At what number can we stop wearing masks, stop social distancing, start dining in, etc.? That's the number I care about. Because until somebody influential picks that number, we'll just keep masking and social distancing until the end of time.
It's like trying to decide if it's too rainy to go out by figuring out how many people are watering their yards right now, when you could just look out and see if it's raining.
Looking at the vaccine numbers for this week is a worse proxy. How does it help?
Sure, you could use the projected vaccinations for next March to decide how likely it is that you'll be able to go and watch a broadway show in March, but, like the weather forecast, you'll need to know what the actual positivity is in March to make the final decisions.
Israel is over 40% on first dose and should have interesting reault sun the next month or two.
As someone mentioned upthread, Israel will be an early indicator here.
If you look at the entire population, it's only about 28% got 1st dose and 12% got second dose, many within the last week.
But with a population of about 9.3 million (size and population comparable to New Jersey) and they just ramped up to about 1million vaccinations a week, we could be at "full" vaccination March 26th - 85% of eligible population, 2nd dose, and 1 week for it to take affect.
Source: Israel's ministry of health https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general and wikipedia's population information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Age_str...
Name a vaccine that doesn’t reduce onward transmission even as it cures disease. It’s overwhelmingly likely that the vaccine will slow transmission and foolish to throw our priors in the garbage bin.
What we don’t know yet is how much onward transmission will be reduced.
There is a difference between HIV vs SARS-Cov2: If you get AIDS, your body does not have the capacity to recover from it on its own. So, 1) the chances of detecting dead material from a long gone infection are nil; and 2) the cost of a false negative is much higher than the cost of a false positive.
Since most people seem not to be seriously affected by a SARS-Cov2 infection, neither is true for SARS-Cov2. So, not agreeing on a fixed, reasonable, standard number of cycles which everyone uses has the consequence of inflating false positives for no gain. Note WHO's updated information[1].
> WHO guidance Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 states that careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed (1). The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load.
If you are not sick and your viral load is barely detectable, what's the point?
See also Figure 1 in WHO's lab guidance[2].
[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-not...
[2]: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/334254/WHO-...
Everyone should use the same number in all tests. From what I understand, about 20 is a reasonable number which might still result in positives up to a month post-infection. I consider having a standard more important that the specific number chosen. It seems when people go to > 30 it is in a quest to ensure a positive test result.
Also I’d only heard of people speak in terms of “positive” for pcr. You can be positive but not infectious, if there are a lot of cycles and you’re tested as the disease winds down.
Whooping cough - that treats the symptoms but does not stop the patient from spreading the disease
Edit: Added context
* Those positive for antibodies but pcr negative —> had been exposed, cleared virus without infection
* those pcr positive but asymptomatic
* those pcr positive and symptomatic
About 30% were in the seropositive group which didn’t have pcr positivity. So it seems like transmission was reduced at least 30%. It’s also possible the other two groups would have had lower transmission rates than if they had had no vaccine.
If you have a more precise source I’d be interested to see it, but if this is the worst case it’s pretty good!
> We used PCR, EIA, and culture to confirm B. pertussis infection in two highly vaccinated groups of children in two day-care centers. Three (10%) of 30 2- to 3-year-old children were seropositive for recent infection; one had nasopharyngeal colonization and a clinical illness that met the modified WHO case definition. In the day-care center for the 5- to 6- year-old group, 9 (55%) of 16 children were IgM positive, 4 (25%) of whom had nasopharyngeal colonization. Of these four children, three had nonspecific cough, and only one met the modified WHO definition for pertussis. None of the children in our study, including those who met the WHO definition, had been examined by a physician before our investigation.
>Children who were seropositive and re- mained both asymptomatic and PCR negative probably had sufficient immunity from vaccines or natural boosters to protect them against persistent colonization and clinical disease. Their seropositivity could not be due to vaccine because the children were tested more than a year after having been vaccinated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627963/pdf/109...
The real worry here is unfortunately human behaviour and not science. The science is clear, and it's been said/written/screamed/spraypainted that the #1 reason we have all of these restrictions is actually human behaviour as opposed to the virus itself.
Nope, if the virus didnt exist, there would be no restrictions; therefore, it is the primary reason.
Has there ever been a control group or any historical precedence to scientifically support the questionable hypothesis that a highly contagious virus can be can be globally controlled simply by controlling human behavior? (i.e. locking down entire nations while "essential workers" -- poor people -- are still forced to go to work)
Sticking only with positivity rates is misleading even if one ignores all the costs of lockdowns. As the WHO pointed out on 13 January 2021[1]:
> WHO reminds IVD users that disease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases (2). This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.
