This statement might be true for your location but is not true in general. Here in New York City hospitalizations due to covid are not very high and going down quickly. Elective surgeries and procedures go on as scheduled. ICUs are not overrun with covid specific cases. Majority of the patients with positive PCR test are hospitalized for medical reasons other than covid. Recorded deaths do not differentiate between "died from covid" and "died while covid positive" making death statistics hard to interpret. In general, compared to the situation on the ground in March-April 2020 this time the covid load on NYC hospital system is lighter.
The biggest challenge is staffing shortages in the hospitals due to general burn-out, people being on sick leave due to spreading omicron. Noticeable percentage of nurses were laid off because of the vaccine mandate (i am not judging the mandate, just stating the consequence).
SOURCE: several physician relatives and friends working in NYC hospitals (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...
I'll tell you that here in Chicago, based off data, and anecdotes: really depends on the neighborhood. Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well.
Gosh, it's like vaccines work and that's the way out of this.
You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I'd just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way. Who is it directed towards? Do you think you are convincing anyone, or encouraging a productive discussion? I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated. I know I am.
In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn't assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.
I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won't help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.
I don't agree with an argument from stand-my-ground, my-body-my-choice principles. I could agree with such a line of reasoning, if a personal choice did not present an immediate danger to anyone else.
This is a very infectious disease with severe health consequences. No one has control over the outcome, if they choose to infect another person. Maybe it's no big deal for them. Or maybe it wrecks their life, long after the vaccine objector has left the scene.
What are some other reasons for avoiding vaccination?
> STOCKHOLM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...
I'm not super well versed in the science but it seems like reasonable parties advise against vaccination in certain scenarios. Also knowing that government bodies are more likely to prioritize group outcomes over individual outcomes it seems reasonable for individuals to be skeptical.
A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection.
Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.
You've probably spent the last year being told these people are trying to murder your family though, so it also makes sense to me if you don't agree with this.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else.
Getting boosted, even after having been infected, is a cheap and easy way to reliably keep your immune response high without unpredictable timing. It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohorts. The recovered cohort didn't have any kind of stipulation that their infection was recent. The text does call out waning efficacy in the vaccines, but it does not mention the same for infection.
> It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
Does this have something do with what I said?
"The evidence in this report does not change our vaccination recommendations. We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19.”
The reasoning is easy: many more people do not develop as strong a response from infection as they do from vaccination, and vaccination happens on a known schedule. This is especially of interest since the relationship here was reversed with Alpha, and is still unclear with Omicron - the figures I’ve seen have relatively recent infection somewhere between 2 doses and 3 in terms of efficacy, and infected plus vaccinated being the strongest.
Now, if you think from a public health perspective that makes the call very easy: vaccines are cheap and effective, and more reliably produce an immune response. Waiting for people to get infected means that the schedule is unpredictable (overloads happen), and the timing being variable means that you might have people thinking they’re protected but they were part of the group who never mounted a strong response, or who have waned over time. Rather than having people get infected randomly or hoping that they had a strong response, it’s much easier to spend a few seconds vaccinating them so you have a higher confidence that they’re protected.
The study shows a cohort of people who had infections sometime between the advent of testing and march of 2021, and that cohort had better outcomes than the vaccinated but uninfected cohort. How can that be? What does it mean for immunity solely from vaccination to be "stronger" and "more reliable" if the outcomes are worse? What am I missing here?
For the alpha vs delta point, what does it matter if the relationship flipped? They're basically equivalent either way. The important part is that they're both much better than seronaive.
I think you might have lost track of my original response to the question that started this thread (what is a reason to not get vaccinated) where I said:
> Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.
How are pox parties and "waiting for people to get infected" and "having people get infected randomly" relevant to the scenario that I mentioned, where people don't have the choice of getting vaccinated before they get infected, since its already happened? There's no waiting, there's no parties, there is just dealing with the cards you've been dealt. By now there should be far more of these people than straight up seronaive folks.
Similarly, "We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19", sounds like the same thing: if you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness. That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see empirically here) already been attained.
Apologies if my edit in quotating you is misrepresenting what you're saying, but it's how I read it.
Okay.
If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
I think so. I'm not a doctor, nurse, anything. But I expect anyone who hasn't seen COVID for a year, it would help. Probably the same benefit as a booster that follows vaccination for people who [think they] have never been infected.
Vaccination has its own risks. I believe there is very slight risk from the injection itself.
But -- I just got booster dose, my third shot, this week. I had to go to a pharmacy a couple of blocks from my house. I walked. I had to cross a street, with the traffic signal, but there were a couple of cars. They didn't hit me. This time. Then I had to go inside the pharmacy talk to some people, wait about ten minutes. Everyone was wearing masks, but honestly it was the most contact I've had with a random mix of people all week...
If I'd needed to drive miles out of my way to get the vaccination, that's also nonzero risk.
And then... well, it seemed to hit me pretty hard, the vaccine, this time. I felt awful for two days. Then I was fine. But it seemed like a bigger reaction than previous doses. I think that's supposed to happen, actually.
Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
It's given me some things to think about, thanks.
I think thats a reasonable interpretation of what the original quote (which wasn't mine) was saying.
> If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
The linked data shows that it did seem to lead to a small improvement for folks during delta. Whether or not that small improvement is worth it is a judgment call.
> Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
Not that anybody needs this affirmation, but I'm 1000% in support of you making that call.
I consistently see anti-vaccination rhetoric on HN.
This is exactly backwards from reality. The groups you mentioned are at much higher risk from covid and ergo it is much more important to vaccinate. The risk in absolute terms will remain much higher even with vaccination but this is a poor reason not to vaccinate. The reason you vaccinate is the degree of risk mitigated not the expectation of reducing that risk to zero.
They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
There are certainly degrees of immune system pathology. If you are receiving medical care for such a situation, by all means please follow your doctors instructions and not mine!
>They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
This is absolutely untrue. Most people who are immunocompromised have an immune system that works poorly not none. They are worse off than others as far as mortality and morbidity with the vaccine and without it compared to healthier individuals but they are absolutely able to develop antibodies and benefit from vaccination.
The CDC says they are 65-80% less likely to end up in the ER presenting with covid if vaccinated and boosted.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
Immunocompromised people that took your advice would be 3-5x more likely to die if infected with covid and given prevalence will very likely to be infected in the year ahead of us. Please refrain from giving medical advise without first taking the time to understand the topic you are speaking on. It's more important not to spread health misinformation than chat on business and tech.
Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid.
They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
Thus the decision to vax or not is clearly a personal choice.
They don't stop it, but they do decrease your chances of acquiring it and they do reduce the viral load you shed.
> They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
So they prevent you from taking up a hospital bed, exposing the people who have to care for you to COVID and preventing other non-COVID emergencies from being tended to. That seems to impact others to me.
Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?
Secondly, and this is the one that people find weird, once you've weighed X pounds, and lost some significant mass, you must eat less calories than simple "calories in is calories out" would suggest, because our physiology reacts as if food is scarce, and will store fat to the detriment of all other functions.
1. Sugar and its substitutes are bad for you, yes thats true (Thank you FDA for recommending 10 servings of grains, and backing the lipid hypothesis which caused low fat (aka High Sugar) products to appear everywhere.
2. Unless the obese somehow violate the law of thermodynamics if you reduce energy in while maintaining energy out mass will decrease.
edit : Also, what's the protocol/norm about posting the same reply in multiple threads? I can see some pros and cons to it being within standard behavior, and don't see a clear answer as to which is larger
I promise you, if losing weight were "easy" then most people would look like Hollywood action heroes.
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
... as a co-morbidity of COVID. Clearly the most effective option for people who are obese (and other people at elevated risk) is to get vaccinated.
Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?
You might as well be telling people to take antibiotics 'just in case' because a partially resistant strain of something is going around.
That partially resistant strain won't be "partially" resistant for long.
Where have you seen otherwise?
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
[1] https://www.jwatch.org/na54386/2021/12/15/transmission-risk-...
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788485
If you want to retreat to "ok, they probably do actually help a little bit with that, but I think the amount to which they help with that is small enough that [thing] isn't worth it.", then ok, but, like, I think you should probably make it explicit.
(earlier, the topic was about like, health insurance, not employment, and so I'm using [thing] to cover both of those things.)
It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead?
> In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
You are comparing getting a couple of free shots at the pharmacy to much more complicated lifestyle circumstances.
and you think this is an experience unique to your viewpoint? do you think the people reading your words who have vaguely opposing views might not also be fatigued when your group flatly denies their concerns as irrelevant?
if you find yourself in an us-vs-them mindset and decide to ditch empathy, all you do is widen the divide.
In the sense that a conspiracy theorist or a crank gets tired of people not believing them, yes, I guess they are annoyed. I just little empathy for them: I want this pandemic to be over, and they are getting in the way of that. Barring that, I hope that they can take responsibility for their choices without forcing the consequences on everyone else.
funny, because most everyone i know wants this too, and it’s always “the other side” which prevents the pandemic from “being over”. from a person standing in the middle, it appears that it’s the divide which blocks this, whereas from deep behind lines i guess it looks like everyone past that divide is blocking things.
well good luck winning a battle in the modern world through force of will. there’s a reason the world powers generally don’t conduct large wars openly these days, and that many conflicts are instead resolved via international agreements (especially of trade). if you do discover a way to resolve the social woes in life without leveraging pro-social behaviors (like cooperation/empathy), write me and share your findings so that i in turn can better the state of our society. and if you spot the inherent contradiction of the previous sentence, i’ll buy you a beer.
