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Update on Omicron

who.int

681–690 of 794 posts

Re: Update on Omicron

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry but no. I have already lost 2 years of my life just following and obeying the orders. Enough is enough. This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.

How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker. And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million othe…

> You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you?

I'd rather be dead, can you fit that in your dumb head?

Re: Update on Omicron

#682
post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am not arguing in good faith nor do I have an ounce of empathy for someone that have not seen family and loved ones for more than 2 years".

I'll be sure to tell that to my neighbor who lost both of her parents and a sister to COVID before the vaccines were available. I'm sure she'll understand. If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are. I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical communit…

Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.

>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith. We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.

Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?

Re: Update on Omicron

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people are even using those masks correctly? There's a lot of people going around with old and contaminated masks or wearing them improperly.

"People aren't using them properly" is an argument for better education, not ditching the things.

And I have mentioned ditching the things where? It's an argument for not "relying that much" on an unreliable use of such tool like masks.

Re: Update on Omicron

#684

The media and government can't be trusted with germ theory. The whole idea that we have control over the virus and that our actions are tantamount to killing people with it or not is ludicrous. The virus is going to spread, and its going to kill people. People aren't killing each other. We will all catch covid. The "treatment" has been so much worse than the disease. 5 million died due to covid, but hundreds of milli…

The existence of and overall success of China's zero covid strategy says you're wrong, human actions can contain it.

If your reply is China's data can not be trusted, then Australia or NZ. But same conclusion, we can and should mitigate the virus.

Also, the economy is doing fine. Some places better than other, but we're much better off now than in 2009, the last global recession. If this is a crisis, it's milder than the last, from an economic standpoint.

Re: Update on Omicron

#685
The WHO has lost all credibility in my eyes. I’d bet all of my money on the South African health system, which has not only dealt with HIV/AIDS but many tropical diseases. They literally have the best ID departments in the world.

Re: Update on Omicron

#686

For those commenting that it's just common cold and about herd immunity, I think we should not miss out on overload on our medical system. This is what happened in India, due to high number of cases (even if mild) the medical infrastructure completely crashed under the load and lead to far more deaths than just a flu could have caused. Wear mask and stay indoors if possible

Politicians have had time to start improving healthcare systems. Corporations that currently pay no taxes could help to fund this stuff. Billions of dollars of war industry purchases could have been slightly delayed. Billionaires could have chipped in a bit more, and we could have started ratcheting up capacities and capabilities of hospitals and healthcare systems. But no it seems that's all teetering on the brink o…

I'm sorry, what?

"The ruling class has proven that they don't actually care about anyone else"—yes, that's a reasonable message to take away from the past year and a half...

"...So we should stop abiding by all the good medical advice and just party" how the hell do you come to that conclusion? The reasonable conclusion to come to from your first two paragraphs is something along the lines of "So we should protest the politicians who want to deny the science, boycott the companies that are actively making things worse, and push for real societal change that prioritizes human lives and well-being over corporate profits."

You're basically saying, "The very wealthy just want us all to shut up and die, but screw them! We should all get out there and die very loudly!"

Re: Update on Omicron

#687

Or maybe SARS‑CoV‑2 just become common flu. There will be herd immunity and risk will become low.

Common flu doesn't leave people with long-term reduction in cognitive and/or physical ability.

Are you sure?

This study [1] finds some interesting long-term effects coinciding with cognitive impairment and might be a good starting point for screening the current state of influenza research (via references to/from this one).

[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/12/3060

Re: Update on Omicron

#688

For those commenting that it's just common cold and about herd immunity, I think we should not miss out on overload on our medical system. This is what happened in India, due to high number of cases (even if mild) the medical infrastructure completely crashed under the load and lead to far more deaths than just a flu could have caused. Wear mask and stay indoors if possible

Politicians have had time to start improving healthcare systems. Corporations that currently pay no taxes could help to fund this stuff. Billions of dollars of war industry purchases could have been slightly delayed. Billionaires could have chipped in a bit more, and we could have started ratcheting up capacities and capabilities of hospitals and healthcare systems. But no it seems that's all teetering on the brink o…

I don't understand how owning yourself fixes/changes anything.

Re: Update on Omicron

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We still don’t seem to know if this variant is more or less contagious (R0 of 2) we already know it's far more contagious but not if it's more deadly than delta with an r0 of 2: > The estimated reproduction number, the average number of people that an individual is likely to infect, is almost 2 in Gauteng compared with nearly 1.5 nationally. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2299194-omicron-how-dan...

I think I am misunderstanding something. But wasnt the original Covid an R0 of 2.5-3? And Delta has an R0 of 7-8? An R0 of 2 sounds like a really low infection rate in comparison, but then it's increasing rapidly and outcompeting delta? I dont get it.

yes sorry you're right - I'm mixing something up here:

> We identified five studies, which estimated the basic reproductive number for Delta. Table 1 shows that the basic reproductive number for Delta ranged from 3.2 to 8, with a mean of 5.08 -- https://academic.oup.com/view-large/305057394

Re: Update on Omicron

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission Do you have a source for that?

The (to my knowledge) largest study on community transmission finds ~10% reduction: https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati... There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.

I had a quick scan of that paper and read

"The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a 29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks."

So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.

> We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness

Why?

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