Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 465 posts

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#381

Post by logicchains »

munificent wrote: post #153
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.

The death rate in Florida is 180/100k [1]. That's pretty close to the national average. If the entire US had gone like Florida, then instead of 613k deaths, we'd have 590k. So, yes, Florida was better than average despite not having a severe lockdown. But Florida also has fairly separated populations: a lot of old people very likely to get vaccinated, and a lot of young people very likely to survive. For comparison,…

>There are thousands of Americans that are dead today because people wanted to go to a party, or a restaurant, or a wedding.

And there are tens of thousands of Americans who willingly gave their lives fighting in wars so that Americans (and citizens of various allied countries) could still do such things and live freely. A life driven just by fear of death is barely a life at all.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#382

Post by newacct583 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #357
newacct583 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I meant "elimination of the outbreak " in the sense of an endemic virus that produces a steady case rate. Clearly no, no one expected this disease to be eradicated.

Well, you and I didn't. I know quite a few people who've been talking since June about how they're comfortable doing suchandsuch "as soon as Covid is gone", and I'm not sure what they could mean by that other than eradication. It would seem to me that by an endemic standard, the Covid outbreak was gone from the US between May and July and has only just recently made a resurgence.

That seems nitpicky. There are lots of non-eradicated endemic diseases (ebola, malaria...) that are objectively much scarier than covid. But we don't freak out about them because they are well-controlled and rare. A covid mitigation regime that keeps its R0 under 1 and its outbreaks local and non-spreading would be very much the goal here.

> It would seem to me that by an endemic standard, the Covid outbreak was gone from the US between May and July and has only just recently made a resurgence.

Pffft. Yeah, not even close. At its lowest, the covid death rate was 5x higher than average deaths from influenza over the past decade.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#383

Post by 0xTJ »

neither_color wrote: post #64
0xTJ wrote: post #20

This gives me hope for Canada, where I am, won't face too many issues even as we slowly start to tick up from the bottom since major reopening happened, allowing indoor dining etc. In the last week, we've passed the UK in number of fully vaccinated people, but that's going to be slowing down as we start running of people who got their first dose during the big surge in shots here. Unfortunately, at 64% of the total p…

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.

In a lot of ways, from politics to oil, Alberta has a lot in common with Texas.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#384

Post by spfzero »

The idea that a “nasal vaccine” would help stop nasal infections is so laughable. However you deliver the vaccine, it’s an antibody generator. That’s part of the adaptive immune system, not the innate system that the nasal mucus membrane is part of. The antibody response kicks in long after nasal exposure, when the virus has proceeded on past the mucus membrane and begun multiplying in cells all over the body.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#385

Post by sumedh »

rob74 wrote: post #379
sumedh wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's something actually happening here. because those people dont want to take the vaccines?

If somebody who refused to get vaccinated gets sick, you can say it's their fault. But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect - these will still be at risk until (if ever) herd immunity is reached...

> But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect

How many people are we talking about?

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#386

Post by jamiecollinson »

lucb1e wrote: post #238
rbirkby wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ONS sampling disputes this.

For anyone else not from the UK, ONS seems to be some official body doing some sort of, well, sampling. Do you have a link to their current stats? I found this page[1] but it's not very accessible, not sure this is what you mean. [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

This is a more friendly presentation of the same data, though note there’s a lag in the ONS data as it’s from ongoing sampling rather than self reported tests. At time of writing this is up to 30 July (next update 6 August):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#387

Post by elevaet »

sumedh wrote: post #385
rob74 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody who refused to get vaccinated gets sick, you can say it's their fault. But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect - these will still be at risk until (if ever) herd immunity is reached...

> But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect How many people are we talking about?

Not sure on the numbers, but immunocompromised people (undergoing cancer treatment for example) often can't build antibodies after a vaccine. Those people are really vulnerable and depend on an immune herd.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#388

Post by amanaplanacanal »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #339
adventured wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I don't think it's terrible at all given the alternative is tens or hundreds of thousands of additional people dying from Covid per year in the US. I guess we'll soon see the extent to which the public can be convinced to get booster shots every year. The governments of the world will have their jobs cut out for them, there will be a lot of resistance to forever Covid vaccinations as time goes on (and ver…

From a public health perspective, the total number of deaths in a pandemic is less important than the timing of the case load. Too many cases in too short a period of time causes havoc in the health care system, and then helps lead to deaths from conditions unrelated to the pandemic (because hospital care is unavailable). It may sound callous, but in terms of first priorities, reducing the total number of deaths from…

The actions of my local government align with that. Keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, but if you die because you didn’t get vaccinated, too bad so sad. Which seems the right way to handle it. Allow folks their individual freedom as much as possible, but don’t break the health care system.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#389

Post by alvah »

"Ferguson looks foolish now" Ferguson has looked foolish for over 20 years, every public pronouncement he has made has been pessimistic by orders of magnitude. Why the government and the public still listen to this charlatan is a mystery.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#390

Post by manwe150 »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #263
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without time for a study, wouldn’t it make sense to assume the most common thing, that a natural infection provides more immunity than the vaccine? No, actually; the actual infection sometimes misfires, leaving dud spike proteins outside the cells. If the immune system finds those first, it'll attack the dud spike proteins instead of the still-functional spike proteins, attacking all the viruses that failed to get…

> Here's a worst-case scenario if people do get vaccinated: everyone is vaccinated, COVID-19 starts going away How do you figure that last part? If we're talking worst-case scenarios from mass vaccination I would think you would need to put Marek's or ADE type outcomes on the table.

Those are already the complications associated with not vaccinating, so putting them on the table again would double-count them.

Not sure I agree with their ‘hundreds of millions (per year)’ figure. That seems like unnecessary fear-mongering. But maybe ‘hundreds of thousands’ or ‘millions’, which is still not great.

Post reply on HN