South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew(washingtonpost.com) |
South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew(washingtonpost.com) |
Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.
I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.
Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.
So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.
It wasn't a cakewalk but it was nowhere the nightmares of many other places.
Or Italy where they had to call in the military to cart away corpses:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/italian-army-moves-coronavir...
First and foremost, we can only make predictions based upon the data we have. The data we have is mostly based upon people going for voluntary testing. Given the variability in symptoms that motivate testing, varying levels of awareness to potential exposure, varying willingness to get tested, and the availability of testing, the number of known exposures will make it look like we're in an exponential growth phase even when things are tapering off. It is hard to blame public health organizations for accepting this data at face value since the potential consequences of not doing so are extremely bleak.
The other consideration is that people will modify their behaviour based upon perceived risk, whether or not restrictions are imposed. People will tend to comply with restrictions, go about life as normal, follow some sort of middle path, or impose tighter restrictions upon themselves. It takes a truly special person to put themselves into a position of greater risk. Even then, there is a good chance that they are doing little more than translating one high risk circumstance into another (more or less balancing out the growth). We are facing a situation where scientists can make predictions based upon what is known, e.g. the outcome of restrictions, or making predictions based upon anticipated behaviour. Given there is not enough data to model anticipated behaviour, the natural response is to rely upon models that use expected behaviour (e.g. compliance with restrictions or no response). Since the average actual response will prefer over compliance, more bleak predictions are made.
Finally, everyone has a different understanding of life now as compared to life before the pandemic. I remember when the coronavirus first caught my attention: it was when major U.S. universities started shutting down. I remember when I first started taking it seriously: it was when my provincial government issued a shelter in place style order. Since that time, I have paid attention to what is happening and thinking about how I should respond. Sometimes it is in an acute manner. Sometimes is in a cursory manner. Either way, I am more likely to notice and respond preemptively to outbreaks. I suspect that many, if not most, people are the same even if their only actions are stocking up to prepare for the worse. Again, this will affect outcomes.
We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to realize we have to live with Covid just like everyone living with the virus descendent of Spanish flu.
And Omicron should be viewed as blessing to some extend as it is less severe and is one way nature provide immunity to us. A lot of people would want natural immunity than constantly getting jab every couple of months (Israel going for 4th right now).
But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and that have a longer period between the start of infectivity (= shortly after infection) and the onset of identifiable symptoms. So you would indeed anticipate that any disease that runs sufficiently long in the population becomes more mild and has a later onset of symptoms as variants with these features outcompete thr others.
In other words: it is expected that covid mutates over time to become more mild on average. But that doesn't mean that everyone survives. Infection rates in many countries are higher than ever, which even if the % of severe cases is lower than with other variants, delta and omicron will still kill and have severe long-term effects on many.
I didn’t say every one was going to survive omicron. I said the spread was unlikely to be materially higher than its predecessor and likely have a lower negative impact.
A disease that spreads twice as fast is unlikely to infect twice as many people (over the long term). A disease that causes fewer adverse effects, let’s say half as often, needs to, by definition, infect twice as many people over the long run in order to cause the same amount of harm.
As a dumb mental model, if omicron is 30% less dangerous, then omicron needs to infect 42% more people to be as harmful to society. That is very difficult to achieve, especially given our collective immunity achieved so far. I would say there is little chance of this occurring.
Virus evolution tends to optimize for replication and transmission, and not reduced severity. If a particular mutation causes a virus to replicate better than other variants, but it ends up killing hosts more often, it doesn't really matter what happens to the host afterwards, evoluntionarily, as the virus has already spread it genes more than it did before it mutated.
I told my friends: "I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief if this thing turns over before it's infected most of us." In fact it's probably hard to speculate why it turned over, but behavioral measures are probably an important factor.
That’s the big assumption in R0.
And yet, you can go from a few rare cases in your country to hospitals overflowing in a couple of weeks. That's because of exponential growth, obviously.
1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad
2) exponential growth confuses readers into thinking that a small boost in spread rate means many more will be infected. This isn’t true because the exponential phase is brief and is a progression towards a ceiling defined by the graph, not an arbitrary period of time. Like what we are seeing in South Africa right now.
The big problem is that people think an increase in the spreading rate will cause an exponentially higher number of infected. But it won’t. The model is not appropriate.
Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.
You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.
I mean technically the lockdowns possibly make sense as a way to control the spread until a spread controlling vaccine (the existing mRNA ones aren't such) is widely applied - ie. that seems to be the case in China where initial spread was effectively controlled and they use inactivated covid virus vaccine instead of mRNA - though we don't know for sure because Chinese government info can be very different from reality.
But I've heard some claims that it already has started to displace Delta, though not from a source I'd feel confident citing. But just looking at it, if you believe the CDC estimate of 73% Omicron the other day, Delta must have dropped a lot despite it being winter. Appears like displacement happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Modeling_ear...
E.g. let’s say there is an office where everyone works in person and a bar with a group of regular customers. If someone in the office gets Covid, everyone in there has some decent chance of getting it. Similarly, if a bar regular gets Covid, each of the others has a decent chance to get it. But if only one person who works at the office is also a regular at the bar, then for the infection to hop from one cluster to the other, that person needs to get it from the initial outbreak, and they need to continue going into the office during their infectious period, and folks need to catch it from them, none of which is certain.
So, my guess is that after enough of these clusters get seeded to start a wave, “R” is initially high, but R decreases massively once enough of the infected clusters are saturated, possibly low enough to make the growth visibly non-exponential, even if the entire population infected rate is nowhere near the point where growth rate would decline in a simple logistic model.
The exponential part is easy and that works, but it's more complicated with isolation of the infectious, refractory periods, etc
While this does appear plausible, doesn't this depend to some degree on what exactly is the immunity conferred by vaccination or past infection? If vaccines and past infections are effective against severity of case/symptoms but ineffective against new/re-infection, then you could still see greater numbers with omicron than even with delta. No?
Still not forever exponential, of course.
Well, that should always be true: the people that are most at risk are already dead from earlier variants, and our treatments are light years ahead of where they were 18 months ago, reducing hospitalizations (and death) for everyone else.
Mathematical models are difficult because we don’t know the real inputs and fitting a curve in retrospect is easy to get a compelling looking answer which is wrong.
You can gain an intuition for it just imagining a random walk on a social network graph though. Just jump from friend to friend randomly on Facebook. Early on it is easy to spread to new people. Later on it’s very difficult to find new people. You get stuck in the same cohorts.
More simply just look at past covid outcomes. Or pretty much any epedemiological model. All of them claim only the initial period is exponential. It’s the issue of how to determine the slowdown period that’s tricky and frankly impossible without more data than we have. But assuming that the slowdown state will look similar to previous slowdown states is a good idea.
The graph of human social contacts is not even close to uniformly random, so it makes sense that simplistic formulas would not work.
I think it’s a bit silly to fixate on the base stats of the virus rather than it’s actually efficacy against the human population.
Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all.
https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]
Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it.
1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
As I understand, we don't know much about whether omicron has worse, same, or better outcomes in relation to long-term consequences and persistent symptoms. Pls do share if you've heard otherwise
The Epstein-Barr virus for example can make you tired for months or years.
I am not saying long Covid isn't a thing, but it is not 'special' in any way.
Virus infections can cause damage. Years ago I had an infection that damaged a nerve. So virus infections can leave marks. But most of the time, as with Covid, you will recover from it.
I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed science that backs up the idea that omicron is going to be our "savior"?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri...
https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...
This is direct from the SA government including archives of all the daily data for the duration of the pandemic.
