nojokes

Government should push better personal health choices? Absolutely. It is a good strategy regardless of covid.

But how can natural immunity prevent covid? Natural immunity appears after infection, it could not somehow magically appear before the infection.

Yes, if people are generally healthy (no diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and so on), they can fare better but it is not guaranteed. Yes, covid death toll in US is high, but it is not low also other countries with much better peoples general health condition.

We know that vaccines help tremendously to reduce serious illness. It is incredibly stupid to not use them.

I do not support vaccination against seasonal flu. You can do it and you probably should do it when you are old but the risk to NOT contact it for general population is at MINIMUM 75%, most likely close to 85-90%.

The risk to NOT contact covid is close to 0.

Yes, it does pair well. Both are incompetent opinions. I recommend you to read the actual study. It is 62 pages long but just read the conclusions part. You will realize that it is not possible to compress it into a single sentence. Even then this study raises more questions than it answers. This claim by the hospital director lacks basic understanding of statistics - when you population is mostly vaccinated, you will get mostly vaccinated patients. Without knowing exact population differences it is a baseless claim about vaccine effectiveness.

It looks like this hospital director is not well aware that most people in Isreal, who are receptive to the illness, are fully vaccinated.

I am not sure I can agree that dispensing ivermectin in the first place was a human subjects research. Or I need at least more convincing.

How I see this is that they provided an intervention that they believed was going to help based on best knowledge at the time and then tried to measure if it really did as part of surveillance practice.

I agree that the proof that it was going to help was indeed very very limited and how they performed the evaluation was more than questionable. All of it was very poorly executed and did not bring any real new knowledge so in principle was waste of resources and unnecessary risk to human health.

I still need a little more convincing that it can be framed as unethical human subjects research.

Again this discussion? Does the booster limit spread? Go for it then as having large proportion of society on sick leave is destructive and for sure less spread is less dangerous for those who are at highest risk. Just do not force people to do it.

These insane prices for anything do have one upside - you can get some miraculous treatments if you have really a lot money. Downside of this is that it does suck talent out of EU that could perform the same treatments here (true story).

The F is wrong with US??? In EU, in high income countries paid PCR tests is less than 60 euro piece if you need it for something else than for medical reasons. In lower income countries it can be less but probably not less than 40 euro.

Perhaps it was because the method they were infected? I do not think it will represent common way of getting infected that most likely was via aerosol.

It still can happen that somebody dies during one of such future trials. I think that this possibility should be accepted if it is for gaining important knowledge about deadly virus but these studies should be very well prepare and vetted that they really will provide this information and will be not for nothing.

Very interesting experience with Google. Were you logged in both times or it was anonymous search? Did you try to somehow refresh your IP address

7 scientists reveal what they got wrong during the pandemic

> I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths.

You do not see it? I see a long fat tail there.

There were 131500 excess deaths during weeks 1-8 and 230000 after that. Does it sound normal to you?

And for every age group below 65, 2021 has been worse than 2020 and worse than previous years except 2019 for 0-14 that was even worse than all pandemic years.

Are you intentionally blind to this?

You appear to think that we can somehow take each age group and somehow handle them much differently. Practice has showed that we all are connected.

Why are we getting such runover by omicron - kids in the schools and kindergartens. I do not blame them, it just is like it is.

What months? Months after omicron appearance? It has been here just about 2 months and boosters are still important because even though omicron is very fairly different from each previous variant we know, vaccine induced immunity still can recognize it after being boosted (it is related to antibody affinity if you want to know more).

Most importantly, vaccine induced immunity still protects against severe disease that requires hospitalization.

More importantly, if the herd immunity is the question - omicron and vaccination might provide very robust immune protection.

Another thing to keep in mind - because omicron was so successful, it may have blocked the appearance of a new variant that is a derivative of it and the next similar variant that might appear that is neither some pre-omicron derivative nor close to omicron.

Vaccination with the original variant is not a bad bet because it is most likely just in the middle of every possible derivation from it.