Yes, that's true. The anti-vaxxers think the vaccines will kill them or make them sterile, or something...it is really hard to keep track of what their current theory is. Again, it's a free shot you can get at the pharmacy, the only rational reason for avoiding it is if you thought it could do harm rather than just being thought ineffective.
But given that unvaccinated are dying 10X more in hospitals due to COVID than unvaccinated cases that come in, maybe this problem will just solve itself the good ole fashioned Darwin way. Mind you, as long as they don't increase unvaccinated deaths, aren't clogging the hospitals or causing my health care costs/premiums to rise (faster than they would otherwise), I believe they should have the liberty to make that decision.
in one sentence, you admit that you don't understand what knowledge some person is operating with. in the next sentence, you claim to know what is rational for that person to do. if you're using "rational" in the literal sense, then you've leapt to premature conclusions.
and i get it. it's exasperating. there's a bunch of people who don't want to take a vaccine. and from the outside it seems that as more information becomes available to this group, their vocalized reason for avoiding the vaccine changes. they're being dishonest, and that's infuriating!
if this is what you're seeing, it doesn't necessarily mean every individual within that group is shifting their story. some certainly are, but many aren't and the group behavior can be explained by things similar to "evaporative cooling": some people leave the group as a result of new information (new people are still getting vaccinated, every day), and the people left behind are the ones for which the previously dominant argument wasn't their primary reason for not getting the vaccine -- and so the dominant argument of the group then changes.
group dynamics encapsulate way more complexity than just that one effect. and i think it's worth considering. you see that your own individual behavior is way more consistent than the other side's behavior -- and it is. but that's comparing an individual (yourself) to a group (anti-vaxxers). it's apples to oranges. the other individuals aren't seeing your individual behavior. they're seeing your group's behavior. they're seeing the exact same type of inconsistent and contradictory behavior that you're so fed up with.
what's the way out? well, we haven't found it, so it's hard to say for sure. but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.
You are right. I am just assuming that there is a rational explanation in their head for why they don't want to vax, and as you point out, it might not be. Nor are the explanations for vaccine hesitancy consistent.
> but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.
I'm not really compassionate enough to see this as an empathy issue: if their choices didn't affect me I wouldn't care one bit what they decided to do. Right now we have a huge society-wide problem that requires some sort of societal cohesion and consensus to defeat, but we lack that, and I don't think any of us have the energy to fight this battle at the individual level.
walk me through it: how do we achieve societal cohesion if not by empathy? a society is a network of individuals and entities, and cohesion implies that the individuals want to "stick together". why would i want to be cohesive with the parts of that network that don't acknowledge me? individuals are drawn together by common interests, shared feelings, mutual understanding, ... empathy. it's the basis of every relationship i've ever held onto. how do you build a cohesive society without that? i really don't mean to be obtuse... this is all that i know.
But at the end of the day, after two years of watching this insanity in our society, where wearing a mask is considered "weak", where taking a vaccine, a vaccine that we're incredibly lucky to have, is considered a sign of Satan, or micro tracking chips, or sterilization or whatever is the latest loony thought of the day, I'm done.
“laughed out of polite society”? think that one over a bit. sounds pretty impolite to me. (also a decent example of how a group [“polite society”] can inadvertently establish foregranted truths [its own politeness] and be thoroughly baffled when the outgroup challenges that fundamental belief. i’m not accusing anyone here of groupthink — just that it’s a prominent aspect of the present moment).
anyway, i get your point. we all have our limits and there’s no shame in that. IMO if you’re at the point where you truly can’t converse productively with some group — and don’t have the desire to grind it out and search for a way to actually relate to/reach them, then just exit the conversation. leave it to those rare overwhelmingly compassionate individuals who are able and willing to endure to bridge the gap. sometimes you’ll do more good by saying nothing than by fanning the flames. not always easy in an era where people can feel defined by the beliefs we advertise, but if you really believe that these opposing views of the vaccine are harmful to our society, then let go of your apparel and delegate to the best methods for resolving these opposing views. maybe that’s linking to data-based writings (sounds like you’ve tried that, to no success). maybe you’ve found that you can’t actually provide anything to resolve these oppositions. that’s okay. someone else will have it. yield the floor to them.
Can attest to that. As a flat earther, I am just so sick of the snarkiness of everyone who believes what mainstream science preaches.
We should all equally appreciate ALL differing views because no idea is more or less valid than any other idea. Evolution, creationism, alien seed planted by Xenu, they all deserve our time and attention.
It's far more nuanced than that. I have now had three doses of the vaccine, and I had Covid subsequent to the third dose. Israel is now moving on a fourth dose, and the vaccine manufacturers are making an Omicron-specific variant. If my city continues with prior behavior, and mandates a booster for a virus I've now had, am I an "anti-vaxxer" for not wanting the unnecessary dose?
That you're characterizing the situation in this binary way says a lot to how the entire issue has been treated as a cartoon political issue. But many millions of people are in exactly this situation, today (i.e. those who already had Covid, and are now being required to get a vaccine).
Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics. Either they are had something else (like a flu or a cold, you wouldn't know without a test), or something about natural immunity isn't working. I won't speculate, I believe its the former (easier to confirm that you got the vaccine then if you really got COVID).
People who have had Covid are at least as well-protected against serious illness as anyone who is vaccinated, and probably more so given the latest variants:
> During October 3–16, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates were 19.8-fold lower (95% CI = 18.2–21.4) among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, 55.3-fold lower (95% CI = 27.3–83.3) among unvaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, and 57.5-fold lower (95% CI = 29.2–85.8) among vaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis.
Or are you saying a lot of people think they've gotten covid but actually got something else?
If it's the latter case, how do you feel about encouraging that the people who don't want to be vaccinated because they've had a prior infection get an antibody test, and get vaccinated if it comes back negative, and if they do indeed have antibodies we treat them the same way we'd treat someone vaccinated?
If you think that natural immunity is comparable to vaccine-generated immunity, but that proposal still sounds unappealing to you, I'd be curious why.
I imagine toward the people who behave as if vaccines aren't effective, which are nonzero.
> In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
I mean. The latter statement is a thing gay people actually DID say, long before the government told them to. Gay people noticed that it was spread through sex and that condoms work. Not even going to touch the former statement since I don't feel like wading into the criminalization of black people. Suffice to say, not convinced by either of these comparisons.
> I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn't assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.
I'd label your preceding statement to be snarky, fwiw.
The fact that he added the word "Gosh" to his comment doesn't make it insulting or target any specific group of people. You're taking great offense over nothing and distracting from a meaningful discussion.
What is real and true matters. There's lots of things that are hard to decide, but we know that they're not millions of hidden deaths from getting vaccinated, and we know that there are millions of people protected from dying because they got vaccinated.
There are vanishingly few circumstances other than legitimate medical conflicts that warrant being unvaccinated. Namely, crippling anxiety of planning/scheduling the appointment, or being misled by trusted advisors (Fox Entertainment or doctors who should have their medical license revoked).
Other than that, I have very little patience or sympathy.
And yet we have cardiologists and eye doctors and chiropractors telling the public that the vaccine is dangerous and that we would be better off without it.
I saw someone mentioned that a doctor/professor from Johns Hopkins was raising concerns about college age kids getting vaccinated. I looked him up. He's a surgical oncologist. Guess what the epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists at Johns Hopkins are recommending?
Oh ya, and the surgical oncologist turned epidemiologist just so happens to have a book about the pandemic that he is pushing right now. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.
I am not so sure. HN is the most "covid is just a flu, masks and respirators dont matter, teachers should teach when sick with covid those lazy bastards" place I regularly visit. I would be surprised if vaccination rates did not followed the same general political alignement.
Encryption is probably the only thing that most people on HN agree with.
Not accurate AT ALL.
NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentage.
Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates.
For most ICUs running at 80 to 90 percent capacity is standard.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...
Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.
Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia.
Also covid patients only make up 13% of the ICU?
Something is odd with your flattening the curve narrative blaming overflow on Covid patients.
So I went ahead and checked this, and it's wrong.
Escambia's ICU capacity is 87% full, SC's is 90% full (and SC is a bad choice, as they have a total of 21 ICU beds in the county, they use bay area ICU beds for overflow, which are currently sitting at ~80% capacity), and Marin's is....40%. So I'm not sure what data you're looking at, but it seems to just be wrong.
Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half, hospitals were reducing non-critical care. That means you have tons of people who need hip replacements or brain surgery or tumor removal who haven't been able to get it. Many of them will need to recover in the ICU a bit, so you'd want a higher baseline ICU use post-elective surgery freeze, as that implies that the "clog" is being recovered from.
