"Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense.
They included young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate, she said. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell."
> The World Health Organization is urging caution after two South African health experts, including the doctor who first sounded the alarm about the omicron variant, indicated that symptoms linked to the coronavirus strain have been mild so far.
> The initial reported infections were among university students, WHO said, adding that younger patients tend to have milder symptoms.
> “Understanding the level of severity of the omicron variant will take days to several weeks,” WHO said in a statement, adding that “there is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with omicron are different from those from other variants.”
It’s interesting compared to some of the initial COVID cases recorded in the US last year, specifically in a nursing home up here in the Seattle area where its death/hospitalization rate were quite high (iirc it was around 1 in 4 of that initial outbreak in the home ended up dying or something quite terrifying).
I’m worried that the opposite might be true here, young and healthy catching it first so death rate is lower (great!) but lulls everyone into a false sense of security that it won’t be another delta wave especially among elderly and sick but then it slowly creeps into one because of the initial coverage.
Tough balancing act for researchers, trying to prevent both panic and complacency.
> Tough balancing act for researchers, trying to prevent both panic and complacency.
It really shouldn't be. Researchers should do their best to publish their finding objectively without consideration for how that will change public opinion.
Researchers have a responsibility not to making people feel or behave a certain way but to further our collective knowledge.
This is a novice interpretation of the data. Most early cases are recorded as mild. Severe cases and hospitalizations lag infections by 2-3 weeks, and deaths lag by 2-3 months.
It's frankly irresponsible to report this factoid without that caveat.
> Severe cases and hospitalizations lag infections by 2-3 weeks
The starting point in this case would be symptoms onset, surely? First samples were taken on November 14; the median time between the onset of symptoms and hospitalization is 5-10 days; patients have been followed since November 18 [0].
- CDC: a median of 5-12 days [0]
- a Belgian study, spring 2020, 14000+ patients: a median of 3-10 days [1]
- a Dutch study, spring 2021, 950 patients: a median of 7 days [2]
Peak deaths lag peak new cases by 2 weeks. Given that testing takes some time (about a week?) deaths most usually lags infection by 3 weeks and in 90% of cases less than a month.
I'm not sure I get this assumption. Few other countries were "pissed off" when borders were closed to them. I still cannot travel recreationally to Japan from the US, and that's fine.
South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said that new travel restrictions amid concerns over a heavily mutated Covid variant are “unjustified.”
He slammed other nations for “wanting to put blame” and ascribe the variant to South Africa rather than working collaboratively to address the situation as guided by the WHO.
And https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-59453842 where ‘[SA president] Cyril Ramaphosa said he was "deeply disappointed" by the action, which he described as unjustified, and called for the bans to be urgently lifted.’
Your country has a very low vaccination rate and you are ground zero for a new variant, but feel the need to be “deeply disappointed” that others trying to slow the spread slightly may impact your tourism industry…
Ground Zero was Botswana[0]. South Africa is the country leading the research and monitoring because they have an exceptionally strong epidemiological community and facilities.
So, the thing with Botswana is actually interesting, because those first cases were found in foreign diplomats who were visiting for a short time. Such a short time, that they probably could not have picked up the infection in the country, but had imported it:
Since this was first detected in Botswana, we don't know where ground zero is. What we do know is that countries with good detection systems get punished and that such travel plans always have come way after the cat is out of the bag anyways.
If the variant pushes hospitals over the brink it will be catastrophic. Peru had very bad outcomes because they ran out of oxygen. Many otherwise healthy patients died who would have likely survived had they had some O2.
We forget how good Western medicine is, but none of that is going to matter if the system is overwhelmed and god forbid we run out of O2.
Also I imagine most patients right now being hospitalized in South Africa have Omicron.
It is not yet clear whether infection with Omicron causes more severe disease compared to infections with other variants, including Delta.
I thought this was weirdly worded. It's also not clear whether Omicron disease is less severe, either, right?
A long time ago, long before the pandemic politicized messaging so much, a researcher posted a comment here on HN where they said that virus deadliness and contagiousness were in tension.
> a researcher posted a comment here on HN where they said that virus deadliness and contagiousness were in tension.
I've heard this statement a lot, and have been rather puzzled by why this must be the case. It's certainly true over a long period of time (a deadly pathogen that will kill off its hosts too quickly will also perish); and it's also certainly true that if a pathogen is very contagious but not deadly it can replace a deadly but less contagious variant; but I don't believe there's any molecular mechanism that locks these two properties relative to one another and dictates that if a new variant is more contagious it is likely to be less deadly and vice versa.
it doesn't have to be the case, but it often seems to be the case. I think there is a model by which deadliness is usually due to an accident -- note that most contemporary deadly pandemic diseases (even flu!) jump from animals to humans, so the deadliness is "accidental" in some sense, it's less deadly in the animal reservoir.
But maybe the better way to think of it is entropically/random walk POV. Starting from a base sequence S0, if the virus starts out at a local maximum of deadliness (or at least an increase in deadliness that only has certain mechanistic "channels of escape"), and then optimizes strictly for contagiousness, statistically speaking most mutations in an S1 will make it less deadly (even if marginally so), unless contagiousness and deadliness are mechanistically linked.
I think our understanding now is that the first order bottleneck in deadliness is something like "binding to a receptor", so most increases in contagiousness will have a strictly neutral-to-deleterious effect on deadliness.
There is no such mechanism, from what I’ve read (not an expert). Most diseases demonstrate the tension for the reason you give: too deadly too fast reduces transmission rate. But hypothetically, you could conceive of a disease with a high R value that is asymptomatic for the first month or two, and deadly in month three.
I would say it's molecular biology that investigates what the virus actually does; while evolutionary biology is an attempt of explaining, mostly retrospectively, how an organism has changed over time, and possibly what has driven this change. My understanding is that evolutionary biology is kinda like statistics in the sense that it can tell you the distribution of the outcomes of tossing a coin, but it can't tell you whether the next flip of the coin will be the heads or the tails. And what we are usually most concerned about practically is not how the virus will behave over a long period of time, but what the outcome of the next flip will be.
Delta managed to thread the needle and grow both more deadly and have higher transmission.
I'm sure some variant in the future will improve both deadliness and transmission. But there is a low chance that this variant (or any particular variant in general) will accomplish this feat.
Is Delta more deadly? I thought that was not really believed to be the case any more, just that it is much more transmissible. I could totally be wrong though; it's hard to find reliable info.
> However, the highest risks were from the Delta variant. In the Delta cases, there was a 108% increase in the risk of hospitalization, a 235% increased risk of ICU admission, and a 133% higher risk of death, compared with the original variant.
Its very rare, but it does happen. Delta is proof of it. But chances are, we won't roll "snake eyes" again on the most recent mutation.
Mutations are random: they can improve, or diminish the virus. Especially on something as important as the spike protein: that is literally the site that binds with our cells. Omicron could be better... or worse... at binding. There's all sorts of questions that are up in the air.
From a policy / scientist point of view, it makes sense to "hope for the best, prepare for the worst". That is: we should react as if its a worst-case scenario mutation, but we need to keep hope until the proof actually comes in.
----
A lot of information will come in the next couple of weeks: I'm sure supercomputers are simulating how this molecule now interacts with our bodies (but those simulations take days or weeks to finish accurately). There are surely trials and science to be done here.
Omnicron is a wakeup-call to the scientific community. But I'm not sure its worthy of being discussed in public yet. There's just not enough information here.
The public must know the virus is still evolving. If you don't give them the full information somebody comes up with a new conspiracy theory. I am really tired of reeducating my family everyday against the old fake news that are still circulating.
I prefer them to be scared from something real than from something fake.
I'm really hoping this holds true as the situation evolves.
In the mean time, my concern with this statement is that Africa was already "doing well" against covid .. bc of a combination of low testing, but also they have a smaller at risk population compared to the west.
In the west we're a lot better at keeping vulnerable people alive a lot longer, which consequently winds up as the demographic covid likes to target.
Optimistically, I do think if omicron was an order of magnitude worse than what we've been dealing with, we would already see "hints" of such traits .. fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case, for now.
Moving forward, I hope everyone continues to treat this seriously .. but it's becoming more clear that covid is here to stay no matter what measures we take.
> Fauci told Biden it'll take ~2 weeks to get "more definitive information on the transmissibility, severity, and other characteristics" of Omicron, per WH.
> "He continues to believe that existing vaccines are likely to provide a degree of protection against severe cases of COVID."
> Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.
Scientists get things wrong. I'm more concerned about someone who won't change their position when better information becomes available.
Did better information become available, or was he misleading the public to prevent people buying too many masks making it harder for medical staff to acquire them?
Either way the quote is important to inform people who may not be aware, that a Fauci quote is not necessarily the end all be all factual information the media would have you believe it is.
Ahh, so the Asian countries that have been using them for decades, as well as medical workers all over, have been hiding their secrets from us until after March 8th, 2020.
Perhaps the real answer is a little bit of both things can be true? That is, if you don’t consider Fauci an infallible deity?
Asian countries have been using them in part due to pollution. In March 2020, there wasn't much literature on the efficacy of it for disease prevention; we now have a lot more information on this.
Healthcare workers are trained not to "keep fiddling with the mask"; that aspect of Fauci's quote seems to indicate some of the concern was not the theoretical mechanics of masking, but the more practical aspects of having the untrained public doing it.
The Fauci quote was definitely a veil to hide the truth. But it's only a thin veil.
>we now have a lot more information on this.
Even little kids have enough information to know that blocking your mouth when sneezing or coughing stops germs. Don't blame it on discoveries or inventions. It's not new information, it's just the full house that wipes your account.
Proven, no. But our current best theory after 100 yeasts says “yes, it seems dice is played.” It’s the deterministic curmudgeons who keep trying to find a way to ignore that!
All that's proven is that statistical models are a good fit for something we don't really understand. No different than using epicycles to solve the problem of planetary motion.
You're wrong and and so was he and you definitely shouldn't weigh in since I'm sure you're not nearly as qualified as he was (neither wrt physics nor virology):
Not comparable. If they believed in miasma whilst also eating out of the trash it may make sense. The same way believing masks don't work but then covering your mouth to cough does...
It's not a good thing since he wasn't correcting himself, he was misinforming others whilst knowing what he was saying wasn't accurate.
I don't really care, since most of the quote is good information and the rest of the quote was made to serve a political purpose.
And to be fair - even that quote "It doesn't provide the perfect protection people think it does" and "people touch the masks".
The science on masks points to them helping when used correctly, but many people use them incorrectly - not following the proper procedure for putting them on, taking them off, reuse and disposal.
Today there's anonymous WHO representative (no mention in article who exactly and when gave the statement) that there's global risk on Reuters and there are dozens of re-publications about the same, linking to Reuters as source of truth.
Did position change overnight or was there any unpublished conference?
It's definitely VOC, not the first one we've seen even if it does indeed seem vastly different [1].
Article includes, however, following quote:
"Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic," the WHO said.
"The overall global risk ...is assessed as very high."
I find "Global risk assessed as very high" statement as both very strong and emotional. It is already replicated globally in various other news sources. I checked WHO's newsroom [2] but haven't seen new press events nor news statement. Yesterday's WHO's update [3] doesn't say anything about general risk and word "high" isn't even used.
Today Dr Tedros highlighted that we still don't know a lot during World Health Assembly opening speech [4]:
We don’t yet know whether Omicron is associated with more transmission, more severe disease, more risk of reinfections, or more risk of evading vaccines. Scientists at WHO and around the world are working urgently to answer these questions.
Reuters post itself do name 2 other sources for other quotes directly but this specific one is left as an "WHO" which makes it hard to verify. It is plausible that Reuters' journalist got some internal source on that matter or that WHO's news room was not updated after giving the statement, yet I'd rather have the WHO's official statement (i.e. on their news room website) for such circumstances.
This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story?
It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’ll never get out of this.
The only way you’ll stop this thing from mutating into a variant not covered by the vaccine is by eradicating it everywhere, simultaneously.
Absolutely true, but not the whole story unfortunately.
While many African countries need more vaccines, South Africa was in the process of throttling shipments because less and less people were getting vaccinated.
So the other big challenge is raising acceptance of the vaccines and fighting denialism.
Talking about vaccine hesitancy in Africa must be accompanied by why there's a certain amount of justification of it and it can be viewed as entirely rational, if also wholly undesirable. Included in that must be the USA's role in creating that problem. A couple of examples quickly turned up with a search engine of which there seem to be far, far too many. I can recall a few not here being reported over the past decade or so. When you tell lies you incur a debt to the truth, the interest rate is very steep. What we're seeing now is one such payment.
That's plausible, but it's not the whole picture. It may only partially explain some of the problem.
We have, in the wealthy west, millions of vaccine-hesistant and vaccine-denialist people.
I'm not just talking about poor or uneducated people, either.
I personally know wealthy, educated, analytical people who have bought into the fearmongering and propaganda. I was shocked to find how deeply skeptical they were. I was even more shocked to be linked to propaganda with hard-to-miss flaws, like the fact that the promoter is not talking on behalf of the AMA, but on behalf of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic... ... and I'm not even in America.
I also know people who got a dose of vaccine, read propaganda, became skeptical and delayed their second dose for a long time.
It's not just the poor, the ignorant, or people we've betrayed. It's bigger than that. I don't think anyone fully understands it yet.
Watching the people around me has stirred in me many new questions.
>I personally know wealthy, educated, analytical people who have bought into the fearmongering and propaganda
Same, including medical professionals who fit this description.
It's clearly an emotional and tribal issue at this point. The animating factor of nearly all of this denialism is a narrative of distrust and outright animus for the "establishment" and the organizations that represent it.
Whenever you got an establishment claiming authority from authority you are going to get this response the only thing surprising is why supposedly competent and intelligent politicians and propagandists keeps getting caught out by this extremely rational behaviour.
The problem here is as that "The Science" is being claimed as a source of authority with the same blind reverence that the church used to claim God or "The Bible" rather then being presented in all it's messy and inconclusive glory.
I think this hits the nail on the head. That the academic space is not just dominated, but overtly hostile to right wingers probably worsens this. Why would they trust advice given by people who proclaim their hatred of them?
Gladly, as far as hostility goes. The "hatred" was a rhetorical flourish about the relationship between the left and the right, as drawn from their media presence, as well as the general trend on left-aligned circles across social media. A scan of twitter and reddit should be more than sufficient to see that, especially /r/hermancainaward.
I'm going to place a few cases here, but you're going to have to accept that there is a cherry-picking-esque effect here, there isn't really solid data on this, unfortunately, only surveys and general opinion. A decent chunk of my social circle are academics in the state though anecdotal as that is. I'm also going to try to contrast the clash of opinion on both sides.
Professor Kindsvatter made a video about how he felt that the way "whiteness" was applied to him like "some kind of disease" was dehumanizing. This gets him an immediate attempt to get him to step down.
The concept of "whiteness" as a clear negative is pretty common in left and progressive aligned media. See [1], and imagine the fireball would be if "white" was replaced with "black". This definition of "whiteness" is certainly not the mainstay outside of said circles.
“I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks, happens almost every semester." This results in David Batson's resignation and the firing of his colleague.
>I do think that poor critical thinking skills, as exemplified in your rationalization here, do play a major role in how we got here though.
I love the way you prove my point by immediately going with a barely more civil version of "You're retarded". For the record, I'm both Vaccinated and, in a previous life, was a biomedical researcher, critically evaluating scientific literature was literally my job. I'm mostly on your side as far as policy goes, but Jesus Christ, with friends like you, who needs enemies.
I ask anyone here, if someone were to go to you, talk down to you and continuously declare their contempt for you and your kind. Then suddenly flip around and say that they mean the best for you and X policy is for your own good. What would your initial reaction be, assuming you have no idea about the ground truth.
So go on, insult them, demonize them and continue your tribal war. Then complain to your own tribe why the enemy tribe doesn't take your perfectly good advice at face value.
You made a bad argument and got called on it. That's as far as it goes. No need to be a victim. No need to double-down with more bad arguments. But, my apologies if I seemed unnecessarily harsh. I don't know you. I was referring to your argument; an argument that rationalizes malignant behavior and happens to be the crux of the problem.
You're more a victim of tribal thinking than you think. You talk almost purely in terms of "sides" and profess to be on my "side" because you agree with me on policy. So, you are surprised when I
call out your poorly constructed argument, as if I should have just gone along. That's tribal thinking.
OTOH, you can agree with me on 99 out of 100 issues, but if your position on that one issue makes no sense to me then I'll tell you exactly that. That's not tribal thinking.
>You made a bad argument and got called on it. That's as far as it goes. No need to be a victim. No need to double-down with more bad arguments.
You don't even have a damn argument here. You've lobbed personal attack after personal attack without any backing. I'm going to quote paraphrase the zen of python here on this. Be explict. Tell me exactly which part of my argument you're dismantling, rather than yelling "YOUR ARGUMENT SUCKS" and declaring victory.
>You talk almost purely in terms of "sides"
Of course I do. That's how American political lines on this are drawn. Deny the existence of this all you want, but your covid debate is almost perfectly modeled by tribal politics.
So, give your counterargument to this point, not some spiel about how I'm a bad person, or some unsupported claim about how my argument is bad. Give a proper, good faith rebuttal
- Most people function with heuristic trust evaluation. That is to say, they gauge trustworthiness by some measure of the source.
- Generally, people who detest you are not going to give you advice that is in your best interest.
- Left aligned spaces are often, if not generally, against, if not outright hostile to any right-aligned individuals. You don't really need to look very hard for this, reddit front page popular posts will give you a fantastic slice
- Given that lefty spaces are so open with their disdain of the right, it is expected that right-aligned individuals do not trust left-aligned authorities.
Despite what a good chunk of the internet seems to believe, screaming at them about how they're horrible people and deserve to die is really really unlikely to change their mind. It is however a fantastic way of signaling to your the ingroup though.
Well, so much for any pretense that you're an objective, non-tribal commentator, amirite?
Obviously, there's a lot of hostility just beneath the surface. Unfortunately, you seem to have bought into exactly the right-wing persecution narrative I mentioned, which is designed to produce the emotional effect you're exhibiting here.
>reddit front page popular posts will give you a fantastic slice
To start detoxing, maybe stop taking Reddit comments as organic and consider the well-known manipulation of online spaces, meant to reinforce bad narratives.
I mean, you offering Reddit comments as proof of anything reveals just how susceptible you are to manipulation. It's bad. Really bad. Your reality is skewed.
>Tell me exactly which part of my argument you're dismantling
Thing is, I told you exactly what's wrong with your argument. Go back and read if you're really interested. I won't enter the infinite loop of re-explaining because every additional comment you make just piles on more bad logic--this, while your anger visibly increases. No coincidence there.
In general, you are regurgitating virtually every talking point you've been programmed to repeat, and even using the language of your programmers ("lefty", "signalling").
It's becoming a case study on exactly how the right has been manipulated, and especially how emotional and tribal vectors are used to circumvent intelligence and critical thinking; which is, of course, my assertion that started this subthread.
So, while I appreciate you offering yourself as a working demonstration of my point, I'm afraid I have no interest in continuing to participate in your demonstration. Fixing the damage here is well-above my pay grade, and I have no delusion otherwise.
