Pandemic: Life on the ground

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Gunnar
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Gunnar »

Binger wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:51 am
So, the vaccines did not prevent contracting or transmitting the virus, obviously. But Nyquil helps with the symptoms, obviously.

Imagine a picture of some Nyquil or an ad with symptoms it helps. And imagine a list of the Omicron symptoms. Imagine they were both listed side by side and the words were all the same.

There. Discussion.
As has been very frequently pointed out, no vaccine is 100% effective, but abundant evidence indicates that the vaccine significantly reduces the odds of getting it, and even more significantly reduces the odds of winding up hospitalized or dead from it, thus it is foolish to refuse getting it if one has both the opportunity and eligibility to get it.

But what is most foolish of all is to have made it into a hotbed political issue when it should never have been anything more than a medical science and public health issue.
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Jersey Girl
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Jersey Girl »

Oh for goodness flippin' sakes. We have a family member (not in this house) with symptoms who got tested today. Results tomorrow. So far as I know this person only has the first shot.

I guess when they said almost everybody will get the Omicron variant, they weren't embellishing. :shock:
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Gunnar wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:44 am
Binger wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:51 am
So, the vaccines did not prevent contracting or transmitting the virus, obviously. But Nyquil helps with the symptoms, obviously.

Imagine a picture of some Nyquil or an ad with symptoms it helps. And imagine a list of the Omicron symptoms. Imagine they were both listed side by side and the words were all the same.

There. Discussion.
As has been very frequently pointed out, no vaccine is 100% effective, but abundant evidence indicates that the vaccine significantly reduces the odds of getting it, and even more significantly reduces the odds of winding up hospitalized or dead from it, thus it is foolish to refuse getting it if one has both the opportunity and eligibility to get it.

But what is most foolish of all is to have made it into a hotbed political issue when it should never have been anything more than a medical science and public health issue.
http://leagueofrealpeople.com/wp-conten ... fect-1.mp4

One of the problems that we have is people like Rachel Maddow, on air, state that the vaccine stops the virus 100% of the time (click on the link and start @ :30). Joe Biden said a similar thing. So, the challenge becomes that if the science-trusting or science-positive types make a single misstep, a bad utterance, or even an error in judgement there’s zero error-allowance by the foolish on the Right and the foolish in the holistic medicine cults for the former to be one, even just a single time.

We can say, “Yeah, the President was wrong.”, but that’s the most wrong thing ever to fools who are deeply beholden to the idea of being right rather than actually being right. Even early on Fauci stated that this’ll be the challenge, that as time goes by they’ll make mistakes, and they’ll adjust as data and evidence reveals the nature of this beast. But because fools need to believe in absolutes, if you're wrong, even if you’re striving in good faith to do the right thing based on sound reasoning, then it’s over. You have to bat a thousand, but even then fools will dig until they can latch onto the misstep you made at some point and they have their reason to not believe.

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by K Graham »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:53 pm
Gunnar wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:44 am

As has been very frequently pointed out, no vaccine is 100% effective, but abundant evidence indicates that the vaccine significantly reduces the odds of getting it, and even more significantly reduces the odds of winding up hospitalized or dead from it, thus it is foolish to refuse getting it if one has both the opportunity and eligibility to get it.

But what is most foolish of all is to have made it into a hotbed political issue when it should never have been anything more than a medical science and public health issue.
http://leagueofrealpeople.com/wp-conten ... fect-1.mp4

One of the problems that we have is people like Rachel Maddow, on air, state that the vaccine stops the virus 100% of the time (click on the link and start @ :30). Joe Biden said a similar thing. So, the challenge becomes that if the science-trusting or science-positive types make a single misstep, a bad utterance, or even an error in judgement there’s zero error-allowance by the foolish on the Right and the foolish in the holistic medicine cults for the former to be one, even just a single time.

We can say, “Yeah, the President was wrong.”, but that’s the most wrong thing ever to fools who are deeply beholden to the idea of being right rather than actually being right. Even early on Fauci stated that this’ll be the challenge, that as time goes by they’ll make mistakes, and they’ll adjust as data and evidence reveals the nature of this beast. But because fools need to believe in absolutes, if you're wrong, even if you’re striving in good faith to do the right thing based on sound reasoning, then it’s over. You have to bat a thousand, but even then fools will dig until they can latch onto the misstep you made at some point and they have their reason to not believe.

