Corona

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kinbaku
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Re: Corona

Post by kinbaku »

Shannon SteelSlave wrote:Be well, and Shannon :hi: salutes you.
Thanks, and don't worry: weeds don't perish so quickly. :rofl:
I was just surprised that it would still happen to me even though I am so careful.
And it's a bit disappointing because this weekend we are celebrating a 50th anniversary of a company where I was the first secretary when it was founded. I had already prepared everything and was looking forward to a nice meal and meeting, but they will have to do it without me. :cry:
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Re: Corona

Post by Gregovic »

bound_jenny wrote:Of course it can happen to anyone. People who have been double-vaxxed and boosted have gotten it not just once, but twice. :?

That is not an effective vaccine.

If the pharma industry would stop sitting on their damned hands and make a vaccine that is actually effective on the current variants they might actually come up with one that really prevents infection instead of just "mitigating the symptoms". :roll:

If they had the same attitude with the flu vaccines as they have with the CoVID vaccines there would be a heck of a lot more sick people (and deaths) with the flu. Every year they come out with a new flu shot because of new mutations, other strains regaining dominance, etc. Why the hell not with CoVID?!?!?!? :evil:

Jenny.
Because the flu (influenza virus) is seasonal and cyclical in a way that makes it predictable to a degree we haven't achieved yet with COVID. Which means by necessity development for new strains of SARS-COV2 has to be done reactionary, which is by default 2 steps behind the real world. "We" have got it wrong with influenza too sometimes (2018 I think for instance) where we had a much bigger than usual flu season because the shot developed for that year didn't protect sufficiently to the strain of flu that turned out to be dominant that year.
How may I serve you? *Curtsey*
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Re: Corona

Post by OrgasmAlley »

A number of places with "zero COVID" policies are seeing Omicron waves, including in heavily vaccinated and boosted populations. On the plus side, natural immunity acquired via Omicron infection appears broad and highly effective.
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Re: Corona

Post by ruru67 »

OrgasmAlley wrote:A number of places with "zero COVID" policies are seeing Omicron waves, including in heavily vaccinated and boosted populations. On the plus side, natural immunity acquired via Omicron infection appears broad and highly effective.
Calling bullshit again.

Here in NZ (pop. 5 million):
  • We had an elimination strategy until late last year. Delta put an end to that around August, but heavy restrictions kept it in check, holding steady at an average of about 100 cases per day (peak at under 200/day around November) and almost no deaths. Omicron ended that, staring the rise early to mid February.
  • Frankly, the NZ Government and health authorities got complacent and consequently fucked up the vaccination programme. In August, when Delta got into the community, the vaccinations had barely started; if it had got going two months earlier (which really, really should have been easily achievable), there would have been a good chance of keeping elimination going until Omicron.
  • Still, once the vaccination programme got underway properly, it went fast - 94% of eligible (over age 12) population are now double vaxxed, most of that boosted.
  • Now Omicron is out, the official figure is about half a million total COVID cases - in the last few weeks peaking at about 20,000 cases per day, or 4,000 cases per million, but the prevalence of mild infections and moves away from professionally taken, lab processed PCR tests in favour of self-administered RATs and effectively optional reporting, means that a lot of cases aren't being counted. Most agree that the real number is about three times that. But the rate of infection has stabilised at that number - the official count has been under 20,000 per day since the beginning of March and is heading steadily downwards.
So yes, we're seeing a massive spike in infections. But don't forget: this is the first big wave here; we never had the massive waves of 2020 or the second waves in 2021. And the infection rate isn't the important number: we all get sick, be it COVID, the 'flu, common colds or whatever. The question is, how many people need hospital treatment or die? Right now there are 28 people in ICU in NZ, again, that figure has been fairly constant over the last couple of weeks. Over the whole country. The death rate is settling at about 10/day, or 2/million/day - the US and other countries that did or could not take the line we did have never seen figures that low. Not even in the deepest troughs. And that's despite the NZ health authorities giving up on trying to differentiate "died of COVID" from "died with COVID" - a good chunk of that rise in deaths are from people who have been infected but really got killed by something else.

(Previously, with tiny rates of COVID in the community, if a stiff tested positive, you could be fairly confident that was at least partly responsible for carrying them off - if you weren't sure already.)

