Hospitalization rates are also back up to significantly higher than they were this time last year.
And that's with the restrictions you're referring to. So, no, I don't think that it would make sense for the UK to just go right back to normal just yet, at least until the vaccinations rates are high enough that you see the case rate go back down and stay down.
IMHO we should just return to normal, consider this a new kind of flu and deal with the fact it's more deadly. I always knew there is a chance a flu can kill me one day. I'm Ok with the fact the chance is higher now.
My personal (apparently risky, I don't recommend it to others) strategy is living an active social life to be in regular contact with the virus (while testing every now and then to make sure I don't spread it) so my immune system keeps on producing the natural antibodies (I also test for every couple of months).
You might be willing to accept the risk of getting sick on your behalf, but by advocating a return to 'normal' before we have the capabilities to deal with this virus, you are advocating for putting even more stress on healthcare systems across the globe already on the verge of failure. There are patients in heavily-impacted areas who cannot access healthcare for other life-or-death concerns because hospitals are crumbling under the workload of COVID cases.
The article even states this; COVID is likely to reach endemic status eventually, but we are still nowhere near that. Ignoring it will have enormous costs on vulnerable populations -- even more than it already has.
This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is. Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80%. [0]
If we look at Israel, which has a very high vaccination rate, we see that they're supposedly running out of hospital space. [1] But the article linked doesn't say _anything about their actual numbers atm_ and points to a fiscal problem rather than a manpower problem.
There was a recent Science Magazine article that states that 13% of the hospitalized-and-vaccinated group are under 60. That amounts to 39 people in a country of 9 million. [2]
I've asked this before both here and elsewhere: If these vaccines aren't "good enough," what is? At what point does this become "zero COVID" in that "nobody can ever die from this disease again?"
[0]: this may have changed -- things are changing quickly -- so I'd be curious if you have any recent (<1 week old) information on this.
[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-s-public-hospital...
[2]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-... -- and I took this from Louis Rossmann's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtfT7HsJq0
Yes.
> This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is.
They aren't overwhelming total hospital capacity, they are overwhelming specialized resource capacity, particularly ICU capacity.
> Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80%
In Florida and numerous other states (not Tennessee), there are significant areas over 95% ICU capacity. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/17/us/covid-delt...
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/08/19/tenn...
It's not like there is any large ICU capacity anywhere anyway.
In the country? No. In large areas? Yes.
> I keep seeing reports of staff getting fired or quitting because of vaccine requirement. Maybe I’m getting fake news?
There are vaccine requirements being adopted some places, and there are departures related to it. But if you are seeing news suggesting that that is the major source of capacity strain (or even the major source of COVID-related causes of people departing healthcare jobs), it is, at least, distorted news.
This is precisely because there is high demand for registered nurses and other medical staff at the moment.
Ok. At least somebody can exercise reason when necessary.
By the way (I believe that's is nonsensical but I also believe I am probably wrong - I am far from an expert), what's the point of force-vaccinating people who have obviously contacted the infection on many occasions and still are Okay? To me this indicates their immune systems are doing a great job and we should rather avoid teaching them (their perfectly competent immune systems) how they should do it. And I don't know about any evidence of vaccinated people being less contagious than those naturally immune.
I don't know but, fwiw, Europe is considering prior infection proven by an antibody test as equivalent to being vaccinated.
This makes no sense from an immunological perspective, and sounds like one of those pseudoscientific ideas that "natural" immunity is somehow stronger than "vaccination" immunity.
A vaccine is nothing more than exposing the immune system to the antigens. If their immune systems are already geared up to fight Covid, they will simply respond to the vaccine as another Covid infection and fight it accordingly.
As for whether there is any benefit, there absolutely is. Multiple exposure events greatly increase the storage of the antibodies in the memory cells of the immune system. This is why most vaccines require at least two shots, and why the CDC is now recommending a third booster shot for some people.
Plenty of studies show that the immunity of people who are vaccinated is stronger than those who were infected naturally (e.g. [1]), and that the immunity of people who have had Covid is significantly more robust after subsequent vaccination (e.g. [2], [3]).
1. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.15.440089v2....
2. https://apnews.com/article/science-health-coronavirus-pandem... ("The survivors who never got vaccinated had a significantly higher risk of reinfection than those who were fully vaccinated, even though most had their first bout of COVID-19 just six to nine months ago.")
3. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.25.21256049v...
>This makes no sense from an immunological perspective, and sounds like one of those pseudoscientific ideas that "natural" immunity is somehow stronger than "vaccination" immunity.
There's nothing unscientific about it; it's been known for a while now that some vaccines like the flu vaccine are inferior to natural immunity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/
Ok, well I've cited two studies that say the opposite, and one of those studies looked at antibody responses over time from matched individuals. The "on the ground" results in Israel are completely confounded by who is an isn't vaccinated, with at risk people (including healthcare workers) being significantly more likely to be vaccinated.
> it's been known for a while now that ...
Oh my. Did you read that study? It shows nothing of the sort. It is a mathematical Markov simulation of what happens assuming natural infection is stronger than vaccines.
The kicker is in the discussion:
> Under the plausible assumption that protection against influenza infection lasts longer after naturally acquired infection than after vaccination, we show that ...
This is literally begging the question. The authors make the assumption that naturally-acquired immunity is stronger. Then they write a model that repeatedly exposes people given that assumption. Then they "show" that, surprise surprise..... people with naturally-acquired immunity catch the flu less frequently.
In Israel, as almost everywhere else (other than early in the pandemic with nursing homes in many places), implementation of and compliance with vaccination and other COVID countermeasures had been strongest among the elderly and immunocompromised; at the same time, COVID infection has been more likely to lead to death in the elderly. So, the population most likely to be infected if exposed has a higher baseline vaccination rate and a smaller rate of prior COVID infection, both due to countermeasures and inverse survivorship effects. Without controlling for that, which bare population numbers like this don’t do, you have no idea what the relative immunity effect of prior infection vs. vaccination is.
The UK: in local areas, patients had to be diverted sometimes hundreds of miles to a hospital with space. all non emergency hospital care was stopped, and some emergency routine care was delayed.
Belgium was overwhelmed.
The issue is this, we can't just not admit the over 60s. even if we did, that would only free up 50% capacity (ie you could go one more cycle of exponential growth, doubling every n weeks/days)[source https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...]
filling hospitals means that the resources used to treat both sudden hospitalizations and long term are diverted. so car accident/drinking/heavy sports/DIY injuries have worse outcomes, and cancer outcomes drop off a cliff.
if the UK manages to keep the total number of patients in hospital with covid to less than 7-10k that would be a brilliant outcome for winter. we are currently at ~6k, and its still summer.