I think enough people here thought otherwise, seeing that the previous comment is flagged.
> mean, you offering Reddit comments as proof of anything reveals just how susceptible you are to manipulation. It's bad. Really bad. Your reality is skewed.
For all the ills of social media, they're very much a reflection of their readers. It's easy to say bots bots bots, but I'd bet that the vast majority of
those are very much real people. If you think reddit and twitter aren't major players in the public zeitgeist, I don't know what to say. The same applies to facebook.
It's also easy to say "I rebutted your argument" without actually doing so. That you didn't do so, despite all attempts to make it convenient (point by point logical chain), instead resorting to the standard non-answers and personal attacks.
If your best response to this is effectively "no u brainwashed", that says more about you than it does about me.
I don't personally believe this, but I know some people who claim that Robert Malone who invented mRNA is saying that the mRNA vaccines are more likely to create worse mutations of the disease. It seems more intuitive that getting vaccinated is the best way to prevent mutations but I'm curious if there is a good response to people who do have these concerns about the mRNA vaccines.
Leaky vaccines in general can create worse mutations of the disease, not specific to mRNA vaccines. See Marek’s disease:
> The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.
To echo the other poster - I read a bit about Malone the other day. He definitely helped the tech along at some point, but he has no claim to sole creation of or invention of the mRNA vaccines. He's one of a cast of hundreds or thousands.
He doesn't, that's a misquote by the OP. If you look at most citations of such, they talk about his involvement in mRNA tech.
However, that's also a long process that involves many people, as most modern scientific endeavors are. He might have played a role, but he certainly didn't single-handedly invent the field.
Robert Malone advanced mRNA research and technology, but no one "invented" mRNA. mRNA is a naturally-occurring biological molecule and a key component of protein synthesis.
They have been perfecting their message for years in the background. I've watched it start as a very left wing thing, then they discovered that the "freedom" message really resonated with the right wing libertarians about 10 years ago. They have been spreading in that crowd since.
Make no mistake, they don't care about you or right/left wing. It might be right wing this time around, but only because they are still looking for a message that will appeal to the left wing as strongly.
The biggest spreaders seem to have a supplement store. Follow the money often works very well.
Most people believe insane things of some form and all of us are usually inconsistent in some way.
It might have tighter correlations with economic and education status, but that’s not all of it.
Whatever skill allows some to see the signal through the noise while others descend down rabbit holes that lead to delusion is hard to teach.
The best community I’ve found that works towards it is the less wrong rationality community, but none of us are immune from cognitive bias or motivated reasoning. It’s all about recognizing it and trying to correct for it in order to struggle closer to the truth.
Even so, I worry most people continually exposed to false ideas will eventually get infected by them - even if you have really good tools, it’s hard.
I think it's not a function of quality, but of time and volume; if you hear something enough, you might–if only fleetingly–find yourself asking "what if they're right?", because it's not like it's just one crazy guy, it's a lot of voices.
>Watching the people around me has stirred in me many new questions.
Have you ever considered they might have a point? More and more data is coming out, like https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.107..., in the highest-impact cardiology journal, showing that the mRNA vaccines are not particularly "safe" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
This isn't a peer reviewed study, it's a submitted abstract. The sole name on the paper is someone who sells psudoscience plant-based debunked theories that the majority of our health issues come from lectins. He "authors papers" for Gwyneth Paltrow's weird publications. The guy sells supplements based on his scaremongering research to fringe-groups who like the idea of plant-based medicine, I don't trust his opinion or his bias with data in any non-peer reviewed studies. If there's something to this wait for a real research group to come out and say it - if there's a chance of world-changing science that will happen (would have already happened).
>The sole name on the paper is someone who sells psudoscience plant-based debunked theories that the majority of our health issues come from lectins
A professional cardiologist with decades of experience who now runs his own cardiology practice. Do you feel you're more qualified to assess his qualifications than the editors of Circulation just because you read a wikipedia article?
>psudoscience plant-based debunked theories
He has published papers demonstrating health improvements in patients after treatment, which is more than can be said of most supplements. The absence of large RCTs for something does not mean it's been "debunked".
> If there's something to this wait for a real research group to come out and say it - if there's a chance of world-changing science that will happen (would have already happened).
You understand doctors have been fired for questioning the safety of coronavirus vaccines? You understand that publically-funded research groups risk having their funding withdrawn if they question the safety of the coronavirus vaccine?
Yeah, I'm sorry, this is the classic pseudoscience narrative. Somehow everyone else is wrong because of <insert conspiracy here> except this one guy who somehow figured out the truth.
Yep, whenever you see something that "just questions the medical science" getting heavily promoted, follow the money. You'll very likely eventually find the link to the sale of food supplements, essential oils, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, cleansing and detox, or other "alternative medicines".
You should probably read the "Expression of Concern" that the AHA has already attached to that abstract (it's a link under the title); namely the part that says "...there is no data in the abstract regarding myocardial T-cell infiltration, there are no statistical analyses for significance provided, and the author is not clear that only anecdotal data was used." (They also mention the typographical errors, but I didn't put that at the forefront because that may be a formatting issue and not the researcher's fault.)
Also, and this is something I'm not clear on, but is this just an abstract? It doesn't seem like there's an associated paper or any data beyond what's mentioned there.
There's a few other issues, too; like, for example, they don't compare mRNA vaccine recipients to people who have recovered from COVID-19 (one would expect that a test that measures inflammation would see increased inflammation in both populations); or that, frankly, the PULS test the publishing doctor developed doesn't seem to explain how it turns a set of arbitrary biological markers into a score that correlates to risk of heart issues.
I would, at best, say that this abstract could be used to establish a hypothesis for a future study. On its own, it tells me basically nothing.
>Also, and this is something I'm not clear on, but is this just an abstract? It doesn't seem like there's an associated paper or any data beyond what's mentioned there.
>"...there is no data in the abstract regarding myocardial T-cell infiltration, there are no statistical analyses for significance provided, and the author is not clear that only anecdotal data was used."
Presumably deeper analysis will be presented in the actual paper. The author claims the data is from 566 people at a preventative cardiology practice, so unless the PULS measurements have an incredibly high degree of variance, it'd be quite unlikely to see such a large increase in the underlying factors measured purely by chance when there are 500+ samples.
>they don't compare mRNA vaccine recipients to people who have recovered from COVID-19
This would be useful for comparing the relative safety of the mRNA vaccines vs getting covid. Such comparison is however not necessary to assess the safety of mRNA vaccines; an mRNA vaccine does not become safe just because covid is more dangerous. The absolute, not relative, risk is important to know as even if the risk of covid is greater, the chance of getting covid is not 100%. And with regular boosters, one might be exposed to the risk of the mRNA vaccine more often than one is exposed to the risk of covid.
> the PULS test the publishing doctor developed doesn't seem to explain how it turns a set of arbitrary biological markers into a score that correlates to risk of heart issues
"The original studies for the PULS Cardiac Test were initiated at Stanford University and Kaiser Permanente. Researchers analyzed gene expression profiles in the lesions of mouse models of ACS (mice do not form hard plaque) . Over 250 candidate proteins were identified in mice lesions and many of them were shown to be conserved in humans by analysis of soft lesions during CABG. The number of biomarker candidates was narrowed from 50 to 9 pathways during additional studies. Various permutations of these biomarkers with existing biomarkers like LP-PLA2 and hsCRP, and global risk factors were tested by 3 software systems (Akaike, Bayesian, and Drop-inDeviance) to predict a 5 year risk of ACS. This process resulted in all three systems identifying the same 9 biomarkers and 4 global risk factors (age, sex, diabetic status, and family history). These biomarkers and global risk factors were then incorporated into a benchmark algorithm format with performance superior to gold standard measures of risk such as Framingham, Reynolds, etc. The resulting algorithm yielded a clinical net reclassification index of 43% (this index penalizes an algorithm for falsely up-classifying and down-classifying patients; values above 10% when compared to Framingham are considered good). The algorithm (PULS) was then independently validated by the NIH NHLBI group in MESA which confirmed the findings. These clinical trials were all longitudinal outcome-based studies."
What I wonder with this (and other warnings about vaccine safety)
mRNA vaccines have been administered to millions of people around the world. A sizable percentage had the first shot six months ago or longer.
The effects the author is warning against also occur supposedly with high probability and across age groups and sex. (He makes no mentions about pre-existing conditions, which would probably be important: usually, you visit a cardiologist for a reason)
If there was actually an increased risk of e.g. ACS, shouldn't we have seen a significant increase in actual ACS cases among vaccinated by now? Wouldn't this have been detected during the clinical trials?
I don't read that as them not being safe. They're trying to explain why there's an increase in some symptoms, symptoms we already know about, post vaccine.
Sadly I can't dig too much into that paper because the page is being really buggy.
But having had three shots now and no symptoms I've stopped really caring much to hear any fear mongering. I'm a lot more concerned by new variants.
I'm in the opposite bucket regarding symptoms unfortunately. First shot gave somewhat unusual symptoms which were brushed off. Only after the left side of my face went numb after shot two did they consider allergic reaction.
The side effects of the vaccines, while generally not that severe, are very real. Discounting them just because you were lucky isn't the best way to go about it imo.
Catching covid is definitely not safe if you’re in that tiny minority that is strongly affected, mostly because the NIH advice for the infected is currently ‘Wait until it gets bad enough to go to the hospital’.
> I also know people who got a dose of vaccine, read propaganda, became skeptical and delayed their second dose for a long time.
Ironically, if only they were lucky enough to not get infected meanwhile and managed to eventually change their mind, that may actually turn out for the better since additional vaccine doses seem to produce stronger antibody response when delayed.
I would be surprised if this is the reason. The South African anti-vax arguments I've read were very similar to the anti-vax arguments I hear here.
None of them argued the vaccines they're receiving are an experimental vaccines, or that the vaccines are a trick. They seem to mostly seem to have concerns about the actual vaccines similar to western anti-vaxxers.
This argument is refuted by 1) no widespread evidence of Africans themselves making such claims about their reluctance to vaccinate; 2) widespread evidence of Africans making the same conspiracy claims as those being made in other countries not sharing Africa's history; and 3) widespread evidence that the claims of both Africans and non-Africans originate from the same sources of disinformation on social media.
Due to low trust in government after decades of corruption and mismanagement of basically everything who can blame them ? And who stepped into into this void of authority... Facebook, bastion of truth and science and critical thinking.
America's inability to curb its own propaganda machines and its capitalism uber alles rhetoric and group-think boomerangs right back. This pandemic has certainly shaken a lot of nuts out of the rug, but where did those nuts came from ?
Ahh yes, lets blame capitalism for all things. You do realize that capitalism created the vaccine in the first place? That with out capitalism you would have no vaccine to complain about people refusing to take?
I really am tried to seeing capitalism blamed on all the worlds problem when it has been capitalism more than anything else that has brought both peace and prosperity to the world
I was shocked to discover, several months after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved in America and trumpeted as proof of the speed and efficacy of our modern, capitalist medical system... that the Sinopharm and Sputnik V vaccines were both released much earlier, and they actually work very well.
All of those vaccines were created within weeks of the genetic sequence being released. The release dates you are referring to is only about regulatory oversight. Countries like the US and EU (and a long list of others) where Pfizer and Moderna targeted their sales are very careful to not allow the release of anything until they have evidence it works and is safe. For Sputnik V they released it before being sure it worked - which allowed them to release much faster, but there is a reason the rest of the world cried foul - even countries with few regulations didn't allow it to be used until more study was done - study that takes time.
This was 100% a decision based on regulations.
The first clinical trial for Pfizer was done in April of 2020, Sputnik was started in June. The difference was Pfizer went through far more and more time consuming clinical trials.
I don't know if you can blame FDA's risk adverse views on capitalism.
Do we know how well they work yet, really?
(Genuine question)
They were released earlier, though I got the impression they were released really without very much phase 2/3 testing at all. If you think the anti-vax folks are having a field day with the current western vaccines being given special accelerated roll-out...
Not being approved could very well be a political move on Europe's part - they have plenty of motives not to approve it, and equally they have plenty of reasons not to trust Russia's claims. In my country it was a running joke that if it's ever available here, the viles would be laced with novichok.
The paper is somewhat questionable though as it shows a 100% effectiveness against severe infection.
Most likely it is a similar effectiveness to other adenovirus based vaccines, which is less than mRNA vaccines, but still better than no vaccine. It has been reported that some countries are paying close to $20 per dose, so it's not any cheaper than mRNA vaccines.
> That with out capitalism you would have no vaccine to complain about people refusing to take?
Cuba, which is as far away from capitalism as you can get these days, has created five different vaccines. And in any case it wasn't capitalism that created the popular vaccines... the mRNA vaccines build up on decades of public-funded research, the Oxford/AZ vaccine was funded by the university endowment IIRC.
>Oxford/AZ vaccine was funded by the university endowment
According to Wikipedia, that vaccine was developed with Venture Capital money from Oxford Sciences Innovation, Google Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, among others. However even if it was "public funding", that public funding is only possible due to the tax base created by the capital system the governments of the world tax to get their funding.
As to Cuba, I believe only 2 has passed Phase II Trials, and none are approved for international use by the World Health Organization. Time will tell if they are effective as they claim.
Oxford University was going to open source its vaccine, then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stepped in and convinced them to sell exclusive rights to AstraZeneca.
So capitalism is the only economic system capable of producing vaccines? If we had any other system of production, we would just be S.O.L because it takes an kleptocratic, imperialist oligarchy to make stuff?
It never fails to surprise me how little thinking technolibertarians do outside of their professional domains. I so wish we trained more generalists capable of recognising at a glance how ludicrous an argument like that is. People who's only qualification is that they're good with computers should really just stop thinking their opinions are useful on topics outside of their domains of expertise.
Not just denialism, but travel costs could also be an issue. I know in more highly vaccinated countries the government had to basically pay people to take the vaccine.
SARS-CoV-2 is endemic worldwide in humans and multiple animal species. It will never be eradicated no matter how many people are vaccinated. The vaccines are good at preventing deaths, however they don't reliably prevent infection or transmission.
The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to evolve in immunocompromised patients who experience persistent infections. Vaccines aren't very effective for such patients.
I completely agree that we should donate vaccines to low income countries. The US federal government has donated 264M doses so far with more on the way.
You seem to be a little confused about how vaccines work. While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, vaccines aren't very effective in immunocompromised patients. Even those who are vaccinated are at risk of persistent infections (depending on their specific medical condition).
I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but the virus is so contagious that there will be no significant protection for those whom the vaccines are ineffective.
If you're talking about herd immunity, you might not be as up to date on the newest variants. We could theoretically reach herd immunity against the original covid-19. But there was no practical way to get to herd immunity with delta without mandating three vaccine shots at gunpoint which would be about as popular as burning Medicare to the ground.
With Omikron herd immunity is impossible. 100% vaccinated population wouldn't get us there.
> With Omikron herd immunity is impossible. 100% vaccinated population wouldn't get us there.
But, as the linked page says:
> Transmissibility: It is not yet clear whether Omicron is more transmissible
We do not know enough about Omicron for you to be able to make a statement like that. Do you have a source that has a better understanding than the WHO?
In addition, even if there are covid variants that our current vaccines are not effective enough with a 100% vaccinated population to cause herd immunity, that doesn't mean it's impossible, just that we need better vaccines. There are some viruses that mutate so quickly that it's unlikely for us to ever have full herd immunity (i.e. the flu, though even for the flu, if we had good enough vaccines and coverage, it might cease to exist), but I don't see you making a compelling argument about that.
It will be weeks until we're certain that Omicron is significantly more transmissible in the uninfected/previously infected/vaccinated
groups than Delta.
But lots of preliminary data suggests it will be. That's why Omicron was designated a variant of concern.
I think this guy has made a pretty compelling case.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing
What do you think the chances are that Omicron is more than 20% more transmissible among the
1) infected : 85%
2) vaccinated : 80%
3) unvaccinated/uninfected : 75%
We may not be able to achieve full herd immunity, but better herd resistance may be the only way to help those who can't benefit from the vaccine.
If the Delta and other contagious variants are spreading more in communities with lower vaccine adoption, then I think it would stand to reason that immunocompromised people would be safer in communities with higher vaccine adoption.
The fact that this has been discovered in Africa doesn’t mean that it originated there in the first place.
> Several scientists said they suspected that the variant had been spreading undetected in countries with lackluster sequencing efforts before it surfaced in Botswana and South Africa, giving it more time to scatter globally. Nevertheless, European nations did not find the variant until after South Africa alerted them to it, demonstrating the gaps in their own surveillance efforts. [0]
Given the large amount of mutation in this variant, theory point to high likelihood of this being evolved from a single individual with compromised immune system, likely a person in advanced stages of HIV infection.
Globally speaking, most of the HIV positives live in sub-saharan Africa, with South Africa having 17.30% of adults carrying HIV, and countries around it in similar ballpark. This points to the variant being evolved in South Africa or its neighbors
This is correct, but I don't believe it devalues the original comment any less. Any part of the world where vaccination rates are lower allows (I assume) any variant to grow in that region, and then makes it easier to export to other parts of the world.
Given the apparently low efficacy of the current batch of vaccines in preventing infection and transmission, I'm not sure that it's any harder for variants to occur in, say, New Mexico than South Africa. If the case rates are higher, the odds of variants is higher.
I read somewhere that the new strains are probably created inside people whose immune system is not able to clear the virus, thus allowing it to mutate and create new strains.
I guess those people would be more likely to be exposed at all in countries with less vaccination though.
That seems to be disputed too, this is an interesting read: Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.[0]
> At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days
> Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.
> There also appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated
Of course that could be different for third world countries.
That article is garbage, full of randomly picked data points, not accounting for other variables, blatant misinterpretations and convenient omissions. Anti-vaxxers love posting it.
Can you think of some issues with this study? legitimate question.
Looking at one data point here. Israel. The data point pretty much represents the peak of the wave caused by the Delta variant. The story in Israel goes that the vaccines worked so well against the previous variants that the entire country went back to normal. But with 60% of the population vaccinated and Delta the effective R number is easily over 1 when there's no other measures in place. Once Israel introduced some new measures (and booster shots), most of the measures are around limits to not-vaccinated people btw, their case rate went down by a factor of 20!
So what does this tell us about vaccines, covid, and this "study"?
I can think of many actually, but this is not my field of expertise so I don't want to jump on erroneous conclusions and I want to pay close attention to what I say, other than get feedback from others that for sure know a lot more than me. Just to get things straight, I am in no way saying that vaccines are not effective, there is strong evidence that indicates the contrary.
I was responding to a user who claimed that the more covid goes around, the more it mutates, and as far as I understand it's what viruses do and therefore is a correct statement.
I then linked this study and cautiously pointed out that it is "disputed", which may still be the wrong term in that case or I was erroneously giving too much credit to the paper itself.
You then point out that the study highlights the Delta variant peak when dealing with the Israel data, and I could agree on that.
