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I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

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Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#141

Post by eigenrick »

As I type this, I'm infected with Covid. I have a wife and three kids, all tested positive.

The oldest complained of a sore throat for one day, the others were "a bit tired" for two days. I've had it the worst. I had intestinal issues for 3 says and now have a mild sore throat and fatigue. Overall, I skipped about 2 half days of work because I felt tired. (I work from home)

Omicron has swept through pretty much every family we interact with.

1. We and most people we interact with are very responsible wrt stopping the spread. Vaccines, Masks, social distancing. Both my wife and I work from home.

We got infected anyway.

2. For people under 65 with no comorbidities, Covid, in general, is nothing to be afraid of. My in-laws (both over 70) got it just before us. They basically had nasty head cold symptoms for 3 days.

3. Omicron is far more mild than prior strains.

4. For people with comorbidities, even the flu is something to be afraid of. Before covid, the flu was the cause of most cardiac and pnemonia related mortality. Prior strains of Covid are worse, for sure, but deaths due to influenza should be enough to make people panic. We just never assigned flu as the underlying cause of death. *[0]

5. I think the last data I saw on the Pfizer vaccine said it was 24% effective against omicron. I don't know what this means exactly. But current evidence says that was too optimistic. *[1] 3 shots of it wasn't enough to stop the contagion, though maybe it made my symptoms milder. Who knows.

5. Omicron is likely a much more effective inoculation against covid than the vaccines which all now appear to be outdated. *[2]

My takeaway from all of this: Vaccines aren't helping. Masks and social distancing aren't helping. Omicron itself might be the biggest help we have. It's time to work to stop the hysteria, and also update our covid policies, because they're no longer relevant.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5158013/

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451#

[2] https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising...

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#142

Post by xaedes »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #25
tomp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're afraid of the virus, get vaccinated yourself. That's literally the most you can do. If you're still afraid of the virus, you should know that vaccinating people (even forcefully) won't stop transmission. The virus is endemic. The only thing that can change between now and "back to normal" future is, your mind.

I'm not afraid. I am triple-vaxxed not for myself but out of solidarity for those around me. I am simply at the end of my patience with people going to protests clogging my city and creating politicians using the greenpass and constant checks and testing to create a divide. mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone. there can still be an exemption i…

> mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone.

Would you not still need a vax-proof when vaccination is mandatory? How does it differ then to the greenpass? It would then be mandatory to be able to produce that proof. Failing to do so may result in fines or land you in jail.

How does that help with the greenpass situation you described?

> And what is more annoying is that the "greenpass" is actually (at least where I live in Europe) a way that allows cops to stop, frisk and harass anyone. It enables the busybodies to play "I aM an auThOrItY and will use my imaginary authority to exercise power over you ..."

> The "greenpass" assumes I am always carrying my phone. It gives me anxiety about my battery going flat.

Making it mandatory seems to only make this worse.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#143

Post by pfg »

analogdreams wrote: post #133
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> highly vaccinated area COVID-19 cases are sharply rising omnicron's effect on healthcare would be a lot worse without majority of people being vaccinated. everyone is anti-vaxx but it's always shocking how many of them clowns are not anti-respirator or anti-ICU.

where is your proof of this statement. this is an assumption, not a fact.

This study[1] shows 70% effectiveness against hospitalization for the Pfizer vaccine (based on a two-dose regime; the level of protection would likely be significantly higher for boosted populations).

I'll leave it to you to do the math on what this would mean for the healthcare system if we take current daily infections and remove that effect.

[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#144

Post by [deleted] »

axby wrote: post #139
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitaliza…

[deleted]

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#145

Post by lozenge »

wutbrodo wrote: post #93
watwut wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, Amerika had super strong opposition to any lockdowns or measure from the start. There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. It is not backslash to any real policy, it is people who are against those having exact same opinions as they had the whole time.

> There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. "America" is 300 million people and 50 separate states in a federal system. The reflexive urge to treat it as a single entity is central to the problem I'm discussing. On the more functional side, the lack of border controls between states in a federal system made tamping cases down to minimal levels a big challenge. The ent…

"UK schools have never entirely shut down"

Not really. Attendance in person was about 15%, being limited to key workers' children who couldn't arrange other childcare, and children with special educational needs. Teachers focused on remote teaching, while in person learning was neglected. In person teaching resumed fully Sep 2020-Dec 2020, and was interrupted again Jan-Mar 2021.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#146

Post by rndgermandude »

parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

As others already pointed out, covid is not just a danger to the kid, it's a danger to anybody in contact with the kid, like the parents the kid lives with, the teachers and aux staff the kid interacts with, the people the kid passes on the way to school.

