine. I knew the vaccine would make things safer when I did need to interact with other people, but also that it was hardly a reason to "go back to normal."
Maybe your problem is you listen too much to the mainstream media instead of doing research for yourself? The corporate interests are trying to get you to consume more and so they wanted to entice you with the prospect of "going back to normal" and consuming things you don't need.
>No, its not. While the rates are somewhat higher with Delta, breakthrough infections were always expected. The accines reduce the probability of getting COVID with similar exposure, they don't 100% prevent it.
That's not my understanding, I'm in IT and not a biologist or whatever. So perhaps you can explain to me.
A vaccine is something that boosts/helps the immune system develop protection against the disease.
Measles vaccine means nobody got measles until antivaxers started spreading measles.
Yes there can be a portion of society which does not have an immune system for the vaccine to help or boost and therefore the vaccines aren't useful and doesn't work. Percentages will change per country/society. However, someone fully vaccinated in my mind is someone who is never going to be infectious. Therefore prevents it.
>Yes, you can. Even if schools weren't full of unvaccinated people, which they are, the existence of breakthrough infections would underline why banning mask mandates is a culpablr error.
The problem with covid is that it clearly divides directly down political lines. Perhaps Texas guy is politically motivated and making bad decisions. The problem is the opposite as well. CNBC is clearly attacking when it's clearly unreasonable to do so.
I have no pity at all for anti-vaxxers who get covid. I'm not in the USA, nor do I care about Texas.
Also not a biologist, but on the point of vaccines and whether they prevent the disease full-stop or just reduce the risk of serious illness, that's covered in the article.
My synopsis of that was that it was not expected (by the developers of the vaccines) that it would prevent people getting the illness, but that it would considerably reduce the risk of serious infection.
Some early trial results raised hopes that it would prevent people getting it, but with Delta that's not been borne out.
That said, in addition to reducing the risk of serious cases, it does also help reduce transmission as vaccinated people who get it, generally have less serious cases, which mean they are infectious for a smaller amount of time.
The article's answer to this question is "the eventuality of endemic COVID-19 does not mean we should drop all precautions. The more we can flatten the curve now, the less hospitals will become overwhelmed". There are currently ~6000 COVID patients in hospital, which is a little less than 1/6 of the Jan 2021 peak and over 1/4 of the April 2020 peak. Which is to say, manageable right now but probably not something you want to let burn much hotter than that.
Long-term mask-wearing seem like an entirely reasonable social change.
It's like any other clothing: you're protecting a vulnerable part of your body and also displaying respect for others. And it's mostly enforced by social norms: though in many places it is in fact illegal to go without clothing, people wear clothes regardless of the law. (I was in San Francisco at the time the public nudity ban, or shall we call it the "clothing requirement," was passed, and I can assure you that people were generally clothed in San Francisco even before then.)
As another comment pointed out the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255121), it's not just going to be SARS-nCoV-2. There's going to be a lot more easily communicable diseases in the future in dense locations. And there was the first SARS, of course, and countries hit hard by the first SARS already adopted a norm of mask-wearing in crowded locations like public transit, which helps them with other diseases that are "here forever" like the seasonal flu.
I think mask-wearing in public is going to become a sign of basic respect and decency and hygiene. We're already comfortable with "No shoes, no shirt, no service."
At this point we almost know too much about the spread of this disease. Never in history have we tested so much for one thing. Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything. This is probably the first time in history that the whole world has the same scary thing as their front-page news.
It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === danger. I am sure there are many thousands of cases of many other diseases in my community right now that I will never know or care about.
I'm not trying to detract at all from the seriousness of the pandemic, just saying that going forward we'll have to pay a lot less attention to covid-19 if we want to have mental space for anything else.
> Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything.
This was an extremely silly thing to write. Typhoid Mary was tracked down, was locked up for three decades and became a legend over a century ago. Before modern drugs and widespread vaccination programs people worried a lot about asymptomatic transmission of disease.
You might argue that not having to worry as much about survival now that we've got modern vaccination has made people think about asymptomatic transmission of infectious disease less, but seriously, that's also nuts. It's not like everyone somehow failed to consider asymptomatic transmission of HIV since the mid eighties. Worrying about it changed our culture.
> Never in history have we tested so much for one thing.
TB skin tests and strep tests have been much more widely used.
Point taken about Typhoid Mary. I should have said never before have we had so much information about asymptomatic disease transmission to see / worry about.
As for the testing ... I still do think Covid is extremely unique here. The US has given over 500M tests (~1.5/person) and the UK has given over 250M tests (~4/person) in less than two years. Many employers and schools are scaling up plans to do one or more tests per week per person. Sure maybe we haven't caught up to the total TB tests given across all time yet, but the rate of testing for this disease is far greater than anything that preceded it and looks like it will stay that way.
It's an interesting question of how to qualify your words when you talk about how widespread the tests are. I'm sure fewer than half the people I know have had COVID tests (versus tests everyone gets), which makes the tests per person metric potentially a little deceptive. I think it's a fair point that the possibility of constant testing tied to access to employment or entertainment could change our culture.
> I should have said never before have we had so much information about asymptomatic disease transmission to see / worry about.
I think this is much less of a problem than you make it out to be. Having a lot of information, and having the information gradually improve in quality, is a good thing. The media's inundation of people with the information and the insanely stupid public dialogue surrounding it all is... less good.
Nevertheless, to the original point, I think all the analogies a person could draw between today and the dynamics of the AIDS epidemic and those years of uncertainty, discrimination and death make what's happening today seem less psychologically traumatic by comparison. Maybe it's less clear because we were already dealing with Very Stupid Times before COVID 19 came along.
Speaking from the United States, if we had rolled out a more robust testing scheme at the outset, we could have saved lives and accelerated reopening. President Trump publicly ridiculed widespread testing. My local school district is going to randomly test up to 20% of students every week. That's what it takes to control a pandemic. If people could have rolled out that level of testing during past pandemics, I'd like to think they would have.
I don’t know if that’s true. Case in point, the reason that Florida is drowning in COVID right now is that the majority of people there don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the same thing and many other parts of the country. There are still a lot of people who are freaked out, but most ordinary people are starting to tune out the news and lose interest because the media calls to be scared and panic just make them numb eventually.
I appreciate you sugar-coating it since I live there, but it's a bit worse than that. I live in Jacksonville. Of my friends, family and other connections there are just a few buckets people fall into: the informed, the purposefully-ignorant, and the idiots. Sadly, we've learned through the last year or so that many of our friends are actually idiots. That's been tough.
Thousands of COVID cases is a small bit of danger, but there are many other things to worry about, and some pockets of the world are already "over" worrying about COVID. People mostly irrationally respond to fear and panic, I doubt whether we can accurately predict what the future mindset will be on various threats.
It's not that the virus will necessarily evolve to become benign, but rather that most people will get infected when they're young and build up natural immunity which protects them later in life. This is what already happens with the other 4 endemic common cold coronaviruses. Each of them probably killed a lot of people when they first emerged.
This is the correct answer and should be highlighted more. The virus doesn't evolve to become benign, it's the hosts that will evolve. In addition to the endemic coronaviruses that you stated, another example are endemic/seasonal influenza strains vs. new strains.
(Yes the virus will evolve but in general mutations will optimise for transmission and be indifferent to lethality.)
Mutations will optimize for transmission, but once there's a high level of immunity against this strain (all the variants are still one strain) then the virus will face the pressure to mutate to achieve actual immune escape. There's 20 epitopes on the spike that need to change, and some of those should come at a cost to fitness, and eventually it should face a choice between trying to increase its transmissibility to find immunologically naive humans (where delta variant is probably reaching its limit) and to better transmit in recovered/vaccinated individuals due to immune escape.
This is not exactly true. Keeping your infectious host alive longer, will increase transmission.
This is why there is an evolutionary pressure for all diseases to keep your host alive, and why some diseases/parasites ultimately evolve to be less harmful/lethal.
> This is why there is an evolutionary pressure for all diseases to keep your host alive
Lethality should be distinguished from "keeping the host alive." For example, HIV is more than 90% lethal (untreated) but can take a decade before killing the host.
It seems like lethality can become a first order evolutionary driver though by turning our focus on it and quickly smothering any "hot" virus but allowing "warm" virus to spread. Can't humans play a part in the evolutionary process of the virus?
In theory yes - and that's what's happening in many countries. E.g. in Germany there is a differentiation between high risk areas and virus variant areas, with different testing and quarantine protocols etc.
However on a global scale only some countries are sequencing some of the time, and only in humans (with ad-hoc exceptions)! Which is simply not enough.
Yes. Hopefully, vaccines confer the same immunity as exposure during youth. Based on their efficacy, it seems they’re quite close, at least for current strains—even with delta, the overwhelming majority of breakthrough cases are benign or totally asymptomatic, just like with a common cold.
so what happens if kids in lockdown now (e.g. australia) grow up w/o exposure to the common cold? is it suddenly going to become a big deal for them later in life?
How do you know? HIV hasn't evolved to be any less deadly in the 40 years it has been around. Instead, there's most excellent treatment available and people have changed their behaviour.
...and also, 40 years is not a long time for disease evolution. ...especially one like HIV which has a much lower transmission rate than a respiratory virus.
I wonder how much we'll change/have to change our behavior long term, for example 10 years from now. I'd imagine not much.
I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's known that immunity against coronaviruses isn't long-lasting (look at the Rev Jackson and his wife, both of whom were vaccinated early this year and are now in hospital) and that antiviral treatment needs to start early (does everyone really want to do a PCR test every other day so they can start antibody treatment early like Governor Abbot?)
We'll have to start wearing masks indoor and stop being in crowded rooms until the virus is eradicated. Right now, with the population half vaccinated, we are setting ourselves up for a re-run of Marek's disease, this time in people.
But doesn't COVID have animal reservoirs? If it does, good luck vaccinating all the bats and monkeys of the world. Or what's the plan there? Wait until the virus has subsided “enough”, then... what exactly? Still be on guard 24/7/365/4, paranoidally testing each and every traveler, ready to quench a cluster formed around some volunteer returning from a distant part of the world?
Nonpharmaceutical interventions work pretty good. Plague is endemic in rodents in the Western US, there are actually a dozen human cases every year, but there aren't epidemics because we do rodent-proofing. Rabies has an animal reservoir, but we vaccinate our dogs.
Honestly, I don't understand the appeal of the ostrich strategy. Vaccination rates in Florida and Illinois are similar but in Florida, where they pretend Covid doesn't exist, the only thing they get is overflowing hospitals.
I'm more talking about some humans getting infected somewhere, then bringing it in from wherever they were, where precautions are lower than where you came from.
The way I see it, the long-term route is treating COVID like, say, malaria. You would get your vaccine when you travel places. Doctors would know what to test for based on your symptoms. But still, the contagiousness here is radically different. By the time you get to see your doctor, you could have infected dozens of people. So the most effective strategy is still isolation and pervasive testing?
IDK, I guess we will just have to sit there and see where we'll be with COVID in 5 years from now. Maybe the virus will really just get bored and go away (unlikely). If not, maybe people will get bored of being freaked out and more comfortable with the thought that electing a new government won't eradicate the virus but you can build more hospitals and keep getting your yearly COVID booster shots.
Maybe if the chinese keep their same lockdown and close their border indefinitely, or maybe for new zealand this is the case but for countries in the EU and NA the cats out of the bag and it wont ever be eradicated.
I dont know who told you eradication was still an option but it stopped being one in feburary of 2020 when nCov19 started commmunal spreading.
If we got every human being vaccinated with a 100% efficacious vaccine for all strains at the exact same time globally without pause then MAYBE eradication would be feasible.
Eradication is a fever dream, did you bother to read the attached article?
Well, keep in mind that the transmission vector of HIV and SARS COVID are completely different. If we had found in the 80's that HIV was transmissible by simply breathing the same air as those infected, we'd likely have seen a similar response... without all the "work from home" benefits that we currently enjoy.
I doubt it. Pandemic preparedness, including for airborne diseases, was the same for decades until it was all thrown out the window to do something wildly different that had never been done before.
Which - evidently, as we're still having "lockdowns" and "resurgences" 1.5 years after that "two weeks to flatten the curve" experiment - didn't work.
What was the old preparedness that we "threw out the window" in favor of lockdowns and masks? As far as I know, humanity has rarely bothered with any pandemic reaction beyond "stay away from the visibly ill" and "go out less".
In pandemics, you isolate only the sick, treat them, and offer prophylaxis to vulnerable groups.
In COVID, we isolated everyone, sick and healthy (utterly unprecedented), then flooded the most vulnerable with sick people (bizarre care home mismanagement), and refused to give treatment or prophylaxis to anyone until they couldn't breathe, at which point they were put on a ventilator.
In some places, that's still the protocol. Others have learned from these mistakes and moved on.
When everyone has, COVID will cease to be a problem.
The original approach has worked for every other novel virus pandemic we've had - which happen regularly every few years. Even the very same people at Imperial College made similarly dire predictions for some of those pandemics at the time - and yet none registered more than a fraction of a flu season.
That original protocol, used repeatedly for years, was abandoned and effectively reversed for COVID, with ongoing disastrous results as anyone can plainly see.
