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midtskogen
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

17 Nov 2021 01:16

Covid passes are now being considered used for entry to night clubs, restaurants and such over here.  Not nationally, but local politicians might be allowed to implement this for their municipally.  So, finally, then, the ideas of equality got thrown overboard.  But this system has already been in use in several European countries for a while, and we have a long tradition of implementing whatever EU does which does not work.

Apartheid aside, this will not slow down the transmission in any significant way.  Most of those admitted to hospitals are now fully vaccinated.  That means that the vaccinated now totally outnumber the unvaccinated, or that the vaccines don't work well, and either way the passes wont help.  In reality the vaccines do help, as hospital admissions when corrected for the vaccinated/unvaccinated ratio (about 6x) shows that there are four times more unvaccinated than vaccinated, but this is nowhere near sufficient to stop the waves. 

So covid passes simply can't stop new waves.  On the contrary, they will only serve to boost false security and increase distrust.  Night clubs and the like, if honest, should make a sign "Free admission for those exempted from worrying about transmission.  All others, show your test papers".  This will work so well, right?

Another interpretation is that covid passes is meant to "encourage" people to be good citizens and take the vaccine.  So, just like what China is doing with social credit scores.  Social benefits for the most loyal citizens is nothing new in communist countries.  Which correlates well with distrust in authorities and low vaccination rates in such countries or former communist countries.  A coincidence?
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

17 Nov 2021 13:30

I hope the idea behind the passes is not to try to stop the waves, and especially not for increasing vaccination rate to be a magic solution in lieu of every other public health measure in the toolkit. 

The more sensible goal is to try to help reduce hospital load. Yes, please be good citizens and get vaccinated/boosted when recommended, so that other people have less risk of exposure or of being turned away from an overwhelmed hospital. Multiple studies show that vaccination offers protection from infection and transmission, but that protection is also the most rapid to decline in the following months. Protection against hospitalization and death declines more slowly and especially after 6 months. Some policy makers seem to think they can stop waves with more frequent boosting, but that's very expensive and increases the risk of potential side effects, requiring yet more study.

One thing I'd like to see happen is a shift away from trying to solve all problems just by vaccinating more and boosting more frequently, and eventually have a distribution of vaccines tailored for whichever most severe and widespread variant is out. But it's still fairly early in our new COVID-19 world, and the fluctuation of waves and variants is chaotic. I think that with time they will settle down into a behavior somewhat more regular and predictable, and for which vaccines can be distributed with more predictive than reactionary power, like we do with flu. New treatments seem likely to help, too, in the near future.
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

17 Nov 2021 15:36

well the introduction of new antivirals will also help after awhile people will be tired of injections and will just want to get the pills
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

17 Nov 2021 17:54

Probably so. I'll still favor taking the vaccine first, and then antivirals are a backup if needed. Better to have a pretrained immune system than rely on an antiviral after you're already sick, and time (and availability) maybe more critical.
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

17 Nov 2021 23:45

Antivirals must be used with caution, since it could be an efficient way to make new, resistent viruses.
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

19 Nov 2021 04:06

Definitely, vaccines first though I'm a bit concerned with what Dr Fauci said last night which is he wants everyone to get boosters every 6 months, instead of once a year.

We are definitely seeing vaccines lose effectiveness after 6 months as there was a nursing home in CT where infections started spreading in September; out of the 89 people in the nursing home, only 2 were unvaccinated, the rest were fully vaccinated.  An astonishing 87 out of 89 were infected and sadly 8 people died.  So clearly some fully vaccinated people died as the vaccination lost effectiveness.  We have also seen a 10% increase in infection rate here in NY.  New mandate is that everyone 18 and older should get booster shots.
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

19 Nov 2021 11:25

I'm a bit concerned with what Dr Fauci said last night which is he wants everyone to get boosters every 6 months, instead of once a year.
As I wrote a few months ago:
I think there is a growing credibility issue.  First, the message was "flatten the curve, and gradually we'll have herd immunity". Then "bear with the restrictions a little bit more, the vaccines are soon here and we'll be out of this". Then "once 2/3 of adults are vaccinated, we're through".  Then "once 90% are vaccinated, we're through".  And now "we'll fix this with a booster dose". And soon "maybe there will be more boosters".  And there is no admitting being wrong about the strategy at any point.  The easy solution is to blame new variants.
These are clear signs of self delusion. Or simply denial.  It happens when science becomes politics.  Politics is impatient.  It doesn't want unknowns.  Doesn't easily change course.
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

