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Delta Variant

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Delta Variant

#131

Post by cloverich »

joelbluminator wrote: post #74
TaupeRanger wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone ever compare an exponentially spreading infectious disease with car accidents? They aren't even in the same realm of concern for public health.

I am saying I am not sure the amount of panic was proportional to the amount of actual deaths. > At least 30.7% of deaths in India can be attributed to air pollution from fossil fuels--that means about 2.5 million people die every year after breathing toxic air.9 I mean who cares, all I know is how many Covid deaths they are having, probably Indian people themselves are much more aware of Covid than Air pollution. Wh…

Because your parents aren't dying from air pollution tomorrow, but they might from COVID. And the vaccine can stop it, and there's a race between DELTA and the vaccine for your parents lives. The story is a bit different in the US, where its more about people not wanting to take it, and an often cited reason is that the virus is going way whether or not that get vaccinated (because other people are). If that story changes, then their reasoning is no longer valid.

Re: Delta Variant

#132

Post by shusaku »

CPLX wrote: post #4

I have to admit, I'm a little perplexed about all the discussion around the Delta variant. It almost feels like people are discussing this like it's a plot point in a novel, a new looming threat that comes after Act II, rather than a cold scientific fact. As someone who lives in New York and has been vaccinated for months, should I worry about this? It seems like the answer to that question is no, I shouldn't. Also n…

> anyone (who's older than 12) who isn't vaccinated is making a clear choice.

I might push back slightly on this. some data on 538 I saw a month or so back seemed to suggest a significant gap in people who say they plan to get the vaccine and people who have. I think the dirty secret is that if you’re poor or living in a rural place, making time to get the vaccine is a challenge. There’s a reason why when J&J came out there was a lot of talk of deploying it in rural communities.

Re: Delta Variant

#133

Post by defaultname »

tremon wrote: post #98
franciscop wrote: post #72

The article purposefully conflates numbers to tell a narrative. I am talking only about EU, and at that southern EU which is where I've been following the numbers closely. Delta variant has been acting for up to 1 month in some regions, and as described in the article yes cases are up very quickly. However, the article says: > COVID deaths [...] And if you think Europe or the US will be spared This is not reflected a…

and we are past the potential 2-week delay from cases to deaths Not everywhere. See here, for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland... The Netherlands went from 550 cases/day at the end of June to 10,000 cases/day now. The Delta variant took less than two weeks to spread as much as the EU variant did in two months (Sep 1st - Nov 1st). Of course, it was helped a lot by the government de…

Isn't it also the case that the Netherlands has vaccinated few of the younger groups, which are the same group that has had an explosion of cases. I can't find the reference right now, but the country rationally focused on older groups. If that's the case, cases may be high with very few deaths.

Re: Delta Variant

#134

Post by drno123 »

Does anyone, really, consider Pueyo relevant regarding Covid? My understanding is that he, a marketing expert, came up with hammer and dance which was used to push lockdown agenda. Lockdown did not greatly help reduxe cocid deaths and it introduced a lot of other problems such as delayed cancer diagnostics, mental health issues, compromised immunity in small children etc. This guy is a danger to public health.

Re: Delta Variant

#135

Post by specialp »

cloverich wrote: post #125
specialp wrote: post #42

I'm not sure what the end game is here. The original plan was "flatten the curve", which meant keep hospitals from getting inundated. Then it became wait for the vaccine. COVID is not going to go away. The vaccine has dramatically decreased the amount of people dying from it. Cases going up without dramatic increases in death or hospitalization might not be a bad thing. The alternative is lockdowns that will never co…

> There are ever present dangers that we just live with like the chances of getting in a car accident and dying, but we decide that these risks are low enough that we carry on normal life. Because there are no other (tenable) options for car accidents. If there was a vaccine you could take that would prevent you from being harmed in a car accident, and it was cheap (free even) and available, the expectations around c…

I don't believe I advocated for people not getting vaccinated. I am saying should we keep having "lockdowns"? I do think having lockdowns perpetually is not a tenable option when there is no end in sight. Vaccines when compared to cars are the seatbelt equivalent. They do not cause economic and social harm, and save a lot of lives. People should indeed get vaccinated and most are.

Lockdowns are equivalent to restricting automobile travel or lowering speed to a extremely low limit. Sure they would be fine if there were a blizzard and lots of people were crashing. All one can do is wait for the snow to melt and then it would only be a temporary disruption.

But in the case of lockdowns there's no chance they are going to end the spread of COVID, they just slow it at best. And they have a very large cost, and it has been a long time. It would be as if the temporary restrictions to save lives during the blizzard were persisted when an ice age occurred.

Re: Delta Variant

#136

Post by CaptArmchair »

mediaman wrote: post #106
franciscop wrote: post #72

The article purposefully conflates numbers to tell a narrative. I am talking only about EU, and at that southern EU which is where I've been following the numbers closely. Delta variant has been acting for up to 1 month in some regions, and as described in the article yes cases are up very quickly. However, the article says: > COVID deaths [...] And if you think Europe or the US will be spared This is not reflected a…

I'm not sure how you assess that he is conflating numbers to tell a narrative. Pueyo discusses fatality rates in the article, specifically that the vaccines appear to still be highly effective at preventing deaths (though much less so for infections) and that countries with high vaccination rates are not seeing high death rates even when infections are growing. The only area where he says deaths are getting worse are…

The problem I have with this article isn't the data, it's unclear what it tries to convey at all.

The first part of the article is an exposé of the evolution of the epidemic, transmissibility and fatality rates. Fine, but at this point, I haven't read any thesis, question, point, claim or argument he would like to answer or prove. It's just a wall of data.

Halfway through, he finally asks the million dollar question "How good are vaccines against Delta?"

That's where he has to retreat to the fact that any data about large populations available is limited:

> The best data we have is from Israel, which used Pfizer.

He then mentions percentages from an article from marketwatch.com and a briefing from technical briefing from the UK government, and goes on to extrapolate several claims based on those sources.

The takeaways in the latter part of his article are generic and have been repeated at nauseam by the medical community and health policy experts at large.

Thomas Pueyo isn't a medical or policy expert. He's a data analyst / publicist. Sure, he's entitled to write musings on his blog. But I don't regard him as an authoritative source because he's able to compile online graphs and stats into an piece which seems to be easily digestible on the surface level.

Re: Delta Variant

#137

Post by [deleted] »

nhod wrote: post #114

FWIW, I’ve been fully vaccinated (Moderna) since March. I was just in Provincetown, MA for the usual yearly 4th of July celebration with 10K other gay men, and Delta ripped through everyone. I got breakthrough COVID, which I assume is Delta because the symptoms were much more like the common cold than classic COVID. I probably know ~150 people in that group, and at least 14 people I know got breakthrough COVID. Meanw…

[deleted]

Re: Delta Variant

#138

Post by alkonaut »

matz1 wrote: post #75
alkonaut wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally quoted the answer to your question

The author mentioned the risk is 2x higher but what is the risk of the original variant itself ? The author didn't mention that.

The author spends a section on that, including a chart. Search for this passsage to see the chart:

The IFR (Infected Fatality Rate4) for the original variant was about 0.01% for those in their 20s and 0.2% for those in their 40s.

Direct link to the chart https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...

Re: Delta Variant

#139

Post by tremon »

defaultname wrote: post #133
tremon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and we are past the potential 2-week delay from cases to deaths Not everywhere. See here, for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland... The Netherlands went from 550 cases/day at the end of June to 10,000 cases/day now. The Delta variant took less than two weeks to spread as much as the EU variant did in two months (Sep 1st - Nov 1st). Of course, it was helped a lot by the government de…

Isn't it also the case that the Netherlands has vaccinated few of the younger groups, which are the same group that has had an explosion of cases. I can't find the reference right now, but the country rationally focused on older groups. If that's the case, cases may be high with very few deaths.

True, the planning is here (in Dutch, but luckily we use Arabic numerals): https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-vaccina...

The first table is for non-medical personnel without high-risk indication. People under 30 have only been able to book their first shot since a month (but they were able to choose the J&J vaccine, which only needs one shot).

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