If the hospital is still full due to covid patients, those elective surgeries will never get done, leading people who never caught covid to suffer too. So low covid capacity, but higher overall use temporarily means that we're catching up to all the deferred non-covid care, something we really need to do!
The other possibility is that you mean that the 70-80% that ICUs normally run at is somehow problematic (because well like I just said, we did actually "flatten" it by deferring elective ICU recovery for more than a year in many places). The US already has more ICU beds per capita than most nations, even other developed nations, so I'm not sure what your idea here is other than perhaps, "The us population is too unhealthy or is providing too much healthcare", which are both interesting positions to take for sure.
Bullshit.
Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions.
COVID is not causing the curve to be need flattening.
The medical system is.
Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
Yes, and actual data says this is a problem, because we don't have the capacity to handle a sustained 15% increase in ICU use. That is simply not a thing we have the capacity to handle.
> Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
The less than 1% of people who fall into this category are probably not the issue. 1% more nurses isn't going to address 15% more patients.
> <a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.>
You really should have, because none of it was "emotional" and most of it was quantitative, so this makes you look rather silly. Like c'mon, you've lied about how full hospitals are in California, when confronted on that you claim I'm "gish galloping" with emotional nonsense that's just true[0] factual content about how we handle and have handled hospital capacity and why your (completely conjectured!) conclusion was wrong.
[0]: https://revcycleintelligence.com/news/40-hospitals-in-ny-for...
100 - 15 is 85.
There's 85% left to handle it.
Where is this 85% going and why is it less of a concern in flattening the curve?
why is no one concerned about this 85% of non-covid ICU patients??
Seems to me covid is a small fraction of ICU cases.
Seems to me maybe the ICU should work on handling its caseload..
Seems to me maybe there's systemic problems like the AMA limiting the number of health professionals to keep the salaries up and firing the ones who have natural immunity.
Maybe that's why the curve can't get flattened.
but one thing that is crystal clear from the data is that covid is not the primary cause of hospital overflow.
The short answer would be "aging" and "accidents". And we already do huge amounts of research to lessen the impact of those things, but if you have any ideas, do let me know.
It's less of a concern because it isn't really something we can change. We can't make people age less quickly, or have fewer accidents. And while we can (and did!) treat some of those things less, that has severe downsides in the long term.
> Seems to me covid is a small fraction of ICU cases.
No, it's a 20% bump in what the system is meant to handle. Systems don't generally do well when asked to sustain 20% more of what they were doing, forever.
> Seems to me maybe there's systemic problems like the AMA limiting the number of health professionals to keep the salaries up and firing the ones who have natural immunity.
Can you explain why you keep bringing up nurses when we discuss ICU capacity? Last I checked, we didn't need to vaccinate beds.
and they still haven't figured out a way to handle the ICU load?
you would think with all kinds of random unplanned disasters happening all over at any time ..like terrorist attacks or earthquakes or tornadoes... they would be able to increase capacity by 20%
the problem is not covid patients, the problem is either a poorly planned system or news media sensationalism
They can, for brief periods. You start by overflowing to nearby hospitals, you can't do that for covid though, because its global. So you try to drop non-urgent care, but they've already done that. You can't stop treating non-urgent care forever, it's only a temporary approach.
So you're left with, well, reducing serious covid case rates. This can absolutely be done, by the way, with a combination of vaccination and varying masking policies as necessary. Because that's the only tool left after all of the others have been exhausted.
> and they still haven't figured out a way to handle the ICU load?
There is actually a really easy solution, it's just ethically terrible. You refuse (or triage last) unvaccinated covid patients. This solves most of the problems. It is however ethically unconscionable.
> the problem is not covid patients, the problem is either a poorly planned system or news media sensationalism
Yes, we all recognize that the global healthcare system is not able to handle a sustained 10-20% increase in demand. That doesn't make it "poorly planned" (are you willing to pay 20% extra in healthcare costs to cover the increased slack?)
You say everything like you have the singular objective answers beyond a shadow of a doubt even if your ideas are just one of many possibilitys.
This has never been true and remains false.
So it is true, and always has been.
As a result, it will never be possible to know how many died of specifically Covid, and how many died of a viral-induced pneumonia.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
We know how many people die of non-covid viral induced pneumonia in a normal year (and in a bad year). Most of it is caused by the flu. We also know that covid policies have demonstrably reduced flu rates to some of the lowest ever over the past few years.
So what other cause of viral induced pneumonia do you suppose is the one killing everyone?
I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?
What do you think causes viral pneumonia? If you get in a car crash and bleed out and die, they put both "massive hemorrhage" and "vehicle accident" on your death certificate. If you die of covid-induced viral pneumonia, they put both on your death certificate, because the covid is what caused the pneumonia. You're trying to draw a distinction where there isn't one. Deaths from covid-induced viral pneumonia are deaths from covid, in exactly the same way that deaths from car-crash induced massive bleeding are deaths from a car crash.
> I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?
See https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm#anchor_16336269..., notably the heading "Are there other metrics that can be used to compare the 2020-2021 flu season with past seasons?", which shows a table. That table compares the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Essentially they tested around the same number of specimens and the incidence of influenza was 1000x lower.
This is probably the most accurate datapoint, other things match up (such as reported hospitalizations also being ~100x lower than the year prior) but those are more prone to accidental misclassification of flu-as-covid. You can't really screw up a test in the same way. But generally speaking, they were low enough that the CDC couldn't actually calculate the likely impact, it was too low to make reasonable predictions about. This year it's higher, but still 10x less than a normal year.
(the reason for this is also straightforward: covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission)
Clue's in the name. A respiratory virus, of which there are many.
>covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission
Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.
I take your point with the data you provided (although there's no information on sampling methods and thus the statistical significance of those numbers. We also don't have a similar data point for the UK), but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures. I'm not in the US, but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter.
So again, if not covid, what other thing is causing the extreme spike in viral phenomena deaths? Is it some other novel virus that no one noticed or did we suddenly become more susceptible to the common cold?
> Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.
Anecdotes are not data, but if we're sharing them, your experience would be unusual in my neck of the woods.
> but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures
It really isn't.
> but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter
Compared to a year ago, social distancing and mask mandates are far weaker. December 2020, gyms were closed and I couldn't go to work and restaurants were at 25% capacity or outdoor/takeout only. Today gyms are open, I can work from my office, and restaurants can run at full capacity.
I'm one of these folks. I think it's wrong to blame this solely on COVID. I won't have kids because my position in the United States is nowhere near guaranteed. I have survived three economic recessions, one of which I lost everything in and the course of my life was permanently altered. I watched as society adopted "the internet" and used it in terrifying detail. I've watched as social problems turned into vitriol, anger, and at times violence. I've watched as climate change was viewed as either "conserve", "don't believe", or "innovate" with the latter being the latest focus - none of which have worked and each took myopic approaches to a very broad problem. I've watched as society became polarized on such arbitrary lines as politics, missing any nuance that may occur across the spectrum; almost turned into a caricature of Star Wars. Home prices are higher than they've ever been, inaccessible to even moderately wealthy citizens.
I may not be on the money with each of my perspectives, though I also don't think I'm really that far off. So riddle me this: Why in the hell would I want to add one more responsibility while dodging and dealing with the bullets of life as-we-know-it today?
But understand: the vast majority of human history is colored by a desire to grow a family in order to provide strength to their progeny knowing that they, in turn, will face an unkind future and can be protected, in some degree, by their kin.
Sounds like you're at the end of a multi-billion year winning streak. Your ancestors did well.
To me judging whether or not to have a child solely based on the value that it would have for you and your community, without evaluating whether or not your child will have [the possibilities of] a good life, seems cruelly selfish.
If you're not sure that there's a stable future to bring a child into, then it only makes sense to wait.
> The world in general, and especially the United States, has never been more peaceful and prosperous as it is now.
Nevertheless, there's a good case to be made that the next few decades will be "interesting times".
> Human civilization needs more people, now more than ever.
Why? For what? I mean, I like humans but there are billions and billions of us. What purpose do you see for which our teeming numbers would not already suffice?
What's stopping a country, or hospital, from saying: "we'll prioritize cancer patients, scheduled surgeries, normal operation; you come in with Covid respiratory distress, and we're full? Go away." From the government data I've found, Covid patients are about 5-20% of emergency department patients in the US[0]; in Switzerland that leaves a healthy amount of free beds[1] (though I'm sure staffing is another issue). Why are they causing such disruption? And if they are, why are we not having a debate about whether all the additional cancer deaths, heart attack deaths (from deprogrammed surgeries and screenings) are worth it? In what way is this "healthcare catastrophe" not partly avoidable?
> You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
That's been happening long before Corona, and I doubt it has much do do with politics or "optimism about climate change" compared with wages, housing, etc.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/hospital-encounters-by...
[1]: https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/icu?time=phase...
Some anecdotal evidence, I went through cancer treatment starting Feb 2020, ending Feb 2021, with a few scans since. Including one in a few days. I have never had any of my numerous appointments postponed for covid. But I think it is because I am lucky enough to afford to be treated by a hospital with a large cancer department.
https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EMT...
