Live data from Hacker News

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

cnn.com

111–120 of 1001 posts

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

#112
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be working from old info here but my understanding is that vaccination reduces the ICU burden. Assuming that's still good info, is it totally unreasonable to blame the unvaccinated for ICU overload?

Yes because no effort was made to increase ICU capacity which was continues to be the biggest issue

No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease.

The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.

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

#113
post #7

As a double vaccinated German, I am very disappointed and angry about this move. Our politicians have failed to prepare the country for the Winter (who could have known...). We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid. And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make an…

Nah. Germans love to complain but not as much as they love having things decided for them decisively and following the rules begrudgingly. There will be no uprising. People are going to complain, as per usual, no matter what the change, and then fall in line without any upset that could begin to rival the downside of them not doing so.

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

#114

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.

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.…

Your assertion about transmission is definitely not proven. It all comes down to an expected value. An unvaccinated symptomatic individual will shed a lot more virus than a vaccinated asymptomatic one. It would probably take fewer encounters to infect someone else than in the vaccinated case. So although an asymptomatic vaxed person might be out and about more, the lower viral shedding could possibly account for that we don’t know. Also you’re overestimating the intelligence of the average person, symptomatic people do stupid shit all the time [0]. This couple probably infected way more people than an asymptomatic vaxed person. Again not proven.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/03/hawaii-coup...

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

#115
post #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. O…

So true and not mentioned enough by the media. The fact that we lost more than 4000 ICU beds over last year (during the Corona pandemic!!) because of personnel shortage is mind-boggling. Instead of rewarding those who worked these horrible jobs and maybe attract new workers with better conditions (e.g. more holidays), better pay or tax reduction, our politicians did campaigning and ignored the upcoming winter. Now th…

With exponential spread, the actual number of ICU beds really doesn't matter, because whatever you've got will be overwhelmed across a similar timeframe anyway. The only way to actually fix the problem is to get the R-value below 1, which requires mass vaccinations.

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

#116
post #56
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you are voted down. This is very much true for The Netherlands as well. Ever since the year 2000, possibly before, ICU beds have been scaled down. Diederik Grommers, one member of the Dutch Outbreak Management Team (OMG) states: "it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not; 60% of the beds are occupied by vaccinated people; the problems we will encounter in the coming weeks are caused by the fact t…

Thanks, that was an interesting video. I had to rely on auto-translated subtitles but from the little Dutch I can understand, it seems like they got the gist across. Yeah, Germany has a ton of ICU beds in comparison, and yet, we're struggling exactly the same as any other country. I find it strange, too. In early 2020 I expected we'd see big differences between different countries based on ICU capacity, but we saw th…

> Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.

There's different standards in different countries for sure. In The Netherlands there's a focus on quality of life. If a patient cannot have a decent quality of life after staying on ICU, there's a preference to provide the patient with palliative care instead. In (e.g.) Italy this approach would not be accepted.

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

#117
post #75

In Denmark we have now reached 90% vaccination rate. We have more infected, the same number of admissions in hospital and a 15% higher death rate than all of 2020. I really fail to see why we are blaming the unvaccinated and not Pfizer/Moderna.

The vaccines, while not as effective as classics like polio vaccine or measles vaccine, are definitely a net positive and help significantly in reducing the epidemic burden. Perhaps instead of internecine finger pointing we could blame covid itself?

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

#118

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.

> unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate Maybe I'm missing something, but the vaccinated population is the one that has introduced an additional evolutionary pressure, so wouldn't we expect to see mutations (that affect vaccinated people) in that population? Vaccine tolerance is no advantage in unvaccinated hosts.

Every single person who's immune system eradicates the virus causes evolutionary pressure.

If your immune system takes a long time to do this, because eg. you didn't have a vaccine so it hasn't got an antibody template to work from, then the virus has much longer to evolve in the host, under a bunch of weird and wonderful new types of antibodies that get thrown against it.

If there's already vaccine exposure then the body just needs to ramp up the antibody production, which is much faster and will result in total virus eradication to each virus as the antibodies encounter them, not halfway-measures which might leave half-functioning viruses which might self-repair in mutagenic ways.

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

#119
I would be very happy if my government did the same. What a relief it would be!

It's a public health measure, like public sanitation requirements, and driving a car that meets safety requirements. Unvaccinated people should be free to do whatever they want, short of risking infecting other people. Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.

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

#120
post #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. O…

This is such a bizarre take. If the ICUs are filling up, the solution should be to prevent people from getting sick, not to make the ICUs bigger. There are undoubtedly many problems in the German healthcare system, but the current surge is clearly due to the very large number of unvaccinated people.
Post reply on HN