The Coronavirus Is Here Forever
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274819&p=5
(Comments like this will eventually go away. Sorry for the annoyance. The server is hurting today.)
Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist.
Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. We, the natives of that village, have vaccines and advanced medical care in finite quantities, plus a better understanding of how to reduce transmission rates. That's gone a long way to soften the blow. The transition from pandemic to endemic usually kills a lot more people in a given area, and the area effected right now is everywhere.
The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic. Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. Until we've built up immunity to several different strains of COVID-19, every new strain has the potential to overwhelm our medical systems, and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility.
It's not as simple as flipping a switch from "life threatening pandemic" to "quotidian endemic". There are shades of grey in between that cause varying strain on hospital ICU's, and the transition isn't one-way.
Our village will be hit far less hard if we behave intelligently about disease prevention. Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
It’s truly maddening. My wife (very on the right) refused to get it and instead talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, vitamin D. All of which she got from conservative media. Right now she is lying in bed wracked with COVID. Ate up with fever and a cough that sends jolts of panic through me when i hear it echoing down the stairs. It breaks my heart, man.
God help us and God bless all of you out there with sick loved ones.
Sorry for the sappy post. It’s been a rough few days.
In my country at least, if you get any of those vaccines and get Capillary leak syndrome as in some cases, a thrombosis that leaves you mentally incapitated as in some cases, a retinal detachment issue that may leave you blind as in some cases, a myocarditis that may leave you dead in some cases --- then you've lost. You will be a pauper for the rest of your life, as you will have to use up all your assets to pay for care cost until social insurance kicks in. The privilege of getting appropriate financial relief for not being able to work in your profession anymore is reserved for civil servants for life. You're finished. In the UK at least they're planning care facilities for those who suffer from long covid -- here it's not even a formally acknowledged disease, you're treated as any other handicapped person or worse, as a patient with a mental problem rather than phyiscal illness.
If you leave people who are afraid of a virus and a vaccine both the choice and tell them taking or not taking the vaccine is their responsibility alone together with the consequences, it's easy to fall into decision fatigue and just do nothing, and ratinalising that behaviour.
I don’t think this will work, because if it did then people would be taking the vaccine right now.
The issue is multi-faceted of course, but the discussion of “extremely rare events” is a red herring and a wink wink to vaccine skepticism.
It’s like why would we even talk about these extremely rare events and taking care of someone if those events happen, when instead they’re millions of times more likely to suffer from Covid-19? I mean why aren’t you saying “if you drive to the clinic to get a vaccine and get in a car wreck we’ll take care of you” when that is far more likely to occur? Let alone any number of other things like walking outside and getting struck by lightning.
The probabilistic case for the vaccine is well beyond settled and even if there was some long-term unknown boogeyman vaccine issue that for some reason causes this vaccine (even the “natural” JnJ one) to behave unlike any other vaccine you would still get the vaccine because of the known probabilities of contracting and suffering/dying from Covid-19 versus an unknown and unknowable probability of some unknown thing occurring at an unknown future date.
I also would hug you if I could because I've seen first-hand what's coming your way if you don't get vaccinated. This is so contagious; it's going to get to everyone. You probably won't die, but you are going to be sick in an extreme that is hard to describe. I don't want you to go through this. God bless you my friend.
I think it works in reverse, like evolution. The people are the chaos machine that generate ideas. The ones that stick FoxNews latches onto. If politicians don't get in line, they don't get reelected.
It's like coronavirus for political information. It mutates in the masses, and the ideas that are the fittest survive - becoming political points for the Party as a whole.
This is not really true. Maybe more educated in some areas but not in all of them. People used to be much better educated to build a garden, better educated to understand the nature. I don't think people think differently than they did hundreds of times ago, I don't feel like we are individually smarter
And there will always be millions of saps and pollyannas who believe their politicians just want to help them.
- Everyone should go to the opera/cinema to fight Covid (7th March 2020)
- Lockdown for everybody (20th March) (I guess people caught it in the theaters…)
- Masks are useless, absolutely useless for the general public (June 2020),
- Masks are mandatory (September),
- Blocking borders is useless, Covid will be here,
- Borders blocked during Lockdown II and III, if I remember the dates, because it’s useful (so maybe we should have stopped the direct flights between WUHAN and Lyon earlier than September 2020?),
- The idea of Passe Sanitaire (a generalized QR code suspending entrance in public buildings) is a conspiration theory (10th May 2021)
- Passe Sanitaire mandatory on August 1st, live and enforced in all public places except offices, including outdoor restaurants and public transport.
- Trust us this time, the vaccine is the right thing,
- But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,
- Given they injected 10,000 patients with AIDS in 1989, and took 6 years to admit it, and press wasn’t under État d’Urgence Sanitaire at the time,
(and also, they didn’t know that Benalla had kept and used 6 diplomatic passports after being fired, just to show how they work).
If anything, they have taught us to doubt everything they say: They clearly didn’t know what they were doing, and did governance-by-lying.
Now outside of the US, anti-vaxxers are in every country including Germany, Australia, the UK. It's a global problem. It's actually the "third world" that seems to have less vaccine hesitance. Probably because they've seen the recent benefits of vaccines and they have less access to misinformation.
People are not that different
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...
Do you have a source for “very likely”? I’m at “plausibly escaped from” so far and would be interested in evidence that changes that in either direction.
My "very likely", however, doesn't come from there. It's more of a statistical statement. What is the likelihood that a quickly mutating virus will appear next to a laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses and not have originated from there? The world is big. The chances of that happening are very low. Therefore it's very likely that it comes from the lab
Further, from the article, "But the WHO scientist pointed out that none of the types of bats suspected to have been the reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 lives in the wild in the Wuhan region.
"'The only people likely to have approached these types of bats are employees of the city laboratories,' he said."
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/13/who-scientist-puts-...
You may be confusing chickenpox and smallpox? Chickenpox is generally considered a pretty mild disease (many countries still don't routinely vaccinate against it), and was so historically as the infectiousness ensured essentially everybody would be infected as a child.