You may find this comment[2] by me and the link to the calculator to understand the impact of varying prevalence keeping false positive and false negative rates constant.
Note also,
> Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.
In plain English, that says that with no illness and no contact with people suffering from Covid19 etc, a positive test does not necessarily mean that the person testing positive is infected.
This is all basic Stats but it has been conspicuously ignored for almost year now.
> The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load.
So, before the test, pick a Ct, and stick with it instead of keeping on going until you get a positive result. At higher counts, the test might be detecting left over material from a long gone infection.
> Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
So, if you are sick and get a negative, test again to make sure you can rule out SARS-Cov2. But, equivalently, if you are not sick and test positive, also make sure that this is not a false positive.
The latter is what has been globally ignored with one positive test on healthy people is regarded as proof of infection and illness. It is what is being ignored when people are not allowed to travel or work due to a positive test result. Basically, a positive test result, even without symptoms, and even with a subsequent negative, puts a scarlet letter on you which cannot be erased.
The flowchart in Figure 1 in this document[3] might also be useful. Note the first box is labeled "Patient meets the clinical criteria for COVID-19". That's where these diagnostic tests are applicable as proof of infection.
The fact that the test is useful for confirmation of infection conditional on presenting symptoms doesn't mean it is useful for screening an entire population or deciding on how much GDP to destroy because of the simple facts that in that scenario a large portion of positive test results will be false positives and these tests have high false negative rates.
[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-not...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25894449
[3]: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/334254/WHO-...
So, even if you're the required 2 months post vaccinated you probably shouldn't stop wearing a mask or social distancing until 100% of the population around you has either also been vaccinated or been infected and recovered.
When will the entire population be vaccinated or already infected? At current rates it may be a year or two.
There's at least one nasal covid vaccine on the way https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/india-n...
Apparently it works very well in monkeys. "We have completed studies on monkeys. It demonstrates 100 per cent sterilising ability."
I'm not sure if under-16 cohorts' trials are underway already. If they are, and if children are going to be vaccinated before their next school term starts, then society as a whole may consider dropping the current precautions.
I think it's pretty well established at this point that the case fatality index for children is vastly lower than for older adults, about 0.1% for people under age 29. [1]
0-19 years: 0.003%
20-49 years: 0.02%
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/delhi-may-be-head...
Note that seroprevalence studies will underestimate the number of infections because some recovered patients don't produce detectible levels of antibodies.
The Academy of Pediatrics says this. It's not just some politicans who don't know anything about epidemology and likely have never even taken a college-level biology course.
The whole "COVID fatigue" thing is one of the craziest things I keep hearing with regard to this pandemic. The virus doesn't care if you're bored of the disease and "won't tolerate" staying home from more football games. It's not like it's just going to go away because we're tired of it! I sincerely hope governments aren't going to just open things up because 2021 is a different year and everyone's just really bummed of it all. Surely we have better sense than that.
Also, do you know what else has unknown long-term effects in children?
What should a schoolteacher do then, die? I'm not going to ask them to do that.
They should be put in one of the top priority categories for vaccination, and THEN we can expect them to go in classrooms (but we shouldn't be doing that anyway unless all kids are also vaccinated - otherwise they will keep the virus in circulation. They tend to have extremely mild or completely asymptomatic cases, but they DO catch it and spread it further)
Feudal traditions aside, no one has the right to draw an income from a position where they are not doing the job. So, if teachers don't want to teach, then they can find another occupation which they are comfortable doing.
Why not the same thing a grocery clerk is expected to do? Or do you not consider primary education to be “essential” ?
To be fair you can't be sure that wasn't covid, unless you have come up seronegative. Not every adult gets it bad
Prior to the pandemic she used to be in a tiny school with 4-6 kids and 2 teachers and she was sick seemingly every other week. The difference seems to be the combination of teachers sanitizing everything, keeping kids in smaller groups, temperature checks, and parents not sending sick kids to school.
Then, many/most will say _fuck it_, I'm taking my life back. I'm visualizing that day, and will welcome it.
Are you into apocalypses? There's the British quick-spreading strain, and there are the Brazilian and South African variants that the vaccine does not offer good protection against. I predict that COVID will be like Picardy Fever, not like the Spanish Flu - there will be outbreaks every few years here and there.
If this thing can basically be treated no differently than the common cold once vaccinated by most people and in the outliers something a little worse there will be no popular support to continue draconian lock down measures.
