Covid-19 Pandemic

[Ivanhoe]

[nitflegal]

Mass has a 92% first shot vaccination rate and the high end of covid hospitalizations for 43 out of every 100,000.  We're much higher than Alabama which has a first dose rate a bit above 50%.  They have a hospitalization rate of 41 per 100, 000 so lower than ours.  DC has a 92% rate of the first shot and has blown everyone out with 111 per 100,000.   The first vaccination provides approximately 2/3 to 3/4 of the final protection so that's not trivial.  Hell, the USA has an overall vaccination rate slightly higher than Germany.  

Vermont has a >90% fully vaccinated rate and 17 out of 100,000 in hospital.  However, Alaska is at 13 out of 100,000 with slightly over 50% vaccinated.  Oregon, Utah and Idaho are at 19 out of 100,000 with vaccination rates between 50-60%.  MA is way past that in vaccination rates but also has 53 deaths a day compared to their 17, 9 and 5 respectively.  NY (73% fully vaccinated) has the highest death total of 183/day while Florida (63% fully vaccinated) has 49/day.  

[rmgill]

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The way I see it, each state confronted with a highly contagious disease that spreads over the air that results in even just a moderate hospitalization rate has essentially three options to choose from,

1) Repeated lockdowns

2) Vaccination campaign (provided there is one)

There wasn't for over a year. The lockdowns don't appear to have helped. 

 

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

3) Triage

Explain. Does this mean letting people die? OR does it mean deciding that you won't care for folks who are sick? OR does it mean you send people home with moderate disease and with no treatment protocol and then wait for them to get severely ill and then of course too late to treat and then effect a sort of half assed hospice? 

I just listened to the Podcast by Bret Weinstein with Dr Peter McCullogh. He pointed out that there should have been multiple parallel paths. Vaccination, distancing protocols, treatment protocols and testing protocols. But the key thing was the treatment regimens that a duty of care ethical standard would require but which somehow  were shoved off into can't do these things land. Which is absurd because you have, for many diseases, various protocols by differnet hospitals for diseases with multiple drugs and mechanisms to treat as part of their own hand crafted protocols setup by their doctors. Somehow with this large pandemic, none of that is done. 

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

If all of the population was infected and only 5% required extended hospitalization we're talking about 10 times more than a well-endowed country has capacity, e.g. 4 million  (out of 80) potential patients in Germany vs a hospital capacity short of 500,000 beds (2019, according to Statista). Most countries have a much worse hospital bed capacity.

Which was what the flatten the curve thing was about here in the US. But the folks in charge let it go to their head. 

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

 Once that 90% of the population have recovered or have been vaccinated, with the same hospitalization rate of 5% the health care system will no longer be threatened to be overwhelmed.

So where does natural immunity fit into this? Because the "Vaccinate or die" mantra clearly ignores this. 

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The problem simply is a numbers game. Potentially we need ten times the hospital capacity than is available. We can't quickly ramp up (and, after the crisis, shrink) the health care sector since trained nurses and paramedics are a "long lead item" and training them isn't very scalable, especially if you try to maintain professional standards.
 

So why are we seeing the various sectors mandate vaccination for HCW's who are immune due to prior infection and firing them when they fail to comply? 

Meanwhile they DO allow vaccinated staff to come back to work even when they should be home as they're sick with COVID. This is apparently now a thing in New York. 
 

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Now, maybe our societies are a bit inflexible as far as flipping the mental switch between defined processes and a "can do spirit, it's war" type of organizing things. But fuck me, I wouldn't know how that could easily be changed as long as we try and stay open societies that maximize individual liberty. The flip side of the coin of living in a liberal society is to assume responsibility beyond one's own life, but also towards the society in which we live in. Nobody can exist in a vacuum.

So where does the exchanging long term health of children to give to elderly come into this numbers game? 