What the study is trying to highlight, as far as I can tell, is not to undervalue *vaccination which has strong evidence ww to greatly lower hospitalisation and death risk from covid infection*, but it instead tries to tell that even in vastly vaccinated communities there are a lot of cases and they can't be distinguished from those in communities with lower vaccination rate.
So my argument was: if cases are rising in largely vaccinated communities, the virus will inevitably mutate in those communities too and it is not a pattern only related to third world countries with low vaccination rates.
I don't think the study shows that either. Generally the bulk of the cases and especially hospitalizations and deaths have been amongst unvaccinated. When you have 40% of a country unvaccinated and when those 40% tend to form social groups and closer connections you can't really look at the country as a whole.
At any rate, the methodology of the paper is just way off. If you truly wanted to understand the correlation between vaccination and infection rates you need to try to control for other factors. That is just experiment design 101. If you control for nothing while there are other significant factors then you get nothing. If the paper is saying "there can be high covid rates with 60%-70% vaccine coverage and the delta variants" then sure, but also duh.
Right (also "in part because the vaccination of children takes time to come into effect").
They are hovering around R=1 with very minimal restrictions and still a significant amount of people that won't take the vaccine ("citing the fact that a third of the population remains unprotected. This refers to 670,000 unvaccinated Israelis, more than a million people who haven’t received the booster, and children under 12"). They're making up for the vaccine coverage to some extent by:
1. Lots of people got sick. Israel has a young population and a very strong healthcare system so they were able to manage a very high daily case rate per capita.
2. Booster shots.
3. And now, vaccinating children.
I don't think anyone knows yet exactly what sort of waning effect you have after the third booster. It's also hard to say what portion of the change is behavioral changes vs. the vaccine's wane.
Now the new variant completely changes the calculus yet again.
And that's how this stuff keeps spreading. People who don't really understand what they are passing on passing it on as though it means something to them. If you didn't really understand it, why did you pass it on?
You can’t compare developing countries that barely test anyone with Portugal which has strong and robust testing. Likely that tons of infections get untested so to prove that vaccine don’t work just because some other country with lower vaccination has less cases makes absolutely no sense. Any epidemiologist knows that and this is why this garbage analysis.
What you do is that you compare within the same country where conditions are similar. It’s the same everywhere, virus spread more and leads to more deaths and hospital cases among the unvaccinated.
> The only way you’ll stop this thing from mutating into a variant not covered by the vaccine is by eradicating it everywhere, simultaneously.
Even if it were possible and achievable to vaccinate all humans, we'd still have a problem because COVID has spread to other mammal species. There's no reasonable plan that I know of to vaccinate animals in the wild.
> We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’ll never get out of this.
But you're 100% right about this. I don't want what I said about your last sentence to diminish the importance of wealthy nations sharing the vaccine with other countries. We're all in this together. The idea that a country can vaccinate only their own citizens and then consider this problem solved is completely false.
Africa has the youngest population in the world and they deal with viruses on a daily basis that are much more deadly than covid to young people. It will be hard to entice people to get vaccinated for covid in these situations.
I don't think the virus could ever be stopped with today's vaccines, even if everyone was vaccinated. Data from fully or almost fully vaccinated countries clearly show that this doesn't eliminate the virus. It of course helps, but we have to depart from the idea that the "zero covid" strategies work.
Define "work". Countries that pursued zero covid largely avoided hospital overcrowding and massive amounts of preventable death. It might never have been possible to actually zero covid out to extinction, but it was possible to be close to zero for long enough to get everyone vaccinated. Millions of lives have likely been saved because of these strategies.
"zero covid" is still the right strategy for a disease for which the population is unvaccinated; even if it doesn't achieve full elimination.
The ironic thing is Australia really only got it when their zero COVID policies weren't taken seriously enough by its weakest actor who was more into "opening up". For people who don't know Australian politics it was the NSW state.
They avoided COVID delta for months (6+) despite locking all incoming arrivals in shared air hotel quarantine systems and workers coming into the quarantine zone day in and day out (i.e. not taking quarantine seriously quarantine). Some Australian states who had better border control policies were able to keep COVID out indefinitely (e.g. WA, QLD, TAS, SA, etc).
Knowing some people who live in WA, despite overseas travel restrictions, life is pretty much pre-2019. Clubs are open, schools are running, no masks, nothing. They are thankful for zero COVID policies - the biggest one being border control and for some areas dedicated, but well resourced, quarantine facilities (NT). Only recently did NT get cases, and it didn't come internationally, but from the NSW outbreak. It's a concern since the indigenous population there typically have less health facilities.
Of course it is much easier to do this in Australia than the US or UK for a variety of reasons. Europe definitely can't do this IMO - land borders aren't strong enough.
Which are the fully vaccinated countries you're talking about here? Vaccines for kids 5-12 are just starting and even the countries with the most vaccine intake still have 10%-20% that won't take it. At any rate it's really enough to bring this to a low enough case per capita which generally the vaccines do help with. The less active cases the lower the number of random mutations.
I don’t know. You don’t need 100% efficacy to achieve herd immunity (obviously I’m not an epidemiologist and my terms are imprecise) if you have a sufficiently vaccinated population.
I generally agree that we should depart from a covid zero strategy, but not because the vaccines aren’t effective; rather, because too many people are making decisions based on FUD and there doesn’t seem like much that can be done about that in the sort of timeframe during which a “covid-zero” strategy might work.
> You don’t need 100% efficacy to achieve herd immunity (obviously I’m not an epidemiologist and my terms are imprecise) if you have a sufficiently vaccinated population.
Treshold of herd immunity depends on transmitability. For delta variant, if r=6 estimates are true, you would need 100% of population vaccinated in last 5 months (because after that infection immunity drops too low).
I mean, there are Zero Covid strategies that work, see China or New Zealand. The problem is just that those measures are so drastic that many countries would probably not accept them.
The goal in western countries is to get to the "endemic phase" of the infection - i.e. "live with the virus". That's all well and good, unfortunately this requires the disease to become significantly less deadly than it still is. We're not there yet.
New Zealand seems to have abandoned that Zero Covid approach [0]
> Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern acknowledged an end to the elimination strategy seven weeks into a lockdown that has failed to halt an outbreak of the Delta variant, announcing that restrictions would be gradually lifted in Auckland, the country’s largest city.
> “We’re transitioning from our current strategy into a new way of doing things,” Ms. Ardern told reporters. “With Delta, the return to zero is incredibly difficult, and our restrictions alone are not enough to achieve that quickly. In fact, for this outbreak, it’s clear that long periods of heavy restrictions has [sic] not got us to zero cases.”
> “What we have called a long tail, feels more like a tentacle that has been incredibly hard to shake.”
That said, NZ is still only discovering 1-200 cases a day and total deaths since it started are still well under 100. The South Island has hardly any Covid at all. Overall vaccination rates are reasonable and will get better when children are given the all-clear to get it.
If other countries had done as well as NZ delta would have never spread in the first place. Attributing NZs failure to how they handled things so far is misrepresentation, they did things by the book, but if other countries keep sending the equivalent of typhoid Mary's into the NZ population then it is a matter of time before the strategy will fail.
If NZ would have kept their borders locked this would have not happened. They will come to regret that decision.
This tracks. Hawaii still has the lowest COVID in all of the US, and even the city (note: not the county) of alameda has the lowest COVID rate in all cities in the bay area (it's kind of a pain in the ass to get to). Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, are all islands. And South Korea is... politically an island.
Definitely true, and that's also one of the reasons Australia has had it so mildly on the global scale. South Australia has had, I think, only four deaths, and this unbelievably low number is, I think, one of the benefits of being on the island of Australia, and not being particularly recognised as a tourist destination in the way Sydney and Melbourne and various part of Queensland are.
ie. South Australia has the ocean borders of Australia and the psychological borders of unpopularity. The combination of which has proven incredibly effective.
Everyone says this because it makes sense at first glance, but does it really? Did the US get most of its infections from people driving over from Canada and Mexico? A virus from China or South Africa spreads by planes, not cars.
Fair enough, I should have said “be a small island”. Obviously everything changes when you’re dealing with a population two orders of magnitude that of New Zealand: it’s harder to secure ports, harder to control contagion internally, etc. Moreover, the US never even attempted to harden its ports until the virus was already spreading out of control.
That said, the US has a lot of people crossing its land borders—even if it completely hardened its ports, outlawed border crossings, and was much better at reducing internal contagion, it would still have to deal with thousands of people who cross illegally and who aren’t going to quarantine for two weeks or abide by any kind of contact tracing programs.
> I mean, there are Zero Covid strategies that work, see China or New Zealand.
Are we really trusting China's data? They still have less than 100k cases reported. That makes zero sense from what we've seen from other countries. How would they have tracked down every case after it ran rampant for 3 months in a major city?
As a westerner living in mainland China, I might be able to weigh in on this. China's data does indeed look hard to believe from basically anywhere outside of China (and New Zealand). I don't expect to sway anyone who doesn't want to be swayed.
But I can say this: (a) there really is a pervasive nationwide effort to track and trace, which affects everybody and everything, and (b) the minor outbreaks that do happen get shard pretty faithfully on social media -- even if there is also censorship, it seems it's not as fast as the grassroots spread of news.
Was in Shanghai from Sept 2019 - Oct 2020. I'm of Asian descent that speaks Mandarin and has friends in China. I will share my experiences and stuff I know.
For people outside of China, the figures would seem really suspect and unbelievable but if you are/was in China then you will understand why infection rates have been low vs countries outside of East/SE Asia.
Reason one: face masks.
People in Shanghai were wearing them from mid Jan 2020 indoors and outdoors. From about mid May 2020 onwards, less people were wearing them outdoors. When I left in Oct 2020, face masks were still required in public venues like museums and on public transport. From seeing photos that my Chinese friends have sent to me recently, face masks are still required on public transport and everybody wears one. Yes, everybody.
This is in contrast to the London Underground (London is my hometown) where people don't bother even though it is required (as a Condition of Carriage). Now you know why the UK has stupidly high infection rates.. people here don't care about their fellow citizens.
Reason two: health QR code thing on Alipay/WeChat (tracking movements).
If you wanted to get into certain places like museums, you had to show a green QR code which meant you was not in a high risk area of the country with outbreaks. So if you was in say another city like Guangzhou that had an outbreak within the last 14 days, then your QR code would be red and they would refuse you entry. In essence, you were tracked by Alipay or WeChat. I have not asked my Chinese friends if health QR codes are still required.
Reason three: limiting movement of people via lockdowns, etc.
I think China got lucky in that the outbreak during Jan 2020 coincided with Chinese New Year so the majority of migrant workers in cities (外地人) were in their hometowns or villages. In other words, cities like Shanghai were virtually empty. People outside of Shanghai returned around the second half of Feb 2020 (after the Chinese New Year holiday break was extended). This extension limited movement of people at the time and thus the potential spread of the virus.
I was living on campus at a Shanghai university. They locked down the campus from the beginning of March 2020 where you could not leave the campus unless it was an emergency. Only university staff could enter and leave freely. TBH, this was too draconian because it was 'safe' from May 2020 but entry to campus was still restricted! As a result, I found ways to sneak out lol. All universities in Shanghai had lockdowns in case you was wondering.
They also locked down residential estates (小区) during the first few months of 2020. Only residents could enter and all deliveries (parcels, food etc) were left at the front gate for you to collect. They were manned with security guards to check if you lived there.
There have been movement restrictions for people in certain industries, e.g. education. Earlier on this year one of my Chinese friends that works at an international school told me she was not allowed to leave Shanghai when taking annual leave.
Reason four: keeping tabs on who buys medicines for flu or colds
You heard that right. One of the most bizarre things ever. When I wanted to buy medicine for the common cold in a pharmacy, they asked me the reasons for purchase and I had to show my original passport and they entered my details into the computer. This was not required when I bought cold/flu medicines during Autumn (fall) 2019. This red tape was not limited to foreigners, when I didn't have my original passport on me on one occasion, my Chinese friend kindly used her Chinese ID which was scanned.
Reason five: mass testing for just a few cases of COVID
Google the news stories of mass testing at Shanghai Pudong Airport last year, Shanghai Disneyland recently or the outbreaks during this summer.
Reason six: all those that test positive have to be treated in hospital and their homes are disinfected. People that live nearby have to quarantine in a government specified venue and have their homes disinfected.
Reason seven: China's borders are still closed with entry restrictions.
Tourists and international students (except from S. Korea) have not been allowed in since early 2020.
Reason eight: quarantine for anybody entering China really early on
The Chinese friend I mentioned above that teaches at a school had to quarantine for around 14 days when she returned to Shanghai from the UK during Feb 2020. Yes mate, Feb 2020. When did the UK government require 14 day self isolation for people entering the UK? June 2020! Too late mate.
This gives you an idea of how serious China has taken COVID-19 to the point of being draconian at times. China didn't want to take chances and took action early last year unlike countries like the UK that dragged their feet until it was too late.
You can strike New Zealand from that list, our isolation systems for people arriving were never very good and didn’t stand a chance once delta became dominant.
Omicron might spread faster but we dont know yet. The doctor in SA who first treated people infected with omicron says synptoms are far less severe for example, no loss of taste or smell and no hospitilization.
per the linked article here these were students who are young, so would not be expected to have severe symptoms:
> Initial reported infections were among university students—younger individuals who tend to have more mild disease—but understanding the level of severity of the Omicron variant will take days to several weeks.
"It's a paradox of public health that being too clean can sometimes lead to disease. For centuries, infants were routinely exposed to the poliovirus in their unsanitary living conditions. Polio rarely causes paralysis in infants, partly because of the maternal antibodies still present in their systems. In the 1900s, many countries cleaned up their water and sanitation systems, and houses in more affluent communities were routinely cleaned, reducing exposure to microbes. By the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, new mothers, especially those in the middle class, had no antibodies in their immune systems to pass on to their children. When children were exposed to the poliovirus in later years, they were defenseless against the disease."
Different type of disease for starters. No animal reservoirs either and the vaccine is effective with a single dose (and doesn’t require boosters). Perhaps we can focus on more health generally? Diet and exercise to curb the massive obesity in the western world.
The lack of sterilizing immunity. You can not expect your immune system to mount a permanent immediate defense against coronaviruses.
Once everybody has encountered SARS2 at least once, it may become as harmless as the other endemic coronaviruses. That is to say, not entirely harmless, but nothing to lose sleep over.
It will never go away. How we deal with that is up to us.
We might have to, there is no guarantee that mRNA vaccines or lockdowns will ever stop covid to to point where no one ever gets hospitalized with covid.
This is the inconvenient truth that absolutely nobody in the establishment is even remotely willing to even consider and a big part of the debate that is being replaced with an accusation contest.
What do we do when the vaccination program only works as promised by the scientists developing it, and not as hoped for by the politicians ordering it?
This season isn't finished yet, but we are seeing far fewer people sick and dying than last year. This trend is bound to continue, even if vaccines fail, if for no other reasons than the herd getting thinned out, cynically speaking.
What a silly comment, especially as there are recombinant vaccines for covid, not just mRNA. mRNA based treatments (not just vaccines) have the possibility to save a significant amount of lives in future.
Totally agree. I am 30 and already got 2 jabs. I will probably need to get 3rd in less than 6 months to be able to normally live (covid pass in Europe). Risk to person of my age is low even without vaccine. I got myself vaccinated only to help the society (and to get covid pass) but I do not feel that I am helping if they are wasting vaccines on people like me instead of sending them to people who actually need them. It is sad that this is official EU policy to require re vaccination of young people (official recommendation to member states is that vaccine is effective for 9 months for all ages).
Not to mention that climate in central Europe effectively stops virus from May to October so it will be way more efficient to vaccinate people in August and September.
Vaccination is less of a supply problem and more of a distribution and demand problem. One vaccine administered in the western world does not mean one vaccine has been made unavailable to the third world. It's similar to food scarcity, the primary problem is poor infrastructure making distribution networks extremely inefficient.
Distribution in the country is not the problem (look what "Medecins sans frontires" do). Mostly 3rd world countries do not have medical standards as high as in first world so you can instruct taxi drivers how to jab people and give them trunk full of vaccines and they will empty it in the same day without problems. And it will be still safe enough as those vaccines are applied to muscles.
I think it is the problem of supply and demand because EU and even more US* are making vaccines way more expensive.
* EU is buying vaccines together to not compete for price between states but the price is probably way higher than African countries can pay. Imagine the whole world teamed up together and vulnerable people would be vaccinated at the same time before young healthy people as it is done now in EU.
Not to argue with you too hard, but I’m also in my 30s and you definitely downplay the “self-interest” angle more than I do. Indeed, I got my shots because I want to “do my part,” and I’m also not particularly worried about personally getting severely sick or dying.
But I also just don’t want to get sick at all because getting sick sucks.
That’s the same reason I’ve been getting yearly flu shots every year since college. Before COVID I never even really considered the personal risk of long-term side effects or death from flu (although I’m sure there’s some measurable risk) or the fact that flu kills tons of people every year. I just hate getting sick and from the evidence I’ve seen the flu vaccine is very safe and usually fairly effective at preventing the flu. Same goes for the COVID shots. I’d take common cold vaccines if they were similarly safe and effective and readily available.
Mostly agree, but have you considered that perhaps falling sick once in a while allows your immune system to adapt and become more stronger? I mean vaccines have been around for all of 100-200 years...
The only reason to want your immune system to be stronger is to not get sick, right? I certainly wouldn’t choose to get sick once a month in order to have a super mega strong immune system, for example. The desired end goal is to get sick less often!
In certain cases it may be that getting a mild infection does help prevent later more serious infections, but AFAIK those cases are generally getting infected as an infant or child. I’m not aware of evidence showing that current widespread vaccines for adults have this effect of trading mild illness now for more serious illness later.
afaiu, in theory, immunity acquired through infection can be stronger than the one from vaccination. E.g. vaccination might prime your body for just one protein, whereas an infection would prime for several.
But it's not universally true, varies for different viruses, and also isn't fully understood whether it's the case for covid. So far seems like a safer and less miserable opinion to get vaccinated rather than get sick with covid.
Vaccines do exactly that, without the discomfort of getting sick. That's the whole damn point of a vaccine: to stimulate the immune system. That's how they work. I just can't understand how people fail to grasp this simple fact.
Sure, for diseases we know and are actively fighting (how long was it before we got vaccines for COVID?). My point was that for unknown diseases you might be exposed to in the future you are probably (I say probably, because hey let's not kid ourselves we're all mostly speaking out of our a**s here :)) better off if you had been exposed to milder diseases beforehand.
The number of studies suggesting people exposed to other coronaviruses (common cold etc) having possibly more immunity to COVID disagree with you. You seem to be absolutely sure it makes no difference. Care to back that up?
Care to back up your claim with citations? Looking at the comment history its clear you don't understand immunology so i'm not sure you get a free pass on virology.
I freely and humbly admit I'm neither an immunologist nor a virologist. But I doubt neither are you nor the many commenters on here who have strongly held beliefs backed by nothing substantive.
This statement is incorrect. Being vaccinated does indeed help others. People who are vaccinated against the virus are enormously less likely to manifest dangerous symptoms and require hospital care, thereby reducing the overall demand for medical resources.