The goal is to stop the bleeding. The patient is on the floor right now and haemorrhaging liters blood. We want to stabilize the patient and let them get on with their life as quickly as possible. We cannot let perfect be the enemy of "Good Enough" here.
At least in the west, global logistics of vaccination seem to have collapsed. We need to, as a species, get on top of vaccine rollout for next time. It’s delayed at the moment because we didn’t make enough vials over summer FFS.
And? The world doesn't end when new strains of the cold or the flu happen. Every year. As it's happened for as long as there have been humans.
Humans have "eradicated"... Polio? Because it's rather serious? What else have we eradicated?
COVID is here to stay.
https://theconversation.com/tuberculosis-kills-as-many-peopl...
However, in the US a lot of diseases were eradicated locally. Malaria used to be endemic, and tuberculosis.
There’s also a list here: Diptheria, Mump, Measles, Rubella
Some have made small comebacks due to anti-vaxxer sentiment, but eradication certainly isn’t some impossible goal.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/6-diseases-the...
How are you going to protest your way into a concert that isn't performing?
How are you going to demand your way into a university that isn't teaching?
How are you going to riot your way into a Disneyland that isn't running?
How are you going to force your way into a sports stadium that isn't playing?
How are you going to disobey your way onto a cruise ship that isn't sailing?
We are much more at the whim of our authoritarian overlords destroying everything joyful in life than we ever realized. We are no longer ever allowed to make personal risk management decisions.
Obesity and heart disease have been killing far more people in the US than covid and yet Mcdonalds and Coke advertisements are everywhere inbetween television entertainment.
Also note obesity/heart disease are among the greatest risk factors of poor health outcomes for covid.
Why is there little to no mention of eating healthy and exercising in the government's health guidelines to combat this threat?
There are countless other examples of bureaucrats caring more about money and power than public health - while putting on the appearance of caring for public health. See also: the war on drugs.
If not, how much more deadly (be precise) would the flu need to be before we should ban group socialization?
Trying to figure out if you're thinking in terms of a logical metric based risk analysis, or just emotion and terror of death.
Seems like this ratio would vary greatly among such demographics.
Obese people are twice as likely to be hospitalized for covid.
When hospital beds are being overrun, someone elses life long decisions to disregard their own health does indeed affect other peoples health negatively.
Living life like there's no pandemic is not just personal risk, it's risk to other people and to society as a whole. If you don't understand that a year in, you're either not capable of understanding or you just don't care.
Your freedom borders with mine - you should be allowed to do EVERYTHING which doesn't affect others without their consent.
Ignoring COVID-19 precautionary measures isn't one of those things, and I am happy the joy-destroying authoritarian overlords took that choice from you.
People don't exist in vacuums. Nearly every decision you make is going to affect society somehow. If you decide to eat fast food for every meal and become obese, that isn't happening in a vacuum. Sooner or later you will start putting strain on the healthcare system and if enough people do the same, the "joy-destroying overlords" are going to start taxing sugar and fat (or other agency-limiting measures) to save you from yourself. Is that the world you want to live in - where the government has to increasingly limit everyone's agency in order to save more lives?
What if I and 500 of my friends want to have a comics convention? With everyone fully aware and accepting of any risks?
Nope, absolutely not allowed anywhere in the entire damn world.
It's right there in the US Constitution. "No law abridging the freedom of the people to peaceably assemble." It does not say "except in case of arbitrarily-declared forever-lasting so-called emergency." If you want it to say that, amend it. If such an amendment wouldn't pass, that's because it damn well shouldn't.
This is freedom-destroying authoritarianism, and the frightened sheep like you eat it up. This is where democracy breaks, if 51% of people want to lock down the other 49% forever, the other 49% are fucked forever.
If you fear contagion and think you need to stay away from me, that is on YOU to restrict YOUR activities. You do not get to restrict mine.
Do you agree that a higher number of people will die if they do this? Are you OK with that?
If not, then you must admit that, _of course_, increasing longevity to the absolute maximum possible extent should not be the only goal of public policy. And then it becomes clear that we’re talking about degrees. How many deaths are worth how much misery, suffering, and lost time among healthy people? Reasonable people can answer that question in different ways, but clearly the answer isn’t “zero”.
People should choose their own risk management decisions, not have a government forcibly do it for them. If you're concerned, you can choose to restrict yourself, but you have no business restricting me and any number of people that mutually wish to interact with me.
States seem to be able to punish that kind of risk taking without complaints about "joy-destroying authoritarian overlords".
Not to mention the perverse incentive: if you feel sick, you want to avoid getting tested and counted as a positive if you don't want your locality or employer to shut down. There is a theory that this accounts for much of Japan's perceived success - antibody studies show just as much prevalence as everywhere else, what happened was that all the mild cases never got tested.