19 Nov 2021 12:38

Or as I wrote here and on Discord:
Even with vaccination, it is important to continue to be careful. Vaccines are really not so much about protecting the individual (though they do), as for protecting society. Once enough people get vaccinated, infections will exponentially decline rather than rise or oscillate. (More resistant variants may compete against this, so it's also important to vaccinate much of the world very quickly.)
Image
(The full question was, "Are new unpredictable variants going to arise even in highly vaccinated countries if the virus spreads through the 20-30% unvaccinated part of the population? Even much more slowly?")

When facing a highly transmissible virus, there's little hope to eradicate it if global vaccination efforts are slower than the combination of newly evolving variants and naturally waning immunity. The nonuniformity of the vaccine distribution globally increases the risk of a sufficiently evasive variant being reintroduced. So does relaxing other measures too quickly, thus not allowing R to stay below 1. SARS-CoV-2 spreads and mutates too fast for what we're willing to do to eliminate it. So, it's apparently here to stay, and the best we can do is mitigate the size and severity of the waves.
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

20 Nov 2021 02:32

The protection that the vaccines give against hospitalisation is fairly straight forward to determine, and it appears to be in the 60-90% range depending on the vaccine and country, a number which appears to drop after 6 months.  Determining the protection against transmission is trickier.  Since we know that the vaccine makes symptoms much milder, and that covid is often asymptomatic even amongst unvaccinated, it would not be unexpected if vaccination makes more of the cases asymptomatic.  Which is good, but it makes the covid passes less than helpful.  First, when 90% of the adult population is vaccinated, requiring that the remained produce a negative test will hardly make a dent.  Second, those who are most likely to know that they're infected, are the ones tested.  Those who are most likely to have asymptomatic covid are exempted (including children who are not offered the vaccine and probably wont because of the myocarditis issue).  That is broken logic.  As I've argued before, the population should not be divided into a supposedly clean and filthy group, and a middle path should be taken, something between lockdowns and nothing.  Simple measures can go a long way.
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20 Nov 2021 02:47

Boosters now available for 18+ in the US. Got mine today (Moderna again), since my 2nd dose was a little over 6 months ago and I am frequently around family who are elderly.
Determining the protection against transmission is trickier.  Since we know that the vaccine makes symptoms much milder, and that covid is often asymptomatic even amongst unvaccinated, it would not be unexpected if vaccination makes more of the cases asymptomatic.
Yes, that's likely, though there are several lines of evidence that suggest it does protect against infection and transmission -- just not as well as it does against severe disease, and the protection drops more quickly in the following months, especially for the J&J vaccine. One approach is to see how the speed at which the first delta wave across the US increased and then dropped back down (corresponding to the effective R value) correlates with the vaccination level of the area. Complications of course are that prior infection, restrictions, and compliance with those restrictions affect this, too. NYtimes had some graphics showing this a while back, but I can't find them freely anymore. But it can also be seen from other data sources like covidactnow at the state and county levels. 

Another source of confidence, in my opinion more persuasive, is from the Veteran study earlier. The entire population in that sample was being regularly tested with PCR (which is extremely sensitive -- it can detect infection at low levels even outside of the infectious period), so asymptomatic cases were detected.

Evidence of declining protection against infection also suggests to expect a decline in protection against severe disease (which we now do have direct evidence for). In the US, voices like Fauci and the CDC had said this was one of their main motivators for the booster campaign. Renewing some of the protection against infection is great, but what we really did not want to get into was a situation where too much of the population began having more rapidly declining protection against severe illness.
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

