Author Topic: Coronavirus Thread v.2  (Read 191157 times)

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Offline KevShmev

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2870 on: December 23, 2021, 03:12:20 PM »
dismiss the warning signs as has been done all throughout the (still going) global pandemic.
Count me in as disappointed too: we've been ignoring all negative signs for as long as the pandemic lasted, but now people want to jump at the first positive one.

I get it. I am sick and tired too. I want to move on with life now that I'm double vaxd and my risk assessment says a) I am literally bound to catch it at work b) nothing particularly bad is going to happen to me or my double vaxd husband, my only social contact right now other than work. The timing, with the holidays, is particularly nasty to be introducing new restrictions or imposing them upon yourself. But is it that difficult to avoid proclaiming we shouldn't have any further restrictions until we actually have some solid answers?

Yes, because the specifics of COVID seem to be ever-changing.  The idea that we should all just lock down and hide ourselves away in fear until we know more about it is just nonsense.  And I am someone who has been vaccinated and got the booster last week and is all in favor of being careful and hoping others do so as well, but more restrictions are not going to work.  The ones in 2020 did not work, and the public at large, right or wrong, simply will not accept anything like that again, so it ain't gonna happen.  If you are going to ask me what the right answers are, I do not have them, and I am not sure who does, but restrictions like 2020 again, or anything surpassing those, are the wrong answers, at this juncture.

Offline MoraWintersoul

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2871 on: December 23, 2021, 03:21:48 PM »
The idea that we should all just lock down and hide ourselves away in fear until we know more about it is just nonsense.
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting not immediately ruling out restrictions precisely because of what you mentioned, that what we know about COVID changes all the time. Now nothing is solid in people's minds except "restrictions didn't work" except they did and "Omicron is a cold" based on a month's worth of data mostly from a very unusual/atypical country for pandemic watching purposes. Maybe something like "we should be careful" should be the new solid thing.

The best reason I've seen is concern about overflowing the healthcare system. But even if the average person has some duty to prevent this, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just write checks to build more capacity?
We can also write checks for a time machine to train more doctors and nurses to occupy that capacity, but they won't cash.

Again, I'm zero percent worried for myself, I trust the vaccines to do their job enough that I have no anxiety. For myself. But there are so many people in so many situations that would not benefit from Covid getting out of hand again, not the least of which the unvaccinated, as much as some of them want to lower the global quality of life with their stupid little antivax games during a pandemic. I don't want people to die or end up in the hospital because they assessed the situation poorly. Yes, deaths from the new variant have been reported.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2021, 03:39:56 PM by MoraWintersoul »

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Offline Harmony

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2872 on: December 23, 2021, 03:45:15 PM »
Let's not forget that in our discussions around this new variant and lockdowns and masks that the picture is much bigger than all of this.

The healthcare system - at least in the states (I cannot speak to anywhere else) is on the verge of collapse.

My 51 year old sister did not die with Covid in her body but she definitely died because of Covid.  Because her general practitioner didn't have the time for a proper medical exam.  The doctors and nurses in 2 separate hospitals were so overwhelmed they missed her heart failure.  She had to be waitlisted for a pulmonologist from September until January (didn't live that long) and the cardiologist was more than into March for a new patient work up.

Healthcare workers are quitting in droves.

If you aren't scared of Covid, good on you.  But you should definitely be scared about getting sick with ANYTHING else right now.  Or your kid, or your parent, or your sibling.  Because their quality of care is going to fucking suck.
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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2873 on: December 23, 2021, 03:49:50 PM »
dismiss the warning signs as has been done all throughout the (still going) global pandemic.
Count me in as disappointed too: we've been ignoring all negative signs for as long as the pandemic lasted, but now people want to jump at the first positive one.

I get it. I am sick and tired too. I want to move on with life now that I'm double vaxd and my risk assessment says a) I am literally bound to catch it at work b) nothing particularly bad is going to happen to me or my double vaxd husband, my only social contact right now other than work. The timing, with the holidays, is particularly nasty to be introducing new restrictions or imposing them upon yourself. But is it that difficult to avoid proclaiming we shouldn't have any further restrictions until we actually have some solid answers?

What restrictions? We have already had restrictions, and still have many of them. What we did in March 2020 didn't work. So what are you all proposing?

I really struggle with the "it didn't work" mentality.  How much worse would it have been if there weren't the kinds of lockdowns that were put in place.  Let's compare Australia with the US.  The former came down hard, and nearly eradicated it - but at least contained it enough to carry on with life.  The latter ... not so much.

What am I proposing ... That we don't need to fill movie theatres, and arenas (sports or concerts) or have a packed Times Square on New Year's Eve.  Or that it's ok for recreation leagues pause their schedules, or that spin classes need not be filled with steamy panting people inhaling and exhaling 80 times per minute.  Or that school systems mandate COVID vaccines the same way they mandate MMR, tetanus, diptheria, polio, and chicken pox.  Or that masks be worn by all in indoor facilities where distancing cannot maintained.  Or that any business where patrons congregate for extended periods of time have restrictions on capacities - because it's unfair to expect business owners to police masking and distancing requirements.

Ya know... stuff that is going to slow the spread of the very virus we humans who (once infected) are spreading and catching through every breath that we take.

When talking about the benefits of restrictions, we should not forget the negatives.  As someone who spent most of 2020 in a depressed state, I can relate.

 - No proof any restriction did anything. Since Delta slithered into Australia, their case count has been an almost vertical line. Or, look at Europe vs. the US in Summer/Fall/Winter 2020. As the US opened up more our case count was higher. Europe's policy was apparently a success story. Then they got crushed in the fall and winter. Restrictions merely delayed the inevitable

 - I am only aware of two controlled studies on masks (though have heard there are more). Neither conclusively showed that masks do anything to lower transmission. One of the studies kinda sorta showed that they might help for older people, but that study (the Bangladeshi one) was based off of people self-reporting symptoms rather than any scheduled testing. Masks fail the basic smell test anyway. I wore mine without complaint for months because the understanding at the time was COVID might spread through the moisture droplets we breathe out. Once we found that COVID spread through air particles, they become pointless. If you have multiple people in a room with cloth masks, even if the cloth is trapping 50% of the COVID particles per breath, the collective result of multiple people breathing indoors is hotboxing the room with COVID. Even if you want to go with an N95 mandate, they need to be worn correctly which most people won't do. People have a right to not be compelled to wear things they don't want to. There's no where near sufficient evidence around mask wearing to justify violating that right

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@ Tim's post.  I agree.  In a time where we have many diametrically opposed issues (ie, it's impossible to solve both/multiple at the same time), which do you chose / which do you sacrifice?  It's almost like medical triage... ABC - Airway, Breathing, Circulation.  What are the ABC's of society?