You have to give it to the homosexuals - they started using condoms and shut down the clubs where you would have sex with ten different men every night. Meanwhile, in large tracts of the country we are still arguing if masks are a good idea.
> And despite killing ten times as many people as COVID
That's an INCREDIBLY disingenuous comparison considering that COVID-19 has been with us for less than two years.
And, though I object to your characterization of said measures, extreme measures weren't taken because you couldn't catch it just via proximity. Also important to point out one big similarity - denial of both was used to dehumanize swathes of the population who were especially vulnerable.
Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe.
And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result (ie, it's wild mess that makes no sense and more typically returns results opposite to expectation), it largely appears this would have been the case had we not ruined everything over it.
> Not really, at the rate death is declining overall COVID will almost certainly kill far fewer in the same timeframe.
Looking at Google's worldwide deaths I don't see much of a decline. Sure, it's down from a peak, but it's actually on the way back up. What data are you using for that assumption that deaths are on the decline?
> And given differences in policy, and differences in resistance to them have not resulted in any discernible difference in result
South Korea, with a population of 51.71 million, is currently sitting at just over 2,000 deaths. Do you believe it to be sheer chance that their deaths are so low when compared to America?
Sweden and UK saw an almost identical death curve per million despite diametrically-opposed policy decisions.
Gibraltar had almost no COVID, vaccinated literally everyone and then had a massive (and ongoing) outbreak.
We can go back and forth for hours with many examples proving and countering each factoid of the "narrative" - and only make my point; it's an inconclusive mess.
Rigid adherence to the prevailing dogma is clearly foolish in such a situation.
As for deaths, if you really want to argue about it, you need to exclude the "died within 28 days of a positive test"'s, the ridiculously-ignored co-morbidities, and the "cases" that resulted in death that were based on RT-PCR's at cycle thresholds above 35, obviously. Those coronavirus "high score table" sites don't do that nor bother to account for any of many subtleties in reporting that can and do have major impact on results.
Good luck trying to figure any of it out then. But hey, don't let that stop you entertaining a false adamancy - I'm sure it feels just great.
Using Ioannidis and others you can make some attempt using seroprevalence studies if you're really interested, suffice to say it's just generally much, much less overall than the SAGE-induced nonsense, you've undoubtedly succumbed to, would have you believe.
Finally, as now hundreds of peer-reviewed RCT's worldwide have shown, it's now one of the most treatable illnesses out there, if you bother to understand its mechanism of cell infection and how to inhibit that, instead of not doing anything to help and then putting people on a 25%-survival-rate ventilator, which thus far has been the most common response.
The problem is not scientific or medical anymore, its political and social. The science and medicine has been worked out for months now.
He didnt die of a gunshot wound he had a comorbidity of blood loss.
Ah well, he tested positive for gunshot wound but thst was 28 days ago.
This is not an inconclusive mess in the peer reviewed scientific community when people use real data and studies to back their claims. The problem is that you are not sourcing your opinion from that community you are sourcing it from pointless online bickering and a confirmation biased perspective.
As for sweden your comaprison to the UK is disingenuous. Compare it to norway and finland for real understanding.
Governments the world over have made repeated, clear statements that if someone tests positive for COVID, and then dies within 28 days for any reason, the death is counted as a COVID death.
That is the end of any validity in test-derived deaths data.
I am sourcing my opinion exclusively from published, peer-reviewed science in well-established journals. If you are not aware of any of it, as it appears you just admitted, you are not a sufficiently qualified researcher and should refrain from comment.
You do understand in vivo and in vitro are different terms for a reason right? That chloroquine worked in the lab but that the coronavirus can use a different pathway than the one chloroquine inhibits?
There have been hundreds of peer-reviewed RCT's in vivo, in live human COVID-infected patients of many differing treatments for COVID, several of which have demonstrated high efficacy in reducing hospitalisation and death as both prophylaxis and treatment.
The context was treatments for COVID, and you brought up only one of the least studied and least likely effective of the studied treatments you could have mentioned. Misinformed.
I downvoted for an opinion-based answer. Yea generally viruses evolve to be less deadly and more infectious, that’s the trend (but certainly not a law), but the important thing is the time scale. Plus there are endemic viruses that are not benign. So this comment came across as a bit too confident. Feel free to expand on it.
With regards this claim, the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) addresses it in their recent paper about future evolutionary scenarios [0].
Scenario Four: SARS-CoV-2 follows an evolutionary trajectory with decreased virulence
Likelihood: Unlikely in the short term, realistic possibility in the long term.
Which makes sense as most transmission occurs in the presymptomatic phase, there's no selection pressure to evolve to be less deadly.
As far as I know the virus H1N1 itself didn't really evolve in the sense that it got milder - all hosts either developed immunity or died off. Now our immune systems encounter one of the endemic, seasonal strains of H1N1 when we are young (or we get a flu vaccine) - however from time to time a new strain of H1N1 emerges that is dissimilar enough, see e.g. 1977 flu or the 2009 flu outbreak.
The original SARS had a much higher mortality rate, which meant that trace-and-isolate responses actually had a chance of working. The mortality rate of Covid-19 is nowhere near that of SARS, which actually allows it to kill more people in the end because it can spread stealthily, and no lockdown or trace-and-isolate has worked. There are also more reports of animal reservoirs for Covid-19 than for SARS.
The virus will evolve so as to make more copies of the virus. This can go more than one way.
The viral evolutionary definition of benign is "does not kill the host or harm the host in such a way as to greatly reduce its ability to spread the virus."
Making the host brutally ill and totally non-functional for weeks is generally fine. Causing harm to the host that reduces its vitality or life span in the long term is fine. Polio met these criteria. It did not usually kill its host.
Benign is only one evolutionary path though. Another evolutionary path for a virus is to boost the R factor so high that it can burn through its hosts and still find more hosts, especially if there are say... seven to eight billion hosts. Smallpox was more like this. A more contagious form of Ebola could be like this.
I think it's a key point to mention that it's more that the hosts will evolve, i.e. develop immunity or die off, rather than the virus. The virus will continue to mutate but mutation activity is invariant to lethality (up to a certain point where lethality precludes transmission - where SARS-Cov-2 is far away from). In fact, because there is a correlation between viral load and lethality, the virus will actually get less benign on average in the short term.
I have an idea: can someone write a script to compare current covid cases among countries as a function of vaccination rates. Same for deaths/1 miliion population. I don't have skills for that, but this is HN after all, so there should be someone...
(One of the parameters should be a timeline of vaccinations - vaccines tend to wane over time, we have a chance to figure out to what extent).
> can someone write a script to compare current covid cases among countries as a function of vaccination rates
This isn't really a good idea, because cases as a function of vaccination rates won't tell you anything meaningful. Vaccinations aren't distributed at random - they are heavily skewed towards people at risk of serious health effects from the virus, and skewed away from people with low risk.
So if you were to tabulate that data, you'd be hopelessly confounded by the differing population structures among different countries.
Vaccine trials run large randomized control experiments to estimate vaccine effectiveness. i.e. they compare a control group to an experiment group, both equally likely to contract the virus, and observe if a smaller percent of the experiment group contracted the virus compared to the control group over a certain time period.
Continued vaccine efficacy data is measured longitudinally, by tracking the cumulative infection rate across populations with similar risk profiles but different preventative measures in place.
The data for vaccine effectiveness is already publicly available and compiled through reports and infographs on the CDC website, the FDA website and the WHO website. xkcd even had a comic about a graph of vaccine efficacy pulled directly from the FDA's preliminary brief about the Moderna vaccine trial results last year. There are papers that have been published regarding longitudinal results for countries - for instance, you might have heard about studies from Israel claiming that vaccine efficacy has dropped by some 60%, while other studies continue to cap the drop at anywhere from 0 to 10%.
It would have to be a multivariate analysis. That's sort of the problem with x over y analysis - the question presupposes a very narrow range of answers.
There are good reasons to believe the vaccines help, but you don't want to beg the question when you start the analysis.
> you might have heard about studies from Israel claiming that vaccine efficacy has dropped by some 60%
Yes, I heard it. 60% is not a constant, the effectiveness keeps dropping over time. So what gives? In country A, everybody has to take a vaccine every 5-6 months with lockdowns in between, while another country doesn't bother vaccinating, and life returns to normal? Is this what you expect from the vaccine?
I really hope we take this as a call to put more research into effective and affordable antiviral treatment. Vaccines are great, but there is always a limitation. Better antivirals could save a lot of lives, especially early in a pandemic.
Does anyone know of any resources that talk about how endemic COVID might look for immune-compromised folks? I recognize there probably just isn't the research yet to make too many claims about how this disease effects people on immune-supressing drugs but I have found vanishingly little on the web that even takes a stab at what life should look like for those folks in the long run.
This is a rare Atlantic article that I think takes a level-headed and nuanced approach to a topic that requires some level of technical understanding. I tip my hat to Sarah Zhang.
It is surprisingly difficult to explain this even to otherwise intelligent people. Everyone has been so brainwashed by mass media's narrative of "stopping covid" that they don't see that even in January of 2020 it was already impossible to "stop" it in any meaningful way. And they're still talking about it today. The strategy, it seems to me, should be to vaccinate as many people as possible, and then, within 6 months of that curve flatlining somewhere at 85-90% just let 'er rip and get people to acquire long-lasting immunity from COVID itself, while they are still protected by vaccine antibodies. And those who decline the vaccine should be treated as adults, and allowed to take the risk, too. There can't be _that_ many of such people given that by CDCs own estimates 120M+ people in the US already had the disease [1]. We will all get it eventually. A year or two from now, we'll be getting it 2-3 times a year and it'll be totally normal. Masks or no masks, you are getting covid. But with a vax you have a much greater chance of suriving it. This should be the messaging, yet we get total incompetence and incoherence out of people who should know better.
I'm not saying there's some kind of grand conspiracy theory but there are people who benefit from states/country not being fully open.
Let it rip announced today would mean the end of eviction moratorium.
"Today" is probably too early. You have to message this well in advance so that people who want to get the vaccine but perhaps were holding out for the fall season could get it in time. I know a good number of folks like that myself. It'd also be great if we could, _after a year and a half_, actually scale up capacity for N95 masks as well, at least for people who can't take the vaccine for medical reasons, if not for everyone who wants them.
The whole "fighting COVID" thing is 100% political at this point. If it wasn't, instead of requiring masks on a plane (stuffed like sardines in a can), we'd see TSA at least measure body temperature and look for symptoms. We'd see the same thing in grocery stores, hospitals, and other public places. Gavin Newsom wouldn't be dining unmasked at The French Laundry, and Barack Obama wouldn't call a 500+ person superspreader event.
People who tell us to worry about COVID, as a rule, demonstrably aren't worried about it themselves. Fauci himself rips that mask off his face immediately after cameras turn off. So after I received the vaccine, I basically said "fuck it" and I'm not going to comply with anything anymore. Nor will I get any "booster" shots or whatever else they come up with. I will also not work with or for anyone who mandates any of this useless garbage.
What baffles me is the total failure to highlight one of the best ways to mitigate the risk of severe covid complications: don’t be obese[1]. It’s also a good life choice for those who also prefer not to die of non-covid conditions.
Edit: And it increases your risk for long covid[2].
The, uh, tone of your comment suggests that there is this epidemic of obese people who simply have neglected to press the STOP BEING OBESE button. "All you have to do is ..." "Can't you just ..." In technology, we hate hearing that from people who do not have a grasp of the situation -- why are you doing it here?
That button doesn't exist. That's the source of your bafflement.
You could same about "Can't you just take the jab?" and "Can't you just wear a mask?". If you want to be the one deciding who has to do something, then that's called authoritarianism and it's the reason why so many people are pissed off about the all of the covid restrictions.
Obesity is something that can take quite a while to address. What baffles me is the total failure of some people to see one of the best ways to mitigate the risk of severe covid complications; TAKE THE VACCINE
I was 35 pounds overweight. Saw the writing on the wall and in three months I'm down 25-30 pounds. Stopped eating sugar and bread and only eat one meal 2-4 times a week.
The trick is to keep that going in the longterm. I did manage to lose that amount of weight in the same amount of time as well, but ended up gaining it back in under 5 years, which I hear is the fate of most people who lose weight.
Unfortunately, it would seem the data would suggest yes.
Per the CDC:
From 1999 –2000 through 2017 –2018, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 42.4%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.
While dieting can control obesity, we have decades of evidence to show it isn’t easy. Bariatric surgery does seem to work but is invasive and dangerous.
Finally a thoughtful truthful article on the topic. It’s a year too late, but better now than never. It’s time to accept the reality and move past the hysteria.
It was actually the first thing I ever really read about covid and shaped a lot of my views early on in the pandemic, largely inoculating me from going full panic mode.
Specially given that after a year and a half we still don't seem to ponder that livestock, hunting, deforestation, and all sorts of animal experimenting mean another deadly disease could slip up anytime as it just did.
