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

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271–280 of 1001 posts

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

#271
post #64
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…

Not only are they forcing the unvaccinated to get the shot, they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to get booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future. When the vaccines were first introduced their validity was fixed at 12 months and their was talk about extending it ("because they are so incredibly effective").

Not sure what to say without being labeled an anti vaxxer...

I was very sick for a week after each shot. I'm 30, I work from home, I work out, I'm lean and only go out when running in the forest and buy food.

I can't possibly know what would happen if I caught covid, but I wish the vaccination (I'm already vaxxed, but I mean the boosters) was my choice. With my reaction to the vaccines, it's two weeks a year guaranteed sickness vs a very low chance of getting covid with an even lower chance of getting very sick from it.

The pros and cons just don't make vaccination every six months an obvious choice for me.

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

#272
post #128
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…

No country in the world has the capacity to take care of more than “a couple thousand” ICU patients (well, it’s more like a couple of ten thousand ICU patients for the best equipped and richest large countries in the world, like Germany). Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times. Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are…

>Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times.

Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen, because we always knew that it would hit us eventually, people have been warning about this for ages, this is not some black swan.

More healthcare capacity would help, just like more supply chain capacity would help, or the ability to manufacture some masks, the entire problem is we've been running on the idiotic 80s managerial efficiency mindset for decades and now we're running on fumes on every front.

If we had any appreciation for crisis management, robustness, redundancy and had some shock absorbers in our system many people would not have needed to die. And no it's not just the unvaccinated. Plenty of countries this year, including the US, will lose more people in total to covid in 2021 than in 2020. Vaccines help but they are not pandemic ending, and our systems are deeply screwed up.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people aren't typically "mathing" right is that even if you have 90% vaccinated, that's still potentially hundreds of thousands (millions in bigger countries) of un-vaccinated people who are prone to getting seriously sick. The numbers here in Ontario are clear. Case rates among the unvaccinated are far higher, and ICU admissions are far far far higher. I never fell for any line that said vaccination would just…

Denmark has 76,4% vaccinated: check on https://www.zeit.de/index

Thanks, something really didn't smell right there.

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

#274

As a foreigner living in Germany I could live with it if there were otherwise sound measures, but it's mostly been a bunch of wishful thinking. There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over". Even this I could understand, but this year they do the same thing again! Surprise, surprise that there is a…

No democratic country is built to handle something like a pandemic. That much became clear the last two years. You need to be able to mandate strict laws that take away a lot of liberties that we have learn to consider as standard.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not true - infection rate grows sigmoidal and not exponential. that's why at the moment you can observe a stabilization despite few changes in regulation as of now compared to the summer. infection spread saturates periodically after suceptible clusters are depleted.

what would make sense is a steady and controlled Durchseuchung with specific protection of vulnerable people (like old and sick) - b/c the best immunity is gained by infection.

but Durchseuchung never sounded good - that's why that term got so popular. it sounds ugly and brutal. but it's what was happening all the time with many diseases in the past thousands of years.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Swedes wore their masks and got vaccinated. What worked for them would not necessarily have worked for us.

> The Swedes wore their masks No such thing happened. Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And far worse then the neighbouring countries. I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the policies were not worse than other bad policies. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Such a relief to live in Sweden. No one is pretending to wear masks and we're doing just fine. If i wasn't reading the news i wouldn't even know there was a pandemic.

As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending to wear masks but only as chin diapers.

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

#278
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t simple and certainly not a matter of just vaccinating. A big part of the problem is that govt was confident that two jabs in the summer would be sufficient because of two faulty assumptions: that immunity would last and that fully vaccinated people would not spread covid.

Also, more broadly, that people would actually be willing to get vaccinated at a rate high enough to reduce the R-value below 1.

The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread, were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about reducing susceptibility, not infectivity. I don't think there were any numbers available on the vaccine's effect on virus transmissibility. It was implicitly assumed that fewer symptoms would translate to fewer transmissions, but was this ever proven?

Point being, we didn't know what vaccination rate would reduce the R-value below 1, and FAFAIK we still don't know. Not even for the original Sars-cov-2 virus, and not for any of the variants.

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.

You should add Mortality + mortality in the following year. Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.

> Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.

I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected".

I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.

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

#280
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden did not keep _everything_ open. We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.

Sweet spot being 3-5x as many deaths as Norway/Denmark/Finland?

The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though.

1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse for Sweden than its neighbors.

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