Healthy happy and productive people. Impossible under a COVID mitigation regime.
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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2874 on: December 23, 2021, 03:52:05 PM »
Let's not forget that in our discussions around this new variant and lockdowns and masks that the picture is much bigger than all of this.

The healthcare system - at least in the states (I cannot speak to anywhere else) is on the verge of collapse.

My 51 year old sister did not die with Covid in her body but she definitely died because of Covid.  Because her general practitioner didn't have the time for a proper medical exam.  The doctors and nurses in 2 separate hospitals were so overwhelmed they missed her heart failure.  She had to be waitlisted for a pulmonologist from September until January (didn't live that long) and the cardiologist was more than into March for a new patient work up.

Healthcare workers are quitting in droves.

If you aren't scared of Covid, good on you.  But you should definitely be scared about getting sick with ANYTHING else right now.  Or your kid, or your parent, or your sibling.  Because their quality of care is going to fucking suck.

If we assume the above is true, then why are we even talking about mandating COVID shots for healthcare workers which will force even more of them to quit?
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Offline Harmony

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2875 on: December 23, 2021, 03:56:36 PM »
Let's not forget that in our discussions around this new variant and lockdowns and masks that the picture is much bigger than all of this.

The healthcare system - at least in the states (I cannot speak to anywhere else) is on the verge of collapse.

My 51 year old sister did not die with Covid in her body but she definitely died because of Covid.  Because her general practitioner didn't have the time for a proper medical exam.  The doctors and nurses in 2 separate hospitals were so overwhelmed they missed her heart failure.  She had to be waitlisted for a pulmonologist from September until January (didn't live that long) and the cardiologist was more than into March for a new patient work up.

Healthcare workers are quitting in droves.

If you aren't scared of Covid, good on you.  But you should definitely be scared about getting sick with ANYTHING else right now.  Or your kid, or your parent, or your sibling.  Because their quality of care is going to fucking suck.

If we assume the above is true, then why are we even talking about mandating COVID shots for healthcare workers which will force even more of them to quit?

Even if the mandates magically went away, the point remains.  And I'm not sure why you would think I would be less than truthful about that which killed my sister.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-11-15/us-faces-crisis-of-burned-out-health-care-workers
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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2876 on: December 23, 2021, 04:03:24 PM »
what we know about COVID changes all the time

I know I'm being repetitive but again I really disagree with this framing. We know it's highly transmissible (to everyone) and mostly only causes serious symptoms in specific risk groups. Everyone is going to get it at some point, and for most people it won't be a serious problem. How it attacks people on an individual basis is still something we're learning a lot about, but that isn't a social policy problem unless they find something truly out there.

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The best reason I've seen is concern about overflowing the healthcare system. But even if the average person has some duty to prevent this, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just write checks to build more capacity?
We can also write checks for a time machine to train more doctors and nurses to occupy that capacity, but they won't cash.

m? If China can build a skyscraper in a week we can repurpose buildings and buy medical equipment to make sure people have access to healthcare. I guess my intuition could be completely wrong, but I think that would be cheaper than the cost of marketing and enforcing social restrictions that many people don't comply with anyway. I just talked to someone from Los Angeles, one of the most restrictive areas in the US, and he told me the policies are a joke and no one listens to them.

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Again, I'm zero percent worried for myself, I trust the vaccines to do their job enough that I have no anxiety. For myself. But there are so many people in so many situations that would not benefit from Covid getting out of hand again, not the least of which the unvaccinated, as much as some of them want to lower the global quality of life with their stupid little antivax games during a pandemic. I don't want people to die or end up in the hospital because they assessed the situation poorly. Yes, deaths from the new variant have been reported.

If someone's out in public, they're making a personal evaluation of the risk and deciding it's worth it. Why is that your problem?
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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2877 on: December 23, 2021, 04:09:28 PM »
Let's not forget that in our discussions around this new variant and lockdowns and masks that the picture is much bigger than all of this.

The healthcare system - at least in the states (I cannot speak to anywhere else) is on the verge of collapse.

My 51 year old sister did not die with Covid in her body but she definitely died because of Covid.  Because her general practitioner didn't have the time for a proper medical exam.  The doctors and nurses in 2 separate hospitals were so overwhelmed they missed her heart failure.  She had to be waitlisted for a pulmonologist from September until January (didn't live that long) and the cardiologist was more than into March for a new patient work up.

Healthcare workers are quitting in droves.

If you aren't scared of Covid, good on you.  But you should definitely be scared about getting sick with ANYTHING else right now.  Or your kid, or your parent, or your sibling.  Because their quality of care is going to fucking suck.

If we assume the above is true, then why are we even talking about mandating COVID shots for healthcare workers which will force even more of them to quit?

And I'm not sure why you would think I would be less than truthful about that which killed my sister.

I worded my post thoughtlessly and I apologize.
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Offline Dave_Manchester

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2878 on: December 23, 2021, 04:16:54 PM »
Quote
The best reason I've seen is concern about overflowing the healthcare system. But even if the average person has some duty to prevent this, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just write checks to build more capacity?
We can also write checks for a time machine to train more doctors and nurses to occupy that capacity, but they won't cash.

m? If China can build a skyscraper in a week we can repurpose buildings and buy medical equipment to make sure people have access to healthcare.

I think her point was that you can create all the new hospitals you want and stock them full of patients, it won't do much good without a corresponding batch of doctors, nurses and trained professionals to occupy those new hospitals and work all that new equipment.