The thing people don't seem to understand about vaccinations is that they don't stop infections. If virus particles get into you, you get infected, regardless of vaccinations or previous infection. What happens then depends on a bunch of things, including whether your immune system is primed to deal with it or not, and how much virus you actually acquired - if someone sneezes a load of virus into your face, you're likely going to end up with a worse infection than a little acquired through contact with an infected surface. If you are vaccinated, or previously had the disease, then your system is already primed to start fighting the infection; if not, it has to develop a fresh immune response and that takes time, time in which the virus could get away on you.

Basically, vaccinations affect severity. Severity appears in your statistics in hospitalisations, deaths, and case transmission rates (less severe cases mean less onward transmission).

The low death and hospitalisation rate here speaks volumes on how effective the vaccination programme has been at blunting the effect of the current spike. Really, the big problem with the current spike isn't health system strain or high death rates. It's supply chain issues due to stores, warehouses and transport operators having staff off sick all at once. And I think we can wear that one. People recover from not being able to get their favourite breakfast cereal.
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Re: Corona

Post by lj »

ruru67 wrote: The thing people don't seem to understand about vaccinations is that they don't stop infections. If virus particles get into you, you get infected, regardless of vaccinations or previous infection. What happens then depends on a bunch of things, including whether your immune system is primed to deal with it or not, and how much virus you actually acquired - if someone sneezes a load of virus into your face, you're likely going to end up with a worse infection than a little acquired through contact with an infected surface. If you are vaccinated, or previously had the disease, then your system is already primed to start fighting the infection; if not, it has to develop a fresh immune response and that takes time, time in which the virus could get away on you.

Basically, vaccinations affect severity. Severity appears in your statistics in hospitalisations, deaths, and case transmission rates (less severe cases mean less onward transmission).
an excellent summary!

sadly most people don't understand biology or statistics. Bear in mind that what we refer to as the "common cold" has been responsible for many deaths amongst populations previously isolated from the virus. Now, of course, there are very many mutations of the common cold, but the population has been exposed to many of them, and a general has been bred into the population as a whole, so a cold is a trivial disease to almost everyone. Covid will go the same way.

Perversely, the wider the spread of covid, the better for the long-term immunity development against it. Better to be vaccinated and get a mild case, than be unvaccinated and get a severe case. But the chances are you WILL get covid. Which is where the statistics aspect comes in. Reporting "cases" is pointless - we don't record "cases" of the common cold, because it is largely trivial. What matters are deaths FROM covid (not "with") - or any other disease for that matter.
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Re: Corona

Post by OrgasmAlley »

ruru67 wrote:Calling bullshit again.
So yes, we're seeing a massive spike in infections.
I'm curious who and/or what you're "calling bullshit again" upon. You've quoted me, but gone on to agree (for your own country) that you are in fact seeing an Omicron wave, exactly as I said. I assume you agree than a half million cases and 20k daily -- or real numbers three times that -- constitute an Omicron wave. What in my statement do you think is bullshit?
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Shannon SteelSlave
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Re: Corona

Post by Shannon SteelSlave »

OrgasmAlley wrote:
ruru67 wrote:Calling bullshit again.
Wow.
I admit to having turned a sort of blind eye to this thread, but I didn't think I died.......... especially as thread host.
Please remember everyone, that the purpose of this thread is to voice concerns, gripe about restriction imposed by, and mourn any casualties of, or related to, the corona virus. Let us not start rivalries over who is right or wrong, especially regionally. Being right and wrong does not change things. And to be perfectly honest, I have stopped reading these fact based studied and numbers, because I spend more time trying to find the faults in their findings and figuring out what they are trying to tell me to do.
In my neck of the woods, in New England-Town, people seem to have forgotten, or are becoming more and more arrogant. Seeing little social distancing, and masking. I too, have stopped listening to NPR (National Public Radio), since they seem to get their jollies from reporting the downside, and is now the only place I even hear about Covid. I am not saying its over, it just might not be worth pausing our lives any more for it.
How are people acting in your location? Share here, I am curious for on the spot, unbiased reporting.
Get well soon, Kinbaku. I enjoy your posting more knowing that you are well. :hi:
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Re: Corona

Post by ruru67 »

OrgasmAlley wrote:I'm curious who and/or what you're "calling bullshit again" upon. You've quoted me, but gone on to agree (for your own country) that you are in fact seeing an Omicron wave, exactly as I said. I assume you agree than a half million cases and 20k daily -- or real numbers three times that -- constitute an Omicron wave. What in my statement do you think is bullshit?
You keep pushing - or at least strongly implying - that vaccinations are not effective and natural immunity is better. Now it's true that vaccination only "primes" your immune system for a subset of the possible attacks - to prime it for every possible attack means exposure to the real live virus, rather than just the spike protein or other key sites, so by that argument, yes it's less effective.