This is better said as "they are not produced fast enough". That will lead you directly to the solution, instead of losing time discussing the price.
It's a very similar thing, the price poor countries pay is not enough to justify investing in extra productive capacity. There is a confounding factor that new capacity takes a long time to arrive, but even when that is taken into account, there are just not enough vaccines and there won't be on the near future.
Do the vaccines have a significant enough impact on transmissibility for that to be true? My understanding is that, while they significantly improve instances of serious illness and death, the effect on transmission is limited (or at least not high enough for “eradication” to be on the cards).
All for greater support of less developed countries in terms of vaccine supplies, but not sure this is the argument for it.
The most recent study that I’ve seen showed a 71% reduction in infection rates for unvaccinated people living with vaccinated people. That suggests a pretty strong transmissibility effect.
a) eradication to be a possibility (intuitively, it would seem not); or, failing that
b) to lower the possibility of novel mutations emerging to a negligible level (I don’t have the knowledge to answer, so this is a genuine question, but again intuition would suggest not)
There is no way to eradicate covid everywhere, simultaneously or otherwise. It's now widely accepted that the virus continues to circulate even in vaccinated people.
Besides, you are not even going to vaccinate 100% of any western country, let alone all of them or the entire world.
Milder mutation are what is actually going to make the virus endemic, like it happened to the Spanish flu. Reports from the South African government seem to suggest that this variant is mild, although it's early to say.
This is a misconception: it is not known that the virus will become less deadly over time; in fact, there is good reason to believe that it may become more deadly because virulence is positively associated with tramissibility.
the flu is contagious once it has symptoms, which mean severe symptoms lead people to self-isolate naturally before it spreads, thus it survives better if its symptoms are less severe.
covid has no such issue as it spreads well before it has any severity and for a few days before any symptoms. all the deadly stuff happens a week later once you've been transmitting for many days.
the above link explains this well
> So, unless SARS-CoV-2 becomes so virulent that it causes people to become severely ill and self-isolate before they transmit the virus to other people, there is no pressure on it to become less deadly.
There do exist viruses that have been virtually eradicated with vaccines, even if they weren't 100% effective (cf Polio). We probably won't eradicate Corona with the first gen vaccines, but that isn't the point anyway. The point ist that we should reduce it enough so that mutations are less likely.
Polio was a different kind of virus, though, with a different kind of vaccine. We never got a vaccine for other coronaviruses either, it's unlikely that we will get it for this.
None of Geerts papers are peer reviewed or based on scientific research/data.
Stress doesn't cause mutations. Mutations happen because of genetics and whatever mutations increase their suvival end up being the mutations prevelent in society.
What viruses need though are willing hosts who aren't vaccinated who carry the virus, allow it to thrive and mutate and more importantly - those who spread it.
Blaming vaccinations is like blaming immune systems when the real issue is people who carry the disease and allow it to continue to spread.
Go read all those papers, none of them support the claims that the vaccination accelerates or causes mutation.
It's unfortunate scientists love to stake a claim on trying to win a huge argument when they can't see the forrest from the trees and they exclude as much evidence as they cherry pick.
We've defeated things before with immunization. No one ran around saying get the whooping caugh because if you get a shot it will mutate...
The main known facilitators for those virus mutations are on one hand the number of contaminations (particularly cross-species but not only), and on the other when the infection lingers in one individual due to a compromised immune system. Considering how at its worst the vaccine reduces the length of the infection, it's entirely implausible that it would also increase the likelihood of mutations. Not impossible, but very implausible. Is there a precedent for this kind of things?
> The only way you’ll stop this thing from mutating into a variant not covered by the vaccine is by eradicating it everywhere, simultaneously.
When I hear words like everything, everyone, everywhere to describe any system I get disheartened failure is almost assured. I wouldn't design software like that for example. Whether they are engineering systems, social systems, or in this case viruses. Relying on every part to comply is the opposite of redundancy. The probability of getting everyone to comply in a group as large as this planet all at once, at the same time without lags (e.g. vaccine rollouts), etc is sadly IMO extremely small.
We probably need new approaches, some which may challenge the current status quo. I remember watching a video early in COVID where isolating populations into smaller groups allows quick treatment of each group and the ability to contain the spread (i.e. limiting the R factor). As long as highly available world air travel is around, reducing redundancy and increasing the interconnectness of our populations into a single system the virus will have an advantage IMO.
I agree with this—not only do we have the usual moral imperative to help others, but it’s actually in our primary interest. The US has actually done exceedingly well here, having delivered more donations than all other countries combined (not sure if this is still the case; I haven’t checked in a couple of months). But there’s still more work to do and other rich countries need to get on board quickly.
Apropos of nothing, I was just listening to NPR and they had someone on to talk about how we don’t donate vaccines to third world countries because they are predominantly non-white and how this is “vaccine apartheid” rather than the more likely “rich countries provide for their own citizens before providing for others” sort of thing. Is there any legitimacy to this, or is it just racemongering?
Biden mentioned that the US has donated more than all other countries combined in his statement two days ago. I would hope his statement was well fact checked.
Most third world countries don't have the infrastructure to reliably deliver refrigerated vaccines at scale. And they've got to deliver two doses, months apart.
Its very "on brand" as the kids say now on twitter for NPR to platform a race-baiter though. The west, a product of mostly european people, came up with the vaccine but blah blah blah racism. Come up with your own vaccine then NPR race bait lady.
Nonsense. Africa is miles ahead of many countries because they have been frought with epidemics. The South African variant is only called south African because they have the technology to do genomics on the strain to identify that it has mutated and there is a new mutation running around.
Having had epidemics previously or having advanced genomic capability doesn’t imply a robust logistics network for the world’s first RNA vaccines which require particularly cold refrigeration.
Doesn't imply they don't already have the tech or couldn't implement the tech for cold distribution (which has been greatly improved from where it started even in the US)
> Doesn't imply they don't already have the tech or couldn't implement the tech for cold distribution
I think you've forgotten that you're the one arguing that Africa's experience with contagion means they're ahead on the logistical hurdles for distributing this particular vaccine. :) You have yet to explain how that experience is relevant for tackling these cold distribution challenges, especially in light of the countries' extreme levels of poverty and corruption.
I understand the impulse to cheer for third world countries, but we can be realistic about their challenges while also opposing poverty and prejudice.
OK, free at the point of need, but it still needs to be paid for; do you have a suggestion. If countries take the vaccine supplies and then sell them on, what do we do then -- install a new government so we can get vaccines distributed? What if people won't take the vaccine that came from USA/China/Russia/local state they don't trust, do we somehow force them?
I'm for your proposal in the general aspect of it, but how do we take it forward as an actual plan?
I still don't think we'll eradicate it, but perhaps with lower levels of community transmission we'll reduce the flare ups of problematic variants?
I assumed we wouldn't be able to supply 100% of the globe at the same instant, maybe we'd distribute ~20% in a first wave (to the most vulnerable people). That means that those who are rich[er] but don't meet the criteria are going to be in a position to want to buy.
If the country/county/area/suburb next door is poor, and a locality has lots of cases then I'm guessing anyone who can afford it has an incentive to acquire a dose of vaccine early, or a booster dose, by buying out someone in that neighbouring locality.
You need strong local government without corruption to distribute vaccines fairly.
> When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’ll never get out of this.
This isn't quite true. All epidemics come to an end eventually, vaccines or no vaccines. There were no vaccines to end the 1918 flu epidemic, but that one too died out just like all the ones before it in a few years' time. At a far greater cost to human life, of course, but we "got out" of it.
The 1918 flu epidemic arguably still persists to this day:
> What’s even more remarkable about the 1918 flu, say infectious disease experts, is that it never really went away. After infecting an estimated 500 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919 (a third of the global population), the H1N1 strain that caused the Spanish flu receded into the background and stuck around as the regular seasonal flu.
> But every so often, direct descendants of the 1918 flu combined with bird flu or swine flu to create powerful new pandemic strains, which is exactly what happened in 1957, 1968 and 2009. Those later flu outbreaks, all created in part by the 1918 virus, claimed millions of additional lives, earning the 1918 flu the odious title of “the mother of all pandemics.”
> The impact of this pandemic was not limited to 1918–1919. All influenza A pandemics since that time, and indeed almost all cases of influenza A worldwide (excepting human infections from avian viruses such as H5N1 and H7N7), have been caused by descendants of the 1918 virus, including "drifted" H1N1 viruses and reassorted H2N2 and H3N2 viruses. The latter are composed of key genes from the 1918 virus, updated by subsequently incorporated avian influenza genes that code for novel surface proteins, making the 1918 virus indeed the "mother" of all pandemics.
Totally agree, and it's the macro version of what I realised after having a discussion with a co-worker who's begrudgingly getting the vaccine, but is against being 'forced' to do it.
I understand the negative reaction to any authority figure forcing something, and I react negatively, to the point of using technical workarounds, to Australia's metadata retention rules and other privacy-related political BS.
Living in a functioning society requires the sacrifice of some freedoms for the benefits that a society provides. People that can get the vaccine have a certain responsibility to get vaccinated on behalf of those members of that society that cannot get vaccinated for valid health reasons, or even for the sake of children currently below the vaccination age range. The vaccinated are forming a shield around the more vulnerable members of their society.
Freedom of personal choice versus 'doing your bit' to protect the weak, elderly, and vulnerable. And most of us have family and friends and co-workers and acquaintances that will fall into this vulnerable category that we'd probably rather they stay alive for a little longer.
I just don't hear it presented this way very much. There's a lot of publicity around the actions of the freedom flag-wavers without too much of the other side of that particular coin being explained.
Like the economics of uber-capitalism being an unhealthy extension of capitalism, this is an unhealthy uber-individualism outgrowth of individualism. It's far more prevalent than I thought it would be, probably because we've had it so good for so long - nearly 80 years since WWII ended.
Edited to add two explanatory things:
1. If COVID sticks around, or if there's a new "thing" in one, two, three, decades' time, we'll be getting into that 'vulnerable' category. When that happens, how will you feel about large groups of 'kids' (25 - 45 year olds) protesting getting vaccinated against a disease that may be very mild for them but fatal for you?
2. I personally know someone, of my age, with COVID-long. The symptoms are something like chronic fatigue syndrome. As a result they're essentially a non-productive member of society who used to be a productive member of society.
> 1. If COVID sticks around, ... we'll be getting into that 'vulnerable' category. When that happens, how will you feel about large groups of 'kids' ... protesting getting vaccinated against a disease that may be very mild for them but fatal for you?
1. I, personally, would not care about it in the slightest. If the current "response", dictating that I should fixate on this one thing, and, more importantly, strictly controlled and prosecuted if not fixated enough, holds any longer I simply won't be around in 10yrs. My "life score" is satisfying to me as it is, any day of life under lockdown, curfew, mask, vaccine mandates only subtracts from it. So I'm looking to "cut my losses" soon, so to speak.
2. It may also mean that "we" failed to give these "kids" proper upbringing. I, certainly, did fail. When the panic started our son, 16 at the time, one day wanted to casually go to the shops to buy some junk. Suggestion that maybe it is better to minimise the cumulative number of shop visits because of this new unknown virus out there, and get your chips and coke once a week in bulk rather than on whim, was met with "I don't care, I need my fix". Did we get emotional after that. Sure we did. Did we berate or disown him, or even forced him to not go? Not at all. Love is not conditional on absence of inconsiderate behavior. As it stands, my chance of dying within a year at my age is around 1/300. Covid, if caught, about doubles it. No point in losing respect to those respected before over such numbers. We will all die anyway.
3. Our kids were always accurately immunised according to the recommended schedule. Did it ever come to mind that "freeloaders" must be forced to do so by mandates? Quite the opposite, my thinking was always - isn't it a wonderful side-effect of vaccination that people can act according to their conscience. These childhood vaccines are so good now that everyone refusing them must have very good (for them) reasons to do so. I have absolutely no interest in knowing the reasons of their choice, but I was always very pleased that we were able to contribute to their ability to make such choice. (Although my expectation to be afforded the right to define my own "validity", "eligibility", "vulnerability" and "essential" status turned out to be naive. But that's on the society conscience, not mine). No medical procedure, however beneficial on a population level, must be forced upon people. I'm fine with myself dying for this principle. Maybe not quite so for my loving ones, but there is no escape from the fact that everyone is mortal. I'll hold the fort for my kids until they are 14, but after that I cannot do much more - they will have to settle their own scores and live with their conscience. It is far better to live a short but free life than a looong but thoroughly mandated and controlled.
> I'm looking to "cut my losses" soon, so to speak
I don't know what to say to this, other than reconsider what other options there are that may allow for further opportunities to feel privileged to be alive; big things, small things, simple things, complex things.
> It may also mean that "we" failed to give these "kids" proper upbringing. I, certainly, did fail
Sounds like you're being too hard on yourself. There are uncountable facets to upbringing, and "proper" is indefinable. I'm happy with how my kids are turning out, but I'm yet to see what the 'jungle of the real world' will bring out of them once they've launched into it on their own. Like that Chinese proverb, "we'll see".[0]
> It is far better to live a short but free life than a looong but thoroughly mandated and controlled.
I'll just say that things are more nuanced than that; those are the two extremes within which a whole spectrum exists.
I don't want to stamp my opinions, borne from my personal life experience, upon your opinions formed from a life experience I am entirely unfamiliar with. Good luck with whatever you choose is the right thing for you and your loved ones.
Thank you very much for saying this. It was refreshing and surprising to see. Upvoted.
I agree with lot, especially with this: "things are more nuanced than that". I also understand the need for somewhat restrictive response to health crisis. Unfortunately, the nuance appears to be lost on many "in the power", who seem to be pushing the most restrictive approach just for the sake of being restrictive. They completely ignore the fact that many employed measures concern some people on a much, much different level than, say, some new taxes or road rules would. The division of society that they create now goes much deeper than disagreement on almost any other political issue, and they either incompetent enough to not give it a thought, or just plain evil to be doing it deliberately. I don't see any other explanation. I understand that in politics moderate position is almost impossible to hold, but no one is even pretending.
They all seem to be in a race to impose a mountain of most conspicious, symbolic and hostile measures on top of a handful that make sense, and then pretend that people are rejecting the good part. No, people are just unable and unwilling to fish for an ounce of gold in the barrel of fertilizer that is pushed upon us. No one is willing to acknowledge and discuss the nuance, hence people are forced to assume a radical position and find themselves in a company which they, in the normal times, would avoid.
In short, I don't expect for it all to end well and end soon. The regimes based on premise that 100% of participants are marching in lockstep, even involuntary so, always end in blood, in my opinion. And, as I said, the issues with worldwide "response" to "pandemic" go so very deep, at primal level, so the explosion of violence is inevitable. At the moment I don't see what can compel someone to hang around to witness the destruction.
Another possibility is a super contagious variant that is much less deadly. Then it replaces its competitor. Perhaps become endemic like the common cold.
Although this would be a good outcome, my understanding is that the inherent mutation rate of the virus makes settling on a single variant or family of non-deadly variants unlikely. Even if a variant became endemic with a death rate of 0.05% for example, unless this mutation is at a near global optima in terms of transmissibility, I imagine it would be a precarious situation.
IIRC my biology lessons in high school, viruses mutate in order to escape from vaccines. Just like mosquitoes mutate and adapted to DDT, we created new chemicals and then mosquitoes adapted to them, under evolutionary pressure.
So vaccinated populations are creating the pressure on the virus to mutate. And un-vaccinated population may get effected (irrespective of which version of virus they encounter at the time)..
Viruses don't mutate to escape anything, evolution doesn't work that way. Viruses have short generation times and they replicate extraordinarily fast compared to what humans see in their lifetimes. Their fast replication allows the virus to experience mutations at a massive scale and mutations that increase its survival become dominent over time.
Those mutations absolutely require an unvaccinated population to thrive but more importantly, a population with a laissez fair attitude that allows the mutation to spread to other humans. If you do everything in your power to cut down the transmission and vaccinate yourself, we could have defeated this thing.
Sorry, a vaccine that still allows infection at a significant rate will continue to foster evolution. It may slow the process, but not change the result. There’s just no way the current vaccines stop this.
Disagree. Not only will what you suggest not happen, ever, because it's logistically impossible but the idea that it's the unvaccinated causing vaccine evading variants is ass backwards.
I'm living in a third-world country (Kazakhstan). Plenty of people here are against any vaccination. Plenty of people are vaccinated, but strongly against any re-vactination. I don't know why that happens, why west was able to vaccinate majority of people. Vaccine is not an issue here, it's free, you just spend a hour and get vaccinated in a nearby hospital. Government is trying to push vaccination through their throats, but it is met with extreme resistance (and some dirty politicians are even building their agenda on anti-vaccination).
I guess, we don't have good enough brain washing media compared to a civilized world. And when people are using their own heads, without trusting government, it sometimes results in a wrong common knowledge.
Very true; and even if Omicron turns out to be less dangerous than previous variants, it's a case of when, not if, a deadlier variant will emerge from a poorly-vaccinated population.
The current vaccines don't prevent infection, reinfection, or transmission -- which eliminates much of the selective pressure for lower mortality. We could end up with a situation where everyone alive on earth is vaccinated, carries the virus, receives regular boosters, and anyone who isn't or who misses a few boosters, faces certain death. Similar to Marek’s disease in chickens.
I'm not sure, but I think the problem is that nobody cares enough about chicken to develop a better vaccine. How much would it cost? Can someone here pay for it so we can remove that scary story in Wikipedia?
> Under normal conditions, highly virulent strains of the virus are not selected. A highly virulent strain would kill the host before the virus would have an opportunity to transmit to other potential hosts and replicate. Thus, less virulent strains are selected. These strains are virulent enough to induce symptoms but not enough to kill the host, allowing further transmission. However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains.[13] The vaccine's inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens. The fitness of the more virulent strains is increased by the vaccine.
Following the references, it all seems solid; the referenced authors note this hasn't been observed for human viruses yet (2017), but posits non-sterilizing vaccines in humans might be too new.
On the other hand, it seems like a kind of inverse prisoners' dilemma.
If no one vaccinates, this particular pathway for the evolution of super-viruses is closed (although others remain open). If some people vaccinate, and a super-virus evolves, they're fine and the rest are screwed, classic P.D.
But it deviates where unlike the classic P.D. where things get worse if everyone defects, once everyone vaccinates, it doesn't matter if a super-virus evolves, because everyone is protected.
So while this raises an interesting policy question on whether non-sterilizing vaccines are worth the risk, once people begin "defecting" by getting vaccinated, it seems like a bad move to risk staying unvaccinated yourself.
This is not true. COVID-19 is unusual because symptoms don’t tend to develop until the second week of the infection, by which time most of the active virus has been neutralized by the body’s immune response.
Unlike most viruses, COVID-19 does not have the same selective pressure to become less deadly.
> History shows that as a Virus mutates and evolves they tend towards more transmissibility but lower morality rate.
This isn't guaranteed, there are plenty of viruses that are still cause severe illness despite being around for quite some time. It's entirely possible that the virus mutates to be more lethal[1], as well.
And if mortality does decrease, it could take many human lifetimes before such an equilibrium is reached. In the meantime, the virus can mutate, wreak havoc and kill a lot of people.