Offline MoraWintersoul

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2879 on: December 23, 2021, 04:27:23 PM »
"We shouldn't have restrictions or rules because people won't follow them" is a bad argument. You need to come up with rules that people will follow, and rules that actually help the situation. I raged about a lot of these unhelpful rules last year, but anything that actually limits contacts while providing an alternative to the activity you want to be doing is a helpful restriction. I agree that indoor masking for prolonged periods of time even with surgical masks properly worn (let alone regular cloth) is so many levels below vaccination as a method of defense that talking about masks so much still means we failed at vaccinating, but do they "impose" protective clothing on you in the army? Do they "impose" the right shoes on you when you go rock climbing? I don't wanna wear anything I don't wanna wear or do anything I don't wanna do either, but... tough shit. We should have the best masks we can afford and wear them and wear them properly.

Yesterday at work we had to explain to a bunch of four and five year olds that this year, because of the new restrictions, Santa will come and visit them but we will only wave at him as he shows up at the door, and he will slide the bag of presents over instead of handing them out. They accepted it completely rationally, as they accept the other one million little kindergarten rules every day. What's the other option? This is daily life now, whether we like it or not. When I was a kid, there were months where I had to accept that during some hours the power doesn't come on and we have to light candles and listen to the radio. Some kids had to accept a lot worse than that. As adults, we should accept that there are situations out of our control and still try to contribute as best we can.

There's no alternative to limiting contacts if you want to slow the infection rate a little with something this crazy transmissible. And you want to slow it until you have either a silver bullet dominant variant (which Omicron may be but we still don't know) or a vaccinated population. Letting the virus burn through unprotected or partially protected populations is bad. Letting a variant take over before we have any solid info on it is bad.

If someone's out in public, they're making a personal evaluation of the risk and deciding it's worth it. Why is that your problem?
Again, I'm the one who made a risk evaluation and I'm out in public - not now, but before we got this news. I was at a concert with 11 000 people with no proof of vaccination or masks (just a relatively highly vaccinated population) in November because I estimated I knew enough about how delta behaves in my region with vaccinated people that I don't think I'll contribute to a terrible spike or end up really sick. My estimation was correct. My problem is that we did this with delta in the beginning, insisting it doesn't change a thing, and we were only fortunate that it didn't kick our asses as much as it could have.

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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2880 on: December 23, 2021, 04:33:22 PM »
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The best reason I've seen is concern about overflowing the healthcare system. But even if the average person has some duty to prevent this, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just write checks to build more capacity?
We can also write checks for a time machine to train more doctors and nurses to occupy that capacity, but they won't cash.

m? If China can build a skyscraper in a week we can repurpose buildings and buy medical equipment to make sure people have access to healthcare.

I think her point was that you can create all the new hospitals you want and stock them full of patients, it won't do much good without a corresponding batch of doctors, nurses and trained professionals to occupy those new hospitals and work all that new equipment.

Yeah you're right. Didn't read it correctly.

I think where the posts about the US Healthcare system bother me, with the understanding that they are sincerely intentioned, is that they're trying to frame the problem as something specific to COVID when really this has been building for a while. Yes some of it is media spin. Yes the media likes a good human interest story about overworked people, and they spin up a hospital capacity story every flu season. And to some degree hospital capacity is undercounted because some of the reserve capacity can be opened immediately if needed. But ultimately it does come back to how the US Healthcare system is a giant game of doing the least possible while getting paid the most possible. This is true in any business but between the care providers, insurance agencies, and a million other bureaucracies, it's so intricate as to make any normal person's head spin.

I still think building more capacity is probably worth it. Ending COVID shot mandates is absolutely essential to not bleed off more staff. Maybe you could subsidize pay for healthcare workers to incentive them to come back. I think everyone has their price but worry about the longer term issues. But this is not a COVID problem and it's a problem with how the US Healthcare system is broken.
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Offline XJDenton

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2881 on: December 23, 2021, 04:45:21 PM »
- I am only aware of two controlled studies on masks (though have heard there are more). Neither conclusively showed that masks do anything to lower transmission. One of the studies kinda sorta showed that they might help for older people, but that study (the Bangladeshi one) was based off of people self-reporting symptoms rather than any scheduled testing. Masks fail the basic smell test anyway. I wore mine without complaint for months because the understanding at the time was COVID might spread through the moisture droplets we breathe out. Once we found that COVID spread through air particles, they become pointless. If you have multiple people in a room with cloth masks, even if the cloth is trapping 50% of the COVID particles per breath, the collective result of multiple people breathing indoors is hotboxing the room with COVID. Even if you want to go with an N95 mandate, they need to be worn correctly which most people won't do. People have a right to not be compelled to wear things they don't want to. There's no where near sufficient evidence around mask wearing to justify violating that right

Well here is a meta analysis that looked at over 5000 papers, filtered down to 6 studies that had strict requirements on lab verified cases, testing requirements etc, that states that mask wearing is associated with an odds ratio of around 0.38 when looking at covid positive outcomes.

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0196655320310439?token=626149079A9AB891D90769E87549880D2FCAC47969AF31C7B02A9DD5E16F427E53FFE3174E805FFBC7B6F2C60515BC7D&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20211223225610
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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2882 on: December 23, 2021, 05:11:15 PM »
"We shouldn't have restrictions or rules because people won't follow them" is a bad argument. You need to come up with rules that people will follow, and rules that actually help the situation.

But what guarantees that a rule will be followed? With any law or rule there's an expectation of how many people will follow it, and there's going to be an enforcement cost. With the COVID restrictions, you either get selective enforcement (parts of the US) or a police state (Australia or New Zealand). I don't know if this is more true in the US than in other countries, but generally our selectively enforced rules tend to sweep up the most disadvantaged segments of our society. Police state tactics tend to go over very poorly.

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I raged about a lot of these unhelpful rules last year, but anything that actually limits contacts while providing an alternative to the activity you want to be doing is a helpful restriction. I agree that indoor masking for prolonged periods of time even with surgical masks properly worn (let alone regular cloth) is so many levels below vaccination as a method of defense that talking about masks so much still means we failed at vaccinating, but do they "impose" protective clothing on you in the army? Do they "impose" the right shoes on you when you go rock climbing? I don't wanna wear anything I don't wanna wear or do anything I don't wanna do either, but... tough shit. We should have the best masks we can afford and wear them and wear them properly.

I do agree with you that the focus on masks has been a major strategic blunder in terms of taking attention away from more productive solutions.

When you join the military you sign a contract with your government essentially saying they own you. Ordinary citizens do not do this.

As for the rock climbing thing, that gets more into what restrictions private businesses impose rather than the government. I have serious issues with private businesses mandating a lot of things, but there's more nuance to that.

Quote
Yesterday at work we had to explain to a bunch of four and five year olds that this year, because of the new restrictions, Santa will come and visit them but we will only wave at him as he shows up at the door, and he will slide the bag of presents over instead of handing them out. They accepted it completely rationally, as they accept the other one million little kindergarten rules every day. What's the other option? This is daily life now, whether we like it or not. When I was a kid, there were months where I had to accept that during some hours the power doesn't come on and we have to light candles and listen to the radio. Some kids had to accept a lot worse than that. As adults, we should accept that there are situations out of our control and still try to contribute as best we can.

Your story about the power going out is sad. I hope you and presumably your family are out of that situation.

COVID policy is completely within our control though. If we collectively decided to end all restrictions tomorrow then they would be over.

And I guess on a more fundamental level I just don't have it in me to say 'it sucks, deal with it.' Yes you have to be realistic and pick your battles. I've been undergoing medical treatment yet and masks are still stringently enforced in those facilities. Do I really care about freedom or do I need my health problems resolved? But as much as I can I avoid anything that brings me into any sort of contact with having to change anything I do because of COVID policy. There is at least one business I really like but will not give money to until they fix their requirements.

Quote
There's no alternative to limiting contacts if you want to slow the infection rate a little with something this crazy transmissible. And you want to slow it until you have either a silver bullet dominant variant (which Omicron may be but we still don't know) or a vaccinated population. Letting the virus burn through unprotected or partially protected populations is bad. Letting a variant take over before we have any solid info on it is bad.

At one point when it looked like I actually had COVID I kept my shopping to nighttime hours when fewer people were in the store. For people who actually are sick I think it's wisest to stay home. Not just a COVID thing. When I still worked at an office at one point we had 20 people out of an 80 person department out sick. Perhaps if 2-3 people stayed home it would not have an issue.

But unless we're dealing with something like airborne smallpox, I don't see how we can possibly hold people accountable for maybe spreading a virus asymptomatically or maybe being at risk of getting it from an asymptomatic person. Just living in a constant state of fear and in the end it can't be controlled anyway.
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Offline Skeever

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2883 on: December 23, 2021, 05:37:17 PM »
"We shouldn't have restrictions or rules because people won't follow them" is a bad argument. You need to come up with rules that people will follow, and rules that actually help the situation.

 This is at least exactly what I'm saying and where I disagree with jingle who was railing against movie theaters and movie theaters and gym classes.  There are ways to get back to life safely.

 This thread is just all kinds of confused and we have people talking way past each other.

Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2884 on: December 23, 2021, 05:54:04 PM »
- I am only aware of two controlled studies on masks (though have heard there are more). Neither conclusively showed that masks do anything to lower transmission. One of the studies kinda sorta showed that they might help for older people, but that study (the Bangladeshi one) was based off of people self-reporting symptoms rather than any scheduled testing. Masks fail the basic smell test anyway. I wore mine without complaint for months because the understanding at the time was COVID might spread through the moisture droplets we breathe out. Once we found that COVID spread through air particles, they become pointless. If you have multiple people in a room with cloth masks, even if the cloth is trapping 50% of the COVID particles per breath, the collective result of multiple people breathing indoors is hotboxing the room with COVID. Even if you want to go with an N95 mandate, they need to be worn correctly which most people won't do. People have a right to not be compelled to wear things they don't want to. There's no where near sufficient evidence around mask wearing to justify violating that right

Well here is a meta analysis that looked at over 5000 papers, filtered down to 6 studies that had strict requirements on lab verified cases, testing requirements etc, that states that mask wearing is associated with an odds ratio of around 0.38 when looking at covid positive outcomes.

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0196655320310439?token=626149079A9AB891D90769E87549880D2FCAC47969AF31C7B02A9DD5E16F427E53FFE3174E805FFBC7B6F2C60515BC7D&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20211223225610

These are still case control studies though rather than randomized control trials. I hate to poop on them too much knowing my own biases, but I'm not sure what they prove either. The authors of this meta-analysis even acknowledge that in their paper.

Something you pointed out and I agree with is that there was a sincere effort at quality control here, which is better than some of the junk out there about COVID (on both sides).

But there are still weird results in here. In their adjusted numbers, being in China and wearing a mask is more associated with preventing COVID than wearing an N95? The super low numbers from China bother me in general. Unless I'm supposed to believe their national case numbers, I don't know how I can look at such a drastic improvement relative to every other group they break out and not wonder what's going on.

Only one of the studies looks at non-healthcare workers. After they apply their random effect adjustment and adjust for subgroups (it looks like they're applying that before the studies are combined), the odds ratio is .78. If I'm understanding that statistic correctly, a 1 means the two are not correlated. But then they say after adjusting for confounding variables the ratio goes down to .23. But I don't see any information on how this confounding variable adjustment was applied.

If I go into the Doung (non-Healthcare) study and look at their breakdown, I see the .78 odds ratio again. And then the number gets lower as you add a medical mask. Interestingly, wearing a mask sometimes gives you .75, wearing always give you .16. But do they have a breakdown in those subgroups of what types of masks are being used there? More significant in terms of odds in that study is duration of contact, which seems logical.

But looking at both the Doung study and the meta-analysis, I'm not sure how they adjusted down to .23. It's possible I'm missing something obvious but it seems like a black box.

It's possible I guess that for healthcare workers in healthcare environments a mask might help. If they're working in more ventilated areas maybe the cloth mask is enough to help? But on the other hand maybe the non-mask wearing members of these studies are less sanitary in general. When it comes to masks, the healthcare side of it matters less to me.