But:
  • Obtaining that immunity means actually getting sick, potentially life-threateningly so.
  • The "reduced effectiveness" is not that great; sure the later variants seem to have less vulnerability to vaccinations, but the NZ experience suggests that it's still pretty darned effective.
  • Immunity acquired from earlier infections may itself be less effective against later variants. I don't have a good handle on that.
NZ infections are pretty close to 100% Omicron since Feb, and about 99% of all cases since the start of the pandemic. (The remaining 1% is itself about 90% Delta; the rest are earlier cases that got through at the start of the pandemic and a handful from subsequent minor outbreaks.) Yet the rate of serious effects - hospitalisation/deaths - is tiny. We have a ridiculously low rate of previous infection, so pretty much all of the immunity that's causing these low rates of bad outcomes is coming from vaccinations.

I don't (and wish I did) have a breakdown of vaccination statuses of the bad outcomes, because I'm pretty sure those numbers would put the argument completely to bed. I think I've seen some rather casually presented numbers that suggest the vaccination status of these is about 50/50 - since the vast majority of the population is vaccinated (94% of over 12s are double or triple vaxxed), that suggests that you're well over 90% more likely to suffer a bad outcome (i.e. dangerously sick / dead - not just "feel like death" sick) if you aren't vaccinated.
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Re: Corona

Post by OrgasmAlley »

So you're calling bullshit on things not in the post you're responding to... one I don't think I've ever said and another that is 100% true. Why?

I seriously doubt that I've ever said (or implied, unless you're reading well beyond what I actually said) that "vaccines aren't effective". I've definitely said that the vaccines have low effectiveness against Omicron infection, but certainly through Delta and quite possibly Omicron as well, they have evidenced clear efficacy against hospitalization and death. Stating certainty about Omicron has serious data issues.

It is 100% accurate to say that recovery from natural infection provides superior immunity to COVID than does vaccination. There is literally no question on this point, and hasn't been for at least a year.
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Re: Corona

Post by OrgasmAlley »

It's interesting to think back on the early claims about infection fatality rate of the COVID. Here in the states, the Imperial College model of March 16 (predicting 2.2 million US deaths using the WHO estimated IFR of 3.8%) drove public policy, leading to a range of measures that have since proven largely ineffective and in some cases harmful. On the other side were people like John Ioannidis, who took the Diamand Princess criuse ship and other "closed cell" data to estimate an IFR in the 0.5% range... often discussed with derision as "like the flu". In the US the flu, using CDC numbers, has an IFR that ranges between roughly 0.15% and 0.5%. The doctors and researchers in the latter group have been largely silenced or excised from social media for spreading "misinformation". Spoiler: it wasn't.

Here is data from The Lancet estimating Infection Fatality Rate for the US states from the start of the pandemic through January 1, 2021, standardized for age. For context, these deaths were before meaningful vaccinations, and the CDC did not have a therapeutic protocol until late in Q4-2020... monoclonal antibodies and Remdesivir. Before that, the plan was to drink fluids at home unless you need to go on a ventilator. This data is IFR in the absence of vaccines or therapeutics.

3.8%? Or like the flu? It's also interesting to note that the states with the most severe restrictions tend to float to the high end, while Florida under the policies of Governor "Deathsantis" is the large state with the lowest IFR, despite having the largest elderly population in the country.

Full Lancet appendix, table in the last several pages includes countries of the world: https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S ... a/mmc1.pdf
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Re: Corona

Post by ruru67 »

OrgasmAlley wrote:3.8%? Or like the flu?
Most 'flu cases go unreported, since it's not a notifiable disease and not usually serious. The reported cases tend to be when 'flu becomes a complication to other conditions, and in the process life-threatening (or life-ending). Of those cases, the case fatality rate tends to be high, but they are a very small proportion of actual 'flu cases.

