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New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

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Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#21

Post by phonebucket »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #2

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now. I get that the lockdown is being haphazardly enforce for those countries who've decided on it but I dislike these even being rules on the books. Leave me the hell alone! If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?…

> If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?

Lockdowns are not about overcoming it; they're about saving lives. I think it's fair to say that the lockdowns saved quite a lot of them. Looking at how the death charts correlate with lockdown impositions might support this viewpoint.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#22

Post by mellavora »

splittingTimes wrote: post #13

For a fully waxed person, Would it make sense to try to get infected by Delta to build more immunity to fight off that omicron thing? With so many significant variations on the spike protein the vaccines will be no help..

vaxed or waxed, no. That's not how immunity works.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#23

Post by roywiggins »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #2

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now. I get that the lockdown is being haphazardly enforce for those countries who've decided on it but I dislike these even being rules on the books. Leave me the hell alone! If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?…

The world survived the 1918 flu without any vaccines and only sporadic and limited social distancing... but it killed 50 million people. That sucks, and we can do better.

Societies survive these things, usually; it's people who die.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#24

Post by timr »

soperj wrote: post #20
timr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we ought to be evidence-based about everything we have done: travel bans, masks, respirators, distancing, plexiglass, closing businesses, forcing healthy kids to wear masks in schools, forcing everyone to get vaccinated, rubber gloves in the grocery store. All of it. So far, our track record isn't that great. The two RCTs for masks and Covid showed minimal (if not zero) effect [1], and you can barely say the res…

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask... There's one from Stanford & Yale that says they do.

Read the study, not a press release. It said quite explicitly that cloth masks had no effect, and surgical masks had an extremely minor overall effect (11.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence), with an absolute effect size of 0.09%:

https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#25

Post by Kkoala »

timr wrote: post #15
gfodor wrote: post #3

> Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not work. This one point compromised the article for me. The standard for “working”, like all measures, is to slow down the spread. We all know travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them. But all countries imposed travel bans and we ought to be co…

Yep, we ought to be evidence-based about everything we have done: travel bans, masks, respirators, distancing, plexiglass, closing businesses, forcing healthy kids to wear masks in schools, forcing everyone to get vaccinated, rubber gloves in the grocery store. All of it. So far, our track record isn't that great. The two RCTs for masks and Covid showed minimal (if not zero) effect [1], and you can barely say the res…

It's pretty clear at this point that restrictions and masks help reduce the spread. Of course it's another question how does that balance out in the longer term, e.g. how did the lockdowns affect the economy, or the mental and physical healtht of people.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#26

Post by kylehotchkiss »

gfodor wrote: post #3

> Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not work. This one point compromised the article for me. The standard for “working”, like all measures, is to slow down the spread. We all know travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them. But all countries imposed travel bans and we ought to be co…

These travel bans serve to slow down the spread, but at the expense of keeping thousands of families separated and harming diplomacy between countries. Even air cargo has taken a big hit. And aviation has barely opened up, now to be put on hold again. The long term consequences of slowing a virus from entering a country for make a week or two are not being considered.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#27

Post by ralph84 »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #8
bingohbangoh wrote: post #2

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now. I get that the lockdown is being haphazardly enforce for those countries who've decided on it but I dislike these even being rules on the books. Leave me the hell alone! If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?…

> Leave me the hell alone! As long as that makes essential things such as grocery shopping more dangerous for others, such as myself, no.

Do you have any evidence of a significant covid outbreak being traced to grocery shopping?

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#28

Post by actually_a_dog »

timr wrote: post #15
gfodor wrote: post #3

> Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not work. This one point compromised the article for me. The standard for “working”, like all measures, is to slow down the spread. We all know travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them. But all countries imposed travel bans and we ought to be co…

Yep, we ought to be evidence-based about everything we have done: travel bans, masks, respirators, distancing, plexiglass, closing businesses, forcing healthy kids to wear masks in schools, forcing everyone to get vaccinated, rubber gloves in the grocery store. All of it. So far, our track record isn't that great. The two RCTs for masks and Covid showed minimal (if not zero) effect [1], and you can barely say the res…

That's incorrect. Here is a review of 19 RCTs showing that masks work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#29

Post by oliv__ »

lokl wrote: post #6
bingohbangoh wrote: post #2

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now. I get that the lockdown is being haphazardly enforce for those countries who've decided on it but I dislike these even being rules on the books. Leave me the hell alone! If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?…

According to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, as of now, Sweden has had 15,145 deaths; Norway has had 1,050 deaths; Denmark 2,863; Finland 1,309. With populations from Wikipedia (10,402,070 for Sweden; 5,402,171 for Norway; 5,850,189 for Denmark; 5,536,146 for Finland), this yields deaths per 1,000 people of: Sweden 1.456 Norway 0.194 Denmark 0.489 Finland 0.236 Saying Sweden has "just survived" doesn't capture…

So Sweden had proportionately 5 times more deaths for not locking down with a death / population ratio of 0.00145? I don't think it's ridiculous to consider not locking down with those stats.

Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#30

Post by mellavora »

miohtama wrote: post #4
bingohbangoh wrote: post #2

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now. I get that the lockdown is being haphazardly enforce for those countries who've decided on it but I dislike these even being rules on the books. Leave me the hell alone! If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes?…

> Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? We have managed to clear out measles, so we should be able to stop COVID as well with high enough vaccination rates. Although this is not apples-to-apples comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine

We were close to clearing out measles in western countries until the anti-vax movement came along. These days, not so much.
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