There are also non-perverse incentives. If I feel sick and live alone, a test test result doesn't give me much actionable information, takes time, and puts the people giving the tests at slightly more risk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/around-65-75-of-the-populatio...
* Herd immunity numbers assume no ongoing vaccination -- they more or less say, "If life went back to normal, would the virus slow down or speed up?"
* Age-related mortality and age-related vaccination rates are important. If we vaccinate all of the people who are at serious risk, the danger is mostly gone. There have obviously been deaths in populations not at serious risk, but not in proportion to the economic costs of locking down the economy.
And as an aside, vaccine immunity is estimated to be about as good as post-infection immunity. And most estimates of the actual infection rate put them several times (some estimate 8-10x, but that's looking unlikely IMO) the measured case rate.
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/14/asymptomatic-covid-l...
Also, we're not going to get much research on this until after the pandemic is over, because of pandemic related lack of routine medical care.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432
Dying from Covid is not “asymptomatic Covid”. So your evidence for this phenomenon consists of a local news article where they’ve quoted the opinion of one person, mis-represented a figure from a journal article, and showed x-rays with no citations or context.
(Obviously vaccination is by far the preferable of those two options!)
As of October, "The confirmed examples worldwide [of re-infections] could possibly be counted on your fingers" [0].
Immune memory cells, which are more potent than antibodies, persist for longer than 6 months [1].
We don't have data to support 2 years of immunity, but current evidence is pointing at it being long-lasting [2].
[0] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/14/im... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03207-w [2] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1349898485756162048
Got tested for antibodies, the test did detect some but concluded I didn't have immunity anymore.
It appears that Russia has a different distribution of coronavirus strains than the rest of Europe [0], but the strains in Russia are certainly found elsewhere. If hundreds of thousands of Russians were re-infected this would be observed elsewhere and documented.
The closest thing I can find to reporting on this matter is here [1]. The Siberian Times does not appear to be a reputable news source [2], and its claims do not match the magnitude of those above. It reports that Russia’s chief sanitary doctor Anna Popova said, "in Russia there was not a single confirmed case of coronavirus reinfection." Furthermore, the doctor on the other side of this disagreement has "heard about other cases [of re-infection] elsewhere in Russia from colleagues" (and claims to have been re-infected).
This is not "lots and lots (hundreds of thousands)"...
There is evidence of re-infections in the scientific literature, but they are exceedingly rare (tens of people worldwide). Long-term immunity will have to be measured, especially in light of new variants, but current evidence points in that direction.
[0] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/europe?transmissions=show
[1] https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/virology-profess...
Its likely that a some places will heavily ease restrictions as soon as next month.
Will that be too early? Depends.
Also, I don’t know where you live, but I think in most places on earth you can legally have dinner with a small amount of friends, without some “influential” person giving you permission.
Here in the UK you may only meet other people for exercise purposes, outside. No visiting each other's homes. It's been this way in most parts of the country for months. Same in Ireland
In France there is a curfew from 8pm-6am and restaurants cannot open. There have been rules preventing meeting others at home, can't tell if they're active right now.
In Germany one person not of that household may visit another household, but only one. This is also true in Belgium.
Some areas of Spain are not allowing meeting in others homes at all.
So ... YMMV.
Not here you can't.
We are not supposed to go outside for anything other than food / exercise and no meeting people from other houses.
People have been fined for going out walks because they didn't go to the closest park to their house.
I was sitting in the park in a riverbank the other day, cops patrolled and asked people where they lived. Whoever you're with must live in the same household as you, and you may not be more than a km from home. I didn't see anyone get fined (although I believe they have the discretion to do so) but I saw some groups of friends be dispersed by the police.
The vaccine grants 95% protection with those measures in place. We have no idea how effective it is without those measures. If we're all going to dance parties, the vaccine might not be adequate.
I think the question is the point at which we can send kids back to schools and reopen our businesses with precautions in place -- in other words, stem the pain and bleeding.
It makes sense to keep masks on and 6-foot distance until the virus is gone, though. Vaccine+masking/distancing should be enough to get rid of it. It's not clear vaccine alone will do that.
If not, we'll be on a dance for decades with new mutations, vaccines, and whatnot. We want this thing dead and gone for good.
I don't think we're on a path to get there, though. People are fed up. If we can't get this under control, I suspect the new normal will be outbreaks for the rest of our lives. Perhaps the vaccine will be 95% without distancing. Or perhaps not.