WHO guidelines are actually to only vaccinate if rates can be kept above 80% consistently, otherwise it'll likely hit older populations with much more dire consequences.
If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood. If introduced in a new population, the consequences to adults would be much different.
Sort of. I got shingles (early 40s) this year. Completely knocked on my ass for a week and maybe 2-3 months to be mostly back to normal. I recommend the shingles vaccine to anyone who will listen.
Ah true, I had not considered that unlike eurasians american populations would obviously not have had it as children.
True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms.
There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients.
> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.
Probably, but even the question of whether vaccines should be a policy issue is in itself a policy issue.
In slovenia, by some estimates of our expert group, half the country got infected by covid (~1mio), 4450 died, almost half of them in old age/nursing homes, and out of all that, only 4 were under 35yo, only one (out of those 5) under 25, and we count every death within 28days of infection as a covid death (even suicide or a car crash).
For a large percentage of the population, it already is common and mild.
Citation needed. The delta variant is the prime counter-example with higher R0 and slightly higher mortality. SAGE admitted SARS-CoV-2 will very likely mutate to defeat all build-up immunity. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS and MERS) showed the potential to have very high infection fatality ratios.
There is no reason at all to suspect COVID will suddenly become mild.
We need to pay attention to virologists, not HN armchair experts.
Contagiousness can certainly increase. Virulency does not usually increase.
Severe flu seasons are characterized by increased infections, not so much increased fatality rate.
> Citation needed.
"Most viruses become less deadly as they mutate." https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/02/27/... (The article is about how COVID might buck the general trend. But in any case, that is the trend.)
Something tells me that this is just history repeating. The difference here is the same as your metaphor; the world is a village and now its much easier to see that one conspiracy nut every village has that gets outcasted.
The problem of course is that now those nuts can band together in the thousands thanks to worldwide communication and argue against the (still vast majority) of the village now.
We must encourage discussions that move beyond overly-simplistic dualistic framing such as "vax versus anti-vax", "individual choice versus public health", etc.
Looking back through human history we can find numerous examples where scientific consensus was wrong, or where we created powerful new tools that backfired in unexpected ways. Diversity in opinion and choice is natures way of arriving at optimal decisions. Although it feels like friction and divisive arguments to us now, these are critical discussions that help expand everyone's knowledge and awareness.
At one level it appears to be chaos, but at a higher level it appears as harmony. We are now living in the age of the super-organism. The age where we all must become acutely aware that the separation between you and I - the separation between self and other - must be dissolved and reformulated, for the survival of our species and our planet.
They are a political wedge issue because some want them to be policy.
Anything that is policy -- taxes, marriage, controlled substances, international trade -- is political.
And always someone says "why is policy X political?" without realizing what "politics" is. Usually, they mean to say "why doesn't everyone agree with me?"
This issue was then weaponized for political purposes, and people got militant about it.
But governments have consistently lied/been wrong about this virus, so there is no trust either in their messaging about this crisis.
This. Feels like the future depends on identifying the root cause of these issues and working to overcome them.
This seems disingenuous. We eradicated smallpox and scientific literacy just as low then. Why is it different this time?
Because public trust in institutions has been destroyed. It's also a main reason why Trump was elected. The people in charge of these institutions destroyed this trust over decades, and they have continued to do so throughout the pandemic.
The “nuts” were also saying covid was coming and was dangerous and were called crazy xenophobes.
I’m vehemently pro-vax but there are as many idiots on both sides of this issue as there are non-idiots. Note that I need to disclose that, since the scarlet letter being handed out now has the power to prevent you from being on YouTube and in some places soon will probably bar you from your local grocery store (now that that is normalized.)
I tried to emphasize that this is a very small slice of the population. They get kicked out of the village because there's no other way to solve the problem. Or at the very least, the village lacks the resources and talent to solve it. Human psychology is still a huge mystery. Ideally, everyone gets free, assessible mental health care, but ideally people would also wear a mask so they don't die/have others die. We're far from Paradise.
>I’m vehemently pro-vax but there are as many idiots on both sides of this issue as there are non-idiots.
I fully agree with this, and I much too often see people trying to cast this as a "all conservatives are antivaxx" issue, which is such a broad stroke that you may as well just say "anyone who doesn't agree with all my world views".
That is not who I mean when I say "nuts". Not the people genuinely misinformed (often by nuts), not the people who may have reasonable hesitations or doubts about certification of a new medical product. And certainly not "people who aren't my political party" (yes, everything is Red's fault. How productive). To be honest, not even the people high up who KNOW they are spouting BS or citizens who know the dangers but "want freedom" (they aren't crazy, that's just malicious and greedy at that point. different topic altogether).
But there are just some few people who genuinely seem unhinged and just want to latch onto something that feels relatable, even at the own health's expense. Those are the nuts gathering together. And this is far from the first time. Just the most potentially impactful.
I only ever saw people saying that calling it things like "Wuhan Flu" was xenophobic.
I'm vaccinated, and I don't care if others don't get the vaccine. Forcing people to get vaccinted is imho stupid. And we've already taken away a year from young people to "save grandma", and now grandma can get vaccinated (or possibly die, if she doesn't want to), and we're again locking down the kids, creating long-lasting problems, especially mental ones.
It's a handle they can pull, so they pull it. It can be xenophobia, it can be "look at what they're doing in country X, what if they did that here?" It can be fear of loosing jobs, fear of wildfires, sea-level change, and it can be fear of getting sick.
> The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic.
I don't think that's possible, since I am not aware of a precedent. Meaning: the other 4 endemic coronaviruses which also started as pandemic and now are harmless cold viruses never caused a new deathly pandemic in a mutated form.
One key difference between this coronavirus and the other endemic 4 is that mass vaccination strategies were never used. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance is a realistic consequence if vaccines are used indiscriminately [2][3][4][5]. So that is one way we may be setting a new precedent here. If you take a look at what happened with Marek's disease virus in chickens, it's not pretty - none of us wants a world where it is literally impossible to survive without vaccination, because multiple generations of vaccines were undermined by viral evolution.
