Austria to declare nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people
bnonews.com
bnonews.com
It is terrifying to me that a government is confining healthy people to their homes for refusing a treatment that they (rightly or wrongly) believe is not in their best interests.
Of course, recorded cases are likely to fall naturally at some point. If the fall is coincident with the introduction of this rule, we can expect the same across the West.
In my (EU) country you need to be vaccinated to go into most shops, restaurants, bars, and beauty services. However you can freely go to your office and not wear a mask. Even the people working in places where as a customer you need to be vaccinated, do not themselves need to be vaccinated.
I'm fully vaccinated, but I have friends who are not. The people who do not want to be vaccinated have their reasons, and I doubt these restrictions which cause mild inconveniences at best (compared to lockdowns like last winter, where some stores were closed for 3 month and you couldn't leave your city) are really going to make them change their mind. If they really want everyone to be vaccinated, they should just come out and say that, then work to get it passed into law.
But when discussions over the degree to which measures actually benefit the collective good are suppressed, both top down (tech censorship) and bottom up (downvotes and social shaming), you are moving into the territory of tyranny/oppression.
This isn't about behavior, unless you mean blindly following authority (in which case those civilizations had huge downsides). This is about a medical treatment for a disease that is objectively not a civilization-ending threat, by any measure.
The problem is forcing people to take a specific medical treatment (it's not about immunity from the virus, it's about the specific treatment ONLY), and using fear as a justification to control society.
What you're calling "collective good" is exactly how past atrocities have happened. Anytime there has been genocide or millions of people getting slaughtered, it's because one side decided it was for the collective good. It's a cliche argument that can go both ways and says nothing about the actual reasons for implementing force across a society.
Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated. You can’t spread it if you don’t have it. If you do contract it, you are less infectious.
This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available.
In situations where the comment is only aimed at correcting a factual mistake, for example, it can be okay, if still bad style.
It always feels as if it prematurely implies evil intention, which is a move that does not belong in any intellectually honest conversation, neither casual nor scientific.
I don't think the boilerplate should be used in comments that then continue with highly questionable, very radical statements. Especially if heterodox opinions are stated as if they were well established positions.
For example: "This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available."
The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical. The radicalism just makes the wrongness trivial to spot.
The position that actually justifies conditional lock-downs (like the new Austrian policy) is one where the discriminatory treatment is acknowledged and justified, not simply denied.
...which should not surprise anyone who somewhat followed the discourse on the issue.
I know that's not as attractive as just denying the existence of differences between two obviously different policies.
Pedantry, I know, but this is HN.
The availability of a vaccine is one of the several ways in which the current Austrian policy is different from earlier lockdowns.
This alone already has direct consequences for the political justification of the policy: In the article OP linked they specifically name vaccination nudges as one of the effects they expect from their conditional lockdown. Which is something that would not have made sense in the absence of vaccines.
Pedantry can have it's upside though, so I'm not complaining! :)
Vaccines suppress symptoms, which may result in infected people being unaware they are infected or transmitting to others. That's why the CDC recommends (as of October 15) that vaccinated people be tested after exposure, since lack of symptoms != lack of infection, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
> Based on evolving evidence, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people get tested 5-7 days after close contact with a person with suspected or confirmed COVID-19.
"COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing infection."
Do these headlines represent revisions to the initial effectiveness? Or do they represent the waning effectiveness over time? What is the point of having Fauci in the video?
Right now, using the Rt map from https://covidestim.org, looks like Indiana & Ohio are in the middle of a wave. Covid hospital bed utilization: IN 10%, OH 15%. Covid ICU utilization: IN 20%, OH 20%.
PS: I think arguments justifying such mandates for avoiding overwhelming of hospitals will further enrage anyone who was already against universal healthcare because it becomes yet another avenue for govt/bureaucratic manipulation of people's lives.
There was a case not too long ago in Alabama where a person suffered a heart attack and died because in three dozen hospitals no intensive care bed could be found, so the concern isn't even theoretical.