The issue is there are not enough trained doctors and nurses. They take at least 8 years to train. that's the main constraint. Suitable beds can be made up in a number of weeks (see china and the "nightinggale hospitals") but if there is no staff, they are pointless
I'm not sure a big percent- of people is prone to hard covid. I tend to believe the majority of people has already went through it asymptomatically/easily and so will the majority of those who still hasn't.
Exponential growth in positive tests doesn't imply infinite (limited only by the size of the population itself) exponential growth of severe cases or deaths.
Correct!
but when in the growth phase we can't know when it will stop. We have a fixed[1] upper bound on the number of people we can deal with at one go. so when we see we are getting close, we have to take drastic action.
We know that testing in the uk is a proxy for actual infection, it tends to favour symptomatic as its "self selecting". The ONS survey is more accurate but has a significant lag.
I really hope that you are correct about asymptomatic. but we can't be sure, yet.
In New Zealand, it already has. Every time there is a single case or two, the entire locale (Auckland in this case) fully locks down. This is the 5th time it locked down. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/world/australia/new-zeala...
It's ironic that Covid has been arguably more disruptive in NZ than in US, which has a ton of cases.
> short and regional
Downplay it all you want. Auckland is a pretty big place. Alert Level 4 means that 1/3 of New Zealand population is locked down.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/10/coronavirus-texas-ho...
As the pandemic started, ~70% of ICU bed use was normal, since then its been around 80~90% and now approaching 100%.
https://covid-texas.csullender.com/
So yes it is overwhelming hospitals. Even if you're vaccinated, this should scare you.
It may not be universal, but it certainly appears to be the case that many hospitals are being pushed over the limit due to covid patients.
Part of the issue, though, appears to be the fact that hospital admins are unwilling to raise salaries on essential employees like nurses.
Note: last April (2020), they said it had exploded due to COVID-19.
Florida has the second-oldest population in the U.S., but it's death rate per 100,000 is average among the states. NYC and NJ are two states with the highest death rate per 100,000.
Both have very high hospitalization rates. Both also have very high vaccination rates.
In the worst case, it may just been that the vaccine effectiveness wanes over time.
Positive covid tests require a hell of a lot more hospital overhead to deal with, even if they don’t have symptoms and are in for something else. It could very well be the case that this is a self made problem. We very well could be artificially overloading hospitals because we dictate that every positive test, regardless of symptoms, invokes massive overhead.
And again, every article I read never clarifies this. In fact many conflate “people with covid but there for something else” and “people sick with covid”.
I am fully inclined to believe that this hospital shortage is a self inflicted problem. If this was literally a hospital full of people choking on their own ooze, the media would be all over it like moths to a flame.
The stories on the reddits I suggested are all pretty much the same. Patient comes in struggling to breath, tests positive for covid, ends up with blood clots or pneumonia which pushes them into the ICU.
Here's just one of many stories of burnout [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/p9ps06/the_burn_ou...
> So, the anecdotal evidence would be...
I'm not trying to represent it as anything other than that.
Here are a few different articles from around the gulf coast states that speak to this:
https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/houston...
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/1029260134/alabama-hospitals-...
Something that may be a little confusing as well is what does "full" mean. Both morally and legally, it is very difficult for a hospital to turn someone away. Rather than turn someone away, the hospital will have new people wait, attempt to make more room, and provide less care to more people. This leads to the question: Is a hospital full if they're stashing patients in hallways and providing hallway care? Within an ICU, typical care is either one nurse to two patients or one to one depending on the reason for the ICU stay. At the moment, the ratios are 3-4 to 1, which is not the standard of care, but the best they can do. Does this count as a hospital being full?
On a more personal note, my wife is an ICU physician. At the moment, I'm writing this from a hotel room because I started traveling with her to help alleviate the stress from her work. On this trip, she will do seven days of twelve hour shifts in a row. The hospital has asked us to stay for longer, but we're exhausted and have work elsewhere. This sort of thing does not happen during flu season, so I will assert strongly that we are still not close to the realm of normal.
In a direct answer to your manpower question, this hospital does not have enough staff. They don't have enough physicians and they don't have enough nurses. Recently, this particular hospital acquired multiple new ECMO units, which do absolutely help with care. They can't use them. They don't have the nurses.
As one more anecdote, a friend of my wife who is also an ICU physician called the other day with a story from her unit. She just admitted a patient who spent six days waiting in the ER with COVID. They had no available, staffed beds until then.
Now, to be sure, I am just another voice on the internet. You can choose to believe me or not and that's fine. I will say that getting news from what actually occurs in the hospital is difficult. Reporters are people too and they're not necessarily trained to understand the nuance of hospital reality. That doesn't mean what they report isn't useful, but it may be frustratingly incomplete.
Some questions that may help with any personal investigation:
1. What are the number of staffed bed available in the hospital? Beds are different than staffed beds, but they are sometimes used synonymously. Right now, with the lack of staff, it may not be.
2. Are the ICUs in the Level 1, 2, or 3 trauma centers full? Trauma center designation gives information about the number and type of staff that a hospital is required to keep available 24-hours a day. Generally speaking, the large trauma centers have better staff and better equipment. Even if there is an ICU bed available in a regional medical center, it doesn't mean it can provide the care required. Simply, they may not have the equipment or specialists required for care. As long as the large hospitals in the cities are full then transfer is not possible and overall medical care in that region is reduced.
Are these difficulties because there are fewer nurses on the market, the existing staff are burned out, there are better opportunities to work locums, or some other factor? Not sure. Mostly, it's to say that there was never a conversation between us on the lack of nurses prior to COVID.
As far as physicians, also not sure. I will say that demand was consistent prior to COVID, but now demand for both temporary and permanent positions is extremely high. They won't stop calling. Something to understand here is that the supply of new critical care physicians takes a very long time to ramp up, four years of medical school, four years of residency, and two years of fellowship. They're not easy to replace.
As a final side note, whether they do or not, they would all like to quit. They're burned out. This has gone on too long. The families dealing with end of life care are often abusive. Virtually all of their patients are unvaccinated, which means that this is preventable. They're frustrated that their professional opinion has very little impact on the public discussion of COVID, especially when they deal with the issue so intimately and they spent a good portion of their life dedicated to understanding and treating the issues behind illness.
[0]: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/20-hospitals-l...
Isolation from other patients means that they need other rooms and other nurses. It is not safe to have a nurse go from a clean room to a COVID room repeatedly if they don't have enough PPE to fully gown between rooms. Otherwise, there is cross contamination. Currently, there is not enough PPE. If a hospital has the staff, they will also isolate the physicians to either COVID or non-COVID wards to prevent cross contamination. Often, they do not have the physicians, so there is a time cost to constantly changing PPE. Time spent changing PPE means time not taking care of patients.