[1] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...
[2] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/
[3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016...
[4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/
[5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...
It's a numbers game. With chickens there are billions of chickens created and destroyed annually, and almost all of them are vaccinated in utero, so it makes sense that we'd see the disease get selectively deadlier. With Covid if you knock down the disease rate to something that's basically a few cases per month via vaccinations, you won't have enough chances for mutations to occur.
This is just history repeating itself, unfortunately. The Spanish flu had people protesting the counter-measures put in place to reduce transmission, as well.
"Masks are effective"
"Vaccinated don't have to wear masks"
"Vaccinated should wear masks"
"COVID is not airborne"
"COVID is airborne"
"COVID came from a wet market"
"COVID came from a lab"
"If you caught it, you have immunity"
"If you caught it, you might not have immunity"
It's not difficult to understand why there is so much confusion. Our government was and has been quite inept at its messaging in both Trump's and Biden's administrations. The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent. It's called the novel corona virus because it's new. What we think today may not be true next month or next year.
I think one of the big problems of course is the government / bureaucrats / politicians are afraid to be straight with us. They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news. I feel their elusiveness is much, much worse; now trust is pretty low which makes the already ineffective government / bureaucrats / politicians' messaging even more ineffective. The government / bureaucrats / politicians found a hole and made it much bigger.
You ain't seen nothing yet. How about firing nurses, firefighters, police, etc.?
Is this not the case with other existing virus' like the flu? Yet people choose to go on with daily activities, even bringing it to the office just to feel (self?) important ...
I was more thinking about the future, than the immediate response.
Seems like someday Corona virus will be something we just get like a cold or chicken pox?
There is no reason to believe this. Many top experts, like Yaneer Bar-Yam, believe there is a real chance it continues to mutate to be worse.
Sadly, there is one thing worse: health "authorities" and "experts" completely disregarding therapeutics, e.g., Ivermectin, which is as safe and as cheap as Aspirin, and which reduces the risk of serious illness and death by up to 86% [1] (which brings the death risk to about 1/4 of the flu... aka a low enough level to not even warrant a news story), all because a politician said it works.
I recommend listening to episode #1671 of the Joe Rogan podcast, in which he interviews Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein. Once you listen to this, if you are not absolutely astounded by what you learn, please let me know (unless the reason is because you already knew this stuff).
Edit: imagine being so ignorant and deranged as to down vote these well studied and cited (see below) facts.
In short, comparing this to chicken pox or other epidemics with "massive body counts" is flatly asinine. It's a slightly worse version of the regular flu; always has been, seemingly always will be.
Fwiw, I've been saying the same thing for 1.5 years now, which is what the original data reflects, which hasn't changed since then. Whenever we get new data that changes our understanding, we should reevaluate at that point.
You could perhaps say "like a deadlier flu".
I'm really hoping we can reduce the intermixing by some degree by banning lineups at airports security screen and customs/immigration lines, but I'm not holding my breath.
Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs, I don't believe there is any case of eliminating it. But, like vaccines can teach the immune system how to respond more intelligently (and less self-destructively) to covid-19, hopefully society can learn to respond more intelligently, and less self-destructively, to the fact that it's always in circulation.
Also we have a large group of unvaccinated group which are under kids under 12. With life going back to normal, the standard diseases are back like RSV, paraflu and others. Get two at the same time and it’s a emergency room visit. Get 3 at the same time and it’s life threatening. Two at the same time isn’t uncommon before covid. Now my pediatrician says 3 is happening and it’s a kid killer. It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.
It really shouldn’t if you’re an educated person who is following what scientific authorities are saying. The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...
> At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools… Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
> In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms.
It doesn't really boggle my mind, it's just that the conclusions it suggests about fellow Americans are really hard to swallow. There is a lot of political polarization in the US and cranking through the implications and reasons for ostensibly pro-COVID policies and attitudes is really disheartening. It's a schism that isn't healed easily.
If anything, an impersonal virus, an implacable, impossible-to-anthropomorphize, zero-upside health hazard could have easily been something for the entire world to unite against. Instead, we got more and deeper division and louder and more extreme and more destructive arguments. And we lost a lot of people and maimed even more. And the reason that couldn't happen: Money. The economy. Me. Freedumbs!
COVID exposed people's real priorities and objectives and showed how craven and myopic our political leaders really are.
We have been on and off masks here in Denmark, and it seems to have no effect on spread. Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one.. from a family member or a friend..
There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway. It's also not as if masks are themselves neutral either - constant mask wearing is associated with higher rates of bacterial pneumonia. Even medical professionals never wore masks all day (until last year), just when they were performing surgery.
And they will have had every opportunity to get vaccinated, so we shouldn't optimize for them.
The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very unhelpful.
We're all in this together. I got my shots. All my family members of age are vaccinated. All our friends and regular acquaintances are vaccinated.
I still wear my mask where I have to be near people in public, because every little bit helps. My risk is not zero, and if I get sick so might someone else who isn't as protected. I still avoid restaurants. I still work at home. I still limit travel.
We can stop this when the pandemic is controlled. Until then, it remains all of our collective responsibility. And I for one am willing to bear that.
We often overlook those who were previously infected. I believe this is a common mistake that makes for inaccurate groupings, which negatively affect the common good.
The age groups to whom the vaccine is not yet available have no reason to fear Covid in 2021 any more than they did influenza in 2019.
I think people who haven't had a chronic condition (including doctors) tend to underestimate the impact they can have on your life. Long COVID symptoms may not be "severe" or "serious" in a medical coding dictionary, but those terms in a medical dictionary are quite distinct from their everyday meanings.
The best evidence we have seems to be that somewhere very roughly around 20% of people who get infected (vaccinated or not) get it -- more if you're older, less if you're younger. Experts don't seem to be willing to say much about what fraction of those people will have symptoms forever, or to what extent (very happy to hear otherwise if somebody knows better!).