Not really politically viable until these numbers equalize.
What is the estimate of the authoritarian rules of increasing mortality? E.g. by a war? By racial cleaning, by collapse of social structures?
You spread half information and consequently fake. The legislation is there for a reason and you throw it away. You just took a decision for the uncaccinated people by eliminating their freedom. They never did it to you.
Actually, the final report shows that COVID patients represented 2% (!!!) of the total hospitalized... And only 5% (!?!?) of what they call "critical care"...
This report from the ATIH (Official agency) was published in october 2021.
The report: https://www.atih.sante.fr/sites/default/files/public/content...
From LCP (a kind of French C-SPAN): https://twitter.com/LCP/status/1458163736175386624
This makes absolutely no sense. The most terrifying is people actually defending and promoting this kind of orwellian and irrational measures.
I don't know if sterilising vaccins are being researched now though. I heard something about possible nose-spray vaccine that would both improve this and make applications easier. Maybe well see that in near future.
It IS true that they reduce net transmission, but the literature is clear that the reason is almost exclusively due to how they shorten the duration of carrying. The nasal viral load is virtually identical. The primary factor is how long you're carrying that load for (approximately 11 days vs 8 days from what I can tell from pubmed et al).
Does vaccination help the herd? Sure, but it's pretty limited. The reality is that vaccination mostly protects YOU - it keeps the infection in the top layer of the respiratory epithelium, ensures to a great degree that you won't be hospitalized for deeper tissue damage.
Dutch data, for instance, has recently shown substantial reductions in transmission within households, locations where a three day difference in the duration of symptoms is unlikely to have had a major impact. [0]
[0]https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v...
So once you're close to ICU capacity you have three options: - Ignore it, likely leading to a lot of deaths. - Full lockdown - Targeted lockdown of the most vulnerable population (similar to 'cocooning' of elderly in the early stages)
Obviously, none of these are great options, but they're the choices a number of places are now facing.
So, in the early stages of the pandemic, a number of countries did exactly that. Which was, arguably, a lot more unfair; over 80s can't take a de-oldening vaccine.
Ultimately, _if_, and only if, the ICU numbers dictate either locking down the whole population or locking down that fraction of the population who have voluntarily decided to be the main contributors to ICU load... well, it's not a _great_ choice to have to make, certainly, but there's something to be said for locking down fewer people, if that is the choice.
Shocking statement that demonstrates more attempt to spin than inform.
Supposing we take the webster dictionary definition of police state: "political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures"
Considering this effects up to 40% of the population according to the article it checks quite a few boxes:
1. Arbitrary: No precedent, first in the world to do so, with no evidence this will solve the problem in total (controlling covid completely).
2. Repressive government control: There's no argument this fits the strictest definition of repressive.
3. Exercise of power by the police: There's no statement they'll use "secret police" but certainly the enforcement will be aggressive and severe to keep 40% of the population locked down. It's not like watching one person's house. That's a lot of people.
For the record, I am not against vaccines. I am however pro bodily autonomy at any cost, for whatever reason, in any condition. The "price to pay in society" isn't to violate your bodily autonomy, and therefore the non-aggression principle, but make a personal decision to avoid or interact with people you disagree with.
It turns out that all it took to test the waters of liberty and free will was deciding what you want to, and what you dont want to, put in your body. You would even think this would be a cut and dry case considering the alleged "libertarian" leanings of HN, but to my surprise it seems many people are willing to sacrifice this fundamental liberty for ephemeral (possibly even negative) gain. We're 2 years into 15 days to flatten the curve. We have all the evidence to show this won't fix anything unless these people are locked down permanently. At that point they may as well be thrown in prisons, or camps, or whatever the dictator says to do. Democracies can't simply hold you down and inject you with chemicals but coercing these people with objectively police state style tactics is the way tyrants dressed as democratic leaders effectively accomplish the same thing.
Do you also oppose the assorted vaccinations that are often treated as a mandatory condition of public school attendance?
