Corona

[ruru67]

We may never achieve complete immunity against the virus but I do expect the lethality of the virus to degrade over time although it also appears that it will become more contagious faster. We shall see. As you rightly said, we must continue to remain vigilant and continue to comply with the respective recommendations.

Yep. H1N1 was the virus behind the 1918 'flu, and is still doing the rounds. But while it's still one of the nastier influenza strains, the recent outbreaks of H1N1 haven't been anything like the first (recorded) round. The usual pattern of disease evolution is to get more infectious and less severe. Not the only pattern, mind, just the most common.

[Shannon SteelSlave]

Total Cases 103,712,003 , Global Deaths 2,248,365
Merry Ground Hog Day!Please keep your celebrating reasonable.

[Shannon SteelSlave]

Total Cases 106,643,519 , Global Deaths 2,330,839

[OrgasmAlley]

In the US, our virus master Anthony Fauci made an amazing statement yesterday. It is his official opinion that when "the level of virus is so low it’s not a threat at all, then at that point, you can start thinking in terms of not having to have uniform wearing of masks." This is totally ridiculous. It is obvious to anyone with any awareness -- medical or historical -- that the COVID will never be "not a threat at all". In the same interview, he expanded the normal threshold for herd immunity (for COVID, that would generally be 70% of adults vaccinated or with antibodies) to "70 to 85 percent of the population vaccinated". Note that this has two changes.... from 70% to the expanded range of 70-85%, and from adults to population. However, there's no significant effort right now vaccinate youth, nor should there be. Not only are minors -- especially those 12 and under -- at an extremely low personal risk should they become infected, they appear to become infected and communicate infection at much lower rates.

This is totally in line with the crap we continue getting from the CDC. About two weeks ago, they started running ads (at least on radio, probably more broadly) encouraging mask wearing, which included the claim that "masks protect both the wearer and others". In actual fact, there is no good proof that average masks protect anyone, and the best study available is only on protection of the wearer and found none.

I know why governments and media want to promote the COVID as more dangerous than we understand it to be. I don't really know why _people_ are resistant to what we understand about the virus thanks to science and experience:

- there is very low fomite transmission (all the surface disinfecting at retail locations is a feel-good... you're not getting COVID from touching a counter)
- there is low transmission by cases who are asymptomatic
- transmission likelihood outdoors is vastly lower than transmission likelihood indoors (on the order of 1:19)
- minors, particularly those 12 and under, and very unlikely to get and extremely unlikely to transmit, COVID
- there is little risk from in-person schooling
- there is almost no risk to air travel
- advancing age is the #1 predictor of COVID mortality, by far... 93% of those who have died with(*) the COVID are 55 or older
- cases and deaths have been significantly overstated thus far in the US (and anywhere else using death "with"(*) and/or PCR testing with more than about 30 cycles)**

* - Dying "with" COVID indicates nothing about the cause of death. We know of motorcycle accident deaths, cancer deaths, heart disease deaths, and so forth "with" COVID that were certainly _because_ of these other causes. Some may have been influenced by the virus, but many clearly were not. It is sufficient to test positive to count as a "COVID death".

** - In the US, PCR testing has typically used 37-40 cycles of viral growth to generate detectable amounts of the COVID virus from whatever amount may have been present on a swab. This number of iterations is sufficient to detect an extremely small viral load, one below the possibility of infecting the host. As a result, people who have not been infected have routinely received false positive results from these tests and added to "infections". At 35 cycles, about half of the positive tests (based on a large sample from Massachusetts) would not be positive. That number rose to 70% false positive at 30 cycles.

[Shannon SteelSlave]

I can agree that it is difficult to believe what is not witnessed or personally experienced. Unfortunately for most, it comes down to who to believe.
I only offered the numbers this week, as it is hard to say anything that hasn't already been said.
Maybe the word "threat" means how much we worry about it. Maybe herd immunity will be that day it no longer poses a "threat". Maybe it goes away when it is no longer the centre of almost every news story.

[OrgasmAlley]

I cannot intuit with certainty exactly what Fauci might have meant is his statement, but I do know what this means in a broader medical context. If one reads about polio eradication in the US, for example, you'll see something like this from CDC:

- Thanks to a successful vaccination program, the United States has been polio-free since 1979.
- But poliovirus is still a threat in some countries.

