The UK’s delta surge is collapsing • Hacker News Board

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#301

Post by outworlder » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:43 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #76

anyonecancode wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine not too long after safe and effective vaccines are authorized for children under 12. At that point the majority of those who actively want protection will be able to get it. This is not the same as saying _all_ who want protection will get it, since no vaccine is 100% effective, and some people who would like to be vaccinated will not be able to because of health conditions or other circumstances, but I s…

> I'd imagine not too long after safe and effective vaccines are authorized for children under 12. Children are at exceptionally low risk from Covid. It's time to stop with fear, uncertainty and doubt, and deal with facts. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have di…

Can we stop talking just about deaths?

It's as if, as long as people survive in some form, we shouldn't care.

There has been an uptick of other diseases, including diabetes. Pancreas cells also have ACE-2 receptors and get infected.

It's extremely irresponsible to dismiss the virus' effect on children at this stage.

EDIT: we are also conflating our vaccines, which are manufactured, stable, controlled and much more understood, with a virus, which is multiplying, uncontrolled and mutating. We don't mess with viruses.

This is not FUD, we simply need to be careful with pathogens.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#302

Post by yellowfish » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #248

nostromo wrote: post #237

I don't see why we should care about number of cases in countries with freely available vaccines. Disease (as reflected by hospital admissions) and death are what we care about. And those numbers are continuing to trend in the right direction. The US media is just addicted to fear at this point. With a more boring/traditional president in the office and the covid panic waning, there is a news vacuum. And the media is…

Deaths have absolutely plummeted, and correlations have very clearly broken from previous "waves". But in order to extract compliance from the population, there needs to be a call to action, so the goalposts were moved to infections, as opposed to hospitalizations/deaths.

> Deaths have absolutely plummeted

From my experience it can take a month or two until the plug is pulled, a lot of people who are discharged to LTACs also don't make it but it takes a bit

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#303

Post by arbuge » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #220

adventured wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wouldn't surprise me if the UK's cases are now dropping because they reached that threshold, but I doubt the US is there now. Given the enormous US Covid outbreak, the US is likely not far away. We're at 70% adult vaccination and had a minimum of 100 million prior Covid infections. Also throw in tens of millions of people that likely have natural immunity to Covid. The biggest question with Delta is going to be…

U.S. is only at 50% fully-vaccinated, with several states in the high 30s to 40s. I could believe 70% with at least one shot but haven't seen any statistics to that effect; it doesn't matter much since Delta is still pretty dangerous to partially-vaccinated people. We had 35M recorded COVID cases; I'd believe about a 2:1 undercount, so about 70M total cases (~22%). Vaccines + previous cases was likely past herd immun…

> I could believe 70% with at least one shot but haven't seen any statistics to that effect

Good guess. As of today, that's the exact number:

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-08-02/...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#304

Post by timr » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #301

timr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd imagine not too long after safe and effective vaccines are authorized for children under 12. Children are at exceptionally low risk from Covid. It's time to stop with fear, uncertainty and doubt, and deal with facts. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have di…

Can we stop talking just about deaths? It's as if, as long as people survive in some form, we shouldn't care. There has been an uptick of other diseases, including diabetes. Pancreas cells also have ACE-2 receptors and get infected. It's extremely irresponsible to dismiss the virus' effect on children at this stage. EDIT: we are also conflating our vaccines, which are manufactured, stable, controlled and much more un…

There's a long subthread right at the top where this is discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28042539

TL;DR: there's not much evidence that these things you are concerned about are happening in children, and the best evidence suggests that they are not.

This discussion about all of these things that might/could/maybe/possibly happen to kids who get Covid, but we don't have evidence for it? That's called "speculation".

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#305

Post by mrhands69 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #298

mrhands69 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming the worst-case scenario until proven otherwise doesn't work like that. You have to look at the entire range of uncertainty, and choose the worst-case scenario for each question. It seems to me the worst case scenario is always applied when looking at things like natural immunity from prior infection, long covid, etc If you model Sars-Cov-2 after Sars-Cov-1 or MERS then you would be lead to believe natural…

We have to err on the side of saving lives, not speculation. Over 2 billion humans have been vaccinated so far, and rising. What's the worst case scenario here?