Keeping with that perspective, those coming to the hospital with Covid that goes untreated are more likely to die in the next 30 days than those who come in with cancer that goes untreated. That's the calculus being played out. They're hoping to get through these waves and then get back to the patients who weren't facing as immediate a health threat.
What's really bothering my medical friends, and I suspect may be the source of so much burnout, is the prevalence of willful ignorance. They see it as a majority of the unvaccinated are people who should know better - that's what's making this so tough for them. They knew there would be cranks and crackpots who wouldn't get the vaccine because there always are. They weren't expecting it to be this prevalent and they certainly weren't expecting it to be politicized. The whole situation is demoralizing and causing people to reassess their life choices.
I suspect it could easily lead to broader exemptions and eventually bring up the issue of other infectious diseases not being treated.
My family also got several, none time critical yet time time intensive treatments over the past 2 years. There was no waiting because of COVID here.
Maybe also part of the reason it never turned out to be the healthcare catastrophe Americans some to live trough.
Edit:// not turning away, but giving less priority. Nobody gets or should be turned down. But when it comes to triangulation cancer may should win against a non vaccinated patient with low chance to survive.
Physicians take an oat to care for patients while looking past that.
They believe that masking is a binary decision and that once made, the die is cast.
Rather, if we tied masking mandates to thresholds of community spread and encouraged/provided high quality masks, the public would at least show medical professionals we're interested in keeping another body out of the morgue, aside from the obvious vaccination need.
But I digress - there are many slow moving disasters that were every so slightly accelerated by COVID that are only going to surface in the years to come.
At this point, mandates have convinced everyone who will ever be convinced. There is no more convincing in our future. A subset of people will always reject masks and vaccines.
This is defeatist and I don't think it's true. Most of those people have never had a mandate — as we've seen everywhere those have actually been implemented, there are a very few dedicated antivaxers and a whole ton of people who are comfortable repeating their shiboleths as long as there's no personal cost. Once they're forced to accept the consequences of their decision, a significant fraction cave. They'll never admit that they spent the last couple of years parroting lies but at least they're vaccinated and far less likely to be tying up a hospital bed.
Ok; recognize that. Pivot. If the best solution won't work, then it isn't the best solution; continuing to believe so is like standing on the Titanic as its going down and yelling "god damn it just don't hit the iceberg, its so simple, just turn left." Its not helpful toward driving positive outcomes, and that's what matters. Its what happens when you let scientists and doctors run the show; they present fantastic solutions which work in the lab, if everyone does them, perfectly. The population is not a programmable computer.
What's the problem right now? Medical care capacity. What's the best way to solve that? Keep people out of the hospital. That isn't working. Stop doubling down. We need to keep medical professionals in the system, and encourage new ones to join. Pass federal laws limiting the number of patients nurses are responsible for. Supplement medical professional income with tax dollars. Create incentives for retired professionals to come back into the fray, and younger people to stay in the pipeline to join the field. Deploy the military to hard-hit areas. Embrace more easily accessible, quicker trade-skill like training for COVID-care specialist to manpower-supplement existing hospital forces, working underneath more highly trained professionals. There are many things we could do, but we're not doing much of them.
This is wrong, and the reason resolves the seeming problem: “our leadership” never did that. Some people in some places did, many did not, and in many cases they actively worked against it. The experts’ plan works everywhere it’s actually been tried.
I do agree that we need to improve conditions for healthcare workers but that’s slow to train people up and it’d be much easier and faster if we had fewer Republicans driving them out. The politics around basic health measures is the most widely mentioned reason for burnout.
Can anyone imagine if we went back to 2020 and pitched this to parents? "Look, if your kid gets it, it will be similar in nature to a chest cold. It's somewhat more dangerous for the elderly. In order to keep doctors and nurses from getting burned out, the kids are all going to wear masks all day. Other than that, outside of school, we're all going to be pretty much getting back to normal."
I have lost track of what the goalposts are. I am starting to think that people just like the idea that children are suffering, it must mean that we're taking the whole thing seriously. As long as none of us are inconvenienced, right?
You say it as if that's the only consequence of a medical shortage... How about replacing that with "in order to have enough functioning doctors and nurses able to treat patients with cancer, respond to car accidents, and do organ transplants"?
The point of masking in schools was maybe, once, based on the theory that it would keep the children and teachers safe. Now, the point is that we must exert every lever of control at our disposal. It just so happens that the only group of people who we can reliably control are children, as they cannot vote, do not have fully-formed civil rights, and (in the main) are legally required to attend government run schools each day.
So, while they'd love to make everyone else mask, they realize they practically cannot -- so they focus on children. It's grotesque.
I cannot countenance the idea that keeping most of your spit with you rather than floating around the room doesn't reduce spread of a respiratory virus. At best I would suggest instead that schools ought to have had a mandate to use and reuse sterilized n95 masks instead of a loosely fitting cloth mask oft worn with the nose exposed.
My default assumption would be that if the mask doesn't make it more difficult to breathe then it is unlikely to be effective. The filtration mechanism should introduce friction which you then have to compensate for with additional pressure in your lungs.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that effectiveness at preventing infection is linearly correlated with difficulty breathing or that to a degree that the additional friction induces difficulty must rise to the level of preventing breath in order to be effective. You aren't preventing 50% of particulates from getting in by preventing 50% of oxygen for example.
For example I imagine that you didn't believe that doctors wearing masks pre pandemic or construction workers weren't just going without breathing well for hours given paucity of air becomes an problem very very quickly
"Expect some discomfort - that lets you know the mask is working"
As a statement of technically accurate fact: I wouldn’t have been able to imagine how easy it is to breathe through a 3M Aura 9320+ FFP2 mask. Not before trying one. It’s… magic? –Feels like magic! These ones: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_LB/p/d/v000078838/ – pretty much the same mask as the 9205+ N95: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/v101146024/
“Duckbill” type masks are great too, like Kimberly-Clark / Kimtech pouch respirators: https://www.kcprofessional.com/en-us/products/scientific-and... … These might be the most comfortable article of clothing I’ve ever worn? Like really seriously. Very easy to breathe through. No drag or inertia at all. The 3M Aura mask has the edge in breathability though – feels impossibly transparent. I believe it’s due to the material itself. The duckbill type gets its breathability through using more material and a bigger airspace. I’d love to try a duckbill made out of the material in the 3M Aura. (Secret tip: If the duckbill is creased just right it looks more like a Stormtrooper than a duck. The free bread is nice though.)
I’m reading the Wikipedia page on HEPA filters now. Trying to get a better feel for how the material works. Seems like part of how the close-fitting masks can be made so easy to breathe through is that the possible speed of air flowing through is limited. Anywhere in the range of airspeed that we can breathe aerosolized particles in or out, the filter material causes slight turbulence in the atmospheric gas, it flows and eddies around the filter material – the air flows around the material – but the aerosol particles have much more inertia and hit the filter. I actually hadn’t understood or appreciated this aspect before now.
This 'they don't 100% work so we shouldn't even bother' bullshit .. is just that. Bullshit.
What is the cost of masked students, it's the cost of the masks. Now granted our schools are, frankly, criminally underfunded. However that PPE could be supplied from outside the school's budget for those students that don't take care of the costs themselves.
The other problem that i've been hearing from my public school teacher friends is that there are so many staff absences due to covid that more and more students are stuffed into the classrooms of those teachers that are there. So if you, as a teacher, have a class that is down 50% of students due to an outbreak but somehow you managed to avoid it. Well your 50% empty class that allows for better distancing will not last, you will be at 100% or grater capacity simply because another teacher is out, there are no available substitutes and you can't leave kids unsupervised.
That total cost may (or may not) still support the decision to have a mask mandate for kids, but let’s not get confused and think the only cost is measured in dollars.
It's much more than that.
The other problem that i've been hearing from my public school teacher friends is that there are so many staff absences due to covid
Sure, and that's happening in schools with and without mask mandates. Unless you go into full hermit mode, you are going to be exposed to Omicron. And if you're young or vaccinated, that's very unlikely to be a big deal.
They’re not, they’re one of the best funded schools in the world.
the US is 66th by % of gdp
This was a trend before the pandemic. The financials of becoming a doctor just don't make any damn sense any more. Sure you'll make more in the long run, but it's a grind to get there and you basically give up your 20's to get there. This has a lot of negative impacts on your social life and your ability to build any sort of financial stability until your 30's.
I'm really happy to see the change in attitude in medicine. Hospital leadership has been milking the Hypocratic Oath for all the can. Physicians (and other health care workers) are starting to realize this bullshit.
----
PS: I know it's not my place, but I'd really recommend having a conversation with your daughter about going into medicine. Take a peak at places like /r/medicalschool, /r/residency/, /r/medicine, and student doctor network.
March 18 will be a sobering day for many.
This isn't true. Here in Washington State we're experiencing peak Covid, and only about 30% of hospital capacity is for Covid. And that's an all-time high. For most of the pandemic it's been between 10 and 20%.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard#das...
You should be angry at corporate healthcare that has prioritized financial efficiency and monetary gain over doing its job and treating healthcare workers fairly, not strangers on hackernews.