Poliovirus is a threat in some countries because it's still possible to contract it there, but not a threat in the US because no one has contracted it in the US for more than 40 years. I do think it's reasonable to conclude that a medical professional's classification of a disease as a threat or not is independent of the news coverage thereof.

Just my opinion, no intent to dismiss anyone else's opinion or statements to which it responds.

[Shannon SteelSlave]

Appreciate the news.

[OrgasmAlley]

For anyone interested in such things, this peer reviewed study documents a series of ways in which the CDC simply ignored their legally mandated requirements under the Information Quality Act (2001) specially for COVID, and employed unapproved and unusual methods that inflated COVID numbers. https://jdfor2020.com/wp-content/upload ... af1541.pdf

Another interesting factoid herein. The CDC via Fauci in 2014 and 2019 authorized NIAID and NIH funding ($3.7 million each of these two years) for research by the Wuhan Institute of VIrology for "gain of function" research on coronaviruses in bats. Gain of function means that one intentionally manipulates a virus to make it worse in order to understand how bad it might get naturally, and what we might be able to do about it.

[Shannon SteelSlave]

Total Cases 108,994,619 , Global Deaths 2,403,462
Where does everyone land on "double masking"? (Or triple masking for some of us)

[Kinbaku]

Total Cases 108,994,619 , Global Deaths 2,403,462
Where does everyone land on "double masking"? (Or triple masking for some of us)

Or with underpants in the mouth, ball gag, duct tape and double mask.

Sad for those more than 2,400,000 dead and their families and friends.

[Shannon SteelSlave]

Total Cases 111,890,818 , Global Deaths 2,478,717
We have 5-6% of the US population vaccinated. When have we achieved "herd immunity"?

[ruru67]

Total Cases 111,890,818 , Global Deaths 2,478,717
We have 5-6% of the US population vaccinated. When have we achieved "herd immunity"?

From memory, the "R" value - the average number of people a contagious case infects - for "classic" COVID without countermeasures is about 3. That goes down with measures like mask wearing and social distancing, but the new variants are more infectious (a contact is more likely to proceed to disease) will push it up.

As long as R is more than 1, the disease will progress through the community; if it's 1 the number of concurrent cases will remain about stable, and if less than 1 (preferably a lot less), the number of active cases is reducing.

If you have 50% immunity (from vaccination, or having already had it), that will effectively halve the R value, so R=3 will reduce to R=1.5; 70% would get R to less than 1 given a "base" R of three. But if the "base" R is much greater than 3 due to a more infectious variants, then the immunity will have to be higher - possibly over 90% to get R far enough below 1 to make a rapid difference; if you can't get R where you need it by vaccination alone, you need to continue with distancing measures.

(If there was any such thing as divine justice, Andrew Wakefield would suffer a painful, lingering death from an incurable but entirely preventable disease.)

[Shannon SteelSlave]

At least we have a formula. Too many variables, but a good formula. I heard on the National Public Radio that mask wearing (and every other preventative measure) could continue into late 2022.

[OrgasmAlley]

Which is an interesting push, given the apparent lack of effectiveness of masks.

We've been seeing a substantial drop in infections across most of the world. https://covid19.who.int/

In the US, new daily infections dropped by 3/4th in the last 6 weeks, a result both not predicted and most ignored by the government disease masters. https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive

And the result of this great news of massively declining infections are mainstream articles like CNN "Despite US Covid-19 cases dropping, infections are still staggeringly high. Here's what has experts worried" and MSN "COVID infections falling worldwide but WHO warns against apathy".

[lj]

same sort of absurdity here in the UK.

Although it seems to be "advice" rather than law, school children in secondary education, ie 11 to 18, "should" wear masks in class. Given a population largely terrified by the constant stream of "doom-porn" would you want to be the teacher or head-teacher who ignores this "advice" ?

Fortunately a decent number of parents and teachers are personally saying they won't support this - reasonably pointing out that a mask hides so many cues needed by teachers to check what they are teaching is getting a positive reaction, to say nothing of hiding disruptive interruptions and misbehaviour. Hope there will be a U turn on this absurd idea.

And as our vaccination programme is moving rapidly - almost all over 70s have had the first dose, by then end of the month so will the over 60s, which removes 99% of the most vulnerable in the population from likely infection - it is hard to see why (anti(social) distancing, mask wearing and limits on groups meeting etc etc are going to stay for months.