>Edit: Please with the “but kids bring Covid home” hysteria. We have vaccines now.

Vaccination greatly reduces the risk of severe covid and death, but it doesn't eliminate it. I know people who despite full vaccination contracted covid and are now fighting with long covid symptoms, to the point where they are unable to work for months (but chances are they would be a lot worse off if they hadn't been vaccinated). In a society such as the US with very limited social safety there is a serious risk of loss of job due to the inability to work thanks to long covid or bankruptcy thanks to the inability to pay medical bills. Kids contracting covid in school (or anywhere else) and passing it to their parents may well result in the family becoming a lot poorer or even homeless in the extreme.

Immediate covid risks aren't just limited to death either. Covid is known to cause issues with blood clotting, which can result in all kinds of things like permanent brain damage, permanent heart damage or amputations of limbs. Severe covid is also treated with severe medications and procedures, like steroids which can cause permanent (partial) blindness, ECMO which causes loss of (some) mobility in the legs far more often than not. Just regular ventilation isn't free of side effects either, in particular because of the drugs to sedate such patients. Survivors of severe covid experience PTSD and/or suicidal thoughts at very high rates.

Immediate death and other immediate primary or secondary effects aren't the only risk to covid. Long covid is a thing. Other long term effects due to covid infections are not only possible, but according to preliminary results seem likely, even after covid infections with only mild symptoms or in asymptomatic cases. This includes damage to organs, in particular the lungs, the brain, the heart and the kidneys, which may well significantly lower the life expectancy and (later life) quality of life of people affected by it, be it the kids or their parents, family or teachers.

Looking only at the immediate fatality rate in kids is dangerously shortsighted and missing most of the picture. Pointing to vaccines like they are magic isn't exactly helpful either, as they are risk reduction at best, not risk avoidance.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#147

Post by watwut »

lamlq wrote: post #70
watwut wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The past goverments did actually responded to pandemics and sicknesses. Quarantine is not something novel. People with disease considered contagious could be banished away. They were no vaccines tho. Those started to be used only after they were invented.

Hence "major government intervention" instead of "government intervention". Do you have a source that the Russian flu (conjectured to be Sars-Cov-0 by some) had any measures like we see now? Certainly not KN-95 masks. They did not treat it like tuberculosis.

They did not use airplanes to get from place to place either. And it has zero implication about travel today too.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#148

Post by denton-scratch »

beardedwizard wrote: post #23
fourseventy wrote: post #13

How many students that got sick are experiencing symptoms more severe than the common cold? It seems like the chaos is caused by the attempted solutions to covid and not the actual symptoms? Edit: 7 day rolling average of COVID cases according to https://www1.nyc.gov/ is 32k cases per day with 38 deaths. So there is a 0.1% mortality rate.

You are failing to consider the spread to vulnerable populations where the symptoms are fatal. Omicron is not mild, people with vaccines have mild symptoms due to its efficacy. All these kids come home to families with parents and grandparents. They also have young siblings.

> Omicron is not mild

Anecdotally, I understand it can be pretty nasty - not "like a winter cold", more like bad 'flu (the anecdote relates to an antivaxx family).

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#149

Post by denton-scratch »

fourseventy wrote: post #82
beardedwizard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are failing to consider the spread to vulnerable populations where the symptoms are fatal. Omicron is not mild, people with vaccines have mild symptoms due to its efficacy. All these kids come home to families with parents and grandparents. They also have young siblings.

No I'm not. Look at the data. Where are all these supposed deaths?

COVID deaths are recorded as "deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID test". Omicron has only been around since November, and only became huge in late December. Give people time to die.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#150

Post by ajross »

Kye wrote: post #122
ajross wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than Uh... schools are open. No one has closed schools in this nation. The debate here is whether or not having open schools this month, during the omicron wave, is helping or hurting. The evidence in the linked article is that schools in NYC have organizationally broken down and that no meaningful education is happening anyway. Because it's very difficult to…

Hospitalization and death lags infection by quite a while.

Death rate peaks happen about three weeks after case load peaks. This has been very consistent through the pandemic (at least everywhere that has good test reporting), you can play with graphs at https://91-divoc.com/ or elsewhere to see the effect.

Certainly if omicron had the same behavior as previous variants, we'd know by now. Continued worries aren't about severity lag, but about whether or not there's something else different about omicron. It's worth being safe and cautious. But nonetheless the best evidence we have says that this is probably a very safe variant and a near-best-case outcome (i.e. everyone gets sick rapidly and we reach herd immunity rapidly with minimal severe cases, vs. everyone "eventually" getting delta with much worse outcomes).

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