"anthropized environments can provide an acceptable habitat for a large range of bat species, generating thus a higher diversity of bats and in turn of bat-borne viruses next to human dwellings … This increases the risk of transmission of viruses through direct contact, domestic animal infection, or contamination by urine or feces." [0]
"Deforestation has also been associated with the increased emergence of viral pathogens, such as SARS, Ebola and other viruses of bats." [1]
The conclusions of the first paper (from April 2018) seem prophetic in hindsight: "The risk of emergence of a novel bat-CoV disease can therefore be envisioned."
I believe the premise is that close contact with nature may lead to species-hopping viruses transmitting to us. Combine that with bats like to live on human structures, double whammy. Bats are highly social and create breeding-grounds for tons of pathogens.
Wouldn't it be better, then, at this point, to focus on hospitalization numbers rather than infections or deaths alone. As vaccines have been, reportedly, very good at preventing hospitalizations.
It doesn't matter if there's 1 death, if hundreds are being hospitalized per day, overflowing the health care system.
The problem isn't just mortality rate of covid-19 itself, it's also how hospitals are other treatments are affected. You better hope you don't get sick when the health care system is overloaded or at capacity.
It will be interesting to see if this will mutate into less harmful variants, or, with vaccines go the way of Marek's disease, and become more lethal. This is a fascinating global experiment that will determine our policy for decades either way.
Personally, the first thing I did when I heard that a vaccine was coming was try to find out if it was "leaky" or not. I could not find this information. We ought to be hustling on a non-leaky version, and perhaps that will be the policy lesson learned.
It's a pre-print of a study that indicates that children born during the pandemic, but not (even immediately) before, have significant cognitive deficites.
Authors attribute it to lockdowns (although they ruled out maternal stress) because pregnant mothers and newborns didn't have a postive test result or symptoms. But that might be because they were not tested at all (researchers didn't track them down to check for antibodies) and had asymptomatic infection. There's also an interesting correlation that poorer children had higher likelyhood of deficits, which might also indicate that deficits are possibly due to covid, because poorer people were more likely to get infected during the pandemic.
So this research might hint that newborns (but not few months olds) are vulnerable to covid and the result is cognitive deficit.
Which might mean that in 20 years we will have a crime wave similar than the one explained by lead hypothesis, that will last for as long as we don't feel like vaccinating newborns against covid.
That this article is even necessary proves that our leadership in the west has utterly failed to convey the goal of Coronavirus suppression tactics. Either that, or the sensible message is being morphed, funhouse mirror style, even through the most banal of media outlets.
COVID-19 in some form was always going to be around forever. The goal was never complete eradication. Perhaps the miracle of the mRNA vaccine led us to fantasize, a little too openly, about going back to the pre-pandemic status quo. But that was never going to be the case.
Personally, I’ve already moved on. I’ll wear a mask as the situation dictates. I’ll get the boosters. I’ll keep mailing in my nasal tests twice a week and check the results. I’ll keep an eye on the hospital numbers and modify my risky behavior as needed. I won’t argue with people about the mask, about vaccines, about the origins. I’ll work from home as long as they’ll let me and go into the office when they say I’ve got to — or I’ll find another job.
I’ve already made peace with this thing. I’ve moved on. If I get it, I get it — but there’s no real use in obsessing over it any longer. I’ve adapted, and I’m ok with that.
It will be interesting to understand the long-term impact of covid on immunity. Given that covid came from GoF research have we developed defenses (albeit at an ultimately very-high price) that will protect us from future novel coronaviruses ?
other classes of virus? (ie how the plague resistance in those of european descent gives some level of protection against hiv [0])
Is this something we have a way to measure or will it be impossible to tell once everyone in the world has some amount of covid immunity?
The only things pushed were masks and vaccines. Nothing about Vitamin D (or C for that matter) supplementation. No push for healthy lifestyles or reduction of obesity rate. Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies. Nothing about the use of UV light safe to stand in that kills virus. Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors.
We should have had a full-court press in all areas to fight this virus. Not just a $100 billion for big pharma for a vaccine that always works, except when it doesn't. It's no wonder 25% of the US have adopted the idiotic position that they wont accept a mask or vaccine. People are so done with the 'new normal' for this week that just needs to be accepted.
> No push for healthy lifestyles or reduction of obesity rate.
Obese and unhealthy people won't become healthy if you ask the nicely. It's requires a lifestyle change.
> Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies.
Not even a simple lifestyle change like putting some cloth over your face is being tolerated.
> Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors.
And many things that would help would be at an fairly incredible financial cost (~$2 billion to cover schools, at an incredibly unrealistic $15k/school), or impossible (most local climates do not allow for comfortably staying outdoors all day).
Most of the people setting the remote work/in office policies seemed to be thinking that vaccines offered a path back to normalcy. Delta seems to have blown that idea out of the water.
It is possible that in the endemic covid world, there always remains a significant health risk due to breakthrough cases, especially for folks who are older or have comorbidities. Given that, it seems employers may face difficulty mandating people to work in person.
Nonpharmaceutical interventions do work. With Internet and E-commerce, full scale lockdown becomes tenable. Together with mass PCR testing, the virus can be eradicated.
The virus can't teleport, and it is here to stay only because the decision-makers thought that it was the cheaper option to let it spread (it is not), then didn't want to admit being wrong.
It is sad to see that with all the technologies available, the world is still in the middle of the pandemic.
I think it would be useful for you to go through the employment by occupation percentages [1] to get an idea of the percentage of jobs that would be eradicated with sustained full lockdown, for those that can't work from home.
How long would a full lockdown take? (a real one, not a mockdown)
The experience in Wuhan shows that 76 days would be enough to eradicate the virus from a massive outbreak. So the loss would be way less than 20% of the GDP (since essential economic activities would still be going on [1], and there would be people being able to work from home. Government could still use financial instrument/regulation to alleviate the damage).
I don't think the the US would be able to do such a large project, but I had thought that the European bureaucratic system was organized enough. I was apparently wrong.
> To give some perspectives on the GDP contributed by different sectors
This is not the correct measurement of loss, since it's only first order. Second order includes the industries involved in the entire supply chain for each, the shortages that would be created, and spending for a significant portion of the population going to zero (or, with previous government assistance, not nearly enough).
Speaking for the US at least pursuing a covid zero approach now that we have vaccines that are very effective against hospitalization and death just doesn't make sense. You act like doing a "real" lockdown would be trivial but we have already seen that even light lockdowns have had serious side-effects.
Its not March 2020 anymore, we have an answer and it is vaccines. Every public policy decision we make going forward should be assessed by asking the question "will this policy encourage better vaccine uptake?".
Personally I think forcing people to continue to socially distance and such even after getting vaccinated leads to more vaccine hesitancy.
Unfortunately, our current vaccines are simply not good enough. Just take a look at the data from Israel and Iceland. From the article, it was clear already from last year.
How many other variants do we need, as we let the apply yet another selection pressure with the leaky vaccines? (AY.12 variant is now the dominant variant in Israel).
Yeah you are going to have to back up your arguments with more than "look at Isreal and Iceland". We have dealt with the flu using leaky vaccines for decades, how is this different?
The virus is in animal hosts already, so it probably won't be eradicated. Even if it wasn't in animals, there are countries with principles of freedom where some 10-30% won't listen to a lockdown. It's unlikely those countries will all change their foundational cultural principles. I don't think technology is the only factor, think of looseness and tightness of cultural behavior, think of self-regard vs regard for others. These things matter, it's not all about grocery delivery and Zoom meetings. Especially for the meat-packers who make the groceries in factories, and the healthcare workers who need to go in to the physical clinic, etc.
Somehow New Zealand is a special country with principles of freedom. I failed see that how it is culturally fundamentally different from other western nations.
IMO, the acceptance is mostly linked to the effectiveness of the initial implementations of the lockdowns. And the effectiveness is seemingly only determined by the initial strategies. Countries which went for elimination/eradication had better outcome, and thus higher lockdown acceptance. In countries which went on flattening the curve, people had the same (if not more/longer) disturbance, but less success (more deaths).
Either we do a full lockdown to reach zero COVID, like NZ and China did (while buying stuff online), or we would have to do prolonged mockdowns like in Europe.
The Chinese have been living a mostly normal life (albeit with limited foreign travel possibilities, and sporadic lockdowns in isolated locations) for a year.
Or we act proportionately and protect the weakest while allowing the rest of the population to exercise their right to be free from a life where the government licenses their every action.
How are things going to pan out, when we apply selection pressure to the virus, while letting the virus sieve through the whole human population, creating dangerous variants due to our leaky vaccines? [1]
I would have had agreed with you if we had a sterilizing vaccine that would help us to reach herd immunity. But we don't.
Those travels which cannot afford 14 days quarantines, are non-essential travels. We fortunately have internet and the possibility to do remote meetings.
The only thing missing is tourism, though. That's sad, but better travel locally than killing people.
There is lots of competition for the top of the stupidity list.
NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu season, really?
Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity. or the fact people still want to lock down despite how epically they have failed. Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America. To no fault of their own, they are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the US sharing a border with them the way it is meant no rosy outcome was in our future.
Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? if we had to lock down because of lack of hospital beds, well we better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds, like real soon. This is why the lockdowns should have came at a price, you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdown, we need timely updates on your progress to that metric, and we need an action plan such that this will never happen again (such as building more hosptials - hey, how about just opening the thousands we shut down in the last 5 years to make hospitals more profitable!). my views on that were called 'myopic'. so we gave them lockdowns without restrictions, and nothing was done. here we are in the same situation, odd.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
edit: just to be clear - I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. There is unrefutably evidence the vaccine prevents sever cases.
> Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity
New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works.
Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case and they knew that, since that lockdown began there are now over 100 patients linked to that single infection. Under a lockdown the people who are surprised to discover that they're infected are (mostly) bored at home, not out infecting yet more people.
I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again, and exit that lockdown as they did earlier ones. Because elimination strategy works.
"small", "remote", and "island" aren't significant direct contributions here.
"seal" does -- whether any group is collectively capable of taking chain-of-exposure and its management seriously.
Make your island arbitrarily small and remote but have even a single person who's boating/flying or any kind of unmanaged travel outside the bubble regularly and you'll see infection overrun the island.
Pick an arbitrarily large city within miles of another on a shared continent with an unmanaged pandemic. Have it populated with people who are unified in careful contact management and they'll keep outbreaks scarce and small.
It's far easier to have a successful seal on a remote island than the Czech Republic or Alabama. Land borders are both more secure and more porous than you'd think.
Nobody really needs to go to New Zealand unless they’re from there. London is an international hub for multiple industries. It’s much harder to prevent people from traveling there.
we never shut the airports (or the channel tunnel). If you arrived in the UK you were told to quarantine, but not made to.
Also our politicians are deeply incompetent and were the only ones in Europe (AFAIK) aiming for herd immunity right off the bat, until they eventually ran the numbers on death rates if the ICUs ran out of capacity and realised it was a terrible idea.
Right, so it's far more to do with institutions and policy than it is to do with how big an ocean you're in. NZ could have done the exact same thing - kept flights going, asked people politely to quarantine, etc.
Very true, but if you're a country with porous borders then it's going to be much harder to enforce. Border control is a prerequisite to enforcing transit quarantine, as well as having said rules in place, and border control is easier for an island.
Britain is so close to continental Europe that being an island is irrelevant. Also, it has a population of 66 million compared to NZ’s 5 on just as small an island.
1. New Zealand isn't "an island", there's two, one is slightly bigger and has less people.
2. Is your implication that the UK is so close to the mainland that the covid numbers are high due to people coming over in rafts? In that case the UK should have lower covid numbers because it has a much larger navy covering a the english channel, irish sea, and the north sea. Where as NZ has to cover the entire south pacific.
1. Sure, it's a figure of speech. And the number is way greater than two, if we're going to be nitpicky.
2. My point is that there's way more people entering, leaving, and going from A to B for whatever reason. Not trying to judge people, just stating a fact here.
It is far easier to lock down an island chain of 5 million people than it is to lock down a city of 8.5 million people.
But China knows how to do it, and they have much more density than the USA. You just need to be very authoritarian; e.g. marching people under guard to quarantine hotels from airplanes.
Right, I will second this, our law enforcement shut down the Florida Keys at what we call he 18 mile stretch. No one that is not a resident was allowed in. for a good deal of time it worked and to be honest, I am thankful that they did, as at that moment in time, we did not know what we where looking at.
Yeah, that's not happening in the U.S. Not without starting a civil war.
"Later the policy became even more aggressive, with officials going door to door for health checks, and forcing anyone ill into isolation. A disabled boy reportedly died after he was left without food, water or help when his his father and brother were quarantined."
I'd argue that a 'strict lockdown' is, in itself, rather draconian. Almost by definition, it requires heavy policing of an individual's life and almost total surveillance of their movements.
If by 'strict lockdown' you mean 'Ask people to limit their movements and preferably just stay at home' then maybe that's not quite so draconian.
Oh really? Is it possible to shut down the birthday parties and holiday gatherings my neighbors were having during the height of the winter peak without being draconian?
Being a remote island nation really doesn't make much difference in the era of Air travel. It has (had) very high immigration rates and a lot of tourists.
every single person traveling through an international airport is concentrated and processed in a way that people driving from alabama to florida are not. that makes an extraordinary difference.
