NON_POLITICAL China Coronavirus THREAD

[Zorba]

So, final update on the kid with the rona I guess. She is fine, returned to her normal self last Friday and now you wouldn't even know she was sick. That is good and all but I am actually fairly vexed at the whole situation, it was basically an advertisement for the anti-truth brigade even though I am still trying to frame it as a vaccine success.

We took zero precautions, none. Covid positive kid coughing in our face, her twin sister sharing the same bedroom, her younger sister playing with her face to face, eating with everyone at the same table, holding her while she is snorting and coughing in her sleep, etc. No one else in the house caught it and the grandparents that took care of her the first day are fine too. She was a bit more fatigued than she is with the usual crud but other than that this was a huge pile of nothing. So now I am back at work because I cannot justify it to myself anymore. Every single person I know is now using my own experience as an example of how this whole thing is just an overblown cold that isn't nearly as dangerous or infections as "they" claim.

I'm not upset that we are not all deathly ill, that is wonderful, but I cannot enjoy reinforcing the position that this is all a lie.

Isn't she pretty young? Young kids don't transmit as much as adults.

 

[local]

Anybody who draws conclusions about the pandemic and the many complex crisscrossing parameters involving how we adjust and respond from one or a handful of cases is stupid and possibly malicious to boot.

True, and it is easier for them when they mentally discount serious cases as being the result of other conditions.

Isn't she pretty young? Young kids don't transmit as much as adults.

Yeah she is almost 8. It is also possible she didn't have Delta either but that would be against the odds at this point.

 

[pauldun170]

Vice put out an good segment on how it hit on the ground in Bronx, NY

 

[gill77]

Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses

The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.
18 This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

 

[Kaido]

Rough headlines courtesy of imgur:

 

[Kaido]

 

[Kaido]

Only 54% of the population is fully vaccinated in America:

1 in every 500 US residents have died of Covid-19 | CNN

The United States has reached another grim milestone in its fight against the devastating Covid-19 pandemic: 1 in 500 Americans have died from coronavirus since the nation's first reported infection.

www.cnn.com

 

[Brainonska511]

All the more reason for mandating that people get a vaccine to participate in society. Most of these people are all talk and would quickly fall in line if we brought out the stick.

 

[Kaido]

 

[Kaido]

I thought I was having a bad day but as it turns out I was not having a bad day...

https://imgur.com/a/cK3Jv8J

 

[nakedfrog]

They all think it couldn't happen to them, until it does

 

[pmv]

Rough headlines courtesy of imgur:

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I'm not inclined to gloat about anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-theorists who die of COVID. I don't know why some some of these stories just make me feel sad - honestly, some of these folk mentioned above (having looked them up) just seem bordering-on mentally unwell, and I can only see them as victims of a screwed-up culture and history.

But with that Bob Enyart guy I'd absolutely make an exception.

In October 2020, Enyart, through his church, sued the state over its Covid rules, which prompted the US District Court to allow a temporary restraining order regarding wearing masks at religious services, among other social distancing rules, such as limits on gatherings.

At the time of the ruling, he said: “We were so thankful that a federal court would recognise our God-given right to worship him, our creator, without the government interfering”.

Vaccinations were not the first topic he was controversial about. In the 1990s, friends and families of people who died due to AIDs campaigned for his television show Bob Enyart Live, which later became a radio show, to be taken off air after he referred to victims of the disease as “sodomites”.

In addition to this, Enyart would recite their obituaries while Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust played in the background. The band’s singer, Freddie Mercury, died due to complications from AIDs.

 

[Captante]

I thought I was having a bad day but as it turns out I was not having a bad day...

https://imgur.com/a/cK3Jv8J

And then you read the stories about the ones its impossible NOT to feel so so very sorry for...... I could NEVER be an MD.

WTF man.....

 

[Kaido]

And then you read the stories about the ones its impossible NOT to feel so so very sorry for...... I could NEVER be an MD.

WTF man.....

