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Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

brusselstimes.com

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Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#91

Post by HatchedLake721 »

enchiridion wrote: post #88
zzzeek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% about hospital capacity and mass death. When hospitals around the country are no longer turning away cancer patients needing treatments and have plenty of ICUs for heart attacks and such, when they no longer have to rent fleets of refrigerator trucks every outbreak to store the bodies, the restrictions will end. It has always been about that and nothing more.

How about scale up the hospitals, or at least covid capacity in a meaningful way. How long does they public have to bear burden of insufficient health infra. EDIT: Sorry that might have come off a bit blunt. But the entire pandemic response has been frustratingly insufficient in my opinion. A variant like Omicron was long predicted and expected. How are we not prepared with a plan to end lockdowns? And blaming unvacc…

And who will staff them?

https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/uk-lacks-nursing-staff-to-...

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#92

Post by [deleted] »

anonygler wrote: post #37
makk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitalizations tend to precede fatalities. While I hope you're right, it's too early (by a couple weeks in the US, at least) to start trumpeting a "minuscule fatality rate". https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/current-covid-patients-ho...

Unless you’re elderly or have health issues, Covid fatality rate was already very, very low. Therapeutics make that even better.

[deleted]

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#93

Post by WalterBright »

yosito wrote: post #85
freetinker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure; respectfully disagree. This only talks about process stricture, not efficacy or process compliance/lapse. Plausible hypothesis, but needs more data.

If I've learned something about people during the pandemic, it's that the average person is far less intelligent and far less compliant than I previously believed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out this was caused by people not complying with protocols. Or at the very least, not having an understanding of the fact that COVID transmission is aerosol, and that breathing reshared air even for a few secon…

Reminds me of the fact that you can fool people into believing the school system is effective, that a record number of tractors was produced, that the leader got elected with 96% of the vote, but you simply cannot fool people into thinking they aren't starving to death.

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#94

Post by mattkrause »

jerlam wrote: post #45
baxtr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is good enough though? I always thought the whole prevention thing is because we want to “flatten the curve”, remember? Not to prevent every single infection, which is impossible.

Different places, different goals. If you're on an Antarctic base where medical facilities are meager and the time and cost for evacuation is high, zero infections is likely the goal. As an extreme example, the US grounded an astronaut for being exposed, not infected, by measles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Mattingly#Apollo_13

As another fun example, the doctor (and only the doctor) overwintering in Antartica needs to have had their appendix out.

Medical evacuations are tricky, especially in the winter, and the logic is that the (single) doctor could remove someone else's appendix, but it would much harder for them to remove their own. Leonid Rogozov did remove his own in the 1960s, but I think most stations would prefer to avoid a repeat of that.

It did make for a fascinating BMJ Christmas Article though, written by his son: https://web.archive.org/web/20100925041337/http://www.bmj.co...

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#95

Post by Auracle »

petercooper wrote: post #25

Viruses are interesting things. I once enjoyed a case study about an outbreak of common cold on an Antarctic base that only happened after 17 weeks of isolation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ (I'm no virologist but given that the common cold didn't seem to be impacted by the severe lockdowns in the UK at all, whereas flu was, I've gotten the - uneducated - feeling the cold is a bit like some S…

If I get really low on sleep I’ll usually develop a cold, even if I haven’t been around anyone that’s had one in some time. I feel like there’s a lot to virology we don’t have a good grasp on.

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#96

Post by _0w8t »

ashtonkem wrote: post #67
Gigachad wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is being 99.9% effective just isn't good enough. One person slips through and it's all over. It isn't realistically possible to keep covid out of areas.

That’s really not true though. 99.9% effective might not be good enough for an Antarctic research base, but that’s a pretty unusual circumstance. We’d be thrilled if our current countermeasures against Covid were 99.9% effective; we would’ve ended this in 2020 if that were the case. If I understand correctly, you can mathematically model how effective countermeasures have to be in order to suppress a virus with a giv…

Can you give a source for that 93% efficiency of measles vaccine? Accuracy for 2 digits is very suspicious. Measles symptoms depend strongly on nutrition deficiencies with insufficient vitamin C being especially bad. If that is not the case, one can be asymptomatic and then we never know about infection.

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#97

Post by nradov »

lettergram wrote: post #83
petercooper wrote: post #25

Viruses are interesting things. I once enjoyed a case study about an outbreak of common cold on an Antarctic base that only happened after 17 weeks of isolation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ (I'm no virologist but given that the common cold didn't seem to be impacted by the severe lockdowns in the UK at all, whereas flu was, I've gotten the - uneducated - feeling the cold is a bit like some S…

The CDC recently admitted as much. People can test positive for covid weeks after initially testing positive. Which implies they still are shedding the virus. https://twitter.com/abc/status/1476189028982702080?s=21

A positive test indicates they are probably shedding pieces of viral genetic material. It doesn't necessarily mean they are shedding active virions. Sometimes there are just leftover fragments. In other rare cases immunocompromised individuals can experience prolonged active infections lasting for months.

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#98

Post by mattkrause »

ssl232 wrote: post #47
jobe_br wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two options: quarantine bubble failure or incubation longer than .. 15 days? Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.

Third option: flawed hypothesis. Swabbing the nose or throat and performing subsequent RT-PCR analysis is not an infallable indicator of whether or not someone is free from the virus SARS-CoV-2 or infected with or likely to become infected with the respiratory disease COVID-19. Before 2020 such tests were typically only used as a part of a diagnosis by a medical professional upon consultation, typically also alongsid…

Not sure there are many animal reservoirs in Antartica, where the only mammals are seals and cetaceans, neither of which have much human contact.

Re: Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures

#99

Post by trophycase »

ryandrake wrote: post #87
bmeski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mandates. No vaccine passbooks or apps. Return jobs to employees lost because of vaccine compliance/rebuild small businesses (If this is somehow possible but the damage is already done). No mask requirements. Covid-19 Vaccines are available and treated in the same way as flu vaccines once FDA approved. Yknow, normal.

Quoted post unavailable.

This is one of the worst nitpicks I've ever seen in my life. "Normal" implies removing all virus related mandates and restrictions. It's obvious what gp meant
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