The public is treating the vaccine for like the vaccine for polio, which is that once you get it, you're good. If 80%+ of Americans get the vaccine and we still have to mask and social distance, you're going to see a lot of angry people.
Then people need to do better. Getting angry at reality doesn't change it. If this is how things work out, throwing a fit only makes the situation even worse.
Carl Sagan once pointed out the perils of basing a society on all this science and technology, when only a few people (relatively speaking) actually understand it. I didn't truly understand this warning until this pandemic.
When COVID19 hit China in January, it was clear it was coming to the US. At the time, I thought the US government was preparing. Nope. Complete denial.
When it hit in March, I thought schools would prepare. Nope. Complete denial. It's 2 weeks. 4 weeks. It'll be gone come the summer.
And so on....
... Anger against reality has led to over 400,000 deaths so far.
From a month ago:
Dr. Anthony Fauci now says as much as 90 percent of the population may need to get vaccinated or infected to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19 — admitting in a new interview that he has been intentionally raising the bar based, in part, on what he thinks the country is ready to hear.
“We really don’t know what the real number is,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert told the New York Times.
“I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Ref: https://nypost.com/2020/12/24/fauci-covid-herd-immunity-requ...
He does have a track record of being dishonest about things. Part of the reason he drug his feet on masks was he was worried about shortages. It makes sense, but I really don't like the "I know what's best for you" paternalism.
In seriousness, I believe him when he said he's not a politician. What he doesn't get is that that's half his job.
It's damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
I think it’s fair to characterize this as dishonesty, and to be less charitable about whether his past communications were in retrospect honest.
At best, they are grossly incompetent at communicating with the public.
https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12447444277357813...
https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12440202923658158...
This has stood up remarkably well, a year on we know that masks are mostly effective to prevent people spreading the virus and not to prevent contracting it and we know much more about how readily it spreads asymptomatically.
TheStreet asked him "why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?"
> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.
https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
He didn't say "because we didn't know any better," he said (paraphrased) so the general public doesn't go out and buy them, causing a shortage. I find that dishonest.
How is that dishonest? He was completely transparent about this motivation from the start, as shown from my clip from the earlier interview.
Another example, when Trump (like him or not) pretended to be best pals with Kim Jon Un, he was being diplomatic. CNN accused him of being dishonest and called for him to announce publicly to his country that "actually I'm lying".
Was he 'lying'? Yes. Should he have told the truth to Kim Jon Un's face for the sake of 'honesty' and destroy all the diplomatic progress he had made at a time when KJU was flaunting his nukes? Maybe. Probably not.
Back to Fauci. Was he 'lying'? Yes. If he had told people 'masks work and will save your lives but health professional lives are more important' would that have had the same effect? Maybe. Probably not.
Also, since we love our fallacies in this place. Accusing someone of being dishonest for no good reason is effectively a variant of the outcome fallacy (judging the quality of an argument/action based on knowing the eventual outcome, rather than judging whether it was a reasonable course of action given what was known at the time). We simply do not know had Fauci been 'honest' whether the death toll would be halved or doubled right now. We can only speculate.
About 25 million have recovered so far. That puts us at about 12% 'immune'.
I think the length of time recovery and vaccination confer are still not really nailed down
Additionally, a lot of the additives in the vaccine are intended to make your immune system perceive it as much more of a threat (while a virus will try to be perceived as not a threat), increasing the priority your immune system gives the virus (and the duration it will be able to stay immune)
There's this early study from July as well https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179?query=fea...
And cdc guidance https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-suggests-reco...
Facing this reality, the policy will probably be once everyone who wants it has had a chance to get it, things will or should move towards normal.
https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/59-des-francais-prets-recourir-u...
Do you know this is verified yet?
It was in the news today and it didn't seem like it was known yet here in Norway. I think we are using the Biontech vaccine.
And, FTR, yes I'm generally pro vaccines.
But based on past vaccines for other viruses and the way they and the covid vaccines help your body be better prepared to fight the virus, it's a reasonable guess that they may well at least limit spread, perhaps even close to prevent it.
So you're right to point out that it's not a sure thing, but I (admittedly, not an expert, but basing on views of experts) also think it would be more surprising if the vaccines didn't slow spread at all, the bigger question will be to what extent (both with and without current protective tools like masks and social distancing).
My uncle got the vaccine, and then a week later his family comes down with Covid, including him. They did fine, but it's not a guaranteed thing.
This particular vaccine isn't even a vaccine in the traditional sense, where they give you an inhibited version of the virus and let your immune system work on it. It's an mRNA cellular protein booster that is supposed to help fight it. It's all pretty new.