> We're a population literally in decline.
No, no we're _literally_ not. Not as of right now at least; the US population grew over the last year. But- even if we were, wouldn't that directly address the unrelated issue of climate change that you brought up?
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
downvoters: is this outcome undesirable? if so, why, and what can we do to fix it? because I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to say that having more kids is a good thing, and using immigration/migration as a means of replacing those kids we're not having is a bad thing.
thus, is this outcome (declining citizen birth rates, increased immigration/migration compensating for it) not the intended, desired one?
From what I understand, people noticed the fact that whites were gradually becoming a smaller proportion of the population of Western nations, due to both lower fertility and increased immigration.
In addition to this, some migrant groups (notably Muslims from the middle-east) have higher-than-replacement fertility rates.
Extrapolating this out, the idea was that whites would eventually be "replaced" by Muslims and other "minority" groups over the course of many decades.
I don't quite know how the Jews got involved in the conspiracy, but I always found the accusation that they're trying to increase the population of Muslims to be a bit ridiculous.
From what I know, the limits on number of doctors licensed each year are tightly controlled. If students drop out, there are countless others who will be willing to take their place.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/nursing-fac...
Compensation helps, but having to do much more work with less people increases burnout regardless of how much you're being paid.
Based off what I read there, I don't think reducing burden on nurses to prevent burnout at any cost is the right response here.
The article makes clear there are two pipelines here:
Nursing student applicants -> Nursing students -> Nurses, and Nurses -> Nursing faculty
There are more qualified applicants than can be accepted as students due in part to shortages in the faculty, according to the article. So why is there a shortage of faculty? There are several items noted in the article, but I'll point out the one I think is relevant to our conversation.
> the pandemic has forced much of nursing education to an online, virtual format ... An overnight switch to virtual learning has not been seamless or easy on students or faculty ... The risk of burnout in these prolonged conditions is high—especially for faculty members who have young children or who are caretakers in the home.
So, this article is arguing nursing faculty is burning out because teaching virtually is too taxing. I don't think this article supports the idea that a nursing shortage will result due to overtaxed nurses in hospitals.
EDIT: Another thing is that nurses often go through 'preceptorships,' which is like a residency but much more focused and shorter in duration. It is how you accumulate a great deal of the clinical hours required by a Board of Nursing. It was difficult during my preceptorship to find people trained to be preceptors, as experienced nurses are dropping out. The difference between a green instructor and an expreienced one can be massive.
Realize that doom and fear porn that you are reading addresses certain type of need we have. If you overdo it well you get depression. Then again some people I know use this crap to give themselves excuse to behave like teenagers in their 30s, stuck in childhood(because they can).
*I'd argue that not having at least one child and possibly adopting others is selfish assuming one has financial means. For example, while I thought I wanted kids, upon reflection what I really wanted are mini-me's. If I could buy a clone I'd do it immediately, but child roulette?, no thanks. My selfish lifestyle had made me very happy so far and that feels like a character flaw.
From where I am, a "selfish" lifestyle of video games and porn replacing responsibility does not seem to be healthy long-term.
I'm in my late 20s now, and the guys I know who are not working towards getting married and starting a family are pretty much all starting to experience some sort of constant existential anxiety.
I think if you drop off the rails of a traditional lifestyle, you need to be ready to stand on your own two feet a little more when it comes to intrinsic motivation.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birt...
The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
Given the extremely contagious nature of Omicron, what plausible way do we have to prevent these individuals from getting COVID and using hospital space? And don't say masking up kids—because if they haven't gotten vaccinated, then why do you think they themselves would wear masks and social distance to prevent themselves from getting COVID?
I have seen no plausible modeling that shows even high level of masking would significantly blunt the spread of this.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view...
So why make the kids put on hair shirts I mean masks?
Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it.
Are you sure this is true? The data you linked to shows that hospitalization rate for 65+ unvaccinated is 7x 65+ vaccinated. But WA has a great vaccination rate, over 99% for 65+ with one or more shot. So even with 7x the rate, unvaccinated elderly probably aren't massively dominating hospitalizations because it is such a small pool of ppl.
vax rate: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard
edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated combined. We can definitively say that the hospital case load is not overwhelmingly dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.
It shows that 79% of hospitalizations in the state are unvaccinated people and that of those, 3,000 are under 34, 11,000 are between 34-65, 7,000 are over 65.
So it is indeed largely elderly unvaccinated in the hospital.
If I look at those numbers, the elderly are not "dominating" the hospitals. In fact, that would show that if you looked in a hospital at any given time, there would be more middle-aged than elderly. I get that "per-capita" the rate is higher, but that does not matter to the hospital census.
What am I missing?
I was just using middle-aged (39-65) as a direct comparison.
In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, but without some top-down moonshot level effort to make it better fast, continuing it would have been an actual catastrophe. I doubt anyone else with school-side insight into how it went would claim otherwise. It was bad.
Classes ranged from some teachers sending out a single email a week with assignments and tests and grades to teachers taking attendance the minute class started and then disconnecting. For 10 year olds.
This means I would get silence for a long time, no posts in the classroom site or Teams and then an email saying “major test is tomorrow, make sure your kids study X,Y,Z” with X being chapters in a pdf, Y being a broken link, and Z being some slapdash PowerPoint posted minutes before the email. And there’s multiple subjects.
It was such a surreal experience with countless “we’re doing our best” emails from school leadership.
It was even more performative and useless than normal school.
I know my mileage may vary and it may be problems with my school district. But in the same district they didn’t suffer like this and my kids performed better.
And this is with me spending 1h+ every day helping, running around between telework. I can’t help but think how it fared for kids who didn’t have parents who could flex their work schedule to support digital school.
How exactly is this better than a consistent schedule from home?
All you have to do is keep your kid looking at a screen. They may need to repeat a year of school. At some point in their future your kids boss may say "oh right, you were a pandemic kid, here let me show you."
It's like someone in WW2 UK complaining that the Germans dropping bombs on their neighbors houses knocked some of the good dishes off the shelf.
Sure, the first six months, or even a year can be discounted as an aberration in the child development process and can be compensated for. This is year 3 with no end in sight. Do you even realize how much children develop in 3 years? A 6 year old and a 9 year old have a significant difference in cognitive capabilities and if you stop the learning process, the lifetime effect can be devastating. It doesn’t matter when you’re 30 and have to sit at home, but it absolutely does when you’re a child and your brain is developing.
And based on my long career on the corporate ladder, absolutely no one cares about whether you were a pandemic baby, a child growing up in poverty or pretty much any other non visible handicap in your life. You either know stuff or you don’t.
And since you mentioned World War 2, schools didn’t stop even in WW2, At a time when people didn’t even necessarily need to go to schools to eventually lead a comfortable life.
Essentially, they got a "pass" for 2020 regardless of what their grades were, without ever stepping back into class or remote learning.
We also had a massive hurricane and two smaller ones that year, and that had more people at home in October than the SARS-CoV-2 virus did.
Either way, assuming other states allowed or encouraged remote learning and continue to this day, as of, say April of this year we enter year 3 of remote learning. I'm on mobile so I could be wrong, but I believe the original post said "going on/into 3 years at this point" - or at least that was how I interpreted it.
Also the original commenter was talking about early childhood development, not beuracracy. Everything kids learned from 9/2019 through 2/2020 shouldn't disappear because of what happened that spring. If it does our school systems are even worse than I thought.
You wouldn't say you are going into 30 years 2 months before your 29th birthday. And "no end in sight" makes 0 sense in the context of in person schooling, because the end of remote school is already in the rear view mirror.
Now envision: You are a parent who HAS to work to make ends meet. Your work has to be in person (nurse, meat packing plant etc). You have two kids 3 years apart, say 7 and 10. One you just were able to adjust to school after years of sensory and social issues. The school is closed. The kids cant go in but bars are open.
It's been the norm for some time to have in-person classes. School districts make the headlines when they cancel in-person classes and even then that situation only lasts a couple of weeks. Look at the most recent case in Chicago - it lasted one week. Since I live across the street from a large park I can tell you the kids are in school, they're playing outside, they're doing after school activities, and they're playing sports. I don't know what these people are getting on about acting like kids have been locked in their homes for two years.
What absolute lunancy; certainly you're trolling. Taking the position of sacrificing children is the position of the villain movies.
Fwiw, we name this trade-off all the time. If you think your kid is getting the best possible experience for their development at school then you are pretty naive. School is largely about improving worst case educational outcomes, not fostering maximum growth.
My own children just repurposed the tools used for remote learning, and now interact more with their peers than they did before the pandemic (and its not just video games either: there's a fair amount of creative activity that happens). Kids are incredibly resilient.
Poor education practices like chaining them to Zoon for hours at a time to attend class, on the other hand, would damage anyone, and show there's a long way to go in the remote learning space. You'd have expected some high profile projects to shine, but I haven't heard a lot from them.
There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse.
And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything. If you look at places and regions that kept kids in school and compare them to places that shut schools down, there's no discernable difference in outcomes. Because people intermingled anyway. So we could've at least had kids socializing and developing normally for that cost.
There have been cases where a school system makes headline news by cancelling in-person classes as the infection peaks in their area. These shutdowns have only been for 1-2 weeks. The kids are in school. The kids are doing activities. The kids are alright.
School is in person this school year, although there have been about 10 virtual days so far for his school, all have been in 2022 because of Omicron making staffing really tough. There are a handful of after school activities, but many are canceled. Sports are largely back to normal.
Hope your son is doing okay.
My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.
Plus a lot of parents are paranoid about online interaction to a crazy degree and will hardly let kids interact online - it makes no sense, but they consider it to be the great bogey man of the 21st century and think that pedophiles are ready to instantly jump on their kids, even if they are in a private discord room just chatting.
It’s hard to measure this systematically and I’m glad that your experiences were positive. My kids had marked drop in grades and really suffered. It wasn’t so much the social aspect as teachers and schools not being to adapt to new methods.
I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
For both fully-remote and alternating-day in-person, if schools still failed kids, they'd have had to fail over half of most classes. Percentages of engaged-enough-to-be-OK kids in online schools tended to sit in the 10-20% range. It wasn't unusual for half or more of kids to effectively be absent for an entire semester. [EDIT] The alternating-day half-in-half-out in-person schedule kids, in the one district that I have insight into that did that for fall 2020/spring 2021, seemed to fare even worse than the online cohort, incidentally.
> I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
Any places that did them, they'll be awful, guaranteed. IIRC at least some states skipped them in Spring 2020 since it'd have been nearly impossible to proctor them and everyone knew they'd be "tainted" anyway. The main point of them is to compare year-over-year progress to see what needs to be adjusted and whether progress is being made, for which a during-remote-learning standardized test would be worthless, since you already know it'll be bad and why it's bad and won't be able to get any actionable info out of comparing it to prior or future years. It'll probably be another couple years before we have something like a new baseline and the tests start to be useful for their intended purpose again.
Stop inventing new problems that don't exist - there's already enough to go around.
The result is these children don't learn how to read. And studies have shown for ages that if a child is not a proficient reader by grade 3, they will likely never be proficient, ever.
That's just one of many costs. We're leaving these children behind.
Minimizing this does nothing for them. And remember, a depressed kid doesn't always look sad, but can seem happy go lucky as they are trying to be what their parents want them to be.
The teachers are trying their best, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome the nature of these problems, and the effects are absolutely compounding over the past couple of years. It's really, really bad.
Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.
Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/online-l...
There are many ways to help those who want to be helped. If they don't want to be helped.. well that's not a new problem.
I don’t know what you call a person that thinks half of the population are Karens, but it’s absurd.
This is yet another problem that's ignored, swept under the run and "averaged out" as a solution.
2. The idea that anyone who wants in person learning is a "screaming Karen" is fucking stupid. There is lots of evidence that remote learning has all kinds of negative outcomes for kids, and your (frankly sexist) dismissiveness is the reason this conversation never goes anywhere.
Unfortunately though that's not true. It's putting a huge burden on hospitals that affects us all.
Liquor stores and bars, too. Ethanol is at least as bad for your body as straight sucrose/fructose.
Log time spent on Facebook, steam, Reddit, etc. Statistically inactivities.
Hell, we could probably reject 75% of Americans in the first three months without any sort of death panels being necessary, just let Google, Target, and walmart machine learn AI the rejection criteria and alert the insurers.
Sure thing. Can we get the Grandpa's to sign documents saying they're going unvaccinated by choice and would like to opt-out from any hospital care related to COVID if their resources are needed for any other patient?
If they’re not collapsing the hospitals then why bring them up?
You are making an argument with no limiting principle, because it's poorly thought out and shallow, and it shows.
> You are making an argument with no limiting principle, because it's poorly thought out and shallow, and it shows.
It wasn’t poorly thought out. Our system sucked but was sustainable before the unvaxxed group decided to eschew medical prevention for this disease. Now it sucks _and_ is unsustainable.
Any argument you bring out that doesn’t recognize that the situation has changed due to covid, that also points out other health problems as a reason to not react to the change caused by covid, is poorly thought out.
If any self inflicted problem causes our healthcare system to tip over we should react to it.
People refusing the covid vaccination have tipped over the system. People getting type II diabetes have not
I'd like to propose a solution that I think you would really prefer:
Let's make it really obvious who the unvaccinated are. I'm thinking we could maybe have some kind of article of clothing that could be worn over top of normal clothes. Perhaps an armband would suffice? Would that make you feel comfortable? It would also make it easier for you to mistreat them and shame them at will. Perhaps we could have a different armband for people that are unvaccinated but have a record of a positive test and recovery. They could be subject to shaming as well for not going along with your sacrament.
59% of Democratic party voters surveyed support a policy of confining unvaccinated people to their homes. We should go ahead and do that right? I'm taking this to its logical end because you don't dare do so.
I voted Democrat my entire life. People have no idea what it was like campaigning for Barack Obama in southwestern Virginia. I literally had a man brandish a shotgun at me in his driveway. It's coal country. I was a die-hard supporter and they betrayed me and other people like me.
This coercion was the last straw and I'm never voting for the party again. Congratulations you and your ilk have created a monster.
I’m not going to accept you trying to make comparisons between the unvaxxed and Jews. Being unvaccinated is a _choice_. If you make choices you deal with the consequence. I’m never going to be behind treating people different for aspects of their life they had no choice in, but I am 100% behind treating people differently based on their choices.
> 59% of Democratic party voters surveyed support a policy of confining unvaccinated people to their homes. We should go ahead and do that right? I'm taking this to its logical end because you don't dare do so.
You didn’t ask. I’m completely fine taking this to the logical end. Not a democrat but I’d be in the 59%. If you want to be unvaxxed and not enter society, that’s fine. You’ve kept your externalities to yourself. If you want to have access to public areas and not take steps to stop breaking down public systems, then you’re pushing your problems on us and that’s where I have a problem with it
> I literally had a man brandish a shotgun at me in his driveway
And? It’s America, who grew up here and hasn’t had someone threaten to kill them for coming on their land?
> This coercion was the last straw and I'm never voting for the party again. Congratulations you and your ilk have created a monster.
I didn’t talk about being democrat at all, but if I was in the Democratic Party and you were threatening to leave over not being getting vaccinated then I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop you. It’s not a threat when I already don’t want the unvaccinated associated with me. Go ahead, take your ball, and go home.
I appreciate your honesty and candor on your feelings on this subject.
What I will state bluntly is this:
You have stated, implicitly, that you support the policy of confining the unvaccinated to their homes.
Unfortunately, I don't see a path forward for me to ever forgive, or be willing to be decent to, people who hold that opinion, because I view it as absolutely and unequivocally tyrannical, to a degree that I view is a betrayal to the constitution. My ancestors settled in southern Appalachia in the early 1700s, and I would have a far larger number of relatives if not for so many of them dying in the Revolutionary War for the right to never again have their fundamental rights violated by inevitably corrupt, morally certain and powerful rulers in distant cities. They too, fled Ulster, where oppressive policies could have been avoided if they had made the CHOICE to convert to the Anglican church. Just a CHOICE. They CHOSE to not join the Anglican church, so they deserved the oppression that was visited on them in the eyes of the British monarchy. "Those stupid Scots-Irish Presbyterians. If they'd just convert, they'd be fine! Let's take their shit." The English KNEW that THEY were RIGHT. It was all justified.
I strongly suspect that, had you been born in 1914, you would have been fully supportive of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Most Americans were, because violating the sovereign rights of fellow citizens made them feel safer. It reduced the risk imposed by some of them being spies. You have applied the same logic here. I know you view that as an unfair characterization. I don't fault you for that. Most people think that, if push came to shove, they would not have been one of the majoritarian oppressors they read about in history books. They think they are one of the small percentage of people who would have taken a stand, and sacrificed to do so. I see no evidence to support that belief in this conversation.
All I will say is that the machinery required to enforce such policies, as put on display in Australia, once put in place, can be used for any end, by any ruler who seizes power.
Regarding the political party aspects, it wasn't intended as a threat, but more of as a single data point that should make you question what the long-term fallout will be when this already endemic virus is eventually recognized as such by the vast majority of the American public. I'm not the only one who has hit a point of no return. I know I am in a minority, but it's an intransigent one, and the effect will be generational. I used to support gun control as well. Knowing that people out there are happy to violate my rights, I no longer do. 2 years ago, I viewed the NRA as a bunch of psychopaths allied with gun and ammunition manufacturers. My opinions, likely correct, was that a lot of the "Obama will take your guns" was designed to boost ammunition sales and profits for the gun/ammo companies. Now I view them as a useful counterbalance. I've been radicalized. Was it worth it?
> I've been radicalized. Was it worth it?
Why do I always hear this from people who think the unvaxxed should be completely unrestrained in their behavior? And why do I always hear it from people who haven’t realized they’ve radicalized the rest of us.
If you asked about limiting someone to their home because they won’t take a vaccine for a plague, you would have only gotten odd looks because no one would have expected people to be that crazy en masse. But hey, they are, they’re inflicting their problems on the rest of us, and like to get threatening anytime it’s questions.