Because lockdowns are detrimental to society (mental health, division, etc). Why can't we take a level headed approach. It seems like our approaches don't take into any consideration past experiences with similar viruses, or leverage data. We have a lot more data this time around.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#306

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #67

neither_color wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is Texas a pejorative? By itself it would be a world top-15 economy, and its pandemic performance was not an outlier or exceptional. If anything it, along with Florida, demonstrated that extremely strict lockdowns don't correlate to better outcomes. Nothing like Alberta.

Who said Texas was a pejorative?

[deleted]

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#307

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:51 PM UTC

newacct583 wrote: post #267

adventured wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wouldn't surprise me if the UK's cases are now dropping because they reached that threshold, but I doubt the US is there now. Given the enormous US Covid outbreak, the US is likely not far away. We're at 70% adult vaccination and had a minimum of 100 million prior Covid infections. Also throw in tens of millions of people that likely have natural immunity to Covid. The biggest question with Delta is going to be…

> The great lie still [...] is that Covid is going to go away courtesy of vaccinations. The authorities have pitched that to the public from the early days of the vaccines That is (1) outrageously hyperbolized and (2) completely wrong. Delta wasn't known to have this level of transmissibility until the last three weeks . People, experts, doctors, "authorities", whatever, you want to label them 100% believed sincerely…

The relevant experts - virologists, epidemiologists, etc. - neither believed nor claimed that we were on a path to the elimination of the outbreak. They've consistently stated that the virus will be around for at least years, probably decades, possibly forever.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#308

Post by difosfor » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

I thought it was pretty obvious that the reason why our last wave here in the Netherlands has dropped as quickly as it rose is that we first let go of too many restrictions too fast and then immediately reinstated the biggest ones. Basically all the kids were going to festivals for a week or two before the government finally realized that was a bad idea until we've vaccinated them as well and we should still apply some restrictions.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#309

Post by outworlder » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #275

danenania wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh fun: the game where everyone puts their pet biases forward in an attempt to explain the behavior of a poorly understood complex system. It reminds me of the financial news. "Commodities markets are spooked as backlash to latest Justin Bieber video mounts!" In all seriousness, apart from the vaccination rate and strictly enforced lockdowns, I have yet to see an explanation for cases going up or down in a particular…

The lockdown thing doesn't work as well as you'd think either. We have nearly the world's toughest lockdown in Sydney, and weeks later the cases are higher than ever. Same thing happened here in Melbourne last year, with "officially" the toughest lockdown in the world, for 120 days. It was absolutely miserable. It eventually works - but the UK eventually saw a similar precipitous decline, along the same timeframe, wh…

Probably these lockdowns were actually very soft "suggestions" that people didn't follow.

Until we find viruses capable of teleportation, quarantine will remain a very effective strategy.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#310

Post by floxy » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 11:57 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #220

adventured wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wouldn't surprise me if the UK's cases are now dropping because they reached that threshold, but I doubt the US is there now. Given the enormous US Covid outbreak, the US is likely not far away. We're at 70% adult vaccination and had a minimum of 100 million prior Covid infections. Also throw in tens of millions of people that likely have natural immunity to Covid. The biggest question with Delta is going to be…

U.S. is only at 50% fully-vaccinated, with several states in the high 30s to 40s. I could believe 70% with at least one shot but haven't seen any statistics to that effect; it doesn't matter much since Delta is still pretty dangerous to partially-vaccinated people. We had 35M recorded COVID cases; I'd believe about a 2:1 undercount, so about 70M total cases (~22%). Vaccines + previous cases was likely past herd immun…

I found:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

...to be quite interesting for covid-19 vaccination information. For example, the state with the lowest rate of at-least-one-dose vaccinations for people 65 and up is West Virginia, at 83.1%. Most states are 90+% or better for that age group.