Pay attention to the data lag. But it isn't _that_ laggy.
I mean, not saying your strategy wouldn't be the better strategy in the end, just think it's hard to know the risk equation at this moment.
edit: not sure why someone downvoted this, I'd love to hear your thoughts if you did
The faster we get everyone infected the faster old people who didn't get vaxxed will either recover or die and after that the ones who die we can't do anything for them.
Trump was right (by chance) all along, that's just some kind of flu, the only difference is that it's the first time our body sees it.
South African businesses, however, almost all have air conditioning.
Each wave is less deadly because: a) we're getting better at treating it b) the most vulnerable populations have been killed off in previous waves. c) through vaccination and prior infections our individual immune systems are primed to deal with it.
If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more.
But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount of herd immunity, it may be a few weeks of heavy spread and then very little.
"Farr's laws is a law formulated by Dr. William Farr when he made the observation that epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern. The time-evolution behavior could be captured by a single mathematical formula that could be approximated by a bell-shaped curve."
South Africa has a population of about 60 million, fairly dense compared to the US. Compared to the US, their spike and fall would be expected to come on faster (and drop faster). The US is more spread out but with many more people. So its great to know that local spikes would come and go fast, it still is a very acute strain likely to be spread over months as it travels around the country.
Omicron is already so yesterday it isn't even a memory.
My point is that COVID and heart disease are largely preventable at an individual level if you have ability to eat healthy foods and take the vaccine and/or practice social distancing.
There are at least some people who have figured out the right covid policies, because some of them are running NFL. NFL has ruled that asymptomatic players who received the initial round of vaccinations don't need to be regularly tested. With the rise of omicron, populations of healthy young people whose families have access to health care don't need to fear infection and don't need "boosters". Of course, many families in USA lack access to health care because capitalism. NFL can't directly be held responsible for that, although many NFL owners are billionaires so they can. [0]
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals.
Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (WHO) https://youtu.be/YdVymGK3OzM https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE
This is a legitimate theoretical concern, however empirically it looks like South Africa's hospitalizations are peaking at slightly more than half their previous wave, with deaths on pace to peak even lower[1][2]
[1]https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1473642495095496704 [2]https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...
Sure, I'd rather we didn't have Covid at all, but that's not been a realistic option for quite some time now.
That's not panic, that's justifiable concern about a new strain of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world already.
The denominator is higher than if, let’s say, delta was let loose in the same population at the same time.
There's no indication that the first world, with much higher vaccination rates won't fare better than South Africa, which seems to be faring exceptionally well relative to other case spikes.
Omicron was first reported to the WHO on 11/24 and wasn't categorized as a variant of concern until 11/26. It hasn't even been a month since it was acknowledged much less has become the dominant variant in most places.
I think we'll see total hospitalization and death rates peak at anywhere from 50-100% of the Delta wave, but over a much shorter time period, commensurate with higher infectiousness but lower severity. The severity may be simply because it's no longer an immunologically naive population.
> https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]
Death always lag infections. That chart is a horrible representation because it doesn't give a good sense of the intermediate dates. But you can still tell with the "7-day average" string.
On the first/infection chart you see the graph touching the word "average" while the second/death chart you can clearly see the graph shifted away from the word "average".
By the same reasoning, the death count could still spike albeit not as high.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red:
- RT > 1
- Cases/100k > 10
- Test Positivity > 5%
- ICU Usage > 85%
If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my social activities. This seemed about right to me for Delta. For Omicron, I'm holding steady with that strategy for now, but if it turns out that Omicron isn't as severe for unvaccinated people, I might relax the strategy to only look at ICU usage.
What's been interesting over the past six months is that it has tended to turn red when everyone was partying, and it'd turn green again when people were still freaked out.
At any rate, it means I can ignore a lot of the rhetoric, because if Omicron subsides quickly, it just means my benchmark will turn green sooner.
instead, the better factors to consider are age, weight[0], comorbidities, household size, job duties (e.g., public-facing or not), and sociability. these also tend to be more stable and consistent, meaning you don't need to reconsider your personal mitigations very often. that'd indicate who generally needs personal mitigations and who doesn't (exceptions like a holiday family gathering would still need to be handled exceptionally).
[0]: i'd suggest 'overall health' is the more accurate (if more vague) factor, but weight tends to inversely correlate with general health (overweight ==> weaker immune system, less efficient pulmonary/cardiovascular system, lower muscle tone, more visceral fat, higher diabetes risk, etc.).
So if you're seeing many cases, that's a bad sign for the future, and it takes a while to figure out for sure.
In a global pandemic, it's best to be safe on these things, because the alternative is that you celebrate early and look like a tit (not to mention all the deaths).
I played along, now they’re done.
edit: the responder assumed something that wasn’t said, and then wrote an essay about something thats not happening and an example from Mississippi. Maybe to save time from having a natural flow of conversation, maybe its what they actually beleive. Either way this is called a strawman argument.
Am I correctly understanding that you intend to move to a different region for the sole purpose of voting against restrictions that otherwise would not apply to you? You’re literally trying to be a problematic immigrant.
I remember when I was in college a bunch of people did exactly this. They registered for residency in the state solely so they could vote a single issue in a state election. Specifically they registered so they could vote for Mississippi to keep the confederate flag as part of the state flag. So you’re in great company.
Honestly, isn’t the whole “state’s rights” thing about telling other people to fuck off and let them manage themselves? And here you are thinking you should meddle in someone else’s self-governance.
The plot doesn't show that. You're looking at the moving average which doesn't move much, but the underlying data (daily, presumably) shows a drastic increase in the last one or two data points, in line with the expected lag time.
Others have already pointed out the other major issue with your comment, that the situation in South Africa doesn't transfer to many other places in the world due to the exceptionally high pre-existing immunity rate there.
"Overall, we find evidence of a reduction in the risk of hospitalisation for Omicron relative to Delta infections, averaging over all casesin the study period. The extent of reduction is sensitive to the inclusion criteria used for cases and hospitalisation, being in the range 20-25% when using any attendance at hospital as the endpoint, and 40-45% when using hospitalisation lasting 1 day or longer or hospitalisations with the ECDS discharge field recorded as “admitted” as the endpoint (Table 1)"
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
I think Omicron offers a possible explanation. An even more infectious variant with lower mortality should out-compete the deadly variant over time. After a few mutations like that it should be no worse than the seasonal flu--which has its own death toll each year, remember.
But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all.
Some people just want the world to continue burning.
Those that want to report that omicron is milder focus on overall stats and average symptoms, and gloss over confounding factors.
Those that want to report that it’s just as severe as delta seem to be just picking up the status quo of poor science journalism, and equating “insufficient evidence” with “conclusive there’s no difference”.
This preprint from today out of SA lays out some prospective good news, but still with a lot of uncertainty over how much the lower severity is intrinsic vs mediated by prior infection/vaccination. And there are plenty of limitations, not least of which that their study only includes confirmed omicron infections up to the end of November (they study hospitalizations, and even had to prune their dataset because some patients are still in hospital).
There is just legitimately not enough data yet to answer the questions that most need answering.
But it seems unwise to be certain that will be what happens. Worst case scenario is omicron running wild mutates into something much more lethal and a bit more contagious.
With a variety of uncertainties imaginable, it's understandable that authorities are currently taking omicron as a serious threat even if it seem like there's a significant chance it will be a "good thing" as you say.
Look around this thread and you will find many links to data that indicates Omicron might have less severe outcomes, but it's really still a bit early to really have confidence in that data because there are a lot of confounding factors.
> What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID?
