Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Covid

avc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 159 posts

Re: On Covid

#81

Post by bairrd »

refurb wrote: post #74
bairrd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of…

Feel free to hide under a rock avoiding covid while ignoring all the other risks you take everyday. Hospitals hit capacity during flu seasons - did you wear a mask everyone, keep your kids home, work from home and cancel all travel plans? I’ll bet you didn’t even know they were at capacity. I’m vaccined, I’m moving on with life.

Risk mitigation whilst hospitals are at capacity? Nah, gotta live my life! Otherwise they might perceive me as weak-willed, and more important than my continued existence is to ensure I am not perceived as a weakling! Anything else is others being hysterical! Fuck doctors, am I right!

Re: On Covid

#82

Post by afavour »

standardsam wrote: post #63
afavour wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broad logic is more infections = more variants. Which makes sense in a purely statistical way, since variants are happened upon by chance on infection.

It seems the messaging from the experts is different in the US and the UK. The message in the UK broadly is: expect to be infected with COVID multiple times throughout your life, vaccination and prior infection should protect you from serious illness.

That's probably the more realistic expectation. Especially when the west is doing very, very little to help curb infections elsewhere in the world. Until they become interested in that there will always be a fresh supply of variants arriving.

Re: On Covid

#83

Post by oxymoran »

A)wasn’t hard to see covid coming, no insider info was needed. 2 years ago I, an insurance adjuster with no inside info, was freaking out about what was happening in China. B)The unwinding of the covid trade has nothing to do with the current stock market implosion. Peloton and Netflix aren’t down because covid is ending. All stocks were inflated because of a decade of quantitative easing and 0% interest rates. Some were further inflated more due to covid. But the money printer has stopped going brrrr and interest rates are going to rise soon which is being priced into the market. Buckle up, we are heading for recession. Also not hard to see if you are paying attention.

Re: On Covid

#84

Post by the_snooze »

it_does_follow wrote: post #79
the_snooze wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to get more people vaccinated. Not to ask more of people who are already vaccinated. Vaccinated people have done their part effectively removing themselves as burdens on COVID wards. The leverage point is in getting more people into that protected population. Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted…

> We have vaccines. Take the damn win. Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0]. There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no mea…

You have to disaggregate those statistics to account for vaccination status. Here's NYC's dashboard. Huge differences in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths between the vaxxed and unvaxxed population. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily

Again, this is very simple. Given that the vaccines work, then this pandemic is over for those who are vaccinated. I'm quite happy to change my tune if it turns out vaccines don't work though.

Re: On Covid

#85

Post by jaywalk »

the_snooze wrote: post #53
it_does_follow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The solution is to get more people vaccinated. Not to ask more of people who are already vaccinated. Vaccinated people have done their part effectively removing themselves as burdens on COVID wards. The leverage point is in getting more people into that protected population. Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted…

Prior infection gives far more protection than vaccination, and a combination of both is as good as it gets (although the addition of vaccination to prior infection gives much less additional protection than prior infection alone): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm

Re: On Covid

#86

Post by standardsam »

kevingadd wrote: post #42
dmitrybrant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Covid is here to stay, and you can be expect to be infected with it every few years. You probably won't even know it's covid because we will have stopped routine testing. Talk about having zero cases is ridiculous and fanciful.

Re: On Covid

#87

Post by GrandMasterPuba »

I feel like I'm being gaslit. By blog posts, the media, Twitter, social media, my work - everyone.

I keep up to date with the latest studies on Covid. Sars-Cov-2 is not a respiratory virus; it's a circulatory virus. And its long term effects on the body are not widely understood.

Everyone is acting like because Omicron doesn't make you cough that Covid is over. But scientists are finding deeply concerning long term effects - neurological effects, telomere and biological aging effects, autoimmune activation, long Covid, micro blood clotting - in a non-trivial percentage of Covid cases. Even asymptomatic and vaccinated individuals.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that having Covid will result in a lifelong disability for at least some percentage of survivors.

But we just ignore that so we can go back to normal? Because Covid is "endemic?" Endemicity was the failure state - it means we gave up. Covid should have never gotten to that point.

Re: On Covid

#88

Post by it_does_follow »

refurb wrote: post #71
wokwokwok wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

800000 people have died over the past two years in the US alone. That’s an order of magnitude difference. That’s why the response was an order of magnitude more substantial. I’m baffled you think this is somehow surprising.

I’m baffled my point went over your head. We have tens of thousands of thousands of deaths every year . In the past decade 300,000 died of the flu and nobody notices .

People did notice. Pre-pandemic this was the major reason most people got flu vaccines: it's nice not to get the flu, but even nicer not to kill grandma when you visit the nursing home. Bad flu seasons were heavily reported, and people were aware that, while mild to most, the flu can be very deadly to at risk populations.

In pre-pandemic years if there was a flu as contagious as omicron people would be in a panic.

I'm sorry you don't like reality, I've never been a huge fan myself, but what's happening is happening.

Re: On Covid

#89

Post by disambiguation »

afavour wrote: post #36
refurb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of people die everyday during bad flu epidemics like 2018 when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season. We didn’t keep kids from school, we didn’t panic when hospitals were overwhelmed, we didn’t shut down businesses.

> when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season Where are you getting that number? CDC estimates 27k: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html which puts it below current COVID numbers by a big chunk. > We didn’t keep kids from school At this point schools are largely closed because there are too many teachers out sick to teach effectively. There isn't a particularly simple answer here.

Weird, here's another CDC source that cites a non-finalized estimate of 61k (45k - 95k)

The lower bound itself is higher than the 27k estimate.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

Re: On Covid

#90

Post by oxymoran »

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.

Current logic: There are hospitals that are forcing covid positive staff to work but not letting staff that has had covid already but isn’t vaccinated work.

Similar logic: shutting down nuclear power plants and then complaining that there isn’t enough power.

More similar logic: allowing decades of fuel to build up on the bottom of forests and then expressing befuddlement when wild fires burn out of control.

What’s the common thread here?

Post reply on HN