2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (Vaccination 2021 Edition)

Agema

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Just worth noting in terms of claims Japan/Tokyo had managed to get widespread immunity despite so few cases and fatalities. Whilst still exceptionally mild compared to Europe and North America, Japan is currently undergoiing a major covid-19 surge.

The UK recently set a new record for recorded deaths in one day and it's probably going to get worse for at least another week or two, as did the USA also set a new record (breaching 4000 in a day for the first time).
 
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Phoenixmgs

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A study of Health Care Workers showed that ZERO workers that were infected in the 1st wave got reinfected in the 2nd wave.

11,000 workers were in the study; 1,000 were infected in the 1st wave and none of them got reinfected in the 2nd wave.

Average time between initial infection and test during the 2nd wave was 170 days (over 5 and a half months).

All those reinfection stories are nothing but fear mongering. There's no data supporting immunity is short-lived.

 

Agema

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All those reinfection stories are nothing but fear mongering. There's no data supporting immunity is short-lived.
Firstly, "short-lived" is a vague term. The study suggests that maybe ~6 months is fine. It doesn't mean 9 or 12 or 24 must be (although a moot point for many countries, what with the vaccines being deployed).

Secondly, I don't think mass reinfection - at least as per the above in short-term scales - was considered a particularly likely event. But we already have plenty of cases of reinfections in some people - mostly thought due to different strains. And bear in mind there will be a lot of different strains. The UK and South Africa have officially had some recognised - but bear in mind these are likely to be countries that have been looking - many are not. There will in reality probably be dozens, even hundreds of new strains round the world by now, it's just they've not been identified.

I don't say this for fearmongering, I say to remind people that those who are "immune" can still be infectious, and those who have been infected before are not guaranteed to be immune, either. So do please continue to exercise reasonable caution for the good of yourselves and the people around you.
 

Phoenixmgs

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Firstly, "short-lived" is a vague term. The study suggests that maybe ~6 months is fine. It doesn't mean 9 or 12 or 24 must be (although a moot point for many countries, what with the vaccines being deployed).

Secondly, I don't think mass reinfection - at least as per the above in short-term scales - was considered a particularly likely event. But we already have plenty of cases of reinfections in some people - mostly thought due to different strains. And bear in mind there will be a lot of different strains. The UK and South Africa have officially had some recognised - but bear in mind these are likely to be countries that have been looking - many are not. There will in reality probably be dozens, even hundreds of new strains round the world by now, it's just they've not been identified.

I don't say this for fearmongering, I say to remind people that those who are "immune" can still be infectious, and those who have been infected before are not guaranteed to be immune, either. So do please continue to exercise reasonable caution for the good of yourselves and the people around you.
It means that 6 months IS fine, not maybe (there's always some exception though, nothing is ever 100%). SARS-COV-1 is an extremely similar virus and its immunity is at 17 years and counting. There's literally nothing pointing to immunity not lasting years. Reinfection is pretty meaningless overall though, it hardly tells you anything of importance. All it says is that you have the virus in you, not whether you're infectious or whether you'll get the disease again (which are the important things). You can get infected by the virus an unlimited amount of times. If you're with someone with the virus inside for a prolonged period, the virus will probably find its way inside your body and in the short window that it takes for your body to respond (it's not like the virus is killed onsite the second it enters your nostril) along with the inactive RNA to get flushed out, you can test positive, but it doesn't mean anything. All these stories are fearmongering because the general public doesn't understand such things and the chances of getting the disease again or spreading the disease unknowingly (if you get infected again) is extremely low and well below the vast majority of people's accepted level of risk. There's no reason to stay home and be lonely and not living your life if you already had the virus. On one side you are 100% causing harm while the other side (going out) is well well below probably like 0.1% of causing harm. If that is not within your level of acceptable risk, then you were probably living in a bubble beforehand.

Apparently some people are still catching the virus, even after vaccination.
You can get the virus a bit before getting the vaccine and a bit after (it doesn't kick in immediately). Plus, as I said just above, infection on its own is meaningless. You WILL get infected even if the vaccine takes hold completely because all infection means is that the virus found its way in your body, which is impossible to stop. It doesn't mean you'll spread it or get the disease. There's always a small window from the time your body takes to react and dispatch the virus along with flushing out inactive RNA (which still results in a positive test result) that you'll test positive even if you have the very best immunity in the world to the virus. These articles are nothing but fear mongering.
 

Kwak

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You can get the virus a bit before getting the vaccine and a bit after (it doesn't kick in immediately). Plus, as I said just above, infection on its own is meaningless. You WILL get infected even if the vaccine takes hold completely because all infection means is that the virus found its way in your body, which is impossible to stop. It doesn't mean you'll spread it or get the disease. There's always a small window from the time your body takes to react and dispatch the virus along with flushing out inactive RNA (which still results in a positive test result) that you'll test positive even if you have the very best immunity in the world to the virus. These articles are nothing but fear mongering.
Also there are two stages to the vaccine taken a month apart.
 