The traditional way (as used by the Oxford/Astrazenica covid vaccine, and others) is to show the body what the virus looks like by giving it non-harmful bits of protein that look like the bit of the virus the immune system will need to recognise.
The mRNA ones (like Pfizer's or Moderna's) use mRNA code to tell your body to create those harmless proteins, and then the rest is the same - your immune system learns to recognise them, which is good because it will be more likely to recognise the real virus.
The mRNA technique is just moving the "create these harmless things" from the lab to inside the body. It doesn't change how your body fights the virus compared to traditional vaccine methods.
(mRNA vaccines have also been undergoing safety tests for years, these ones for covid are the first approved but not because previous/ongoing ones were shown to be unsafe.)
e.g. info from CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
However, there is not yet any evidence I've seen that the vaccine can cause Bell's Palsy. There's not conclusive evidence it can't, but the FDA says: "The observed frequency of reported Bell’s palsy in the vaccine group is consistent with the expected background rate in the general population."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covid-vaccine-bells-palsy/
(Please do correct me if I'm out of date and there's anything showing statistical significance, but I don't see anything new from a quick Google.)
When you vaccinate a lot of people, some of them will develop medical problems that would have developed regardless of the vaccine. It's not impossible you will be proven right once there is more data, but until then it is spreading misinformation to say that the vaccine did cause the problem.
This is a new standard. Even though the flu is very dangerous in small children, adults who mix with adults in work settings while infected with the flu have never been held to this standard. And since everyone might carry something that might be dangerous to someone under the right circumstances, I never wanted to go down the road of locking people up just in case someone somewhere may possibly be spared an infection.
Keep in mind that solitary confinement is an additional punishment for most inmates in most prisons in the world. Yet, that has been inflicted on people without so much of a second's thought to what the costs are.
So, by your standard, nevermind the kid who kills himself because he has now been put in solitary due to forces completely out of his control. Or, the grandmother who lives in another country who may be spared a SARS-Cov2 infection, but lost most of her mental faculties due to lack of contact with other human beings.
Do you think the only bad thing that can happen to someone is a SARS-Cov2 infection?
If not, they one must take into account how much of one bad thing one is willing to tolerate in return for a given reduction in some other bad thing. Because the probability of some bad thing happening to someone is 100%.
Once the sane ones are vaccinated, open everything up and let nature take care of the dumb ones. If you insist on drinking gasoline, good luck
There are definitely people who may not benefit as much from the vaccine because they are immuno-compromised for example.
The only reason not to take it is if your doctor tells you not to. Unless they've told us not to for medical reasons, we should take it if we can get it, ASAP.
And I think pressuring people to take it is appropriate, given that it's not just them at risk.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/who-can-and-cant-safe...
Pressuring in form of awareness efforts will take probably years, and who knows how many deniers will even get it. I'm starting to read posts and "studies" about paying people off, which I think is insane - (1) the whole idea of people who want to fix this problem actually having to bribe via their taxes those people who refuse to accept reality, and (2) payoffs can simply be abused in a million ways - but whatever, say we all take one for the greater good. But then even a large-scale payoff effort will also take months if not years.
What else can you do to pressure people? Restrict their rights until they get a shot? Tell them their kids can't go to school until they show a QR proof of vaccine? Realistically, just how can you pressure people if you are not in North Korea? So then we're back to everyone on lockdown because of the stubborn few?
That largely works pretty well at keeping the pool of deniers down to the true-believers; it turns out that many anti-vaxxers give up their beliefs when it becomes personally inconvenient to hold them.
I think of it much the same way I think of driver's licenses. I believe if you are driving on your own private property you don't need one. But if you are using public roads and putting people at risk, there's an expectation of training and the ability to revoke permission if you harm others.
If we average 1 million per day, we have 231 days to go, which is Aug 25th.
Right now we are production-constrained, and somewhat distribution constrained since every state is handling it differently. But soon enough we will be constrained by people's unwillingness to get vaccinated, and then things will get really fucking annoying.
There was no reason for us to stay as locked down as we have been.
[0] https://news.wttw.com/2020/03/30/mccormick-place-be-transfor...
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/doctors-and-nurses-coronavirus-pande...
[2] https://news.wttw.com/2020/05/01/field-hospital-mccormick-pl...
[3] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/11/13/21562828/mccormick-p...
So New Zealand was even more successful. By July, they got things well and truly under control: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&mid=%2Fm%2F0ctw...
Or take France: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&mid=%2Fm%2F0f8l...
All of these are having a bit more trouble with the second wave, Clearly something has changed about the nature of Covid. But you can see them weathering the first wave, and dealing with the second wave. You see how the number of cases drops off to near 0 during summer?
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This is the USA: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&gl=IE&ceid=IE%3...
Take care: that Y axis is much larger than the other examples above.
On June 1 2020 there were still 22000 measured new cases on that day alone. Sure that's a slight drop from the 34000 cases on April 9. But that's not really safe to loosen restrictions, now is it?
(Now we do know that that's an aggregate and some individual states have done better. You can drill down to get that information.)
https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&gl=IE&ceid=IE%3...
You can see that restrictions did have clear effects in first and second wave. By June, restrictions had beaten back the virus almost far enough.
You can also see the effect of strong restrictions at the end of November (up to "Tier 3" by Nov 20) : the number of infections is trending back down.
Looks like Illinois is doing a fair job! Thank goodness those extra beds weren't needed.
Due to the way that Covid is stealthy, you don't see the effects of policy measures for 14 days or more. It's not very surprising that policy measures would lag behind the curves.
And I don't really see a problem with the extra hospital beds. This particular pandemic is really hard to manage. If someone accidentally prepares more hospital beds than they need, that's perfectly fine by me. That's a much better plan than not having enough.
Unless you think that protecting citizens from harm (foreign or domestic) is not a duty of the government, I guess they're doing as good a job as they can, given the circumstances. It's not pretty, but then again it can't be.
You might argue in this case they could have theoretically backed down restrictions to a lower level, once they saw that the lower level was already having an effect.
But in leadership, it's often good to stay a given course, if it is at all helpful. In this case, it is, You get back down to lower infection numbers faster, thus allowing people more freedoms again sooner.
Eh, probably not.
You'd know that some people who are hospitalized also die.
Also; knowing the difficulty of trying to deal with an exponential curve, how would you be sure to cut off at just the right time, before people start dying in the streets?
Ok, no, that can't be it. I don't think people are monsters, so you're unlikely to be one :-) .
Not completely filled, but yes, this is exactly what I've been saying. If we had allowed the extra capacity to get used, instead of getting rid of it, the lockdowns wouldn't have had to be as strict. Less strict lockdowns means less economic problems, which means we could sustain them longer.
Which gets right back to my original point: As it is now, people have ended up with more pressing concerns than the virus and so care less and less about following the lockdowns.
Also another quick aside, back on that original point - "two weeks to slow the spread"? Lockdowns were sold to us specifically on slowing the spread while we increased capacity, to deal with the increase in patients. There was always an understanding that as long as we don't go past that capacity, no extra lives would be saved, they'd just be spread over a longer period. That's why the original slogan was "two weeks" - it was what we needed to build the extra capacity, then we could stop the lockdowns as long as we kept masks/social distancing.
What could possibly be a more pressing concern than people's health?
Indeed in many countries the original restrictions were lifted or ameliorated after the first wave. However -just looking at the numbers- obviously something went terribly wrong in the United States overall, and authorities were not able to keep their promise.
This sucks terribly. It doesn't magically make it safe to not have restrictions, of course.
"Health" is far more encompassing than "don't get the virus". I'm also talking mental health and security (food and shelter), both of which have been badly affected by the lockdowns and lost jobs from the lockdowns.
> obviously something went terribly wrong in the United States overall
There's (at least) two things going on here, neither of which has to do with the response:
* The US is big. Half the country has a different climate than the other half, and all evidence is that SARS-CoV-2 is heavily seasonal. What you're seeing in the country graph is as it recedes in one set of states, it grows in another set. Check out the curves for southern states like Florida, Mississipi, or Arizona - their first wave doesn't start until the summer, after first wave in the northern states like Illinois have already ended. Add them together and you get the consistently high rates for the whole country.
* Too-high-cycle PCR positives without symptoms being counted as a "case". The WHO just changed their recommendations last week because PCR testing has been being misused (as people have complained about since at least last summer) to take into account the false positives and symptoms; if these new recommendations are actually followed, expect the case rate to plummet pretty rapidly (though perhaps not sharply as different states may adopt it at different times).
In those countries, those forms of security are already factored into the "Operating System" of society.
That was enlightening. Thanks for taking the time and patience to talk with me! :-)
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200927/florida-lifts-covid...
With those that are the most vulnerable (front-line workers, elderly and health compromised), hopefully the death rate will start to fall as they are getting the vaccine first. That is what I'm looking forward to.
As number of immune people goes up, R goes down, and you can start reducing measures. (until R goes to near-0, at which point you're done) .
At least, that's the theory.
All the rest is pure fear-driven bullshit
Sadly it didn't have to be this bad. Compare the US to New Zealand.
I'm an expat living in Thailand, which has an exceptionally low number of cases due to consistent mask use and social precautions.
Even if the vaccine reaches a level of saturation that is deemed safe, wearing a mask is a sane precaution that does not hurt you in any way and potentially saves lives of those unable to receive the vaccine.
Who cares if my action causes problems for anybody else, yeah Freedom FREEDOM!!!! I'm the most important person in the world!!! ME ME ME ME ME My rights!!!! Freedom, oh and anything else is ism.
swap in whatever ism is the flavour or the month, I have no idea what any of them mean, but they are all BAD!!!
Sorry... couldn't help myself. There is something disgusting about how people cry freedom as an excuse to take actions that place everybody they encounter at risk.
In a high profile case Dave Ramsey had a holiday party and told employees to not wear masks .
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/caterers-finance-guru-d...
Not long after we’re allowed to carry more than 3 ounces of liquid on an airplane, if I had to guess.
I imagine they’ll lie again and say something like 70%. Screw the “vAcCiNe iSnT 100%”. Nothing is sure. But we gotta keep going w our lives
In the shrill world of the media, point-scoring politicians, and people that believe we live in some kind of movie world where we can save everyone from everything, probably when everyone is vaccinated.
Also if your media perception is shrill world then you might want to change your perceptions/media channels.
Do you have a link for that?
> so we might not want stop wearing masks until the case numberes have fallen to less than 5 per 100.000 per week. - we might not want risking that the virus mutates, so we shouldn't use infections amoung the young to get back to normal.
Which backs up my point about being pragmatic. 50% of the UK population are over 50 where COVID risks are dramatically higher. The likelihood of death or serious hospitalization for under 50s is much, much lower. 20-something men in the UK are much more likely to commit suicide, or die driving a car than dying from COVID, or having long-COVID (it's something like 100x more likely IIRC but I can't find a link right now).
> Also if your media perception is shrill world then you might want to change your perceptions/media channels.
I'm not sure what country you are in, but in the UK, at least, the closest to neutral reporting is the BBC, and only for its news bulletins. For everything else, Sky News, newspapers, and so on, the whole approach is just unrelentingly negative, and point scoring against the Government and its advisors.
So as long as COVID can be used as a way to achieve long-standing political goals, there will be absolutely no political will to relax the restrictions, even as infection rates start to fall as a result of vaccinations. It will take serious pushback by the populace - people making it clear that incumbent politicians will lose their next elections unless restrictions are relaxed - to return to any sense of normalcy in a reasonable period of time.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-...
I assume you know the answer to the question you asked, and were just being argumentative, because the answer is quite obvious. But in case you really wanted to know, instead of answering directly, I'll point you to a few resources:
1) "For authoritarian-minded leaders, the coronavirus crisis is offering a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power. Censorship in China and elsewhere has fed the pandemic, helping to turn a potentially containable threat into a global calamity. The health crisis will inevitably subside, but autocratic governments’ dangerous expansion of power may be one of the pandemic’s most enduring legacies." - https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-e...
2) "The outbreak of Covid-19 and subsequent pandemic has led to an alarming uptick in authoritarian behavior by governments across the globe, who are using the crisis to silence critics, an open letter signed by more than 500 former world leaders and Nobel Laureates claims." - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritar...
3) "...as the crisis goes on, some leaders could order restrictive measures that make public health sense at the peak of the crisis and then extend them in the hope of quashing dissent once the disease declines....A harbinger of what is to come may have appeared in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban asked parliament on 21 March to indefinitely extend a state of emergency that prescribes five-year prison sentences for those disseminating false information or obstructing the state’s crisis response." - https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/sb4-covid-19-and-conflict...
Ultimately, having vast swaths of the population reliant on the government for money, food, and healthcare, with oppressive taxes for those who are lucky enough to be employed/in business, and a currency that is rapidly being devalued, is a pretty significant step on the road to socialism.
”...the letter's chief warning is that countries with strong democratic traditions could use the pandemic to introduce extraordinary measures that in the long run become ordinary, doing permanent damage to global democracy...”
You, and those who think and act like you, really should educate yourselves before you criticize things you apparently know absolutely nothing about. You guys are turning the Internet into a toxic place where discussion of undeniable facts, from your own news sources and in this case brought to light by a collection of 500 of the world’s most credible people, are dismissed as wild conspiracy theories - simply because those facts might call into question the motives of politicians you blindly support.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritar...