Coronavirus

[pilowsky]

One of the biggest concerns with using the sars-cov-2 spike protein for vaccinations was that it is a protein that interacts with the Angiotensin system to gain access into cells.

This instantly led to two fears, neither of which is supported by any evidence.

 

First, people thought that if you were being treated for hypertension with drugs that blocked Angiotensin receptors then this might somehow make COVID19 worse [1]. I think this is the opposite of the truth. If you stop taking effective antihypertensive then you are probably going to be more unwell. Secondly, one of the reasons that America is suffering so badly is that they have an obesity epidemic. There is a close association between obesity, bad lipids, hypertension and diabetes. It is so well-known that it has a name: The metabolic syndrome (or Syndrome X - same thing).

 

Secondly, people were concerned that because the vaccine acts on something that is part of normal mammalian physiology, there may be a risk of autoimmune problems [2]. This also turns out not to be true.

 

In summary, get whatever vaccine you can as soon as you can UNLESS you have a specific contraindication - that's why someone will take a brief history from you (or should) when you get it.

Some people can be allergic to the carrier (very very very rare - but bad if you happen to be the one).

As for variance, it depends on the outcome being measured. Even the so-called 'poor vaccines' still markedly reduce viral load thereby decreasing the risk of serious illness. The same is true of 'flu vaccines.

 

Finally, please do not just believe anything you read on Google or Wikipedia. Even some scientific 'Journals' are bogus, but you have to be in the biz to know which publishers are reputable, and which are not.

 

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7296326/

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428639/

[kenberg]

So the virus has undergone mutation, maybe controllable, maybe not.

And the Trump supporters still refuse to wear masks.

The devastation from Trump's insistence on denial is moving from incalculable to unimaginable.

We will do what we can, but it would really help if Trump supporters would acknowledge reality.

 

[pilowsky]

So the virus has undergone mutation, maybe controllable, maybe not.

And the Trump supporters still refuse to wear masks.

The devastation from Trump's insistence on denial is moving from incalculable to unimaginable.

We will do what we can, but it would really help if Trump supporters would acknowledge reality.

 

 

The problem with calling them 'Trump' supporters is that although voting for Trump is a characteristic of all of this 'set' of people. It does not explain their bizarre thinking and behaviour.

There is something very 'child-like' about the approach to life in general of these people.

 

They seem to have only three considerations in any social interaction: me, me and me.

 

Couple this with a highly-synthesised fatalism - I control nothing I do only by an ephemeral supreme being (God, Q whoever it doesn't really matter) and suddenly you have a Manson family of 76,000,000 people - approximately.

 

I despair at people that are willing to take everything they hear at face value. The problem for other people in their orbit is that they only choose to believe things that seem to give a positive short-term benefit to themselves.

 

Everything, to the contrary, is 'wrong'.

 

I listened to Marjorie Taylor Greens yesterday interacting with a CNN journalist. She spoke the same way as Kayleigh M. Or Donald T. - smug, self-satisfied, arrogant and completely off the point. Even slime mould behaves socially in times of stress. These group of people haven't developed emotionally past the age of 10.

 

If there is something, they want or need; they will shoot you to get it. Grown-ups do not behave this way.

 

They are the same as the 'pod people' in 'Night of the living dead', or the 'Stepford wives': they look like people, they use words, they walk on two legs, but something isn't there: http://bit.ly/ZombiesShesNotThere

[Winstonm]

I characterize these persons as “libertarians” - and admit that may not be entirely accurate or fair. Above all they are the privileged by whiteness - and they are immensely pissed not that they are losing that privilege but that they are being called out over it.

[kenberg]

Rightly or wrongly, I was focused on the Trump role.

If he had encouraged taking the virus seriously his followers, many of them, would have acted more responsibly.

But if course he didn't. He encouraged fantasy. We all know that.

My point is that many of us look to leaders for advice. Unfortunately, that means many looked to Trump.

And now we are approaching a half million deaths and a mutating virus.

 

I'll argue about Libertarianism some other time.

 

Here, I am hoping people, more people, will think a bit and decide the obvious.

We are in one hell of a mess and we need all hands on deck to deal with it. I am confident that there are still some people out there who will come around.

 

Of course, people are responsible for their own mistakes. But Trump could have helped. He hindered. Seriously hindered. History will judge him, harshly no doubt.

But right now, right here, I want to encourage anyone who still can't bring themselves to put on a mask and treat this seriously to think again.

 

As to Greene, there will always be a nut. But she got elected? Trump said how great she was. So his followers voted for her. It's bizarre, seriously bizarre, but that's what happened. Same with masks.

 

In speaking with someone who does not see the need to wear a mask, I put it simply "You get to commit suicide, you don't get to take others with you". Some will think about it and change, some won't. But but but, some will. We need to encourage it.

[Winstonm]

Rightly or wrongly, I was focused on the Trump role.

If he had encouraged taking the virus seriously his followers, many of them, would have acted more responsibly.

But if course he didn't. He encouraged fantasy. We all know that.

My point is that many of us look to leaders for advice. Unfortunately, that means many looked to Trump.

And now we are approaching a half million deaths and a mutating virus.

 

I'll argue about Libertarianism some other time.

 

Here, I am hoping people, more people, will think a bit and decide the obvious.

We are in one hell of a mess and we need all hands on deck to deal with it. I am confident that there are still some people out there who will come around.

 

Of course, people are responsible for their own mistakes. But Trump could have helped. He hindered. Seriously hindered. History will judge him, harshly no doubt.

But right now, right here, I want to encourage anyone who still can't bring themselves to put on a mask and treat this seriously to think again.

 

As to Greene, there will always be a nut. But she got elected? Trump said how great she was. So his followers voted for her. It's bizarre, seriously bizarre, but that's what happened. Same with masks.

 

In speaking with someone who does not see the need to wear a mask, I put it simply "You get to commit suicide, you don't get to take others with you". Some will think about it and change, some won't. But but but, some will. We need to encourage it.

 

I agree with everything you are saying. I admit that I cannot comprehend how anyone can become enslaved by a personality - or join a cult.

 

But at the same time I do not believe the cult of Trump is as big as thought. And because it is not that big, it means that a large number of people who support him do so while holding their noses and pretending he isn't so bad. I'm sure history has had a number of authoritarians who eventually gained power with the same type of supporters.

 

The problem is that it doesn't take that many to ignore the pandemic to make it almost impossible to overcome. Fauci is now saying that it takes 70-85% vaccinated to reach herd immunity. If 20% refuse, that leaves little room for error among the rest.

 

Perhaps those who refuse would like the climate on Elba?

[pilowsky]

I get what you're saying Ken, but the problem is that unlike you and me, some people will not believe or change when presented with a rational argument.

Instead, what you get is a praecox feeling¹ (http://bit.ly/Praecox). It's as though you are talking to someone, they seem to be listening, but they aren't.

I'm sure that you have had students like this. No matter how you try to explain something, they lack the mental agility to pick at it and discover what you are getting at.

 

Reductio ad absurdum, if all people could store, synthesise and understand everything you told them, Einstein would not have discovered relativity, my grandfather, the trainee Rabbi, would have.

And so would all his mates, but they didn't - as Dr Suess might say.

 

In that way, Bridge is a synecdoche for life; some people will rapidly grasp all the game's key elements (even the Laws and Rulings) and rapidly become superstars.

Others of us are doomed to be 'bound in shallows and in miseries', which is not good luck, partner.

 

When you say 'Trump supporters' - we have them in Australia as well - I imagine a group of people that are susceptible to believing in something not because it makes sense, but because they want it to be true so much that it anaesthetises that part of their brain that thinks rationally.

 

In Good Will Hunting, the maths Professor asks his Social Sciences colleague (after his friend has bought a lottery ticket) what he thinks the chances of winning the million-dollar prize is. "Oh, about one in seven".

 

There is nothing you can do to convince these people. Everything they say and do is just a bit of fun.

In fact, they probably enjoy the sense of outrage they can see that it provokes as you turn slightly red and say 'but but but..'

 

What motivates them? They enjoy the life they have, the 'Harm principle' (http://bit.ly/HarmPNAS)² means about as much to them as the feelings of fish mean to Great White Shark.

Sure they get that it's bad to be eaten, but hey man I'm hungry, I want to open my travel/coffee shop and sell masterpoints to apparently intelligent people (or fish - they don't care).

 

Well, I think I've mangled that metaphor as much as possible - I'll leave it at that for now.