While case numbers are high again (in the UK) and with the more infectious and virulent Delta variant having replaced others, it's not totally clear to me that the risks from long COVID are even all that much changed since before the vaccines.
Perhaps because "always worried me more than the risk of death"? If so: this is because the evidence always seems to have said that the risk of long COVID has been at least an order of magnitude higher than the risk of death. Also, if you have no dependents, death involves less suffering: in the unlikely event it happens, you're out of the picture already after a short period of misery. On the other hand, chronic illness can come with a lifetime of suffering.
I've received both shots and was pretty low risk to begin with.
However, local hospitals were shipping patients off to other cities, and sending adults to the children's hospital.
I don't think it's a stretch to believe that the outcome of something like being in a car accident would be worse now than normal.
We can do one of two things as communities:
(1) Mandate vaccination for everyone, and provide everyone care
(2) Allow everyone the freedom to remain unvaccinated, and limit care
There's no other "normal" world where a highly communicable disease that causes a sufficient number of hospital cases exists and circulates in the human population.
* Where normal means "normal freedoms of movement" + "normal social interactions allowed" + "normal economic operation" + "hospitals aren't overwhelmed and have capacity for normal care"
If the numbers were flat maybe you would have an argument, but I strongly disagree that we need to "learn to live" with a situation that is rapidly getting worse. I do not want to learn to live with full hospitals and oxygen shortages, as is currently happening in parts of the US.
Thankfully birds and pigs seem to be immune, which could have had a huge impact on food supply and transmission.
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up concluding that pigs can catch and transmit as well, eventually. Birds does seem to be more likely to hold true, as I don't know of any non-mammals that have been found susceptible yet.
You realize there are thousands and thousands of viruses that are circulating every day for billions of years. New epidemic or pandemic can happen anytime anywhere. You can only mitigate it not prevent it.
>It is implausible that it will ever cease to have an animal reservoir, especially given the finding in Canada of 30% of white-tailed deer having it.
>Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs, I don't believe there is any case of eliminating it.
Exactly
>But, like vaccines can teach the immune system how to respond more intelligently (and less self-destructively) to covid-19, hopefully society can learn to respond more intelligently, and less self-destructively, to the fact that it's always in circulation.
For example society and in particular Institutes of Virology should take extra security precautions when experimenting with gain of function viruses.
And at least one papaya, apparently. https://globalnews.ca/news/6910821/coronavirus-papaya-goat-t...
Perhaps we can learn to be more mindful of our interactions with other animals, wear masks in public spaces or public transport, and hopefully WFH becomes a permanent option.
It seems that I stepped on many nerves, please, feel free to disagree or argue.
It seems likely that they were drinking sewage-contaminated water. Ingestion of contaminated water is the source of a staggering variety of illnesses for both humans and animals. Souce: I work in environmental monitoring.
As for the "stepped on many nerves", I think your comment was interpreted as meaning "we should stay at home and wear masks forever", whereas the general patience for such measures is wearing thin. My guess is that part of the reason for a rising rate of violent crime in the U.S. in the last twelve months is simply more people with rising frustration, such that they are more willing to resort to violence.
By the way it appears that white-tailed deer in the US have now also been found to have antibodies likely indicating covid-19 exposure: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.29.454326v1....
Interactions with humans transmitting the Delta variant, in very extreme (NB shortest) cases need upwards of 50-60 seconds, where common transmissions need longer. Which suggests that people need quite long 1-1 interactions with multiple animals to spread it, which to me appears very unlikely.
This belief is based on research that supported that covid was unlikely to happen until the first super-spreader event in the wet market.
Furthermore, given the symptoms observed in humans, if we are to assume similar symptoms in the wild animals, then odds are these animals become easy(er) pray, which reduces odds of mass transmission. Finally, even if wild animals spend a lot of time in 'close proximity', they are constantly out-doors and in much larger distance than humans sitting in public transport, which suggests there are super-spreader "events" or viral-sources that dump virus particles on wild animals and allow the virus to enter the population.
So I do agree that there may be something we are overlooking, perhaps related to waste-water, but this is why I am asking. Even if it doesn't matter anymore wrt covid, it matters for the future.
As for the people that misinterpret the noun 'option' accompanied with the adjective 'permanent', they need to understand that the ability for those willing to WFH, will help deal with covid, reduce road congestion, gas emissions, time wasted in commute, and ease measurements. I am not advocating for permanent lockdowns or anything alike. But it is common knowledge that flu infections have reduced significantly, and masks can help deal with smog in cities, as is done in cities in Asia.
I've been within a few feet of wild deer plenty of times in my life. Humans have a lot more interaction with wild animals than you would think once you move outside of urban areas.
Wild animals are not commonly tested for covid-19, but those that have been have seen widespread infection. ...which means most populations of mammals and possibly birds are infected as well.
...so the deer could have caught it from any number of other animals in the wild - or more likely, from their droppings.
https://gothamist.com/news/germs-spill-from-animals-to-human...
Think about it like online ads. Even though you've never clicked on one and don't know anyone who clicks on them, the market is worth hundreds of billions. There are so many novel pathogens floating around the world that if humans are exposed to 0.01% of them we'll still see regular epidemics and occasional pandemics.
The good news is that even if COVID is running rampant through the deer populations they shouldn't pass them on to humans very often, so if humans are good at identifying and stopping isolated outbreaks then we can live with the risk.
Which is exactly how we got here.
How do we know this? PCR test? At what threshold? Or, antigen test? Is there a guinea pig antigen test for COVID?
I'm suspicious of this reasoning due to the apparently complicated and necessary natural pathway this virus used to become infectious to humans in the first place. This apparently doesn't apply anymore?
> Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs
The contact with those reservoirs needed to be much more than casual in order for infections to pass. I'm not sure this logic applies to a SARS virus.
In the case of mink in Denmark, they were convinced that new variants that emerged first in the mink had made it back into the human population.
It's unclear why you think a wild reservoir isn't a problem, nor which eradicated disease you're referring to.
Only two diseases have been eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest (a viral disease that infects cattle and various wild animals). The latter had both airborne transmission and wild animal reservoirs.
Now, let us suppose that cats may be vehicles. "Vaccinate everyone" and "cats do not matter" is inconsistent.
Hospitalization rates are also back up to significantly higher than they were this time last year.
And that's with the restrictions you're referring to. So, no, I don't think that it would make sense for the UK to just go right back to normal just yet, at least until the vaccinations rates are high enough that you see the case rate go back down and stay down.
I hear you that we will eventually reach a point where we've hit the new normal. It's just going to be whether that point is reached because we've given up (due to people refusing to vaccinate) or because we've managed to vaccinate enough. I think many people aren't ready to give up. Personally, the restrictions are quite meaningless to me in the US, but I can imagine that that's just because I get to work from home and all that.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/united-kingdo...
Intranasal boosters are the one obvious thing we could do top-down to end the pandemic and only have to deal with epidemics.
ref: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/397
ref: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... page 5, #8. "Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals."
Any restrictions you see in the UK are implemented by businesses/local government (e.g. masks on the tube, or in some shops).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Age_str...
I cracked some ribs three weeks ago and coughing / sneezing are really painful. I am keeping my mask on because I really don't want even a mild cough, for whatever reason.
More generally, the vaccines are not 100% effective, the virus can still be transmitted and spread. For lots of people, getting COVID is still life threatening, even if the average case is not as bad as it used to be.
https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pand...
There are almost no UK legal restrictions relating to covid. There are some rules about people returning from certain high risk countries. And unvaccinated people who test positive still have to self isolate. And that's about it.
Many people (like myself) still wear masks in busy indoor locations. And many are choosing to forego foreign holidays this summer.
Life here in the UK doesn't feel entirely normal, but it's much much nearer to pre-pandemic conditions than this time last year.
Until the number needed for herd immunity is achieved, the 30% (or whatever) of your population that is not vaccinated can suffer devastating spikes in cases. Mostly having herd immunity is not a thing.
I certainly don't see a reason to go maskless on public transportation in the future. And, as supply chain problems work themselves out, someone will probably make masks that actually filter out virus-size particles and fit more people's faces. (I feel like every mask I've bought so far during the pandemic has either been completely ineffective, or has been designed to fit someone that is 1/3 my size.)
If you get it after being vaccinated, you still have a ~20% chance of becoming disabled.
Because it s not about the pandemic. It s about asserting control over population and making them obey whatever govts, ongs, big pharma or big corps come up with. A kind of a mass scale social engineering project.
Edit: this btw doesn t need to be some sort of a secret group project. It can rise naturally and decentralized among many connected decision groups(govts, academia, big corps, etc) which already happened.
Our government loves to pat themselves on the back having 80% vaccination. Which is more than double the usual flu shot rates. Yet here we are with a 4th wave, talk about complete lockdown.
At what point do you say that our approach is no different than the usual flu season? In my opinion that was long ago.
So why? Technically don't know the answer. You can look at it from liberties point of view. That the reason these restrictions haven't lifted has nothing to do with covid.
Another theory which seems legit. Vaccine doesnt work. If you follow texas gov abbot. TONS of articles slamming him for getting covid. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/texas-gov-abbott-who-banned-...
Texas Gov. Abbott, who banned mask and vaccine mandates, tests positive for Covid
But wait... Abbott is fully vaccinated. That's a huge issue. You can't slam him banning masks and all that. Vaccination is vaccination.
Article title should be "Texas Gov. Abbott, who is fully vaccinated, tests positive for Covid"
But that's where the politics of the situation come in. It's very evident covid-19 is completely influenced by politics. Which brings you right back to liberties point of view.
It's like any other clothing: you're protecting a vulnerable part of your body and also displaying respect for others. And it's mostly enforced by social norms: though in many places it is in fact illegal to go without clothing, people wear clothes regardless of the law. (I was in San Francisco at the time the public nudity ban, or shall we call it the "clothing requirement," was passed, and I can assure you that people were generally clothed in San Francisco even before then.)
As another comment pointed out the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255121), it's not just going to be SARS-nCoV-2. There's going to be a lot more easily communicable diseases in the future in dense locations. And there was the first SARS, of course, and countries hit hard by the first SARS already adopted a norm of mask-wearing in crowded locations like public transit, which helps them with other diseases that are "here forever" like the seasonal flu.
I think mask-wearing in public is going to become a sign of basic respect and decency and hygiene. We're already comfortable with "No shoes, no shirt, no service."
It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === danger. I am sure there are many thousands of cases of many other diseases in my community right now that I will never know or care about.
I'm not trying to detract at all from the seriousness of the pandemic, just saying that going forward we'll have to pay a lot less attention to covid-19 if we want to have mental space for anything else.
This was an extremely silly thing to write. Typhoid Mary was tracked down, was locked up for three decades and became a legend over a century ago. Before modern drugs and widespread vaccination programs people worried a lot about asymptomatic transmission of disease.
You might argue that not having to worry as much about survival now that we've got modern vaccination has made people think about asymptomatic transmission of infectious disease less, but seriously, that's also nuts. It's not like everyone somehow failed to consider asymptomatic transmission of HIV since the mid eighties. Worrying about it changed our culture.
> Never in history have we tested so much for one thing.
TB skin tests and strep tests have been much more widely used.
As for the testing ... I still do think Covid is extremely unique here. The US has given over 500M tests (~1.5/person) and the UK has given over 250M tests (~4/person) in less than two years. Many employers and schools are scaling up plans to do one or more tests per week per person. Sure maybe we haven't caught up to the total TB tests given across all time yet, but the rate of testing for this disease is far greater than anything that preceded it and looks like it will stay that way.
Source?
(Yes the virus will evolve but in general mutations will optimise for transmission and be indifferent to lethality.)
The viral evolutionary definition of benign is "does not kill the host or harm the host in such a way as to greatly reduce its ability to spread the virus."
Making the host brutally ill and totally non-functional for weeks is generally fine. Causing harm to the host that reduces its vitality or life span in the long term is fine. Polio met these criteria. It did not usually kill its host.
Benign is only one evolutionary path though. Another evolutionary path for a virus is to boost the R factor so high that it can burn through its hosts and still find more hosts, especially if there are say... seven to eight billion hosts. Smallpox was more like this. A more contagious form of Ebola could be like this.
This isn't really a good idea, because cases as a function of vaccination rates won't tell you anything meaningful. Vaccinations aren't distributed at random - they are heavily skewed towards people at risk of serious health effects from the virus, and skewed away from people with low risk.
So if you were to tabulate that data, you'd be hopelessly confounded by the differing population structures among different countries.
This is a rare Atlantic article that I think takes a level-headed and nuanced approach to a topic that requires some level of technical understanding. I tip my hat to Sarah Zhang.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/3rd-covid-shot-highly-potent-i...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
The whole "fighting COVID" thing is 100% political at this point. If it wasn't, instead of requiring masks on a plane (stuffed like sardines in a can), we'd see TSA at least measure body temperature and look for symptoms. We'd see the same thing in grocery stores, hospitals, and other public places. Gavin Newsom wouldn't be dining unmasked at The French Laundry, and Barack Obama wouldn't call a 500+ person superspreader event.
People who tell us to worry about COVID, as a rule, demonstrably aren't worried about it themselves. Fauci himself rips that mask off his face immediately after cameras turn off. So after I received the vaccine, I basically said "fuck it" and I'm not going to comply with anything anymore. Nor will I get any "booster" shots or whatever else they come up with. I will also not work with or for anyone who mandates any of this useless garbage.
Edit: And it increases your risk for long covid[2].
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/latest-evidence-on...
[2] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210608/obesity-increases-r...
That button doesn't exist. That's the source of your bafflement.
Where do people come up with this stuff?
It was actually the first thing I ever really read about covid and shaped a lot of my views early on in the pandemic, largely inoculating me from going full panic mode.
It doesn't matter if there's 1 death, if hundreds are being hospitalized per day, overflowing the health care system.
The problem isn't just mortality rate of covid-19 itself, it's also how hospitals are other treatments are affected. You better hope you don't get sick when the health care system is overloaded or at capacity.
Personally, the first thing I did when I heard that a vaccine was coming was try to find out if it was "leaky" or not. I could not find this information. We ought to be hustling on a non-leaky version, and perhaps that will be the policy lesson learned.
It's a pre-print of a study that indicates that children born during the pandemic, but not (even immediately) before, have significant cognitive deficites.
Authors attribute it to lockdowns (although they ruled out maternal stress) because pregnant mothers and newborns didn't have a postive test result or symptoms. But that might be because they were not tested at all (researchers didn't track them down to check for antibodies) and had asymptomatic infection. There's also an interesting correlation that poorer children had higher likelyhood of deficits, which might also indicate that deficits are possibly due to covid, because poorer people were more likely to get infected during the pandemic.
So this research might hint that newborns (but not few months olds) are vulnerable to covid and the result is cognitive deficit.
Which might mean that in 20 years we will have a crime wave similar than the one explained by lead hypothesis, that will last for as long as we don't feel like vaccinating newborns against covid.
COVID-19 in some form was always going to be around forever. The goal was never complete eradication. Perhaps the miracle of the mRNA vaccine led us to fantasize, a little too openly, about going back to the pre-pandemic status quo. But that was never going to be the case.
Personally, I’ve already moved on. I’ll wear a mask as the situation dictates. I’ll get the boosters. I’ll keep mailing in my nasal tests twice a week and check the results. I’ll keep an eye on the hospital numbers and modify my risky behavior as needed. I won’t argue with people about the mask, about vaccines, about the origins. I’ll work from home as long as they’ll let me and go into the office when they say I’ve got to — or I’ll find another job.
I’ve already made peace with this thing. I’ve moved on. If I get it, I get it — but there’s no real use in obsessing over it any longer. I’ve adapted, and I’m ok with that.
other classes of virus? (ie how the plague resistance in those of european descent gives some level of protection against hiv [0])
Is this something we have a way to measure or will it be impossible to tell once everyone in the world has some amount of covid immunity?
0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h... (first thing i could find)
We should have had a full-court press in all areas to fight this virus. Not just a $100 billion for big pharma for a vaccine that always works, except when it doesn't. It's no wonder 25% of the US have adopted the idiotic position that they wont accept a mask or vaccine. People are so done with the 'new normal' for this week that just needs to be accepted.
Obese and unhealthy people won't become healthy if you ask the nicely. It's requires a lifestyle change.
> Nothing about developing new mask or shield technologies.
Not even a simple lifestyle change like putting some cloth over your face is being tolerated.
> Nothing about ventilation system technology. Or permanently moving some activities outdoors.
And many things that would help would be at an fairly incredible financial cost (~$2 billion to cover schools, at an incredibly unrealistic $15k/school), or impossible (most local climates do not allow for comfortably staying outdoors all day).
Most of the people setting the remote work/in office policies seemed to be thinking that vaccines offered a path back to normalcy. Delta seems to have blown that idea out of the water.
It is possible that in the endemic covid world, there always remains a significant health risk due to breakthrough cases, especially for folks who are older or have comorbidities. Given that, it seems employers may face difficulty mandating people to work in person.
The virus can't teleport, and it is here to stay only because the decision-makers thought that it was the cheaper option to let it spread (it is not), then didn't want to admit being wrong.
It is sad to see that with all the technologies available, the world is still in the middle of the pandemic.
1. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...
Its not March 2020 anymore, we have an answer and it is vaccines. Every public policy decision we make going forward should be assessed by asking the question "will this policy encourage better vaccine uptake?".
Personally I think forcing people to continue to socially distance and such even after getting vaccinated leads to more vaccine hesitancy.
NYC locking down all summer and then 'opening up' in September seemed top of the list to me. It's not that I thought they should have stayed locked down the entire time, its that they should have opened in the summer so they could lock down in the winter if they really needed it. But seriously though, locking down in the summer to only open up in flu season, really?
Or maybe the whole 'if we just lock down for two weeks, this will be over' tops the list of stupidity. or the fact people still want to lock down despite how epically they have failed. Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America. To no fault of their own, they are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the US sharing a border with them the way it is meant no rosy outcome was in our future.
Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Or what about the fact we are 2 years into this and we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals? if we had to lock down because of lack of hospital beds, well we better f'ing demand they have enough hospital beds, like real soon. This is why the lockdowns should have came at a price, you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdown, we need timely updates on your progress to that metric, and we need an action plan such that this will never happen again (such as building more hosptials - hey, how about just opening the thousands we shut down in the last 5 years to make hospitals more profitable!). my views on that were called 'myopic'. so we gave them lockdowns without restrictions, and nothing was done. here we are in the same situation, odd.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
edit: just to be clear - I am not anti vax, I am vaccinated and I recommend to everyone to do the same. There is unrefutably evidence the vaccine prevents sever cases.
New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works.
Right now they are locked down (since last week) because they had one case in their community, but of course it isn't ever one case and they knew that, since that lockdown began there are now over 100 patients linked to that single infection. Under a lockdown the people who are surprised to discover that they're infected are (mostly) bored at home, not out infecting yet more people.
I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again, and exit that lockdown as they did earlier ones. Because elimination strategy works.
Do you have a link/links to where you read that vaccines don't do well at stopping the spread? Everything I've read is that vaccines, while not 100% effective at stopping the vaccinated person from infecting someone else, significantly lower the risk of spreading the virus[0]. That risk drops dramatically when both parties involved are vaccinated.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings..., see Effectiveness --> What we know
If I understand correctly, there isn't a lack of literal beds/space; it's a lack of personnel. Basically hospitals are unable to staff themselves at the levels needed to accomodate being basically 100% full. This is compounded by the fact that hospitals are struggling to retain healthcare workers, who are burnt out, and the fact that healthcare isn't something that someone can easily switch to.
So why are they calling this the pandemic of the unvaccinated?
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/21/how-unvac...
- https://www.healthline.com/health-news/risks-of-the-delta-va...
- https://abcnews.go.com/Health/statistics-show-risks-vaccinat...
and the list goes on and on.
I have personally seen unvaccinated family members get sicker...plus countless of people mentioning the same.
So every single tool in the quiver is about reducing Rt below 1. A lockdown will give you a few points. Vaccines will give you more. Masks give you more. Social distancing give you more. None of them get you all the way there. Some are more temporary than others, so have to be implemented at the right times.
So...
> they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated?
The do help limit spread. Going from "they don't stop spread entirely" to "why force people to get vaccinated?" is like saying "body armor doesn't prevent being killed, so soldiers shouldn't wear them". Plus, there's the aspect of it being contagious - vaccines make it less contagious overall. Vaccines reduce Rt.
> we still haven't built a significant amount of hospitals?
The goal was never to permanently increase supply of hospitals, it was to reduce the demand for them, by putting measures into place to reduce Rt.
> anti-mask at the beginning
During that time, scientists thought that COVID was chiefly droplet-transmitted, so the emphasis was on distance, washing hands, hand sanitizer, etc. In an environment where people were already hoarding toilet paper, then if it had been true that droplets were the only source of transmission, masks were overkill, wouldn't do a lot to reduce Rt, and also had the risk of limiting supply to people who needed them. After it became clear that it was also aerosol-transmitted, the scientific recommendations changed, because then it was clear that masks would help reduce Rt.
As for Germany... Delta has a higher Rt than the Wuhan strain. Their lockdowns were effective.
Hindsight is always 20/20, early on the virus was not believed to be airborne, only spread through relatively large droplets from coughing/sneezing which you'd likely only encounter in close contact with an actively ill person. Plus, Fauci had the responsibility to preserve masks for those that would be exposed directly to infected people - the medical workers and first responders.
The first lockdown in the USA was mid-march, and the mask guidance had already changed by the beginning of April as we understood more about how the disease spread.
Early guidance (and news coverage) also recommended sanitizing surfaces to prevent the spread of the disease, but surface contact was later found to be a less significant mode of transmission.
As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
People with serious diseases are being turned away from hospitals or asked to reschedule appointments/visits because hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID patients (and healthcare workers are being pushed to the limit). Vaccines are a public health decision, not a personal decision.
I don't think 2 years is enough to just "build new hostipal", let alone staff them, supply them to hospital standards, and start taking business.
It's not land that's short, it's talent.
There was never anything even remotely close to a total lockdown here. Too afraid that telling people not to got to work might hurt the economy.
What Germany got "right" was mostly things done long before the pandemic, e.g. investment in a large number of hospitable beds, as well as public health insurance and flexible sick days guaranteed by law so sick people can actually afford to stay at home.
> They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America.
LOL the US border is mostly ocean and the part that is through land is much more controlled than the "borders" in the EU.
> Or how about how everyone was anti mask in the beginning, including the CDC, WHO, and my very liberal coworkers. When I said it would be advisable to wear a mask when in crowded places March, 2020 - I was heckled for not following the science.
Yeah, that was one of the biggest atrocities of the pandemic. Not only is it immorral to give false medical advice, this has also been responsible for more people (rightfully) mistrusting later recommendations. There should be leaders stepping down over this.
> As far as making the vaccines political, well they don't have to be. some research has shown that they don't do very well at stopping spread, so why all the fuss to force people to get vaccinated? just say do it for yourself if you want to, politics removed.
I agree, forcing people to get vaccinated (and that includes excessive restrictions to those not vaccinated) is not the way to go.
It‘s probabilities. The vaccinated kid who dies after getting infected because of transmission via unvaccinated.
Although interestingly, not everyone gets the annual flu shot. So maybe this will turn out to be the same.
Easier to take personal responsibility than depend on the government or whoever is meant to parachute in all the beds and doctors to save us from our own misunderstanding of exponential growth curves.
What I am upset about is why there was no plan to fast-track induction and graduation of nurses/paramedics/physicians with a minimum employment guarantee of 5 years by the govt so that folks are incentivised for a medical career.
There was never going to be an "easy" way to combat this pandemic, and experts have been quite clear about this from the beginning. A really successful strategy would have required a careful combination of several types of interventions, close monitoring of the situation as well as fast and effective adjustments to policies, and probably also a certain dose of luck.
Germany did a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong (though in certain instances, people might reasonably disagree about which is which), and Germany was also a bit lucky that we had many hospital beds and a social structure that is maybe a bit less conducive to infections (fewer inter-generational households). I think that Germany did well enough to avoid the worst effects of the pandemic (hospitals never got to the situation where they were fully overwhelmed, although it seemed close a few times) due to somehow people getting their shit together at the last minute every time, but I'm certain that a strategy with fewer deaths and less economic damage would have been possible.
The main problem that I see in Germany is that the government (or governments, if we include the regional ones) never had a real plan on what to do. Such a plan doesn't need to be inflexible, it can react to different situations and new scientific evidence, but it still should have been possible to establish some basic principles instead of stumbling through this pandemic almost blindly.
As an effect, we went into (more or less restrictive) lockdowns several times that prevented the worst, but a combination of other measures could have had a better impact: going into stricter, but shorter, lockdowns instead of months of weird "semi-lockdowns" with tons of exceptions (a lot of time was wasted especially last Summer), finding better solutions for schools and universities (such as better tools for remote teaching, and air filters), buying vaccines earlier, forcing employers to allow people to work from home (this was done eventually, but much too late — this was basically only because the industry lobbied hard enough, while at the same time, restaurants and museums had to close down completely), allowing certain lower-risk activities during the lockdown (such as outside terraces for restaurants), etc.
I'm not saying that all of these things would have worked, but we certainly could have tried more (or, in certain cases, earlier).
I am pretty sure people not getting sick in the first place is the priority, rather than making enough infrastructural medical capacity for something that is preventable. It's not like you can just magic up more doctors either.
> you want to lock down then we need a metric that you are trying to achieve by the lockdow
Well, this is obviously the vaccine
> Germany masked, distanced, and locked down better than anyone could expect, and here they are sitting with 4 million cases, 100k dead and are still in the pandemic. They don't even share a porous border with Mexico/South America
Are you saying you advise lockdowns (especially in winter) and then saying lockdowns are ineffective?
Building greater capacity and staffing should be the focus.
The lack of capacity has been the justification for lockdowns since after summer 2020, and likely will be in some areas in the future. Its about periodic and seasonal things that occur while COVID is also taking up some bandwidth, not about whether it stops the spread at all. The messaging has been lackluster and hyperbolic and conflicting the whole time and will continue to be.
Sorry about your experience, its not worthwhile to stay frustrated on crowd reactions, this is a fast moving scenario and consensus will never be reached on the various overlapping chapters.
First, the elephant in the room... Ivermectin. Ivermectin, which has been on the market globally for like half a century, is 86% effective as a prophylactic against COVID-19 (aka a better vaccine than the "vaccines" themselves), is 72% effective in early treatment, and is 40% effective in late treatment[1]. Side effects most experience? Kills parasites, including scabies, and reduces systemic inflammation, including TNF. Because of the fear and hype surrounding COVID-19, there are thousands of folks out there who have been taking what is generally considered to be an annual dose... every week... for almost a year. I mean, we can basically just stop right there; right? We've got a safe and effective drug that reduces the risk of serious illness and death to almost zero, collectively demonstrated by the studies in the first reference (bottom). For real, just stop and consider this, and then consider whether it's even worth considering ANY other information. There is a literal cure that is also a prophylactic, and which is completely safe. What else can be said?
But, I'll continue. So then, in the US, we've got recommendations, from the world's preeminent purveyor of disease information, to wear paper masks OUTSIDE IN THE SUN, masks that are known to cause cancer, and which reduce oxygen[2] and increase resting heart rate, and which are about as effective as using a chain link fence to stop mosquitoes (less, even).
Then, the mRNA "vaccines", which are an experimental form of gene therapy, with less than 1 year's worth of data. A normal vaccine would undergo about 12x the study duration, and that's when we're using existing and proven technology; but for some reason, we're ok with 1/12 of the study period for a "vaccine" that is of an entirely new category.
Then, we trap people in their houses, where disease is shown to thrive, without sunlight and without exercise.
The only way this ever ends is for a majority of people to turn their TVs off for good, and to start using common sense.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and none of this is medical advice.
1. https://c19ivermectin.com/#prep
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9610792/ OR (bacterial disease enhancement) https://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/11/2/293
This is a material worsening of society and our economy, that's why people care. Do you even care about the happiness and health of fellow humans?
Except for the people who, in addition to those who die year after year after year from flu, now die will die from Covid.
For them it won't feel normal at all.
Are you sure you want to compare the current policy to building concentration camps?
HIV deaths were 348k in 1990 (which is the earliest year I found stats for on a quick googling). Around 4m people died from covid over the past year. We definitely would not want covid's mortality trajectory to follow HIV's, which peaked at 1.95 million, a 5.5x multiple of 1990's figure.
News to me. There isn't a "the".
I get the tech hipster ethos that it's cool to just run one big ass server and supposedly avoid a lot of complexity cost. But it's the year two-thousand and twenty-one. The fact that the most well-known tech forum in the world either can't or won't set up autoscaling is an indictment of the entire tech industry. We're living in the binary age, but we still need humans to push the bits around by hand, like 1960's operators juggling wires on a switchboard.