Coronavirus

[AdmiralKird]

The big shutdown was because we didn't understand what we were dealing with yet and it was to prevent a nightmare scenario. If vanilla sars-cov-2 had an r0 closer to the delta variant and there was no shutdown you'd be looking at ten million dead or more in a few months. (There were no treatment options that were known to be effective, death rates were high, hospitals would have been completely overrun, not enough ventilators, people weren't used to pandemic protocols to slow spread in public, etc). We talk about not having enough ICU beds now, we would have been 10x over capacity. This is why the discussion was all about "flattening the curve."

There's no need for a national shutdown again because it grows in pockets all over the country at different rates so applying a fix to the entire nation is pointless and counter productive - much like a national minimum wage. Some states like NY barely got their curve flattened after they passed peak hospitalizations - even with the shutdown & curfew, other states were no where close to needing a flat curve.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Without stepping into a big pile of [expletive]; can I ask the question--with all these variants going on; why are there not any pushes for the type of shutdowns we had when the original outbreak of the virus began?

About 100+ pages ago we talked a bit about how pandemics end and, largely, there's a social end before an epidemiological one. Which seems to be the case we're in.

Also, the whole point of the lockdowns weren't necessarily to stop the spread but more so to slow it. A true lockdown, which we didn't see, would be more along the lines of no leaving the house for any reason. Groceries delivered, everything done virtually, no church, sports, recreational travel, work etc etc etc. This also creates massive interruptions to supply chains worldwide as we saw. Farmers/Distributors spoiling crops/livestock/food. Shortages on the back end. Etc.

Given that the USA lockdowns didn't eliminate the virus, and given that there are vaccines that so far have proven effective against every variant not to mention natural immunity that has proven effective against all variants, and given that society at large is ready to move on, any policy to lockdown would be met with widespread criticism. And...rightfully so.

Oh, and there's also the thought that transmission among animals (birds, dogs, cats, etc) will prevent lockdowns from ever being truly effective at eradicating the virus....though, that's certainly up for debate.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

The big shutdown was because we didn't understand what we were dealing with yet and it was to prevent a nightmare scenario. If vanilla sars-cov-2 had an r0 closer to the delta variant and there was no shutdown you'd be looking at ten million dead or more in a few months. (There were no treatment options that were known to be effective, death rates were high, hospitals would have been completely overrun, not enough ventilators, people weren't used to pandemic protocols to slow spread in public, etc). We talk about not having enough ICU beds now, we would have been 10x over capacity. This is why the discussion was all about "flattening the curve."

There's no need for a national shutdown again because it grows in pockets all over the country at different rates so applying a fix to the entire nation is pointless and counter productive - much like a national minimum wage. Some states like NY barely got their curve flattened after they passed peak hospitalizations - even with the shutdown & curfew, other states were no where close to needing a flat curve.

IIRC, the Imperial College in London released a forecast sometime in the spring of 2020 that called for 2.2-3.3 million Americans alone dead within a year without preventative measures. That was what got Rump's attention or maybe it was Boris Johnson's who then told trump.

The report came out around March 15th, 2020 which was about the time it was being taken seriously. NBA had cancelled games around that time along with the NHL shortly thereafter. March Madness was modified then cancelled. Crazy times that no one wants to live through again.

[CardsofSTL]

Interesting

[haltz]

Without stepping into a big pile of [expletive]; can I ask the question--with all these variants going on; why are there not any pushes for the type of shutdowns we had when the original outbreak of the virus began?

With a good portion of the country vaccinated, I don’t think we need to go full shutdown. I would like to see mask mandates and limited capacity return for a while.

Maybe just shut down Florida, which I was in favor of prepandemic as well.

[ghostrunner]

It's interesting we don't have any seriously anti-mask people here, and it seems like that's more widespread and more active than anti-vaccine groups. Granted there's some overlap, but most of the high-profile objection is specifically to mask mandates.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Re: mask mandates and limited capacity, what would the purpose be? About the only thing I think we ought to be worried about anymore is hospital capacity.

It's becoming painfully obvious this virus is going to infect everyone, or everyone is going to be exposed to it, likely again and again.

Does it really matter if we wear masks for the next year? Limit the amount of people that can go to a baseball game? In a year is anything going to be different other than perhaps more people will have natural immunity that keeps them out of the hospital? Does it matter if we're exposed to it twice a year instead of four times? All hypothetical questions, but...

Vaccines have been available to all since April if not earlier. Make your bed and sleep in it and for better or worse, this is the bed we've made.

I guess the other argument would be we should all limit spread as much as possible to protect kids too young to get vaccinated which is a legitimate point, especially since their attendance in school is pretty much mandatory unless they're online which has its own issues. But - and I may regret saying this because it's not absolutely settled - even with the delta variant, the flu is still represents a higher relative risk. That's not to say the risk is zero with delta because kids are being affected more. But, more here is relevant. Or if I was going to rank them from most to least risk, it would go: flu>delta>alpha/wild type. Sure, it sucks because delta doesn't knock off flu as being irrelevant anymore so it's flu + delta instead of flu alone. But, if the argument is do it for the kids, then that would be the counterargument which is not illogical. As I've said many times, there is no world moving forward where the risk we face is not increased by covid. It was true during the pandemic and it appears its going to be true after as well.

Which brings me to another point of how the [expletive] do we not know where this came from? So, we can, you know like stop it from happening again. Or learn how to do a much better [expletive] job of mitigating it in the event it does. [expletive] ridiculous that big pharma can come up with a [expletive] vaccine before a government or the who or the global community in general can figure out where this came from. FFS. What a complete failure.

[GeddyWrox]

I agree with the sentiment about protecting kids still. And we're still in a phase where (regionally) hospitals are crushed. I'm also still scared of new variants like Lambda and Mu. Until we know for sure the vaccines still stave off more serious infections & death with those, I'm going to be paranoid.

[Arthur Dent]

The WHO is tracking a new COVID-19 variant called Mu

The World Health Organization (WHO) is tracking a new COVID-19 variant that it says could have the ability to evade the immunity people get from vaccines and prior COVID-19 infections.

Called Mu, the B.1.621 variant was first detected in Colombia in January this year. It has since been detected in 39 countries and was added to the WHO's watchlist on August 30.

According to the open-source database Outbreak.info, 1,953 cases of the Mu variant have been reported in the US. At press time, only two states - South Dakota and Nebraska - have not yet seen infections of the Mu variant.

"At the moment, it looks like there's genuine cause for concern in USA, Central America, and South America, but as we saw with Delta, a potent variant can traverse the globe in the blink of an eye," said Danny Altmann, an immunology expert at Imperial College London, to The Telegraph.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-cov ... 13983.html


I hate that these constant click bait no empirical evidence variant panic stories keep getting pushed. It was one month ago or so that we were supposed to believe the Lambda variant would doom us all. Looks like it may actually be pretty close to extinct:



https://outbreak.info/situation-reports/lambda

Currently, Mu does not look like it's gaining much ground either:



Granted, these both originate in South American countries where there is less testing available, but what data is available doesn't really justify the "next big thing" framing implied by all these stories.

[Arthur Dent]

Re: mask mandates and limited capacity, what would the purpose be? About the only thing I think we ought to be worried about anymore is hospital capacity.

If it weren't for crushed hospitals, I think the case for "get your natural immunity sooner rather than later" would be somewhat compelling. To the extent there is some decay in immunity over time, now is safer than later, and there is reason to believe natural immunity will be more variant resistant than vaccine immunity because the immune system gets exposed to the full virus rather than just the spike component it sees from vaccination.

flu>delta>alpha/wild type

To make a totally pedantic point that doesn't really matter, the elite discourse engineering changing variant naming from like "the UK variant" or "the South Africa variant" to Alpha and Beta was swift and total, which is kind of surprising in that I think these sorts of efforts don't typically work very well. Anyway, one consequence is that I think most people assume Alpha refers to Corona Classic, but it's actually the name for what used to be called the UK variant. Corona classic is supposed to be wild type, though wild type is actually a bunch of different variants in of itself.