Hospitalization could be about the same. While we see decreased hospitalisations in South Africa, the assumption is that this is due to widespread immunity from exposure to earlier waves and vaccinations. For the last two weeks, Omicron has been hitting populations that have higher shares of naive subjects. Now the first results on hospitalizations are coming in. Refreshing my tabs constantly :-)
I assume that long-term damage is related to immediate severity, so it's likely not going to be worse. But I'm out on a twig here.
> Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc?
Suggestive evidence of mildness is being discussed. No conclusions.
Yes from a low base, but they have still done multiple doublings.
Fortunately they are on track to only rise 50% this week.
Literally all data has shown that omicron is a non-issue for triple vaxxed individuals, with a baseline being the standard flu.
If someone has data showing that triple vaxxed people are dying at rates similar to March 2020 I’d love to see.
If someone vaxxed and boosted dies of COVID, the media spins it as "Look how deadly..."
If someone is on Ivermectine and dies of COVID, they're villified as spreaders.
But isn't COVID novel in the damage it poses to microvascular systems (importantly brain and lungs), compared to other viruses? E.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7556303/
My understanding is that this is still different from other viruses.
So if large swaths of a country get that damage from delta vs omicron vs some future weaker variant, that could have very different public health consequences in the coming decades...
Disclaimer: In tech for over a decade, but once upon a time I did an honours degree in biochemistry, so I'm only maybe half-capable of musing my way through some of these papers :)
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876
Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...
It's time to return to actual real normal. Let people make their own risk assessments.
Life is very, very short and we just spent 2 years of it acting as if the only point of our existence was to stop the spread of exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of basically everything else.
Move on.
In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious before they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, there is less selective pressure towards making it less severe.
It would be odd if this is the one, the permanently deadly respiratory virus that just never gives humanity a break, for ever and ever.
The sensationalist flip-flopping media reports have been mostly unhelpful. I've been swinging between "this is wishful thinking and it's going to be really bad" to "this is overly dramatic and it's going to be ok" for the past few weeks. I've been feeling more of the latter recently, but I'm still not 100% certain. Call it cautious optimism.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...
Of course, it's not yet peer-reviewed, and doesn't model the possible outcomes based on the conclusions, but it certainly seems to be great news.
There is a wrinkle though: the 80% reduction in hospitalizations is compared to this summers delta infections, but they found no difference in hospitalizations compared to non-omicron infections this November (the time period of the study).
They have some discussion of maybe if that’s due to prior immunity or something, but it seems like things are still just not clear, and more data is coming down the pipe.
At the time of the breakout of Covid-19 in Jan/Feb 2020, the reports on the ground in Wuhan and Italy were pointing to a catastrophic failure of healthcare systems leading to significantly enhanced death rates, CFR of 10% or so was being observed in Wuhan. Yes, everyone knew that not everyone was being tested, but having 10% of everyone you tested died... well that ain't good. And China has a powerful government and can mobilize resources when they feel like it. Witness the building of hospitals in Wuhan in 10 days. Turns out they were probably more like convalescent centers, but they were fighting the multi-generational housing problem where younger sick people would get their parents/grandparents sick (who lived with them, and weren't able to isolate in their apartment/houses).
Back then, people noted "if we do this right, then we will be accused of over-reaction", and sure enough that is what we are seeing. Fun fact: by the time the first lockdowns in SF/bay area were announced, domestic flights were down... 97%. All major conferences had been cancelled. Tech companies were already allowing/requiring WFH. If that seems like an overreaction, imagine if Google Search went down in spring 2020... that isn't an impossible situation, after all if staff were spreading covid to each other readily without being aware and having a 1% death rate as a result... that is devastating. The notion that life would have been fine if we just ignored it is kinda nuts considering we had 800,000 deaths to date, and yet our mask effort resulted in the extinction of a strain of the flu, and reducing the pediatric flu deaths from 200 -> 1. Yet still 800,000 deaths.
In Germany some hospitals are postponing "planned operations" and as much as this sound like no big deal, every operations that is not an emergency is "planned" so this affects cancer removals as well. People are dying of cancer because covid patients saturate ICU beds.
Are these hospitals doing this because they've currently run out of ICU beds to staff COVID patients, or in anticipation of a future influx of COVID-19 patients?
Also over 90% of people who die with COVID-19 have co-morbidities. For example, Colin Powel recently died with COVID-19 in his system, but he also had myeloma (blood cancer) and was 84 years old.
In any case it's been 2 years now since COVID-19 started. At this point if hospital systems still can't manage this, then that's a failure of the governments and the healthcare systems.
The people I know who have been doing this have all contracted covid at this point, unless they are a recluse who doesn't go outside.
Why aren't you upset with your governments for not making this a non-issue? You gave them 2 years to figure it out and all I hear are excuses like "you can't just spin up new staff". Bullshit. These governments have virtually unlimited resources to build healthcare capacity to deal with covid. If there was a will to do so, they could have built capacity specific for covid that includes proper staffing.
The fact that entire regions of 17 million people get thrown into month-long lockdowns and asked to cancel christmas because the region can only support like 400 people in the ICU is a travesty.
People should be furious with their governments continuing to blame the public for "possible healthcare collapses". We paid with 2 years of our short-ass lives waiting for them to fix capacity issues. There are zero excuses.
I will stop wearing one much sooner. I hate the muffled voices. I can't see anyone smile. It's dehumanizing.
- Infected Mushroom in the Midway: hardly anyone wearing masks, irregardless of if they are drinking or not
- Chvrches in the Civic Auditorium: most people wearing masks, maybe 20% of the audience unmasked. Even people with drinks mostly just removing it drinking and putting it back on.
- Spiderman in the AMC Kabuki: mostly everyone wearing masks
- Karaoke bar in Japantown after Spiderman: no one wearing masks, not even the barman and the owner of the bar that were of course not drinkingReal talk, wth is going on in your head...
I guess our government was too slow to roll out the 3rd shot since so many are affected.
The reason why we’re having lockdowns now is because the situation is that so many people are sick that we need to make sure there is enough people to staff things like power plants.
I don’t know about the light symptoms bit. I can’t remember the last time I felt this shitty, but I’m obviously not close to being hospitalised either. I’m probably fit for work by American standards, but I’ve been home sick since the 20th by Danish standards. This is very anecdotal of course, but I sure as shit don’t feel well.
That chart shows it spiking just days ago (~Dec 15) in SA, not on Thanksgiving. So it’s still too early to know the effect on deaths (though I still agree that it seems they won’t be as bad).
Finally with local statistics, you still have political dramatics like https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1473480933579923456
But before, here at least, it was repeatedly underestimating the in the aftermath clearly visible exponential growth, exactly as the r factor is calculated? Which scientist/MD doesn't understand there is a saturation, in the extreme even schoolers understand you cannot have more than 100% infected.
Yes, at some point it is becoming logistic, but the previous waves were not about getting anywhere there, but going from 0.1% to 1% or more, and there it was truly exponential growth and overwhelming the health care system, what the start of that logistic curve is about..?!
Pretty interesting how it clearly shows both "deaths" and "excess deaths".
Here's a good one for Europe:
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
Like others my initial reaction was “deaths lag” but upon closer inspection the data is more nuanced: While deaths do lag, in previous waves deaths had risen substantially by the time cases peaked, but with omicron in South Africa cases have already peaked but deaths have barely risen. This could be partly because the omicron wave has peaked faster (~3 weeks) than previous waves (~1 month or more), partly because the population has more immunity, and partly because omicron is less severe?
I’m not sure yet. All in all, I’m optimistic but will wait another week or two to be convinced.