Because that's precisely what you have with the vaccination of children who have functionally ZERO covid risk and more than zero cardiac risk from the mRNA vaccines. 

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

 Nevertheless, as long as the threat of overwhelmed hospitals looms while there's no good medical treatment for the disease, broad vaccination seems to be the only viable alternative. That doesn't seem to be particularly hard to understand.

Treatment is the thing you're missing. 

Edited January 16, 2022 by rmgill

[sunday]

Curious.

[Ssnake]

9 hours ago, rmgill said:

Explain. Does this mean letting people die? OR does it mean deciding that you won't care for folks who are sick?

If there are more patients arriving than you have facilities for treatment, at some point doctors have to make decisions who will receive treatment and who won't. I take it that we're on the same page that this is A Bad Thing (TM) that's best avoided. Effective or not, the rationale behind all anti-covid measures was to create the necessary conditions that the healthcare system would not be overwhelmed.

We may disagree about how effective those measures were and if the danger of the healthcare system becoming overwhelmed was ever as acute as governments said it was. But can we agree that governments need to be granted some leeway in their decision making when facing a new disease with its, at the time not very well understood, associated risks?

[seahawk]

10 hours ago, rmgill said:

Explain. Does this mean letting people die? OR does it mean deciding that you won't care for folks who are sick? OR does it mean you send people home with moderate disease and with no treatment protocol and then wait for them to get severely ill and then of course too late to treat and then effect a sort of half assed hospice?

 

It means denying people treatment and access to working medicine, because government decided to waste money on useless "vaccines" and masks. Money that should have been used to increase capacity for sick patients and finding a working drug. Or better yet accepting that we have existing drugs that work. It seems that smoking a joint offers more protecting than the vaccines.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/55228/1/new-research-shows-cannabis-can-prevent-covid 

[bojan]

Except vaccines are far from useless in preventing deaths and heavier cases of covid, which is all that pharma* claimed they would do.

*vs governments that have claimed that they are basically spring of youth and cure for cancer.

[sunday]

1 hour ago, bojan said:

Except vaccines are far from useless in preventing deaths and heavier cases of covid, which is all that pharma* claimed they would do.

*vs governments that have claimed that they are basically spring of youth and cure for cancer.

How many days need to pass after the jab for people being considered as vaccinated in Serbia?

Edited January 16, 2022 by sunday

[rmgill]

3 hours ago, Ssnake said:

If there are more patients arriving than you have facilities for treatment, at some point doctors have to make decisions who will receive treatment and who won't.

Which is why you start them on a regimen of early antiviral treatment from the start. Instead of sending them home to just sit and wait for it to get worse. 

When your get an infection in say a cut, do they send you home with antibiotics and wound care? OR do they send you home until you need to be hospitalized for sepsis?  

Also, the preventative measures. Where is the vitamin D uptake advice (for example) alongside the advertisements for the vaccines? 

 

3 hours ago, Ssnake said:

We may disagree about how effective those measures were and if the danger of the healthcare system becoming overwhelmed was ever as acute as governments said it was.

With the clear and obvious as well as documented flaking for Horse Paste Narrative against folks like Joe Rogan, no, it was not. The overwhelming stages came at very specific points in each country that had covid surges and then was passed. 

 

3 hours ago, Ssnake said:

But can we agree that governments need to be granted some leeway in their decision making when facing a new disease with its, at the time not very well understood, associated risks?

What do you consider leeway? What's leeway in a free society? To what extent and what benefit? New York had MORE leeway and has locked down beyond measure. Florida did not. Did New York's methods pay off? We can look at Sweden vs other countries with stronger lock down policies. Did the leeway afforded to Austria work out better than it did for Sweden vis a vis the 1st, 2nd and 3rd waves? 

Cyprus is, from what I've heard locking the entire country down and people have to ask on their phones for permission to leave for scheduled times. 