The "pro bodily autonomy" message is smoke and mirrors, designed to put a palatable glaze on an increasingly fringe and reactionary position.
Why do authorities not want the populace to know about conscientious objections?
It is very odd how this misinformation is _vehemently_ stated as fact.
There is absolutely nothing fringe about wanting control of your body. This is a modern authoritarian take that is working to undo the last 50 years of increases in bodily freedom for everyone. I obviously won't win against someone espousing left-authoritarian views because neither of us will concede. But I do have some rhetorical things for you:
On "smoke and mirrors" for "an increasingly fringe, reactionary position". Do you think the same about abortion? Or is it, in your mind, okay for that form of bodily autonomy but some forms of bodily autonomy are more okay than others? Do you draw the line where "it harms people"? Who are "people"? It doesn't help you linked the CDC who has a vested interest in talking down the "bodily autonomy" argument as a public policy (public health is typically diametrically opposed to bodily autonomy because public health requires shirking the individual for the "common" good).
Arguing against bodily autonomy is binary. Either you are for bodily autonomy or you are for some level of government control over what people can and can't do with themselves. What I am willing to do to myself is my own business. Why should anyone but me decide?
The rest of the post is built on top of your initial incorrect assumption, and isn't worth a line response. Consider, instead, whether there is any meaningful sense in which getting a free and effective vaccine can be reasonably compared to reproductive rights.
Effective?
Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
Vermont sees the biggest surge in COVID cases despite having the country's highest vaccination rate https://fortune.com/2021/08/12/vermont-covid-cases-vaccinati...
Iceland has been a vaccination success. Why is it seeing a coronavirus surge? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...
99.7% of Waterford adults fully vaccinated against Covid-19 https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40704104.html
Waterford Now Has Highest Incidence of Covid in Ireland https://waterford-news.ie/2021/10/11/waterford-now-has-highe...
76% of September Covid-19 deaths are vax breakthroughs https://vermontdailychronicle.com/2021/09/30/76-of-september...
Safe?
Orange County woman's death after 2nd dose of Moderna vaccine spurs concern from family https://abc7.com/moderna-vaccine-covid-side-effects-orange-c...
CDC says 28 blood clot cases, 3 deaths may be linked to J&J Covid vaccine https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/12/cdc-says-28-blood-clot-cases...
Belgium halts J&J COVID vaccine for under 41s after first EU death https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
COVID-19: Vaccine recipient died of heart attack, CECC says https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/06/13/...
'I blame myself for vaccinating wife' https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelh...
Two die in Japan after shots from suspended Moderna vaccines - Japan govt https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
The linked articles regarding Iceland in fact contradict your assertion. They provide a very clear graph of cases over time vs deaths over time and it is trivial to see that during the recent spike in cases, deaths are much lower in proportion compared to earlier spikes, a clear indicator of the vaccine working well.
It is also logical that most COVID cases in places with high vaccination rates are breakthrough cases, there are simply less unvaccinated hosts for the virus to potentially infect. It does not follow that the outcome would be better with less vaccinated hosts.
Finally, you've posted links to 7 deaths and 28 complications following vaccinations. Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have been vaccinated safely. (Source- Google searches for worldwide covid deaths and worldwide covid vaccinations).
If discussions on HN are any indication, opposition to lockdowns/vaccines is growing and anything but fringe. Risk tolerance is subjective, and the fact that someone's cost benefit analysis aligns against the extreme measures we are seeing does not imply heartlessness. This is not the plague. On the scale of deadly viruses, covid is quite close to a severe flu in terms of mortality/long term effects. It's high time that the moralists started listening to the rapidly growing body of opposition. Clearly this is a curve that we are not going to flatten without extreme measures, if ever given that this is now an endemic virus.
It's not nice to lump me in with anti-vaxxers but I guess that's how modern politics^W^W^W^W^W^W science is.
I don't take the stance that children have complete autonomy only because it leads to some very strange and disturbing consequences. Therefore, if the parents decide the child should not be vaccinated than I think that's a fine decision. I also think deciding your child should be vaccinated is a fine decision.