When a patient dies in a COVID room, the room must be cleaned. This takes time and staff. Failure to do so can also lead to increased infections.
To be clear, infections that spread in the hospital are very well studied. It's the reason why hospitals have very strict rules about things like hand hygiene. It's one of those inspections that can cost a hospital a lot of money.
That's a long way to say, it's not a self made problem. A patient that comes in for something like a heart stent who is also COVID positive is far more work than one who does not have COVID. I do not know if these news articles are referring to these cases as COVID hospitalizations. In some sense, it doesn't impact the broader issue: In a good number of states, hospitals are effectively full. The reason behind this issue is unvaccinated people catching COVID.
We need to accept that vaccines exist and work. It shouldn’t matter if the dude in the hospital has a positive covid test because everybody in that room can be vaccinated if they want to.
This mass testing created a bunch more problems than it solved.
The difference between COVID and something like cancer is that cancer is not highly contagious. COVID is. Further, it's contagious and deadly. That's why it requires special care. COVID is also not the only disease where these kind of precautions are taken. Another one is TB. Now, there are other diseases that are contagious, but not right now. For example, syphilis is both contagious and deadly. However, you're not going to catch syphilis when you're sitting next to someone who is positive. With COVID, you potentially will. That's why they have to test for it in the hospital.
Now, I will agree that vaccines exist and work. In the sense that there are people who choose to refuse vaccination, I will also agree it is a self made problem. However, this affects everyone to a high degree and not just the vaccinated.
Case in point, my wife and I are vaccinated. If she gets COVID, she most assuredly won't die, but she can't work in the ICU. She would risk getting her patients infected even though she is vaccinated. That means the hospital loses a physician in short supply. They're going to test you in the hospital because they can't afford you getting their staff sick.
This also affects you. You're vaccinated. However, say you're appendix bursts, you may or may not be able to get into the ER before you become septic. Yes, the ER will triage based on need. However, if there's no beds there's no beds and you will not be seen.
However, to reiterate, the hospital will always test you for diseases that they believe will affect their staff. You come in with respiratory symptoms. You're getting a COVID test. Having surgery? They'll test you for HIV. It's a protection issue. COVID is a pain because airborne infections are hard to contain.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/08/19/tenn...
The bottlenecks here aren't total capacity, they are (in order of importance) 1. the number of vents, 2. the number of nurses with ICU level training, and 3. the number of ICU beds. The total number of hospital beds doesn't even factor in.
Source: I am a physician.
This is a blip in the ocean of hospitalizations in LA county.
"Tallia says his hospital is 'managing, but just barely,' at keeping up with the increased number of sick patients in the last three weeks. The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and its outpatient clinics have no appointments available.”
"Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that UAB Hospital cancelled elective surgeries scheduled for Thursday and Friday of last week to make more beds available"
“We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” says Camins. “The emergency room was very crowded, both with sick patients who needed to be admitted”
"In CA… several hospitals have set up large 'surge tents' outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat … patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.”
“Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread… Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots to triage the hordes of… patients.”
“We’ve never had so many patients,” said Adrian Cotton, chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County.”
...but then again, maybe not. These are all quotes from 2018, flu season.
Why are healthcare systems unable to scale (horizontally or vertically) to meet demand unlike every other industry in the world? That should be a red flag that you don't have a robust system when it is unable to scale. We've had nearly 2 years since the start of covid to make healthcare systems more robust. Why haven't we? Maybe we should focus on that instead of telling people to mask up from cradle to grave.
Imagine if the computer industry were the same and we asked people to limit their internet time for 2+ years because the servers and routers that make up the internet were always on the brink of collapse? Like... wouldn't we just build more servers and routers until demand could be met?
Extraordinary claims…
If you're saying we should fill that labor requirement with low-skill medical technicians, you're misunderstanding the needs of the hospital. If you are ending up in the ER or ICU with covid, or any other cause, you are beyond the help of an at-home med tech, which is why you're at the hospital in the first place.
The problem is that the incentives aren't aligned with health care primarily due to third party payer system and onerous regulations.
You ever wonder why there is a line of people outside of urgent care every day to get tested for covid? Presumably, there are cheap tests that be administered at home without having to see a nurse or doctor. Or if you really can't do that you can train someone how to administer tests in a few hours and have that as a service. But in the US at least, it's nearly impossible to do these things. It took until April 2021 for the FDA to approve at home covid tests, and they're still not popular or available (at least I haven't seen them)
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
But a lot can be done. In Italy during the height of the pandemic, they "emergency graduated" 5th (or maybe 6th ... near the end) year medical students. I really wonder if there's any data whether they provided worse care after some on-the-job training than "fully educated" practitioners.
If I have a private pilots license and the pilot of my commercial aircraft is incapacitated, sure I'm technically more qualified than the others on the aircraft to try to perform an emergency landing. But that doesn't mean American Airlines should be expanding their routes because I could land a plane.
If the ICU patient can't breathe on a vent and are able to secure ECMO, the ECMO specialist ratio is ideally 1:1. Under a crush of patients maybe 1:2 patients. A 1:3 ratio is risking all the patients under that specialist's care because the patients are all too tenuous. Let me reiterate and restate: 3 ECMO patients are too much for a single ES to support.
The ECMO specialist isn't the only person caring for the patient. There is the ICU nursing staff, the pulmonary therapist, plus the actual pulmonary doctors, the renal doctors, plus plus plus. You are talking decades if not a hundred+ years of study just to take care of a single ICU patient.
Labor and not beds is the bottleneck.
The only way to deal with this pandemic is to vaccinate as many people as possible. It's the best way that we know of to reduce spread of, and the effects of catching covid-19.
This has always been a systemic problem of how hard medical education and license are to get. I'm pretty sure medical personnel can be trained to reasonable (mediocre but better than nothing) skill level much faster and for much cheaper than it normally is.
This approach might sound like some completely out of the box, untested and extreme approach, yet it’s completely standard in industries that are not as heavily regulated as medicine is. Alas, healthcare has its Rules and Procedures and Best Practices, and as a result, everyone else must adjust and implement novel approaches, so that the healthcare industrial and regulatory complex doesn’t have to.
I guess I'm bias because my spouse is an ICU RN, but the ignorance of HN comments boggles my mind. Do all the hackers try to solve domain problems they have absolutely 0 experience in? I don't pretend to have solutions for the healthcare system because I don't work in the healthcare domain. I can assure you, the red tape that exists is there for very good reasons, because we've tried "unregulated" systems and they were a disaster. We've learned from our mistakes, and that means rigor that can't be replaced by some keyboard jockey writing webdev or embedded systems for unrelated fields.
How did this understaffing happen?
> More than 260 hospitals and health systems furloughed workers in the last year, and many others implemented layoffs.
[0]: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/20-hospitals-l...
The big issues are: the job sucks, the patients suck, the insurance companies suck, the hospital administration sucks. It's a hard, thankless job, where you get shit on all day by everyone, figuratively and literally, and for not much pay. Pre-COVID, pay was maybe $30-35/hr for most floor jobs. Or you could get an hospital office job, making more than that working a basic 9-5, no shit, no working holidays, no lawsuits (due to bone-headed coworkers fucking up), no feeling like a waiter, or being groped by patients.
Nursing is a terrible career anymore.
What you're describing is either an MD, a NP, or a traditional nurse/specialist.
ICU nurses have been worked to the bone for 18 months now, and often already at higher patient/nurse ratios that customary.
The coming problem won’t be one one of insufficient beds but insufficient people to care for them.
I understand this is much easier said than done but we hardly have a choice if we actually want to do something useful.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/intubation-ventilator-...
The answer to this is not to say 'we can't fix the underlying issues right now, so we're not going to do anything'. The answer is to take measures that we _can_ implement until those longer-term solutions can come into play.
It's like the whole chip shortage thing. Most people ask why aren't we building more chip-building plants? The answer is we are doing that, but it takes billions of dollars and a lot of trained manpower to set up such a factory, and all of that takes a lot of time.
These are what are called in economics as highly inelastic supplies, which it seems is unknown to many commentators, who BTW have a habit of quoting Econ 101 in every discussion.
Social distancing and masking work. They reduce the possibilities for spread between people -- not perfectly, but enough to reduce it to a manageable level for our current healthcare resources.
Saying that our current measures to combat the virus don't work is disingenuous at best, and a blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst.
I have always been a vaccine enthusiast but now I see infection surging even in the most vaccinated areas.
> masking work
I have always been saying this, even when officials denied. Yes, mandatory masks in public transport and grocery stores are the only of all the deployed measures I recognize as actually working.
> blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst.
I actually don't think we have learnt much.
Despite the decline in vaccine effectiveness (I've seen conflicting studies of how much this has changed), they're still incredibly effective compared to any other protection we have at the moment.
None of this changes the fact that people are going to continue to die until a higher proportion of the population receives a COVID vaccine -- and that we _can_ mitigate this through other measures. None of these things lead me to the conclusion that we should return to normal and accept an increased healthcare system burden and death rate.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...
The reported share of COVID-19 cases among those not fully vaccinated ranged from 94.1% in Arizona to 99.85% Connecticut.
The share of hospitalizations among those with COVID-19 who are not fully vaccinated ranged from in 95.02% in Alaska to 99.93% in New Jersey. (Note: Hospitalization may or may not have been due to COVID-19.)
The share of deaths among people with COVID-19 who are not fully vaccinated ranged from to 96.91% in Montana to 99.91% in New Jersey. (Note: Deaths may or may not have been due to COVID-19.)How is this data useful what so ever? I don't particularly care if someone in a car accident was or was not vaccinated unless Pfizer has came up with an MRNA based seat belt recently. If anything this data just muddies up the waters further.
Over 94% of patients are unvaccinated... It's pretty clear in my mind what's happening here.
This line made me both laugh and cry a little.
edit: your comment did make me laugh though. So perhaps you were just going for humor, in which case you succeeded and I apologize for being a wet blanket.
Might be better than having nothing, in the case of ICUs being overwhelmed and overcapacitied.
This seems to be the fundamental disagreement between the ‘anti’ side (anti-mask, anti-vaxx etc) and the ‘pro’ side. The reality is that different people can have vastly different risk tolerances. Some people are ok knowing they could die from a circulating respiratory illness and some simply are not. Some people believe vaccines are risky, others do not.
The challenge is it’s very hard (maybe impossible) to change someone’s personal risk tolerance. Imagine trying to convince someone with a fear of heights to go skydiving. You can state the facts, cite safety figures for parachutes etc but you are still unlikely to get them on a plane.
There are many articles (I’ve seen two just in passing) where nurses talk about COVID patients going on a ventilator, and begging for the vaccine, only to be told it’s too late.
I feel that most people that are taking risks with COVID (e.g. healthy people not getting vaccinated) either don’t have enough foresight to realize they actually don’t want to be hospitalized/die from this, or they don’t believe the risks are real.
Risk assessment is something many aren’t great at — that is striking a reasonable balance between no fear and too much fear. This is made worse by conflicting opinions and studies, and not being able to discern truth from fiction/sensationalism.
You read about it, I have heard from the witnesses. Some beg, some show fatalist. In fact,
> until they’re bitten
some do not quite realize that it is death involving slow asphyxia we are talking about... Days of drowning, not minutes.
> Risk assessment [...] is made worse by conflicting opinions and studies, and not being able to discern truth from fiction/sensationalism
Which is one of the biggest mess behind e.g. vaccine hesitancy, not to mention not convincing narratives about correct behaviour to prevent spreading.
Anyway, the communicational mess is a disaster, while this reference "fiction" is more problematic. It is not, at this level, something you discriminate easily. When Derek Lowe writes some find him credible, when Robert Malone speaks some find him credible - keys for discrimination are not easily at hand.
That is your opinion. One person’s neurotic is another person’s normal. It’s very hard, maybe impossible, to force-change someone’s perception of risk. Both sides will remain at loggerheads until they accept this.
Second, about "getting antibodies the natural way": what about a 7 points IQ drop as a risk? What about a first-level-paretian-20-per-cent risk of long consequences, "the fifth wins four fifths of the jackpot"? A few made that reasoning and could tell you it was not a good idea, some still feel damaged. I invite you: do not focus on death as a risk.
How can you be almost sure ? Are you an immunologist or a contagious disease expert ? Do you have data to back this up ?
Maybe on the next mutation I'll have cause to agree with you. For now, herd immunity is still an endgame worth pursuing.
In the US through May 2021, so it might not be a good representation for delta, here were the infections, hospitalizations, and deaths per 100k for various age groups:
Age Inf Hosp Deaths
0-17 37k 287 0.5
18-49 44k 1100 25
50-64 32k 2600 85
65+ 22k 5200 1140
If the numbers for delta are at all similar for kids, then there is a good chance that there is not much difference between a population where everybody gets vaccinated and population where all the adults get vaccinated but the kids do not, suggesting vaccinating adults should be the priority.