My concern with mask policies is with the general population, and I'm not seeing anything here that tells me they're a significant factor. But again perhaps I'm missing something
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Offline MoraWintersoul

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2885 on: December 23, 2021, 05:54:55 PM »
Your story about the power going out is sad. I hope you and presumably your family are out of that situation.

COVID policy is completely within our control though. If we collectively decided to end all restrictions tomorrow then they would be over.

And I guess on a more fundamental level I just don't have it in me to say 'it sucks, deal with it.' Yes you have to be realistic and pick your battles. I've been undergoing medical treatment yet and masks are still stringently enforced in those facilities. Do I really care about freedom or do I need my health problems resolved? But as much as I can I avoid anything that brings me into any sort of contact with having to change anything I do because of COVID policy. There is at least one business I really like but will not give money to until they fix their requirements.
I wrote about this already in the thread, so I just paraphrased it for the purposes of this post - they were country-wide power restrictions. Among many other more notable things, but the power restrictions were the first thing that clued me into knowing it's not just my family that's poor, I just live in a crappy place in a crappy time. Sometimes crappy times happen to literally everyone you know - natural disasters and their consequences, boots on the ground near you, dictatorships, an economic crisis hitting a vulnerable country or city particularly hard and at once, etc.

Covid is the first time the average youngish western person has experienced this and I get the reflex to say that if only we did One Smart Thing and decided the restrictions were over, they would be over and everything would be fine because we all manage our own risks. But there's no one neat trick, sometimes you fight a strong enemy for a real long time with the best weapons you have and still suffer defeat after defeat. Covid doesn't care how much we wish all the restrictions were taken away, because it's going to kick our ass as soon as they are taken away, as it did every time. There's not a lot of individual accountability to be handed out in a global pandemic, and most of it should go to literal snake oil salesmen and active antivax preachers anyway, but it's not good to pre-emptively decide every new variant is as good as dominant because we can't be assed trying to control it in any way.

There are ways to get back to life safely.
Yes, but some parts of life are inherently unsafe during Covid spikes, and if you know someone suffering from the consequences of throwing caution to the wind, preaching caution is expected, a spike in cases from people going out to party will (especially with the new variant) infect someone catching the bus to work. Sucks if the movie theater the way it used to be is your favorite part - seeing international bands on tour is literally the only thing I wanna do. Doesn't mean that Chad is automatically wrong when he "rails" against that - at first people by and large ignored Covid and then ignored every subsequent variant, and maybe if we're on variant #4 or #5 we should at the very least consider not doing that anymore.

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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2886 on: December 23, 2021, 06:23:59 PM »
I wrote about this already in the thread, so I just paraphrased it for the purposes of this post - they were country-wide power restrictions. Among many other more notable things, but the power restrictions were the first thing that clued me into knowing it's not just my family that's poor, I just live in a crappy place in a crappy time. Sometimes crappy times happen to literally everyone you know - natural disasters and their consequences, boots on the ground near you, dictatorships, an economic crisis hitting a vulnerable country or city particularly hard and at once, etc.

Covid is the first time the average youngish western person has experienced this and I get the reflex to say that if only we did One Smart Thing and decided the restrictions were over, they would be over and everything would be fine because we all manage our own risks. But there's no one neat trick, sometimes you fight a strong enemy for a real long time with the best weapons you have and still suffer defeat after defeat. Covid doesn't care how much we wish all the restrictions were taken away, because it's going to kick our ass as soon as they are taken away, as it did every time. There's not a lot of individual accountability to be handed out in a global pandemic, and most of it should go to literal snake oil salesmen and active antivax preachers anyway, but it's not good to pre-emptively decide every new variant is as good as dominant because we can't be assed trying to control it in any way.

Yeah that situation you mentioned sounds really bad. Again I hope you're not there anymore.

But I guess though I'd frame the analogy differently. Because you're talking about COVID itself as an unstoppable force of nature we keep having problems with.

The real problems with COVID though, the economic stress and the health stress, I think are almost entirely driven by the societal response we decided to go with. If we had decided in March 2020 to rush the vaccine development but otherwise live life as normal, I think most peoples' lives would be substantially the same as they were in February. March and April would have possibly been harder due to stress on the healthcare system, but better to take a couple months of difficulty than the ongoing two year saga we're living in now. Whenever I read or hear someone talk about hardships suffered during "the pandemic", my mind thinks "no, the hardships due to our government's response to COVID" (unless the story is about someone actually suffering from COVID).

Like you were talking about how the different variants have different effects, and I guess this is anecdotal, but during the initial wave of COVID if someone got it I knew a story of battling a severe illness was coming. When Delta showed up more people had it but it was more like "oh I had a bad cough" or "I couldn't smell for a couple weeks." Still bad symptoms but less scary than the initial wave. The case counts were higher but in terms of their effect on individual people it was more mild. Seems to me like an improvement. Seems like our immune systems forced COVID to become less deadly and humanity won. And it seems with Omicron we won again by forcing it to be even more mild.
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Offline Skeever

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2887 on: December 23, 2021, 06:27:41 PM »
Yes, but some parts of life are inherently unsafe during Covid spikes, and if you know someone suffering from the consequences of throwing caution to the wind, preaching caution is expected, a spike in cases from people going out to party will (especially with the new variant) infect someone catching the bus to work. Sucks if the movie theater the way it used to be is your favorite part - seeing international bands on tour is literally the only thing I wanna do. Doesn't mean that Chad is automatically wrong when he "rails" against that - at first people by and large ignored Covid and then ignored every subsequent variant, and maybe if we're on variant #4 or #5 we should at the very least consider not doing that anymore.

But where is the evidence as to what parts of life are "inherently unsafe"? And what parts of those parts? This is the problem. We have people criticizing others for living with some type of normalcy. Well we've had a long time to figure out what's safe and what isn't, haven't we? And the CDC have definitions around close contact as well as other guidance that we can follow. So I personally do not believe that something is suddenly unsafe just because the numbers are rising and there is anxiety over "doing something". With all due respect, there are people in this thread who have shared that they have not done a single thing face-to-face since the pandemic started, even though there have been stretches of time when it is pretty much widely agreed upon that there are ways to meet safely face-to-face, both then and now. That is not a burden you can put on the entire world population.