Maybe. But I suspect actually the reverse is true. "Normal" viruses (virii?) are probably far more damaging than we have ever credited.
The fact that we can vaccinate against a cancer (cervical cancer) and the fact that asthma went down more than expected during lockdowns, suggests that we are significantly underestimating the risks that "normal" pathogens incur.
It's not necessarily correlated with age either. We went out to eat at a bar-like place that mostly 50-somethings go to. Most people didn't have a mask, even if they were just hanging around the bar doing nothing.
I think some of it is a self selection process. People that think the virus isn't a big deal are more likely to not care about masks, go to these places, and I would bet also not be vaccinated.
My wife and I have discussed this a lot. We are much more likely to do things with people that are taking it seriously but still have a social life, than people that never thought it was a big deal - the latter are much more likely to be taking absolutely zero precautions.
If this variant is 5x more infectious, but 5x less likely to result in hospitalisation, the net effect on healthcare resources should remain level, no?
Omicron might be a blessing in disguise, but there is a very bad plausible outcome for the coming month.
If the infection is milder across the board, hospital stays will be shorter on average. People will improve faster and will be discharged sooner.
500 people who on average need 3 days of hospitalization are less of a load than 200 people who on average need 10 days of hospitalization - unless those 500 arrive at the same time, of course.
Do you wash your hands between when touch a bottle of salad dressing, and before you eat?
3 day average is only 48 deaths per day in all of South Africa. We are at the 3 week mark. If Omicron was half as deadly as Delta we'd be seeing a corresponding spike as we saw the initial burst of cases weeks ago. We're not, it's a slight uptick. Another week and we can be quite confident.
The wording startled me until I understood the intended meaning.
I thought I understand DNS but I guess I don't.
edit: elsewhere linked is an explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
If one indeed puts greater value on "not indefinitely social distancing" than on "a slightly decreased risk of death or serious complications from Covid", then the decision not to continue social distancing is a good one.
I guess “poor decision making” was a misleading phrase on my part because I think I get your point that individuals could put greater value on enjoying the present, future be damned, and who’s to tell them that’s not the best way to live life. Life on average will be shorter, but I guess that’s not fair to project that as a success metric onto other people who might not care as much about their projected lifespan as they do about enjoying some more indulgent foods.
And further to your point, there’s a very reasonable debate about the value of the individual vs. the value of the community in decision making that isn’t universal. So yeah I take back that earlier comment.
Short version: The Archive.is authoritative DNS servers do not give correct addresses to Cloudflare when Cloudflare asks for them
Posted by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota, whose profile reads:
> A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare. [ my public key: https://keybase.io/eastdakota; my proof: https://keybase.io/eastdakota/sigs/_uDY0ZsLTEWaNu5daRtuwzZtJ... ]
I believe quite a few hospitals around the world overflowed pretty badly.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
> I'd like to see a source for your claim that numbers in hospitals are decreasing.
I was always not a fan of gloomy winters, but this on top of it has made it terrible. I am so over all of the panic and fear.
Hang in there!
Today we find the term “gay plague” abhorrent and I wonder if in 30 years we will be equally as shocked and embarrassed of Herman Cain awards etc etc
What appears to have happened with Omicron is that it has mutated in a way that increases transmission at the expense of lethality:
https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-c...
That depends on whether the mutations that cause it to replicate better also make it more virulent. The symptoms that help spread Ebola, for example, are the same symptoms that kill those who become infected with it.
Giving "natural selection" as a force the capacity to "want" is probably less controversial that saying that a virus "wants". For example if you are a religious evolutionary biologist you can think that natural selection is an entity that makes some kind of conscious decisions that may appear random to us only because we don't understand them. I don't think that believing that will hamper your ability to actually understand natural selection as much as any other scientist, specially if you go by the Roman Catholic tenet of unquestionable faith in unsolvable misteries.
If you go by the more neutral terms used in evolutionary science I think natural selection is more of a process than a system or force and then it "wanting" things is also anthropomorphism.
My personal line for when anthropomorphism is tolerable and when it's not is when as an analogy it can make you come to dangerous conclusions. For example "oh COVID wants to mutate, we should just let it mutate because when you give something what it wants it will usually leave you alone" or stuff like that.
Providence hospitals on the west coast are overwhelmed
Hennepin hospitals are overwhelmed in Minneapolis
Trinity Health with hospitals in 25 states is also getting overwhelmed
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/21/1066093...
“ The troops deployed to hospitals will include doctors, nurses, paramedics and other personnel during January and February as needed, the senior administration officials said. The White House is also deploying six emergency response teams to Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Hampshire and Vermont, the officials said.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/21/omi...
Anyway, I was suspicious so I looked up some of the hospitals you mention. It turns out they are actually short of staff not beds... because they fired them all for not taking the vaccine.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2021/12/...
The media is in full spin trying to cover up the reason why hospital workers are leaving, claiming it is because they are exhausted, and ignoring the fact they were fired.
https://www.fox9.com/news/people-are-exhausted-health-care-w...
The Hennepin hospital you mention is getting the army to send more staff
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/safety-quality/defense-depa...
Obviously they aren't short of beds or more staff wouldn't help.
I do think that the decision that was made to keep pushing boosters and basically do nothing else is probably the correct one, but not because it was the default thing to do and we have to wait until there's incontrovertible evidence that the default action will lead to ruin before doing anything else.
That said, deaths are still dropping, and have been dropping since November, which was a local minimum in case numbers.
The pertinent fact, I think, is that the UK is vaccinating like crazy, coming up to 1m boosters per day recently (total population just short of 70m IIRC), even 12-18 year-olds are getting jabbed now.
The real concerns about omicron are that: 1) A rapid initial spread will overwhelm the healthcare system and 2) that if its basic R0 rate is sufficiently high, then even after remedial measures are taken, we will still be left with an effective R0 rate above 1 for quite some time.
I know you’re caveating “effective R0” but frankly that’s stupid. Saying as long it keeps growing it will keep growing purposefully ignores the point I am making which is that it won’t keep growing.
The effective R0 falls on its own. That is the point being made. It will absolutely not reach 100% of the population. Not even close.
And what I'm saying to you is that nobody believes otherwise. It's all known that diseases are self-limiting, and infection rates follow an s-curve and eventually drop off. This isn't a groundbreaking revelation.
In other words policies that affect the super majority are being formed due to the actions of a small group.
Not sure why people support restrictions at this point. If someone doesn’t want to be vaccinated that’s fair enough, but let the rest of us be free.
If that’s true, you’d see a decrease in mortality over the next few years. Covid is basically doing what the flu does every winter (but on a larger scale) - it pushes people close to death over the edge.
Less so with age group 75-84, but still visible.
For example the first omnicron death in the US was in their 50’s that had already had COVID but never got vaccinated. By many metrics that’s old but their still well below average life expectancy.
You can make that argument with any illness, and people do. E.g., you can't get cancer if you eat healthy, oh, you got cancer? You must not have been eating the right diet for your body type.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/blog/immunocompromised-...
The title itself suggests the immunocompromised are acknowledged as an overlooked group.
The CDC has some discussion at
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/duration-isola...
From the link above, the immunocompromised are a reservoir for the virus for a longer time, since it takes longer for the body to clear the virus. So certainly worth the extra attention, from an epidemiological standpoint if nothing else.
My sense is the immunocompromised would know the COVID response drill from all the other infectious agents they have to deal with so, maybe, they are more careful anyway, but…
The puzzling thing is (from the Johns Hopkins link) there are 15M immunocompromised in the US.
Which does beg the question: if COVID is truly a superbug, two years on, why aren’t they (the immunocompromised) dead yet?
A death rate of only 6%, over two years, for this highly vulnerable immunocompromised population would explain all the US deaths from COVID.
How can COVID be simultaneously
(1) the Plague of the Century and,
(2) two years on, also leave 94% to 99+% of the most vulnerable alive (depending on your assumption on the percentage of symptomatic/hospitalized/fatal COVID cases who are/were immunocompromised)?
Just another COVID “mystery”? Seems a bit odd.
Seriously - what's the subtext here?
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34735425/
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.12.21263461v...
"have been exposed to the virus" usually means something like "immune system isn't totally unprepared, but has had contact with this virus before (or a proxy via vaccination)".
In South Africa, it is mostly via getting COVID-19 in the Alpha or Delta waves.
Yes, over 70% of South Africans have had it:
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bloomberg/news/2021-12-14-ove...
The science has been super clear on this for a long time. The problem is that the CDC and NIH, the grand tradition of federally funded science, have chosen not to study anything that conflicts with the directives of their organizations. They haven't bothered to study natural immunity and have left it to other countries like Israel.
Instead they pretend like it doesn't exist and claim that they don't have science to support it (exactly like the federal government did with marijuana in the past) because they never bothered to fund studies.
When you factor in the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated, well over 70% of the US population has been exposed to the virus in one form or another.
I caught the virus in the alpha wave. It's been infuriating having the federal government pretend like t cell immunity isn't a thing. For my age group it absolutely is.
A thing that gives some benefit to a lot of South African who also later got sick with COVID-19-Omicron, some of those were hospitalised, and some of those died. So clearly not a magic wand that prevents Omicron entirely.
A benefit obtained at huge human costs in previous waves, which vaccination would have blunted.
You can tell the bad takes because of the accusatory tone - Who is going to "suddenly admit" I don't even know who is being accused here? And the simplistic "all or nothing" thinking - the "is a thing or isn't" idea. Medicine is not Boolean logic. None of this is binary, boolean, on-off. neither vaccination nor prior infection are a guarantee.
That immunity may very well work better than the vaccines on omicron - I don’t think we’re far enough in to it to have a great idea of that yet.
My friends who have it now indicate it is very mild.
2. Not all staff quit due to vaccine requirements. As some of the articles pointed out, they quit due to sheer exhaustion from the hospitals being continually overwhelmed
3. The percentage of nurses taken out due to vaccine requirements is less than 1%. Yes, every staff member counts, but that’s not the sole source or even the main source for hospitals being overwhelmed
4. The main cause of hospitals being overwhelmed is still due to a surge of incoming patients.
I will note that it's easier to break the rules and commit voter fraud when you can vote by mail. In person voting at least requires that you be physically present on Election Day. I moved to California and got voting materials from whence I came. I did not elect to commit voter fraud and vote, but I could have pretty easily.
Haven’t most (all?) jurisdictions supported vote by Mail for absentee ballots since a long time ago? All that vote by mail has actually changed is that people can vote from their homes.
This is the first year I’ve gotten election material I didn’t request. I had forgotten to deregister, but the crazy thing is the post office told them I had moved because they forwarded a previous letter. They then sent me more material at the new forwarded address in another state.
I don’t think this is nefarious, mostly incompetence. I think fraud happens, always has. Voting by mail probably increases opportunistic fraud. It probably also increases voter participation, so maybe it’s worth it in that sense, not sure. However, I think we need to have rock-solid verifiable and trustworthy elections, even if it’s inconvenient and the fraud it is meant to prevent is theoretical (hacked voting machines, other schemes). It’s very unhealthy for a democracy when large fractions of the population distrust the results. We’ve had both major political parties suggest electoral fraud/shenanigans multiple times over the past 20 years. It’s bad stuff.
Tie any restriction to ICU capacity and only if efforts were made to expand ICU capacity
Otherwise that means the state was only pretending to care because it was easier to govern if people werent doing anything
If the state actually cares increase the ICU bandwidth or tell us the challenges encountered doing that and how those are being addressed
You’re reading what you want to read, it was worded specifically and intentionally
Its not any one of them, its the one that I am registered to vote in.
Subjective boundaries aren’t an excuse to cover your ears and ignore strong correlations.
Most people who contracted covid, 99.9% of them, are fine. Of those that have died, 100% seem to have had some underlying issue. You're acting as though it's unreasonable to account for comorbidities when determining the cause of death.
The above policy is pushed in the exact Medical Boolean Logic you just attacked in your comment. They push policies that pretend the vaccinated can't spread it and that unvaccinated (previously infected or not) are all dangerous to be around. Boolean logic. They deliberately avoided informing the public about the extremely steep age gradient of risk for COVID infection, pushing that no matter your age or health status, COVID is super dangerous to you. Boolean logic. CNN has had a different story of the same variety fixed to their front page for over a year: A story featuring a person who isn't old getting really sick from the virus who wasn't vaccinated. They deliberately highlight the statistical outliers to push the boolean logic that YOU ARE AT RISK FROM COVID NO MATTER YOUR AGE/HEALTH. Yep, and I'm also at risk of getting struck by lightning when I take a walk on a sunny day. They push the lie that previous infection provides no immunity. My father's physician told him the other day that "natural immunity from COVID doesn't exist." Boolean logic.
You're attacking me for "bad takes"? Are we on Twitter here? I utterly despise that kind of dialogue, and the meta-analysis of my commentary as if I'm part of some super-entity of horrible humans who fall into a collective tribe to be attacked and expelled from all polite conversation. I'm a lifelong Democratic voter, I drive an electric car, I think climate change is bad, support women's rights, support labor unions, I grow marijuana and donate to medical patients and no, I'm not a "simplistic all or nothing" thinker. You've done this in other threads, and clearly view yourself morally superior to those who disagree with you on this specific issue.
One thing to add: I've voted Democratic since my first vote for Al Gore in 2000. I voted for Biden in 2020. I will never vote Democrat again. I've switched my status to Independent. This party no longer deserves my support, and I look forward to voting for anyone not in it in the future. They aren't the party of science anymore. The Republicans are nutbags, but at least they don't interfere with my life and force me to get a shot i don't want or need. I caught COVID, I recovered, and I'm done. Fuck anyone that wants to force me to get a shot I won't benefit from. As if there's a single fucking record of someone catching COVID a second time and suffering more severe symptoms than with the first infection.
The vaccine mandate turned me into a single issue voter. No government will ever tell me I have to inject something into my body to be allowed to engage in commerce. Especially a government like the US, which doesn't do a fucking thing to pay for my health care. They have no fucking right. If I get myocarditis from the shot, like a 35 year old Googler who lives on my street did (he now has permanent scarring on his heart), the bill is on ME. Fuck that. He can't even hike with me anymore, and will suffer life-long side-effects. And the bill for the treatment is on him.
The situation was not caused by overstressed people going "you know, I really want to be fat".
I tend to think adults are capable of being responsible for their own decisions, including how much to eat.
I fully agree with that. I also think it’s unhealthy for democracy when large swaths of the population feels disenfranchised, though, and there is a lot of that sort of shenanigans going on. I think the push against vote by mail is a mostly a 1)scheme to disenfranchise more voters, and 2) stir up unfounded BS about fraud.
It’s well established that high turnout favors democrats. And it’s well established that vote by mail increases turnout.
[0] https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/how-scientists-quantif...
i’ve been mildly amused/dismayed by the constant misplaced focus on R0 over the past 2 years by the media/laypeople, given this essential context.
The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave.
Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.
Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.
Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.
Pretty good advice in my opinion.
