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Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

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Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#271

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #245
TheDong wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a massive difference between contagious diseases with exponential growth potential and the other freedoms you talk about. For a closer analogy than "what people are wearing or eating", what about "what people drive and how fast in public areas". The government introduced speed limits, regulations on vehicles, and driver licenses, all of which significantly limit who can drive what, and how fast. All of this i…

It's proven that speed limits save lives by 100% of scientists. There's absolutely no proof that quarantine or any of these Covid restrictions was effective. There's a study that masks might prevent spread by around 2%. That doesn't seem enough to enforce massive restrictions to me. Sweden and had less deaths per capita then most of Europe and they had minimal restrictions. Also the scale of the restrictions is diffe…

There's also no randomized trial proving that parachutes prevent death during skydiving.

But it stands to reason that not slamming into the ground at terminal velocity is good for your health, and it stands to reason that preventing the spread of a deadly disease saves lives.

Countries that have prevented the spread of the disease (China, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and others) have orders of magnitude fewer deaths, as a proportion of their population.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#272

Post by tim333 »

peteretep wrote: post #255
kikokikokiko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing an island nation of 5 million people, that can effectively close it's borders and "avoid" new focuses of infection, to countries of 100+ million of people, where the difficulties of border closing are effectively unsurmountable, is extremely disingenuous. The whole approach governments took in facing this pandemic needs to be studied in the next decades. It's an eye opening thing to see how viruses spread p…

Thailand’s 50m people with 3,000km of mostly unpoliced border, they made it work. Vietnam made it work. Locking borders early and moving to quarantined entry apparently works, and when some knobs walk over the border with Covid, as has happened with both countries, you can unleash an almighty track-and-trace and isolated lockdowns because the health system isn’t already on its knees.

Track and trace works way better when you have 20 or so people infected than when you have 100,000. It's not even the health system, just the logistics of tracking everyone down. I kind of experienced both - the first in Koh Lanta and the second in London.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#273

Post by hutzlibu »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #225
hutzlibu wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that is surprising, I mean, I hate the masks, too, but my immune system is quite good, so I wear it only for the sake of other people. May I ask, why you object to masks for yourself?

I guess I was deleting that line as you were writing. Sorry, I don't really want to get into it. That seems like a shit show waiting to happen and all downside.

Thats allright. I suspect it has to do with the breathing impact and potentially accumulating of germs inside the mask?

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#274

Post by throwaway-8c93 »

peteretep wrote: post #255
kikokikokiko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing an island nation of 5 million people, that can effectively close it's borders and "avoid" new focuses of infection, to countries of 100+ million of people, where the difficulties of border closing are effectively unsurmountable, is extremely disingenuous. The whole approach governments took in facing this pandemic needs to be studied in the next decades. It's an eye opening thing to see how viruses spread p…

Thailand’s 50m people with 3,000km of mostly unpoliced border, they made it work. Vietnam made it work. Locking borders early and moving to quarantined entry apparently works, and when some knobs walk over the border with Covid, as has happened with both countries, you can unleash an almighty track-and-trace and isolated lockdowns because the health system isn’t already on its knees.

They're not islands in a strict geographical sense, but there are a dozen or so countries which are de-facto islands for any practical purposes - accessible only through large bodies of water, with land borders mostly impassable or crossed so infrequently that they don't matter.

South Korea, North Korea, Finland, Vietnam, several central American countries and others. Even China fits the bill. Not sure how frequent traffic across Thai borders are, but my impression is that SE Asian countries are not very well integrated.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#275

Post by buu700 »

ddingus wrote: post #139
DoreenMichele wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate this kind of logic. I get where it comes from but I still hate it. I have a genetic disorder that causes a compromised immune system, so germ control is my life. My life got better in some important ways with the entire rest of the world being less germy and disgusting. About one of out every five people is officially labeled "handicapped" and at least one study suggests that up to three out of every fi…

I do not have those problems. I am sorry you do. Sucks. But, I am definitely not returning to "normal" pre Covid behavior. I got Covid early on. It was extremely rough. Should probably have been in the hospital, but frankly worried about that a lot given what was happening. Made it through, as did my family. Those experiences were why we played it very safe. Lots of negatives in doing that, but there were some positi…

But, I am definitely not returning to "normal" pre Covid behavior.

What would this look like, in practice? Of course on a macro scale we'll see changes like increasing adoption and acceptance of remote work/meetings, but in terms of individual behavior what can or should change?