The long term endgame is probably a population where it is endemic, everyone gets it as a child when they are young enough that it doesn't cause serious illness, and then keeps getting it every year or so for the rest of their lives. Those subsequent cases don't cause serious illness because they still have protection from the last time.
That's what happened with the four other coronaviruses that are in wide circulations in humans. They are thought to have caused terrible pandemics when they first got to humans which were deadly in adults but not bad in children. Nowadays they are still around, everyone gets them frequently, and we don't even bother to have a separate name for the illness they cause. We just lump it in with the illnesses from a bunch of other viruses and call it the common cold. Around 20% of common colds are from those coronaviruses.
The relevant argument with kids and Delta is not about whether it happens to some people, it's whether the risk rates high enough to mobilize large scale, disruptive countermeasures.
I can only find data on deaths, not hospitalizations [1], but assuming the numbers are roughly proportional here are things that are more dangerous to kids than Delta:
- Drug ODs
- Car accidents
- Cancer
- Heart disease
- Drowning
- Suffocation
The posted numbers seem to imply that if 37k out of 100k kids had covid, 287 of them end up in the hospital. Does it not follow that if 100k out of 100k had covid that 775 kids would have been hospitalized?
> Granted we're probably way under counting infections in that age group
People get tested when they feel sick enough to be worried, there are many very minor and/or asymptomatic cases for which we won't have data. By using the positive case counts as the denominator you are using the most serious slice of cases to argue that coronavirus infections are serious.
It's definitely not exact to use the infection as the denominator, but I'd argue it's much closer than using the 100k as the denominator. I think I stand by my original post.
Like you, I can't wait until the vaccines are approved for under 12 children.
Yes, this is now thought to be the case for the 1889-1890 pandemic.
[0]: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/infant-child-and-teen...
Hospitalisation rates have been pretty much flat vs previous waves (there was no wave last summer).
Do you have some numbers?
As far as I know, it indeed supresses the virus from circulating, it just doesn't stop it completely.
Here in my area, which started early with broad vaccinations - the numbers are way down.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
For fun, add India, which has comparatively low vaccinations, where Delta began:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
But while I was looking into that, last at the beginning of the year - the quality was horrible. Even here in developed germany, it was hard to get meaningful numbers from different districts. I mean, there were lots and lots of data flying around, but most of it not solid or directly comparable in my understanding.
And here india looks interesting, if true. That would speak for a sort of herd immunity?
I think most data is not really comparable across countries, only across time (and even then: discard data early on), because of different levels of data collection. So best only to compare the same country vs its own prev spikes. But this is esp true with India vs smaller countries, you may be able to compare Euro nations to each other more accurately, but would caution against interpreting small differences as meaningful.
UK for instance: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
Both those factors would result in a softer curve without any vaccination.
Nope, it does not. Check your facts again with the Delta variant.
This fact really bothers me. I feel like once adults got vaccinated we all spiked the football and said "F--k the kids, I got mine".
Death rate for kids with new variant please?
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
That said, my kids are wearing made in the USA masks.
Until there is data that shows conclusively that Delta affects kids more than previous variants, you should not parrot lines like "that appears to be changing quickly". Substantiate your claim with data or at least say it's anecdotal. Alternatively, if you have data, please share it.
We can send the kids back to school with no vaccines, no masks, no precautions, and say "We don't have any data that this thing is dangerous for children". The obvious problem there is that we don't have a ton of data in general with this variant. So, if we're wrong about the danger, we risk harming a lot of children while we dutifully wait for the data to roll in.
This is the same reason that most women (and many men for that matter) will cross the street late at night if they are on an empty street and see a large man approaching them. They have zero evidence suggesting that the person is a threat, but the cost of being wrong in such cases is very high. So, having limited data, they tend to take a very cautious and conservative approach and cross the street. In our case, just change, "Cross the street" to "Wear a mask".
This comparison is far from perfect, but you get the idea.
In other words, whoever makes a claim that things have changed better provide a reason why it is reasonable to think things have changed. Typically that comes in data.
No arguing on Hacker News is going to change the policy response anyway.
Also remember that herd immunity works best when those who are antibodies are evenly distributed. Schools will become major places where it's spread because of how many people without immunity are in one place.
For me, the mood in London is "we've had enough, it's endemic, let's live with it".
How can herd immunity be achieved with a leaky vaccine?
I hear you that we will eventually reach a point where we've hit the new normal. It's just going to be whether that point is reached because we've given up (due to people refusing to vaccinate) or because we've managed to vaccinate enough. I think many people aren't ready to give up. Personally, the restrictions are quite meaningless to me in the US, but I can imagine that that's just because I get to work from home and all that.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/united-kingdo...
We are also lagging among BAME groups and in certain economically deprived areas. If you are a white 75 year-old in Wimbledon the odds that you are vaccinated are around 95%, while if you are a 30 year-old Pakistani immigrant in Bradford then I would put the odds closer to 50%. Still a long way to go, but constantly improving.
Are there reasons for hesitancy expressed among the population?
However, with the high R0 of Delta taking its toll, it looks like places are starting to take the approach of making people's lives more limited if they aren't fully vaccinated without quite going to the level of mandating vaccination.
Low compared to what? Do you know the vaccinations rates for all other diseases for which we have vaccines for?
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-around-nine-in-10-adults...
> Latest estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show 89.8% of adults in England are likely to have the antibodies, with the highest percentage of adults testing positive for them estimated to be the age groups 60 to 64, 70 to 74 and 75 to 79 (all 96.8%).
> The lowest percentage was for 16 to 24-year-olds at around 59.7%.
The 92% (91.8% cited) is presumably from this sentence?
> In Wales, 91.8% of adults are estimated to have antibodies in their system
Intranasal boosters are the one obvious thing we could do top-down to end the pandemic and only have to deal with epidemics.
ref: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/397
ref: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... page 5, #8. "Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals."
The narrative has always been we‘ll be back to normal in X weeks if we are all good little boys and girls and do what we‘re told. Unless of course some other really good reason to lockdown arises, like that single case in NZ.
I'm willing to believe this is fake news from the NYT, or that the situation has changed, but others are reporting it as well.
Meanwhile at my regional institution the students are beginning to grumble. Let's go back online, they say, too many instructors cancel lecture because they are sick with covid and too many students can't attend class because they in bed with covid. That's what excess freedom looks like.
If everyone would just get vaccinated, we'd be there.
Instead people are for whatever reason ignoring the risks of the virus, and if the rate of hospitalization in their age category is only 1 in 50, enough of them making that choice mean that 2% of them guessing wrong is knocking the hospital system over again.
Ok then don't? No one is forcing you to go out.
