Coronavirus

[haltz]

Kinda skimmed so I'm sorry if this was addressed but you have to be careful with some of these numbers. Take Israel, which is highly vaccinated, of course more of their hospitalizations are among vaccinated people. Imagine if you had 100% full vaccination, then 100% of your hospitalizations will be fully vaccinated people, and there will be some because these vaccines are not 100% effective.

And Karp I'm not picking on you here, but it's hard to hear someone who is unvaccinated telling vaccinated people to be careful.

If you were to be as generous as possible and take the antivaccine arguments at face value and accept them as fact, it still pales in comparison to the downside of the actual pandemic, which is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead humans. You have orders of magnitude less deaths among the 160 million vaccinated Americans and seemingly smart people like Brett Weinstein saying the vaccine causes headaches. What are we even talking about here?

[AdmiralKird]

seemingly smart people like Brett Weinstein saying the vaccine causes headaches. What are we even talking about here?

Vaccine bad b/c rat telemeres? His episode on Joe Rogan a year ago or so was something else. Dude came off totally sane for the first two hours and a half, then went complete quack about some fringe science research a nobel prize overseer rejected on the basis it was a pile of poodoo. Yet if you only listened to the podcast, you only heard his argument the whole time that it sounded to be a legit conspiracy... until anyone listening researched it and was like ohhhh, he spent a lot of time and had what he considered a groundbreaking discovery that his peers and colleagues determined to be false, but he just rejected all their contradiscoveries that tested his hypotheses and conclusions.

[sighyoung]

[IMADreamer]

If you told me a cat knocked over a bottle with the virus and that's how it started I wouldn't be surprised at all. Heck it's probably in the top 50 plausible reasons it happened.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

On top of that, at Mrs. AW's hospital, 22% of hospitalized patients in Med Surge (non-life threatening, a step before ICU so to speak) are fully vaccinated. They've yet to have a fully vaxxed person admitted to ICU or die. So, that's good. Back to the 22%. There are some numbers floating around, but something like 44% of those eligible have been fully vaxxed in AR. So, yeah, the vax is preventing exactly 50% of vaxxed from being hospitalized (if 44% are vaxxed and it was zero percent effective, 44% hospitalized would be vaxxed, and it it was 100% effective, 0 percent would be vaxxed...Idk if that's how numbers work at the moment, it's late). I know these numbers don't mesh with published numbers, but whatever, I'll trust the anecdote here becasue the DOH isn't publishing the numbers.

I have to question this one in the strongest possible terms. To say that this doesn’t mesh with published numbers is an extreme understatement. Here’s the CDC count of breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths. Or here’s the same Ankansas med school dean who wrote the report containing your unlinked quote saying that COVID hospitalizations are 98% unvaccinated. 78% is WAY off here and should not be passed around as undocumented anecdote.

What's the point of wearing a mask? For me it's to be as safe as possible and prevent catching/possibly spreading the virus if I do. Like I said in a previous post, to me at least it's become relatively clear that even 50% vaccinated populations aren't immune to massive outbreaks. Who knows what the real number is for herd immunity is, but if r naught really is 6, the theoretical number is 83%. Daily cases are increasing in every state in the nation. The lowest infection rate at the moment is 1.1. For reference, over the past year, 1.1 would have been relatively high as most states outside the first couple months didn't reach it very often. Arkansas was only above 1.1 for a few days in November and we still managed to top out at over 100 cases per 100K people daily (along with the rest of the country). And, we're currently at 1.28 with 40 some odd cases per 100K daily.

As you wrote earlier, it’s totally clear that existing natural immunity plus achievable vaccination rates will not result in herd immunity. In that case, what’s the plan? Ideally, it would be to figure out how to get vaccination up to herd immunity levels, but we agree this is impossible, and no one is even bothering to claim they can produce a plan to get there. In ideal world, herd immunity would wipe out wide circulation of the virus, and most vaccinated people would never be exposed and have to find out their outcome. That would be wonderful. But in the existing world, this is not in the cards. That means basically every individual needs to assume they are going to be exposed. For the overwhelming majority of vaccinated individuals, this will be fine. If you don’t want to get the vaccine, you have to trust your luck. Masks are great, but at some point, you will absolutely be infected unless you decide to forge for yourself in the wilderness.

In that context, the only real point of precautions like masks is the old flatten the curve narrative from the very beginning of this — try to avoid overrunning hospitals — but ultimately the only way out is through. In the flatten the curve world, “everyone has to wear masks” would make sense on the grounds that we’re not able to do something like vaccine passports, so only blanket rules are possible and because vaccinated people do contribute to spread, albeit to a much lesser degree. But again in the real world, where we’re mostly not enforcing rules at all but relying on voluntary compliance, I’m skeptical much can be achieved especially given the strong correlation between vaccine opposition and opposition to non-vaccine measures.

Don’t let it dominate your life!

It’s gonna take me a hot second but I’m going to get you proof of the numbers since you don’t believe me.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Okay I’m out of the country and having issues with imgur. But my numbers are spot on. I’ll show you in a week when I can post pics. 3 unvaxxed people in icu. 18 people in medsurge. 78% unvaxxed. 129 outpatient. 70% unvaxxed.

Kind of pisses me off I even have to write this

[G. Keenan]

This opinion piece by a professor at Tulane who studies pandemics looks at the role of variants in past influenza pandemics and what that might tell us about the role variants will play re Covid and what it means for vaccines. I thought it was pretty good.

What history tells us about the delta variant — and the variants that will follow

[ghostrunner]

As much as possible, I think we (collectively) need to start mandating the vaccine. Don't force anyone, but require it for participation in events, attendance at concerts and games, etc... There shouldn't be unvaxxed Olympians, for example. One of those "bad idea whose time has come" situations.

[cardinalkarp]

I know some here have mentioned the Dark Horse podcast, and for those that are curious there was an interview w/ creator of the mRNA technology (if you haven’t heard/seen it already it really is an interesting discussion on some of the potential things that was missed/ignored).

Yes, it’s pulled from RFK’s website (which I’m sure some will immediately say is “misinformation”) and it was on YouTube but has been censored from there. But, I just ask that if you have any sort of curiosity to both sides, just take a listen. It seems like these guys have legit concerns and they definitely don’t sound like they are some conspiracy theorist nut jobs.

It’s about an hour long, but is pretty interesting to hear their opinions.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defe ... echnology/

[ghostrunner]

The fact that that guy is not the inventor of MRNA vaccines and labels himself as such is a bit of a red flag. So is Bret Weinstein and yes, RFK.