 

1. The praecox feeling concept is undergoing a bit of a rethink in psychiatry, but it is a great shorthand. Review Schizophr Bull. 2019 Sep 11;45(5):966-970. DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sby17

 

2. I would love to know what the mathematicians make of this paper! Reassessing "Praecox Feeling" in Diagnostic Decision Making in Schizophrenia: A Critical Review. 2017 Jul 10. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706693114)

[thepossum]

On some level, they all do the same thing: somehow produce copies of the coronavirus spike protein inside your body, so your immune system learns to fight it.

In the case of mRNA vaccines, they just spam cells in your body with the RNA code to produce the spike protein. (This is part of the normal replication process of viruses within the body - hijacking your cells with their RNA to reproduce copies of the original virus.) In the case of AstraZeneca, Sputnik, Johnson & Johnson, they changed the genetic code of another (harmless to humans) virus so that it also includes the coronavirus spike protein. In the case of Novavax, they basically grow lots of spike proteins in their factories, which you then get injected directly.

 

Thx Cherdano. Was wondering if it was just a variant on the "all psychotherapies are about as effective as each other" thing :)

 

Some of us out here like variance. Its gives us a bit more trust :)

 

Some of us also like outliers, extremes, strange distributions, despite so many being taught they have to delete those annoying things

 

If anyone asked me what concerns me most about people's understanding of statistics it would be lack of understanding of the Central Limit Theorem

 

But something of even more concern is the possible impact of the dollar over peoples approach to analysis

 

E

[johnu]

 

The problem is that it doesn't take that many to ignore the pandemic to make it almost impossible to overcome. Fauci is now saying that it takes 70-85% vaccinated to reach herd immunity. If 20% refuse, that leaves little room for error among the rest.

 

About 25% of the population is under 18, and there isn't emergency use for <18 Moderna, and <16 for Pfizer. No telling when the vaccines will be ok'd for minors. So the margin of error to get to herd immunity is very small indeed.

 

Over 30 percent of Americans say they won't get COVID-19 vaccine: poll

 

Sixty-seven percent of survey respondents said they plan to get vaccinated or have already received an inoculation, including 19 percent who said they “probably will,” 35 percent who said they “definitely will,” and 13 percent who said they have already gotten their shot.

 

The poll found that people ages 30-44, Republican voters and people without college degrees were among the most likely to say that they “definitely will not” get a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available to them.

[pilowsky]

I've just discovered that Led Zeppelin is the reason that the COVID19 problem was not solved earlier.

It turns out that Jimmy Page wanted to be a biologist and study germs.

 

But he got distracted, which is a shame.

http://bit.ly/JimmyPageGerms

[y66]

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/how-much-do-we-value-covid-safety.html

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-deltas-big-bet-on-blocking-middle-seats-means-for-flying-11612966066

 

The grand experiment of blocking the middle seat on airplanes has proved what we have known all along about air travel: More people care about a cheap fare than comfort, or even pandemic safety.

 

Delta announced on Monday that it was extending its middle-seat block for one more month, to the end of April. Delta, the last U.S. airline to block all middle seats in coach, will consider further extensions based on Covid-19 transmission and vaccination rates.

 

So far, Delta thinks it’s earning goodwill and confidence with customers, particularly business travelers, who aren’t traveling now but will come back. Some who’ve flown during the pandemic have been willing to pay Delta more for more space onboard. Most have been price-sensitive leisure travelers willing to sit shoulder-to-shoulder for cheap fares—on airlines not blocking middle seats…

 

The bottom line for Delta during the pandemic has been bigger losses than rival airlines selling all their seats. Delta was the most profitable U.S. airline in the final six months of 2019. That flipped during the pandemic. In the last six months of 2020, Delta had the biggest losses, with a net loss of more than $6 billion, greater than United and Southwest combined.

 

Mr. Lentsch says Delta can’t keep blocking middle seats forever.

I do get there is an externality here, so people are not paying enough for those more spacious Delta seats, as they do not take their higher risk to others into sufficient account. Still, a lot of the risk here is private, and I feel the public health community in the United States has not been willing to look such data in the face squarely enough. Is the public policy problem about minimizing “lives lost,” or maximizing “welfare,” or giving people “what they want”? Or some combination of those? Who exactly has been good at thinking through those trade-offs?

 

Have the pandemic population flows been into the relatively strict Vermont and California, or to the relatively open Florida and Texas?

 

To what extent is the real externality a kind of degradation of the public sphere, and the spread of stress and mental health problems, rather than the health of others per se?

 

Worth a ponder.

[pilowsky]

FYI

Australia's vaccine roll-out strategy - due to start this month.

http://bit.ly/OZCOVID19

[thepossum]

I've just discovered that Led Zeppelin is the reason that the COVID19 problem was not solved earlier.

It turns out that Jimmy Page wanted to be a biologist and study germs.

 

But he got distracted, which is a shame.

http://bit.ly/JimmyPageGerms

 

Who knows what he would achieved in anything he tried but we would have lost this

 

 

I was amused and concerned at the comment that since he didnt have enough brains to be a doctor he wanted to do research instead. No disrespect intended in any direction :)

[pilowsky]

Who knows what he would achieved in anything he tried but we would have lost this

 

 

I was amused and concerned at the comment that since he didnt have enough brains to be a doctor he wanted to do research instead. No disrespect intended in any direction :)

 

haha - I did Medicine instead of science because I was worried that science would be too hard.

 

I read somewhere that as far as working things out went there was no difference between Science and Med students, but Med students tended to have better 'pattern recognition' memories.

I've no idea if there is any truth to this.

[thepossum]

haha - I did Medicine instead of science because I was worried that science would be too hard.

 

I read somewhere that as far as working things out went there was no difference between Science and Med students, but Med students tended to have better 'pattern recognition' memories.

I've no idea if there is any truth to this.

 

I have no idea on that score. Different people do have very different minds and strengths and weaknesses IMO :)

[y66]

Spring 2020 brought with it the arrival of the celebrity statistical model. As the public tried to gauge how big a deal the coronavirus might be in March and April, it was pointed again and again to two forecasting systems: one built by Imperial College London, the other by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, based in Seattle.

 

But the models yielded wildly divergent predictions. Imperial warned that the U.S. might see as many as 2 million Covid-19 deaths by the summer, while the IHME forecast was far more conservative, predicting about 60,000 deaths by August. Neither, it turned out, was very close. The U.S. ultimately reached about 160,000 deaths by the start of August.

 

The huge discrepancy in the forecasting figures that spring caught the attention of a then 26-year-old data scientist named Youyang Gu. The young man had a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another degree in mathematics, but no formal training in a pandemic-related area such as medicine or epidemiology. Still, he thought his background dealing with data models could prove useful during the pandemic.

 

In mid-April, while he was living with his parents in Santa Clara, Calif., Gu spent a week building his own Covid death predictor and a website to display the morbid information. Before long, his model started producing more accurate results than those cooked up by institutions with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and decades of experience.

 

“His model was the only one that seemed sane,” says Jeremy Howard, a renowned data expert and research scientist at the University of San Francisco. “The other models were shown to be nonsense time and again, and yet there was no introspection from the people publishing the forecasts or the journalists reporting on them. Peoples’ lives were depending on these things, and Youyang was the one person actually looking at the data and doing it properly.”

 

The forecasting model that Gu built was, in some ways, simple. He had first considered examining the relationship among Covid tests, hospitalizations, and other factors but found that such data was being reported inconsistently by states and the federal government. The most reliable figures appeared to be the daily death counts. “Other models used more data sources, but I decided to rely on past deaths to predict future deaths,” Gu says. “Having that as the only input helped filter the signal from the noise.”

 

The novel, sophisticated twist of Gu’s model came from his use of machine learning algorithms to hone his figures. After MIT, Gu spent a couple years working in the financial industry writing algorithms for high-frequency trading systems in which his forecasts had to be accurate if he wanted to keep his job. When it came to Covid, Gu kept comparing his predictions to the eventual reported death totals and constantly tuned his machine learning software so that it would lead to ever more precise prognostications. Even though the work required the same hours as a demanding full-time job, Gu volunteered his time and lived off his savings. He wanted his data to be seen as free of any conflicts of interest or political bias.

 

While certainly not perfect, Gu’s model performed well from the outset. In late April he predicted the U.S. would see 80,000 deaths by May 9. The actual death toll was 79,926. A similar late-April forecast from IHME predicted that the U.S. would not surpass 80,000 deaths through all of 2020. Gu also predicted 90,000 deaths on May 18 and 100,000 deaths on May 27, and once again got the numbers right. Where IHME expected the virus to fade away as a result of social distancing and other policies, Gu predicted there would be a second, large wave of infections and deaths as many states reopened from lockdowns.

 

IHME faced some criticism in March and April, when its numbers didn’t match what was happening. Still, the prestigious center, based at the University of Washington and bolstered by more than $500 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was cited on an almost daily basis during briefings by members of President Donald Trump’s Administration. In April, U.S. infectious-disease chief Anthony Fauci told an interviewer that Covid’s death toll “looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000” once expected—a prediction that reflected IHME forecasts. And on April 19, the same day Gu cautioned about a second wave, Trump pointed to IHME’s 60,000-death forecast as an indicator that the fight against the virus would soon be over.

 

IHME officials also actively promoted their numbers. “You had the IHME on all these news shows trying to tell people that deaths would go to zero by July,” Gu says. “Anyone with common sense could see we would be at 1,000 to 1,500 daily deaths for a while. I thought it was very disingenuous for them to do that.”

 

Christopher Murray, the director of IHME, says that once the organization got a better handle on the virus after April, its forecasts radically improved.

 

But that spring, week by week, more people started to pay attention to Gu’s work. He flagged his model to reporters on Twitter and e-mailed epidemiologists, asking them to check his numbers. Toward the end of April, the prominent University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom tweeted about Gu’s model, and not long after that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included Gu’s numbers on its Covid forecasting website. As the pandemic progressed, Gu, a Chinese immigrant who grew up in Illinois and California, found himself taking part in regular meetings with the CDC and teams of professional modelers and epidemiologists, as everyone tried to improve their forecasts.

 

Traffic to Gu’s website exploded, with millions of people checking in daily to see what was happening in their states and the U.S. overall. More often than not, his predicted figures ended up hugging the line of actual death figures when they arrived a few weeks later.

 

With such intense interest around these forecasts, more models began to appear through the spring and summer of 2020. Nicholas Reich, an associate professor in the biostatistics and epidemiology department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, collected the 50 or so models and measured their accuracy over many months at the Covid-19 Forecast Hub. “Youyang’s model was consistently among the top,” Reich says.

 

In November, Gu decided to wind down his death forecast operation. Reich had been blending the various forecasts and found that the most accurate predictions came from the this “ensemble model,” or combined data.

 

“Youyang stepped back with a remarkable sense of humility,” Reich says. “He saw the other models were doing well and his work here was done.” A month before stopping the project, Gu had predicted that the U.S. would record 231,000 deaths on Nov. 1. When Nov. 1 arrived, the U.S. reported 230,995 deaths.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-19/covid-pandemic-how-youyang-gu-used-ai-and-data-to-make-most-accurate-prediction?sref=UHfKDqx7

[kenberg]

https://www.bloomber...n?sref=UHfKDqx7

 

A very good article, thanks.

 

Maybe the short version is that it shows how education and intelligence can work together.

 

Education shows how to use some tools, intelligence guides a person on which tool to reach for.

 

At any rate, congrats and appreciation to Gu

[cherdano]

Oh my god a trip to the memory lane. These IHME model were just awful. Moreover, when you'd explain the theory to any random mathematicians, they would either shake their head in disbelief or start laughing.

 

It's wrong though to cite the Imperial models as predictions. The famous 2-million number was a scenario, assuming no serious government measures to stop the spread of covid, and no serious behavioural changes.

 

"Dad, slam the brakes, there is a cyclist on the street!!!" Dad brakes, stops before the cyclist. #lockdownsceptics scream "WHY DID YOU TELL HIM TO BRAKE? SEE, NOTHING HAPPENED!!!"

[thepossum]

Rather concerning. Certain parallels between the huge growing Covid modelling industry and how the Climate Modelling industry has been going for decades

 

Hopefully some people will remember that we are dealing with a global health and social and economic crisis - affecting billions of people - not an opportunity to sit around comparing models and other technologies forever and a day.

 

I know I am risking disrespect but does nobody else have any concerns about how IPCC and the massive associated industries and technologies dominate everything (whether good or not) - same is happening with Covid Tech

 

regarding IPCC most predictions and knowledge can be based on very simple models and physics - they were known decades ago. How many complex models of everything are needed to try to verify what happens - before anyone picks me up I mean easily simplified, conceptualised and explained.

 

And in relation to the conflicted interests of those benefitting from the Climate industry and those who claim to have all the expertise and be able to challenge and silence misinformation I fear the same for some in the new Covid industry. And believe you me, much of the worst misinformation comes from interests having or at least claiming authority

 

When technology, profits and other interest conflict with various types of ethical professions there can be problems - even if not intended

 

Not to mention politics. We are often talking about difficult political and social and economic justice issues which most prefer to put in the too hard basket and go for a nice tech solution. Well looking through history technology has often benefitted the oppressors

 

I know many of us on here are from various maths/science/engineering/tech/modeling type backgrounds. But maybe sometimes I think the world has become obsessed with the tiny technical details and precision at the risk of overfitting highly complex systems, wasting huge resources striving for a tiny bit of variance - its an overfit for those who understand the term

 

What has sadly taken over the world is the kind of precision required for precision machinery being used on humans. Think of an example I actually know a fair bit about - predictive models in psychology where even tiny effects or relatively small amounts of explained variance are regarded with some excitement, I imagine similarly in many health/human/biological/natural systems models. I am all for precision in terms of trying to deal with an individual - I wanted to be a clinician after all but that takes human on human precision - not a model and a machine approach

 

Quick question on Covid tech - whats happening to the mountains of PPE often being used unnecessarily/incorrectly by members of communities. Is it clogging up all our waste systems yet and polluting the planet. Much like the wonderful Lithium industry allegedly clean and green where as far as I know most lithium batteries end up in land fill - not recycled as the industry would have us believe etc etc. Some of us out here actually know enough about enough things and are smart enough to spot BS without being experts. Efficient use of resources taking account of externalities - one for the often maligned economists perhaps

 

Where is the oversight on everything. Its problematic when the same people needed to do oversight are needed elsewhere. It may seem strange to have the same concerns as with the climate industry but since health is now so technological, so engineering and manufacturing focussed, etc etc surely we have a right to have concerns

 

We live in a world that now has fully industrialised and profits from the destruction of a planet and people's lives as well as making massive profits from technology to allegedly fix it up

[Chas_P]

And now, ladies and gentlemen, back to the coronavirus hysteria.https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

[sfi]

Hysteria is an odd word to use on the very day that total deaths in the US from the virus are likely to pass half a million people.

[y66]

Good read: Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid

[johnu]

CDC Director Warns Latest COVID-19 Data Could Spell Trouble For The U.S.

 

“At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

 

Recent declines in cases have leveled off at nearly 70,000 new cases per day, with nearly 2,000 deaths. Those number are both up 2% from the previous seven days, she said.

 

“I remain deeply concerned about a pootential shift in the trajectory of the pandemic,” Walensky said.

 

Vaccine rollout is picking up, but we still have a long way to go, she said, noting that states with aggressive reopening plans pose a serious risk to safety.

 

“With these new statistics, I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19,” Walensky said. “I understand the temptation to do this; 70,000 cases a day seems good compared to where we were just a few months ago. But we cannot be resigned to 70,000 cases a day, 2000 daily deaths.”

 

For the record, 70,000 new cases per day is more cases than anytime in the winter/spring of 2020 when the US was in close to full lockdown, or anytime during the 2nd peak in the summer . 70,000 only looks good because from late October to today has been dismally awful compared to anyplace in the world.

 

Same thing for the ~2,000 deaths per day from Covid. More deaths than that awful time in the spring when the local gov had to bring in dozens of refrigerator trucks to NYC to handle the overflow of dead bodies. For comparison, 2,000 deaths per day is the equivalent of 2 9/11's deaths happening every 3 days.

 

The variants are extremely troubling, because some appear to be somewhat resistant to the available vaccines, which means you may not be safe even if you are vaccinated. Also, some are much more easily spreadable, may cause more severe symptoms, and the Manaus variant may be able to easily infect those who were previously infected.

 

Reinfections More Likely With New Coronavirus Variants, Evidence Suggests

[johnu]

UW study: About 30% of people who get coronavirus experience long haul symptoms

 

But, research does show clearly the virus doesn't only impact older adults or people with underlying conditions. Even people who are young and healthy -- and didn't have severe cases of the virus -- may have to live with its long-term impacts.

 

“You can do well initially, but then overtime develop symptoms that are quite crippling in terms of fatigue,” Chu said.

 

In the study, about 27% of people 18 to 36 years old were impacted, compared with 30% of people 37 to 64 and 43% of people 65 and older. So, the likelihood people would experience long-haul symptoms did increase for people who were older, but still impacted a significant percentage of people who were younger.

