981–990 of 1001 posts
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Meanwhile my friend who is a nurse in the UCLA hospital complex says they’re so understaffed because they let so many people go/nurses retired or quit that all nurses are allowed to come to work if they’ve tested positive but their symptoms are improving
This is a perfect sign of what I’m talking about. They fucked around with these people for so long that when they need them, actually need them, they aren’t there. They rolled the dice in an assumption that they held sufficient economic power to control them. Now they are left exposing patients to covid as a necessity to prevent their operations from completely ceasing. That is failure by any other name.
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He's a former FDA commissioner, so his opinion is arguably relevant. I'm not sure why they called him "Pfizer board member." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Gottlieb
Is it because he's a board member? I remember a time when people thought it worrying when regulators moved to highly paid positions of the companies they were in charge of regulating.
But yeah, having our required health treatments controlled by a group of Goldman Sachs et al executives and former regulators collecting large payouts from a company they previously regulated isn't ideal.
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> So in that sense, the response to COVID is similar - though on an accelerated time scale, because the epidemic is much worse. Tobacco still causes 480K+ deaths a year in the US so saying covid is worse is a very strong claim. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
Thanks for bringing those numbers. Kind of crazy to me that tobacco still causes so many deaths - I had no idea. I think the epidemic is worse in a few particular ways (though obviously not as bad in other ways as smoking, since I doubt COVID will keep causing 480k deaths a year). Ways in which it is worse: 1. It causes a spike of hospitalizations - this causes much less healthcare to be available in general. Smoking…
2, Whole heartedly disagree with. Covid has specific health risk factors (Obesity, Diabetes etc) that long term people have a similar level of control over as smoking. People also have direct control over how much risk they want to take; there are vaccines, there are therapies, there are N95 Masks & no one is forcing you to go to a bar/club/sporting-event.
3. I'm not going to attribute to Covid the panic and over-reaction because of its novelty. Just like we don't attribute to the 9/11 terrorists the destabilization of the middle east and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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Obesity is a complicated disease that manifests through a variety of biological, behavioral, and environmental factors. These factors differ widely between individuals. I think there are mandates that could help make the disease less prevalent, but it is very much ingrained in our daily life, so I'm cynical as to the efficacy of such measures. It's very difficult to mandate behavioral (look at how many people don't e…
>Obesity is a complicated disease that manifests through a variety of biological, behavioral, and environmental factors. Obesity is not a disease . It is a condition defined as a Body Mass Index (BMI) of >30[0]. Yes, there are a variety of factors that contribute to a BMI >30, but like "tobacco use disorder," it's emphatically not a disease. Some obesity may be related to actual diseases, but obesity in itself isn't…
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Sorry what? Yes, this has happened many times in many regions during this pandemic. If anything, as governments lean more and more into "let's just call it endemic and give into anti-vaxxers," it's happening more. And to make it concrete: where I live we're into emergency (as in, stretching the system past its limits) ICU capacity and elective procedures (which, please note, does not mean optional) have been cancelle…
I don't know where you live but they cancelled those things here as well. Not because of the unvaxed but because 30% of nurses who are triple vaxxed were down with covid.
Severe outcomes stretch the system more, and unvaccinated people have more severe outcomes.
At any rate, if those nurses weren't vaccinated it's likely more than 30% would be out and a significant portion of them would be dead, so if you want to go down the "vaccines make people sick/more likely to be sick" path then you've just fallen off the rails. The path you have in mind would be a mass death event our medical systems are completely unequipped to handle.
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Some unvaccinated are immunocompromised. I know someone who could not get vaccinated for medical reasons (legitimately), and caught it, and died. It just really sucks to know that the person I know would more likely be alive if not for the choices of others.
Vaccination does not prevent one from being contagious. On the contrary, vaccination could lead to more risky behavior. Which of these two people are more likely to spread COVID: 1. An unvaccinated person who rarely leaves their house and avoids contact with people as much as possible. 2. A vaccinated individual with an asymptomatic infection who regularly engages in social activity, confident that their triple-boost…
> Vaccination does not prevent one from being contagious.
I never said it did, that's not even a counterpoint. Seat belts do not prevent car accident injuries, helmets do not prevent concussions. But they all are effective in reducing the probability.
> On the contrary,
Note the common form of the straw man.
> Vaccination could lead to more risky behavior.
"could", an imagining of some sort of scenario that works for whatever reality you're trying to believe in
> Which of these two people are more likely to spread COVID:
Apparently you think those two options are exhaustive?? Eliding right past the public behavior of the non-immunocompromised unvaccinated? Ignoring the point that if more unvaccinated people were vaccinated and boosted, it would be less likely that vaccinated people engaged in social activity would spread COVID? So, no thank you, I will not ignore a reality that hit me viscerally in favor of your theories of what "could" be true.
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A non trivial portion of excess deaths can be laid at the feet of the response to the virus, not necessarily the virus itself. This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on surviv…
we maybe fired less than a tenth of a percent of health care workers. and most were not even nurses they were janitors and the like. a few thousands in a field of hundreds of thousands. if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.
And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.
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I agree with this, and I do not think it contradicts my original statement. You cannot prevent new variants, but you can reduce the rate of their emergence. The paper you cite supports this: in a case study of a single immunocompromised patient who---because of that---had a prolonged infection, many replications of the virus were observed. This patient represents a "hot spot" of variant emergence in this furthermore…
We don't do anything to reduce the rate of emergence of new variants of HCoV-OC43, another betacoronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 in terms of genetics and clinical effects. So far that hasn't been a problem. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026240792...
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We don't do anything to reduce the rate of emergence of new variants of HCoV-OC43, another betacoronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 in terms of genetics and clinical effects. So far that hasn't been a problem. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026240792...
That virus has also not caused a global, multi-year long pandemic. In this context, your reference seems tangential to me. Vaccinations ought to reduce SARS-CoV-2 variant emergence rates by virtue of reducing viral replications.