Probably waiting on hospitals to be fully staffed and less busy.
My sibling moved from being a pedatric nurse to a non-patient care position (not at a hospital). She'd been nearly permanently removed from her pediatric role and moved to be on the front lines for COVID care for over a year with no relief in sight. She spent 2 years in Iraq and said that this is much more tiring and exasperating since she's treating people that largely could have avoided being in the hospital at all.
Her hospital has been cancelling elective procedures, so everyone is suffering from the COVID wave.
This is not what caution looks like.
I may not have all the details right on that, just seems the approach some are taking to covid is the "yes we won't eliminate it and yet we can try to minimize exposure during times of high infectiousness."
Public opinion.
0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-...
1 - https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majo...
Groupthink is so dangerous.
COVID was never going to be completely managed by states less than willing to take draconian measures, the purpose soft-lockdowns was instead to lighten the load on our healthcare system so that we didn't need to invest in field hospitals and a bunch of field-trained doctors and nurses. If we had done that instead not only would the optics be worse (not just many more people dying, think front page photos of them dying in muddy tents), it would also dilute the market capture of the existing entrenched healthcare system.
Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.
In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.
"Immunocompromised" as a category includes a very wide range of people, and someone who's on a small temporary prednisone prescription is far less immunocompromised than a chemotherapy patient, solid organ transplant recipient, or HIV+ individual.
But it's much easier to blame fat people than the pushers, and it feels so much more satisfying to break out the hauteur about them as opposed to the businesses that tech people with tech salaries might someday seek to emulate, so--I guess I get it.
Yes, the issue there is sociopathic political maneuvering rather than an actual lack of national resources which could have been used to help our society in its time of need.
> Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden?
In the early days of covid it was irresponsible spring breakers spreading covid at destinations like Florida and then back home a week later. These days, look for areas with small purple cities surrounded by large red counties. As far as personal experiences go a couple Eastern states and the Pacific Northwest have issues with hospitals being literally over capacity. Many healthcare workers have been pushed past their breaking points and the national guard has been (and still is) providing manpower at the hospital next to my state's capitol (which is located next to a handful of universities). As other surrounding state's healthcare systems were overwhelmed with delta waves those states denied noncritical care and eventually sent patients out to my state. The collapse of the healthcare system is an issue for old people on vents and also a huge issue for college kids when their parents and professors up and die (caused a huge issue at one of the colleges here when a particularly irreplaceable professor passed away) and/or there are no hospital beds for them and there's a year plus waitlist on the mental health services they need now more than ever. College kids are a covid sink since they generally suffer only mildly from covid yet spread it rapidly due to their social habits and environment. The college kids are not the demographic wrecking the healthcare system, but they still spread covid and are affected by covid in their communities. Asking them to stay home to prevent spreading infections isn't that big a deal.
> Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018?
Because we've pushed them to the breaking point rather than supporting them. Some died, some retired, some straight up left the field. Back in June of 2020 the cops had no shortage of riot gear and were always able to dig up more crowd gas, meanwhile doctors and nurses had to reuse contaminated PPE for months while a bunch of supply chain fuckery played itself out. How do you think that feels as a doctor, watching a shipment of PPE your state paid for and imported for you get confiscated by the feds and put into a big pile to get sold back to the highest bidder? How do you think it feels to notice how the police can suppress riots for months on end with endless tear gas and yet you get one N95 mask every two weeks even though you spend your entire day around people dying of covid?
> How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing?
See the above, we chose to stress existing resources instead of training, building, and deploying new ones. We don't have new hospitals, we don't have nationwide boot camps to get young civically minded people the skills needed to help support society.
> These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.
The indicators that we're lacking capacity are the shortage of replacement workers, the shortage of hospital beds during covid waves, the insane wait times to see specialists, and finally the countless secondary deaths caused by covid patients taking up resources that could've been used by someone close to me with once-treatable cancer whose care was delayed until it metastasized and who will now die a slow, painful, and what should have been preventable death in the next couple of years.
But I’m still stuck on why. What is the point in getting yourself involved in something that doesn’t affect you personally? Why is it worth getting yourself involved with someone else’s self governance?
The goal being that there would eventually be one less county and state that would consider restrictions.
But this doesn’t seem constructive so we can let this go.
[0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...
E.g. “I’m from New York. If any of New York, Chicago, LA, Atlanta [etc.] shut down, I’ll move back to New York and [etc.]”
The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.
Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.
On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)
So, you know, business as usual in the US.
I never heard about it before. Could you provide link to your claim?
All of that is pre-delta, remember that when COVID first hit in 2020 we still didn't have a good idea how it spread.
The tl;dr is that the US government doesn't do a good job of collecting statistics of how many health care workers died of COVID.
1.5k nursing home workers seems to be the one reliable # from the first article, and The Guardian is saying around 3600 healthcare workers in total.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/21/who-estimate-115000-heal...
WHO reports over 100k deaths of healthcare workers world wide.
So statistically a small #, but it doesn't account for the # of nurses who got COVID and had long term symptoms that kept them from going back to work, or who just decided to no longer work at all.
And it looks like these #s are highly biased towards major population centers, so it wasn't an even distribution from the country or anything.
I'm not an actuary though, I only have statistics background.
The lack of healthcare capacity has been a conscious choice. There's been no serious effort to build it out. We've chosen to indulge this fantasy that humanity can get control of COVID and we'll just vaccinate it out of existence, despite decades of knowledge about how difficult that would be from our research into other coronaviruses. So when I hear that we need to give up another year of normal life to "keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed", it is frustrating to hear.
Personally, after 2 months of being angry with the ridiculous response of the government I just accepted that you can't fight with mass stupid and moved on to areas of my life that are not affected by covid.
But I still get surprised from time to time you know, you'd expect politicians to accept that everybody had the chance to get vaccinated and lift all the restrictions so that darwinism can do its work, but it seems they want to impose vaccine mandates instead... trying to protect people who don't want to be protected, what's the grand idea behind that?
There's no real end in sight to be honest, it's better to ignore it as much as possible and focus on areas you do control
If we are going to see constant new variants and new waves, then its the only choice we have.
Realistically, the only viable course is probably to vaccinate and boost as many people as humanly possible, and await better vaccines and therapeutics. Paxlovid should hopefully help when it's available in quantity.
Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not great), and that if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.
If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge sacrifies for something they don't perceive to be a major problem.
That said, I think massive numbers of people (likely the majority still, although the tides seem to be shifting extremely quickly lately) would strongly disagree with us on the degree to which covid is a "major" problem. I am very worried that the inability for people to even mutually agree upon a way of discussing (let alone agreeing on anything) culture war topics, and our inability to take such phenomena seriously, is going to be a gift that keeps on giving for decades into the future (just in time for the climate change culture war).
No, there wouldn't, because, among other things, comorbidities that must be managed, especially in the population most COVID hospitalizations come from.
> Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, even to the point of running IVs
Which allows them to serve as, basically, better-than-nothing EMTs in the absence of anyone else, which is useful on the battlefield to keep people alive to get to proper medical care; they don't replace doctors and nurses, though.
This is a battlefield. It's an emergency, remember? Do whatever it takes. We forced people to sacrifice their short-ass lives in lockdown so these people could figure it out. Where is the results? 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down to protect a healthcare system they had 2 years to build up specifically to manage covid.
It's as if every one of our lives is worthless in the eyes of people making excuses. No. We paid with our time--something we'll never get back. It is a complete travesty that governments continue to blame the public for their own inability to figure shit out.
IDK, I'm in a fairly 'cautious' state, and things are pretty normal. My kids are in school, stores are open. Restaurants are open. People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.