It's also important to point out that virus evolution depends on selection pressures, and one of the selection pressures for decreased viral lethality is a severe reduction of host organisms that the virus can replicate in. That is to say that the selection pressure that causes a virus to be less lethal can very well be the eradication of large populations of host organisms.
I don’t think this helps much. We know that mortality rate has not been incredibly high even for the original variant, but it managed to overwhelm the medical facilities of nations regardless. Unless the mortality rate drops dramatically, down to what’s observed with eg the flu, it’s still concerning.
Covid is actively being stopped from evolving however because of vaccines and because, you know, we don't just let infected people die. Deaths are usually in people with preexisting conditions. In this context , why will the virus evolve a milder version? It seems strict isolation of the infected might help
I don't really care much for the finger pointing, but for sake of setting the record straight .. aren't most of the omicron mutations in the spike protein? ie it evolved to evade vaccine based immunity
Does this vaccine eradicate the virus? I’m vaccinated and boosted btw. I don’t think vaccines are going to make the virus go away. People vaccinated still carry load and spread it.
There aren’t enough administered vaccines. Many areas have vaccine doses but lack infrastructure to deliver them or just simply have ineffective government.
would this be enough? isn't SARS-COV2, being a zoonotic virus forming strains and evolving in the massive available reservoir of animals? afaik MERS also spreads from contact to camels, H5N1 in birds etc. Is controlling mutations actually possible in a way that goes beyond merely managing the (inevitable) fallout?
They teach the immune system how to fight the virus, reducing duration and quantity of infection, which reduces opportunities for the virus to replicate and potentially mutate.
A non-sterilizing vaccine only increases the evolutionary pressure on the virus to evolve to be vaccine-resistant. Such a vaccine more or less becomes like taking a half-course of antibiotics.
Hmm, is that really so? As far as I understand, for bacteria a more significant factor is horizontal gene exchange (because their genome mutation rate is much lower, presumably because they are more complicated than viruses).
Viruses can't do gene exchange, so the only factor for developing resistance is the total number of viral particles produced, so even if it's a weak vaccine or half dose of antiviral drug, it would be helpful
If I was African I'd argue against vaccination. People in Africa are less obese and younger than folks from the developed regions. So, Covid won't cause much problems there to begin with. And vaccination just handicaps the pandemy turning endemic.
The omicron variant could be a blessing in disguise if the early stories on how it is less deadly checks out. That means people refuse to get the vaccine shot will be infected with the omicron variant with relatively low consequence and get immunity that way.
Btw this is how it suppose to work. The virus has no incentive to kill its host. The variant that is fast spreading and less deadly eventually wins out.
> The omicron variant could be a blessing in disguise
Not really. There is a very low evolutionary pressure to become less deadly.* You start infecting people in day 3, have symptoms on day 8 and die on day 20. You can walk around for a week infecting people before you die. Compare it to previous SARS epidemic, where people started infecting others much later. It just died out, because people were isolated at homes and hospitals.
*SARS-COV-2 is an upper respiratory track disease and SARS-COV-1 is a lower respiratory track disease.
this makes me think that there’s got to be at least some people in power who believe that engineering and releasing a more transmissible but less deadly variant is a prudent way to respond to this pandemic. i wonder how many people are working on this right now.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Given all the google hits for "transmissible viral vaccines", people have surely thought about it. I'd honestly be more surprised if people in power hadn't at least tried to look into the feasibility
This post is a case-study in the self-awareness of conspiracy theorists.
Parent post posits a conspiracy theory, in the literal sense, without any evidence.
In fact, it's worse than that. The parent didn't even claim their theory is true! They just sort of throw it out there as a random-ass thought/hypothetical. They didn't say "X is happening and I have proof". Fuck, they didn't even say "X is happening"! They said "Consider the following conspiracy in which X is happening".
But, for some reason, you not only (a) latch onto this theory as if it were plausible without a shred of evidence, but then also (b) slander a large group of people on the basis of... what? One internet user's random-ass thought that sounds kinda-sorta right to you because it tickles the right neurons even though the original claimant not only doesn't provide evidence but doesn't even actually assert that their conspiracy theory is anything other than a random thought!
Your post is close to something like "People who believe in bat-shit-insane conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence tend to distrust the people who those conspiracy theories tell them not to trust".
Which... yeah, no shit. This is why people believe conspiracy theories. Because they are prone to believe bat-shit insane things about people they don't like, regardless of whether there's any rational or empirical justification for that belief. And, not only that, but they are prone to circular reasoning to justify these beliefs. You hit the nail on the head.
a hypothetical occurrence to which there are adjacent real-world occurences. gain-of-function research being perhaps the most damning. if i was doing gain of function experiments, i would at least consider engineering a variant that squeezes out the more deadly ones.
it's not really that dissimilar a line of thinking to the people who want to use CRISPR to release genetically modified mosquitos with dominant traits that lead to eradication of the species as their new genes take over.
> A hypothetical situation is why people don’t trust experts?
it's the real-world occurrences which lead a person's theory of mind to believe that similar experts might feasibly pursue certain hypothetical occurrences. without the hypotheticals, it's mostly individuals who lose their credibility after doing specific things in the real world. but the hypotheticals allow that loss of credibility to spread from individual bad actors to whole groups.
Healthy people will generally continue being fine. However, people who are at high risk have a new reason to be concerned. I'm not sure what you mean by 'how it's suppose to work'.
-1, viruses are not sentient and are only given pressure to not kill their hosts if that reduces transmissability... which specifically doesn't apply for COVID, which is asymptomatically transmissable.
If you're dead you can't continue to transmit the virus, so lethality absolutely does decrease transmissibility. The fact that some people can be asymptomatic and contagious doesn't change that.
also if it was more deadly, presumably that would lead to people taking it more seriously.
E.g. HIV is asymptomatic for a long time, but is ultimately deadly, so people use condoms because of that (of course there are other STDs as well, but I feel like HIV plays the biggest role in condom use).
If its effects were less serious, it would probably be far more widespread (e.g. like HPV).
With covid more deadlines would probably lead to people would using masks more often, taking rapid treats more often, etc.
Summary: PCR tests still work, certain therapies still work, and interestingly, they claim to already know that "Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death." while claiming to know basically nothing else (not even whether it is more transmissible).
I think the wording is kinda weird, and maybe it was a bit of encouraging people to still get vaccines? Since it's effective against Delta and other variants, it's still pretty important to get them. But it sounded unclear what impact would be at this point.
The whole snippet here:
> WHO is working with technical partners to understand the potential impact of this variant on our existing countermeasures, including vaccines. Vaccines remain critical to reducing severe disease and death, including against the dominant circulating virus, Delta. Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death.
> maybe it was a bit of encouraging people to still get vaccines
This is exactly what it feels like - and what we need is clear, honest statements of facts, not attempts to mislead for some higher goals.
Given the whole context (this is a post about Omicron) and the fact that they aren't qualifying some of the other statements either ("Corticosteroids and IL6 Receptor Blockers will still be effective for managing patients with severe COVID-19"), I am going to treat this statement as a claim about Omicron. I don't really care much whether they are explicitly trying to make a statement about Omicron, intentionally writing it in an ambiguous way to make people think it's about Omicron while being able to claim that that's not what they meant, or whether they're incompetent to communicate clearly - either way, if the statement turns out to not be supported, it's a further signal that everything coming from the WHO cannot be trusted.
I also thought the line about current vaccine protection against severe disease/death sounded a little more confident than the evidence seems to justify. I’m no expert in this field and would never pretend to be. But I would like to know what they base that confidence on when there’s so little data at this point.
We know from previous studies that T-cell immunity is much more resistant to mutation than antibodies. It's almost completely certain that vaccines will be effective against severe diseases and death.
Dr Angelique Coetzee, chairwoman of the South African Medical Association:
“It’s all speculation at this stage. It may be it’s highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild,” she said. “Maybe two weeks from now I will have a different opinion, but this is what we are seeing. So are we seriously worried? No. We are concerned and we watch what’s happening. But for now we’re saying, ‘OK: there’s a whole hype out there. [We’re] not sure why.’”
If it turns out that it is indeed extremely mild, does not cause deaths, and an infection with it confers immunity to covid in general, shouldn't it be allowed to run like wildfire?
Even if it really was like that, there are still good reasons for not allowing that - if there is still a chance it can kill people, there would still be considerable bodycount if it really is more transmissible and many people get infected at once (overloaded hospitals). Mild symphtoms also still don't say anything about possible long term damage that might only become aparent later. And lastly, infecting so many new hosts opens the possibility of creating a more deadly variants, just by pure chance, due to so much virus replication going on in the hosts.
> And lastly, infecting so many new hosts opens the possibility of creating a more deadly variants, just by pure chance, due to so much virus replication going on in the hosts.
In the very unlikely event it actually had a 0.00% death rate that would be the most likely response (because places would lift all their restrictions). The harder question is what to do if it is milder than delta, but still potentially deadly
Presumably you develop a vaccine that targets this variant and give it to the most vulnerable while those outside the risk group don’t need it. That’s how rabies vaccine works: most people don’t get it but those who work with animals may since they are at an increased risk.
in addition it can probably mutate back up in terms of severity? although I believe geneticists have some framework to estimate/predict likelihood of that
The problem with these studies is the mild symptom cases may never even be reported as cases, I know alot of people that had covid symptoms but never got tested, and would never get tested unless it got to the point where they needed medical care. So if you just had a "pretty bad" flu and sat at home you likely never got tested, and thus would never show up in these studies
Hell I know a couple people that were told by local medical center to not even bother with the test, they just assumed it was covid, was told to self isolate and monitor.
Both can be true - if you have a variant that is less deadly (but still deadly for some) and it is more transmissible then it will kill more people in absolute numbers. Also it can overwhelm hospitals, cuaing additional deaths and injuries (due to late treatment or treatment errors).
Delta is less deadly because more people have some immunity, either because of vaccination or because they have already been infected. Also it came late in the game, and many of the people who are the most at risk are already dead. Treatment has improved too.
So the virus itself isn't less deadly, it is just that we are better prepared.
the relative deadliness of delta... we'll just not ever really know. Though IIRC, some early surveillance with all the controls (only looking at unvaccinated, etc) suggested that it was LESS deadly for the elderly, more deadly for other age groups, net less deadly.
This is not necessarily the case for a virus with such a long period of asymptomatic transmission.
There is very little selective pressure for the virus to become less deadly; in fact, higher viron count is positively associated with both transmissibility and mortality.
Exactly. People overlook this fact constantly. There is no selection pressure for a virus like this to become more or less deadly. Just pressure to become more transmissible within our mixture of vaxxed, unvaxed, and some natural immunity.
I don't see how that negates my point. If the virus can mutate to have a longer transmissibility window, it implies that it will also be less deadly. The period when symptoms start is the period where your immune response is ramped up. Delaying or reducing the immune response implies longer transmission window and less severe illness.
Of course, if a virus killed you before you had a chance to pass it on then yes - but most viruses (including SARS-CoV-2) kill you slowly enough to have plenty of opportunity to propagate, there is no selection pressure to be less deadly.
To my knowledge, we have no evidence that any human virus has evolved to become less virulent (please furnish examples if I'm wrong!).
Unfortunately this common myth, that contagiousness is inversely correlated with lethality, has been used by those who would wish to downplay this public health disaster for whatever reason.
My understanding is that in fact we don't know. A likely explanation for its disappearance is that it ran out of susceptible hosts. Specifically, we have no evidence of a successor virus that was both less lethal, and induced immunity to the original.
I looked up Ebola to see if it has changed over time [0] and it looks like nada, since outbreaks are generally zoonotic, which means that the viral mutation-selection happens outside humans. Of note is Ebola's relation to Marburg, which was imported to Europe with Uganda-sourced lab monkeys.
Two large outbreaks that occurred simultaneously in Marburg and Frankfurt in Germany, and in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1967, led to the initial recognition of the disease. The outbreak was associated with laboratory work using African green monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) imported from Uganda. Subsequently, outbreaks and sporadic cases have been reported in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, South Africa (in a person with recent travel history to Zimbabwe) and Uganda. In 2008, two independent cases were reported in travellers who had visited a cave inhabited by Rousettus bat colonies in Uganda. [1]
Replication-incompetent adenoviral vectors? Lex Fridman had a virologist on his podcast talking about the mutations done to the adenovirus to make it safe for the delivery of the s-protein (used in viral vector J&J + AstraZ vax). Maybe I misunderstood that?
For people, the difference between 2% and 0.2% mortality is huge, but for the virus (and the evolutionary pressures on it), the difference between 98% and 99.8% chance of continuing to spread is insignificant; any minor changes in the rate of spread far outweigh that. The evolutionary pressure towards survival of the host matter only for diseases with very high lethality.
Being more severe and deadly is not necessarily a propagation disadvantage.
Because if you sick you stay at home and don't go out. If you are very sick, you need to go to the doctor, or the hospital. This can create more spread.
wow, suddenly I feel like the film "Venom" was trying to teach me this, it's no good for the virus if it keeps killing its hosts, really its mutating itself while searching for a host that can coexist with it (as I understand it, much of our DNA is incorporated from viruses, but I don't understand it very well :)
It already coexisted with a host: bats. If we're going to anthropromorphize the virus, maybe it's searching for a way to kill off one of the biggest predators of its preferred host.
Let's go for endemy and be done with it. This vaccination chaos isn't more than trying to scoop water with a sieve. I'm 100% sure this is going to be one of the conclusions in 10 years. We are vainly shooting on a moving target with a musket from 100 meters. It's good effort and very lucrative but it won't work. Some people will die and some won't.
It is not going to stop... new variants, booster shots, masks, lock downs, tests for everyone everyday. Get over it. It's like airport security, once setup, the system is not going away and soon nobody will remember how life used to look like before all of it happened.
It actually differs from airport security in one crucial way: vaccination actually works, and it will continue to work. Airport security measures, at least the ones commonly discussed, the ones that spring up after 9/11, have zero effect these days, since the threats they were supposedly intended to combat were solved the moment cockpit doors were required to remain locked at all times.
Vaccines work, boosters work, masks work, lockdowns work, and testing works. And the combination of these measures works. They operate in tandem. I am not advocating keeping all of these measures forever—merely noting that they are not, in fact, really that comparable to airport security.
Well they do have some effects. For example, I won't even think about flying, except if it is necessary because of my work.
Same as covid measures. I won't even think about participating in activities requiring me to have a green pass, except if it is necessary because of my work.
Tandem is operating just fine. The thing is that it is going to operate forever now and it is not going to be pretty.
Before you flame me - I don't think they are to be used constantly, or all at the same time. They are all valuable tools to reducing the pain, suffering, and lost productivity of respiratory illnesses. I'd like to see universal masking in schools during flu season, for example. Limited group of people, limited time, but would happen every year. Maybe there's a trigger for a "bad" flu season.
It's insane to say we should not use things that work because they might be useful in the future. We just need to be smart about how we use all these interventions, WHICH WE ABSOLUTELY ARE.
Making children wear masks and vaccinating them against the virus that mostly doesn't affect them seems like a sacrifice on the altar of "hours lost". I'm not from the USA, and I am not following USA's political scene, so I can't answer your second question.
The WHO has lost all credibility in my eyes. I’d bet all of my money on the South African health system, which has not only dealt with HIV/AIDS but many tropical diseases. They literally have the best ID departments in the world.
WHO lost all credibility since ~Jan 2020(If i recall correctly between 1 through 15) when they stated on couple occasions that Covid was a mere "nothingburger", when in fact western journalists have been expressing concerns since late November through December.I understand most people don't consume rolling news or independent reporting, but it is still not an argument. You can't seriously expect WHO to not have the information independent journalists or 'simple plebs' do.
When the genie was out of the bottle(as in containing the virus in China was not possible), they switched gears and went with the opposite narrative, even though not much was known about the severity of the virus besides it spreading very quickly and easily.This is not the scientific method, because if it was you wouldn't firstly claim it was nothing and then suddenly say it was so bad you need to half-ass shut down civilization.A scientific-method approach would have been: "we don't know" until "we do" , not to mention denying the claim it was a lab-leak (which is now the most probable thing).
As they say in politics & propaganda: "never let a good crisis go to waste".WHO and national institutions that were responsible for measures and actions governments should take are fully responsible, but nothing will happen.The fact people still debate about the origin of the virus should be indicative that facts don't matter, but twitter blue checkmarks and fact-checking labels on mainstream platforms do.
It has the potential to corrupt customer data, but the likelihood and severity of the corruption hasn’t been established yet (it could be anything from flipping ECC-correctable bits through to total system compromise).
The flaw is exploitable over the network, and affects potentially all CPUs. The only way to avoid any risk of compromise is to disconnect your servers from the network.
Millions of people depend on your servers. Some of them will die if their data is corrupted. Some of them will die if you disconnect your servers and cut them off from accessing their data.
It will take security researchers about a month to work out the likelihood and severity of corruption, and about 3 months to deliver a fix. By the time we find out, the corruption may already have affected your servers. The eventual fix isn’t guaranteed to be reliable, nor can it fix corruption that has already happened.
The CVE may already have been mitigated by a previous microcode update for a similar previous issue. The security researchers are working on determining that too.
Hmmm this goes against what the RKI is saying. Omicron is indeed very infectious, as the data has certainly shown so far.
This appears to be an individual in the thought camp of "we don't know if it's a big deal so let's not treat it like one". I disagree, personally - we did that the first time and it made things worse. Why risk it?
> Omicron is indeed very infectious, as the data has certainly shown so far.
What data are you referring to? The WHO[1] and most experts I've seen say we don't have enough information to know that yet
> we don't know if it's a big deal so let's not treat it like one
not sure how that is your interpretation. Their thread is mostly addressing those (such as yourself) who are speaking as if they already know how transmissible/deadly/vaccine evasive it is.
She's a well-known commentator on the pandemic. She is/was involved in the development of the Moderna vaccine, verified by various media orgs.
She's a credible commentator, but she tends to skew towards the positive end of the arguments. That thread is 3 days old, and there's a bit more evidence now that Omicron is spreading quite effectively.
Something about this just doesn't sit well with me. I find an individual's anonymity troubling when one speaks in an authoritative manner about healthcare policy for two reasons.
Firstly, it's concerning that I have to take someone's word on their authority. I'd much rather see their Google scholar to gauge the extent to which they are engaged in current research. Indeed, two researchers in the same subfield of quantum computing could easily work in different areas, say adiabatic- vs gate-based quantum computing.
Secondly, I'd like to think that the reason we often interview CDC officials is since they're experienced in healthcare public policy. Especially with respect to the Twitter thread's commentary about whether we'll be "back to square one," science isn't the sole basis for policy.
While I do appreciate the Twitter user's engagement with a lay audience, I hope the latter consult other sources as well. That's, however, not to undermine their endeavors: I think the Twitter user has done splendid work in encouraging readers to think critically and curiously.
The Greek letter pronounced more like Kai. But, yes, the anglicized written form of the Greek letter looks like the anglicized written form of the Chinese leader’s name. And I agree, I’m sure it was skipped in the interest of not being antagonistic.