I have friends in the local medical community & they are, once again, incredibly frustrated people. The general public doesn't get as much exposure to the insanity of COVID as they do, and because it's all happening behind closed hospital doors, other than the random person you know who gets COVID or what you see on the news, it's not super visibly prominent, so people have gotten a LOT more relaxed. I don't know how to doctors detach themselves, but I'm also an overly-sensitive person (yay ADHD!), so being an ER doctor or an EMT or something would probably leave me as an emotional wreck lol.

 

[Muse]

I have friends in the local medical community & they are, once again, incredibly frustrated people. The general public doesn't get as much exposure to the insanity of COVID as they do, and because it's all happening behind closed hospital doors, other than the random person you know who gets COVID or what you see on the news, it's not super visibly prominent, so people have gotten a LOT more relaxed. I don't know how to doctors detach themselves, but I'm also an overly-sensitive person (yay ADHD!), so being an ER doctor or an EMT or something would probably leave me as an emotional wreck lol.

The stories that hit me the hardest are on network news stations where they interview ICU staffs. Their PTSD syndromes are horrendous, as a result I'm all in on mask and vax mandates. I'm for forbidding religious exemptions too.

 

[Kaido]

The stories that hit me the hardest are on network news stations where they interview ICU staffs. Their PTSD syndromes are horrendous, as a result I'm all in on mask and vax mandates. I'm for forbidding religious exemptions too.

What they're going through is really awful. I wish there was more we could do for them. They really are putting in heroic levels of effort into saving people!

 

[Muse]

What they're going through is really awful. I wish there was more we could do for them. They really are putting in heroic levels of effort into saving people!

The ONLY THING we can do for them is get the populace vaccinated.

 

[Torn Mind]

The stories that hit me the hardest are on network news stations where they interview ICU staffs. Their PTSD syndromes are horrendous, as a result I'm all in on mask and vax mandates. I'm for forbidding religious exemptions too.

This particular story is for the province of Alberta, where 79.5% of the 12+ have one shot and 71.4% of the 12+ are vaccinated.

Furthermore, this particular woman "did not have the time", not the cookie cutter, oversimplified media vilification that the unvaccinated are evil dumb scoundrels who refuse the vaccine.

The solution would have been door-to-door vaccination service for her. Some people do not have cars and depending on logistics, public transportation can be utter garbage.


It's kind of funny because "Alberta conservatism" is a just a little different from the U.S conservatism. Kenney waited until his province cross the 70%+ double vaccination threshold before opening up and lifting restrictions, and then let the virus "run its course.

What Jason Kenney's 'mission accomplished' moment has reaped for Alberta - Macleans.ca

Case counts have soared, surgeries are getting postponed and the COVID-19 death toll is mounting. Why did the premier ignore the majority of his province's voters?

www.macleans.ca

 

[Spacehead]

Only 54% of the population is fully vaccinated in America:

All the more reason for mandating that people get a vaccine to participate in society. Most of these people are all talk and would quickly fall in line if we brought out the stick.

As to these quotes & the pics posted above, ... i hate feeling this way but i'm to the point of having absolutely zero sympathy for unvaccinated getting & dying from Covid. It's horrible about the kids getting it from the parents & dying though

There was a mobile clinic set up today to vaccinate people & no one showed up
F these people

Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses

The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.
18 This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

When at all possible, due to expiring & storing conditions, F the ones in the US that don't want to get vaccinated & get these to countries that do need them. We all know that just having nearly full vaccination or antibodies from past infection in one country isn't enough for this virus. It needs to be global before we'll truly be safe.

Most of these people are all talk and would quickly fall in line if we brought out the stick.

Probably most would, but man, i see a lot of rage over this from people around here. Some of the guys i work with... i can't believe their heads haven't exploded yet over the rage i see from them almost every day.
Vaccine mandates... they rage enough over their kids having to wear masks at school.

Some idiot on the local news the other night was mad because his kids had to wear masks at school, then was mad because the school had to close due to an outbreak so they had to do the learn-from-home thing.

