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Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

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Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increase hospital staff? Encourage social distancing? I don’t know, anything other than creating second class citizens in a country with a horrible history of it?

The hospitals have been hiring nonstop. Unfortunately medical staff is also leaving the hospitals that treat corona patients. As one said, speaking to a journalist, the current patients are a "potpourri of difficult personalities", so the nurses apply for jobs at things like eye clinic and the hospitals can't even operate the beds they have.

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Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.

If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach. Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time. Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the c…

What are you talking about?

The vaccines have shown to slow down infection rates and avoid many many hispitalisations and death.

So yes, getting vaxxed helps the graeter good.

Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an accident or a stroke or heart issues.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#43
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: given the current situation, what's the alternative? A lockdown for everyone? Vaccine mandate? Doing nothing and removing restrictions? Something else?

Probably not much. All KPIs are heading down now anyways, just look into the RKI dashboard [1]. Doing a quick math exercise underscores this: 70% are vaccinated, 6 million had it (at least, the number is probably higher), so in total 80-85% of the population already had it or is vaccinated by now. Numbers should go down now from now, which they actually start to do, if you look in the dashboard. [1] https://www.rki.d…

It's not great, and I do wish that the current coalition had prepared a bit more for this winter, rather than assuming 1. enough people would get vaccinated, and 2. that it wouldn't come back seasonally like last year. They really should have prepared months ago.

I can't think of a better alternative given the current situation if the end goal is to get people to reduce contact and get vaccinated, short of a full lockdown for everyone (which I think is a lot less preferable). Whether this form of lockdown will have any effect remains to be seen.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, so a vaccine that does not stop transmission does not create selective pressure on the virus? Wouldn’t that be unusual from an evolutionary biology standpoint? Can we at least agree that if infected, as a vaccinated and asymptomatic carrier, there is a higher chance of transmission than if I were unvaccinated and symptomatic? This seems like common sense to me, but I recognize it goes against the Covid orthodoxy.…

The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did with Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of vaccination.

This is an entirely different situation then smallpox though. The modes of action are not the same.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, so a vaccine that does not stop transmission does not create selective pressure on the virus? Wouldn’t that be unusual from an evolutionary biology standpoint? Can we at least agree that if infected, as a vaccinated and asymptomatic carrier, there is a higher chance of transmission than if I were unvaccinated and symptomatic? This seems like common sense to me, but I recognize it goes against the Covid orthodoxy.…

The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did with Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of vaccination.

While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, you're not making a valid comparison. We were able to effectively eradicate smallpox (except for a few lab samples) because the vaccines are highly sterilizing and there were no animal reservoirs.

That situation doesn't obtain with SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths but don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. And most mammal species can transmit the virus; cases have been confirmed in dogs, cats, minks, deer, tigers, etc.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#46
post #39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.

Do you have a citation for that? I haven't seen any high quality studies which directly compare long term R0 for vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. While I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, it seems to have only a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/experts-vaccine-immunity...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v... and... can't find the other just now. Note that population-based studies will find different results, AIUI mostly because of the birthday paradox.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#47
What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.

The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then. Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.

FSJ is a year-long volunteer program for young people typically organized and funded by NGOs like the Red Cross and similar. I worked with small children, plenty of the other volunteers I met regularly worked in hospitals and nursing homes. They all talked at length about how atrocious the working conditions were and how they were asked to do things they weren't legally allowed to (e.g. taking blood, handing out medication) because the staff shortages were severe enough that people didn't have enough time to adhere to very reasonable safety rules anymore. That was 17 years ago.

This is a well known, widely publicized[0] and not at all new problem, and the unvaccinated are not to blame for it. Let me repeat, we're talking about one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of 83M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients.

[0]Some random articles from 2018/19 (German):

https://gesundheit-soziales.verdi.de/themen/mehr-personal/++...

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/wenn-aus-notstand-panik-...

https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2018-05/pflegenotsta...

https://www.rbb-online.de/kontraste/ueber_den_tag_hinaus/bil...

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.

If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach. Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time. Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the c…

Go on, laugh me out of the room, laugh whoever you want out of the room, the virus doesn't care how much or how little you laugh.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#49
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the risk of transmission is understood to be significantly lower, and since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate it's in the governments best interest to get people vaccinated, a way of accomplishing this could be making life inconvenient for the uncompliant.

The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to evolve in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, the vaccines aren't very effective in people with malfunctioning immune systems. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...

The link references a specific response to remdesivir, but I don't see how the selective pressure isn't the same in the broader case of low-level or asymptomatic illness persisting in a vaccinated person, particularly when they'll be mingling more and taking less precautions.

Re: Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.

If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach. Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time. Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the c…

Changing data and changing virus variants doesn't mean you were "obviously lied to".
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