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Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

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Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#311

Post by garaetjjte »

walterbell wrote: post #284
baxtr wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done my PhD on T cell activation. The persistent focus of the media and even some of the science community on Antibody induced immunity was completely beyond me. T cells were largely simply ignored even though they play such a crucial role in the body’s immune response. Antibodies seem to be a concept much easier to grasp. Maybe we should call T cells "Police Cells or "Anti-Cells" instead. You know, some marke…

Good idea! Infographic, logo, spokesperson.

They were also featured in Once Upon a Time... Life... https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/once-upon-a-time-life/imag...

(from https://once-upon-a-time-life.fandom.com/wiki/Lymphocytes)

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#312

Post by walterbell »

garaetjjte wrote: post #311
walterbell wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea! Infographic, logo, spokesperson.

They were also featured in Once Upon a Time... Life ... https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/once-upon-a-time-life/imag... (from https://once-upon-a-time-life.fandom.com/wiki/Lymphocytes )

Thanks!

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#313

Post by ddingus »

buu700 wrote: post #275
ddingus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not have those problems. I am sorry you do. Sucks. But, I am definitely not returning to "normal" pre Covid behavior. I got Covid early on. It was extremely rough. Should probably have been in the hospital, but frankly worried about that a lot given what was happening. Made it through, as did my family. Those experiences were why we played it very safe. Lots of negatives in doing that, but there were some positi…

But, I am definitely not returning to "normal" pre Covid behavior. What would this look like, in practice? Of course on a macro scale we'll see changes like increasing adoption and acceptance of remote work/meetings, but in terms of individual behavior what can or should change? I assume 10 years from now (barring another pandemic) we won't all be wearing masks and gloves all the time or strictly maintaining a six-fo…

Your list is a lot like mine. Giving the basics a higher priority for the longer term, and teaching these to young ones, along with appropriate norms are how I intend on playing it all going forward.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#314

Post by statstutor »

8ytecoder wrote: post #307
statstutor wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps unpopular opinion If I was responsible for policy, I would ask (have asked) a scientist to model this rather than stating it as opinion. I suspect that any model would just show you to be extremely wrong, for a virus which is already circulating freely.

It’s not a scientific problem. The scientific solution to contain the pandemic would be a full 21 day absolute shutdown of everything with people surviving on rations. It becomes a political problem if you try to do that in any functioning democracy. Decisions made about people must have a feedback loop to learn from how people react to it. For example, the lockdown became ineffective when it was extended too long. P…

None of that is relevant to vaccination.

I agree it's a political problem - a political solution is proven by Asian democracies and Australasian democracies. As you say, it was pretty obvious that a 21-day lockdown with appropriate testing and follow-up would have resolved this issue in any country.

The people's right to have an opinion does not change the truth, that an indefinitely long half-lockdown is a bad compromise between opinions.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#315

Post by betwixthewires »

pbourke wrote: post #180
betwixthewires wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's define normal as, no lockdowns, no business restrictions, public gathering restrictions, public activity restrictions, and no mask requirements.

For all of those, you’re probably looking at 2022. For some - enough that it feels much more like normal than it has in over a year - the middle of summer seems like a safe bet for most of the US.

Where I am those are already gone. It is already "normal". There is still a lot of voluntary mask wearing, and the social pressure that comes with that, so not completely normal, and I'd still be subject to travel restrictions, but those two weren't in my definition.

I think it will be a lot sooner than you think, because it's already happening in a lot of places.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#316

Post by stjohnswarts »

silisili wrote: post #140

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but the US vaccination system is about the worst when it comes to preventing spread. Instead, it seems to be attempting to prevent death. I've always argued that preventing spread would as a byproduct prevent death, but I'm obviously not studied in the field. Put shortly, I would have vaccinated college kids and working age folks first. They are not likely to die from it, but are far more l…

Well no one -likes- getting covid but there's a far cry from dying from it as the groups who are more apt to want to get it first. If you want to use a more statistics based approach like "well we're going to vaccinate those who are most likely to spread it" (say 20 somethings or republicans who won't wear masks) the general public is not going to go along with that and start making calls to congress critters really quickly since they are afraid memaw is gonna die because she can't get a vaccine while all the college kids throwing ragers on the street are now effectively just a bit safer than before (they were already highly unlikely to die from the disease). Americans by and large do not understand statistics (or even the scientific approach in general) to minimize spreading but "getting shots in arms of those most likely to die" has an undeniable "folksy" logic. The most important thing (the 90% problem) is to get vaccines cranking out as fast as possible and into people, everything else is background noise. I would have been fine with a randomized system based on a voluntary signup list.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#317

Post by stjohnswarts »

odiroot wrote: post #243
silisili wrote: post #140

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but the US vaccination system is about the worst when it comes to preventing spread. Instead, it seems to be attempting to prevent death. I've always argued that preventing spread would as a byproduct prevent death, but I'm obviously not studied in the field. Put shortly, I would have vaccinated college kids and working age folks first. They are not likely to die from it, but are far more l…

> Put shortly, I would have vaccinated college kids and working age folks first. They are not likely to die from it, but are far more likely to spread it than elderly and severely diseased folks. Many people agree with you. Vaccinating the most mobile people and isolating the most "immobile" (retirees, children, sick) is very logical. My guess is politicians know it but they would never make such a decision. It'd be…

I should have read your comment first. It was much more succinct than mine :)

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#318

Post by loveistheanswer »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #301
loveistheanswer wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. Yep, that's how censorship works. I'm sure you won't see too many people talking about Tiananmen Square on Chinese social media either, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Are we really going to pretend that the Chinese government h…

> Yep, that's how censorship works. China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, or the millions of live conversations going on at any given moment between people inside China and people outside. This view of China, that it's a black box that information can't escape out of, is simply not reality.

>China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter,

Yes, they do, directly and indirectly.

Directly: Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese virologist who blew the whistle on covid in December 2019, but the Chinese government covered that up. She defected to the US, and published a research paper critical of the Chinese government, and Twitter banned her account.

Indirectly: How likely do you think it would be for the chinese government to renew an expats visa if they were doing activist work like the chinese activists who got dissapeared for reporting covid deaths on Github? They didn't even let a WHO investigation team into their country for almost a year

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#319

Post by nickthemagicman »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #271
nickthemagicman wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's proven that speed limits save lives by 100% of scientists. There's absolutely no proof that quarantine or any of these Covid restrictions was effective. There's a study that masks might prevent spread by around 2%. That doesn't seem enough to enforce massive restrictions to me. Sweden and had less deaths per capita then most of Europe and they had minimal restrictions. Also the scale of the restrictions is diffe…

There's also no randomized trial proving that parachutes prevent death during skydiving. But it stands to reason that not slamming into the ground at terminal velocity is good for your health, and it stands to reason that preventing the spread of a deadly disease saves lives. Countries that have prevented the spread of the disease (China, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and others) have orders of magnitude…

The principles underlying gravity are well understood.

Covid and everything about it is not.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#320

Post by retrac »

tinus_hn wrote: post #209
retrac wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite their hands-off measures legally, Swedes still socially distanced aggressively. The government has been encouraging people there to take active measures in a manner unlike during swine flu. So we are still comparing the spread, and damage from spread, of a virus where significant behavioural change/mitigation efforts were made, against a virus with significantly less efforts to mitigate it.

Except when discussing poor results in Sweden, then its because they congregated, held events and allowed the virus to spread. I’m not buying either of these no true swedesman arguments.

There's nothing to buy. Data exists for this. Go check out Google's data on people's movements. It went down in Sweden significantly. Maybe less than elsewhere, and that's a rabbit hole you can get lost in. But I think the point stands that it is not a one to one comparison.
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