Let everyone else make their own decisions. I'm kinda tired of the hypochondriacs forcing everyone else to do what they want. Everyone has access to the vaccine, they can stay in and mask all they want, they do not have to go near people. There's absolutely no reason to be locking down the rest of society. The only argument to keep these restrictions in place is if the hospitals get over capacity and that's not happening.
It’s happening in quite a few places.
https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
Additionally you need to provide a strategy that would stop this. Since apparently mass vaccination and locking down for nearly 2 years didn't help. Or you can keep supporting the same thing and hoping for different results.
Are you suggesting we should all be responsible for stopping other people from drunk driving and also stopping anyone from getting into a car with a drunk driver? Are you also attempting to suggest that everyone else get should have their drivers' license revoked for the few that are caught drunk driving? That's essentially what masking, forced vaccination, mandated passports is.
Might wanna find a new metaphor. I'm sure you think that was an intelligent comparison but it absolutely sucks. You're comparing something that would take a deliberate act to something that might or might not be happening passively to you.
Also you're trying to appeal to emotion by framing mask wearing as some sort of punishment ("revoking" people's drivers licenses) vs a precaution (like wearing a seatbelt... or not driving drunk). Furthermore, people caught drunk driving DO get their licenses taken away.
That's because I do view it as a punishment. Maybe you like wearing a mask, I do not. I got vaccinated and stayed away from big events, masked etc. for 2 years. I did my part, I'm done.
Enough with this kindergarten level discipline. It's like punishing the entire class for the one kid that can't keep quiet. Yeah the noisy kid is an ass and should be quiet but the teacher is the one you should really be mad at.
And we are not talking about locking down the rest of society. That was the extreme end of the spectrum when we were trying to get it under control. The only place still with national lockdowns are NZ and Australia because they were able to contain and control the virus earlier on.
Sounds like you are equating your experience with everyone. Not everyone has access to the vaccine, not everyone is able to work remotely, some people have to interact with the public as part of their job. Perhaps try looking at things from the perspective of people who are less fortunate than yourself.
There is an underlying current of selfishness behind everything you say.
Sorry. It is selfish to ask people to continue to cower away in order to assuage peoples fear.
How am I removing that choice? Did I say anywhere they were not allowed to host it virtually if they chose to do so? The only one removing choices is the individual that decides they don't want anyone in person.
>Sounds like you are equating your experience with everyone. Not everyone has access to the vaccine, not everyone is able to work remotely, some people have to interact with the public as part of their job. Perhaps try looking at things from the perspective of people who are less fortunate than yourself.
Every reason you listed here only supports NOT locking down. Everyone in the US does have access to the vaccine. I am looking at it correctly, you're the one that wants people not to work by locking down everything. What's your solution? Wait until everyone gets it, which will never happen?
The irony in calling me the selfish one. I'm not making anyone do anything here. Exactly how is telling everyone they must do something not selfish? Anyone supporting more lockdowns/masking at this point is only doing it for themselves and no one else.
Literally the only country that should be considering a lockdown at this stage is New Zealand due to them being a great way to prevent spread if there are very few cases in the general population and the majority of people are unvaccinated. For everyone else the only realistic solution.is vaccination for as much of the population as possible.
You literally supported lockdown measure with this comment. I'm not sure why you're backtracking now.
You might wanna backtrack on the whole AUS NZ thing since they've essentially become authoritarian police states over the COVID cases everyone told them they would get hit with. Turns out it had nothing to do with their measures and everything to do with the fact they're giant islands that can stop anyone coming into their country.
Australia has gone a bit nuts but it's hardly a police state and NZ has fared very well and is very definitely not an authoritarian police state.
Of everywhere NZ has had the best handling of the situation. Of course it had everything to do with their measures, stopping international travel was one of those measures, lockdowns were another.
If the lecturer is remote, then the 250 attendees don't have the choice to be there in person.
The problem is it's a tricky system to manage. We can measure hospital utilization, but that lags infections. We can mandate lockdowns, but compliance varies and too many changes risks more non-compliance.
Also, there are existing reasons leading to too many people in hospitals that reduces capacity. And systemic issues that make staffing a challenge.
No, what the world is seeing is that intramuscular vaccination for respiratory diseases does not provide long lasting IgG antibodies to the upper respiratory mucosa tissues. They seep into the lower lungs and provide protection there though. This has been known since the 1960s when the first intranasal flu vaccinations were introduced to combat the problem.
It wouldn't matter what variant is going around, it just happens to be delta now. The problem is the lack of persistent IgG antibodies in the surface mucosal tissues. To get long term protection from infection of these you need intranasal vaccination to recruit resident B and T cells to the mucosa to make IgA antibodies. Intramuscular does not prevent spread, it only prevents hospitalization and death. This is also true for intramuscular flu vaccination.
(I was right in front of ourworldindata.org)
I guess it's possible that the same site shows different numbers depending on what view you use, so I include the link below.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
It's better than before, but it's too dangerous.
Maybe the only out of this is wait for more mutations with lower fatality.
:(
Any restrictions you see in the UK are implemented by businesses/local government (e.g. masks on the tube, or in some shops).
The law to imprison yourself (isolate) still is very much a law.
Not true. There is no national requirement to wear a mask on public transport. London Underground and the Manchester Metro have used mayoral powers to require mask wearing - with variable compliance. Elsewhere its down to individual choice.
> Plus mandatory self-quarantine if you are pinged by the NHS app.
Not true. The app gives a recommendation. Only the NHS test and trace service can legally require you to self isolate. And for that you need to test positive (pcr) and not be fully vaccinated.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that around 70-80% of people on the London Underground are still wearing masks. Which is to say that the "mandate" is a joke (like so many of our restrictions have been) and clearly isn't being enforced.
The percentage of people wearing masks on the tube, where masks are "compulsory", doesn't seem much higher than the percentage of people who are voluntarily wearing masks in other public places which have no mandate, so the fact that most people are still wearing masks on the Tube is probably less because of the mandate and more because of people's general sense of precaution/paranoia. I suspect if the mask mandate were lifted then most people would continue to wear masks voluntarily anyway, just as they're still doing at the supermarket.
I think you're poorly informed - it has never been mandatory to self-quarantine if pinged by the app.
And government mandated face masks on public transport went away on the 19th of July - but people are still encouraged and I think required by some individual institutions not by Her Majesty's Government.
And I don't think jet-setting around is 'daily life' so that's disingenuous.
The only thing OP has a point on is travel abroad, which yeh as you say isn't really daily life for the majority of people and probably isn't too big a pill to swallow temporarily, and continued working from home, which to my knowledge is the choice of companies, not the government (though either way, I'm not complaining)
This is the new normal (thankfully). Government regulations or not, management will not be able to force people back in the office. Office culture was a quirk of the 20th century. A halfway house between the assembly line and the internet. Covid just forced its inevitable collapse.