>In a statement provided to the AP, the WHO said it skipped nu for clarity and xi to avoid causing offense generally.
>“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’ and ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name,” the WHO said, adding that the agency’s “best practices for naming disease suggest avoiding ‘causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.’”
>Those best practices were outlined in a May 2015 document issued by the agency. The organization said at the time that it wanted to “minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people” when naming infectious diseases.
Xi is most definitely not a common last name, I’ve yet to encounter a single person with that surname in China besides Xi Jinping. Mu (穆) on the other hand is far more common and yet it wasn’t skipped.
it's not a conspiracy, but it is lamesauce that the WHO said "it's a common surname" when Mu is a more common surname than Xi. They should have just said "it's the surname of a world leader" for honesty and transparency. Instead, they just discredited themselves.
seriously. i get that it’s different organizations doing the naming here, but if the average person actually cared about name conflicts, we wouldn’t still be naming hurricanes after common first names.
it’s 100% because of a single, notable person being impacted. maybe more conscientious naming IS a thing we should be doing, but we should make that change because of an organic desire for it — not because of a single prominent figure being offended.
The media and government can't be trusted with germ theory. The whole idea that we have control over the virus and that our actions are tantamount to killing people with it or not is ludicrous. The virus is going to spread, and its going to kill people. People aren't killing each other. We will all catch covid. The "treatment" has been so much worse than the disease. 5 million died due to covid, but hundreds of millions will die due to the global economy tanking. People acted like we were "sacrificing" lives to the economy, but in reality we were sacrificing children's childhoods for extending the lives of septuagenarians.
The existence of and overall success of China's zero covid strategy says you're wrong, human actions can contain it.
If your reply is China's data can not be trusted, then Australia or NZ. But same conclusion, we can and should mitigate the virus.
Also, the economy is doing fine. Some places better than other, but we're much better off now than in 2009, the last global recession. If this is a crisis, it's milder than the last, from an economic standpoint.
hundreds of millions of people will die from the... economy? what? no, i think you got this backwards. nobody is being choked by the invisible hand of the market.
> The coronavirus crisis will push more than a quarter of a billion people to the brink of starvation unless swift action is taken to provide food and humanitarian relief to the most at-risk regions, the UN and other experts have warned.
> About 265 million people around the world are forecast to be facing acute food insecurity by the end of this year, a doubling of the 130 million estimated to suffer severe food shortages last year.
This study [1] finds some interesting long-term effects coinciding with cognitive impairment and might be a good starting point for screening the current state of influenza research (via references to/from this one).
Severe cases of the flu can certainly cause chronic issues, as can severe cases of COVID.
I am not aware of any compelling evidence that minor cases of COVID cause severe long-term symptoms at any substantial frequency. Assuming vaccine efficacy remains at a level where severe COVID cases are extremely rare amongst vaccinated individuals, I see no reason to worry.
The common cold is an infection of the upper respiratory tract which can be caused by many different viruses. The most commonly implicated is a rhinovirus (30–80%), a type of picornavirus with 99 known serotypes. Other commonly implicated viruses include human coronaviruses (≈ 15%), influenza viruses (10–15%), adenoviruses (5%), human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), enteroviruses other than rhinoviruses, human parainfluenza viruses, and human metapneumovirus.[36] Frequently more than one virus is present. In total, more than 200 viral types are associated with colds.
Samuel Johnson's first dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, gave the definition of swan as “The ſwan is a large waterfowl, that has a long and very ſtranght neck, and is very white, excepting when
it is young [...]”,
Following your logic, I have just proven that black swans do not exist.
Wiki shows what we mean for coronavirus now, at the moment we are having this discussion. That the world had maybe a different connotations 40 years ago is not relevant at all.
I guess HPIV, Hendra virus, and Nipah virus don't exist because they're not listed under paramyxovirus.
There's a bunch of other stuff that's wrong (for starters, the locations of rubella, dengue, yellow fever) or missing (papillomavirus can cause cancer and not just warts).
If you actually think that your video means anything, you're too unwise to realize how unintelligent this sounds. A coronavirus is a type of virus, as an educated person and barely-sentient animal that can read a Wikipedia article both know. Did the "common cold" kill people like this in the "80s"? No? Then go home, Mr Crowder, and stop spreading misinformation. You don't understand what's going on.
But if you're willing to respond, and in case any other readers still believe you, what's a "rhinovirus" and why does the internet suggest that that is the "common cold"?
I am so tired of this bullshit, it's so damn tiring. Everything feels, just so very useless, its just sad to see how much this thing has effected everyone, everyone I love, every stranger I see, we are all getting pushed to the limits, people are depressed some people are suffering in silence while governments and organizations like the WHO are not telling us exactly what's going on, they change the narrative everyday, apparently its a lab leak, apparently its not, sometimes its bats that caused this, sometimes its some poor nobody at a wet market who caused all this, you listen to ten experts and you hear 20 different stories.
I don't know what to believe in anymore, no matter how much I follow the rules, wear masks, take care to social distance myself from others this things doesn't seem to go away.
The media says its the fault of the people who are not social distancing, they are saying the vaccine will work, just two shots they said, then it became 3, and now apparently we might need to keep taking this vaccine longer. Oh no what? there's another version and the vaccine I took are no longer useful?
Apparently the people concerned about governments using this opportunity to grab more power to keep us all in order are crazy antivaxers, the moment you step out of line you become a "non believer" in science, the moment someone questions science they become an idiot a hillbilly a tinfoil wearing lunatic. Apparently we should all fall in line and listen or else we are the problem.
Reasonable people I knew in my life are now getting more and more agitated, many people are angry, many people are lost and suffering in silence. The rich are getting richer, the powerful are getting away even after they were caught abusing children just because their mother is a powerful person.
Thank you. There are so many whiners on this site who act like following the recommended precautions is worse than dying. Sometimes it seems like entitlement is the pandemic.
> I am so tired of this bullshit, it's so damn tiring. Everything feels, just so very useless, its just sad to see how much this thing has effected everyone…
I agree. Regardless of your beliefs about the pandemic and how it’s been handled, everyone is sick of this shit.
> governments and organizations like the WHO are not telling us exactly what's going on, they change the narrative everyday, apparently its a lab leak
This is because they don’t know. Maybe the Chinese government knows the truth. And maybe they’re telling the truth. But no one else actually knows and so it’s all educated (at best) guesswork and the media prints anything sensational for clicks.
> Apparently the people concerned about governments using this opportunity to grab more power to keep us all in order are crazy antivaxers, the moment you step out of line you become a "non believer" in science
I remain unclear what exact power governments are getting from this. They’re spending hundreds of billions on vaccines and tests. What are they actually gaining?
My impression is that governments are for the most part doing the best they can against a disease we don’t have good tools to fight. The best bet was social distancing until everyone could get vaccinated. Then it turned out that 1) tons of people are refusing the vaccines, and 2) no one ever really addressed the fact that the entire world needs the vaccine, not just wealthy nations.
This is why we are stuck in this shitty state of bouncing between open and locked down to the constant drumbeat of “please get vaccinated”. No one knows what else to do because the alternative of “fuck it” is also not a solution, at least not if you care about minimizing the death toll from this thing.
Understandable reaction. Although the underlying problem seems to be the uncertainty of not knowing for certain, and the confusing and contradictory information, and the question of culpability.
Fact is:
- It is quite clear how to protect oneself. Wear masks, get vaccinated, try to reduce contact, keep distance.
- Governments need to balance safety concerns with concerns for the economy and the health system. Not an easy tasks and it's different everywhere.
- The only context in which it is important where the virus came from is science, and perhaps the development of better vaccines and preventing future pandemics. For the individual it is irrelevant.
- The question whose "fault" it is is totally useless. The virus is here and we will all get it. The only question is how we get through this.
There's a significant contingent of people who think if we all just followed every precaution, all the time, forever, "we" could stop the virus, and it would die out. Coronaviruses don't behave like that. At some point, everyone on Earth will be exposed to this virus, and masked or not, vaccinated or not, each person will have to deal with how it affects them. Some people are hardly bothered. Some die. Some wind up in the ER 3 times, and have lingering problems (like me). I get that masks can help slow transmission, but can we stop pretending that if we all "just did" whatever "the authorities" tell us to do that we would magically escape from this plague? The data from various countries concerning protocols and amount of people following them just doesn't seem to support such thinking. Such data seems to be suggesting that it's much more about genetic makeup than anything else, and not masking and distancing and hand washing.
At what point does the new covid variants stop being SARS-CoV-2 and morph into something else?
To me it seems intellectually lazy to keep pretending we are still dealing with the same SARS-CoV-2 virus that emerged in 2019 given that covid is an old and relatively common family of vira that's traditionally been classified alongside rhinovirus as "The Common Cold"?
For those commenting that it's just common cold and about herd immunity, I think we should not miss out on overload on our medical system.
This is what happened in India, due to high number of cases (even if mild) the medical infrastructure completely crashed under the load and lead to far more deaths than just a flu could have caused.
Politicians have had time to start improving healthcare systems. Corporations that currently pay no taxes could help to fund this stuff. Billions of dollars of war industry purchases could have been slightly delayed. Billionaires could have chipped in a bit more, and we could have started ratcheting up capacities and capabilities of hospitals and healthcare systems. But no it seems that's all teetering on the brink of collapse for some astounding reason.
So it's become quite clear to me that we are not, in fact, "all in this together". The situation is that the ruling class are in it for themselves, and they are demanding everybody else lose their jobs and businesses and we comply and mask up and shut ourselves in, so that they all may carry on as usual and refuse to invest our own money in our healthcare systems.
Given what we know about this situation now, I think perhaps a better approach might be to instead not comply with these demands. Ridicule and hound and vote out anybody who insists that after two years of complying we have to continue to shut ourselves away because the healthcare systems they have not adequately invested in are still on the brink of collapse.
That's no problem people who are petrified and happy to be owned by others may continue locking themselves inside their homes. I'm not asking let alone demanding that everybody or anybody else do this, it's just a possible alternative I suggested.
The poster I replied to made some weird "argument" about owning ourselves not helping anything.
> > continue locking themselves inside their homes
Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified that you think everybody else must "wear masks and stay indoors if possible" in response to new covid variants as OP said. It's a great way to reduce contact and minimize your own risk.
> Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified
You don't see the contradiction in what you have written here? You're trying to belittle people taking precautions by saying that they're "petrified". You're using emotive language to try to force through a weak argument.
Obviously you can't stay indoors all of the time. People need to get food, fix their houses, and so on. People who are especially vulnerable to the virus are the ones who have to leave their homes the most for essential medical care.
I don't see the contradiction, no. Petrified isn't belittling it is quite a suitable word for people who are so scared of this that they demand everyone else in the country should shut themselves in, wear masks, stay indoors, etc. How is that belittling? Aren't they pretty much self-describing as incredibly fearful?
And food can and is delivered. Not everything can be but almost everything for most people.
"The ruling class has proven that they don't actually care about anyone else"—yes, that's a reasonable message to take away from the past year and a half...
"...So we should stop abiding by all the good medical advice and just party" how the hell do you come to that conclusion? The reasonable conclusion to come to from your first two paragraphs is something along the lines of "So we should protest the politicians who want to deny the science, boycott the companies that are actively making things worse, and push for real societal change that prioritizes human lives and well-being over corporate profits."
You're basically saying, "The very wealthy just want us all to shut up and die, but screw them! We should all get out there and die very loudly!"
The interventions promoted by the ruling class to "curb the pandemic" have resulted in 20 million people going into starvation in the poorest countries, restrictions and hardships only being placed on the poor in the richer countries, and no resolution in sight.
Meanwhile, half the population has taken it upon themselves to start dehumanizing the rest because of politics, and all the money in society is funneling upwards to the ruling class while small businesses collapse.
What exactly do you not understand about this? There is no "us" in this situation, just division and demands.
I'm not sure what it is exactly you are unclear on, but that is certainly not what I am saying. I'm saying what I wrote no more and no less. If you want to reduce it to a quip it would be the exact opposite, we should get out and live.
There's tradeoffs for everything. We weren't all grandma killing fascists in the previous years for not locking ourselves in our homes and wearing masks and not going to large gatherings and shutting down businesses in response to influenza. Yet the flu killed many many people every year.
We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles despite that statistically contributing to killing many many people.
There are safe and effective vaccines available and people can make up their own minds to use effective masks and isolate themselves, shut down their businesses, and take advantage of all the online and remote services that now pretty much means they never have to leave their house or see another living person if that is what they choose, and that's fine they can make that choice. That's not the responsibility of everybody else though. This strange collectivism where apparently I am responsible for the choices of others and that I must change my lifestyle to keep you safe is where things are going way off the rails, in my opinion. You keep you safe.
> We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles
In most developed countries there are strict rules about driving. You are expected and required to drive according to certain rules to keep other people safe. There are rules for driving because the right of other people to not get injured or killed are considered more important than your right to do what you feel like.
Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?
> In most developed countries there are strict rules about driving. You are expected and required to drive according to certain rules to keep other people safe. There are rules for driving because the right of other people to not get injured or killed are considered more important than your right to do what you feel like.
Driving your automobile legally on the road is statistically responsible for many many deaths. No two ways about it. That makes your next rhetorical question a failure. You also couldn't address the flu one either.
> Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?
For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilation. Limit contacts in general. Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.
If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one.
Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.
"Please stop propagating this BS." At least in the US hardly anyone has or uses FFP2 level masks (N95 here) and the government has not promoted them (except on the last page of the CDC page on masks with half a sentence saying they're better). And the data on cloth masks does show their effectiveness is much lower than initially advertised.
If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
> I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them.
IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it.
They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory.
Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.
The irony, at least in the US, is that the ad campaign against using N95 masks was completely unnecessary as they were diverted in the supply chain to hospitals and government. There were no masks to be had at the hardware store or retail goods.
This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.
As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside
Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends):
longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask
Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.)
Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by.
It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc.
If masks didn’t work, surly we’d all have anecdotes of people catching covid while wearing a masks. I literally have not heard of a single story. Everyone I know who has caught covid was maskless (not even stories of people wearing masks poorly).
There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.
"The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic
seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a
29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks."
So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.
> We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness
> So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.
It is a real word example. It's not an increase of 29%, it's an absolute difference of 29%. Specifically, mask wearing in the intervention villages was 42%, in the control 13%. That is, in a hypothetical village where mask wearing approaches 100%, you might expect something like a 20-30% reduction, assuming a linear correlation. Again, that's not the real world.
> Why?
If an intervention is effective, the effect needs to reproduce. If it doesn't, the larger effect likely occurred by chance. Publication bias promotes positive results and inhibits negative or null results.
You have the same problem with all these COVID drugs. Remdesivir appeared to have an effect in early trials, now it's proven useless. Molnupiravir was initially report to be 50% effective, now it's down to 30%. At the other end of the aisle, you see that Ivermectin has many small studies showing remarkable effectiveness, but the larger ones show little to no effect.
If you apply scientific standards, you must apply them across the board. You must not let wishful thinking guide your decisions.
Certainly if you wear loose fitting cloth masks like most people I see; they need to be FFP2-rated or N95, tight-fitting, and sanitized (heat, ozone, or UVC, etc.) or replaced between uses.
I am sorry but no. I have already lost 2 years of my life just following and obeying the orders. Enough is enough.
This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.
I hate to break it to you, but a virus doesn't really care if you're sick and tired of the situation. It sucks, yeah. No, it's not OK to stop caring only because it's been so long. The socially responsible behavior is still the best course for an individual, even if surrounded by morons.
I'll be sure to tell that to my neighbor who lost both of her parents and a sister to COVID before the vaccines were available. I'm sure she'll understand.
If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are.
I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.
We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.
>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.
We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
> Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.
Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.
> Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
My family has been separated, too. By almost half the planet. Your victim appeal doesn't work here.
> Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.
In pandemic times medical community matters more but nobody should be the only one making decisions about the life of others. People on the front-line lack insight about everything else that's happening. And experts on other fields and even politicians know things that epidemiologists don't. This has gone too far.
There are many bright individuals around the world that could contribute to this fight but as long as their opinion goes against the built consensus they will stand no chance of getting heard. As a global society we are committing all in to a local optima that sucks.
For the last two years I tried my best to stay at home and used respirators even at outdoors. Please see that politicians are the ones that benefits from this new status quo because on this long lasting and seemingly eternal crisis they have absolute power over people freedom to travel, to gather and to express on public. This being the new normal scares me.
Of course, because there's no local context and you have all the information required to infer that. If you're in Europe I understand but in my local context "staying at home" as I was doing would have a near zero impact on improving this global pandemic while being a huge cost for my well-being and health.
I live in a poor country with cases slowly approaching zero, a high vaccination rate and in the midst of the hot/humid season. Also staying at home is a luxury that the large majority of the population can't afford so my decision has a linear effect because nobody on my neighborhood will be "staying at home" or using masks anyways. Right now poverty and hunger are more of an issue than Covid.
Oh yeah let's ignore all the economical, social and health issues that are side effect of the "staying at home" and insist on social shaming and in a policy that is unsustainable. Let's adopt a dogmatic approach to solve novel issues.
If you want to shorten the global pandemic please lobby your politicians into not holding but subsidizing vaccines to poor countries.
I'm a supporter of building longer term effects that contribute into making society more robust against Covid and other kinds of airborne diseases. Like proper indoor ventilation in public spaces, load balancing, better respirators for daily use. Improved vaccine manufacturing capability and shorter lead times for vaccine development. I understand that they are not mutually exclusively in theory but there's so much we can lobby for at the same time and I prefer not to waste it.
How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.
And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity and attempt efforts at preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals available to staff those hospitals. In fact a lot of countries have an artificial cap on the number of doctors and nurses which is driven by various medical professional associations, the government could easily have said “STFU, well take as many doctors and nurses as the universities can graduate” to these “industry self regulations”.
> Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity
The limiting factor is medical professionals, not adding buildings. You can't train a doctor in 2 years.
> preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals
What's the drop-out rate? How would you "prevent" this? Do people drop out because they can't cope with the role, or some other reason? What would the overall effect of this policy be in terms of numbers? I suspect it would be minimal.
I did mention the fact that in many countries the medical students are put through a course structure designed not just around individual achievement on simple academic competency, but aimed and structured sometimes explicitly capped to only graduate a fixed number of doctors. Many put forward justification for this such as “there aren’t enough placements in the field once they graduate” and other semi-valid arguments to put downward pressure on the number of doctors able to and willing to (many migrate to other non “doctor” fields after the first few years of medical school) finish a medical school education as a doctor capable of working with patients on the front line.
I’m well aware it’s not possible to train a decent doctor in two years, which is why my point was more that they could have applied positive pressure like merit based scholarship opportunities or any of a number of other ways to assist students in the second/third years of medical school to stay on track to graduate as doctors and nurses. The point is that there’s never been a shortage of people trying to become Doctors, we have social, educational and economic effects in play that limit the number of people that manage to get there all of which the governments around the world could have done things about.
Why not? Do you really need a "doctor" to treat COVID, or just a "person trained in treating COVID and putting people on the respirator"?