20 Nov 2021 05:25

The protection that the vaccines give against hospitalisation is fairly straight forward to determine, and it appears to be in the 60-90% range depending on the vaccine and country, a number which appears to drop after 6 months.  Determining the protection against transmission is trickier.  Since we know that the vaccine makes symptoms much milder, and that covid is often asymptomatic even amongst unvaccinated, it would not be unexpected if vaccination makes more of the cases asymptomatic.  Which is good, but it makes the covid passes less than helpful.  First, when 90% of the adult population is vaccinated, requiring that the remained produce a negative test will hardly make a dent.  Second, those who are most likely to know that they're infected, are the ones tested.  Those who are most likely to have asymptomatic covid are exempted (including children who are not offered the vaccine and probably wont because of the myocarditis issue).  That is broken logic.  As I've argued before, the population should not be divided into a supposedly clean and filthy group, and a middle path should be taken, something between lockdowns and nothing.  Simple measures can go a long way.
I generally agree with you on not applying mandates to everyone, however I think it's fine for government to apply vaccine mandates to government employees (their own workers), so for example PD, FD, EMS, sanitation, teachers and all healthcare workers.  They are at the frontlines and vaccinations should be a condition of employment for them.  For other people, like for example, office workers, sports figures and other entertainers, and professionals outside of healthcare and teaching, probably not.  Their own employers should be doing that.
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

20 Nov 2021 05:28

Boosters now available for 18+ in the US. Got mine today (Moderna again), since my 2nd dose was a little over 6 months ago and I am frequently around family who are elderly.
Determining the protection against transmission is trickier.  Since we know that the vaccine makes symptoms much milder, and that covid is often asymptomatic even amongst unvaccinated, it would not be unexpected if vaccination makes more of the cases asymptomatic.
Yes, that's likely, though there are several lines of evidence that suggest it does protect against infection and transmission -- just not as well as it does against severe disease, and the protection drops more quickly in the following months, especially for the J&J vaccine. One approach is to see how the speed at which the first delta wave across the US increased and then dropped back down (corresponding to the effective R value) correlates with the vaccination level of the area. Complications of course are that prior infection, restrictions, and compliance with those restrictions affect this, too. NYtimes had some graphics showing this a while back, but I can't find them freely anymore. But it can also be seen from other data sources like covidactnow at the state and county levels. 

Another source of confidence, in my opinion more persuasive, is from the Veteran study earlier. The entire population in that sample was being regularly tested with PCR (which is extremely sensitive -- it can detect infection at low levels even outside of the infectious period), so asymptomatic cases were detected.

Evidence of declining protection against infection also suggests to expect a decline in protection against severe disease (which we now do have direct evidence for). In the US, voices like Fauci and the CDC had said this was one of their main motivators for the booster campaign. Renewing some of the protection against infection is great, but what we really did not want to get into was a situation where too much of the population began having more rapidly declining protection against severe illness.
Separating the J&J vaccine from the other two was especially noteworthy in the CDC report.....so booster shots should be gotten 2 months after the J&J shot, while it's 6 months after the second dose of the other two?  I wonder if protection would have been higher and the interval to taking a booster shot longer like the other two had the J&J vaccine been a two shot vaccine too?  I wonder if they tested for that?
 
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

20 Nov 2021 11:56

Their own employers should be doing that.
I'm not sure I'd like to work for a company excluding workers based on their medical situation which does not in any way impede their work.  That would be like banning overweight office works.  Or worse.  So much for equality and diversity.
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

20 Nov 2021 11:58

Got mine today (Moderna again)
Please let us know how it compares to the 2nd shot.

After my first Moderna I felt nothing.  After the second, I was pretty useless for a day and a half.
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Thread

20 Nov 2021 14:43

Separating the J&J vaccine from the other two was especially noteworthy in the CDC report.....so booster shots should be gotten 2 months after the J&J shot, while it's 6 months after the second dose of the other two? 
Yeah, that seems to be the case. Then we'll need to see if and how often additional J&J shots are recommended after that. Hopefully not less than 6 months.
Please let us know how it compares to the 2nd shot.

After my first Moderna I felt nothing.  After the second, I was pretty useless for a day and a half.
First shot was pretty mild, second shot basically did the same to me as to you.

This time I had both the booster and the flu shot, which I had been procrastinating making an appointment for so now I just went ahead and did both. Surprise -- it now feels like I have both COVID and flu symptoms. Chills, nausea, full body aches. Normally I have almost no reaction to the flu vaccine, but apparently the combination of the two makes it hit very differently. So just taking it easy for today. :)

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