Offline XJDenton

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2888 on: December 23, 2021, 07:03:04 PM »
- I am only aware of two controlled studies on masks (though have heard there are more). Neither conclusively showed that masks do anything to lower transmission. One of the studies kinda sorta showed that they might help for older people, but that study (the Bangladeshi one) was based off of people self-reporting symptoms rather than any scheduled testing. Masks fail the basic smell test anyway. I wore mine without complaint for months because the understanding at the time was COVID might spread through the moisture droplets we breathe out. Once we found that COVID spread through air particles, they become pointless. If you have multiple people in a room with cloth masks, even if the cloth is trapping 50% of the COVID particles per breath, the collective result of multiple people breathing indoors is hotboxing the room with COVID. Even if you want to go with an N95 mandate, they need to be worn correctly which most people won't do. People have a right to not be compelled to wear things they don't want to. There's no where near sufficient evidence around mask wearing to justify violating that right

Well here is a meta analysis that looked at over 5000 papers, filtered down to 6 studies that had strict requirements on lab verified cases, testing requirements etc, that states that mask wearing is associated with an odds ratio of around 0.38 when looking at covid positive outcomes.

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0196655320310439?token=626149079A9AB891D90769E87549880D2FCAC47969AF31C7B02A9DD5E16F427E53FFE3174E805FFBC7B6F2C60515BC7D&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20211223225610

These are still case control studies though rather than randomized control trials. I hate to poop on them too much knowing my own biases, but I'm not sure what they prove either. The authors of this meta-analysis even acknowledge that in their paper.

Something you pointed out and I agree with is that there was a sincere effort at quality control here, which is better than some of the junk out there about COVID (on both sides).

But there are still weird results in here. In their adjusted numbers, being in China and wearing a mask is more associated with preventing COVID than wearing an N95? The super low numbers from China bother me in general. Unless I'm supposed to believe their national case numbers, I don't know how I can look at such a drastic improvement relative to every other group they break out and not wonder what's going on.

Only one of the studies looks at non-healthcare workers. After they apply their random effect adjustment and adjust for subgroups (it looks like they're applying that before the studies are combined), the odds ratio is .78. If I'm understanding that statistic correctly, a 1 means the two are not correlated. But then they say after adjusting for confounding variables the ratio goes down to .23. But I don't see any information on how this confounding variable adjustment was applied.

If I go into the Doung (non-Healthcare) study and look at their breakdown, I see the .78 odds ratio again. And then the number gets lower as you add a medical mask. Interestingly, wearing a mask sometimes gives you .75, wearing always give you .16. But do they have a breakdown in those subgroups of what types of masks are being used there? More significant in terms of odds in that study is duration of contact, which seems logical.

But looking at both the Doung study and the meta-analysis, I'm not sure how they adjusted down to .23. It's possible I'm missing something obvious but it seems like a black box.

It's possible I guess that for healthcare workers in healthcare environments a mask might help. If they're working in more ventilated areas maybe the cloth mask is enough to help? But on the other hand maybe the non-mask wearing members of these studies are less sanitary in general. When it comes to masks, the healthcare side of it matters less to me.

My concern with mask policies is with the general population, and I'm not seeing anything here that tells me they're a significant factor. But again perhaps I'm missing something

Well, if I may offer some alternate perspective, please consider the following points:

1. A masks effectiveness in preventing spread does not just depend on its ability to filter out/capture aerosols. Respiratory Aerosols with diameter greater than 5 um typically fall to the ground within 2m (hence the social distancing recommendations). This size of aerosol is both large enough to be filtered reasonably effectively by most/all mask types, and additionally the mask will reduce the velocity of those that do escape significantly, reducing their ability to spread even further.

2. Viral load (i.e how many viruses a person is exposed to) affects how severe the disease can be,

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0258421

so even partial effectiveness of a mask can assist in reducing the number of patients who experience severe complications of the disease simply by limiting the total number of viruses in the local atmosphere (which would be even more important in less well ventilated areas.)

3. There are very few places that have absolutely not ventilation. In this case, the total viral concentration in the local atmosphere is going to reach an equilibrium based on the input (from infected persons) vs output (based on the air changes per minute). Any measure which reduces the input, even imperfect ones, leads to the equilibrium shifting towards lower concentrations, which in turn reduces the chances of an person in that atmosphere being infected.
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2889 on: December 23, 2021, 07:10:10 PM »
The viral load argument is very fair. I just don't know how you prove the degree to which it has influence in the real world. You could test it in a laboratory but the real world has a million different variables.
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2890 on: December 23, 2021, 07:17:32 PM »
I'm not sure you need proof. As far as I am aware, there are no viable mechanisms by which using a mask INCREASES your chance of airbourne inhalation, so at worst masks do nothing, but if they do anything that is better than nothing, and is a cheap and easily applied measure.
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2891 on: December 23, 2021, 08:17:33 PM »
Haven't been able to read this page yet - I'll do so over my morning coffee.  I didn't mean to stir up a hornet's nest with my rant that (Western) society largely acts entitled and privileged - related to COVID or not, I'm not sure anyone can really argue that point.
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2892 on: December 24, 2021, 08:37:32 AM »
There's no where near sufficient evidence around mask wearing to justify violating that right

Not this shit again.  No "rights" are being violated under mask mandates.  Unless I'm misunderstanding your comment.

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@ Tim's post.  I agree.  In a time where we have many diametrically opposed issues (ie, it's impossible to solve both/multiple at the same time), which do you chose / which do you sacrifice?  It's almost like medical triage... ABC - Airway, Breathing, Circulation.  What are the ABC's of society?

Healthy happy and productive people. Impossible under a COVID mitigation regime.

Ok, so you yourself cited "healthy" as the first criteria/priority that we have to focus on; happy as second; productive as 3rd.  Completely reasonable, and I'm fully on board.  To me, restrictions* have a net positive effect on the first priority (health), but net negative on the 2nd and 3rd.  So if those are your ABC's to triage the pandemic, I'm unclear the resistance to restrictions.