I suspect once the bean counters discover that the office is only used for an hour once a week also after corona there will be pressure to remove a lot of the seats.
The only one really resisting at my company is the "office manager" for some reason ;)
Not to mention the millions of jobs that can't be done remotely no matter how hard you try, but that's on a whole 'nother planet.
I really hope this will stay forever, or at least until people don't learn to stay home when they get a cold
Not everyone can afford that, with a fear of losing their jobs.
How can the new employee proof he was fired, because he was sick too often?
Sure it may differ If I travel but that's one restriction not a multitude as you suggest.
[1] https://www.sst.dk/en/english/corona-eng/status-of-the-epide...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Age_str...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/02/herd-immu...
I cracked some ribs three weeks ago and coughing / sneezing are really painful. I am keeping my mask on because I really don't want even a mild cough, for whatever reason.
More generally, the vaccines are not 100% effective, the virus can still be transmitted and spread. For lots of people, getting COVID is still life threatening, even if the average case is not as bad as it used to be.
Sorry. Life is short. I’ve sacrificed 1.6 years of it for something I’ve never been afraid of. I’ve played by all the rules, but enough is enough. It is super selfish to insist we continue to live this way. We aren’t living, we are being kept alive… life was meant to be lived.
The only person who truly looks after my well-being is me. I can be selfish. I deserve to have my actual normal life back. My 2019 life didnt revolve around worrying about stopping the spread of exactly one very specific disease.
If y’all want to hide under the bed at home until some undefined end date… go for it. But forcing society to do the same with you is incredibly selfish.
https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pand...
There are almost no UK legal restrictions relating to covid. There are some rules about people returning from certain high risk countries. And unvaccinated people who test positive still have to self isolate. And that's about it.
Many people (like myself) still wear masks in busy indoor locations. And many are choosing to forego foreign holidays this summer.
Life here in the UK doesn't feel entirely normal, but it's much much nearer to pre-pandemic conditions than this time last year.
"Choosing" is a strange way to put it when COVID testing and quarantine requirements have added hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of pounds to the cost of most foreign holidays and the rules are changing so frequently and suddenly that it's a big financial risk to book anything more than a few days in advance.
Until the number needed for herd immunity is achieved, the 30% (or whatever) of your population that is not vaccinated can suffer devastating spikes in cases. Mostly having herd immunity is not a thing.
SARS in 2002-2004 killed 811 people. H1N1 killed 18,500 in 2009. Neither of those had the sort of mass lock-downs mitigating their spread that we are experiencing now. I don't know about you, but I can see a big difference.
I certainly don't see a reason to go maskless on public transportation in the future. And, as supply chain problems work themselves out, someone will probably make masks that actually filter out virus-size particles and fit more people's faces. (I feel like every mask I've bought so far during the pandemic has either been completely ineffective, or has been designed to fit someone that is 1/3 my size.)
> The experience may also prompt people to take all respiratory viruses more seriously, leading to lasting changes in mask wearing and ventilation.
I don't think that mask mandates will continue, but I do think that many more people will choose to wear masks in situations that warrant them. In Asia, it was already pretty common before COVID-19 and even before SARS. Walk around Tokyo on any given day and you'll see people wearing masks (mostly to protect others). I think the West now has some idea why that might be a good thing.
The world has irreversibly changed. There is no getting around that.
If I found being nude to be significantly more comfortable/freeing than being clothed, I would still be expected to wear clothing in public spaces for both politeness and sanitary (e.g. sitting on subway seats) reasons.
And why stop at respiratory viruses? Sexual infections cause all kinds of harm too - the obvious response is to ban sex. When people want to reproduce they can just use IVF - thank God we live in the modern era.
And by the way, do you have any idea how many people are killed every year in road accidents? I propose we ban cars. Let's also ban walking in case anybody trips over. And let's ban eating so that no-one ever chokes on their food.
Am I doing this right?
Barely a century ago, it wasn't common for doctors to wash their hands, because it hurt doctors' feelings. Dr. Charles Meigs, an obstetrician, said, "Doctors are gentlemen and a gentleman's hands are clean."
But, of course, factually they weren't clean, factually they were full of germs, and factually Dr. Meigs was killing several of the people he operated on through his unclean hands. There was factual data that infant mortality dropped significantly in clinics where doctors were washing their hands.
But the response to hand-washing was much like yours. "You're saying society should keep washing hands everywhere literally forever? That's so insane I can't tell whether you're even serious." And in fact they sent the doctor who suggested hand-washing to an insane asylum, where he died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...
This scenario [1] is a specific instance of using chlorinated lime to clean your hands after dealing with cadavers, which is a totally different scenario. In fact, he apparently references this as an alternative to "normal hand washing". The mid-19th century is not the middle ages, we knew about washing hands.
> Semmelweis's key claim was that physicians contaminated their hands with "cadaveric particles" in the morgue while conducting autopsies. He pointed out that ordinary washings with soap did not remove these particles, because the hands could retain a stench for several days in spite of such washings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...
All I can say is that people are going to be super upset when they go to cash in their HN karma and find that it isn't honored as legal tender ;)
If you get it after being vaccinated, you still have a ~20% chance of becoming disabled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/well/live/vaccine-long-co...
It literally says: "While most of the breakthrough cases were mild or asymptomatic, seven out of 36 workers tracked at six weeks (19 percent) still had persistent symptoms. These long Covid symptoms included a mix of prolonged loss of smell, persistent cough, fatigue, weakness, labored breathing or muscle pain."
It's certainly not great data, but it's still the best information we have as of right now.
I'm starting to think you've never encountered someone with a disability in your life.
Having muscle weakness in your arms mean that you can't do things like raising your hands to chest level and squeezing someone's hand. In practice it means you can't do everyday things like opening doors, or else can only do them with great difficulty.
Having muscle weakness in the legs means that if you're lying on your back, you don't have the ability to raise your legs off the ground. In practice, it means that you can't do everyday things like walking, or else can only do them with great difficulty and probably some form of assistance.
It's obviously not exactly the same as being paralyzed, but it's not that far off either. On the spectrum from "I'm not setting new deadlift PRs lately" to "I'm likely going to hospice soon", it's a lot closer to the latter than the former. There's a good chance that it means using a wheelchair, possibly indefinitely. I think you're doing people an extreme disservice by underplaying how serious this is.
With paralysis, the cause is usually traumatic spinal cord injury. Whereas with muscle weakness, the cause is usually something more like an autoimmune disease attacking the tissue around your spinal cord. But in both cases the end result is nerve signals not getting properly transmitted, and the impact on everyday life is pretty similar.