I assume 10 years from now (barring another pandemic) we won't all be wearing masks and gloves all the time or strictly maintaining a six-foot distance from all other people, but offhand I see myself maintaining a few habits to varying degrees of strictness:

* Consistently washing my hands after touching mail or packages

* Letting packages sit by the front door for a day or two before bringing them further inside and opening them

* Pressing crosswalk buttons with my elbow

* Flushing non-automatic public toilets/urinals with my foot and opening/closing restroom doors with my foot, my elbow, or my hand and a paper towel

* Immediately showering and changing after being in public

* Wiping down groceries before putting them away

* If I need to go out in public while sick for whatever reason, wearing an N95/equivalent mask (not that I had a habit of going out while sick to begin with / I can't specifically recall having ever done so, but if I had ever needed to it certainly wouldn't have occurred to me or struck me as socially acceptable to put on a mask)

* When I return to the gym, consistently wearing gloves (I bought a bunch of full-fingered workout gloves and did this for a week or two last year just before everything shut down, and resumed the habit at home after a sliver of metal broke off of one of my dumbbell handles and got stuck in my finger)

* Maybe continuing to wear gloves while in public in general, or even just semi-regularly using hand sanitizer

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#276

Post by tim333 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #110

I hope they are correct. I also hope we will continue to be more careful about germ control from here on out in myriad ways. I hope we do not blithely go back to "business as usual" in a way that fosters future pandemics as if we learned absolutely nothing here.

We could have a proper pandemic response unit like the one Trump disbanded - tweet from 2018 https://mobile.twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/994696175575...

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#277

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

mistersquid wrote: post #91
015a wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States has administered 2.3 million vaccination doses. Oh, lol no, not cumulatively. I mean Yesterday. We administered 2.3 million doses in about 14 daytime hours on March 12th. Naturally, the number of vaccinated individuals grows every day. That's what vaccinations do. But the number of doses we are administering every day is growing every day. One week ago, on March 8th, we administered about 2.05 milli…

> the US was hard-hit, but the US will be one of the first countries back to normalcy, and the rest of the world will quickly follow. Though I very much like this optimistic take, this is a bit revisionist. Specifically, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and a few others (including parts of mainland China) have already returned to “normalcy” in that their economies are growing and…

Mainland China as a whole has been close to normal for about a year now.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#278

Post by tim333 »

nikolay wrote: post #206

Famous last words. I wish things were that simple. Evolution is a bitch - it made us, but it can also wipe us out.

Viruses evolve but so do the vaccines. I think we have about 200 more in development. I'm kind of optimistic on that front - as tech improves we'll outpace nature.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#279

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ateesdalejr wrote: post #268
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is the most populous country on Earth, and geographically, one of the largest. It has followed a similar strategy as New Zealand and Australia. That strategy has worked to keep the country essentially CoVID-19-free over the past year.

That's what you've been told by Chinese authorities; whom we have no reason to trust due to previous events.

It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. I'm sure there are many on HN who live in China - they can also tell you what things are like there.

If there were a major ongoing epidemic in China, it would be impossible to hide. Hospitals would be under the same sort of pressure that they are in Europe and the US. People would have family members and friends who got sick or who died. That's not happening. China is simply too tightly connected to the rest of the world to keep things like this a secret. In December 2019, the existence of the outbreak in Wuhan was known around the world within days of the first patient test results coming back.

Even Western media began grudgingly admitting several months ago the virus was essentially gone from China. For example, German/French public radio did a pretty interesting documentary on post-CoVID-19 Wuhan. The first scene is in a packed discotheque:

* German: https://youtu.be/LmsI7lc2_Vg

* French: https://youtu.be/OyHt7-KmK7Y

* English subtitles: https://youtu.be/DEOyhN2-kPs

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#280

Post by mikem170 »

boldpandabear wrote: post #174
mikem170 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you put "one-in-tens-of-thousands" in quotes? I looked it up, in 2019 there were 89 million 20-39 years olds in the U.S. [0], and 7000 ages 18-39 died dies of covid19 [1]. Mathematically that works out to 1 in 12,714, and would be a bit higher were 18-19 years added to the denominator. I didn't mean to exaggerate this number. You mentioned family in vulnerable groups. Lets grant common sense, that someone who…

Because viral theory is unproven and likely wrong. Much more likely that illness is the result of stress & conflict.

What relevant viral theory do you think is wrong?

Virologists know a good bit about coronavirusus, and so far I haven't seen where any of their prior knowledge that has not been applicable to the covid19 coronavirus. I've been reassured by what this body of knowledge has always had to say about the dangers of retransmission, the longevity of immunity, and the immunity conferred across variants, amongst other things.

What do you mean about the illness being the result of stress and conflict? Are you saying that a covid19 is not transmitted by a coronavirus?

How does any of the above apply to the dangers faced by young people? Only 7000 out of 89 million have died so far in the U.S. That is a low number, especially compared to a couple years out of someone's lifetime. Do you pay any attention to numbers?

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