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On Covid

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Re: On Covid

#41

Post by watwut »

basisword wrote: post #20

Maybe he’s right. Hopefully he’s right. But personally, I feel like this is just more shortsightedness. I’ve lost track of the number of times my employer thought it was time to get back to the office - only for restrictions to be increased a month later as cases rise. This cycle repeats and people seem to not learn. They get overly optimistic and then kicked in the teeth. Yes, things are better than they’ve been but…

> I’ve lost track of the number of times my employer thought it was time to get back to the office

This has nothing to do with employer thinking and trying to predict covid.

This is all about some managers feeling lonely. And even as it sounds cynical, I really mean it and think it is factor in this. The other factors are also some management feeling less in control or thinking it will be more productive. But imo, them feeling lonely, especially those who have no real social life outside of work, is a factor.

People love to pretend that companies and management are all about rationality, but they are not. Their emotions influence their actions a lot (so are developers emotions etc).

Re: On Covid

#42

Post by kevingadd »

dmitrybrant wrote: post #25
elliottkember wrote: post #4

> First, we have less severe variants now. Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.

New variants of viruses can arise at any point in the future, regardless of what we do. Any flu season in any previous year in history could have produced a deadly variant, and yet we went on with our lives. I think this is simply about reassessing our risk calculus with the fact that the current Covid variant is mild enough that it can be gradually folded into the background noise of seasonal viruses that we deal wi…

If you don't have any cases you won't get any new variants, because variants arise when the virus mutates while reproducing in the human body. More cases = more opportunities for a mutation that produces a more dangerous variant.

Re: On Covid

#43

Post by tjr225 »

e40 wrote: post #27
wokwokwok wrote: post #17

> It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on. Is it? I mean, I’d like that to be true too. …but are things not still a bit too screwed up to be pretending everything is fine quite yet? > The current 7-day moving average of new deaths (1,74…

When hospitals are not choked with unvaccinated people, that's the time to stop obsessing. I'm still reading too many stories of people dying of non-covid reasons because they can't get medical care due to unvaccinated people taking up those resources. EDIT: all parts of each country are not equal. In the Bay Area, the hospitals are doing (mostly) fine.

At what point do we blame our broken health care system that seemingly can’t handle something as mild as omicron? Now.

Re: On Covid

#44

Post by it_does_follow »

the_snooze wrote: post #12
elliottkember wrote: post #4

> First, we have less severe variants now. Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.

We have the technology to make COVID just a nuisance to broad swaths of the population. Let them live their lives. Now is absolutely the time to quit the tut-tutting. I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.

Because it's not an "easy W" and treating it like it is causes more deaths.

Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.

I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.

Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.

There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.

0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

Re: On Covid

#45

Post by kevingadd »

tjr225 wrote: post #43
e40 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When hospitals are not choked with unvaccinated people, that's the time to stop obsessing. I'm still reading too many stories of people dying of non-covid reasons because they can't get medical care due to unvaccinated people taking up those resources. EDIT: all parts of each country are not equal. In the Bay Area, the hospitals are doing (mostly) fine.

At what point do we blame our broken health care system that seemingly can’t handle something as mild as omicron? Now.

We can blame both. People talking about herd immunity and intentionally filling the hospitals are going to overwhelm any system, and european countries had problems like this too when COVID was at its worst there.

Re: On Covid

#46

Post by theli0nheart »

eli wrote: post #9

Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave). I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were liter…

I am a parent of young children, and we probably have more reason to feel "over it" than other folks. I spent the first two weeks of this year balancing full-time work with a kid at home because he tested positive. I got a fever for about a day, but that was it. But the disruption to my work and his education was far worse than any alternative. The entire class ended up getting sick with COVID anyways.

We were triple-vaccinated. Our kid had his first shot in early December. We spent basically all of December in lockdown. All of the little one's playdates were cancelled because everyone was freaking out about Omicron. And we still got sick. What was the point?

I'm absolutely done with the lockdowns, the masks, the strict controls, etc. The older people in my life are sick of it as well; they don't know how many years they have to live, and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives holed up inside a building. We have lives to live.

Hopefully, we as a race start taking into account quality of life in addition to length of life. We have a looming mental health crisis on our hands and it's exactly because of the fear-mongering; who knows how many years we're going to have to spend cleaning up this mess (it will probably be decades).

If you haven't gotten sick from COVID yet, you probably will. At this point it really is just a virus. The time for pulling out all the stops to prevent ICU overflows is over. This might be a permanant fixture in our lives and I'm more sick of the constant fear-setting than I am from the virus itself.

Re: On Covid

#47

Post by Ozzie_osman »

Most of the discussion in the threads is around whether covid is over as a pandemic.

I think this post gets something else wrong.. The economic story. The claim in the post is "covid is over, so everything will reset to precovid levels." I think there's a much bigger correction happening potentially that will be worse than "we're right back where we started".

Re: On Covid

#48

Post by kevingadd »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #23
eli wrote: post #9

Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave). I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were liter…

There's a difference between effectiveness against "new cases" vs. heavy illness. Deaths/severity is not rising even though there are a lot of new cases. Deaths ( = going down): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#... Severe cases ( small increase): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#... While new cases > x 7 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#…

Deaths per day is higher on the chart you linked than it was not too long ago.

Re: On Covid

#49

Post by micromacrofoot »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #5
shafyy wrote: post #3

> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway. We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing. I really hope he's right and it's normalized, but I do fear that many people will go back to not staying at home and not wearing masks when they feel sick. And people who do wear masks, will do so catching lampooning gazes from others.

> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway. My understanding was that mask-wearing was mostly to protect others . Has that changed?

This was my understanding about surgical masks pre-covid, but I plan on wearing a better-sealing (KN95, KF94, N95) on public transportation, airplanes, and in busy places like supermarkets for the rest of my life. If I can avoid even 10% of the colds or other viruses over the course of my life it seems like a very worthwhile tradeoff.

Re: On Covid

#50

Post by ramesh31 »

What worries me more is the next time, when there's multiple different viruses and the death rate is much higher.

Given that there are two possible scenarios for the origin of COVID; natural transmission or lab origin, I find the former to be a far more terrifying prospect. If it were a lab outbreak, that's a protocol problem that can be addressed to prevent it in the future. If it was natural transmission, why hasn't this happened before? Why isn't it happening again right now? Why isn't there 10 different viruses at once, that are much more deadly? What happens when that occurs? If this happened naturally, it will happen again. And I just pray that we are prepared.

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