Coronavirus

[pioneer98]

Yesterday: 153,329 new cases and 1,194 deaths
Today (so far): 160,511 new cases and 1,239 deaths

[G. Keenan]

Curious everyone’s thoughts. Seems to be a pretty middle of the road approach. I’m sure some will favor more stringent requirements while some will think they’re too tyrannical.

If you're a business, pretty much any kind of business, requiring the vaccine for your employees is almost a no-brainer. Fewer workers out sick and if you're a business that serves customers face-to-face, your customers will be reassured knowing your employees are all vaccinated.

Which airline would you want to spend 2 - 12 hours inside a metal tube with, the one with all of its employees vaccinated or one where you have no idea? Restaurant, same question. Grocery store, same question.

But do you then start charging more for obese employees? They’ll also miss more time/be out more than a healthy employee?

I'm talking just about companies mandating Covid vaccines for their employees, not charging non-vaccinated employees more for their health insurance. If you have a mandate, why the need to charge them higher premiums? Most will get it. The ones who don't want to will leave. And a few will get a medical or religious exemption, and probably shouldn't be charged higher premiums for that.

Obesity is way more complicated than people being lazy and gluttonous. It is sometimes that, for sure, but a lot of times obesity is connected to some mental health struggles people have, childhood traumas, as well as hormonal problems. It's also connected to poverty and lack of access to healthy foods and stress.

Seems like a wrong turn here to me. Lots of jobs and schools and other institutions require various vaccines in order to work or attend. Covid is going to be with us forever. It's going to turn into a seasonal respiratory disease like influenza. It will become endemic. It will be always mutating and as time passes the population will develop stronger natural immunity. Seasonal shots much like the flu shot which are targeted at what they think will be that year's prevailing strains will be recommended. That's not a dystopia.

But now we're in the most acute phase of this journey and the vaccines make a lot of sense in pretty much any setting that involves bringing large numbers of people together to engage in commerce, work, learning, transport, healthcare, and entertainment. We'd like to go back to doing those things without an elevated risk of severe illness or death from Covid.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Not much new here, kind of a blast from the past really that gets back to the innate/adaptive arms of the immune system. It was hypothesized way back when that a stronger innate immune response was the reason some people, children in particular, had less severe and possibly asymptomatic cases. This video goes through a study that specifically looks at levels of interferon cells (part of the innate immune arm from my understanding) in children. And, as you can probably guess, there are a lot more of them in children compared to adults. Interferons are antiviral. And, Sars Cov 2 has a way of shutting off interferons but is also extremely sensitive to (can be killed by) interferons. From the study:

Children displayed higher basal expression of relevant pattern recognition receptors such as MDA5 (IFIH1) and RIG-I (DDX58) in upper airway epithelial cells, macrophages and dendritic cells, resulting in stronger innate antiviral responses upon SARS-CoV-2 infection than in adults. We further detected distinct immune cell subpopulations including KLRC1 (NKG2A)+ cytotoxic T cells and a CD8+ T cell population with a memory phenotype occurring predominantly in children. Our study provides evidence that the airway immune cells of children are primed for virus sensing, resulting in a stronger early innate antiviral response to SARS-CoV-2 infection than in adults.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-01037-9

The video goes through this in more detail and does a better job explaining it than I ever could. But, there's the tl;dw: Video goes on to rehash things they've already talked about including interferon production and how to increase them.

Also, can't imagine this study/data is specific to the delta variant given the likely amount of time required to put this together.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

[SHOW]

Latest update. Numbers look a lot more in line with the overall nation.

@Arthur Dent I didn't find much out about why the numbers were out of line before from the stat keepers. Mrs. AW didn't ask them. But, I do need to make a correction to something I told @heyzeus when he asked if people were being counted that weren't experiencing covid symptoms. Apparently there is a sister VA that has long term residents/patients that are being housed for, likely, the remainder of their lives or until something miraculous happens.

Those patients at the sister VA are being tested regularly and if positive being transferred to the covid ward where Mrs. AW is working regardless of symptoms and housed in the med surge. So, I was wrong. They do have asymptomatic patients hospitalized in the med surge that have other issues for which they are being treated. They're returned to the sister VA when negative and no symptoms show up.

I don't know the % for sure but Mrs. AW thought, and it would make sense, the patients at the sister VA are 100% vaxxed.

eta: I think it was @haltz that asked the question, not heyzeus. Mea culpa for bring heyzeus into the convo.

[CardsofSTL]

I congratulate @AWvsCBsteeeerike3 for his proper use of the Mention feature.

[Jocephus]

does that actually work?

[CardsofSTL]

does that actually work?

@Jocephus

[expletive] yeah.

[Jocephus]

does that actually work?

@Jocephus

[expletive] yeah.

do i get a notification somewhere?

[Arthur Dent]

Those patients at the sister VA are being tested regularly and if positive being transferred to the covid ward where Mrs. AW is working regardless of symptoms and housed in the med surge. So, I was wrong. They do have asymptomatic patients hospitalized in the med surge that have other issues for which they are being treated. They're returned to the sister VA when negative and no symptoms show up.

Interesting. Thanks.

The CDC has ~25% of “breakthrough” hospitalizations as asymptotic i.e. in the hospital for other reasons but tested because they are there, but if the hospital is drawing from an extremely vulnerable vaccinated population, I can imagine that would result in significant cases both symptomatic and not.

[CardsofSTL]

does that actually work?

@Jocephus

[expletive] yeah.

do i get a notification somewhere?

It shows up for me in the my notifications in the upper right. Might depend on the layout you use.