All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (3 Viewers)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[MT15]

So you are saying the vaccine alone is more effective than natural immunity alone?

No, not what I said. But that question cannot really be answered with one word.

With Omicron, it looks like 3 doses of vaccine (original 2 plus booster) provide better protection than both previous infection or 2 doses of vaccine (which either one don’t provide much protection against Omicron).

Before Delta, definitely vaccination provided slightly better protection against Covid than previous infection. When Delta appeared, those two changed places, with previous infection providing slightly better protection than the 2 dose vaccine. When they say things like 40-50% better, that is a bit misleading because the numbers are generally small, as seen in the graph I posted above.

There was some of this when pediatric cases started to go up, done by “my side” (lol). When pediatric hospitalizations went from 3 to 6 at a certain hospital, they said hospitalizations are up 100%. That makes it sound more significant than it really was. (Numbers made up to illustrate the point)

Overall, though, vaccination was judged in that study to be a better route than actually getting Covid because you get roughly the same protection, without actually risking the damage that the disease could do to you.

 

[RobF]

Overall, though, vaccination was judged in that study to be a better route than actually getting Covid because you get roughly the same protection, without actually risking the damage that the disease could do to you.

Yep. That's the crux of the matter. If we care about immunity, it's because we care about being infected and the risks that come with that. Being infected to get infection-induced immunity defeats the point; the thing we were concerned about already happened.

Put it this way, if we think about lifetime cases, every single person with infection-induced immunity has been infected at least once, and for all of those who were unvaccinated, they had to go through that without any immunity. And there's millions of people who never got infection-induced immunity because they died.

So for unvaccinated versus vaccinated, it's a no-brainer. Get vaccinated.

That said, it is a fair question to ask, "But let's say I was already infected, which is more effective, the infection-induced immunity I have or vaccination?", but the answer to that is, "it depends."

On average, the data suggests they're both effective, as you'd expect. And, I emphasise again on average, raw data has shown one or the other to be more effective at different times; but this depends on a lot of factors, including the timing of waves of infection and vaccinations, different variants dominating, the differing demographics of the two groups and spread of the virus at particular times, so any direct comparison based on raw data has to be treated extremely cautiously.

And the nature of the two makes it hard to make good comparisons; we know how many vaccinated people there are, we know when they were dosed. But we can't catch all infections, either initial ones or repeat exposures, which it makes it harder to assess both the effectiveness of infection-induced immunity, and how it wanes over time.

It may be that vaccine-induced immunity is more effective initially, but if it wanes more rapidly than infection-induced immunity, it may be that over time infection-induced immunity is more effective at particular points in time, depending on the timing of vaccinations and waves. And then boosters may flip that again. Overall, I'd say the data suggests that on average, vaccination immunity has a higher ceiling, currently wanes faster, whereas infection-induced immunity appears to have a lower ceiling, but wanes more slowly, but has a lower floor. But that may well be inaccurate; because of the difficulty making a comparison, there's a lot of uncertainty.

Additionally, when we're talking about effectiveness, there's effectiveness against infection, against symptomatic illness, against severe illness, and against mortality. Those can also differ. So there isn't a single measure there; above, I'm speaking broadly and mostly in terms of protection against symptomatic illness.

But the reason I emphasise 'on average' is that, in as much as the data we have suggests that they're both typically effective across the groups, you can't apply group statistics to an individual like that, and immune responses to infection vary a lot; typically a lot more so than immune responses to vaccination, because vaccination doses are consistent, and we can can add doses and boosters at particular intervals. Infection-induced immunity is a lot more random than that. Some people are infected and don't seroconvert (produce antibodies) at all.

So for a particular individual, it's pretty much impossible to say whether their infection-induced immunity is more or less effective than vaccination, because we can't say how effective their individual infection-induced immunity is in the first place. Most likely it is good, but it may not be.

Personally, if I'd been infected, I'd still get vaccinated, because that would greatly reduce uncertainty around my individual infection-induced immunity, and address possible waning since whatever infection-induced immunity I have was developed.

And I I was considering the population as a whole, I'd also recommend getting vaccinated, for much the same reason, but on a group scale. It would ensure anyone who hadn't developed immunity following infection was far more likely to have immunity, improving population coverage. That the data suggests infection-induced immunity combined with vaccination also offers higher protection is a bonus.

 

[MT15]

This was just tweeted out:

 

[zztop]

So now some anti-vaxxers are promoting drinking your own urine. Sometimes I think this is all just an attempt by trolls to see what they can get people to willingly do to themselves.

 

[insidejob]

Story about having COVID even after doing everything you possibly can to protect yourself and everyone you come in contact with.

After 22 months, I got Covid. But my flu-like symptoms were only part of the problem.

“Morning Joe” booking producer and single mom Cat Rakowski says the indirect side effects, including not being able to see her son and dealing with feelings of shame and anger, were far worse.

www.msnbc.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Virginia school mask drama
====================

In Virginia Beach, a mother is sending frantic emails to her school board, begging them to reverse their mask-optional policy to protect the life of her 14-year-old daughter who has a heart condition. In Arlington, a teenage girl broke down sobbing this week as she asked her parents for help navigating the suddenly thorny social dynamics between masked and unmasked friends — leading her mother to pull her from school for a mental health day.

And in Chesapeake, Va., on Tuesday, the first day her school district stopped requiring masks in accordance with Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s mask-optional executive order, ninth-grade English teacher Amanda Lambert awoke unsure if she would go to work. Lambert was thinking about what her doctor told her: that, because of her blood-clotting disorder, she was unlikely to live through “the next round” of coronavirus variants if she contracted the illness and had to go on a ventilator. “Being intubated,” she thought to herself, “is signing your own death certificate.”

Above all were thoughts of her son in sixth grade, and how badly she wants to see him graduate, get a job, get married.

“When I was in the Navy, I signed on the dotted line to put my life at risk and I understood that,” Lambert, 41, said. “This is different.”

All across Virginia, similar scenes of fear, division and chaos played out this week, as teachers reentered classrooms where children were suddenly allowed to appear maskless. The change in rules is due to Youngkin’s controversial executive order, issued on his first day in office but which took effect Monday, asserting that parents have the right to decide whether their children wear face coverings in school.

A Washington Post analysis found that, as of Friday, more than half of Virginia districts had opted to ignore the governor’s order — which is already the subject of two lawsuits, one from parents and one from school boards — and keep requiring masks.

But in the 59 districts that did adopt mask-optional rules, teachers, parents and approximately 400,000 students have had to grapple with the fallout from a directive that many said felt like a poorly thought-through political ploy with profound health and academic consequences for Virginia’s students and teachers................

For many households — especially those with elderly or immunocompromised members — Youngkin’s mask-optional order ushered in a new era of turmoil two years into a pandemic already full of it.

In Chesapeake, mother Kasha Herek switched her child to home schooling this week after the end of required masking led the 9-year-old to fear going to school. In Virginia Beach, another mother — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain her family’s privacy — said she has kept her son home this week after the boy started crying and asked if he was going to die at school.

And in Chesterfield, an elementary school teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation warned that mask optionality will cause a huge spike in student quarantines, yielding floods of work for teachers who must develop extra assignments to keep them on track. She said Youngkin’s mask order has led her to consider quitting for the first time in the pandemic.

“All that he’s done is divide our state and made this a political thing — he sees teachers as the villain, is how it feels,” the teacher said. “We are so broken down at this point by how little we are cared about anymore.”

Parents say they worry for the future, and if and how children will begin acting out the heated rhetoric on masking many hear at home. Virginia Beach mother Cara Eggers, 50, who supports masking, instructed her children to be kind to everyone, maskless or not, before dropping them off at school this week.

Her daughter in middle school was at first pleased and surprised that so many classmates were still wearing masks, Eggers said. Then she found herself seated near four unmasked students, which made her “extremely nervous,” but was too shy to ask the teacher if she could move. Later in the week, the girl heard other kids discussing how school policy barred teachers from asking about masks and proposing removing their own, although some of her classmates shared that unmasked students make them uncomfortable.

“She [doesn’t] want to be a target of derision by the other children,” Eggers said.

Elsewhere in Virginia Beach, the mother of a girl with a heart condition wonders if she should stop sending her child to school, where more of her daughter’s classmates are going unmasked every day. The mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter’s privacy, said one of the children in her medical support group — for parents of children who have congenital heart defects — died of covid-19 this month.

But her daughter suffered during online learning, and the mother is scared what will happen to the 14-year-old’s mental health if she stays home. For now, the mother is sending emails to the school board pleading with them to reestablish a mask mandate.............

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Story about having COVID even after doing everything you possibly can to protect yourself and everyone you come in contact with.

After 22 months, I got Covid. But my flu-like symptoms were only part of the problem.

“Morning Joe” booking producer and single mom Cat Rakowski says the indirect side effects, including not being able to see her son and dealing with feelings of shame and anger, were far worse.

www.msnbc.com

I'll see if I can find it but there was article in the Post a while back talking about people who did everything they were supposed to, were careful, went above and beyond being careful and got Omicron anyway and feel depressed about it

 

[wardorican]

This is related enough. Amazing how far people will go to defraud the gov't. But folks worried about $600/month.

BTW, yes, she's a Democrat. Very embarrassing for her father who ran for congress (I believe). It's not a mistake dear, it was full on calculated fraud.

Damara Holness gets 20 months in COVID fraud case

Damara Holness, former president of the Broward County Democratic Black Caucus and daughter of longtime Broward politician Dale Holness, was sentenced Monday to 20 months in prison.

www.local10.com

 

[Farb]

There will be a lot more fraud cases coming down as companies taxes get completed. The goberment is the only one allowed to be corrupt, we as peasants should know this by now.

 

[samiam5211]

With us clearly on the downside of the Omicron curve, and hopefully herd immunity that will eventually (hopefully) be seen as the beginning of the end of the pandemic, I think we need to start thinking about how to repair our society.

