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Update on Omicron

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Re: Update on Omicron

#521

Post by seba_dos1 »

PostOnce wrote: post #349
harry8 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about vaccine hesitancy in Africa must be accompanied by why there's a certain amount of justification of it and it can be viewed as entirely rational, if also wholly undesirable. Included in that must be the USA's role in creating that problem. A couple of examples quickly turned up with a search engine of which there seem to be far, far too many. I can recall a few not here being reported over the past deca…

That's plausible, but it's not the whole picture. It may only partially explain some of the problem. We have, in the wealthy west, millions of vaccine-hesistant and vaccine-denialist people. I'm not just talking about poor or uneducated people, either. I personally know wealthy, educated, analytical people who have bought into the fearmongering and propaganda. I was shocked to find how deeply skeptical they were. I w…

> I also know people who got a dose of vaccine, read propaganda, became skeptical and delayed their second dose for a long time.

Ironically, if only they were lucky enough to not get infected meanwhile and managed to eventually change their mind, that may actually turn out for the better since additional vaccine doses seem to produce stronger antibody response when delayed.

Re: Update on Omicron

#522

Post by coryrc »

lifeformed wrote: post #470
throwaway894345 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first and most important step in the New Zealand strategy is “be an island”. You need a lot of draconianism to make up for land borders.

Everyone says this because it makes sense at first glance, but does it really? Did the US get most of its infections from people driving over from Canada and Mexico? A virus from China or South Africa spreads by planes, not cars.

How about the border between Washington State (65% fully vaccinated) and Idaho (45% fully vaccinated). Lots of covidiots using eastern Washington hospital ICU capacity.

Re: Update on Omicron

#523

Post by throwaway894345 »

lifeformed wrote: post #470
throwaway894345 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first and most important step in the New Zealand strategy is “be an island”. You need a lot of draconianism to make up for land borders.

Everyone says this because it makes sense at first glance, but does it really? Did the US get most of its infections from people driving over from Canada and Mexico? A virus from China or South Africa spreads by planes, not cars.

Fair enough, I should have said “be a small island”. Obviously everything changes when you’re dealing with a population two orders of magnitude that of New Zealand: it’s harder to secure ports, harder to control contagion internally, etc. Moreover, the US never even attempted to harden its ports until the virus was already spreading out of control.

That said, the US has a lot of people crossing its land borders—even if it completely hardened its ports, outlawed border crossings, and was much better at reducing internal contagion, it would still have to deal with thousands of people who cross illegally and who aren’t going to quarantine for two weeks or abide by any kind of contact tracing programs.

Re: Update on Omicron

#524

Post by esyir »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #514
esyir wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this hits the nail on the head. That the academic space is not just dominated, but overtly hostile to right wingers probably worsens this. Why would they trust advice given by people who proclaim their hatred of them?

> academic space is...overtly hostile to right wingers... > Why would they trust advice given by people who proclaim their hatred of them? 1. It's all institutions, not just academia. 2. The "right winger" narrative seems to be that everyone is overtly hostile to them (media, academia, Hollywood, scientists, health organizations, voting machine manufacturers, pharma companies, Dr. Fauci, Big Bird, etc.), which appare…

>I do think that poor critical thinking skills, as exemplified in your rationalization here, do play a major role in how we got here though.

I love the way you prove my point by immediately going with a barely more civil version of "You're retarded". For the record, I'm both Vaccinated and, in a previous life, was a biomedical researcher, critically evaluating scientific literature was literally my job. I'm mostly on your side as far as policy goes, but Jesus Christ, with friends like you, who needs enemies.

I ask anyone here, if someone were to go to you, talk down to you and continuously declare their contempt for you and your kind. Then suddenly flip around and say that they mean the best for you and X policy is for your own good. What would your initial reaction be, assuming you have no idea about the ground truth.

So go on, insult them, demonize them and continue your tribal war. Then complain to your own tribe why the enemy tribe doesn't take your perfectly good advice at face value.

Re: Update on Omicron

#525

Post by throwaway894345 »

supernovae wrote: post #455
gotoeleven wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most third world countries don't have the infrastructure to reliably deliver refrigerated vaccines at scale. And they've got to deliver two doses, months apart. Its very "on brand" as the kids say now on twitter for NPR to platform a race-baiter though. The west, a product of mostly european people, came up with the vaccine but blah blah blah racism. Come up with your own vaccine then NPR race bait lady.

Nonsense. Africa is miles ahead of many countries because they have been frought with epidemics. The South African variant is only called south African because they have the technology to do genomics on the strain to identify that it has mutated and there is a new mutation running around.

Having had epidemics previously or having advanced genomic capability doesn’t imply a robust logistics network for the world’s first RNA vaccines which require particularly cold refrigeration.

Re: Update on Omicron

#526

Post by wesleywt »

xg15 wrote: post #170
aetherspawn wrote: post #154

Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…

Absolutely true, but not the whole story unfortunately. While many African countries need more vaccines, South Africa was in the process of throttling shipments because less and less people were getting vaccinated. So the other big challenge is raising acceptance of the vaccines and fighting denialism.

I am South African. Can you give a citation for this claim?

Re: Update on Omicron

#527

Post by colordrops »

m4rtink wrote: post #469
colordrops wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it turns out that it is indeed extremely mild, does not cause deaths, and an infection with it confers immunity to covid in general, shouldn't it be allowed to run like wildfire?

Even if it really was like that, there are still good reasons for not allowing that - if there is still a chance it can kill people, there would still be considerable bodycount if it really is more transmissible and many people get infected at once (overloaded hospitals). Mild symphtoms also still don't say anything about possible long term damage that might only become aparent later. And lastly, infecting so many ne…

> And lastly, infecting so many new hosts opens the possibility of creating a more deadly variants, just by pure chance, due to so much virus replication going on in the hosts.

Isn't this true of the flu as well?

Re: Update on Omicron

#528

Post by adzm »

disambiguation wrote: post #314
aetherspawn wrote: post #154

Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…

Have they open sourced the vaccine recipe? I feel like that would help greatly to this end.

Yes, it is on GitHub even. https://github.com/NAalytics/Assemblies-of-putative-SARS-CoV...

Re: Update on Omicron

#529

Post by incrudible »

scotty79 wrote: post #479
incrudible wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of sterilizing immunity. You can not expect your immune system to mount a permanent immediate defense against coronaviruses. Once everybody has encountered SARS2 at least once, it may become as harmless as the other endemic coronaviruses. That is to say, not entirely harmless, but nothing to lose sleep over. It will never go away. How we deal with that is up to us.

People get sick with covid multiple times. Our immune systems are just naturally not good enough to deal with this virus. Covid will stop being a concern only after safe and incredibly efficient antiviral drug is developed, which might take decades.

You can get reinfected with all sorts of respiratory viruses. Like I said, nothing to lose sleep over.

Antivirals have a very limited window of opportunity. Nothing will make our concerns disappear. At some point, we need to move on.

Re: Update on Omicron

#530

Post by nimbleal »

HanaShiratori wrote: post #457
nimbleal wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is — is it significant enough for: a) eradication to be a possibility (intuitively, it would seem not); or, failing that b) to lower the possibility of novel mutations emerging to a negligible level (I don’t have the knowledge to answer, so this is a genuine question, but again intuition would suggest not) if, say, 99% of the population is vaccinated.

Wouldn't any kind of reduction be a good thing? Even if it just prevents severe illness / hospitalization by the stated amount I'd consider it a win.

Good thing, yes, but the parent argued omicron “happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries.”

I’m asking if that makes sense given the evidence, and commenting that my (lay) intuition says it isn’t.

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