661–670 of 1001 posts
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Where are people dying because they cannot get access to healthcare?
My large city in Texas is now down to 35 ICU beds across the entire city. That's how. A friend's father-in-law had to drive 4hrs away to find a hospital with capacity for his cardiac surgery. That's how.
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How Does an individual choice to get vaccinated or not impact others? Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid. They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid. Thus the decision to vax or not is clearly a personal choice.
Because if you're unvaccinated you're much more likely to require hospitalization should you get Covid. The impact to others is the unvaccinated are consuming medical resources and causing burn-out amongst medical practitioners.
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> If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem. Sure thing. Can we get the Grandpa's to sign documents saying they're going unvaccinated by choice and would like to opt-out from any hospital care related to COVID if their resources are needed for any other patient?
Why? We're on a free market. Surely they could simply add a big surcharge. I'd expect their insurance to go way up too.
This argument is poorly constructed. I think there could be better ones, but here’s my problem. It goes through the three CDC studies and correctly observes that they fail to separate regions that have high vaccination rates from schools without a mask mandate. Indeed, the ideal experiment would involve two schools that are otherwise identical in the same geographical area with high vaccination rates: one that has no…
A randomized study was run in Bangladesh. There they handed out masks to randomly selected villages among a pool of 600 villages with similar vaccination and political stances. That study showed that the effect of surgical masks was statistically significant when used by the elderly 50+ population. For other age groups and for cloth masks, the advantage was statistically insignificant. All the headlines around this s…
The study could prove that the masks worked in 50+. And this was with a maximum of 40% of people complying.
This does NOT mean that the masks didn't work in 50-. It means that the statistical power was insufficient to prove that they worked.
It could also mean that 50- didn't comply with masks as well. It could also mean that 50- engaged in other risky behavior. etc.
Why everybody seems to think that "Provably works in 50+" and "Provably doesn't work in 50-" are completely compatible ideas is completely beyond me. "Provably works in 50+" significantly increases the Bayesian prior on "Works in 50- even if we can't prove such."
General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors. And i…
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There is no stigma these days for not starting a family kids and men can privately retreat into video games and pornography. When confronted about their selfish* lifestyle the above comment is convenient cover but it is not backed by solid data. I'd take birth in this past decade over birth in my decade any day. *I'd argue that not having at least one child and possibly adopting others is selfish assuming one has fin…
May I ask how old you are? From where I am, a "selfish" lifestyle of video games and porn replacing responsibility does not seem to be healthy long-term. I'm in my late 20s now, and the guys I know who are not working towards getting married and starting a family are pretty much all starting to experience some sort of constant existential anxiety.
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How about if you have anxiety issues and the reduced inflow of air from masks gives you panic attacks? This has been my life for this pandemic. I take medication but it does not stop them 100% from happening, and I have to use anti-anxiety techniques most times I put one on to stop from being overwhelmed by anticipation. Does anyone care about people like me? It sure feels like they don't. And I have seen my physical…
[ EDIT: other commenters response to this comment made me go look up some original research on the topic. As a result, I fully retract what I've said below. I found several papers that report substantial restrictions of airflow from wearing a correctly fitted N95 mask. I was wrong, and I apologize for the misinformation. I did try to explicitly say that I was not doubting someone's experiences, but I apologize for ap…
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Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated. A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection. Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me. You've probably spent the…
> Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me. It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anyt…
I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohorts. The recovered cohort didn't have any kind of stipulation that their infection was recent. The text does call out waning efficacy in the vaccines, but it does not mention the same for infection.
> It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
Does this have something do with what I said?
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Yes, and? The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/... Given the extremely contagious nature of Omicron, what plausible way do we have to prevent these individuals from getting COVID and using hospital space? And don't say masking up kids—because if they haven't gotten vaccinated, then why do you…
I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.
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There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals. Only vaxxed patients and medically-ineligible unvaxxed patients get treatment. If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.
Firstly, there no way to check someone’s vaccination status. There are fake cards, there are people who got vaccinated before government databases, there are people who got vaccinated without documentation, there are people who got documentation from medical people who didn’t actually perform the vaccination. Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a…