Also, a country with a GDP the size of the U.S. state of Oklahoma mind you (New Zealand's G.D.P 204,671, Oklahoma's G.D.P. 206,058 (in USD million, 2019, according to the IMF) [1]
[1]
Comparison between U.S. states and sovereign states by GDP
It gives you a general idea, how significant or insignificant an economy is and also roughly how many other moving parts of the global economy it has complex gears in.
And thereby how many more fold damages can result from a catastrophic shutdown of the country, something a small geographically-on-the-periphery-of-the-world nation need not worry about, to the same degree.
NZ isn't North Korea. It's not a hermit jurisdiction relying on its own internal economy. It relies a lot on trade with the rest of the world - it gets a lot of money from exports and relies a lot on imports (everything here is depressingly expensive for that reason).
Hell I'm even able to connect to communicate you using internet (the exact same kind you get in Oklahoma).
You got it all in reverse. Large countries are much less affected by this as they are more self sufficient. Small countries have far more open economies and depend far more on import and export to work. They are too small to make everything themselves.
Except that's completely wrong. All the costs are borne by the citizens of NZ. Someone who can't go to work in NZ is just as affected as someone who can't go to work in the US. The difference is, and was, in the government's response in assisting those bearing those costs.
Wait until they actually open up. They are just delaying the inevitable. Then again there’s no reason to go indoors in crowds in NZ—not like they have an arts scene, or anything, really, besides the outdoors.
Yes. For small island countries like New Zealand it works "great." This was never an option for countries like the US, or even most of Europe. Much less so for countries like India.
But we'll see how it goes. If New Zealand and Australia persist in this notion that they're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away, particularly with its endemicity now inevitable, I think you will soon find vast swaths of those countries in open, violent revolt.
I live in NZ and can assure you from the front lines of the revolt that we don't think we're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away.
The game has always been to play it by ear. That's been a great call so far, we've lived normal lives for the last year while incredible scientific advances have delivered vaccines.
This is a long game, and we've done well in the first quarter. I hope the politicians continue making good calls as the game goes on.
Don't assume that because we locked down hard that that will always be the path forward. That's your straw man talking.
While not disagreeing with that, I think we can continue to eliminate. During level-4, the R value is clearly lower than 1.0 meaning the infection shrinks. And the infection is small since we locked down immediately when a community case was first found. Six weeks will probably do it... so long as we don't have (a) new cases coming in through the border, or (b) infected people flaunting the lockdown rules and spreading it faster than we can contain it. Indeed, if it blows out past a couple thousand or so, we will need to pivot.
> During level-4, the R value is clearly lower than 1.0 meaning the infection shrinks
Delta is a different beast.
Here in Australia, Victoria managed to get the Reff rate down to ~0.75 during their OG outbreak last year with a strict lockdown. Delta has an R0 that is multiples higher than the OG strain so the same lockdown would not get it below 1. You can look at Victoria's current outbreak for evidence of this.
Now that doesn't mean NZ can't beat it. A part from Auckland, the population density is very low and as long as compliance is high you might be able to just about get it back down again; especially if you manage to keep it out of large households and essential workers.
I just wouldn't base my expectations on what worked last year as Delta is quite a different game.
>You can look at Victoria's current outbreak for evidence of this.
Also worth noting that peoples' behaviour is very different this time round compared to a year ago. A lot more people are flouting the rules or at least coming up with creative ways to see their friends while technically not breaking the law. After 200+ days, everybody's just sick of it.
The framing of New Zealand's approach as "working great" is also very highly opinionated. My NZ colleagues are all starting to get sick of this approach, and even the ones that fully support it are realizing that having no international travel and a couple of 6 week nationwide lockdowns every year is not a viable long-term solution.
If you look at how far NZ has gotten in regards to overcoming the virus, it's clearly very far behind most of the world. It's done a good job so far of reducing the harm caused directly by infection, but in many ways it's just tried to lock itself into a time bubble in early 2020. The world is starting to move on, and NZ has put itself in a rather bad position of having to try and catch up. The longer it sticks with this approach, the harder it's going to be.
I agree, elimination still looks a good strategy, it's too early to give it up yet. If we can punch out the current outbreak (I'd put money on it, but not too much) and get back to zero then that will re-legitimise lockdown as a strategy for a bit longer.
We've got a few "open 'er up and let it rip" friends and I just don't get it. There are so many potential game changers when you are an island. If a reliable saliva-based test appeared that produced results in say 2 hours we could reduce MIQ and use waiting booths at the airport. Even if it was only 99% accurate we could pool groups of 20 into rooms together while waiting for results. So many possibilities if we continue to think critically instead of politically.
A quick word on test attributes and why we still don't have a more rapid test than PCR.
Tests for disease rely on two numbers:
1. "sensitivity" - the proportion of people with COVID who get a positive test
2. "specificity" - the proportion of people without COVID who get a negative test.
COVID, despite the media attention, is a rare disease compared to the number of people tested. Say we have 10,000 people tested for COVID at the airport. We have 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity. And we know 100 people have COVID (1% prevalence) in this group. Our test would find 99/100 of the positive cases. But it would also find an additional 99 false positives! It also misses one true positive case. Which would be disasterous for the quarantine measures in place in Australia and NZ. In short, even a gold standard rapid test is not enough, although at 99% specificity and sensitivity it would be somewhat useful.
This is a lot less intuitive than it looks. The companies pushing rapid antigen tests at the start of the pandemic would have know better, but they chose to lie to the public about this.
Our vaccination program is ramping up nicely, even with the lockdown they're posting record numbers. Should be done by the end of the year, and if we can get this outbreak under control we'll easily get there before the next one.
Definitely a concern for countries that have been able to lock down. Taiwan also had to rush to get people vaccinated when they had an outbreak recently.
> I don’t think anywhere in the US did anything that could reasonably be called a lockdown.
Agreed, yet people still clamor for more of the same ineffective nonsense while dousing their hands in sanitizer and erecting plexiglass barriers in front of everything. We do everything except what would make a difference: fixing indoor ventilation.
the problem is that even those halfhearted measures have proven to be economically disastrous for small to medium scale businesses and virtually everyone without a line to nearly limitless private equity. pairing the rollout of ineffective 'lockdowns' with woefully insufficient safety nets [that were even further stripped down and delayed by politicking] has effectively poisoned the public will towards any further interventions across large segments of the country. you would have been hard-pressed to even deliberately design a containment more guaranteed for failure.
It worked pretty well for Thailand, a country with 3k of land borders that people can and do walk across. Delta seems to have changed the calculus though
Edit: Don’t mean to sound nasty, but this type of reasoning gets repeated so often without much criticism.
It worked for China too, so don’t come with this “small countries” crap. The US is “small” relative to China. Okay… now we get the “easy in a dictatorship” response to which I offer Japan. A democracy, with relatively large and dense population, yet have had relative few cases… although I am sure an excuse can be invented for them too…
We're on a 4th wave, that's currently completely out of control. The hospitals are overwhelmed, and most Covid patients aren't being accepted by the hospitals.
One guy punching a horse and Queensland putting a hundred or so bored soldiers on the border to check permits of cars that drive past is not a state of open violent revolt.
I know people like to think that doing the per-capita calculation puts every country on an even footing for comparison. But it's kind of silly to straight compare countries with vastly different geographies and economies, regardless of population normalization.
>I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again
If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything.
> If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything.
They eliminated this virus across Aotearoa. We didn't eliminate it everywhere else (actually almost anywhere else) and infected people continued to arrive at their border, eventually one of those infections (from Australia) leaked into their community about two weeks ago.
Unless your point is some purely nihilist position like "In the end nothing matters" (then why are you posting?) they beat this and now they're going to have to do it again.
But.. they didn't beat it. It's not endemic, it's not "one of the common colds", it's a locked down island, where noone can enter or exit freely anymore. This is like hiding in a cave, and saying that you've beat the bear outside.
I understand the advantages to a global village but we rarely talk about the downsides. Perhaps the global village is a failed experiment and needs to be reconfigured into bubbles. Perhaps we need to move back to a protectism of sort.
But why? People prefer the freedom to a minor risk. When lockdowns stop, people don't stay in their home bubble, but go out and meet with people. Why? Because they weren't at home because they were afraid of the corona, but because they were forced by their governments. Looking at the current happenings in europe, sooner or later a critical mass will be reached somewhere, and some (political) heads will fall.
In general yes, closing people up inside, in separate rooms, giving them only the needed amount of calories, forbidding every even mildly dangerous sport, and of course driving and cycling, would save many lives. But who wants to live in a world like that?
Not being able to leave your house, and not being able to leave your country, aren’t the same. The difference in degree is big enough to count as a difference in kind.
The point is that you can't just draw a line around obvious failure modes and say they're not part of the strategy. If you compare the median global response to "we beat the virus with a single lockdown!", that sounds like an obvious winner, but it's a much more equivocal story if you compare it to "we'll be doing snap lockdowns 1-2 times a year for the foreseeable future, and even then we may need to give up on elimination if one of the lockdowns doesn't work".
(As someone mentioned upthread, this shouldn't be seen as a slight against the people or leadership of New Zealand, who generally seem to understand that lockdowns weren't meant to be a one-and-done measure.)
> The US is suffering another 9/11 every few days.
Except no, it is not 9/11. People with a year or two of life expectancy dying is not the same as what happened with 9/11 & not the same as Vietnam. Millions of people die every year in the US, it's what happens to the old, the sick and eventually to us all.
Please stop saying that 1 or 2 years life expectancy does not matter. It matter a LOT for their families and for them it is almost the same as loosing someone with 20 years life expectancy.
They are a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere with a population of a larger city - how is their situation applicable to any major nation in the world ?
Uhuh. Hawaii, an entire US state that is "a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere" and yet somehow didn't eliminate the virus has far fewer people than New Zealand.
Hawaii is still allowing tourism from the USA, I assume NZ is not allowing similar tourism. They could have locked down harder (being an island and all) but didn't probably because their economy isn't as independent as NZ's is.
Cases have been skyrocketing in Hawaii over the last month, though, especially on the outlying islands. Before July, the highest daily case count the Big Island had ever had was ~30. Now the 7-day average is 125, or 60/100k.
Given the health care resources available anywhere but in Honolulu, things won't be pretty if it keeps climbing.
Western Australia is also a state and we've regularly locked down all travel from other Australian states when they have community outbreaks. We have a COVID death rate lower than New Zealand and, like NZ, have lived essentially normally throughout COVID despite the travel restrictions.
Currently you can only come here from NSW with express permission and then you have to quarantine at your own expense for 2 weeks. Quarantine requirements kick-in whenever there's a community outbreak in other states/territories and the restrictions ramp up as case numbers grow.
It is easy for Western Australia and Tasmania to isolate because the former has a vast desert between here and the east coast and the latter is an island without an international airport (probably one of the safer spots on Earth). There's no physical reason Hawaii and Alaska couldn't have done the same, but it's probably not politically or socially acceptable.
Atlantic Canada locked travel from out of region down almost completely ... as a result Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland have had the lowest rates (per capita) of COVID in North America:
No. There have been plenty of people traveling in and out of Hawaii all along. There were some quarantine/testing requirements at various times. But certainly not closed borders. I even looked of going there at one point but, when I looked, hotels were quite expensive.
I look at New Zealand and see close to the opposite. A near-complete failure. They've isolated themselves from the world for nearly 2 years, and have approximately zero things to show for it. They're not significantly vaccinated (25%, what happened??) and have no plan to be able to re-open up anytime soon.
It sounds harsh, but I don't see that they've done a lot other than waste 2 years of their life sitting on their hands.
It's not just that... NZ is an island, with few people going in and out daily. In europe, you have people living in one country and working in another, and driving across the border daily. You have trucks driving through 10 different countries, with drivers stopping, filling up the gas, eating and sleeping in many of them. You have large cities, where the border goes across the urban areas, and your nearest store is in another country.
I'm not saying that Wuhan's number is 100% accurate, feel free to inflate it by 10 times. But even with the censored social media in China, words do get across, and there's no evidence of any big outbreaks like in Wuhan or New York after April last year.
Virus cannot teleport from person to person, so why wouldn't NPIs like real lockdowns with full food delivery and mass testing (unlike mockdowns in some other countries) work?
If you don't believe the numbers, ask anyone you know who has relatives in China.
Lockdowns, or mass hospitalizations/deaths from Covid are a bit difficult to hide from the people living through it, if either of those two things are happening, everyone would hear about it through the grapevine.
I did exactly that (wife’s family lives in Beijing).
Various parts of Beijing and Nanjing have been under relative “lockdown” at various points in time in the last year. I’m pretty sure this has been reported in Western media too (and I’m sure that other parts of the country have too). I have no idea where this idea that “China has zero COVID lockdowns” came from. I suppose it may depend on your definition of lockdown.
I don't doubt that lockdowns are happening, which is why I listed the presence or absence of them as one of the two obvious things that can be observed by people living there.
I do have doubts that their actual case numbers are too far off from reported case numbers. (Because mass sickness and death, just like lockdowns, would also be obvious to observe.)
NZ has no cities. Auckland, the country's largest town, consists of 4 or 5 blocks of high density "city". Wellington another 2 or 3 blocks of high density "city". Outside of those few blocks the entire country is low-rise detached apartments, quickly giving way to semi-detached housing, which quickly gives way to endless suburbia. NZ has zero density.