- Doc
To be fair to Maddow though, her remarks were from almost a year ago before Delta or Omicron, when that was the general belief about vaccine efficacy. This was well before we had a significant portion of the population vaccinated.

Unless you're alluding to something else, Biden said he would "shut down the virus" but that was just a play on words in responding to trump in the debate. Trump said, "He's going to shut down the economy." Biden responded with something like "I'm going to shut down the virus, not the economy." Of course, disingenuous folks on the Right will insists this means a promise to "eradicate" the virus entirely, just so they can use it against him when he doesn't.

Folks arguing along these lines are doing so in bad faith. As if any of these idiots would vaccinate if they thought it would "shut down" the virus entirely.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... don-lemon/
There’s a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.
You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
If you’re vaccinated, even if you do catch the “virus,” quote, unquote — like people talk about it in normal terms — you’re in overwhelm- — not many people do. If you do, you’re not likely to get sick. You’re probably going to be symptomless. You’re not going to be in a position where you — where your life is in danger.
The point is normal people understand that the ground truth evolves over time. As we’ve seen with this virus, especially with the Omicron variant, the statements above didn’t hold 100% true. And that’s the problem we have is because Biden, or Fauci, or the CDC isn’t god-like and can predict with 100% accuracy every scenario with regard to a virus, the know-nothings seize on these kinds of statements to push their conspiracies. That’s the challenge Fauci talked about early on and warned us against, but the onslaught of bad-faith ‘news’ and ‘theories’ has caused a significant portion of the population to gain a voice and cause unnecessary suffering. It’s sad and it’s frustrating.

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

And of course because the universe is an infinite recursion this literally just popped up on my Yahoo feed:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ant ... ?.tsrc=374
But it was, very much, about vaccines. Children’s Health Defense Fund, the political wing of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vax organization, hosted the event. Kennedy, who has been vocally spreading false claims about vaccine safety for decades, addressed the crowd to offer unsubstantiated warnings of the Covid-19 vaccines’ dangers. So did several doctors, wearing their physician whites, who also touted ivermectin to prevent Covid (it won’t) and rehashed long-debunked studies suggesting vaccines cause autism (it doesn’t). Just days after the CDC released its first study showing vaccine boosters help protect patients against hospitalization from Omicron, Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and well-known vaccine skeptic, falsely told the crowd: “The science is settled: they’re not working.”
It gets worse:
But I met many more who are new to the movement, like Stephan, a teacher from Santa Cruz, California, who carried a “Teachers Against Mandates” sign. He and his children were “traditionally vaccinated,” he says, but his faith in vaccines changed during the pandemic. He cites Kennedy’s latest book, The Real Anthony Fauci, as key to that conversion. “I’m a full anti-vaxxer now,” he says. Like Liz, he trusts Children’s Health Defense for information — a neighbor he trusts had turned him onto it. Most of the rest of his news comes from conspiracy-adjacent podcasts: The Joe Rogan Experience, No Agenda, and HighWire, whose host, Bigtree, spoke at the rally.

A man from the New York area who declined to give his name told me that though he is new to anti-mandate activism, his ex-wife had taken him to court over his refusal to vaccinate their child. “I won’t let children become clinical trials,” he says.
-_-

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

The result of this BS, of course, is that a graphic like this:

Image

goes right the “F” over their heads. Fully vaxxed and boosted shows that only 4% of us occupy ICU beds and 8% regular hospital beds. It seems no amount of factual information can penetrate their minds.

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Jersey Girl »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Tue Jan 25, 2022 1:15 am
The result of this BS, of course, is that a graphic like this:

Image

goes right the “F” over their heads. Fully vaxxed and boosted shows that only 4% of us occupy ICU beds and 8% regular hospital beds. It seems no amount of factual information can penetrate their minds.

- Doc
I'm assuming that Intermountain is your area and that CO is not a part of that.

Riddle me this...if that many unvaccinated people are contracting Omicron...aren't we moving toward at least some level of herd immunity?

I realize that natural infection isn't going to be as reliable as vaccines in preventing illness...BUT aren't we getting into the neighborhood of bottom line...intermittent spurts of herd immunity? Aren't we getting somewhere???

Huh? I'm watching the number of new cases...it's off the charts.
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canpakes
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by canpakes »

.
From Ars Technica today:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported three studies Friday, two published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and another, appearing in JAMA, by CDC scientists.