Once again, you need to be careful about your comparisons.
It's also interesting to note that the states with the most severe restrictions tend to float to the high end, while Florida under the policies of Governor "Deathsantis" is the large state with the lowest IFR, despite having the largest elderly population in the country.
I'm sure there are reasons. Most likely these are due to different approaches in behaviour among those with tighter restrictions (which, let's be clear, had lower infection rates and therefore lower overall death rates) compared to those with looser or no restrictions. But I think if you're going to quote numbers without explanation, then we are just left with idle speculation rather than actual analysis of the behavioural and medical dynamics involved.
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Re: Corona

Post by Shannon SteelSlave »

I have to say, the only thing I pay attention to anymore is peoples' individual experiences. Anything reported by a media outlet just comes down to who to believe, forcing me to understand their underlying agenda, and, I just don't care. Either or.
I appeal to everyone's good nature, rather than the alternatives, to please follow the rules of the forum pertaining to No Politics and No Vulgar Language. As a peer, I ask that everyone get along. Please take any political gripes or scientific beliefs elsewhere, to a Private Message or another forum.
I am not completely blameless in all of this. I had received several PMs about pandemic concerns. That is where I got the idea to start this thread, to give them all an anecdotal voice, a place to talk about lock down coping strategies, and speak out if they are feeling down or grieving from casualty. I knew that arguments were a risk, but I believe this group of members could carry out conversation without insults. Now members are coming to me saying they are afraid to post here in fear of starting fights. I am honoured by the responsibility, but at the same time, worried that I set this trap to encourage bad behaviour and spawn feuds that would not otherwise have come about.
No warnings or suspensions will be issued here (again, because I feel I would bear some responsibility for that), but keeping up these bad habits hurts everyone in ways you may not realize. I am not saying we always have to agree. (I am best friends with some members who have publicly disagreed with me)
This is the only forum I visit. Bound Anna is a place for friends and friendly discussion. Without that, I would see little point in visiting here.
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Re: Corona

Post by OrgasmAlley »

I'll answer the two explicit responses above and be done. The CDC's US estimates for flu IFR referenced above uses as the denominator their estimate of total infections, not a number of reported infections. Yes, I'm sure the death rate in reported flu infections is considerably higher. I remain happy with my comparison. With state IFR's averaging between 0.4 and 0.5, the flu could have an IFR of 0.0% and COVID is still much more like flu than like the projected 3.8% of the WHO/Imperial College. I don't believe it's accurate to claim that states with more restrictions had lower rates of infection or death (although I didn't bring up either rate). Infection rate is heavily confounded, to the point of uselessness.... it's extremely dependent on testing, which not only varied substantially but is unfair to high restriction states as people living in fear are more likely to get tested when ill. Death rate, while useless for many things thanks to counting "with" rather than "from", is at least consistent because a deceased person is clearly a death. Florida is at the extreme low end for US states in level and duration of restriction, while the extreme high end includes New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and California. Of those four only California has a lower rate of death with COVID (per 100k population) than Florida. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states ... t_type=map
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Re: Corona

Post by bound_jenny »

Maybe I should put on my moderator's hat (the green one, not just useful for St Pat's day :hi: ).

As Shannon is, I am also quite disconcerted about the trend of the tone of responses here. Since we're a sample of the general population, then we should not be surprised that the debate is just as emotionally - and sometimes politically - charged as with the rest of society. That's not the spirit of Bound Anna.

Goodness knows I have tried to compartmentalize all of that and stay in the strictly neutral and factual.

I think we can do better. Much better.

So if any political or emotional hackles are being raised, no matter who you are, step away from the keyboard for a while and weigh the possible consequences of a visceral reaction to a post. Cooler heads must prevail. We must resist the temptation to do as the rest of the world is doing - to become aggressive and become increasingly polarized, instead of debating calmly and engaging in a mutually beneficial exchange that elevates everyone.

I will, as a moderator, start watching this thread with greater interest in how members relate to each other in their discourse.

The green hat stays on.

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Re: Corona

Post by Riddle »

I am thankful that the mask mandate in Oregon has been mostly lifted. Only healthcare settings still require masks. I never got accustomed to wearing a mask; struggled to breathe and quickly overheated while wearing a fabric mask.

The Veterans Administration has recently (3 months ago?) started requiring paper masks and giving me flack for my cloth mask. However, I can’t wear the masks they give out because they don’t fit my face and want to ride up and block my vision. What am I to do?
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