New Zealand is not really a replicable model. It has a lot of unique properties like the combination of wealth, remoteness, culture, population density, etc. Not a lot that other countries can learn from it. Other countries could learn more from countries like Vietnam.
If you want to learn how to get a basketball in the hoop reliably, you’re better off asking a regular guy than a 7 footer who will say “well just put it in.”
As others have pointed out they're able to totally control their border and quarantine every single arrival.
But more importantly, how will it end for them? Australia and New Zealand are among the worst corona zealot nations. New Zealand just shut down everything over a single case and the PM told people to not even talk to each other anymore. How will they get out of this? If they looked at the facts they'd understand they will have to open up eventually, might as well do it now. Instead they're now trapped in eternal 'zero covid'.
Your comment is slightly out of date. The stated position of both the Australian PM and NSW state premier is that elimination is impossible, and vaccination/reopening is the goal.
I recognise you may not have the backstory on why this is the case.
Australia relied mainly on AstraZeneca and the UQ molecular clamping vaccine for its vaccine strategy, both of which could be manufactured locally. It signed other contracts for vaccines lackadaisically and with a late delivery time.
AstraZeneca is less effective than mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna, and causes a rare blood clotting condition that's fatal at a rate of 1 per millions. The UQ molecular clamping vaccine failed clinical trials despite being effective because it caused some patients to return a false positive result for HIV. This meant that domestic vaccine production in Australia was limited to one less effective vaccine that sometimes (very rarely) kills the people who get it, which the media have had a field day with.
The government now faces the problem of having millions of doses of a vaccine that few people want, few doses of the vaccines everyone wants, drug manufacturers who've already signed agreements with everyone else, a low rate of infection (due to lockdowns) that means they don't deserve emergency support, and a population that has no idea what's happening because the situation is complicated.
On top of this, the government has made some bad decisions with the roll-out itself. It doesn't allow the age groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 to receive the marginally safer and significantly more effective mRNA vaccines, on the basis that this age group has a clear benefit from receiving AstraZeneca and a lower risk of blood clotting, so there's significant vaccine hesitancy and less effective vaccine coverage among the very group who's most likely to die from the disease. It also didn't allow young people to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine for a long time, and even now requires them to give informed consent to a doctor or pharmacist before receiving it, so the roll-out requires finding qualified doctors and pharmacists as well as nurses, at a time when the medical system is already strained.
I live in slovenia, and we're giving vaccines away to other countries (literally), because people don't want to get vaccinated, and the vaccines are nearing the expiry date.
You can choose the vaccine, and can get vaccinated any day, even without signing up.
Yes, that's the obvious solution, and in fact we've bought Pfizer from Poland and cut various other deals. It's unfortunately not quick to do, although in my opinion the government failed to prioritise it as heavily as it should have.
Australia is a rich country, once this happened they could have paid whatever it takes to get enough Pfeizer/Moderna. The price almost don’t matter, it is so cost effective it’s insane.
If we could figure out the total cost of this pandemic I’m sure all the vaccines we will take over many years will be a fraction of 1% of the total cost and that is not including human suffering and death.
Yep. It costs somewhere on the order of $100 million to $1 billion a week to keep Sydney or Melbourne in lockdown. The costs thus far have vastly exceeded the estimated cost of ordering mRNA vaccine doses for every adult in the country ($780m[0]) or building federal quarantine facilities that don't leak cases (around $200m for a 500 bed facility[1]). It's an astounding leadership failure.
For elderly patients at least the risk of HIV infection is minimal so I don't understand why a false positive HIV test would cause a clinical trial to fail. Some cancer therapies also cause false positive HIV tests and that doesn't prevent them being used.
Because the federal government is full of incompetent conservative fuckwits that couldn't organise a root in a brothel and would struggle to win 5% of the vote without decades of the worst Murdoch propaganda behind them that makes Fox News look reasonable.
We have one of the worst governments in the entire democratic world. We just got insanely lucky that at the start of the pandemic they decided to lay off as much responsibility as possible to the state governments who have mostly been fantastic.
you misunderstand the zero covid strategy. The endgame is not zero covid forever. The endgame is zero-covid until we get as many people vaccinated as possible. This is the best result that can be achieved. less deaths, AND less economic disruption.
"They might as well do it now" is misguided. Would you prefer to release a virus into an unvaccinated or fully vaccinated population?
At this point, in the US any adult who wants to be vaccinated, is. But we still have to mask up due to Delta getting past the vaccines, and children not being vaccinated.
in Aus we don't have enough vaccines to give to the people that want them. bad luck on vaccine betting and incompetent government are the main reasons.
Why are they not vaccinated yet? Everyone here in Western Europe has had access by now if they wanted to get vaccinated. Could it be their "strategy" changes every week and isn't a strategy at all?
> "We ask people to stay two metres away from anyone you pass," she said. "Stay local. Do not congregate. Don't talk to your neighbours. Please, keep to your bubble."
To interpret that as anything other than physical distancing measures can only be deliberate obtuseness. You can talk to anyone you want, just pick up the phone.
One (1) positive case, entire nation placed on maximum level 4 lockdown where you can't leave your house except for a very short list of permitted reasons.
I'm quite well aware of what's happening in NZ, thank you, and the reason they locked down the whole nation is because that one case a) could not be immediately linked to another case, implying there were likely others out there, and b) had moved around quite a bit, meaning other cases were likely widely spread. As we now know both these turned out to be true.
Nevertheless, it is still a literally true statement that the entirety of NZ was locked down over one (1) case, because if they hadn't found that one case, they wouldn't have done that.
> some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
Do you have a link/links to where you read that vaccines don't do well at stopping the spread? Everything I've read is that vaccines, while not 100% effective at stopping the vaccinated person from infecting someone else, significantly lower the risk of spreading the virus[0]. That risk drops dramatically when both parties involved are vaccinated.
Yeah, GP has a couple of interesting ideas mixed in there (NY lockdown policy and building hospital capacity) but the rest are bog standard anti-mask, anti-vax talking points. Masks help, vaccines help -- it's all about pushing R below 1, and a measure doesn't have to be 100% effective (or anywhere near that) to push.
Lockdowns do flatten the curve, and while we might have built new hospitals in a parallel universe, in this one we really don't want to saturate the beds (again). I was pleasantly surprised by the "flatten the curve" narrative -- usually the telephone game ensures that this kind of nuance gets buried under simpler, incorrect versions like "if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over," but this time around I was pleased to see "flatten the curve" start strong and keep its legs.
CDC's initial mask take was wrong, but evidence changed their minds, and that's a good sign. GP, if you want to harp on this, tell me: if I were to dig through your post history would I find a bunch of poorly aged posts about a silent first wave?
> while we might have built new hospitals in a parallel universe, in this one we really don't want to saturate the beds (again).
Unfortunately, while hospitals can be built, you can't train enough medical professionals to staff the hospital in two years.
More generally, rather like nobody expects the Spanish inquisition, no health care system can cope with a global pandemic. We'd need to 10x health care capacity, most of which would sit unused for most of the time.
I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. However, relying on this vaccine as a long term solution is a very bad idea.
Also you are stating I am anti mask when I stated how I recommended mask usage. Do you not read or do you just force your expectations on people?
Sure, go ahead and dig through my history. not sure what you mean by 'a silent first wave'.
Accusing somebody of following a talking point seems needlessly provacative and ad-hominem, and not in the spirit of HN. Better to just give reasoned cited responses and leave it at that.
GP's statement contradicts the scientific literature - vaccination does reduce viral load of subsequent infection, and consequently reduces transmission [1].
However folks should be aware that immunity acquired through natural infection is robust and durable, and also has the same effect of reducing viral load and transmission [2].
It has been documented that people with asymptomatic infection will clear the virus quickly compared to those who are symptomatic [3]. Recent meta-analyses [4] and large population serological studies [5] have estimated the asymptomatic proportion lower bound to be at least ~33%, and the upper bound to be ~65% (even higher for young adults). Considering recent evidence that cases may be massively under-reported, the true asymptomatic proportion could be even higher than suggested [6].
Taken together, these results imply that a majority of the population has been already exposed to the virus, and either through natural infection or vaccination has acquired some degree of immunity that reduces the transmission of the virus.
Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance can evolve if vaccines are used indiscriminately [7][8][9][10]. So the benefits of compulsory mass vaccination may not outweigh the risks of such a policy, given the current state of affairs.
> so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
It is an important question with tremendously complex factors that go beyond the expertise of most lay people.
Covid-19 vaccination used to reduce viral load of subsequent infections. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with the current Delta variant - both the CDC in the US and PHE in the UK have released studies finding that the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated people is basically the same. They're also not so effective at stopping people from catching the Delta variant, and when you combine that with its higher infectivity it's basically impossible to get herd immunity using them.
No this is extremely misleading, the misquote you are using applies only to breakthrough infections, but the vaccines themselves are highly effective at preventing infection and thus breakthrough infections are very rare in vaccinated individuals.
Should you happen to not mount a robust immune response despite being vaccinated then at that point you will have a viral load similar to an unvaccinated person, but the good news is even if this is the case you will still have much less severe disease outcomes than an unvaccinated person.
The vaccines are incredibly effective against all current variants.
>breakthrough infections are very rare in vaccinated individuals.
This is simply not true. In countries with accurate tracing like Singapore and Israel, it's apparent that the vaccinated aren't significantly less likely to get infected than the unvaccinated. Check figure 10 on https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/update-on-loc... ; the unvaccinated only make up around 10-20% of cases. They also only make up 10-20% of the population; if the unvaccinated were more likely to be infected, we'd expect them to constitute a larger proportion of infections.
There have been > 111k breakthrough infections in the US alone through the end of July. The CDC stopped tracking them unless they resulted in hospitalization or death, but we can still look at the data from the 35 states still tracking it.
It is fair to say that vaccination reduces the chance of infection. "Very rare", however, is not how I would characterize it.
They are effective. The vaccine stops delta between 70 and 90% of the time (depending on which vaccine and which study you look at). The "impossible to get herd immunity" scenario is within the error bars, but I wouldn't state that as a fact. On the contrary, it looks like NYC just reached it's Delta peak 2 or 3 days ago. This strongly implies herd immunity is still possible, but we need to wait and see if the trend holds.
Even in the case of the delta variant vaccinated people who get infected are more likely to have reduced symptoms (if they have any noticeable symptoms at all). That means a lot less coughing up huge plumes of virus over great distances. Nothing is perfect, but in the end the vaccines increase your odds of not being infected while decreasing your odds of spreading the virus. Herd immunity may not be reached but we can drastically reduce deaths and serious illness. That's already a win for vaccines.
> Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals?
If I understand correctly, there isn't a lack of literal beds/space; it's a lack of personnel. Basically hospitals are unable to staff themselves at the levels needed to accomodate being basically 100% full. This is compounded by the fact that hospitals are struggling to retain healthcare workers, who are burnt out, and the fact that healthcare isn't something that someone can easily switch to.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely a lack of beds. Someone I know was in emergency last week (totally unrelated to pandemic) and had to wait an entire day before actually being properly admitted to a ward because there were no beds available for them. So they layed in an emergency room "booth"[0] for close to 24 hours, until a bed became available. There are lots of news articles about the lack of beds/capacity all over the place [1][2][3]
[0] I don't know the right word for it, but a small room usually used for short-term (<few hours) evaluation of a patient before passing them along to the next phase, like admitting to a ward or sending them home or etc.
Yeah, people keep responding to this, so I'll reply.. Yeah, the beds are literally full, at least in the hospital I was in. People on beds in the hallways and stuff. It's not a staffing shortage or anything like that.
"beds" and capacity can be synonymous in casual medical conversation. If the staff had plenty of literal beds, but no staff for them, they might still tell you that they had no beds, because they are just saying they don't have the capacity.
This is down to a startling lack of imagination and flexibility on the part of healthcare providers and government healthcare regulators. They could train unemployed batistas to tend to COVID patients in a couple of weeks hugely reducing the pressure on the rest of the health system. You don't need to know all the shitloads required to be a doctor if all you're doing is tending to covid patients to try and somewhat reduce the dying.
My theory is that the vaccines are not stopping transmission, just reducing the effects -- enough that people don't even know they are carriers.
Then we re-opened everything and vaccinated (and others) stopped wearing masks. So in effect, coronavirus is spreading as if there were no masking or social distancing since those have ended. And by and large it is the unvaccinated who are paying the price.
I might be wrong, but at least my explanation is plausible.
Every tool in the quiver is about reducing Rt below 1. If it's above 1, cases double every few days. If it's far about 1, it's hardly any days, if it's just above 1, it's more days. But either way, the cases are still doubling at some rate, not just spreading but growing.
So every single tool in the quiver is about reducing Rt below 1. A lockdown will give you a few points. Vaccines will give you more. Masks give you more. Social distancing give you more. None of them get you all the way there. Some are more temporary than others, so have to be implemented at the right times.
So...