*I'm lumping a variety of things into the term "restrictions" ... capacity limits, distancing and mask mandates, wfh/virtual schooling requirements; event postponements/cancellations, vax requirements.  I AM COMPLETELY OPPOSED TO FULL LOCKDOWNS like we had in wave 1 and 2.  I'm not a fan of school closures either, but see them as a means to an end.

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2893 on: December 24, 2021, 08:37:40 AM »
I agree that indoor masking for prolonged periods of time even with surgical masks properly worn (let alone regular cloth) is so many levels below vaccination as a method of defense that talking about masks so much still means we failed at vaccinating,

This isn't directed at you Milena, I'm just using/quoting your comment to introduce this point regarding vax + masking.  I'm unsure why some can't comprehend that BOTH provides more protection than either one alone.  It's not like we all stop using seatbelts once airbags came into place.  The combination of both provides better protection.

As adults, we should accept that there are situations out of our control and still try to contribute as best we can.

There's no alternative to limiting contacts if you want to slow the infection rate a little with something this crazy transmissible. And you want to slow it until you have either a silver bullet dominant variant (which Omicron may be but we still don't know) or a vaccinated population. Letting the virus burn through unprotected or partially protected populations is bad. Letting a variant take over before we have any solid info on it is bad.

Amen to both these points.  Sing it sister!   :lol

If someone's out in public drunk driving, they're making a personal evaluation of the risk and deciding it's worth it. Why is that your problem?

If I add these two little words to this comment, does your question still hold?
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2894 on: December 24, 2021, 08:37:48 AM »
I apologize if it seems like I'm harping on you Reap ... I don't mean to be if it's coming across as such. Based on some of your other comments, you're taking a number of reasonable steps to do 'your part'.  But there's a couple of comments I want to tug at, and I'm hoping I'm not talking past you.

But ultimately it does come back to how the US Healthcare system is a giant game of doing the least possible while getting paid the most possible. This is true in any business but between the care providers, insurance agencies, and a million other bureaucracies, it's so intricate as to make any normal person's head spin.

I might agree with this, if it weren't for the fact that most global healthcare systems are buckling under this.  We sure are here in Canada; NHS is in the UK, and we know other areas of Europe are getting crushed as well.

And I guess on a more fundamental level I just don't have it in me to say 'it sucks, deal with it.' Yes you have to be realistic and pick your battles.

So is the alternative to say "it sucks, so I won't deal with it".  Where does that leave us?  Is that going to accelerate the end of the pandemic?

But unless we're dealing with something like airborne smallpox, I don't see how we can possibly hold people accountable for maybe spreading a virus asymptomatically or maybe being at risk of getting it from an asymptomatic person. Just living in a constant state of fear and in the end it can't be controlled anyway.

I don't think it's a matter of holding people accountable for things they unknowingly do (or living in a constant state of fear).  For me, I'm just hyper aware of the potential implications of my decisions, and would like to see more people recognize the risks of their actions/choices on society.  For instance, jingle.daughter has a friend who was exposed to someone who had recent contact with a known COVID positive person.  jingle.daughter's friend is now choosing to (mostly) isolate until she knows if the person *she* was in contact with is COVID positive.  It's those kinds of decisions I appreciate, and think need to happen with more regularity - because the daily case count in Ontario MORE THAN DOUBLED FROM YESTERDAY (4400 yesterday; 9500 today).
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2895 on: December 24, 2021, 08:38:04 AM »
Seems like our immune systems forced COVID to become less deadly and humanity won. And it seems with Omicron we won again by forcing it to be even more mild.

While this may be true in the end, expert after expert is warning that this is a dangerous belief to hold this early into the spread of the variant.  VERY dangerous.  Whether anecdotal, media reports, or non-peer reviewed studies.  This is a nice notion to hope for, but what if it's not the case?  I've always approached everything COVID with the attitude that I'd rather make the mistake of being overly cautious, than the bigger mistake of not being cautious enough.

And even if it is more mild, given how the quickly and easily it is spreading, it's not mild enough to NOT put a burden on healthcare.  A single match won't burn wet leaves, but a raging forest fire will.  Omicron is becoming / has become a raging forest fire in many places already.  Other countries are sending out warning signals (see, my above comment ... DOUBLE the case count in one day).  The spread of this variant will very likely find the unvax'd; the immune compromised; the elderly; the double-vax'd (data is showing this group has a higher chance of hospitalization from Omicron vs Delta); healthcare workers (who then can't work because they would expose the vulnerable).
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2896 on: December 24, 2021, 10:42:21 AM »
I can't speak to other places but in a news segment about NYC they posted a side by side of current hospitalizations vs the height of the pandemic and it was about 970 at the worst and 54 currently which made me laugh. They're trying hard to make omicron seem scary but I'm not surprised that the vast majority of people aren't buying what they're trying to sell.

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2897 on: December 24, 2021, 11:26:07 AM »
Not sure what NYCs daily case count is, but as we approach 10,000 per day here in Ontario (12M population; 80% vax’d), even if 1/2% require hospitalization at some point, it doesn’t take long for that to add up - especially while case counts continue to climb.

I hope you all can laugh at me in a month or two and say “I’d told you so”. IMO, it’s too early to slough these data points off, while medical and disease experts are ringing the warning bells.

https://www.cp24.com/news/model-projects-10-000-covid-19-cases-daily-by-january-in-ontario-without-more-boosters-and-public-health-measures-1.5709731

Just 8 days ago, the warning was 10k/day by January. Looks like we’re a week ahead of schedule - and that’s WITH an aggressive booster rollout, and restrictions.

Like hurricane preparedness, the time to act is before the storm arrives.
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Offline bosk1

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2898 on: December 24, 2021, 12:27:40 PM »
You'll forgive me if I don't board up the windows and spend my life savings on sandbags for a light drizzle, no matter how many of my neighbors hysterically scream "hurricane!"
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2899 on: December 24, 2021, 12:43:50 PM »
I mean, if your neighbours included a good number of renowned meteorologists, and the light drizzle was already killing as many people 9/11 did nationwide on a daily basis, you might at least think about putting on a coat. Or staying inside for a bit. Especially if the severity of the hurricane depended on how many people were outside.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2021, 12:51:54 PM by XJDenton »
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Offline ReaPsTA

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2900 on: December 24, 2021, 01:16:02 PM »
There's no where near sufficient evidence around mask wearing to justify violating that right

Not this shit again.  No "rights" are being violated under mask mandates.  Unless I'm misunderstanding your comment.