Where's the line? This is just like the leeway governments have when enforcing alcohol laws. Look over at the story of the ABC cops in Virginia attacking and going after the girl who had the flat of water. Was that an example of just enough leeway or maybe way too much with tragedy just nearly averted? Is that juice worth the squeeze? 

[rmgill]

2 hours ago, seahawk said:

It means denying people treatment and access to working medicine, because government decided to waste money on useless "vaccines" and masks. Money that should have been used to increase capacity for sick patients and finding a working drug. Or better yet accepting that we have existing drugs that work. It seems that smoking a joint offers more protecting than the vaccines.

I am much more likely to accept the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration as credible than the THC will cure anything crowd. Though it may given all the weird stuff that goes on with lung T-Cells and how smokers are apparently not as likely to be having bad covid as non-smokers. 

 

[jmsaari]

1 hour ago, rmgill said:

 We can look at Sweden vs other countries with stronger lock down policies. Did the leeway afforded to Austria work out better than it did for Sweden vis a vis the 1st, 2nd and 3rd waves? 

Sweden is perhaps better compared to Norway & Finland than Austria , being more similar in climates, population densities, some aspects of culture. Sweden has had 150 dead per 100K so far, Norway 25 and Finland 30. So judging by that, no, didn't work out too well for Sweden. The Tegnell himself has admitted that they misjudged the situation and stronger measures should have been taken. In Tegnell's defense, it's of course easy to say with hindsight - but at least one should take advantage of what we know now and not stubbornly insist that it's just a bad flu and nothing needs to be done except maybe vaccinate the most vulnerable.

Edited January 16, 2022 by jmsaari

[Ssnake]

1 hour ago, rmgill said:

What do you consider leeway? What's leeway in a free society? To what extent and what benefit?

Again, can't speak too much about other countries, but I think that all things considered, Germany's policies were successful. Maybe not the best that they could have been in 20/20 hindsight vision, but still a reasonable balance between restrictions for public life, managing the threat level for those at risk, and preventing triage conditions in the healthcare sector.

Financially it was a rather costly way, but at least the years between 2010 and 2019 with somewhat resposible fiscal politics (not as great as they could have been) gave the government the option to expand public spending in response to the crisis to prevent mass layoffs in many sectors (except gastronomy and culture).

So, all in all I think Germany kept a reasonable balance. France hasn't turned into a dictatorial hellhole, nor have Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, or Denmark.

[bojan]

6 hours ago, sunday said:

How many days need to pass after the jab for people being considered as vaccinated in Serbia?

14

[sunday]

I find this funny:

[DB]

On 1/16/2022 at 4:07 AM, nitflegal said:

Mass has a 92% first shot vaccination rate and the high end of covid hospitalizations for 43 out of every 100,000.  We're much higher than Alabama which has a first dose rate a bit above 50%.  They have a hospitalization rate of 41 per 100, 000 so lower than ours.  DC has a 92% rate of the first shot and has blown everyone out with 111 per 100,000.   The first vaccination provides approximately 2/3 to 3/4 of the final protection so that's not trivial.  Hell, the USA has an overall vaccination rate slightly higher than Germany.  

Vermont has a >90% fully vaccinated rate and 17 out of 100,000 in hospital.  However, Alaska is at 13 out of 100,000 with slightly over 50% vaccinated.  Oregon, Utah and Idaho are at 19 out of 100,000 with vaccination rates between 50-60%.  MA is way past that in vaccination rates but also has 53 deaths a day compared to their 17, 9 and 5 respectively.  NY (73% fully vaccinated) has the highest death total of 183/day while Florida (63% fully vaccinated) has 49/day.  

Those numbers look all over the place, don't they?

I would like to see the distribution versus degree of urbanisation (as a proxy for population density/close proximity), but a State level aggregation would likely be problematic for that.

[nitflegal]

1 hour ago, DB said:

Those numbers look all over the place, don't they?

I would like to see the distribution versus degree of urbanisation (as a proxy for population density/close proximity), but a State level aggregation would likely be problematic for that.