> they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
The do help limit spread. Going from "they don't stop spread entirely" to "why force people to get vaccinated?" is like saying "body armor doesn't prevent being killed, so soldiers shouldn't wear them". Plus, there's the aspect of it being contagious - vaccines make it less contagious overall. Vaccines reduce Rt.
> we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals?
The goal was never to permanently increase supply of hospitals, it was to reduce the demand for them, by putting measures into place to reduce Rt.
> anti-mask at the beginning
During that time, scientists thought that COVID was chiefly droplet-transmitted, so the emphasis was on distance, washing hands, hand sanitizer, etc. In an environment where people were already hoarding toilet paper, then if it had been true that droplets were the only source of transmission, masks were overkill, wouldn't do a lot to reduce Rt, and also had the risk of limiting supply to people who needed them. After it became clear that it was also aerosol-transmitted, the scientific recommendations changed, because then it was clear that masks would help reduce Rt.
As for Germany... Delta has a higher Rt than the Wuhan strain. Their lockdowns were effective.
Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Hindsight is always 20/20, early on the virus was not believed to be airborne, only spread through relatively large droplets from coughing/sneezing which you'd likely only encounter in close contact with an actively ill person. Plus, Fauci had the responsibility to preserve masks for those that would be exposed directly to infected people - the medical workers and first responders.
The first lockdown in the USA was mid-march, and the mask guidance had already changed by the beginning of April as we understood more about how the disease spread.
Early guidance (and news coverage) also recommended sanitizing surfaces to prevent the spread of the disease, but surface contact was later found to be a less significant mode of transmission.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
People with serious diseases are being turned away from hospitals or asked to reschedule appointments/visits because hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID patients (and healthcare workers are being pushed to the limit). Vaccines are a public health decision, not a personal decision.
> Hindsight is always 20/20, early on the virus was not believed to be airborne, only spread through relatively large droplets from coughing/sneezing which you'd likely only encounter in close contact with an actively ill person.
This isn't about hindsight. Coronaviruses are not an unknown and airborne spread should have been assumed unless ruled out. And it was assumed by many: Taiwan immediately mobilized their military to ramp up mask production, even before the WHO admitted there was a problem.
> Plus, Fauci had the responsibility to preserve masks for those that would be exposed directly to infected people - the medical workers and first responders.
Then he and other leaders should have communicated that. Treating people like dumb idiots that you need to lie to to get what you want results in those people mistrusting your future recommendations, e.g. to get vaccinated.
Coronaviruses are not an unknown and airborne spread should have been assumed unless ruled out.
That's the hindsight I'm talking about. The WHO declared that it was not airborne at the beginning of the pandemic, as did the CDC, and it took a long time for them to change their guidance. Even independent aerosol researchers didn't release their findings until April, but that was after the CDC had already asked people to wear cloth masks.
Treating people like dumb idiots that you need to lie to to get what you want results in those people mistrusting your future recommendations, e.g. to get vaccinated.
You have more faith in people than I do -- the truth is that many of the public are dumb idiots and if you say "We want you to wear cloth masks to protect either other, but please dont use N95 masks, we need those for first responders", the first thing that will happen is that there will be a run on N95 masks, leaving none for first responders. Which happened anyway, my older sister ended up sewing homemade masks that my younger sister used in her job in healthcare because they had to ration N95's.
But supply chain issues for PPE is a whole different problem, and I'm not sure we've solved it.
But they burned huge amounts of their social trust capital in doing so, because they didn't just say "there are shortages, please stop hoarding masks", they outright lied about the efficacy of masks and perpetuated the lie for months. If people have no idea what to believe, it's because the government led a catastrophically inept response.
No. The CDC said AT THE TIME that they didn't recommend everyone wearing masks because hospitals were facing shortages. They have always been open about their reasoning and data. Quit repeating this terrible lie.
That is not quite true. The CDC listed several reasons not to wear masks. They definitely mention a shortage of masks and retaining supply for medical personnel, but at the same time they also said they were unnecessary and unhelpful for anyone not working directly around symptomatic sick people. Also, most people do not differentiate the CDC from the Surgeon General. This is a quote from the LA Times quoting Jerome Adams:
“Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” he wrote in a tweet that was later deleted. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Regarding the surgeon general quote, if you understand that he's referring to protective masks (such as N95s) and their capacity -- and it's pretty clear that he is -- the contents of his statement holds up very well, even now. PPE is extra crucial for those working around infected people. Most members of the general public are unlikely to use N95s in such a way they'd be significantly protective (after watching how most people wear any kind of mask including x95s, I don't know anyone could argue differently, and that's before you get into the kind of fit testing that people who count on these things professionally do and speak of as difficult).
What happened subsequently was a shift to cooperative masks whose benefit is primarily reducing transmission from the wearer.
These two things are both discussed under the header of "masks" but they are very different interventions. It's less that the position changed, it's more that what authorities were actually talking about changed.
You can fairly argue that this counts as a messaging failure and I'd agree, but a lot of people seem to be missing what the issue actually was (especially some who set this up as dishonesty or an attack on expertise).
Many N95s have valves that aren't permissable as COVID masks anyways. They are mostly designed to keep pollution out rather than your breath off of other people.
I for one, am glad that N95s haven't been mandated. I found them extremely irritating when I had to wear them because of high pollution in Beijing. The masks we wear instead, in comparison, are much more comfortable.
Here[1] is Dr. Fauci talking about how masks are mostly ineffective. Only at the end of the video, he agrees with the host that if everyone wears masks, it can lead to shortages for healthcare workers.
> I don't think 2 years is enough to just "build new hostipal", let alone staff them
It totally is enough time to build one. Staffing is more problematic, but if it was a state-run hospital you could've converted a lot of national guardsmen into nurses in the meanwhile. You don't need a lot of talent to handle most Covid cases, just people able to follow the protocol.
Maybe it depends on the area. I know California has famously strict building codes, so I'd be impressed to see a hospital made up to code in 2 years (unless the government threw the entire checkbook at it of course.)
It is, but you don't need ICU for most hospitalizations. My dad had a cytokine storm, and the doc looked at the health ministry Covid protocol that said "inject IL-6 inhibitor and keep the patient prone and on supplementary oxygen" and did exactly that. You don't need full-grown doctors to do that.
This is not a "standard" hospital, this is basically comparable to a warzone... so containers, drywall, and considering that most people there don't need a specialist, they can reuse doctors, that have nothing to do during the lockdowns (eg. in my slovenia, government-employed orthopedic doctors had someone else check them in daily, to get paid and get covid extra-pay, while never showing up for work and working in private practy all that time).
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect
There was never anything even remotely close to a total lockdown here. Too afraid that telling people not to got to work might hurt the economy.
What Germany got "right" was mostly things done long before the pandemic, e.g. investment in a large number of hospitable beds, as well as public health insurance and flexible sick days guaranteed by law so sick people can actually afford to stay at home.
> They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America.
LOL the US border is mostly ocean and the part that is through land is much more controlled than the "borders" in the EU.
> Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Yeah, that was one of the biggest atrocities of the pandemic. Not only is it immorral to give false medical advice, this has also been responsible for more people (rightfully) mistrusting later recommendations. There should be leaders stepping down over this.
> As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
I agree, forcing people to get vaccinated (and that includes excessive restrictions to those not vaccinated) is not the way to go.
On the curve, hospital beds are basically flat compared to a covid spike. There is no rational amount of beds that is enough, because bed estimates are always a guess: wrong and wasteful because too many and then suddenly too few. And then you need doctors and nurses. And the disease spikes in one area and then another. Do you ship beds around?
Easier to take personal responsibility than depend on the government or whoever is meant to parachute in all the beds and doctors to save us from our own misunderstanding of exponential growth curves.
Personal responsibility is fundamental, that's what makes the collective measures work efficiently. But there are simply things that are near impossible to do personally. Are you going to build a personal ICU for your family just in case? Are you going to train as an ICU nurse, a respiratory disease specialist, and are you also building a personal protective equipment factory for yourself too? Of course not.
Though we need a bit of both. Depending on cheap just-in-time shit from China is great when you are dealing with a local flu outbreak in the local preschool, but not great in a pandemic. And the efficient solution is that everyone stocks up a few at home, and collectively we stock up a few billion in the country and then distribute it when and where needed instead of everyone trying to stock up thousands at home. (And so on for other aspects of protective measures.)
There currently isn't enough staffing to man the current hospitals forget about any newly created ones.
What I am upset about is why there was no plan to fast-track induction and graduation of nurses/paramedics/physicians with a minimum employment guarantee of 5 years by the govt so that folks are incentivised for a medical career.
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic.
There was never going to be an "easy" way to combat this pandemic, and experts have been quite clear about this from the beginning. A really successful strategy would have required a careful combination of several types of interventions, close monitoring of the situation as well as fast and effective adjustments to policies, and probably also a certain dose of luck.
Germany did a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong (though in certain instances, people might reasonably disagree about which is which), and Germany was also a bit lucky that we had many hospital beds and a social structure that is maybe a bit less conducive to infections (fewer inter-generational households). I think that Germany did well enough to avoid the worst effects of the pandemic (hospitals never got to the situation where they were fully overwhelmed, although it seemed close a few times) due to somehow people getting their shit together at the last minute every time, but I'm certain that a strategy with fewer deaths and less economic damage would have been possible.
The main problem that I see in Germany is that the government (or governments, if we include the regional ones) never had a real plan on what to do. Such a plan doesn't need to be inflexible, it can react to different situations and new scientific evidence, but it still should have been possible to establish some basic principles instead of stumbling through this pandemic almost blindly.
As an effect, we went into (more or less restrictive) lockdowns several times that prevented the worst, but a combination of other measures could have had a better impact: going into stricter, but shorter, lockdowns instead of months of weird "semi-lockdowns" with tons of exceptions (a lot of time was wasted especially last Summer), finding better solutions for schools and universities (such as better tools for remote teaching, and air filters), buying vaccines earlier, forcing employers to allow people to work from home (this was done eventually, but much too late — this was basically only because the industry lobbied hard enough, while at the same time, restaurants and museums had to close down completely), allowing certain lower-risk activities during the lockdown (such as outside terraces for restaurants), etc.
I'm not saying that all of these things would have worked, but we certainly could have tried more (or, in certain cases, earlier).
> better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds
I am pretty sure people not getting sick in the first place is the priority, rather than making enough infrastructural medical capacity for something that is preventable. It's not like you can just magic up more doctors either.
> you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdow
Well, this is obviously the vaccine
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America
Are you saying you advise lockdowns (especially in winter) and then saying lockdowns are ineffective?
ICU capacity should be the only metric for any mitigation measure.
Building greater capacity and staffing should be the focus.
The lack of capacity has been the justification for lockdowns since after summer 2020, and likely will be in some areas in the future. Its about periodic and seasonal things that occur while COVID is also taking up some bandwidth, not about whether it stops the spread at all. The messaging has been lackluster and hyperbolic and conflicting the whole time and will continue to be.
Sorry about your experience, its not worthwhile to stay frustrated on crowd reactions, this is a fast moving scenario and consensus will never be reached on the various overlapping chapters.
If you're going to pick one metric, if the exponential growth of the disease has any chance of overwhelming hospitals, then regional Rt > 1 should be the only metric for any mitigation measure.
If you're okay with Rt > 1 until hospitals are close to overwhelmed, then it means you were okay with allowing a doubling rate for a dangerous disease. It makes no sense. If you're destined to put mitigation measures in place eventually, why not just do them sooner and save a lot of suffering?
> If you're okay with Rt > 1 until hospitals are close to overwhelmed, then it means you were okay with allowing a doubling rate for a dangerous disease.... If you're destined to put mitigation measures in place eventually, why not just do them sooner and save a lot of suffering?
correct, it makes sense because now people have a choice about whether the prevalence of the disease will land them in the hospital. the mere prevalence is not the issue.
the subset of people that don't have a choice had the same issue before COVID existed, aka: the same distribution of immunocompromised people always existed.
this makes the calculus simply that it is back to business as usual, until ICU capacity is nearing full, that is. Since ICU capacity isn't only due to COVID cases, but due to all emergencies and injuries, then society as a whole needs to slow down to reduce the likelihood of emergency incidents, while also expanding ICU capacity to avoid future disruptions. The core of my supposition is that developed nations are not developed if emergency services are unavailable, and that governing system can prioritize reacting to that.
So no, you don't want business as usual until ICU capacity is near full. If you do that, you're basically destined to overwhelm ICU capacity.
If you increase ICU capacity, that solves nothing, because you're still satisfied with business as usual until ICU capacity is near full. No matter how big you make ICU capacity, Rt>1 means you will hit that capacity eventually. That's what exponential growth means.
The only answer is to move Rt<1, and you might as well do that sooner rather than later.
> No matter how big you make ICU capacity, Rt>1 means you will hit that capacity eventually.
I mean... for a little while until enough of the patients die. I mean that's whats happening.
ICU capacity due to COVID is filled overwhelmingly by unvaccinated people who had a choice in the matter for 9 months straight. If there wasn't a choice I would agree with you.
What is occurring now is completely tolerable to continue to allow to occur and is the consensus in all states, across the entire political spectrum.
Rt>1 means that there is a doubling rate of some number of days. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. The more cases, the more breakthrough cases. There are also children under 12. You can't say that all infected people had a choice in the matter, it simply isn't true.