Do you wear masks 8 hours a day for work? 'Cause I'm sure all the people who do might beg to differ.
Plus masks interfere with communication. Faces are important.
We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.
Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.
> Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.
What makes you so sure?
If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.
I wore an N95 on a series of flights to Europe over the summer. It was not the most pleasant thing, but I was ok with it. Doctors and nurses regularly work 8/10/12 hours while masked up.
For example, how many people know the:
- Case fatality rate of COVID-19 (in the U.S, it's 1.6%) - Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 (can only be estimated, but probably around 0.1-0.3%) - Hospitalization utilization (not just now, but also before COVID-19 so one can compare to prior flu seasons and such. Personally I have not found this data) - Demographics of those who died with COVID-19 (in the UK the median age of death is 84, above the life expectancy of 82. Most deaths are old people and/or those with co-morbidities)
Most people drastically overestimate the danger (eg. by at least 5x according to one survey) because they're bombarbed with news and government fear-mongering, forced to take vaccines and be subject to draconian restrictions, then told to shut up and "trust the experts" while being kept in the dark on the data. Even Big Tech was censoring those who questioned the mainstream narrative (eg. Chris Martenson briefly being banned on Youtube)
In any civilized democracy, the citizenry should be educated so they can make the most informed decisions. There obviously seems to be no interest in educating the people except when it serves the narratives of the elite - which right now is basically "get your shot" and do whatever it takes to reduce COVID-19 numbers regardless of any collateral damage (eg. businesses going bankrupt, people losing work/income, hospitals reducing capacity for other kinds of care, schools shutting down, mental health crisis, restriction of freedoms like movement, general fear).
> What's most shocking to me is how little interest there seems to be in educating the population.
I think it's even stranger than it seems at first glance. There is no shortage of people calling for "moar critical thinking", as in "why don't those whose job it is to teach critical thinking do a better job"....but have you ever seen the conversation go beyond that?
To me, it is clear as day that overall humanity has a very serious problem with "critical thinking", and when I say that I'm casting an extremely wide net, one that would capture not just Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and over-enthusiastic progressives, but also 90% of the HN userbase (an arbitrary line can be drawn anywhere according to the drawers wishes, but it is not difficult at all to draw a line that captures ~everyone, according to an explicit standard/methodology). I truly believe that things are in a far worse state than anyone realizes, and my reasoning for that is that each individual overlooks one crucial detail: critical thinking is implemented by the human mind, and the human mind is an illusion machine....and, due to millions of years of evolution, it is so good at conjuring illusions (such as each of our respective entire conceptualizations of reality) that we are unable to realize when what we're seeing is an illusion....or worse: the possibility never even crosses our mind. And, if it does, we will ask our mind "Is this an illusion?", and the answer will come: "No, it is not, this is reality", which will be enthusiastically accepted as fact. And that I propose is "how it works", and how nobody realizes what is going on. (There's more strange stuff over and above that, like if you mention this particular idea to anyone, the majority of the time they will get ~angry and insist on changing the conversation, or, engage in non-logical rhetoric, character attacks, scolding, etc etc etc - but this is the essence of the problem imho.)
That will be the fun one for sure. What I do know is the knuckleheads running the show right now up and down the west coast are the last people I’d trust to handle that correctly.
It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else.
Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures.
They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.
This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable.
In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.
No, it's literally not.
> It's an emergency, remember?
Yes and all battlefields are emergencies but not all emergencies have the same conditions (and thus make the same measures expedient) as battlefields.
> Do whatever it takes.
Sure, but what you are suggesting is not what it takes, or something that would be reasonably expected to be useful and effective.
> 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down
We never generally locked down in the US and no one is suggesting lockdowns now, so I have no idea what “continue locking down” is supposed to mean. (Some US jurisdictions had brief and mostly unenforced policies that, if enforced, would have been local lockdowns, but even the on paper policies expired without renewal quite some time ago.)
Do y'all not value your lives or short time on this earth at all? You should be furious the government is still playing the "protect healthcare capacity" card. They literally wasted 2 years of your life. No results. And they have the audacity to blame you and the rest of society for their failure!! How on earth is that excusable?
I reject that that's an even remotely accurate description of anything that has happened, or has any other relevancd to reality.
> many places are locking down yet again
What places? Unless you are using “locking down” as loosely as you’ve used “battlefield”, that's not actually happening, anywhere.
> And they have the audacity to blame you
The only people I’ve seen anyone in government even approximately blame are particular government decision-makers who allegedly deliberately acted to make things worse and the unvaccinated, neither group of which included me. So, again, I reject that this description is grounded in reality.
So why don't you run for office and do it differently?
Who else's fault is it? It isn't the public, that is for sure. You can't blame people for human behavior and "not taking this seriously". These governments asked us to pay one of the highest costs you can pay--they asked us to donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause. And thus far, they have done absolutely nothing but blame the public for their failings.
Life is short. Being asked to flush 2 years of your life down the toilet in this purgatory we are in is a huge ask. Don't you think we should see some results now?
I also wish the various levels of government would have responded differently. I'm assuming you mean in the US, but that's where I am so I'll go with that. I wish the Trump admin would have responded differently, the Biden admin, the US Senate and House (2020 and 2021 members), my governor in Michigan, the senate and house in Michigan, the county health department, my local mayor, and more.
At least in Michigan, they didn't ask me to donate 2 years of my time, much of that has been my choice, frankly against what the Michigan Congress voted. The governor pushed for strong closures in the beginning and the Congress overruled that. Many of the people here have been acting as if there is no pandemic, doing almost exactly what they did before covid-19 existed. Frankly, even many elements of the Trump admin and US Congress have told us to live our lives as normal.
So if anything, I think the government, at its various levels, have provided mixed messages on what we should and should not do. From complete and total lockdown, to open but wear masks, to complete and total return to normalcy. At least in my experience, I haven't heard a coherent "donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause," but rather a mixed message, coming from politicians, who, just as the public are people with human behavior.
Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period.
It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too.
This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!
They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.
For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe
Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either.
ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).
Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for healthy people are extreme asks and should be used for extremely short durations while you pour your nations entire pool of resources into building healthcare capacity up.
What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals. The fact that all of these were shutdown virtually unused after a month but we continued with all these stay-at-home orders shows exactly how little respect these "experts" and government officials have for the general public. The day those things closed was the day we should have gone back to full normal. That these "experts" doubled down on this crap is so immoral and unethical it amazes me people continued to support it.
Covid itself had 0 impact on my life, I don't know a single person that died of it. All the suffering come from restrictions.
It's ok if you have a super boring life without friend or family, never doing anything out or traveling but at least have empathy for others that got miserable because of all those undue restrictions.
Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.
That being said, it sucking is not the same as years being wasted. You still have opportunities to do plenty of other stuff. The only reason these years would be wasted is if you do not try to adapt. Are they going to be among the best years of your life? Probably not. Are they necessarily wasted and "stolen"? No.
Covid having a low impact on your life personally is missing the mark on a couple of levels. The low impact might very well be connected to the restrictions in place. In an alternate timeline where restrictions never happened, you might have been equally or more frustrated over the lack thereof as you lost a loved one.
How do you quantify how much discomfort for the general public is worth it to save X amount of lives? You and yours might have gotten dealt a shitty hand because of the border shutdowns, but on the aggregate I think the restrictions have been reasonable.
This is a much better way of describing my reaction to these claims. I appreciate you making it soberly.