Where I draw the line is the prevention of attendance at a learning institution. Since you mentioned public school, then this should either have a distanced option (home schooling, etc) or permit the students regardless. Private institutions may do what they please. Yes, this also goes for public grant-receiving universities, community colleges, etc. Forcing people to manufacturer "exemptions" is simply an end-around to the government enforcing it's will upon people and their choices with their body. It's both immoral and unethical.
At vaccination rates of 60-70% the vaccinated make 1/3rd of new infections (and giving that the vaccinated have less symptoms, one may suppose that the vaccinated rate of infection is even higher than the official 1/3rd), and thus raising the vaccination rate from 70% to 100% would decrease infection rate just 2 times at best, so even locking down unvaccinated permanently would solve nothing. And that too:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."
"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
Me too! Have you figured out how to keep your COVID to yourself?
None of these apply of course for one simple reason: a black person in South Africa can't simply choose not to be black to escape Apartheid. American slaves couldn't simply choose not to be slaves.
So policies that apply to unvaccinated people aren't analogous for the simple reason that you can choose to get vaccinated in almost all cases (side note: the very few people with a valid medical exemption shouldn't be subjected to these kinds of policies IMHO).
So it's not a lack of body autonomy that's going on here. It's just that those choices come with consequences. You don't want to wear a mask? No one is holding you down and putting one on you. But you can't fly on a commercial plane either.
I too believe strongly in body autonomy, which is one reason why I fully support reproductive rights, including access to abortion. What I find particularly ironic is in the Venn diagram there's a seemingly large intersection between the unvaccinated, those who oppose restrictions on unvaccinated people and those who support restricting access to abortions. Again, not you, specifically.
It's worth adding that this isn't purely a personal choice. If it was, I don't think anyone would be upset about it. There are documented cases of contact tracers who can directly establish links between a given person spreading Covid and the deaths that result from that. What about the people who medically cannot get the vaccine? Or are immunocompromised? If you oppose the vaccine because of the extremely low risks of negative side effects, remember your choice affects other people.
It's riskier to drive in a car than to get the Covid vaccine.
The term "body autonomy" here just doesn't apply. "Consequences to personal choices" is far more accurate.
so the chinese forcing the Uyghurs to abandon their culture is totally fine, because all they have to do is stop practicing it?
This isn't arbitrary at all, its actually extremely common to restrict the participation in society of unvaccinated people - in countries _much_ more free than the United States.
CDC estimates 146 million Americans have already been infected, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I think this would surprise a lot of Americans at least, since their government pretends that prior infections don't matter.
That said, it does send a chill up my spine to read about a country locking down a specific subset of their population.
Perhaps Sweden did the right thing? Unthinkable, let's repeat failed policies ad infinitum!
Edit: Austria currently has more absolute excess deaths and lower population than Sweden according to Financial Times.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
Total deaths per million in Sweden so far: 1466 Total deaths per million in Denmark so far: 471
With ~69% [2] of the population fully vaccinated that is definitely going to skew the numbers a bit.
1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Looking at this, I also do not understand why Austria's ICUs are overloaded now but not in November 2020.
I wish other governments did the same. We could all work together to get rid of this disease, but this will never happen if we let people that refuse medicine to walk freely contaminating others.
Saying "the vaccines don't work at all" is IMO equivalent to saying seatbelts don't work at all, they should be abolished, because someone wrecked and died at 200mph while wearing seatbelts.
For the analogy to hold true seatbelts would have to double your chances of actually crashing your car, and also sometimes randomly kill people who hadn't crashed at all (vaccine injuries are a real thing and excess death is now elevated for non-COVID reasons). Clearly the tradeoffs involved here are quite different and statistics need to be used very carefully to assess them.
Do you have any good source ?