"Real pilots know that autopilot means you still have to pay attention - nevermind that 99.9% of society thinks that idiom means they can sleep behind the wheel while it's turned on"
Because it s not about the pandemic. It s about asserting control over population and making them obey whatever govts, ongs, big pharma or big corps come up with. A kind of a mass scale social engineering project.
Edit: this btw doesn t need to be some sort of a secret group project. It can rise naturally and decentralized among many connected decision groups(govts, academia, big corps, etc) which already happened.
The only group who can be said to have really profited off this is pharma. Maybe they have orchestrated the whole thing, but I'd like to see some evidence first.
Unless you think we're living through the only crisis in history which powerful people haven't exploited to further their existing agendas.
Are seatbelt laws a mass experiment in social control?
Are laws mandating wearing underwear in public "about asserting control over population and making them obey"?
For this, or other instances you might come up with, you had a large consensus between the rulers and the ruled. No one questioned the motif behind seatbelt wearing or other public safety measures.
Do you have such a consensus for vaccine mandates, lockdowns, mask wearing or covid passports? It seems not. The only consensus you have is at the top between those who hold the power, resources and influence.
When you have skeptic voices and vaccine hesitant people among medical personnel we can t really talk about a consensus. If you can't even persuade some doctor or nurse to agree with your medical decisions without using coercion what should the average joe do? What does that tell us about the motifs of those that hold the decision power?
Our government loves to pat themselves on the back having 80% vaccination. Which is more than double the usual flu shot rates. Yet here we are with a 4th wave, talk about complete lockdown.
At what point do you say that our approach is no different than the usual flu season? In my opinion that was long ago.
So why? Technically don't know the answer. You can look at it from liberties point of view. That the reason these restrictions haven't lifted has nothing to do with covid.
Another theory which seems legit. Vaccine doesnt work. If you follow texas gov abbot. TONS of articles slamming him for getting covid. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/texas-gov-abbott-who-banned-...
Texas Gov. Abbott, who banned mask and vaccine mandates, tests positive for Covid
But wait... Abbott is fully vaccinated. That's a huge issue. You can't slam him banning masks and all that. Vaccination is vaccination.
Article title should be "Texas Gov. Abbott, who is fully vaccinated, tests positive for Covid"
But that's where the politics of the situation come in. It's very evident covid-19 is completely influenced by politics. Which brings you right back to liberties point of view.
80% vaccine efficacy. We were hoping for 50% so that's actually pretty good.
This is on par with "we had a snowstorm so climate change isn't real" levels of logic.
Abbott has a mild case and isn't sucking on ventilator.
CDC says 94% efficacy. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7018e1.htm
Immunocompromise is 6%. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/blog/immunocompromised-... - Estimates are that about 6.2 percent of adults ages 18-64 in the U.S. are living with weakened immune function,
The vaccine is 100% effective for healthy fully vax people. That 6% is concerning and will differ amount countries im sure.
>This is on par with "we had a snowstorm so climate change isn't real" levels of logic.
I find your analogy to be very telling. You have moved to another political issue that is quite divided along the same political lines.
>Abbott has a mild case and isn't sucking on ventilator.
Does abbott have a compromised immune system? Shrug?
Should we even discuss the possibility that covid testing has high false positive testing? That Abbott never had covid and his more recent tests only days later he tested negative.
Published in May, using data from Jan-Mar.
Delta didn't exist.
> I find your analogy to be very telling. You have moved to another political issue that is quite divided along the same political lines.
I mean, yes. Science has become politicized and one side of the debate keeps making poor arguments.
> Abbott never had covid and his more recent tests only days later he tested negative.
He's vaccinated. Ct loads of viral mRNA drop more sharply if you've been vaccinated. Having it clear fast is expected.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...
No, its not. While the rates are somewhat higher with Delta, breakthrough infections were always expected. The accines reduce the probability of getting COVID with similar exposure, they don't 100% prevent it.
> You can't slam him banning masks and all that.
Yes, you can. Even if schools weren't full of unvaccinated people, which they are, the existence of breakthrough infections would underline why banning mask mandates is a culpablr error.
That isn’t the way it was portrayed. The way that it was initially portrayed by the media is that these would be 99% effective and that after getting the vaccine you could go back to normal.
Maybe your problem is you listen too much to the mainstream media instead of doing research for yourself? The corporate interests are trying to get you to consume more and so they wanted to entice you with the prospect of "going back to normal" and consuming things you don't need.
That's not my understanding, I'm in IT and not a biologist or whatever. So perhaps you can explain to me.
A vaccine is something that boosts/helps the immune system develop protection against the disease.
Measles vaccine means nobody got measles until antivaxers started spreading measles.
Yes there can be a portion of society which does not have an immune system for the vaccine to help or boost and therefore the vaccines aren't useful and doesn't work. Percentages will change per country/society. However, someone fully vaccinated in my mind is someone who is never going to be infectious. Therefore prevents it.
>Yes, you can. Even if schools weren't full of unvaccinated people, which they are, the existence of breakthrough infections would underline why banning mask mandates is a culpablr error.
The problem with covid is that it clearly divides directly down political lines. Perhaps Texas guy is politically motivated and making bad decisions. The problem is the opposite as well. CNBC is clearly attacking when it's clearly unreasonable to do so.
I have no pity at all for anti-vaxxers who get covid. I'm not in the USA, nor do I care about Texas.
My synopsis of that was that it was not expected (by the developers of the vaccines) that it would prevent people getting the illness, but that it would considerably reduce the risk of serious infection.
Some early trial results raised hopes that it would prevent people getting it, but with Delta that's not been borne out.
That said, in addition to reducing the risk of serious cases, it does also help reduce transmission as vaccinated people who get it, generally have less serious cases, which mean they are infectious for a smaller amount of time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-gov-gre...
It's like any other clothing: you're protecting a vulnerable part of your body and also displaying respect for others. And it's mostly enforced by social norms: though in many places it is in fact illegal to go without clothing, people wear clothes regardless of the law. (I was in San Francisco at the time the public nudity ban, or shall we call it the "clothing requirement," was passed, and I can assure you that people were generally clothed in San Francisco even before then.)
As another comment pointed out the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255121), it's not just going to be SARS-nCoV-2. There's going to be a lot more easily communicable diseases in the future in dense locations. And there was the first SARS, of course, and countries hit hard by the first SARS already adopted a norm of mask-wearing in crowded locations like public transit, which helps them with other diseases that are "here forever" like the seasonal flu.
I think mask-wearing in public is going to become a sign of basic respect and decency and hygiene. We're already comfortable with "No shoes, no shirt, no service."