Every state has some rules about safety. Traffic, food production, health care and so one. These rules are in place because they are a good thing that creates order out of chaos, it makes things more predictable.

Does it make every government totalitarian?

I do not know if that move Austrian government made is a smart one but I certainly can understand the motivation behind it. I do not support their decision wholeheartedly but I'm not sure I should oppose it either.

We can argue at the moment that the situation has changed. Perhaps. But the main principle I described here remains.

It is not an excuse, it is an explanation.

People mostly do not know a shit about the immune system.

Can you for example name types of blood cells that are responsible for your immune reaction?

What organs are involved?

If somebody is trying to sell you a product that should strengthen your immune system, can you differentiate a fraud from a real thing?

Perhaps you can but most people have very naive understanding about the immune system.

I like this comment from there "The healthy 35yo might not have a bed for something unrelated thanks to freedom fighters with poor understanding of statistics."

Second order deaths and reduction in quality of like can be as much high as deaths from covid-19.

"as compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations" - what is this comparator? Sweden?

I do not think that it is possible to derive much out of just simple comparisons without taking into account cultural differences.

Have a look at this https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

If you just put these 4 countries into your data, you will get a lot of confusion. Just calculating numbers will not answer this question.

But this study will be definitely used to make unsubstantiated policy decisions.

Interpretation of the title is completely wrong. Restrictions did have effect but severity was not the most important factor.

When checked US main causes of death, diabetes rates are very high. At least twice than in other countries. It points to generally bad health condition. Violent death rate is very high (even as 10x higher than in other countries), it points to bad social trust, traffic deaths are at least 2 times as in Germany despite Germans driving with very high speed. It points to much worse safety issues.

US has higher diabetes related deaths too.

And much higher accident and violence rates but I think this is not relevant here or maybe it is.

He actually gets the data wrong about fluvoxamine. It has about 30% efficacy against hospitalization (it is actually more complicated but I let it slide at the moment).

I think that his argument is totally misplaced.

He tries to argue that vaccine mandates are bad because natural immunity after infection is superior.

Honestly, this is ridiculous conclusion. If natural immunity gives about the same or better or not too much worse outcome than vaccines, we should treat it equally. Period.

If somebody gets unlucky and gets infected. Let it be. If they want to have one additional shot, encourage them. If they are afraid to get one, calm them with correct information. But let them decide.

Of course then somebody would claim that we would encourage then people to get infected.

Yes, there would be some people who are stupid enough to try to get intentionally infected. I know that they exists through media and my personal contacts. But this very limited number of bad actors should not affect well behaving majority.

If we made convalescence passports equal to vaccine passports, we could have avoided a lot of unnecessary discussion and divide.

Anti-vaxxers are people who find for some reason that vaccines are bad or somewhat bad and should be avoided and then desperately constructs articles like this to mislead other people and convince them to accept their beliefs.

I touched this topic only because the author tries to convince us that he is not one.

Why is it important? Because their beliefs distract them to view this issue objectively.

For example if two doses of vaccine do not work against new variant, they conclude that vaccines are bad and should be abandoned instead of asking and testing if three doses might work.

I am seeing the same again with omicron. Vaccines do not work, should be abandoned. I am seeing that they still work fairly well, at least against serious illness that requires hospitalization and actually after boosting also against infection but just the virus is everywhere and changes to get it are enormous and this makes it hard to avoid even when vaccinated by three doses (efficacy is around 60% with 3 doses that is about the same as was 2 doses with delta but delta was just much much slower virus (even though I thought that it was fast back then)).

Maybe this doctor really is not one but people who are, are going to use this opinion piece to confuse other people and gain support against vaccination even when it really is the best option that they got at the moment.

This is why I find this aspect also important.

Actually against omicron 3 doses of vaccine is superior but you will still get infected very likely. More likely than with 2 doses and delta because omicron is just so much more prevalent at the moment.