I'm not sure you need proof. As far as I am aware, there are no viable mechanisms by which using a mask INCREASES your chance of airbourne inhalation, so at worst masks do nothing, but if they do anything that is better than nothing, and is a cheap and easily applied measure.

Yes you have a right to wear whatever clothes you want. In the US at least the only things we restrict tend to be virtually universally accepted standards of public decency.

Unless you can prove that masks substantially reduce the risk of transmitting a highly dangerous disease, there is no basis to mandate wearing them. I see none of these conditions fulfilled. And until I see that evidence myself I'm not making a personal decision to wear one. I find them uncomfortable and creepy.

Quote
Quote
@ Tim's post.  I agree.  In a time where we have many diametrically opposed issues (ie, it's impossible to solve both/multiple at the same time), which do you chose / which do you sacrifice?  It's almost like medical triage... ABC - Airway, Breathing, Circulation.  What are the ABC's of society?

Healthy happy and productive people. Impossible under a COVID mitigation regime.

Ok, so you yourself cited "healthy" as the first criteria/priority that we have to focus on; happy as second; productive as 3rd.  Completely reasonable, and I'm fully on board.  To me, restrictions* have a net positive effect on the first priority (health), but net negative on the 2nd and 3rd.  So if those are your ABC's to triage the pandemic, I'm unclear the resistance to restrictions.

*I'm lumping a variety of things into the term "restrictions" ... capacity limits, distancing and mask mandates, wfh/virtual schooling requirements; event postponements/cancellations, vax requirements.  I AM COMPLETELY OPPOSED TO FULL LOCKDOWNS like we had in wave 1 and 2.  I'm not a fan of school closures either, but see them as a means to an end.

You need to be happy and productive to be healthy. Depressed people are more likely to develop emotional disorders and other unhealthy life habits including over-eating and self-harm. Hard to be healthy if you aren't making money.

I've seen this general line of argument basically saying - okay yes full lockdowns have a lot of bad second order effects but we can knuckle up and learn to handle restrictions. Even these restrictions still make day-to-day life an onerous exercise where it's hard to be propserous unless you're a big corporation, work a WiFi job, or are an internet entrepreneur. Everyone else gets Netflix and barely surviving.

Quote
If someone's out in public drunk driving, they're making a personal evaluation of the risk and deciding it's worth it. Why is that your problem?

If I add these two little words to this comment, does your question still hold?

Better question - Should it be illegal for people to drive to bars because they might get drunk and drive home?

Seems like our immune systems forced COVID to become less deadly and humanity won. And it seems with Omicron we won again by forcing it to be even more mild.

While this may be true in the end, expert after expert is warning that this is a dangerous belief to hold this early into the spread of the variant.  VERY dangerous.  Whether anecdotal, media reports, or non-peer reviewed studies.  This is a nice notion to hope for, but what if it's not the case?  I've always approached everything COVID with the attitude that I'd rather make the mistake of being overly cautious, than the bigger mistake of not being cautious enough.

The various "COVID Experts" our public institutions shove into the face of the public are liars, idiots, and panic mongers. Their opinions are most useful as counter-signal. If they are saying a belief is dangerous, it is most likely logical.

https://www.cp24.com/news/model-projects-10-000-covid-19-cases-daily-by-january-in-ontario-without-more-boosters-and-public-health-measures-1.5709731

And this is a precise example. These models have consistently over-projected the consequences of COVID by multiple orders of magnitude. Either the people making and publicizing this model are too stupid to understand that or they are deliberately stoking panic for no reason.
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Offline XJDenton

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2901 on: December 24, 2021, 01:31:54 PM »
Have the models actually overpredicted? Or are you judging the models based on the worst case figures that the media promote while ignoring the confidence intervals and range of possible projections any model worth its salt made by competent scientists would surely include?
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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2902 on: December 24, 2021, 01:37:16 PM »
Just took at-home tests before heading to my folks for Christmas and our 14 year old came up positive.

Merry Christmas.

Both my wife and I have been boosted and the kid has his two shots as well, so we hope everything is mild.
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Offline XJDenton

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2903 on: December 24, 2021, 01:39:03 PM »
Just took at-home tests before heading to my folks for Christmas and our 14 year old came up positive.

Merry Christmas.

Both my wife and I have been boosted and the kid has his two shots as well, so we hope everything is mild.

Stay safe. Hope you are still able to have a good day despite the plan changes.
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Offline jingle.boy

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Re: Coronavirus Thread v.2
« Reply #2904 on: December 24, 2021, 01:42:59 PM »
You'll forgive me if I don't board up the windows and spend my life savings on sandbags for a light drizzle, no matter how many of my neighbors hysterically scream "hurricane!"

Well, like XJ already pointed out, it's not hysterical neighbours screaming, but virologists, the medical system, epidemiologists ... but whatever.  Make the facts fit into your worldview.

https://www.cp24.com/news/model-projects-10-000-covid-19-cases-daily-by-january-in-ontario-without-more-boosters-and-public-health-measures-1.5709731

And this is a precise example. These models have consistently over-projected the consequences of COVID by multiple orders of magnitude. Either the people making and publicizing this model are too stupid to understand that or they are deliberately stoking panic for no reason.
[/quote]

I'll state it again in case you missed it....  Ontario hit 9500 cases reported TODAY (ie, yesterdays tests).  So I guess you're right, the model was off - it wasn't aggressive enough.  Reality is proving (on a case count basis) to be much worse than the model.

I find it worrisome when people want to dismiss (inconvenient?) truths when it doesn't fit with their worldview.  Seems as though the default for some here is to find holes, or dismiss what's happening to other regions of the world.  That's fine, although it didn't work out so good during other waves of the pandemic.  I hope it turns out better from here on out.

Sorry to hear that T-Ski.  You did the right thing though in testing, and not risking any additional spread.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2021, 01:51:07 PM by jingle.boy »
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