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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

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431–440 of 465 posts

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long Covid. It's not just death and hospitalisations. From The Lancet: "Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden." https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ec…

Vaccinated people don’t get “long covid” in appreciable numbers.

Vaccination only reduces the risk of long covid (as defined by "still symptomatic after 28 days") by about half. It helps but it's no silver bullet.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#433
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think schools closing, euros ending, the nhs covid19 app ping and holidays starting are actually contributing to a lower number. scotland’s early school holiday should correlate at least part of this hypothesis. a couple of q’s thou: 1. where do you report lateral flow tests? i do mine at home every day as my work sent out boxes of them. 2. if a lateral flow is positive, aren’t you supposed to do another and then a…

> where do you report lateral flow tests? https://www.gov.uk/report-covid19-result > if a lateral flow is positive... I imagine that that report result site will refer you for a PCR test, although thankfully I've never personally been in that position.

That's exactly what happens. False positives with lateral flow tests are not unknown. In fact, if the prior probability of having covid is less than about 0.5%, you still have <50% probability of having covid even with a positive lateral flow.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#434
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work. Dozens of countries and well organized societies responded well to the pandemic.

> There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work If that was true why can I take the population adjusted graphs for any interesting statistic, overlay several countries or states, and see the shape of them all is basically the same? I would assert that for any of these non-pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile the effect on such charts should be absolutely noticeable to any layman on the…

That is true and you are lying.

Please show me a chart where competent governments like NZ, Japan, Australia, China and Indonesia are somewhat similar to incompetent ones like Brazil, USA or South Africa.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Diseases and fascists are however entirely different, so I'm not sure your example proves anything.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The herd immunity threshold changed with Delta, which I've heard has an R0 of 8-10 (compare 3.5-4.5 for the UK Alpha variant, and about 2.5 for the original strain). Instead of 60% vaccination, you'd need 90%, and will likely overshoot that. 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. Probably Delta will blow through literally all th…

Add to that, the more it multiplies and spreads, the more chance of mutations leading to more variants. Needing updated vaccines, booster shots of existing, and/or higher rates needed to reach herd immunity. Didn't the UK have another lockdown for this wave too? Herd-masking seemed like a no-brainer from the beginning. It will be really hard to go back to that in the US after the CDC giving the all clear to go maskle…

You can't expect people to wear masks forever.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At what specific death rate would you be comfortable saying "okay cool" and treating Covid the same way as other diseases?

I don't mean for this to be a trick question. 5x the flu is within my comfort zone, but 2x or 1x or even 0.5x could all be reasonable answers. The answer that's not reasonable, but is by far the most common answer I've gotten, is that no Covid deaths are acceptable and we should never stop taking extreme measures to suppress them.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At what specific death rate would you be comfortable saying "okay cool" and treating Covid the same way as other diseases? I don't mean for this to be a trick question. 5x the flu is within my comfort zone, but 2x or 1x or even 0.5x could all be reasonable answers. The answer that's not reasonable, but is by far the most common answer I've gotten, is that no Covid deaths are acceptable and we should never stop taking…

Gah. Influenza kills more people in the US than any other infectious disease, and frankly it isn't even close. You aren't making any sense here. I cited that number, clearly, as an UPPER bound beyond which we couldn't possibly view an outbreak as acceptable.

I don't view a statement that puts 100k deaths/year as within your "comfort zone" as a serious attempt to engage, sorry.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what specific death rate would you be comfortable saying "okay cool" and treating Covid the same way as other diseases? I don't mean for this to be a trick question. 5x the flu is within my comfort zone, but 2x or 1x or even 0.5x could all be reasonable answers. The answer that's not reasonable, but is by far the most common answer I've gotten, is that no Covid deaths are acceptable and we should never stop taking…

Gah. Influenza kills more people in the US than any other infectious disease, and frankly it isn't even close. You aren't making any sense here. I cited that number, clearly, as an UPPER bound beyond which we couldn't possibly view an outbreak as acceptable. I don't view a statement that puts 100k deaths/year as within your "comfort zone" as a serious attempt to engage, sorry.

I dunno. I'm not gonna browbeat you with more arguments for my risk tolerance if you're not interested in them, but I think you're avoiding looking reality in the face here; there's a lot of people an order of magnitude more risk tolerant than me who wanted to open crowded bars in February or earlier. A policy that expects restrictions will remain in place as Covid deaths fall, but can't offer any explanation for why they should remain in place or when they'll no longer be needed, seems doomed to the same kind of mass defection we saw in mid-2020.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#440
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.

> Since when is Texas a pejorative?

The Norwegians use the word texas to mean crazy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34622478

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