I wrote about this opinion piece in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172569

I think its arguments are really flawed and not grounded in reality but like I said, I do not think that convalescents should vaccinate but I think they should be highly encouraged to have a booster shot because it about halves the change to become reinfected.

I think that this discussion if previously infected should or should not be vaccinated has generated just too much distraction.

Even in EU, where one, who had PCR test confirmed infection, can get COVID-19 certificate for 6 months (compared to 12 months for double vaccinated, now 9 months), it has given the anti-vaxxers too large platform.

They would not have gained it without this mistake in politics.

Antibiotics do, so do antivirals and antifungals.

I think it is not possible to compress the essence of this very long paper into single sentence.

I recommend to read at least "5 Concluding observations" fully. There is much more nuance to it than can be expressed in a single sentence.

I would strongly recommend also "6 Appendix A. The role of timing".

My personal observation is that when countries managed to start restrictions (not full lockdowns but something that limited contacts) after first detectable infections then the death toll was greatly reduced.

There was huge difference for example between Greece and 2 other Mediterranean countries Italy and Spain. There is also similar difference between Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.

I do not think that bringing out (again!!!) absolute risk reduction argument has anything to do with science really but propaganda.

ARR requires that background risk is taken into account. Please note that small remark "Data collected from the Veterans Affairs system between December 2020 and March 2021." under the table.

Has prevalence of the disease changed after this period? Sure, greatly, there was delta wave and there is now omicron wave that has made the virus a lot more prevalent than it was during the winter/spring 2021.

This means that to address the risk, you should take into account future prevalence because it will affect your risk assessment.

Does he do this? No, of course not.

He just tries to look smart and is quite good at it by fooling great amount of people.

Is he really smart? I do not think so.

But I get it. People do not like to be told what to do. Especially when people who tell it are not really smart.

Vaccine mandates are an useful tool to reduce burden on health care system and reduce total amount of deaths. It has population level effect.

But it is being sold as solution for personal level problems. It just does not make sense and every claim about its benefits feels like total bullshit because it mostly is.

Of course vaccines have great personal benefits too. You will reduce your changes of severe illness and death. If there was a vaccine against death in car accidents, I would take it. The others in the accident who die? Well, bad luck for them - should have taken the vaccine too.

The vaccine will also reduce prevalence of the disease but so far the effect on personal level has stayed on coin flip level. Definitely better than nothing but still not great. But this on the population level is a huge difference. If you can reduce the amount of people being infected by half, it would be tens of millions (in US).

But lets get back to the ARR "theory". What if I told you that your child has 0.01% to die when infected. If I have the remedy that will reduce it to 0.009% and it is free but there is 0.001% risk that your child will develop heart condition that has 20% change being long lasting then will you take it? What if your child also has 0.1% of change to develop the same condition when infected but it has 50% change of being long lasting?

Now of course you will ask what is the change that your child will get infected, because you are a smart person. Why take the risk of the remedy when there is no real threat.

What this person is doing, is to confuse you to not ask this question. He claims that because the risk of infection was low in the past, you should not vaccinate your child. He decorates this claim in cleaver terms but the essence of it is exactly this.

Is he stupid or evil, I do not know.

What was the reality with delta wave? In some countries I checked, change of getting infected was about 10% in first weeks in unvaccinated children population. Omicron has been even faster. I would claim that there is near 100% change that your child will get it in coming years.

ARR does not tell us anything about this. This is just a tool used by anti-vaxxers to confuse people. Is this doctor an anti-vaxxer? Maybe not, but he for sure sound like one.

I think the last sentence is the best advice one can be given about the topic.

I have tried to understand people who are against vaccination and have read great deal of this material and it will eventually, rather sooner than later, end up with complete delusional non-sense.

Then every approved medicine is in experimental phase after approval continuously till everyone ever has taken it has died. Then we can compare final numbers and make final conclusion.

Or we take data we already have and make the conclusion already today - vaccines we currently have save more people from severe illness and death than they possibly put into risk.