 

One of the scariest long haul Covid symptom is brain fog. Basically, the virus invades the brain, and causes inflammation and maybe the death of some brain cells. Nobody can really afford to lose excess brain cells.

 

Why Does COVID-19 Cause Brain Fog?

[thepossum]

According to the WHO the vaccines will protect the most vulnerable people but will not prevent the repressive measures against everyone else

 

I smell a rat

 

The rest, especially the young have a right to a life and not to have their lives, dreams, and hopes put on hold indefinitely to protect people who have had one of the best lives in human history and have the while world looking after them

 

The fascism we are observing all over the world. The inequalities. The true lack of care for genuine inequality.

 

Seriously what happened to everyone's "liberal" credentials

 

There is even inequality in the sacrifice expected. The wealthy maybe have a year or two's sacrifice but the poor have many more years, maybe indefinite given the way their chances have been knocked back

 

Meanwhile all these happy privileged biotechs and associated interests sit their smugly as the dollars roll in indefinitely. They worked that one out nicely too

 

When are people going to take their heads out of the sand, look around and start asking some serious questions

 

In other possibly related news etc

 

Some of us had the nous/knowledge and the courage to call out the way the world was going years ago. 2020-21 is so far the pinnacle etc

 

I don't usually like ad hominem but sometimes you need to look at the money, who is doing well out of something and ask a few questions - on a global scale as well as across sectors within countries

 

And no, I do not have to be an academic, a doctor whatever to ask legitimate questions and make informed comments - but I appreciate the risks people like me take calling stuff out

 

For most of 2020 the one hope the people spreading the BS used against us all was that a vaccine would free us all up. All we had to do was wait and get excited when thse dozens of corporations and research insitutions globally made all their money and produced their competing vaccines

 

But hey, when a few of them start being rolled out sure enough the BS (most of us saw) is held up for all to see by the WHO itself

 

Meanwhile the self-interested powerful groups who benefit from it all, are hardly affected, still get to do their stuff, make money, have nice lives get to enjoy stuff indefinitely while the rest suffer indefinitely. That's the deal is it

 

What's interetsing and what some of us know is that its not just biotech where they sit, climate tech, other tech, all sold as a lie to a gullible world so they keep wealthy and powerful and who cares about the rest

 

But what doo we get from one of our other self-interested groups which like to manipulate the world. Instead of pictures of poor people dying in the street under repressive measures we get happy smiling propaganda pieces of people waving their 24/7 surveillance apps around

 

We get puff pieces out of Beijing about the manipulative stuff they feed their own people. Now seemingly the whole world has the same level of media manipulation. I'm not pointing fingers at Beijing by the way. The problem groups are in each of our counties

 

Finally, I know I'm not officially allowed to comment. I was denied that for various reasons (private) but in terms of biotech/pharma lack of scrutiny I have a fair bit of evidence and know of a fair bit of silenced evidence in a few major areas of big pharma. Are we trust those same people with the covid rubbish. You cannot compromise a health ethic with dollars. Its something of a disaster really. You cannot compromise health with the same kind of risk that people take investing in other types of tech. Look at the world. Seriously. How many people can defend it

 

And while I am not going to outline my evidence the doubts and the possible suspicions/questions/hypotheses that are quite legitimate its educational how few people ask them and how those who ask them have their lives destroyed. Sadly the group(s) we trust to ask questions have gone AWOL or are not knowledgeable enough to ask or sadly are too interested to ask. I know we all have interests. We all have lives. That is power. So I have a legitimate interest and am starting to speak up. Not all of us believe in an afterlife or reincarnation or whatever

 

So tell me all you experts out there (many who play Bridge) I could sit here and have a comfortable but miserable self-interested life and stay silent. Or care about something with meaning and speak up. What am I supposed to do. Maybe ask that of everyone

 

Hey at least I'm prepared to own up to my self-interest and realise it relies largely on things like expectancy of quality life ahead compared to may others. Seriously people

 

All these years we/I trusted all these institutions. When the crunch comes they either show up as not competent to provide adequate scrutiny or too self-interested to ask questions. Maybe look at how all those interests have become concentrated increasingly. I may be able to understand papers about the dopaminergic system, receptor and the impact of medications on those - but seriously does anyone even have the time or patience to try and make sense of a biotechengineering paper

 

Public debate is still at a very low level.

 

Maybe the world doesnt care. Maybe everyone is happy in their empty propaganda filled lives. Who knows