There are absolutely folks who've been dealt a rough hand over the last two years--but I certainly wouldn't call my life "boring", and somehow I've figured out ways to make the last two years two of the best of my life: building a wood shop, getting away from the computer more, learning more about myself. And while I'll go back to traveling, etc. once things settle down, I have learned that I don't have to go places to be fulfilled.
Focusing on what one can't do is probably a great way to have made the last two years suck, though.
Their methodology is based on an assumption that healthcare workers are as likely to die of covid as the general population, that is, their job does not expose them to elevated risk. You can see the start of their methodology as:
"As a start, the number of deaths among HCWs was simply estimated by applying the crude mortality rate from each country (namely, the number of deaths reported to the WHO COVID-19 Dashboard divided by the population size) to the estimated number of HCWs in each country derived from ILOSTAT . This simple estimation considers HCWs to have a similar exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of death to that of the general population..."
From there they do adjust for some things, but they are the ways that healthcare workers are different, demographically, from the general population. They are not looking at occupational risk.
I could still totally believe that healthcare workers are at elevated occupational risk, but a paper that assumes their risk is what you would expect from their demographics isn't going to help us answer that question.
That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.
> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.
With what staff?
> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.
As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.
It’s 100% excuses. If healthcare capacity was an actual issue we’d have fixed it already and gone back to pre-pandemic normal.
And if the goal isn't to flatten the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity, please inform me what the goal actually is. 'Cause if that ain't it... I have no fucking clue what we are doing.
When you use a dramatic-sounding word like "lockdown", there's an implicit bargain you're making. You get to have a stronger emotional effect on me, and in exchange I get to call bullshit if it turns out that you're using it for something that doesn't justify that stronger emotional effect.
It sounds as if you're calling _every_ restriction anyone imposed on anyone in the name of fighting COVID-19 "lockdown". In which case, I call bullshit. For instance, being required to wear a mask when indoors with other people (I guess this is the sort of thing that the bare word "masks" in your list means): yeah, it kinda sucks, but it is a long way from anything that justifies the term "lockdown".
The same goes for your words about the government (I'm not sure which government, but never mind) "flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". I don't know exactly what's happened in your life, nor in the life of anyone else who isn't me; but while lots of things have been worse than usual for the last two years it's a long way short of "flushing my life down the drain". In fact, here are some things that two years of would be (1) much worse than what I have endured for the last two years but also (2) much less bad than "flushing (those years of) my life down the drain". (a) Being out of work. (b) Getting divorced. (c) Having a substantial disability such as deafness or the loss of a limb. (d) Major depressive disorder.
At least one actual underlying point you're making is a cogent one: governments across the world were concerned about their healthcare systems being overwhelmed, they asked or required people to make sacrifices that (as well as protecting the people making the sacrifices) made that less likely, but they didn't take steps to make substantial increases in the capacity of those healthcare systems that would make such sacrifices less necessary in the future.
That's partly because making substantial increases to the capacity of your healthcare system is hard and takes time. Hospitals take time to build. Doctors take time (a lot more than two years) to train. Etc. But, still, it's probably true that one thing we should have been trying to do alongside panic-mode COVID-19 fighting is to make longer-term capacity increases.
And, yes, all those restrictions governments have imposed have costs as well as benefits, and we should be weighing those up and not just assuming we should do everything that has benefits.
But you don't do either of those points any favours by tying them to hyperbolic language for all the things governments have been doing in the short term to try to reduce the spread. Nowhere has been "locked down" for two years, unless you take "locked down" to mean "doing anything at all to try to reduce the spread of COVID-19", and you shouldn't do that because words have meanings and connotations and that isn't what "locked down" means. Some people have indeed suffered terribly, but by and large we have not had two years of our lives "flushed down the drain", unless you take "flushed down the drain" to mean "made a bit worse", which again you shouldn't do because that's not what those words mean.
Say "Wearing masks kinda sucks, and we should actually look at whether the benefits justify the costs" and I'll warmly agree (though I might or might not end up agreeing with you about how the calculation comes out). Say "Working from home kinda sucks for many people and is basically impossible for others, and having everyone do it has severe economic consequences, and we should weigh those up against the benefits and not do it if it's net negative" and I'll warmly agree (though, again, I don't guarantee to agree about how the calculations come out in every particular case). But say "the government is flushing your life down the drain" or "we have been in lockdown for two years" and, no, sorry, I call bullshit. Those things are not true, and when you say them I can't help suspecting motives I can't endorse such as a preference for labelling everything a government does with the most negative labels you can find.
It takes a remarkable amount of privilege to say something like this.
We stole peoples proms, first dates, high school dances, drunken college hookups, funerals, weddings, livelihoods, social lives, you name it and we stole it in a failed attempt to “flatten the curve”.
People who minimize or brush away the impact the last two hellish years of our existence are either privileged as fuck or have a pathetic, miserable pre-pandemic life. I hardly know what else to say.
How dare anybody say last two years was “made a bit worse”. Speak for yourself… but you have no right to make that claim of others. These last two years seriously fucked my shit up and I’m hardly the minority. Screw people who gaslight us by saying “made a bit worse”.
No.
The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that (for all causes, not just COVID, since no ICU capacity kills people regardless of the reason they can't get into an ICU) to provide time for the development of effective preventive and treatment interventions, minimizing deaths on the route to that. (I suppose you can call that “building healthcare capacity”, but the goal has never been prinarily about bulking up the number of seriously I'll people hospitals can concurrently treat on a sustained basis, but the capacity to prevent people from getting seriously ill.)
(The original research indicated that after a general lockdown period, cycling local, often more modest, control measures would likely be necessary to that end.)
While the particular half-measures adopted and half-heartedly implemented have had mixed results in preventing health system overload (since we've seen temporary overload various places at various times), we have, in fact, developed various effective interventions and are on the road to more.
So we agree it is about healthcare capacity. You know the best way to avoid healthcare collapse? Build more of it!
You know the unethical, immoral way of avoiding healthcare collapse? Force hundreds of millions of people into this purgatory we are living in right now while doing absolutely fuck-all to build capacity. Then blame them all for "not taking this seriously" when their brilliant plan of doing fuck-all fails.
Seriously. Do you not see how much bullshit it is to just expect the entire world, billions of people to put their lives on hold indefinitely for exactly one specific illness when the solution could be to simply build capacity to deal with covid surges? These governments did fuck all to solve the capacity problem. They dont respect any of us at all!! They pissed our lives away so they didn't have to do anything.
Do you not value your time on this earth at all? 'Cause if you do, I'm sorry to tell you but the government just hoodwinked you into thinking it was your job to sacrifice your life so they didn't have to do anything at all.
Life is short dude. Expecting everybody to do this because "original models" by some bullshit "expert" said so... bleech...
What "takes a remarkable amount of privilege" is equating what has happened over the last two years to the awful, awful things that can actually flush two years (or more) of a person's life down the drain.
Note that you didn't just claim that some people's lives were impacted badly enough to amount to flushing them down the drain. (That might well be true. The Plague Years have been much worse for some people than for others.) What you wrote, to someone about whom so far as I know you know nothing to speak of, was: "So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". "Your life", not "my life" or "some people's lives". And, if I may borrow your language for a moment: you have no right to make that claim of others.
To repeat something I already said (but you apparently didn't read, or decided to ignore because if you acknowledged it it would be harder to maintain the desired level of outrage): yes, it's been much worse for some people than others. If you tell me your life feels like it's been flushed down the drain for the last two years then I'll believe you. But you don't get to point at some random person on HN and claim that the same is true of them.
No, the best way is to not need it in the first place. Vaccinating people is vasty more efficient in terms of people's time and money.
Universal vaccination uptake would obviate that.