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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

nymag.com

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Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#391

Post by piotrkaminski »

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?

At the moment? At least every person under 12, which is ~15% of the US population (and presumably similar elsewhere in the world).

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#392

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #388
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Allow folks their individual freedom as much as possible, but don’t break the health care system.

Unfortunately, these two goals, when combined with an infectious agent with a good-sized R0, are really in opposition to each other.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#393

Post by esyir »

manwe150 wrote: post #201
timr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Death is not the only bad outcome to be avoided. And this is yet another illustration of the point I was making about fear, uncertainty and doubt: the Nature article didn't say that there is proof that children will have "long Covid"...it says that these particular studies didn't address the question . By this standard, anyone can make up any speculation of something that might happen to children someday, and we'll…

I agree there is a lot of hysterical speculation, around everything from the initial high death rates to the supposed benefits of HCQ. And slowly we have need to attempt to re-evaluate the data, when it is possible. I really wonder how we could get that data more accurately in the future, without all of the inherent privacy implications and dangers from collecting it. The article also mentions that most of those myoc…

Having a personal experience with this, I now strongly suspect that we have a severe gap in data collection, and failures of the medical system where I'm at to properly capture side effects. This might be in part because of medical professional cultural hesitancy to attribute effects to vaccination. The bucketing of symptoms may also affect this, not all heart related side effects are myocarditis, but that's what everyone is looking at.

In my case, with no prior history of any heart conditions, I experienced a racing heartbeat, crushing chest pain and pain that radiated from my chest to my head beginning 2-3 days after the vaccination. Doctors I saw were generally skeptical that this could be caused by the vaccine; their first instinct was to discount any possibility that it might be vaccine related.

I'm now significantly more distrustful of public vaccination campaigns for covid-19, and the side effect data for such. There seems to be a strong incentive, or some underlying cultural bias to underreport this.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#394

Post by stadium »

XorNot wrote: post #365
stadium wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What frightens me are polymerase mutations. What are these in layman's terms?

Mutations in the genetic replication machinery of the virus. All the world's worst and most untreatable diseases tend to have very fast, but very low quality polymerases. This means they replicate quickly, and generate mutagenic variants quickly. HIV and Ebola have this in common. Delta is already selecting for viral load over vaccine escape - if it keeps getting faster then it could become more dangerous, but it wou…

Interesting, thank you. If I understand correctly, viral load mutations are the current and quickest path to spreading faster, currently. It hasn't selected as fast for vaccine escape, yet, which is not to say it isn't trending in that direction with delta?

Or, we're kinda f'd with regular transmissions at the moment, and vaccine escape is a possible accelerant?

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#395

Post by Brybry »

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…

The Louisiana government had a press conference today where doctors from children's hospitals claimed their hospitals are full, especially the ICUs. [0]

Even if kids don't die and just get sick enough to take up beds that still puts stress on limited hospital resources that other children need.

The CDC data doesn't seem to show an unusual surge in hospitalizations for kids (0-17) [1].

But the LDH data does show a significant increase in cases for kids [2] (and local news has reports from local hospitals citing highest-ever covid-positive child patients [3]).

Of course if the nymag article is correct and it's just a short spike then that would be a relief for many people.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxWZ8qe0oU&t=2005s

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis... [Jurisdiction: Louisiana, By Jurisdiction and Age Group]

[2] https://ldh.la.gov/coronavirus/ [cases over time by age group]

[3] https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_27d70fa...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#396

Post by manwe150 »

amirhirsch wrote: post #368
kkvcdyh wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you "hear" it has an R0 of 8-10? It's not time to be imprecise. If you're referencing the CDC's case study from Provincetown, I think it's important to point out that the R value cited is the R value during Bear Week, not on average.

When people present R0 as a property of the pathogen, you can take it as hot panicky air. From wiki: "R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population."

Wiki also lists this number as the current R0 (though without a source, as far as I can see). Found this study too in attempting to answer your question: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/forecasting/

And learned the difference with Rt today (which some others are quoting, eg for Alberta), is that Rt is computed, while R0 is a guess based on a model, to try to normalize Rt so that it is more comparable over time and place. So I thought that was cool!

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#397

Post by D_Alex »

robbiep wrote: post #317
dTal wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at least unless we get a vaccine-resistant strain. ...which will happen promptly. The selection pressures are perfect. You already have a variant with vaccine breakthrough, circulating in a partially vaccinated population.

I don’t know if you can make that bet - evolution of the virus needs to conserve the current mode of cellular entry and attachment and fitness of spike appears to be the main driver at present - and then spike mutation has driven drift from the original vaccine target leading to a degree of immunity ‘escape’. So the question is, is the virus now in a local minima where it is highly adapted for spread (ie big increase…

I agree with everything you wrote, however - when we bet, we need to consider the stakes and the payoff.

So the important question is: should "we" take the bet on that immunity escape? Or should we not take that chance?

My opinion is that we should act decisively to avoid the bet.... but the UK government clearly feels lucky.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#398

Post by D_Alex »

manwe150 wrote: post #374
amluto wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measles, polio, and smallpox beg to differ. The varicella vaccine is fairly new, but I haven’t heard of a vaccine-resistant strain evolving. Pertussis seems to be an odd duck, and its vaccine is not as effective as people would like. History is mixed here, but most of the mandatory vaccines seem to be extremely effective and to work well for at least decades.

Those also have low breakthrough rates (assisted by high vaccination percentages), giving it relatively no opportunity to evolve. They also had millennia to reach (and then work to maintain) peak fitness, while COVID is still encountering beneficial mutations somewhat frequently.

Presumably also the human species had time to co-evolve some resistance to these illnesses. I shudder to think at the cost... hundreds of millions of lives for smallpox alone...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#399

Post by malandrew »

lucb1e wrote: post #240
malandrew wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if we don't see a rise in hospitalizations that is any worse than a typical flu season, then it really doesn't matter that no one is testing.

At least provide data if you're going to be like "it's just a flu". I'm willing to believe you mean well if you are only talking about people that are fully vaccinated 14+ days ago, but in general this sounds like an excuse.

I didn't say that it is or is not. I'm saying that if we see numbers reach the point that it's no worse than the flu, it becomes a big nothing burger.
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