We’ve been radicalized by the insistence of personal freedom over not harming the rest of us. Was it worth it?
Please explain to me why the scientists in the EU consider prior infection equivalent to being vaccinated but the United States doesn't?
Cheers
I'm angry and disappointed, but I'm not afraid of you and the other innumerate immunity deniers. I pity you. The willful imposition of tyranny on others is dehumanizing for those who push it, and for those who go along with it. You're better than that, and I hope you realize it one day. I sincerely wish you a good evening, and I appreciate the opportunity to learn your perspective. I also want you to know that I apologize for being so harsh at times in my comments. I don't fault you, because I understand that people aren't themselves when they are afraid.
The unvaccinated are harming and killing a lot of people. It isn't just grandpa's problem.
It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who???
It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.
His view of Oregon is that it's filled with people who are really not that bright. Obviously this is a stereotype but I will say that being out there what I kind of sensed was a bunch of people who were descended from pioneers who were very religious and are wired for religion but don't have it. I think COVID helped foster a new form of religion in the population, but perhaps it was always a sort of case where people on the coast were kind of doing that with progressive politics in general.
Human beings really are herd animals, and the vast majority of the population would rather do what is popular than what is right. I think that you have a toxic mix of this ideology combined with the rather unique Pacific Northwest cultural trait of never speaking your mind and primarily using passive aggressive behavior at all times. My brother worked at Nike for a while and was always told by colleagues that he was "too intense". He and I both worked in military intelligence in the past in the DC area and he's a driven worker like I am. He's only intense to people that really want to take it slow all the time. He always told me that the cultural traits in the region were really obnoxious and obstructed. Getting good work done. Nike is after all a shitshow of a company. Highly unproductive, very unefficient, with the dramatically larger workforce then it needs at its campus in Beaverton. We are talking about a state that has made the decision that people can't pump their own gas because it would hurt the economy by robbing people of the job of pumping their gas for them. That's a special kind of stupidity at the government level.
On top of this rather insane groupthink that you are referring to west of the Cascades, you have this other weird situation which is the rather extreme government measures at the state level have completely radicalized people on the right side of the political spectrum. When going to a grocery store in Sherwood outside of Portland, I encountered a bunch of boogaloo boys. Half the time I was driving around there I would occasionally see a truck with radical right wing stickers all over it, signifying membership in some group. (3 percenters or something like that?) I almost never see that anywhere in Colorado outside of Denver.
But perhaps the most memorable part of that trip was the interior of the state and the fact that the state government of Oregon clearly has zero authority anywhere east of the Cascades. It's really something to behold. You have this massive land area that is essentially ungovernable by the state government. The local population absolutely hates everything from the capital. They aren't at all subtle about it. It is basically a state of open, proud disobedience. It is the only place I've ever been since the pandemic started where there is a state law requiring wearing a mask indoors, but if I walked into a convenience store wearing one, they would get angry at me including the employees. It's a very good lesson to me about the fact that urban areas should understand that large swaths of this country will become completely ungovernable if they continue to use the government as a cudgel to force their values on a population that doesn't want it.
Another item that was shocking was the fact that we had visited Portland a few times before in previous summers, and the horrific degradation of Portland's downtown was tragic to see. It's really insane. Granted I was there right as the federal courthouse was being besieged, and it was pretty crazy having young men dressed in black threaten me and my brother when we were walking. We are both over 6 ft and over 200 lb and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we didn't get our asses beat. Complete lawlessness in that city. I just don't know how people who live there aren't completely embarrassed by it.
According to the article, studies have said very little in a way that controls for variables. There haven't been great studies showing their effectiveness. The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective." Not that it matters. Omicron is so contagious masks are well past their usefulness.
And then the raw data came out and there was a difference of maybe 20 cases.
The gold standard is an RCT, and it failed to show any benefit to masks in general.
Masks work great on mannequins or hamsters but they are essentially useless as a public health measure. We learned this in 1912. I am astonished that so many people still cling to them and claim "masks work" when we have overwhelming data that as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, they really don't. unless 100% of the people wear an N95 24/7.
The masks were well past their usefulness in 2019.
I'd be more than happy to test and vaccinate in schools. In particular vaccinate. But having kids wear masks…which they don't do well, because they're kids…not like adults do it well either…is a fig leaf. It's not going to work. And you can see that from the massive infection rates in schools that have masks.
I'm actually in favor of doing away with masks and social distancing. Just create a nationwide policy that the unvaccinated will not be admitted or treated for COVID and we can all return to our daily lives.
https://twitter.com/orwell2022/status/1486330027549544452
Sure, you can deny some people medical treatment if you want to reduce the load on the hospital by a bit but it does not go away!
I think people underestimate how big a number 5% of a population of most countries -- even small ones -- actually is, especially when compared against available health care resources.
But before you seek medical treatment we’ll just need you to fill out this questionnaire:
1. Have you ever had an alcoholic beverage?
2. Do you have a BMI greater than 18.5?
3. Have you ever eaten at The Cheesecake Factory?
4. Do you ride, run, or swim less than 40 miles per day?
Please understand that your answers may disqualify you from eligibility for healthcare. Thank you, Acme Excellence Health Partners.
Governments did.
I read that some politicians also choose to vacation in Miami, and without masks.
Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration.
We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.
He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID, she actually died from pneumonia, and not COVID. I guess no doctor explained to him that pneumonia is simply an infection that has spread to the lungs.
You can't help people like this.
Not surprising he'd perform basically any level of mental gymnastics to avoid that.
Ego-protective delusions are extremely common and most are motivated by far less than this.
Also you need to update your Sam Harris stats, its not 40% unvaccinated anymore like some outlets continue to harp on, check CDC numbers, its closer to only 20% of the population remaining.
[0]: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#ethnicity-gender-age
I remember reading here and elsewhere that early childhood exposure to germs builds a robust immune system.
While my kid doesn’t wear mask in his class but his school is following very strict cleaning procedures. So he hasn’t gotten sick as much before pandemic. Maybe that is good, definitely easier on us. Maybe we will always have higher level of hygiene now. Or maybe in future there will be a lot of young adults with underdeveloped immune system.
So I think it's possible that precautions reduce viral and bacterial exposure, but since they don't completely stop it, immune systems may still get enough exposure to build immunity to things while still not getting enough exposure to actually make them sick.
I believe that it's common for kids to wear masks during flu season in some countries. They probably have some relevant data.
I think there's a belief that strict adherence to vaccination and masks would get us to a place where we won't need masks all the time, and kids can resume their usual immune-system adventures. That might be less realistic than we might want. I don't know.
But they also do weekly testing. And did surveillance testing at the end of winter break, which kept about 15% of the school's students at home for the first week back because they had covid.
This statistic was also consistent with LA Unified surveillance testing after winter break - about 15%.
Before winter break, some parents of 2nd graders had an indoor, maskless, holiday party. Apparently all the kids got covid. Then gave it to the teachers - all 4 2nd grade teachers were out of school with covid the week before winter break. But from what our school's testing showed, it didn't spread beyond that.
I do know of a couple families who did seem to get covid from their school though.
We have caught about 3 things over the past ~year, but none of it covid (as far as tests showed) and all of them had obvious non-classroom links.
Two of them were sick friends. And the third was probably when our 3 year old licked a trashcan at the zoo.
Calling mothers who want their children to receive an in-person education "screaming Karens" is terribly out of touch.
I have young children, and my position is simple: the hospital load, the vaccination status of the elderly, the burn out of the teachers -- it's not my child's burden. It's the adults' burden.
You are free to wear a mask for the rest of your life for all I care. I find it pathetic, but I really don't care. But you and people like you do not deserve power over my children, and if you don't see the reckoning coming you are not paying close enough attention.
The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.
That's just deaths, though. What about other long-term effects? Long COVID and MIS-C come to mind.
> TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR.
And you'll notice that schools tend to take measures to prevent drowning - namely, barring unsupervised access to bodies of water deep enough for kids to drown.
> The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks
Maybe there should've been?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-021-04345-z
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surve...
Everyone will inevitably be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that exposure occurs in school or somewhere else hardly matters. We can't wrap our children in protective bubbles. At some point they have to exist in the real world with all of it's risks.
Throughout this pandemic, measures were taken with a public health benefit in mind that was purely limited to the virus, and any and all mentions of weighing the cost of these measures or even trying to quantify it was met with "You're killing people!!! You shouldn't have a platform. You should be silenced!" Shaming tactics are the last resort of people with bad policies and bad ideas.
I wasn't aware that any schools had completely closed their doors to prevent kids from drowning or were preventing kids from learning to speak by forcing them to cover half of their faces to prevent drowning. The point is that you don't know a kid that's drowned most likely and most of us don't.
Additionally, masks don't stop the spread. So we're sitting here arguing about an intervention that hasn't done anything to prevent omicron from spreading all over classrooms anyway. If you had school age children you would know this, but I'm going to take a wild guess you don't do you?