Case in point, in Italy in 2020, at the peak of the first wave ("Bergamo"), they fast-tracked final year medical students. Looks like the change is permanent [1]. So clearly "you can't doctor in X years" (AFAIK 6-7 years in most of Europe) was wrong before the pandemic. We can and should do better.
Maybe if more people voted for the party that typically funds healthcare, instead of the one that tends to defund healthcare, we would be further along on hospital capacity. There's only so much democrats can do when republicans insist on opposing everything sensible just because the hated opposition supports it.
That’s certainly one element of what’s happened in the USA… but I was trying to keep a more global perspective as the fact we are clearly watching the development of what may become an endemic infection like the seasonal influenza virus waves currently are makes it more clear than ever that in the long term this is a massive global issue we need to be coordinating better on.
The global nature of the situation makes any solutions focused on a single nation and their own citizens inadequate as they will just be eventually defeated by the natural mutant strains developing elsewhere. In fact “more doctors and nurses and hospital beds because we’re just going to let it happen” is the only local to national level strategy that has any long term ability to make a difference if the virus continues on its course to become endemic.
For starters I would want my government to change the narrative. They should do their own independent research and present their own facts. Instead they blindly buy vaccines from US and repeat the agenda as everyone else.
There is way too much politics involved. Pandemic should make people naturally empathic not forced by their governments to blindly obey.
>How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.
This is solely on the government. It's immoral to keep vaccinated people in uncertainty and include them in any sort of lockdowns.
>And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
This is not arguing in good faith. Healthy people in their 30s are not dying.
Of all the 0.5m children infected in Israel only 200 were severe cases.
>So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
I already did my part. Now my part will be attending a demo with all those "antivaxx / 5G chips believing people" and I will fight for my right to live a normal life.
Covid is not the only threat. And what is being labeled as convenience sometimes is just physical/mental health. How I'm supposed to exercise, be healthy and productive by staying indoors all the time? Also, am I supposed to substitute IRL social activities with video calls and social media?
Don't get me wrong, I know there's some sort of middle ground but I wanted to provide food for thought.
This isn't about you. And those 2 years are sunk costs for all of us.
You're engaging in magical thinking, here. We can't afford it. It's self-centered. And it does nobody any good, most especially not you. Might get you killed, though.
As an aside, no, the healthcare "sector" is not at all prepared, it has never been prepared, and it can't magically be made prepared, either. The only solution there is to avoid overloading the system. There aren't any other solutions. So rational people will continue to argue for all of the mitigation measures that we know are effective. Whether you like it or not. It's just as much "on you" to participate in that as it is "on" all of the rest of us.
It’s wild how few campaigns I am seeing for vaccination. I want 1950s era propaganda posters on every street corner and at every tv and radio break until we get these numbers to 100%.
We had plenty of posters and advertising on this. Vaccination rates were great in early 2021, before an entire major political party decided to cynically pretend that fighting vaccination was somehow defending "freedom".
I read through it and the assessment makes sense (vaccine effectiveness is not binary in the face of spike protein mutations). But I think it also fails to mention the promising anti-COVID pills that are going to be approved soon, and those from my understanding wouldn’t be as affected by spike protein mutations since they use a different mechanism for treatment. [0]
Throughout this experience the mistake has been to make discussion of the virus about the tone and nature of the discussion itself. We are so accustomed to having all problems originate between us that it is as if our minds cannot grasp having to think about a problem with a force of nature on the other side of it.
I do wish people would be more specific when saying “the media”. There are a lot of media outlets out there, some are level headed, some are hysterical.
Yes, but media outlets that go "hysterical" are the ones that get the most views and get talked about most. Nothing we can do about that in a free society, it's just human nature.
Usually when people say "the media", they mean the mainstream liberal leaning news companies like CNN[1] or New York Times[2]. When talking about Fox (conservative media), people usually just say that.
You’re kind of proving the point here, the media does not only exist in some “conservative vs not conservative” binary. CNN is a cable news network, NYT is a subscription based newspaper. Their output differs accordingly.
I just caught myself on the funny fact, that my level of trust for some stranger on HN is higher than the level of trust for WHO. They worked hard to ruin their reputation.
Wasn't that the most up-to-date data at the time? Are you claiming that they did find clear evidence and were lying about it, or that they somehow should have had evidence to the contrary at that time?
Just like any burgeoning subject, you should generally keep up with the expert recommendations. Expecting them to have had all the answers and get everything exactly right in a circumstance with as many unknowns as this pandemic has had is foolish. It's silly how many people are treating medical agencies like this as if they're complete amateurs because some of their educated guess have ended up not being ideal, or that they've updated their recommendations regularly based on recent data.
It seems like people are expecting medical organizations to be like politicians. Updating recommendations based on new data regularly isn't "double backing" or flip-flopping, it's updating recommendations based on new data. It does mean that sometimes their advice will not be correct, especially when the data is thin, but it's literally the best choice you have available.
I really expect a technical community to be better about this kind of stuff. Limited data means less reliable conclusions.
Can’t believe we still have to deal with this FUD.
No, China “hasn’t been arresting doctors”; in particular Li Wengliang was never arrested. He had “a talk”, similar to certain American YouTuber visited by NSA for not being patriotic enough.
The same thing happens with e.g. Fauci's mask remarks from March of 2020. Somehow people pretend like that was the fatal communication sin of the whole pandemic and the reason there's little trust in the medical community and they ignore the months and months of downplaying the virus and just an endless stream of disinformation from literally everyone else in the administration in service of trying to get reelected.
"Preliminary" is a key word, as is "clear". The clear evidence came (to the WHO, at least) about a week later. On the same day as the tweet, they provided further information that doesn't fit in a tweet indicating they expected things to potentially change:
> The timeline states that on that date, a WHO official noted in a press briefing that there "may have been" limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus between family members and that there was "a risk of a possible outbreak."
They very confidently ruled out the lab leak theory (while admitting that they know basically nothing else about the origin, except that it couldn't have been a lab leak), then had to backtrack on that.
This makes me suspicious of their current claim (that they know that "Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death." while at the same time claiming to know basically nothing else).
The "concern" in "variant of concern" is a function of the number of potentially significant mutations in the spike protein. It's an indicator of unknowns (and therefore unknown risks), not a positive indicator of risk.
Because it's it became the most dominant strain of covid in SA in about two weeks. And it has a massive number of mutations compared to other strains. The former might be partly due to the collapse of last wave of delta. Latter tends to scare immunologists.
This whole thing will never end, will it ?
Should we be prepared to live with masks, mandatory vaccination, QR codes and worse for the rest of our lives ?
I don't think so. I think what we need to do is cast the net wider with future vaccines. Imagine a universal-viral vaccine - giving you strong immunity against all kinds of viruses and any future mutations.
Of course such a thing hasn't been invented yet (AFAIK).
I'm sure people under the threat of smallpox felt just like you.
No one still thinks Covid is ever going away, right? It's likely something we'll just have to deal with like the flu. For one thing, there are now Covid-19 reservoirs in various animal populations.
It's hard to say how this will evolve but there's a lot of evolutionary pressure on viruses to become more transmissible and less deadly. Why less deadly? Because a virus that is too deadly will likely die. It's why the Spanish flu is now just H1N1.
This isn't guaranteed and will no doubt join the ranks of many other anti-vaxxer straw man arguments alongside "you said the vaccine was forever", "you said the vaccine would stop transmission", "people with the vaccine still can get Covid", "people with the vaccine can still die" and so on.
It's actually quite depressing how staggeringly selfish, wildly irrational and willfully ignorant so many people are. I don't mean just being ignorant. I mean taking pride in that ignorance. Particularly in the US, it seems the anti-intellectual chickens have come home to roost in droves.
Seeing all of this I really hope there's no one out there who believes for a second that the world as a whole will sacrifice anything or even mildly inconvenience themselves when it comes to addressing climate change. It's never going to happen.
Like there are still people who believe the millions that have been killed is fake news and part of some media conspiracy.
So, I see a future with annual Covid shots just like annual flu shots. I'm personally beyond caring if any individual chooses not to get one. We've blunted the initial onslaught of a novel disease appearing in a population of >7 billion with no natural immunity (albeit at the cost of millions of lives). At this point, it's now evolution in action.
> Like there are still people who believe the millions that have been killed is fake news and part of some media conspiracy.
Without going into the medical and scientific reasons why this perception may exist among people, I'd just like to point out that trust in the media and other institutions has been sabotaged over the last 5-6 years among a non-trivial percentage of the population, perhaps permanently, just for the sake of political victory.
The lesson that these institutions should learn is a self-reflective critical one that they'll forever refuse to acknowledge. Don't cry wolf repeatedly for years and then complain that the ignorant villagers won't believe literally anything you have to say on any topic ever again.
> It's hard to say how this will evolve but there's a lot of evolutionary pressure on viruses to become more transmissible and less deadly.
I'd like to think so but I fear there's no selective pressure with regards to decreased lethality for COVID-19. An infected person has already spread it far and wide by before they even develop symptoms – if they die after spreading, where's the pressure?
> Why less deadly? Because a virus that is too deadly will likely die. It's why the Spanish flu is now just H1N1.
The Spanish flu mutated into a deadlier strain first.
If the reproduction rate is kept low enough for an extended time, the virus eventually extinguishes itself. With vaccination, "self-vaccination" among the uncooperative, sanitation, testing, contact tracing, and some fraction of the population continuing to take personal measures, the combination can bring the rate down low enough.
The optimist in me hopes that today's anti-vaxxers are just the current incarnation of Luddites. We've had resistance to new ideas for probably the entirety of human history. I mean Galileo was persecuted for heresy. Irrational dogma eventually fades into history.
people don’t just flip a coin and say “heads, i won’t cooperate”. they all have their own reasons for not cooperating. very few of those reasons are “i flat out don’t want this virus to be eradicated”. so address their concerns, and problem solved.
i’m not claiming it’ll be easy, and i don’t think it’s practical within the short span of a few years, but it’s not impossible.
> Why less deadly? Because a virus that is too deadly will likely die. It's why the Spanish flu is now just H1N1.
Given how slowly SARS-CoV-2 kills you (if it does), there isn't any selection pressure to do it less often.
Indeed, my understanding is that no human virus has evolved to become less virulent. It is unclear why H1N1 disappeared a few years after it emerged as the Spanish flu, most likely it simply ran out of susceptible hosts. In particular, we have no evidence of a successor virus, evolved from H1N1, that was both less virulent and drove out H1N1 at that time.
I agree that annual shots are a very real possibility. I also share your pessimism about our response to global warming.
Think about it this way: what is the evolutionary pressure for it to become more lethal? Particularly if we accept your premise that such lethality occurs after it spreads.
Now a given strain may mutate to become more deadly but why would such a strain become dominant?
Even if all this occurs after the virus can spread, consider the human reaction to it. You have two diseases: one is essentially the common cold, the other is basically Ebola. Even if those events occur after transmission, the response to each disease is going to be wildly different. The common cold will just be tolerated and managed. There will be no lockdowns. The second will have the military enforcing lockdowns and curfews combined with hard travel borders and checkpoints. There would be forced vaccination in some places and severe restrictions on the voluntarily unvaccinated.
Just the human reaction alone will tend to make the common cold version more dominant over a sufficiently long time frame.
I don't think it quite works like that - human reaction would affect the transmission of both the original 'bad' variant, and a hypothetical 'good' variant equally. It wouldn't induce a selection pressure favouring one over the other.
Furthermore, even with ICUs overflowing, a large segment of the population considers it 'just the flu' - and likely still would even if it became more virulent. After all, their assessment is based on ideology, party affiliation etc rather more than cold facts.
> Indeed, my understanding is that no human virus has evolved to become less virulent. It is unclear why H1N1 disappeared a few years after it emerged as the Spanish flu, most likely it simply ran out of susceptible hosts. In particular, we have no evidence of a successor virus, evolved from H1N1, that was both less virulent and drove out H1N1 at that time.
Indeed H1N1 has popped up from time to time, with varying outcomes, not least as prior immunity waned. We are also much better at treating people, particularly bacterial coinfections.
Flu is a bit peculiar with viral RNA/DNA (I forget which) reassortment. However it did not fade out or transmute at the end of the 1918 pandemic due to a selection pressure to become less lethal (or at least, we have no evidence that that is the case)
HN folks are all pseudo, amateur, professional scientists of all fields, at least that’s what I pickup from the conversations. A true scientist, ex. Marie Skłodowska-Curie, will perform every kind of test possible to ensure he gets to the truth.
Here’s a scientific test for COVID: turn off all media, news and information sharing apps for 3-5 days, report daily your findings, continue with the test after 5 days if no abnormalities detected. Share your results with others.
The WHO statement seems to have a more sanguine viewpoint than the Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution (TAG-VE) which defines "Variant of Concern" as associated with one of the below:
Increase in transmissibility or detrimental change in COVID-19 epidemiology; OR
Increase in virulence or change in clinical disease presentation; OR
Decrease in effectiveness of public health and social measures or available diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics.
This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning. Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant, as compared to other VOCs. The number of cases of this variant appears to be increasing in almost all provinces in South Africa. Current SARS-CoV-2 PCR diagnostics continue to detect this variant. Several labs have indicated that for one widely used PCR test, one of the three target genes is not detected (called S gene dropout or S gene target failure) and this test can therefore be used as marker for this variant, pending sequencing confirmation. Using this approach, this variant has been detected at faster rates than previous surges in infection, suggesting that this variant may have a growth advantage.
This variant is already being found on nearly every continent as I type this. We still don’t seem to know if this variant is more or less contagious or more or less deadly. It’s too late to stop it’s spread. So then what? Just keep pushing the worldwide vaccination campaign? I don’t see what else can be done that wouldn’t simply be kicking the can down the road more.
yes sorry you're right - I'm mixing something up here:
> We identified five studies, which estimated the basic reproductive number for Delta. Table 1 shows that the basic reproductive number for Delta ranged from 3.2 to 8, with a mean of 5.08 -- https://academic.oup.com/view-large/305057394
I don't know, this variant sounds an excuse for the expected failure of the vaccination plan, now that cold weather and flu season is here it's will hard to keep pretending vaccines are leading us to any kind of long term victory.
There's little that can be done, sadly. We had so many shutdowns/lockdowns that did not really help (here in Germany, lockdowns were usually announced when the growth rate had already leveled off). Closing schools and kindergarten hurts kids. Home office might be an idea, where it is not already standard.
What I wonder is: Instead of only restricting movement in the general population, why are there not many more tests? Why can we not PCR test the whole population every single day? Using a relatively straightforward pooling scheme that should not be too difficult, should it?
At the same time: Why on earth is it so difficult to coordinate vaccination? Why is no industrialized nation capable of vaccinating 10-20% of its population on a given day?
I really feel like government response has been disproportionate so far: Many restrictions and few, if any, actual actions.
Regarding tests: It's still problematic that self-administered antigene tests have weak sensitivity (so even if you test every day the tests will miss many cases).
PCR tests cost something around 100€ a piece, so assuming Germany has ~90 million population, that's 9 billion Euros for a single cross-sectional population test.
Now let's add some speculative factors: Some 10 million (+/- 10 million) are strongly opposed to state-mandated measures. Some will evade the tests, some will fake them, some may become violent. These people are also among those who are most likely to be Cov-positive.
Also, testing the entire population would only help if you simultaneously lock down the borders to prevent re-import.
So while broad testing has its merits, I feel like the gains here would be mostly modest.
> Why is no industrialized nation capable of vaccinating 10-20% of its population on a given day?
Probably because there aren’t enough qualified people to do the work. It takes a lot of people to manage a mass vaccination. Even just crowd control at a mass vaccination site requires quite a few people.
It’s not clear that capacity to vaccinate is a significant factor in industrialized nations at this point, anyway. Vaccine uptake had halted due to “hesitancy”, not capacity.
In the UK we can order boxes of lateral flow tests for free online. You can easily test daily before going out with friends/going to work etc. but for some reason, despite the ease of this most people still don’t bother. Obviously governments can do better but we have free daily testing, vaccines available for almost every one, and still laziness/stupidity win in too many cases.
In science, "we don't know yet" is on of the most useful statements you can make. It does two things of note:
1. Tells anyone that's paying attention that any speculation is just that, speculation, and
2. Tells people that while we don't have answers yet, those answers are being looked for.
> Severity of disease: It is not yet clear whether infection with Omicron causes more severe disease compared to infections with other variants, including Delta. Preliminary data suggests that there are increasing rates of hospitalization in South Africa, but this may be due to increasing overall numbers of people becoming infected
Tl;dr: we don’t know much currently. It is very frustrating that our tools and techniques are so slow at analyzing, detecting, understanding airborne diseases.
I think their best would be educated guesses without actually seeing how it behaves in the wild. Though with them simply saying it's a VoC with a high number of mutations has led the media to catastrophise in their reporting.
Would be interesting if Omicron turns out to be protected against by vaccines over natural immunity. I’d been in favour of America adopting the European 2G precedent, but perhaps a more conservative stance is warranted.
The way people(as in the vast majority, the non-rulers) responded to this virus and the measures following it will remain a stain on humanity.
You don't even have to wait to see the negative effects the restrictions, panicking rhetoric & messages(not about the severity of the virus per se) and dividing political hacks will have on the current/future generations, it's already here.
Again, this authoritarian top->down approach of "let's shut everything down because a _small_ segment of the population is kind of in danger"[and even then, most people are fine given good levels of vit. D and general immunity] is everything there was to say about it.
This is not about the virus, it's about control(and money, though that's a bonus).Thinking otherwise is just delusion at this point.Vaccinated and 2-3 boosters already? Tough sh*t, the new conveniently-renamed variant Omicron will require you to have another "jab", you don't want that 1-5% chance of grandma dying, do you?
It's so disgusting how conservatives downplay the lethality of this disease, and get all hysterical about the inconvenience of the measures taken to stop it. Quit whining and supporting the fasists tring to prolong the pandemic for political gain, and maybe we can emerge from the crisis sooner.
Cloth masks may not help much to protect those who wear them, but they reduce the amount of aerosol they emit, and reduce the likelihood of spreading the virus.
For some reason they are still treated like a trust-worthy authority despite continually getting things wrong. They are rainmakers -- if the results don't match their promises they just blame the people for angering the gods and demand more sacrifices.
The current measures in place are simply preventive, more in the lines of caution and unnecessary spread, mainly to save our Public Health Service from overdrive and spare medical professionals that are exhausted at this point in time. We don't want to have unnecessary stress that hurts the whole health system, and compromises other health services.
The vaccines are working exceptionally well in Portugal!
Look at the hospitalizations[0] and death[1] numbers compared to last year, with the added noted that we had basically 0 measures since April.
We're only vaccinating with the 3rd jab people over 65, and people with weakened immune systems.
I’m not sure what your point is. That article literally says Portugal is not experiencing as large a surge as other countries (probably due to their high rate of vaccination) and that the lockdown proposed is not necessary.
Weird they don’t mention that South Africa had so much of a vaccine surplus they asked other countries to stop sending vaccine [0]. Their low vaccination rate is due to hesitancy amongst the population, not access to doses.
not sure why you are bringing up Portugal as if it's some sort of gotcha. It's doing very well in terms of deaths, similar to the UK, Canada etc. who also have high vaccination rates.