 

[Spacehead]

Some potential good news... i guess
Mechanism Behind Long COVID May Have Been Discovered

 

[Kaido]

Some idiot on the local news the other night was mad because his kids had to wear masks at school, then was mad because the school had to close due to an outbreak so they had to do the learn-from-home thing.

So this is one of the things I struggle with - this is an actual billboard here in Hartford, right off the highway:



If you have a kid & if you care about them, wouldn't you want to take EVERY precaution possible in keeping them safe & healthy, whether or not it's completely proven that masks work 100%? Especially as when it's as easy as simply putting on a mask? As of today, we are at 667,000 deaths in America. Children make up 15.5% of COVID cases, with 5,292,837 cases to date cumulatively. I can't imagine getting so upset about wearing a mask that you'd setup a website & pay thousands of dollars to get the message out there. It just seems so completely illogical!

 

[Kaido]

i hate feeling this way but i'm to the point of having absolutely zero sympathy for unvaccinated getting & dying from Covid. It's horrible about the kids getting it from the parents & dying though

It's a form of schadenfreude, which is kind of a built-in human-nature reaction:

The Chilling Popularity of Anti-Vax Deathbed Videos

Why are so many people drawn to stories and videos of the unvaccinated dying of Covid-19—and, at the final moment, wishing for the vaccine?

newrepublic.com

Headlines about the anti-vax volte-face come with a detectable whiff of schadenfreude. In her book, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune, cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith identified five key characteristics to this controversial feeling: Schadenfreude is “felt when we stumble across another’s misfortune we have not caused ourselves”; it’s “furtive,” as people attempt to cover up their glee; yet it’s something the observer feels “entitled” to, usually because “the other person’s suffering can be construed as a comeuppance—a deserved punishment for being smug or hypocritical, or breaking the law”; it’s a “respite” that reassures the viewer of their own superiority; and it’s typically focused on “minor discomforts and gaffes rather than dire tragedies,” Watt Smith concludes, but “this rule isn’t hard and fast, and context matters.”

Followed up by "compassion fatigue", which was seen back as far as the Civil War:

In Republic of Suffering, Gilpin Faust writes that the Good Death became more important as the war continued and soldiers on both sides lost faith in the legitimacy of their cause. The “battlefield carnage” they witnessed made them “question both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation.” That’s a good description of what we now call compassion fatigue—a type of traumatic stress first identified in helping fields like health care, firefighting, and education, but something any news consumer alive today can understand.

Basically:

1. This has been going on for a long time & a cure (or at least, enhanced protection) is available
2. At this point, most people who were going to get vaccinated are already vaccinated (54.7% of American is vaccinated as of today)
3. As the headlines saturate with stories about unvaccinated people dying in droves, schadenfreude kicks in & compassion fatigue sets in

This article highlights the issue:

You all need to stop with the Covid schadenfreude

We can’t let the conversations about the Covid vaccinated and unvaccinated be infected by polarisation

www.wired.co.uk

There is a growing trend in the framing of severe cases of Covid-19. You will have come across it by now. It runs like this: a person is a vaccine sceptic. They claim it contains a microchip, or that it was brewed up by Bill Gates. They mock those who receive the vaccine and preach to those who haven’t. Then, they get Covid. They become deathly ill. Hooked up to a ventilator, they admit they were wrong. They beg for a vaccination. Sometimes they recover; sometimes they don't.

This narrative is wildly popular. Last week, the BBC article “LA man who mocked Covid-19 vaccines dies of virus” – while no match, of course, for the Mail Online’s “Cat rides on a robot vacuum” – received more than 39,000 interactions on Facebook, making it one of the more popular news stories on the platform during that time. The narrative isn’t new, either, and falls, most recently, under the banner of Covid shaming or the #covidiot hashtag. No matter how neutrally these stories are reported, the implicit moral is the same: they split the undeserving from the deserving. Covid becomes a kind of punishment. And this framing seems to be on the rise just as society cleaves between those who have, and have not, agreed to a vaccination.

