471–480 of 560 posts
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Now we're getting into value systems. - How much do you value your life? - How much do you value the trip? - How much do you worry about spending two weeks in a hospital? - How much do you mind memory lapses and brain fog from long COVID? From what you wrote, it's clear we have at least somewhat different value systems. Since you're an avid traveler, you should realize that's good, common, and healthy.
The subtle implication of your comment seems to be that I value my life and health less than you do? If so, I think that's unfair. But I'm happy to roll with it. If, in the face of substantial evidence that two doses of one of the mRNA vaccines remain highly effective at preventing hospitalization and death 8 months on, you still cannot tolerate the potential that you could end up in a hospital in a developing countr…
No. That's not the implication.
I don't know you well enough to tell you what the differences in our value systems are.
Since you do ask, if I were to speculate, I would guess you value your life and comfort more than I value mine. I was never fearful of dying of COVID, or of hospitalization, even pre-vax. Americans place an exceptionally high value on their own life and comfort relative to most cultures. I've also been in several hospitals in developing countries, and that's also not something which has really concerned me.
On the other hand, I suspect I am much more concerned about long COVID than you are.
And no, we don't know much for sure about COVID, but we have to work from best available evidence. If there's e.g. a 50% chance that a booster shot increases protection from 30% breakthroughs to 15%, and a 50% chance it does nothing, that means I've reduced my odds of breakthrough by (30-15)*50% = 7.5%.
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Anecdotally, the CEO of my company just died of Covid.
Anecdotally, my uncle who was otherwise healthy died months after getting the jab. And my sister's husband came down with some major fatigue/fever issues recently after the jab. So again, I took my chances based on the facts I had, yet I will get downvoted because they aren't in lock step with most of HN.
The whole booster conversation seems like a political game. If you have a vaccine, then your risk of death is far below that of the flu (statistically). If you don't have a vaccine by now, you want covid instead and this booster conversation is irrelevant. Kids are banned from taking anything. So I expect booster or no booster, frankly it just won't matter much at the population scale. I also don't understand the mas…
If big pharma can get billions of people signed up for regular booster shots and new vaccines, they will become enormously powerful.
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The CDC seems dangerously close to a no-win scenario. Present truth and facts backing policy: Not managing public perception correctly. Tell public what needs to be done but omit details: Conserve N95's with "masks don't work" all over again.
This. Even here in Germany it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. It's entirely polarized.
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As long as they don't impose to me (40 y.o.) to catch a plane... fine with me I am getting very wary of the whole situation. "As soon as we get a vaccine we are good". Now we have the bloody thing, I got injected with it hoping to get back to normal: "We need a booster shot" I was always pretty rational about it, but this is becoming a farce
There is a good chunk of society that absolutely refuses to move on.
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Doctors and nurses don't get built in a year.
That seems like such an excuse. A year and a half is plenty of time to get creative. Pull people out of retirement. Let nursing students do more. Pay truckloads of money to all of them. I dunno. Figure it out. These folks are supposed to be the “experts”… what have they been doing this whole time? Saying “no it cannot be done” is just not a valid excuse.
So take the most vulnerable age group (old people) - and stick them on the front lines, looking after fat lazy middle aged people who are too lazy to get a 50cc jab.
They are retired doctors, they are not retards.
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IFR is a better metric than CFR: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... The overall IFR is misleading, given how age-stratified the risk is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
I absolutely adore when publicly available data sourced from government agencies gets downvoted. Since March of 2020 any kind of statement suggesting covid isn’t as bad as some make it out to be is met with fierce vitriol. The number of times I’ve been called “dangerous” for posting well sourced data that clearly shows the IFR of covid is not 1-2%… It’s as if people believe that any good news will result in others “n…
Strangely, despite all the pearl clutching about "misinformation", this data-backed and quantifiable instance of covid misinformation never gets brought up. As a result, I now consider government / public health institution claims to be politically calculated fearmongering or propaganda until proven otherwise, and likely not worth my time to pay attention to. I'll update my opinion about them if their stance toward "correcting misinformation" starts to include misinformation like the above as well.
I'm not holding my breath.
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PCR doesn’t differentiate between live and dead virus molecules, which makes it less than diagnostic for active infection without symptoms, right?
That distinction isn't as important for evaluating vaccine efficacy. It wants to measure if the person was infected, not if the person is infectious.
I think this reporting is dancing around the issue, that the vaccine supply is most concentrated in countries that have essentially reached their maximum vaccination percentage. By not providing access to those developing or smaller countries, larger countries are shooting themselves in the proverbial global foot. I don’t think countries like the US and Canada aren’t trying to do that, I just think these experts woul…
Agreed that it makes total sense for HCWs to get a booster, but also why are you seeing patients before they test negative? Every patient could be getting a $5 antigen test as they walk in the door. The fact that this is not being done is just one more missed opportunity.