I think that we need covid amnesty. Whether you were quadruple boosted with a Fauci tattoo, or an ivermectin addicted Proud Boy, we should just all agree to never talk about it again.

If there is another pandemic in 100 years, those people will have plenty of data about what happened in the past 2 years to figure out what happened. Us arguing about who was right for the next 50 years isn't going to help them figure out the next pandemic.

Lets fix education, roads, and the economy. We can still fight about things, but let's fight about things that matter now.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

If the mortality rate of COVID were 90% then you wouldn't have all these anti-vaxxers running around.

 

[coldseat]

With us clearly on the downside of the Omicron curve, and hopefully herd immunity that will eventually (hopefully) be seen as the beginning of the end of the pandemic, I think we need to start thinking about how to repair our society.

I think that we need covid amnesty. Whether you were quadruple boosted with a Fauci tattoo, or an ivermectin addicted Proud Boy, we should just all agree to never talk about it again.

If there is another pandemic in 100 years, those people will have plenty of data about what happened in the past 2 years to figure out what happened. Us arguing about who was right for the next 50 years isn't going to help them figure out the next pandemic.

Lets fix education, roads, and the economy. We can still fight about things, but let's fight about things that matter now.

I wish it where that easy.

We still don't know if we're out of the woods yet with Covid.

But beyond that, misinformation, which is the main driver of the anti-vaccine movement, is something we have no handle on of how to solve. Nor do we currently have the political or social will to solve it with a fractured society. Misinformation is also so pervasive and easy to spread now a days that it impacts every area of life and governing. Until we can deal with that, we really can't move beyond anything. The same thing will happen in the next pandemic, whether it's 10 years from now or 100 years from now if we can't stop the easy dissemination of misinformation in a free and democratic society.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Also posted on EE
===============
Before 2020, Vietnam looked particularly vulnerable to a pandemic. The Southeast Asian country, a single-party state with nearly 100 million people, scored low on international assessments of universal health coverage and had relatively few hospital beds for its population, as well as a closed-off political system.


Instead, Vietnam emerged as an early pandemic success story. Long after the coronavirus began to spread in neighboring China, Vietnam maintained low levels of infections and fatalities even as wealthy countries with more robust health systems, including the United States and much of Europe, struggled.


A new study of pandemic preparedness across 177 countries and territories appears to have found a key element in Vietnam’s success: trust.


Thomas Bollyky, one of the study’s authors, said Vietnam should have failed in the fight against the coronavirus, according to traditional tenets of preparedness.


“What Vietnam does have, that seems to potentially explain what has happened, is that they have very high trust in government — among the highest in the world,” said Bollyky, who is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.


The peer-reviewed study was published Tuesday in the Lancet, a top medical journal, following 10 months of research by Bollyky, his colleague Erin Hulland, a scholar at the University of Washington, and a team of dozens.


The aim of the study was to answer a question that has been dubbed the “epidemiological mystery” of the pandemic: Why did the coronavirus hit some countries so much harder than others?……..

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/01/trust-lancet-covid-study/

 

[superchuck500]

It's weird that such a lover of the Constitution would say this.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

It's weird that such a lover of the Constitution would say this.

Why? What the hell is he talking about?

 

[superchuck500]

Why? What the hell is he talking about?

The whole obsession with Fauci as being the source of everything they hate about the pandemic is strange and stupid.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

The whole obsession with Fauci as being the source of everything they hate about the pandemic is strange and stupid.

A point of view:

The Anti-Expert Pandemic - Harvard Political Review

As America responds to the coronavirus pandemic, this politicization of the disease and ignorance of health guidelines hinders public health efforts. Americans across the ideological spectrum must put ideological biases aside and open up channels of conversation with scientific experts and...

harvardpolitics.com

"Roots of the Anti-Knowledge Pandemic

The resistance to established knowledge, which took the form of a movement composed of “anti-intellectuals,” gained traction in the early 1970s and has persisted throughout the modern era. At the time, the government was coming off what historian Brian Balogh calls the “prominstrative state,” a period in which the public held ardent faith in government officials and other experts, leading to a high-functioning bureaucracy. As documented by a 1966 Harris Poll, 70% of Americans reported “a great deal of confidence” in medical leaders, 60% felt the same of educational and military leaders, and 55% trusted the heads of major corporations.

However, as the government grew, so did its critics. Beginning in the 1960s, public intellectuals such as Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan decried experts as “pencil-pushers and weenies who had no respect or allegiance to ordinary citizens,” which garnered attention from both Democrat and Republican groups. These ideas, which were developing against the backdrop of a controversial ‘70s that brought Watergate, the Vietnam War, and conflict in the Middle East, put the final nail in the coffin of Americans’ trust in experts."

 

[MT15]

The Bulwark with another excellent article. I am trying to resist their subscription service, but they seem to have a clear-eyed way of looking at the dangers the current Republican party poses.

COVID Derangement Is Working Out Just Fine for the GOP

Joe Biden didn't want a vaccination culture war. He got one anyway. And he's losing it.

www.thebulwark.com