All countries or states that had initial comparatively high fatalities like Sweden, Italy, Portugal, New York, Florida are doing relatively well now regardless of vaccination status.
A possible cause is that there are fewer vulnerable people left.
Even if the vaccine does help against severe cases, it does not stop the spread, so being vaccinated should be an individual choice and not forced like in Austria. That is why a closer look at highly vaccinated countries is in order, everything else is unscientific.
That's not wrong, but this time it was scientists who were ringing the bell.
This write-up [1] explains the particular mutations in Omicron in more detail. Basically, Omicron appears to be a perfect storm of various concerning mutations that had appeared in individual strains before - now all assembled into one strain.
Add to that a sudden, unusual spike in infections right where the variant is found and I guess things can start to look scary for a moment.
Of course, it's still guesswork and even though the genome looks scary, the real-world effects may be mild.
Dr. Jeffrey Barrett listed the mutations in a figure below. [...] Of these, some mutations have properties to escape antibody protection (i.e. outsmart our vaccines and vaccine-induced immunity). There are several mutations association with increased transmissibility. There is a mutation associated with increased infectivity. This slide, from a presentation yesterday from the South Africa Health Ministry, summarized B.1.1.529 nicely.
> Medical doctors are not scientists.
What?
> Remember, the WHO said closing borders wouldn't help, and how dead wrong they were.
This narrative is so silly to me. Same with those who think that mandating mask wearing is some flex by the government to exert control.
It's common sense that in order to stop the spread of highly contagious respiratory viruses, having folks stay away from one another for a bit works... if people follow the lockdown, which too many don't. If anything, politicians are hesitant to invoke a lockdown due to the vocal minority's tantrums over them.
People don't like them, the same way that people don't like wearing masks. But most understand the value of both. And it's not like the local government is gaining anything from slowing down the local economy and annoying its citizens--aside from trying to save lives and put less stress on the healthcare system and its already overtaxed workers.
Based on people I've discussed this with their explanation is: The data doesn't support lockdowns and madates for the masses. Deaths are typically a select subset of the population. Hospitalizations much the same. Using a one size fit all solution - when surgical solutions are more appropriate -makes them suspect.
Please don't shoot this messenger. I'm just providing context that tends to be missed elsewhere.
p.s. fwiw, there were these in the past week or so:
Aside from ethical concerns around shutting a subset of the population out of society to benefit others, that presumes that a selective approach would be effective, and that it is feasible to segregate the vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations. Do you have any practical suggestions as to how that might be implemented? As a I believe that’s why it hasn’t been attempted.
Again, I'm just the messenger. But the gist I get is this: locking down select subsets (of high risk individuals) is doable simply because locking down everyone is doable.
But speaking for myself, the fact that early on there were such a ridiculous number of deaths in retirement homes (primarily in NY, NJ, PA and CA) never smelled right to me. We had data - openly mentioned in the media - about Italy and the elderly and yet the same thing happened here? It's been all down hill since then.
You don't understand the problem, do you? Nor do you understand you're part of that problem.
It's - by definition - is a pandemic of everybody. Anyone who suggests otherwise is suspect. Those ppl fuel the discontent. The fact that they're allowed to furthers the divide.
The phrase that comes to mind is: "Divided we fall." An absolute truth if there ever was one.
It's shutting out a tiny elderly subset for the benefit of all vs shutting down all for the benefit of a tiny elderly subset. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but your ethical concern should be 2 sided.
What is the proposed method of actually isolating the most vulnerable parts of society? I don't see how you do it in any meaningful way (At the very most vulnerable end, they are dependent on lots of people that are less vulnerable...).
To that point, my grandma's retirement home was as well locked down as possible.
But you know who didn't take it seriously? The staff who worked there and brought COVID in, which ended up killing her.
There's no way of isolating them without isolating their staff, their families, everyone they interact with. With a virus as contagious as COVID, there doesn't appear to be a way to target portions of the population effectively.
Indeed, and that's a retirement home which is really the easy case. I don't see how an elderly person that lives with their younger family members is supposed to be isolated.
The staff could work like oil rig workers - in month-long shifts. Get quarantined for a week on the way in, do your shift, go home to your family. Not pleasant, but doable and a lot simpler than placing everyone's life on hold.
An improvement in testing (accuracy + turnaround time + cost) would also help significantly. But there's been little talk in investing in such a tool. That strikes me as a red flag. Instead, we're betting on the jab, and apparently that's not working out well. At all.
> And it's not like the local government is gaining anything from slowing down the local economy and annoying its citizens
It’s a lot simpler than that. Weilding political power is psychologically addictive, perhaps even more so than recreational drugs. Like drugs, the user will always want to come back for another hit, and thus politicians will use every excuse and rationalization to continue to use emergency powers.
You can always follow the money to see who benefits from a decision, and who gets penalized.
The initial lockdowns penalized many small businesses (small shops, hairdressers) that could not operate and benefited large online retailers and chains like Walmart that were declared exempt, that got extra business.
The lockdowns also justified large-scale payout of benefits, that were funded by increasing the money supply. This benefited the owners of limited-supply assets (stocks, real estate, even the f*cking crypto) at the expense of people with cash savings and those with fixed/slowly changing income (most salaried employees).
Since most members of government are major real estate owners and stock investors, they absolutely had benefited from the lockdown-related economic measures more than an average salaried employee.
It is also notable that the effects of increasing the money supply are delayed. We are starting to see the inevitable rise of inflation over a year after the start of the pandemic. It will take a long time for it to taper down, and we are yet to see how it will affect the average quality of life (i.e. salary/expense ratio).
Will we know if we actually saved net lives in 20 years? That's what I keep thinking. If we just let it run its course it could have been over in a few months and we would have been back to normal.
Yes, that is literally what so many libertarians on HN and elsewhere think. Who cares if people die or suffer as long as I am not inconvenienced. You see the mental contortions they go through in this thread alone. It's death by petulance as much as pestilence.
>Are you implying that someone in government has alterior motives to desire a lockdown?
They have obvious ulterior motives. Political motives, or ass-covering. If they don't do a lockdown they will be utterly attacked by the opposition for 'not being proactive enough' no matter if there is only one more death.
I believe this is the principal motive, health being a distant second. Remember, governments act first to get votes, second to help population.
Do you really mean that government acts primarily to avoid being voted out of office? Should we be shocked or disgusted by that?
I guess someone like Putin doesn't have to be worried about being unelected, so they were able to go soft on the virus in Russia. But, I don't think that turned out well for them.
> Do you really mean that government acts primarily to avoid being voted out of office? Should we be shocked or disgusted by that?
shocked? no.
disgusted? yes.
the ideal politician is one that works towards societies best interests, not one that maximizes time-in-office and career security.
That isn't to say that one can't have one without the other, only to emphasize the fact that no political office was ever won on the promise of a lengthy career and self-interest.
Politicians that do the right thing regardless of election prospects simply aren’t in power long enough (or even at all) for you to notice them. A real “survival bias” at work.
The alternative (an autocracy) doesn’t work out any better, so even though our system has flaws, it is still better than the alternative.
lockdowns are profoundly politically unpopular - from economics, to convenience, to the enormous burden of closing schools, no politician wants to lock down anything, for any amount of time, without an amazingly good reason, period.
If you don't order a lockdown and it was needed then lots of people die, this is very bad.
If you do order a lockdown and it wasn't needed then you can say that you were just being safe. And it's hard to even tell when a lockdown wasn't needed because the very act of doing it changes the result and leads to less cases. The lockdown was successful!
It's always easy to say "We did it to save lives" and few people will hold you to account for it.
Such a one sided view. Let me tell you the truth of the matter.
Government is made out of multitudes of personalities and conflicting interests. There are those that care, there are those that don't care, there are scientists, there are people who are knowledgeable of the proper action and there are those who are emotional and everything in between exists as well.
It is a hodge podge of motives. Classifying government action in a singular light as if it was one ulterior ass covering agenda is a lie people tell themselves when they need something to blame.
I don't understand how what you are saying refutes ass-covering at all. Yes, you have a pile of people in government with all sorts of opinions, but ultimately there is someone who has to make the decision.
If you present that person with a cloud of information from a bunch of different conflicting sources it actually incentivises ass-covering even more.
You say "ulterior ass covering agenda" but an Agenda is entirely the opposite of what an ass-coverer has.
When you don't know what you should do, you pick safe option that nobody is going to blame you for.
I didn't refute anything just like the original statement didn't prove anything. To do this you require evidence. Neither of us offered anything concrete so we are in a discussion where we only offer opinions.
Additionally my statement itself doesn't refute ass covering. All I am saying is that the government is too complex to classify it as a singular entity out to cover it's own ass.
Several things cause me to disagree with you. Some of the most best science is being done by people who are part of or have high influence in the government. There are definitely people up there who view the problem as a situation that needs to be resolved rather then an every man for himself type of deal you seem to characterize it as.
As I said, the government is a hodge podge of both. This has both benefits and downsides.
An example of a government that tries to act as a singular entity is China. In terms of stopping covid in its' tracks China done better than the hodge podge government that makes up US democracy. However, in terms of stopping covid from spreading out of Wuhan, Chinas' ass covering is what screwed up the world. There's good and bad to either methodology and It's too complicated to characterize.
Ya, to me, ass covering is much more like trying to rewrite history after the fact, downplaying the virus, or maybe trying to hide statistics like nursing home deaths in your state.
He knows. He just needs to make up an alternate reality to justify his own darkness.
On some level many of us simply don't give a shit about the fact that the virus can slaughter millions. We just don't think it will affect us and we don't want to be locked down. It's like a heroin addict. He knows the reality of his addiction but he needs to make up a reality to justify shoving one more injection into his veins, just one more.
On the one hand, people have been claiming for years that the world is sleep walking into authoritarian, kleptocratic fascism.
On the other hand, if you are even slightly sceptical that the same authoritarians might be using lockdowns to make public protest illegal and overstep civil liberties you are a conspiracy-believing, alt-right moron.
Arse covering is as good ulterior motive as any, something anyone who’s dealt with large organisations of any sort will attest to.
I’d argue the reason governments obsess over marginally effective at best measures like masks is that they give society the opportunity to wag their fingers and exercise the usual moral authoritarianism at their neighbours instead of blaming the politicians for their various inadequacies throughout the pandemic (including in the UK’s case running the NHS into the ground with cuts a decade before in their usual miserly short-sightedness).
COVID is bad. When cases spike, people naturally take steps to avoid getting infected. They also want other people to do the same.
The problem is that some steps are more conspicuous than others and that doesn't always align with efficacy. An obvious example is wearing a mask vs. washing your hands. They're both effective measures, but one can be seen by anyone and the other happens in the privacy of your bathroom, so one gets politicized and over-emphasized even if they're both of similar importance.
It works the same way for politicians. If things are going poorly, they're expected to do something. But their incentive is to do things that are conspicuous, even if they have a high cost and therefore a low cost/benefit ratio.
Almost any kind of mandate falls into this category because the cost/benefit for doing that thing is going to depend on individual characteristics. "Stay at home" may be a better strategy for someone who lives with amiable people than someone who lives alone and suffers from depression, or who lives with an abuser, but blanket mandates don't distinguish them. And yet when cases spike, Something Must Be Done.
You're disrespectfully referring to the work of Dr. Tyrone Hayes [1] of The University of California at Berkeley, who discovered that Syngenta's herbicide Atrazine is indeed an endocrine disruptor, causing frogs (of both genders I believe) to turn hemaphroditic, develop both male & female gonads-- i.e. males developing ovaries, females developing testes.
Do you... prefer pollutants in your water?
Do you... approve of chemical companies privatizing the gains (profits) of externalizing pollutants into innocent ecosystems and humans?
Or maybe... you just really love to be told what to think by media overlords [2].
Estrogen and estrogen-like plastics in waterways is a huge problem. Some people mis interpreted it, but that doesn’t discount the fact that plastics are a huge problem that are interfering with nature.
>There is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with Omicron are different from those from other variants. Initial reported infections were among university students—younger individuals who tend to have more mild disease—but understanding the level of severity of the Omicron variant will take days to several weeks.
I read the article and it seems like what she is saying is more nuanced than that. There is significant concern, not least for potential impacts on the elderly and those with co-morbidities.
To the point about lockdowns, nobody in govt in the UK is looking for an excuse for another. The exact opposite is true in fact.
Travel bans have never worked either. The variant almost certainly already reached community transmission in Northern Africa, they're just not reporting it. Travel bans reward this behavior.
Furthermore, airports are good places to track and study infections. Assume that this variant will spread worldwide. We've already been through this with the wild type, with Beta and with Delta/Gamma.
Travel restrictions bought Taiwan and South Korea lots of time in the beginning. Other countries who usually follow scientific guidance have implemented them (israel).
There seem to be no real papers linked to the base of this guidance, except that they feel like a attack on the freedom of movement for a globalist elite and the tourism industry. I rather prefer to be healthy and safe, then to put a blind eye to some elite favoured cultural blind spot.
>Reply: Families are even less a reason to visit internationally in a global pandemic. Why should it be a right to bring a potentially deadly disease to your loved ones? Others cant visit there dying family in a hospital, why should one be granted exemption to visit the living?
I'm a little confused by that article, to be honest. The Science paper they link seems to confirm that travel restrictions can have effect. Eg, from the abstract: " The travel quarantine of Wuhan delayed the overall epidemic progression by only 3 to 5 days in mainland China but had a more marked effect on the international scale, where case importations were reduced by nearly 80% until mid-February."
My impression is that travel restrictions aren't a panacea, but can reduce or delay spread. (Whether or not they're appropriate with Omicron in particular seems to be a slightly different issue).
from what I understand travel restrictions are more effective earlier in the pandemic (as you pointed out from the Science paper) and less effective as the virus becomes ubiquitous.
Because it has already spread world-wide in all likelihood, we just haven't noticed yet. Targeted travel bans are worthless and very few nations are willing to close borders altogether.
In general, respiratory viruses tend to get less severe over time. With this mass vaccination approach it may not turn out that way by some accounts I've read.
In the book “spillover”, notably written before Covid (so quite prophetic read from today’s perspective), the author discussed this claim. Although it often happens, it is by no means guaranteed (at least on satisfactory timelines), and there are counter examples.
One is the evolution of myxomatosis in Australia, it is a disease affecting rabbits. The disease split into 4 strains. Eventually the dominant one become, IIRC, one that had the slowest progression, but also was the deadliest overall.
Buns infected with that strain had larger chances of passing it on (since they were alive longer), and yet they would be more likely to die.
I guess evolution doesn’t care, and if a strain is more deadly, yet more persistent, it will win.
The easier way to look at this is that from the perspective of evolutionary pressure what happens to a host (or parents, for that matter) once reproduction has taken place is irrelevant. So there is no selection pressure for mortality, that's just another outcome, unless it happens too quickly in case the virus has less chance to make it to the next generation.
Reductio ad absurdum: if a virus would kill on first contact there would never be any time for it to spread, but once a virus has spread the host is not all that interesting unless it could be caused to continue to spread. So whether the host lives or dies after that won't cause that particular virus to be more or less successful.
I would go further, and say we have no evidence that any human virus has evolved to become less virulent as it becomes 'endemic'. Instead, susceptible individuals simply die off (e.g. smallpox in the Americas).
In order for there to be an evolutionary pressure toward becoming less severe, having higher severity has to give some disadvantage - e.g. killing the host before it can spread the disease or giving stronger symptoms so hosts can be isolated before they can spread it. The corona virus is pretty unique in how much it can spread before/without any symptoms showing up, which should mean there's relatively less room for improvement by lowering the severity.
I think it is the other way around, there is no pressure to maintain a high severity as long as the virus can spread thus leading to mutations that lose the severe traits.
Viruses aren't trying to kill their hosts, they're trying to replicate. But to replicate they kill the cells they're in.
COVID's severity is because it's making a tradeoff between the time it takes the immune system to destroy it, vs the need to get a host walking around and socializing while breathing it out onto new hosts. The lethality is a side-effect of its replication strategy.
Viruses lyse (explode) the cells they take over in order to exit the cell, since packaging for membrane transport is much more complicated.
Unchecked, they would just exponentially destroy your tissue.
Cytokine storm responses are a particular kind of immune system over-reaction that can make relatively benign viruses much more dangerous to a healthy host then a more immunologically suppressed host, but that's not the behaviour of COVID-19 which is showing pretty standard lethality profiles.
No that's why I said there is no pressure to be severe. Killing hosts doesn't provide many benefits (unless you spread via people touching dead bodies such as Ebola).
The study you cite doesn't seem to say what you want it to say.
> Controlling for differences across studies, secondary attack rates were higher in households from symptomatic index cases than asymptomatic index cases, to adult contacts than to child contacts, to spouses than to other family contacts, and in households with 1 contact than households with 3 or more contacts.
Can someone explain whether corona is unique in this attribute of spreading versus other viruses? I would expect most cold-related viruses or other viruses in the human virome to exhibit this pattern.
The argument one frequently reads/hears on this is, that a virus has no evolutionary advantage to kill its host and if the virus becomes fitter in terms of infecting new hosts, they can neglect functions in their genome that lead to deadliness.
A respiratory virus may have an evolutionary advantage if it doesn't hit the organism so hard that the host stays home and isolates. Mild symptoms may increase the likelihood for socialising for example, thus there could be evolutionary pressure for a milder form to develop.
I would assume that these are just general observations and it won't allow a clear prediction where COVID19 variants are headed. But there are theories that other coronaviruses have been more aggressive initially until they became the milder forms that are nowadays endemic.
Of course we know plenty viruses that have evolved and are still deadly, so this isn't something I would bet on.
Host availability is likely the greatest pressure I would think. Then severity or its lack, given our numbers, would be less a driver of genetic change than would random mutations.
"However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains. The vaccine's inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens. The fitness of the more virulent strains is increased by the vaccine."
Are we certain Delta was/is more severe? Since it’s more contagious, might it also be producing a lot more mild/asymptomatic cases that don’t get reported? Severity seems like a difficult thing to measure reliably if you can’t be sure about the denominator.
Multiple countries have sustained mass testing of at least certain groups of population. The argument about undetected asymptomatic cases would be valid in early 2020 when tests were scarce, but now there are good continuous metrics from people who get tested even if asymptomatic.
Oh, I'm not following the news on Delta or any other variants much, however, I just know people who are measuring the prevalence of variants in the general population in reasonable ways which would definitely cover also asymptomatic people (one is mass testing - e.g. right now 100% of local kids are getting weekly tests in schools, and all hospital admissions get tested even if it's e.g. a car crash, but there's also the viral analysis in sewer system, which is a cool way to get a total perspective on large populations), so studies about the severity of Delta (whatever they are saying) should not be distorted by the particular problem of asymptomatic cases not getting reported, the researchers now have good tools to get the "denominator" part correct.
https://youtu.be/3RSRtuRm92o
Edit: "South African doctor who raised alarm about omicron variant says symptoms are ‘unusual but mild’"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
"Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense.
They included young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate, she said. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell."