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South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

washingtonpost.com

331–340 of 515 posts

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#331

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> makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all th…

> Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either. ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentra…

Some of these places have like 400 ICU beds in a region of 17 million people. You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.

Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for healthy people are extreme asks and should be used for extremely short durations while you pour your nations entire pool of resources into building healthcare capacity up.

What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals. The fact that all of these were shutdown virtually unused after a month but we continued with all these stay-at-home orders shows exactly how little respect these "experts" and government officials have for the general public. The day those things closed was the day we should have gone back to full normal. That these "experts" doubled down on this crap is so immoral and unethical it amazes me people continued to support it.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#332
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot to unpack but I doubt you are as right as you think you are. For instance in new variant outbreaks there ate usually harsher responses than for known variant outbreaks, so it is very difficult to identity the real infectivity. But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and th…

Covid-19 doesn't kill rapidly, so there is no pressure for it to mutate to become milder.

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Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#334
post #294

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A place where it hit exponential levels with really bad results is here in NY at the beginning. We had no precautions, testing, or vaccines in place yet, and hospitals were overwhelmed. It was honestly a scary time. That was where we started "flattening the curve". Now with vaccines available if there are surges and they are not literally building hospitals on fields like they were near me that is something we have t…

We are currently sitting at at total of over 800,000 COVID deaths in the US and 1,500 COVID deaths per day, which is roughly where it’s been since September 1st. That’s approximately an additional half a million dead people per year. So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.

We shouldnt forget that something like 80% of them were already old people with a variety of health issues.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't downvote you, but I think that this is mistaken. I think that everyone will get omicron eventually.

And it will generate herd immunity...

Maybe. There is a lot of reinfection/breakthroughs going on from alpha/delta to omicron. Does conferred immunity to omicron protect from alpha/delta? I don't know enough to say.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that covid has given us incredible insight into the human psyche, including how well we are able to respond to problems that have political/tribal attributes to them. Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not g…

> if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked. If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge s…

I think we're probably in luck somewhat: if something actually serious came along, I agree that people would be much less disagreeable, and perhaps we'd have enough actual problems so authorities wouldn't have to engage in make work projects.

That said, I think massive numbers of people (likely the majority still, although the tides seem to be shifting extremely quickly lately) would strongly disagree with us on the degree to which covid is a "major" problem. I am very worried that the inability for people to even mutually agree upon a way of discussing (let alone agreeing on anything) culture war topics, and our inability to take such phenomena seriously, is going to be a gift that keeps on giving for decades into the future (just in time for the climate change culture war).

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SA severity may not be representative because of greater prior immunity and a younger age skew.

Exhibit B will be the UK. Their cases started spiking about two weeks ago. So far their hospitalizations haven't budged and are even a bit lower than they were a month ago, less than a quarter of their pandemic peak[1] [1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

England had high prevalence during the Summer, so not even them, maybe Denmark

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#338
post #285

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> If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid? The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out. Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are shor…

> The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses I never heard about it before. Could you provide link to your claim?

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Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're using cloudflare dns? https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...

Can someone explain in English what is going on here? I thought I understand DNS but I guess I don't.

For Cloudflare DNS servers the archive.md DNS server tells them the URL is not configured. It's configured to change according to which DNS server queries it by location/IP. It's not something Cloudflare can fix unilaterally. (or something like that)

edit: elsewhere linked is an explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain I reject that that's an even remotely accurate description of anything that has happened, or has any other relevancd to reality. > many places are locking down yet again What places? Unless you are using “locking down” as loosely as you’ve used “battlefield”, that's not actually happening, anywhere. > And they…

Sorry, not gonna play "its not a real lockdown" pedantry with you. I don't care what you call it. Any restriction we made in the last 2 years be it closed small businesses, masks, vaccine mandates, hall passes to go on dog walks, "not allowed to walk on the dry sand, only the wet sand", closed playgrounds, closed schools... all of it... it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase hea…

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