A quick search shows ~20% of immigrants being deported testing positive (up to 25%). There are something like 200K immigrants currently encountered by border patrol per month. Naively that's 50K people coming to the US each month with covid who are poor (probably can't self quarantine), live in dense, multi generational households and exist outside of the law. Realistically, we'd expect that ICE (deportation) contributes to the spread. At any rate, I don't see how illegal immigration could be qualified other than a significant vector in the spread of covid.
We couldn't find a lot of places more far away from Mexico frontier in the entire US that NY. It was the first place seriously hit. It was hit for months while the Mexican border was showing... nothing. Do you have a logical explanation for that?
People being detained for months in really crowded places, as can be seen in all videos taken... they had covid when were deported? Well.. This is hardly a surprise to me.
We are talking about one vector over the last few months. The state of NY over a year ago is a non sequitur. Illegal immigration has probably increased close to 3x since then. Besides which, my understanding of the high mortality in NY is that it was mainly due to Cuomo emptying out hospitals of covid patients and sending them to nursing homes.
Maybe if their rate of infection were significantly lower than the local population, you could argue that we would be decreasing the percentage of the infected population which doesn't feel particularly compelling to me... but we'd really need to know how much each group contributes to the spread. My expectations is that illegal immigrants make larger contributions than average given their density in living arrangements, lack of access to health care, inability to take sick days, etc.
I think we are only in the business of arguing the counterfactual of what percentage of them get covid from interactions with law enforcement vs otherwise.
I'm not blaming the southern border, I am pointing out a fact that has implications on how we manage our expectations, and what actions to mitigate the corona virus that will work better than others given our situation. if you think facts should be suppressed then you hardly believe in science. its sad that russdpale thinks this comment should be removed by moderators. I also didn't state this is the only reason, nor that the solution should be stopping the border crossings.
In fact, I am arguing for increased capacity to handle the corona virus long term. short term measures like trying to lock down borders is going to have little meaning in the long run, and hurt a lot of people.
Hospital bed / ICU capacity is really just Hollywood accounting. They can prepare for surges and make more meds. There are federal and local incentives that get handed out to hospitals that are at or near capacity. So they’re always at or near capacity.
Except that in kids COVID is about as lethal as the ordinary flu. It’s more transmissible, but the number of kids we’ve seen suffer serious consequences across the US has been very, very low. We don’t make kids wear helmets everywhere they go, though it would be decidedly more efficacious from a safety perspective. It seems to me some relativity is in order.
The CDC estimates that the survival rate for the 18-49 age bracket (which accounts for most parents of young children) is 99.94%. And that's since the start of the pandemic without vaccination. For vaccinated parents now the survival rate is virtually 100%.
Some 18-49 year old parents have cancer diagnosis that they're living with and are taking immune suppressants, or they're taking care of older family members.
You can't erect a solid barrier around that population demographic like they never come into contact with vulnerable sections of the population.
And enough people are being stupid about vaccinations that they're out there getting sick, and unfortunately if you just let them roll the dice while letting the virus rip through kids, it will find all the vulnerable people out there and overload the hospital system and affects everyone. Kids don't exist in a vacuum and the virus will happily hop through them to find every vulnerable adult it can.
Once again we find ourselves in a "flattening the curve" problem.
And you need to stop focusing on death rates. In terms of hospital resources, a patient who spends 2 weeks in the ICU and recovers is just as bad as one that spends 2 weeks in the ICU and dies. And per patient they're more resource intensive than other respiratory viruses.
> Some 18-49 year old parents have cancer diagnosis that they're living with and are taking immune suppressants, or they're taking care of older family members.
If your immune system is already compromised, there's TONS of other stuff just as scary as COVID. The risk of the flu to these people in past years was just as high, but this argument wasn't used because the entire world can't put life on hold forever.
I mean there is no reasoning. We never did this crap for other illness. It’s as if people woke up on March 2020 and discovered “holy crap people die of illness!!”
Orlando is having a water shortage due to lack of liquid oxygen to treat water, because it is being diverted to COVID patients. That does not typically happen during flu season.
Immune suppressed individuals and the people who interact with them I would assume are, as a population, used to taking care of themselves in the face of the common flu and other things which present danger to them.
The ease at which COVID, especially delta, spreads basically guarantees immune suppressed individuals will come into contact with it w/o everyone taking precautions.
You don't have to put your life on hold forever. Wear a mask, be vaccinated, and encourage others in your life to do the same. Live your life within the bounds that helps others survive this. We're in this together.
I really just don't understand the hyperventilation about this stuff. At this point, the vast majority of elderly people are fully vaccinated, and breakthrough cases -- especially those resulting in severe illness or death -- are extremely rare. The risk is nonzero, but living with zero risk is simply not a realistic goal. It never has been and never will be.
That's absurd. To the extent that hospitals are "overflowing," it's due to unvaccinated people, not people with breakthrough cases (the nonzero risk I mentioned).
The context here is that somehow if kids get Covid it's a death sentence for their grandparents, and that's simply not true when the vast majority of Americans over 50 have been vaccinated.
You educate people on the risks of covid, tell them how it spreads and let the individuals and families decide what level of precautions they feel are appropriate.
Grandma only has a few years left… they wanna see their grandkids. My daughters grandparents would rather die of covid than not be able to hug and interact with their grandchildren. Who the hell is the state or some blowhard health “expert” to deny them that?
The odds are overwhelmingly high they won’t with COVID either. Let’s not forget that the survival rate in all populations is well north of 90%. Parent age populations closer to 99%. Even higher if the parents are vaccinated.
Whilst I don't have the figures to specifically source, yesterday's daily pressing briefing for my area had the health minister saying that delta was 100x more lethal than the flu in children, or 1000%.
Excess mortality rates aren’t relevant at all to the lethality of the delta variant in children relative to prior strains. Overall mortality isn’t even asking the right question, and it’s a very poor proxy even for the lethality rate of SARS-COV-2 (contingent on pervasive testing). And that we’ve eliminated influenza deaths is no argument that influenza is no longer lethal.
Unless Australians are an order of magnitude more vulnerable to COVID than elsewhere in the world, those numbers are more the result of low test rates missing infections than anything else.
In the US, the CDC estimates an actual mortality rate of 0.6%, compared to the ratio of cases/deaths of ~1.6%.
Australia has had an order of magnitude fewer infections than elsewhere in the world. We have come close to eliminating its spread altogether several times, so it should come as no surprise that the proportion of deaths is higher than somewhere else that has failed to contain the illness.
How does that follow? How deadly a virus is for any given individual should be independent of how many other people got it (outside of situations where the health care system is overwhelmed and can't provide adequate care - but that'd make the numbers worse for the US, not better).
If the virus is under better containment, those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions. Thus death rates when looking at the entire length of the pandemic are likely to be higher.
Delta is the first time Australia has seen widespread infection in healthy people.
> those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions
I'm not totally sure that's the case - it's at least something you can't just aver as self-evident. I'd guess that those most likely to be infected early on are going to be people who travel or those who come most into contact with them (service & tourism workers).
But I also think it's a moot point. In the context of this thread - which is about how to move forward once we've accepted that containment is off the table, and especially about the risk that poses to the healthiest members of society (kids) - it doesn't make sense to cite numbers that you yourself acknowledge overstate the risk of COVID by being biased towards the most unhealthy members of society.
Australians now have to post a sign on their door saying they are in quarantine. People are not allowed to travel within the country. They locked down a state of 1.3 million people with 5 hours notice because of one case they said was from a pizza box.
They are also building giant quarantine facilities, indicating they are gonna do this for the long haul.
Australia is hardly a model country for how to handle an infectious respiratory virus.
What you sound like is a deluded and emotionally post-justifying case of Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing normal or in any way ideal or worth romanticizing about the measures you describe, or their absurd over-reach for increasingly minuscule justifications that have moved goal posts to a degree that moderate rational analysis and weighing of risks reveals as somewhat demented. How sure are you that so many people in your state so whole heartedly support such a normalization of social control on the flimsy clinical pretexts you describe.
Calling actions decisive doesn't spare them from being badly decided or indeed even oppressive. Decisiveness first requires solid reasoning, not just a defense that rests on an action simply being decisive.
No it's not. There's still no evidence that there is any real risk to children. Please prove otherwise. Anecdotes and one in a million cases don't count.
Even seemingly innocuous viruses like Epstein-Barr are tied to various health problems later in life. Why should we knowingly expose an entire generation to a little understood virus?
So less than one in a million children hospitalized per day. And 500 dead after almost two years is nothing, sorry to be so blunt.
You can say epstein-barr, I can say other corona viruses like the cold virus. You can't just choose an arbitrary virus to compare to. We need strong evidence of serious risk to impose such restrictions, and not ungrounded fear which is not backed by data.
Fear mongers run out of ammunition for forever lockdowns. Low quality of arguments will be compensated by hysteria and insults. For instance that you don't care about children (while in their age group it's less harmful than a flu).
> Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year:
No, not only does this exaggerate the normal annual impact, but it has killed far fewer (about half) in that age group than COVID has during the COVID crisis. Most of the COVID countermeasures (everything other than the vaccine itself) are effective against the flu, too, and COVID is much more dangerous (considering both deadliness and infectiousness) than the flu even to kids.
With apologies, I'll correct myself: flu kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of children per year. My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid. It's important to keep that in perspective, is all I'm saying.
> My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid.
This is false if you include the period during which COVID-19 has been around in “every year”, because COVID countermeasures also suppress the flu. Without COVID countermeasures, and without vaccination for most kids, COVID would kill far more than the flu normally does. Now, the COVID vaccine right now is more effective than the flu vaccine usually is (but that may be temporary if COVID is endemic and different variants proliferate), so with vaccines available to younger kids than now that might get evened out or reverse, but right now COVID is clearly far more deadly to kids.
You can't make a direct comparison between a global pandemic and a normal year for influenza. In future years there won't be as many opportunities for people to be infected with Covid, further reducing the risk.
I'm already bored to tears talking about this, though. The only point that I'm trying to make is that we have always accepted a certain level of mortal risk to people, including children. At some point, we are going to have to do that with Covid as well.
So looks like more kids were hospitalized and more died from the flu? What bull are you referring to? Were you outraged about them in any of the last 20 years?
It's not about children getting it and being ill, it's about children getting it and spreading it. This is the concept behind 'herd immunity'. If we can cut the chain, we mitigate older and people with weakened immune systems from getting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Yes, but parent poster wrote: "Any talk of lifting restrictions before march is basically a re-formulated "fuck the kids"."
which is not honest in my opinion. The kids so far have suffered the most from corona - no school, no friends - no activities - yet had the least, to fear from it.
So vaccinating the kids is not really about saving the kids - it is about the older population.
But if vaccinated people are also spreading it, I don't get the point of waiting for kids to be vaccinated.
The population at risk being vaccinated was the big deal, but that's done now (apart from those who refuse to be vaccinated, but then it is their problem).
The Delta variant is contagious enough that we'll never achieve a level of herd immunity sufficient to protect unvaccinated people. All of us will be infected eventually, it's basically inevitable. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing deaths.
It is not a binary 0 or 1 as far as if vaccinated people will spread the infection if they are infected. The vaccine lowers the chances, so the more people we can get vaccinated, the lower the chances can get.
> It's not about children getting it and being ill, it's about children getting it and spreading it.
Vaccinated people can still get ill and spread it so why do you keep pushing vaccines to children who have no risk whatsoever if the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated and are safe??
Early this year it looked as if the virus was on the way out in Israel until they started opening up schools again. The risk to children is small, but it's a communicable disease - school is how it spreads between households.
When doing risk assessments I wish people started looking beyond their own immediate circle. Then again, Pharao let the Children of Israel go only after his own firstborn son died.
Asymptomatic spread of the virus is negligible from everything I've read. Children that don't show symptoms aren't a threat. Additionally, there's really no evidence that schools are spreading the virus more.
I suspect the reason children are the hold up here is less around current data than around where we are in this pandemic and patterns of thought/risk assessment. Here's an analogy that maybe will work with the HN crowd. Say we've got a service that, for 75% of the API endpoints, often gets a severe error. 25% of the endpoints only very rarely get the same error. My team discovers that by applying one simple change to the 75% of the affected endpoints, their error rate drops dramatically. We can't, for whatever reason, apply the same fix to those 25% yet, but we're confident that within a relatively short amount of time we'll be able to.
Do we declare that the service is now working well and move on to other items? Maybe -- in a real setting it'll of course depend on what other priorities the team's juggling at the moment. Maybe this is "good enough" to move on. Still, I think we can all relate to the emotional pull to say "hold on, we still don't actually know why those 25% of our endpoints weren't affected as often. Something could easily change there so that we start seeing similar error rates. We have a fix on the way for this -- can we wait just a bit longer so we can roll this out?"
I think that's where a lot of people are. Again, one could certainly argue that we're close enough, but OTOH I think the reluctance to declare this "over" yet makes a lot of sense too.