The thing is, this is exactly how seasonal influenza looks.  The colder and more congested the populace, the higher the infection rates as people are forced inside with sh*t ventilation to share bugs.  Put them in a dispersed area and the case load goes down dramatically.  What it suggests (but certainly doesn't prove) is that vaccination status has fairly minor effects on transmission.  If you combine it with death rates per hospitalizations it looks like the vaccines have significantly lowered fatalities before the birth of our newest variant.

[Ssnake]

2 hours ago, DB said:

Those numbers look all over the place, don't they?

My neighbor worked dureing the mid stages of the Covid pandemic for the local Public Health Authority where they had a map of Hannover with incidence levels for the different precincts, and the point was that from one precint to the next the figures would vary wildly.

[seahawk]

It is normal. Just one wedding or larger social gathering can be the nucleus of a larger outbreak.

[Ivanhoe]

2 hours ago, seahawk said:

It is normal. Just one wedding or larger social gathering can be the nucleus of a larger outbreak.

Or just one large employer with craptastic HVAC (like where I work, black & brown crud particles get belched out of the ceiling registers every few months, no openable windows anywhere in the building).

[Ivanhoe]

 

 

[DB]

The guidance for AC is to maximise the mixing of external air, minimising the recirculation rate, so that there is less chance for a buildup of airborne droplets.

Needless to say, this causes higher costs operating the AC unit as the fresher air has to be conditioned, whereas recirculated air is just, well, recirculated. Then separate the responsibility of having a healthy worforce from the responsibility to manage the AC costs and you get some conflict.

An acquaintance of mine was told that the management had ordered the AC shut off in his office so that if one office gets it, the others won't, which isn't really how AC is supposed to work at all.

[Ivanhoe]

Keep in mind that my workplace is a federal building, which means that the building was designed with zero consideration or interest in adhering to codes, regulations, or standards.

The term USian HVAC folks use is "exchange rate" and if you talk to experienced HVAC technicians, they know all about it but will tell you that most commercial buildings don't provide the minimum.

And again, it's not just droplets; aerosols are roughly half of the problem;

https://www.ashrae.org/file library/technical resources/covid-19/iea-bahnfleth-5may20.pdf

 

[Ivanhoe]

Not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Interwebs, but a possibly interesting take;

https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/12/30/denial-of-early-covid-19-treatment-a-crime-against-humanity/

 

Quote

 

This set of actions constituted a violation of my human rights, subject to The Nuremberg Code of 1947. The following excerpts from that Code apply to the specific offenses outlined in my circumstance.¹⁰

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur;

7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.

9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

~ The Nuremberg Code of 1947 (see footnote 10)

A seven-count violation of my human rights. I lost loved ones to this experiment. My family suffered extensive career and financial losses, we all suffered physically and mentally beyond reason, and any member could have died inside this experiment.

One elder family member who underwent a severe cytokine storm, very nearly died of blood clots in her lungs and other organs twelve days later (right on time as per Exhibit 1 below), solely because she was actively refused treatment by her general physician until she was actually dying – a tortiously late intervention in an otherwise foreseeable and treatable condition.

 

 

Americans will not resume trusting public health officials, or the medical community in general for that matter, until the guilty parties are seen to stand in the dock. Which probably ain't gonna happen, which implies that the general public will be as obedient during the next pandemic as a herd of cats.

 

[Ivanhoe]

Take with a large grain of salt, but interesting;

This asserts that clotting conditions begin much earlier than other stuff I've read. If true, or even partly true, then maybe we all should have a bottle of aspirin handy.

 

 

[JWB]

37 minutes ago, Ivanhoe said:

Take with a large grain of salt, but interesting;

This asserts that clotting conditions begin much earlier than other stuff I've read. If true, or even partly true, then maybe we all should have a bottle of aspirin handy.

 

 

Link?