There's also an interesting phrase that's been going around the news media lately - unvaccinated people who have died from COVID were "trying to decide".

Texas teacher trying to decide about Covid vaccine dies three days after testing positive | CNN

One of two teachers at a Texas junior high school who died last week of Covid-19 was nervous about returning to school because of the Delta variant, her sister told CNN.

www.cnn.com

However...the vaccine has been out for a looooooong time. Per the CDC, "the federal government is providing vaccines free of charge to all people living in the United States, regardless of their immigration or health insurance status." As of June & July of this year, Americans were in pretty good shape in terms of being able to simply walk in & get a COVID shot anytime they wanted to. So I don't know if "trying to decide" is the same as "actively choosing not to", as I 100% understand vaccine hesitancy given my own medical background, but like, the numbers speak for themselves:

Vaccines Work: 97% Of COVID Deaths, 95% Of Hospitalizations And 94% Of Cases Are Among Unvaccinated Pennsylvanians

From the FDA:

FDA Evaluation of Safety and Effectiveness Data for Approval for 16 Years of Age and Older

The first EUA, issued Dec. 11, for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for individuals 16 years of age and older was based on safety and effectiveness data from a randomized, controlled, blinded ongoing clinical trial of thousands of individuals.

To support the FDA’s approval decision today, the FDA reviewed updated data from the clinical trial which supported the EUA and included a longer duration of follow-up in a larger clinical trial population.

Specifically, in the FDA’s review for approval, the agency analyzed effectiveness data from approximately 20,000 vaccine and 20,000 placebo recipients ages 16 and older who did not have evidence of the COVID-19 virus infection within a week of receiving the second dose. The safety of Comirnaty was evaluated in approximately 22,000 people who received the vaccine and 22,000 people who received a placebo 16 years of age and older.

Based on results from the clinical trial, the vaccine was 91% effective in preventing COVID-19 disease.

We live in a very weird time where we essentially have a cure for a disease that has killed over half a million Americans, and yet nearly half the country refuses to take it. Sadly, I don't see COVID variants magically going away anytime soon, so I think this problem is going to linger with us for a long time due to the choices that people are making. Which leaves us with people with other medical needs not being able to get into the hospital & dying as a result of those people's choices to not take advantage of what's available to them:

Veteran dies of treatable illness as COVID fills hospital beds, leaving doctors "playing musical chairs"

The surge in new COVID cases is putting an enormous strain on hospitals, jeopardizing patients who cannot get the medical attention they need because of a lack of space.

www.cbsnews.com

A Man Died After Being Turned Away From 43 ICUs At Capacity Due To COVID, Family Says

Ray DeMonia didn't die from COVID-19, but after the 73-year-old experienced a cardiac emergency, he was turned away from dozens of packed ICUs, his family says.

www.npr.org

 

[Kaido]

Amazing

 

[Muse]

Some of the guys i work with... i can't believe their heads haven't exploded yet over the rage i see from them almost every day.
Vaccine mandates... they rage enough over their kids having to wear masks at school.

Some idiot on the local news the other night was mad because his kids had to wear masks at school, then was mad because the school had to close due to an outbreak so they had to do the learn-from-home thing.

I'll throw out the worn cliché that never loses its power:

If you aren't part of the solution you're part of the problem.

I like this twist on it:

If you aren't part of the solution you're part of the pollution.

 

[Brainonska511]

The unabated spread of COVID in the US, seemingly driven by anti-vaccine/mask nonsense, is quite ridiculous. I'd like to travel to another country without having to jump through hoops. Too bad many of them are not making exceptions for people from non-backwards states.

At least the UK is allowing vaccinated people in without quarantine, provided they take a COVID test ≤72 hours prior to arrival, and one 2 days after arrival. Maybe my wife and I will finally get to go on our trip to London (originally scheduled for Summer 2020, then Spring 2021, now Christmas 2021).