Almost 4000 children die each year from drowning in the USA, with double that having a non-fatal drowning [0]. Note that non-fatal drownings can cause long-term health problems. They haven't banned pools yet, so it follows that, as a country, the USA considers 4000 dead children an acceptable risk of having open water, such as rivers, ponds, and pools. And bath tubs, I suppose.
Now with that number in mind, how many children are expected to die if all of them were to be infected with covid-19? I found it hard to find some numbers about this, in my country all corona-deaths of people aged 49 or less are grouped together these days because there are so few that they could be traced to individuals otherwise.
The information on that CDC page is misleading. While the page is about children, the text that mentions the 3960 annual drowning deaths does not specify "children," and the number seems to be across all age groups.
This source states ~800 children deaths/year to be children (in 2014). [0]
(I am not commenting on your overall point, just that statistic.)
For reference, the CDC notes annual total US children deaths (if defining "children" as <= 14) as a little over 9000 (in 2019, I think). [1]
Thanks for the correction! I guess I sound a bit callous in my previous post, but I'm quite happy to learn that 3000 fewer children drown each year than I anticipated (it did feel like a high number). The 800 deaths per year figure can still function as a comparison for the expected child deaths from covid-19.
> Younger people, under 30, and children are getting it and ending up in hospital.
To emphasise this point, in Victoria, Australia, most of the cases are in the 20-29 age group. Most of the active cases are in the 0-9 age group.[0] NSW data doesn't have the pretty graphs, but the raw data [1] bears out similar groupings.
Your first link reports that out of the thousands of total cases, only 20 are in the hospital, 9 of which are in the ICU. This does not support the claim that young people are "widely" ending up in the hospital from COVID.
A COVID case != serious illness, especially in vaccinated individuals. We need to stop pretending that they are equivalent.
> Your first link reports that out of the thousands of total cases, only 20 are in the hospital, 9 of which are in the ICU.
My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.
If you want to use the total cases, then you should be noting that 820 people have died, and 20,212 have recovered. The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.
20 hospitalised cases out of 492 total active cases, is about 4%, and the 9 in ICU are about 2% of total active cases.
>My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.
You are correct, I was looking at total cases, not active cases. My apologies!
However, this still does not support the claim that young people are "widely" going to the hospital. Even assuming that age ranges are going to the hospital at equal rates (which is a preposterous assumption), given 20 total hospitalizations spread across 492 active cases (of which 290 are ages 0-29), we would only expect ~11/290 active COVID cases under 30 to be hospitalized. But again, this an extremely unrealistic upper bound, based on the ludicrous assumption that all ages get hospitalized at equal rates.
On top of that, these data are from Australia, where the population is still not widely vaccinated. I assume the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients in Victoria are not fully vaccinated.
>The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.
This (and all previous calculations) depend on accurately estimating the denominator, i.e. the total number of cases. Given the amount of asymptomatic/low symptomatic cases, how is this accurately done? Has the composition of who gets tested shifted over the course of the pandemic? Has it ever actually accurately sampled the true number of cases?
The vast majority [0] of cases in Victoria are for the 20-29 age group. There are as many cases for the 10-19 age group as the 40-49 age group.
The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.
Whilst there isn't a current breakdown of mortality by age rate, the overall mortality rate for Victoria is 4%, meaning that there is a high risk to children.
A mortality rate of 4% in Victoria is obviously wrong. The only way to get a number that high is to ignore all the asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic cases. US CDC data shows a mortality rate of only 0.6%, and that's mostly from earlier in the pandemic before vaccines were available.
The Victorian government data you linked is very unclear.
It treats cases in aged care vs. not in aged care as separate sets, but is not clear on whether or not hospitalisation cases come from both sets.
At the top of the page it says "cases in hospital by age" but I can't seem to find any reference to the age of those people in hospital.
What's clear to me, though, is in the age group of 0-29 there's been a total of 1 death in Victoria. It's not a whole lot to go on, but it seems unlikely to me that many in the 0-29 group require hospital treatment.
> The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.
And then you shared data that shows 0-9 age group with less than 30%. Since we apparently agree on how to read the chart, I can only assume the words “vast majority” were not what you meant.
Only 73 Pediatric ICU Beds in North Texas (from the Yahoo! Article)? This article puts a little different perspective on that reality - ‘No Staffed Pediatric ICU Beds Available’ In North Texas Area, DFW Hospital Council Says https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2021/08/12/no-staffed-pediatric-icu...
There are risks to all of us when we let millions of children act as a breeding and mutation substrate for the virus. I would think that would be blinding obvious to anyone with even a basic grasp of biology.
It’s also completely unknown what the long term effects of the virus are.
Edit: Disappointed but not surprised by the amount of anti-science on this site. I feel like a lot of people have let politics destroy their ability to think critically to the point of near suicidal ignorance. Sad.
The other user was suggesting lifting restrictions would be equal to "fuck the kids". Clearly that is not the case.
As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?
> As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?
Vaccinate everyone, there’s no shortage of vaccine. Remember when Bill Gates fought to stop the manufacture of vaccine in other countries? People like him are the enemy to a fully vaccinated population.
Given global vaccination rates, it will have abundant and plentiful opportunities for breeding and mutation forever. There is no vaccinating the entire globe for coronavirus. Certainly not in our lifetimes. And not given the declining effectiveness of the vaccines.
I agree that the whole globe will not be vaccinated and that will continue to be a problem. That doesn’t negate what I said though, unvaccinated children are a huge part of that problem.
> And not given the low effectiveness of the vaccines.
I have no idea what this means. It sounds like you’re under false impressions. The vaccines are quite effective.
I meant “declining.” Revised simultaneous with your comment. If the vaccine immunity does not persist and requires boosters, we will never reach global here immunity. The parent article is on point.
Because COVID poses very little risk to children. The flu poses more risk to that age group. No one is running around saying we need to mask children for the flu and vaccinated all of them.
No more than 64% for school aged individuals. So, since you're supposedly using this as a reason why we should be keeping everyone locked down then I'm going to assume you feel the same for influenza? Which means you're saying we should have shut schools down and mandated all sorts of measures to protect them since the inception of the influenza vaccinations?
It's not so much "fuck the kids" as "fuck the teachers".
Even if you believe that "kids don't get sick from COVID", you can't ignore that teachers do. And many of them are in high-risk groups -- older, with comorbidities. Most are vaccinated, but they're still taking a risk.
Teachers are already smarting over the fact that (in the US) they're literally trained to take a bullet for their kids. So when you tell them to open the schools "for the kids", they're hearing that they're disposable human beings, and they don't like it.
Open the schools incautiously, and there won't be any schools to open. Because a school without teachers is just a warehouse.
> Most are vaccinated, but they're still taking a risk
Pre pandemic they took a risk every day as well, so it's a matter of acceptable risk, which I believe is what the article was focused on. What level of risk is that?
That existing risk was already at the limit of acceptability. New risk being added on pushes many past that limit.
It's made worse by the fact that this additional risk is being left out of the discussion so often. People talk about what's good for the children and their parents and the economy, but not about what the teachers need. They're being treated as disposable, which exacerbates the perception of risk further.
Discussions about school openings that ignore a critical factor are not going to result in what people hope for.
> That existing risk was already at the limit of acceptability.
Do you actually thinks so? I've never heard that aspiring teachers are thinking about their increased risk to illnesses, especially since many have children of their own and are exposed to an increased risk by children anyway.
With the rise in gun violence at schools, teachers have had to undertake additional training for scenarios that they had not priced in their initial decisions. They did not like that, and they like even less being ignored in the discussion of whether or not to open schools.
So a great number will not remain teachers if they do not feel like they're part of the decision. They're used to being told to "do it for the children", but there are limits, and this will push many past them.
In NYC, teacher's unions refused to go back to work until a vaccine was available. Despite that, the vaccination rates were only 40-60% before the mandate that public sector workers be vaccinated.
The coronavirus will never end until people turn off their TV and MSM in general and start looking elsewhere for information.
First, the elephant in the room... Ivermectin. Ivermectin, which has been on the market globally for like half a century, is 86% effective as a prophylactic against COVID-19 (aka a better vaccine than the "vaccines" themselves), is 72% effective in early treatment, and is 40% effective in late treatment[1]. Side effects most experience? Kills parasites, including scabies, and reduces systemic inflammation, including TNF. Because of the fear and hype surrounding COVID-19, there are thousands of folks out there who have been taking what is generally considered to be an annual dose... every week... for almost a year. I mean, we can basically just stop right there; right? We've got a safe and effective drug that reduces the risk of serious illness and death to almost zero, collectively demonstrated by the studies in the first reference (bottom). For real, just stop and consider this, and then consider whether it's even worth considering ANY other information. There is a literal cure that is also a prophylactic, and which is completely safe. What else can be said?
But, I'll continue. So then, in the US, we've got recommendations, from the world's preeminent purveyor of disease information, to wear paper masks OUTSIDE IN THE SUN, masks that are known to cause cancer, and which reduce oxygen[2] and increase resting heart rate, and which are about as effective as using a chain link fence to stop mosquitoes (less, even).
Then, the mRNA "vaccines", which are an experimental form of gene therapy, with less than 1 year's worth of data. A normal vaccine would undergo about 12x the study duration, and that's when we're using existing and proven technology; but for some reason, we're ok with 1/12 of the study period for a "vaccine" that is of an entirely new category.
Then, we trap people in their houses, where disease is shown to thrive, without sunlight and without exercise.
The only way this ever ends is for a majority of people to turn their TVs off for good, and to start using common sense.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and none of this is medical advice.
"Who even cares?" It takes empathy-blinders to not see this. Think of all the people whose livelihoods were incredibly damaged by Coronavirus: the children whose parents died alone in an ICU and no one was allowed to see them; the young fathers who couldn't be with their wife as she gives birth; the millions who lost jobs; the thousands upon thousands of businesses and cultural events ended.
This is a material worsening of society and our economy, that's why people care. Do you even care about the happiness and health of fellow humans?
Maybe it would be good to follow up the vaccine with a dose of COVID-19 a few weeks later. I’d say then there’s very little need for boosters and you’ll get a much more full spectrum immune response…
I don't know what's the best way of dealing with it, but what I do know is that what's Australia's doing is a recipe of what to avoid doing. Whatever's the way forward, it can't be arresting people for being outside, tagging people's homes like they're lepers or something and building concentration camps for the forced relocation of the sick.
Though coronavirus is very different in many respects, it's worthwhile (especially if you are older like me) to remember the history of AIDS. We've learned to live with it and limit its spread very effectively in the western world.
HIV deaths were 348k in 1990 (which is the earliest year I found stats for on a quick googling). Around 4m people died from covid over the past year. We definitely would not want covid's mortality trajectory to follow HIV's, which peaked at 1.95 million, a 5.5x multiple of 1990's figure.
That's comparing apples and oranges because you're comparing the effectiveness of a particular treatment (condoms) with the effectiveness of a particular policy (mask mandates).
Do you need a study to understand that a latex condom can catch infected seminal fluids while a cloth mask cannot stop the spread of droplets, or aerosols containing covid?
A cloth mask does reduce the spread of aerlsols as well as droplets. Anything telling you otherwise is false and i will happily bury you in a dozen backing studies.
No it doesn't. The last year and a half is proof that masks played no significant role in reduction of infections. Bringing all kinds of studies doesn't prove anything since we effectively had the chance to witnesss the biggest study of all. Sure, it might stop some droplets. But a mask can never be as effective as a condom in stopping the virus. It s common sense. You can still infect or get infected. And that s the issue.
AIDS never spread broadly among heterosexuals who did not share needles or have partners who are bisexual or shared needles. Everyone is at risk for covid, like the flu.
Spoken like someone whose knowledge of the world ends at the US border. Hate to be the bearer of unpleasant news, but there are parts of the world where HIV was mostly a heterosexual disease. The nature of the main infected population depended upon how HIV was first introduced a country and what cultural behaviors helped or hindered its spread.
Even in Eastern Europe currently most HIV transmissions happen with heterosexuals. I was surprised to learn that in the Western countries it is mostly spread by MSM (men having sex with men) and IDU (intravenous drug use).
This certainly was not the experience of other countries such as South Africa where the majority of transfer (roughly 80%) was via heterosexual transfer.
I get the tech hipster ethos that it's cool to just run one big ass server and supposedly avoid a lot of complexity cost. But it's the year two-thousand and twenty-one. The fact that the most well-known tech forum in the world either can't or won't set up autoscaling is an indictment of the entire tech industry. We're living in the binary age, but we still need humans to push the bits around by hand, like 1960's operators juggling wires on a switchboard.
Wow, no mention of long covid in the entire article. People are making a lot of assumptions about a disease with billions of people naive to it (the unvaccinated) and selective pressure from the vaccinated. I think we could all benefit from some humility.
> "“A big question mark there is long COVID,” says Yonatan Grad, an immunologist and infectious-disease researcher at Harvard. There are still no data to prove how well the vaccines prevent long COVID, but experts generally agree that a vaccinated immune system is better prepared to fight off the virus without doing collateral damage."
I did miss that. I still think humility and caution are warranted. The preliminary numbers for long covid in breakthrough infections were similar to the unvaccinated in the Israel report, for instance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=5
(Comments like this will eventually go away. Sorry for the annoyance. The server is hurting today.)