One of the MMWR studies looked at the vaccination status of nearly 10 million COVID-19 cases from 25 state and local health departments. CDC scientists and health officials compared weekly rates of COVID-19 infections between unvaccinated people, fully vaccinated people, and fully vaccinated people who were also boosted. In the month of December, as cases of the ultra-transmissible omicron variant skyrocketed, unvaccinated people were nearly three times more likely to report a case of COVID-19 than people fully vaccinated. Compared with fully vaccinated and boosted people, the unvaccinated were five times more likely to report a case.

The study in JAMA supported this finding. In that work, CDC scientists looked at nationwide pharmacy-based COVID-19 test results collected in December from around 70,000 people whose vaccination status was known. The analysis concluded that omicron infections were significantly less likely to occur in fully vaccinated and boosted people than in both the unvaccinated and fully vaccinated.

Still, both studies noted a drop in vaccine effectiveness against omicron compared with the previously dominant coronavirus variant, delta. In the MMWR study, researchers looked at cases reported from October to November, when delta was raging. They found that unvaccinated people were four times more likely to be infected with delta late in the year than fully vaccinated people and nearly 14 times more likely to get a delta infection than fully vaccinated and boosted people.

But in the second MMWR study, CDC scientists found that booster doses do appear to restore protection against serious disease and hospitalization back to delta-era levels. The study was a multi-state analysis looking at nearly 223,000 patient visits to either emergency rooms or urgent care centers for COVID-19, as well as nearly 88,000 hospitalizations, all between last August and earlier this month.

Amid delta, the effectiveness of two doses against emergency room and urgent care visits started out at around 86 percent, fell to about 76 percent as people reached beyond six months after their second vaccination, and was pushed back up to 94 percent after a booster dose. With omicron, two-dose effectiveness against emergency room and urgent care visits started out at a dismal 52 percent, fell to 38 percent with waning protection, and was boosted back to 82 percent after a booster.

For hospitalizations caused by the delta variant, the effectiveness of two doses started at around 90 percent, fell to 81 percent amid waning protection, and rose to 94 percent after a booster. Against hospitalizations caused by omicron, two-dose effectiveness started at 81 percent, fell to 57 percent with waning, and rose to 90 percent after a booster.
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Re: Pandemic: Life on the ground

Post by Gunnar »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:53 pm
One of the problems that we have is people like Rachel Maddow, on air, state that the vaccine stops the virus 100% of the time (click on the link and start @ :30). Joe Biden said a similar thing. So, the challenge becomes that if the science-trusting or science-positive types make a single misstep, a bad utterance, or even an error in judgement there’s zero error-allowance by the foolish on the Right and the foolish in the holistic medicine cults for the former to be one, even just a single time.

We can say, “Yeah, the President was wrong.”, but that’s the most wrong thing ever to fools who are deeply beholden to the idea of being right rather than actually being right. Even early on Fauci stated that this’ll be the challenge, that as time goes by they’ll make mistakes, and they’ll adjust as data and evidence reveals the nature of this beast. But because fools need to believe in absolutes, if you're wrong, even if you’re striving in good faith to do the right thing based on sound reasoning, then it’s over. You have to bat a thousand, but even then fools will dig until they can latch onto the misstep you made at some point and they have their reason to not believe.

- Doc
Yes, it is a serious problem that so many people don't understand science and how it is supposed to work. We have people like Marjorie Taylor Green who insist that science just doesn't work and can't be relied upon because we can point to examples in the past when science didn't quite get it right and had to refine and in some cases even radically modify their conclusions. They just don't understand that science's willingness to frequently re-examine and re-evaluate formerly and currently held view, and then correct themselves when warranted by newer, more complete evidence, is not some inherent flaw. It is science's greatest virtue and strength. It is the only thing that makes real human progress even possible. On the other hand, conservatives' reluctance and even outright refusal to even reconsider their views, regardless of compelling, contrary evidence is their stupidest and most shameful weakness and flaw.

The stupidity of people like MTG insisting that science doesn't work and can't be relied on, while using products of science like today's ubiquitous cell phones and computers that are possible only because science does indeed work, is positively breathtaking! This is why anti-progressivism is inherently stupid. Without people who are progressive and willing to continually consider the possibility of better and more effective and fairer ways of doing things, we can never improve. Staunch anti-conservatism and staunch anti-progressivism are both stupid, but the latter is the stupider of the two. The truth is that we need both honest conservatives and honest progressives/liberals willing to honestly discuss and consider each other's views and select the best from both.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
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