Phoenixmgs

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Here's a great video on the ridiculousness of how nobody is applying any sense to the science of covid. Do parents tell their kids to not run around with scissors because a randomized controlled trial told them that? No, it's fucking common sense that kids fall and if you fall with something sharp in your hands bad stuff could happen. You don't need to perfect science to tell you something that you can extrapolate that is 99.9% likely, there's very very few things that you need to be literally 100% confident of. There's no point in California's asinine ban on out-door dining for example. The UK's Rule of 6 is/was (not sure if that's still a rule) asinine as well. I was all for masks when everyone was citing studies saying masks don't work in the beginning (check the v1 forums on my posts) because it was common sense that they would help at least somewhat and there was literally no downside to wearing them.



Also there are two stages to the vaccine taken a month apart.
Yeah, I haven't really looked into if you need both doses for likely immunity or not. I almost certainly had the virus way back in March and have been exposed for sure one time afterwards (and didn't get the disease again nor did I spread it) so I personally don't care about getting the vaccine myself.
 
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Agema

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You can get the virus a bit before getting the vaccine and a bit after (it doesn't kick in immediately).
You can get the virus at any point before or after vaccination. Immunisation does not and has never meant that you cannot carry a virus and be infectious.

Here's a great video on the ridiculousness of how nobody is applying any sense to the science of covid.
Yes, lots of measures that governments have come up with are not strictly scientifically proven. But some of them are not really supposed to be: they are pragmatic fudges. The "six people" rule is a guideline to give people some functional social mixing, but to encourage them to think about and limit how much they do. If they say don't mix at all they know people will just disobey, and they don't want a free-for-all either. So they create a hopefully reasonable middle ground people might stick to and call it a rule. There is no precise justification for it, but it is designed under a principle of minimising contact to restrict spread, viewed in combination with other practicalities.

I don't mean this to say it was necessarily the best policy - overall, I think the British government created a series of fudges that in many cases caused counterproductive confusion. Nor do I mean it as a generic defence of any and all policy, as some of it is genuinely random garbage or based on nothing at all.

You have been from the word go unrealistically optimistic about just almost everything. Be that Vit D, hydroxychloroquine, levels of herd immunity required, claims that Japan had somehow achieved mass immunisation with virtually no cases or casualties, or the effectiveness of immunity and vaccines generally. I understand that covid-19 is frustrating, depressing, even terrifying and thus a desire to see the positives, but a lot of what you call "fearmongering" is reasonable caution and responsibility, and you leave yourself open to the opposite accusation of encouraging complacency.
 

Phoenixmgs

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You can get the virus at any point before or after vaccination. Immunisation does not and has never meant that you cannot carry a virus and be infectious.
What I meant with that was getting the disease and transmitting it (they very quickly talk about transmission going down generally from vaccines at 1:13:00 in the video I linked above). I said in that same post you can get the virus an unlimited amount of times even if you are have the very best immunity against it. Infection itself is a rather meaningless term and I bet if you ask the majority of the public about just the word "infection", they'd tell you it's a pretty bad thing.

Yes, lots of measures that governments have come up with are not strictly scientifically proven. But some of them are not really supposed to be: they are pragmatic fudges. The "six people" rule is a guideline to give people some functional social mixing, but to encourage them to think about and limit how much they do. If they say don't mix at all they know people will just disobey, and they don't want a free-for-all either. So they create a hopefully reasonable middle ground people might stick to and call it a rule. There is no precise justification for it, but it is designed under a principle of minimising contact to restrict spread, viewed in combination with other practicalities.

I don't mean this to say it was necessarily the best policy - overall, I think the British government created a series of fudges that in many cases caused counterproductive confusion. Nor do I mean it as a generic defence of any and all policy, as some of it is genuinely random garbage or based on nothing at all.
If you wanna give people functional social mixing, tell them OUTSIDE IS SAFE. Science backs that up. There was no reason to keep people trapped inside their homes during the summer months. And people got so fucking ridiculous with the virus all because of the news. People, like my aunt and uncle, were wiping down their car and groceries after they got home from the store for no reason as getting it via surfaces is extremely unlikely.

Here's this Chinese exercise video of a how to deal with an infected person. Notice how they are spraying sanitizer literally everywhere but the one place they actually should've sprayed it? It's like everyone lost all common sense over this.

You have been from the word go unrealistically optimistic about just almost everything. Be that Vit D, hydroxychloroquine, levels of herd immunity required, claims that Japan had somehow achieved mass immunisation with virtually no cases or casualties, or the effectiveness of immunity and vaccines generally. I understand that covid-19 is frustrating, depressing, even terrifying and thus a desire to see the positives, but a lot of what you call "fearmongering" is reasonable caution and responsibility, and you leave yourself open to the opposite accusation of encouraging complacency.
I'm following basic common sense and applying past knowledge to the current situation. For example, the worry that the vaccines wouldn't work over a mutated strain. If that was the "norm", vaccines would have never been a thing because viruses mutate faster than it takes to make a vaccine and we wouldn't have vaccines for other viruses. I had a friend that's a health care worker post on Facebook about the vaccine being pointless because of a the new strain. Same thing with the short-term immunity fear mongering, the previous very very similar virus (SARS from 2003) provides 17+ year immunity, and the re-infection stories were also misguided in their logic (like being infected doesn't really mean much of anything). How about those stories that found virus RNA on cruise ships weeks after they been vacated where they didn't tell you it was inactive RNA leading to people getting worried about touching things? Or the articles predicting that covid might be another flu that's always around when the flu itself is very unique and we know covid doesn't have those properties. Sure, there's an ever-so-slight chance of that being true but it's nothing to concern yourself about. We know different amounts of viral load impact how severe the disease is from animal studies with different viruses, thus masks lowering viral loads (even if they don't lower infections) is helpful. You don't need to run studies on every new virus to find out it behaves generally like other viruses. I'm also still willing to bet that my prediction from October from this thread that restrictions will be basically gone by this Summer ends up being rather accurate because I saw that how much the virus was spreading again combined with the fact that the vaccine was close meaning herd immunity (through a combination of natural means and artificial) was going to hit at an accelerated pace.

Here's all the data on all the treatments for Covid, no Twitter sources ;). Hydroxy works to a degree, it's not some miracle cure, I never said it was. Vitamin D has been proven to at the bare minimum do what the $3,000 remdesivir can do which is lower the time of recovery. An Indian study giving people the inactive form of Vitamin D that the body takes a WEEK to process worked in lowering the time to getting a negative test. And, we know Vitamin D will help your immune system generally (not to mention all the covid related areas that it affects like ACE2), what's the harm in taking something we know that helps at least somewhat? A few cents a day. It's the same sense as wearing a mask. The Japanese survey I linked was about possibly half of Tokyo being infected, not herd immunity. I said it wasn't a thorough survey and said that even if only a million people in Tokyo got infected, just look at how low their fatality rate is with just good Vitamin D levels + wearing masks. Just maybe that should be something we try because it basically costs nothing and does no harm. If it doesn't help, nothing was lost, and if we don't do it (which we haven't) and we find out a year later it would've saved say 50,000 lives, then how stupid is to not have tried? Because there wasn't an RCT?
 
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Baffle

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"yOu CaN't CoMpaRe CoUnTrIeS!" screams man convinced UK won WWII because of British pluck.
 

Thaluikhain

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So, part of my work today was trying to explain covid to someone.

Not a covid denier, someone who apparently hadn't heard of it, and wanted to know why it was mandatory to wear face masks on public transport in the Greater Sydney area.
 

Agema

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"yOu CaN't CoMpaRe CoUnTrIeS!" screams man convinced UK won WWII because of British pluck.
What's that Orwell quote? Something like "Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but all subsequent wars were lost on them."
 

crimson5pheonix

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But speaking of economic help to people during the pandemic


Americans can expect whatever minimum threshold is necessary to not storm congress.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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So anyone for a video originally by Chinese State media before the outbreak happened showing the research into bats and the researchers not taking basic precautions?


Some highlights 7:52 handling bats with nitrile gloves not animal handling gloves

A team member showing his bat bite at at 8:48
 

Agema

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So anyone for a video originally by Chinese State media before the outbreak happened showing the research into bats and the researchers not taking basic precautions?
1) Nitrile gloves are basic precautions.
2) It is not safe to claim nitrile gloves were inadequate because you don't know the circumstances: it may have been appropriate to handle that bat with nitrile gloves.
3) The strongest evidence is that SARS-CoV-2 passed to humans from bats via at least one animal intermediary, rather than directly from bats - hence for instance the particular interest in the wet markets.
4) There is insufficient evidence SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted by bites
 

Dwarvenhobble

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1) Nitrile gloves are basic precautions.
2) It is not safe to claim nitrile gloves were inadequate because you don't know the circumstances: it may have been appropriate to handle that bat with nitrile gloves.
3) The strongest evidence is that SARS-CoV-2 passed to humans from bats via at least one animal intermediary, rather than directly from bats - hence for instance the particular interest in the wet markets.
4) There is insufficient evidence SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted by bites
1) Not for anything other than sample work. I especially wouldn't use them for some stuff in even labs
2) Unless the bat is literally unconscious and you know they're 100% free of any transmissible disease, No it's not.
3) Not really. That's the working theory but it's not entirely known and may not ever be truly known. That's also based on the information the CCP provided about the Wuhan lab and it's work so how much do you believe the CCP?
4) If it's transmissible by simple droplet expulsion then an exposed wound would be a lovely opportunity for an infection
 

Trunkage

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400 000 deaths

Also about 4000 per day. By the 100 day mask 'suggestion' of Biden's, the US could double that number
 

McElroy

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Some highlights 7:52 handling bats with nitrile gloves not animal handling gloves

A team member showing his bat bite at at 8:48
And a minute later without any gloves at all. Zoonosis-wise it looks pretty bold. Of course a five-second clip is just that, but in hindsight... everything prior to the epidemic in China looks bad in hindsight, in fact.
 
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