Your last question indicates that you think making mask wearing in school by children a permanent feature should be explored. I would welcome you to submit your own children if you ever have them to this experiment, but good luck finding researchers that think it would be ethical to conduct this experiment. They certainly wouldn't endorse it for more than a short period of time, but we did it to all of our kids in an uncontrolled experiment born out of panic.
You are on the wrong side of history.
Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.
I deeply resent it when people call it an issue of convenience. Proper emotional and social development of children is not an issue of convenience despite the constant claim from people like you that "You're just mad because you lost your free babysitting. Get over it."
The teachers were first in line to get vaccinated. Every other kind of employee in public places faces equivalent risks. As usual nobody is talking about numbers because your side has no numbers to back you up. It's just waving your hand and talking about people's comfort levels. Unquantifiable emotional nonsense, with people who are impervious to any form of facts or statistics or actual numbers.
Consequences be damned.
It depends what kind of mask. Proper respirator masks like N95 and FFP2 work very well. There are now very clear results that show that the main mode of transmission is respiratory aerosol.
As an example, this Lancet paper captures it well: ”Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2”, The Lancet, 2021. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Numerous results have come out since.
I can’t find fault with the data or the investigation or the conclusion – I act according to this: We’re dealing with an airborne pathogen. Aerosolized.
Closed masks – respirator masks – N95/FFP2. These do work. Almost unreasonably well.
“Surgical masks” that gape at the sides do not protect well against aerosolized particles.
If you feel like you should wear an N95 properly to be safe then you should do that. But let’s not pretend we can get everyone to properly wear N95s
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/commenta...
If people knew that they actually are effective, more would wear them.
Instead of blaming unvaxxed people, you should blame the government for not having more capacity and not planning on how to handle surge in demand for hospitals. We're lucky covid is so tame, this could have been a crazy disaster.
This rhetoric where we try to divide the population is insanely toxic when the fault should be placed on the ruling class for mishandling both the planning, the communication and the handling of the pandemic.
Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. Medicine knows where that goes and is strongly incentivized to never go there again.
I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage
There are no single issue voters for increasing the medical systems capacity. There are multiple political groups who care about the medical system but none who are willing to sacrifice every other possible gain if they get an improved medical system. That is what I mean about the electorate signaling that they do not care
Have you considered Nth order effects of this simple approach (the law of unintended consequences)?
> If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.
Have you considered that there might be some of this within the infinitely complex (and typically invisible, due to the nature of consciousness) causality behind why some people aren't getting vaccinated? Perhaps we are enjoying the bitter taste of unintended consequences as we speak.
Because wearing masks is a good thing. A large part of the resistance to mask wearing in the US stems from seeing it as an abnormal thing and an oppression, but, in fact, wearing a mask when you're sick—even if it's just a minor sickness, not in the context of a global pandemic—is a good and respectful thing to do, practiced as a matter of course in many countries. Kids who grow up wearing masks will not have the horror of them that their vaccine-avoiding forebears did, and hopefully will be better equipped to meet the next pandemic sanely.
> I have full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system
What do your medic friends say?
Anything that follows from that will be a flawed argument.
Are you saying you know better than those two about whether or not masks are necessary at schools?
If I were you I would simply trust the experts on this one.
This may not be a bad thing in the long run. There’s a shortage of medical professionals because the medical industry wants it that way. If the crisis becomes acute enough, the government will be forced to loosen regulations, and that would allow for more people to enter the field faster and more easily.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
From [1]:
> "The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians," the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. "The current rate of physician supply -- the number of physicians entering the work force each year -- is clearly excessive."
> The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year.
> The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate.
They've changed their tune (which I, cynically, think is because the members in the late 90s have all "gotten theirs" by now).
[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/thanks-to-doctors-there-a...
[1] https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-03-01-19970600...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/01/us/doctors-assert-there-a...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/13/health/train-more-doctors-res...
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001936.htm
The other thing that changed in the past 100 years is that Americans on average are older, sicker, and have higher demand for healthcare.
It's an uncontrolled experiment that was launched, without any regard for potential negative consequences. Your kids are older, you don't know anything about what they are facing.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. It's a huge topic of constant discussion amongst the entire faculty at her school and others about how insanely developmentally delayed and poorly socialized the current crop of kindergartners are. They've been stuck in isolation, left alone on ipads and other screens since they were 3. This isn't just anecdotal, there are studies showing small children are TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS behind where they should be. Your sitting here whining about young adults in an extremely high-paying profession being worn out saving a population that will mostly be dead of old age in less than 20 years, and ignoring the damage that has already been done (needlessly) and the continuing damage being done for bio-security theater. Utterly infuriating. These kids are OUR future.
Your comment showed zero empathy or thought towards that. YOUR kids didn't miss kindergarten. YOUR kids didn't get isolated. YOUR kids had a normal childhood. Mine aren't. Many others aren't. But really glad you care so much about "Global Climate Change" (why capitalize it, is it your religion?). The selfishness of your statement is appalling.
In any case, we're seeing a surge in cases where the young are facing hospitalizations https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/health/covid-children-hos.... When I trained at a country hospital, it was overwhelmingly people under 50 being hospitalized for COVID-19. Children are at risk and we shouldn't think like it's spring of 2020 anymore.
Adults have offloaded as much of the burden of the pandemic on young people as possible.
- Suicide rates are through the roof
- Developmentally delays
- Societal debt
And it goes on. Medical professional have it rough… oh well! Open up more medical schools, theres far more people willing to go to med school than get in.
Id rather not go to the Dr. and not need prescriptions to buy most drugs. Lets loosen those regulations and 80% of the reasons Ive been to the Dr. in the last six years will be covered with the same formula: 10 days of augmentin.
They are perhaps one of the most significant drags on economic growth in the history of the United States. Because of the artificially induced scarcity, we pay mediocre physicians the wages that CEOs earn in other industries.
Everyone in the US thinks insurance companies are to blame, while they are certainly not efficient, there have been numerous studies that show that the majority of growth in price increases in medicine are due to physician wages and their organized bargaining power with insurance companies driving up prices.
What other service have you encountered where you routinely have the person you are paying reschedule your appointments at the last minute? Thanks to the American Medical Association, they have the ability to do this with impunity. What's insane is we actually have to import medical workers from overseas where they are trained in countries that don't have an evil organization limiting supply.
Knowing about this has made it even more unbearable to get scolded by these people for 2 years. I'm terribly sorry that they have to endure such horrible conditions while earning over $400,000 a year. It really is primarily a profession of non-creative, rule following mid-wits, kissing the ass of their licensing boards and taking defacto bribes from pharma reps to push the latest overprescribed Big Pharma product.
Thats what I was implying, but I wasn’t sure if this was also the case in the US as in other countries. Like you say, its their doing so they can go and cry me a river for all I care.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
If you're talking about clinics catering to poor populations. Why can't they use their Medicare money?
I'm sorry, I don't trust anything from the AMA because they are a lobbying organization. Why don't I just start sending links to the American Petroleum Institute while we're at it?
Yes the American Petroleum Institute is a good source of information on some topics. They're certainly biased and I disagree with some of their conclusions, but they publish some accurate data and it's worth understanding their perspective.
Do you have a link? I would not be surprised if there were significant developmental issues, but two standard deviations is such an enormously large effect size that I'm doubtful.
ICU's are not overflowing. They run at an 80 to 90 percent capacity in general.
Flattening the curve has been a news media myth for YEARS now that has never come true.
Here's actual ICU data around the U.S. They all run high because they ALWAYS HAVE.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
More medical professionals are being fired for not getting the vaccine than retiring.
People weren't having kids BEFORE COVID.
On a geological time scale the earth temperature is not even close to the hottest it's ever been.
It's a gish gallop of unfounded liberal news media talking points.
Do you have a source for that? The percentage of Covid patients in ICU wards in the UK peaked at somewhere near 30% for a short period in January 2021.
>the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out.
Now I do know this to be true, but it's not due to the absolute numbers of Covid patients. In my experience (as I know several people in frontline healthcare), its the side-effects of Covid restrictions making healthcare impossible to provide.
The CDC has already admitted half of the people in the hospital with Covid aren’t there because of Covid and this lines up with other countries experiences.
The world has been through far worse than what we are going through now and we made it just fine.
You personally may die from Covid or you could get run over by a car walking your doggy.
Rather than worrying about it, try and turn off the internet, spend time with people you love and enjoy your life. There will always be time to worry and stress.
I program as a hobby, so I do frequent here. It is unusual how many people talk here about medicine, especially when deciding to debate medical ethics. A lot of it feels like they are working it out a priori.
That claim is misinformation, please edit and delete. Medicine as a field is very broad and plenty of other conditions are being treated.
Not encouraging preemptive healthy lifestyles backfiring? (Obesity, etc)
Things will work out just fine.
And who can blame them at this point? If anything we need more doctors/nurses/healthcare workers, but now we're going to be moving in the wrong direction for many years.
I should know, I'm one of them since 10 years ago.
The ones dancing on tiktok a year and a half ago? Or the ones who are left in an understaffed environment after their unvaccinated colleagues were canned?
And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
We're walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that's not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn't gone away and there doesn't seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.
You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.