There are no sources showing an increase in excess death due to vaccination because the medical and media establishment categorically deny that this could possibly be happening. As far as they're concerned more or less nobody ever dies of the COVID vaccine, period, end of story and any claim to the contrary is misinformation. This attitude is sometimes summed up as "Vaccines are amongst the leading causes of coincidences".
The US VAERS database of course tracks peculiar diseases/symptoms/deaths that follow vaccination. At this point it has more records of adverse events for COVID vaccines than all other vaccines combined since the tracking programme began, but the vast majority of problems never make it to VAERS or similar databases, so the absolute numbers aren't that useful. So the best people can do is inference. There appears to be a sharp increase in deaths due to heart attacks and strokes/other clotting disorders this year. The media are occasionally reporting on this but either claiming it's some inexplicable mystery or coming up with some absurd alternative explanation. Examples:
"Health experts have been left baffled by a big rise [25%] in a common and potentially fatal type of heart attack in the west of Scotland": https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mystery-rise-in-heart-att...
"Why are heart attacks becoming common amongst seemingly fit people?" - their answer is a sudden epidemic of too much exercise: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitnes...
The UK has very good public health data compared to most countries. It breaks out heart related deaths for both with and without COVID. There has been a large rise in non-COVID heart deaths in 2021. Some of this may be/must be due to the (not really admitted) collapse of the UK healthcare system due to lockdown triggered overload. However there is also a correlation with the vaccine rollout (it's graphed):
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/31/why-has-there-been-a-ris...
It's a 12x increase. That's either lockdowns or vaccines but whichever it is, that's not a natural cause, it's caused by government policy.
From a quick bit of Googling there seems to be similar data from Israel but I have not checked this tweet in any depth - the tables seem legit but the summarization of it looks backwards to me:
https://twitter.com/RanIsraeli/status/1425002893116166144
Anecdotally there seem to be a noticeably larger number of athletes having heart attacks whilst playing. Example montages of these stories are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l34v01crsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZAPxYouf-c
I have a friend who is investigating this phenomenon in more depth. He found a research paper from the early 2000s that counted news reports about sudden on-field medical emergencies amongst young sports players, then compared that rate to some big lists of news stories in 2021 about it he compiled. He's still working on this project and hasn't written anything up publicly but so far it seems the rate is 6x higher than normal. Obviously this sort of investigation is limited by several factors, but as public health agencies refuse to investigate or report on this stuff, there's a limit to how far random members of the public can go.
But well, I've spotted something: https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-..., ages 40-49: the vaxxed are getting sick at twice the rate of unvaxxed ones.
But this image https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/7A0B/production/... from https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55274833 says more than 75% of 40-49 have had 1 dosage.
Imagine if 100% of a population has been vaccinated. We know breakthrough cases are possible. Everyone that gets Covid after that will be breakthrough! And this graph would have 0 cases of the unvaxxed, and a non-zero bar for the vaxxed, and you're going to interpret that as "The vaccination gives you Covid!". The quoted emails try to explain why this graph is bad and liable to misinterpration, but the Substack author is misleading you by telling you there's dodgy stuff going on.
If the vaccine efficacy drops down after 6 months, then, boosters should be prescribed and even made mandatory. But boohoo, more crying from the other side.
1. The problem appears when comparing rates. Your counter-argument is assuming we're comparing absolute numbers which is false.
2. The argument about "data fudging" is the other way around. The raw data shows sharply negative effectiveness against symptomatic disease, and the UK HSA then "fudges" the data into showing the opposite using a statistical technique called TNCC - the validity of which is currently under debate, as it relies on an assumption that doesn't seem to be true.
But these mis-understandings aren't really surprising given that you admit you haven't actually bothered to read the links, and instead decided that you already know the answers because of some unrelated discussion to do with US politics. None of the people I've cited are Americans or in the USA so whatever you think did or did not happen in the 2020 election is quite irrelevant.
Maybe because the CDC says so? Or have we lost all faith in them?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...
"COVID-19 vaccines are effective at protecting people from COVID-19 and help keep adults and children from getting seriously sick. COVID-19 vaccines can reduce the risk of people spreading the virus that causes COVID-19."
Look into what happened with Vietnam. They were able to 'control' the spread multiple times over the first year. They thought they could always control things, so they didn't focus on vaccination.
Once delta took hold, it spread more quickly than they could control things and the govt. has gone crazy on getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible.
At this point though, infections are soaring. The govt. has given up trying to control it. A lot of people are going to die. They are figuring that they will push to get as many people vaccinated, but herd immunity will come faster. The plan now is to get the country open again more quickly.
I'm sorry but the narrative "vaccine prevents spread" has been falling apart for the past 6 months and is now completely disproved by real world data. Not a single country has been successful at preventing the spread with vaccination. And it shows at every level : from cities (singapore) to small islands (cayman islands) to states.
The real benefit of the vaccine is that it lessen the effects if you are infected. The benefit of that is that hospitals don't fill up. People who have other issues won't be locked out. Fewer people will die.
Get vaccinated.
It's sad to see how many otherwise presumably normal people so easily skip away from ideas of basic individual rights for such flimsy reasons now.
I assume you would be able to get a booster off-label in the Netherlands.
[0] https://gruenerpass.gv.at/geimpft/ "03. Jänner 2022 ist das Impfzertifikat einer einmaligen Janssen Impfung nicht mehr gültig."
Currently no one in NL has gotten any booster yet. They hope to start 60+ somewhere beginning of December.
So as an example, come 03-01-2022, if you’re 30 and you have a Janssen shot and you want to go to Austria you’re out of luck. It’ll be months before you’re going to get the booster and you cannot “get it off label”.
'From 1986 until 1994, Cuba quarantined people living with HIV in medical facilities called sanatorios, or sanatoriums.'
https://nacla.org/news/2017/11/29/cuba%E2%80%99s-hiv-sanator...
This is hardly unique to australia. UK, Ireland, Israel, and other highly vaccinated nations are experiencing record case numbers. Where is the skepticism? I feel like 80% of the population has gone totally crazy, completely unwilling to question the safety or efficacy of the vaccines, as though they were sacrosanct.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/ng-inter...
Edit: article is about austria. Still, the accusations of being "antivaxx" are dishonest. Not all vaccines are created equal. And in any case a ≈65% vaccination rate failing to contain the virus still does not bode well for estimates of effectiveness. Something's not right and the discussion needs to be had.
[edit] aahh, you linked Australia instead of Austria - that's pretty much exactly on the opposite side of the globe.
The people filling the hospitals are unvaccinated.
The vaccine doesn't prevent new cases. It isn't a super man cape. It lessens the effects, if you do get infected.
If it supposedly lessens effects if you get infected, why is there such controversy of worrying about those that don't want it?
The people filling the hospitals, which has consistently been overstated in magnitude, are obese/overweight and with other co-morbidities. For vast majority of Covid cases the symptoms are nothing to worry about. The risk of dying from under 50 is like 0.1% or better if not overweight.
This is an extreme modern aversion to any risk that would desire society grind itself to a halt forever and fight pointless mandate battles towards inevitable political chaos instead of just moving on with life.
I'm not sure this claim is consistent with the available evidence. Long term cognitive side effects (e.g. "brain fog" and memory loss) and respiratory problems each seem to occur in ~15% of symptomatic COVID cases among working-age, not-particularly-unhealthy people. "Long term" here means 7-9 months after infection. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v...
Okay? That's not inconsistent with what I said, and moreover this is an absurdly vague and nebulous set of supposed symptoms. It is just simply not that credible that this is a significant real world issue to any large degree worthy of the costs of (ineffectively) trying to mitigate them.
But also, everyone is going to get Covid more or less. It is not going away. It is an endemic coronavirus. Even if what you're saying was true, so what? Where does that leave us? It leaves us with those occurrences still happening, AND a perpetually degraded economic, political and social life due to ineffective mandates, shut downs, restrictions and mask drama. None of this stops the spread of Covid!
Good thing that only 15-30% of the Western world is obese. I don't follow the situation everywhere but here in Belgium fact is that people have been refused access to the ICU because there was no place because of COVID-19. And that's with postponing non-urgent care (which is happening, again) and all the measures taken.
What you call moving on with life means refusing people access to hospitals.
Hospitals at capacity has been wildly overstated and additionally none of these measures stop the spread of Covid. The cost is not worth the negligible benefit.
Every time after measures are taken the spread of COVID slows down, every time they are loosened it increases again.
We should probably keep doing this merry go round yes? Expecting different results. This is like arguing we should never pull out of Afghanistan because chaos would ensue. Just lock-down forever yes?
Stopping the spread of a coronavirus is impossible, how do you not understand this?
It's not going to go on forever, we have vaccines, every time more people aquire natural immunity, we get better treatment, etc. But we will do this until we don't have to worry about our hospitals anymore. How do you not understand this?
JFK airport has about 500 takeoffs a day. 0.1% chance of a crash means on average a jumbo plane full of passengers (400 people?) crashes every 2 days. How would you feel about air travel if these were the risks?
*Covid was the cause of death, not sepsis and btw he tested positive for Covid.
0.1 was for everyone...without co-morbidities it's even lower and more of a non-issue. People that want to take the vax should do it. Why do they care what young and healthy people do?
Again though, coronvirus's don't go away it will be around forever and likely everyone gets it eventually. So what are we even talking about accomplishing here?
Maybe you should read this (and feel free to conclude it's lying media): https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/30/fact...
A strong immune system might even be better for the virus: https://magazine.ucsf.edu/your-immune-system-could-turn-covi...
Sure it'll probably be around forever. But a higher vaccination rate will decrease the rate of hospital overflow. Currently in the UK no one else can get sick or end up in the ICU, and ambulances queue for hours. Suddenly we've gone to third world level of healthcare accessibility. Maybe the answer is expand the hospital network, but no one else is doing this either.
Good luck with your health... you'll need it, since you said everyone will get the virus.
Well, for context, the US military is overwhelmingly physically-fit and healthy compared to the general population.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/09...
50% of the 6 deaths reported in the article were >50 years old.
"Their deaths bring the military’s COVID-19 mortality rate to just over 0.02, much lower than the roughly 2-percent rate nationwide, but 50 times higher than it was during previous surges last year."
Seems like banking on your overall fitness isn't a terrible position to take... Delta variant is probably the main cause of the uptick in fatalities but they remain comparatively low (nevertheless something that led me to get vaccinated....just before they made it mandatory to keep feeding my family anyway).
Nobody is saying "stop" the spread, it is obvious it isn't going to just stop. "slow" it is a more admirable goal.
You also have to keep in mind that the incidences for vaccinated and unvaccinated are vastly different. Several German federal states record these values and the incidence among the unvaccinated is usually ~10x as high as for the vaccinated, so a small fraction of the population can be responsible for a good deal of the infections. I shall provide a link for the latter in a moment.
Example for Saxony, one of the more affected federal states at the moment. Ratio of incidences for unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~19:1, see:
https://www.coronavirus.sachsen.de/infektionsfaelle-in-sachs...
Example for Bavaria, also heavily affected. Ratio of incidences for unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~9.7:1. Source:
https://www.lgl.bayern.de/gesundheit/infektionsschutz/infekt...
Baden-Württemberg, taken from an article as I couldn't find the original source. Ratio of incidences unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~18.4:1 there:
https://www.swp.de/panorama/intensivstation-geimpfte-corona-...
Keep in mind that you would need to weigh that according to the vaccination levels if you want to calculate somethign with them but you should find the current levels on the same pages, I think.
I'm going to trust the statistics that the vaccines work, and aren't deadly. The numbers seem to speak for themselves, thousands of samples and you can see any region with higher vaccination rates have lower infection and death rates (well, I guess until the efficacy wears down and boosters are needed...). On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
https://www.uab.edu/reporter/resources/be-healthy/item/9544-...
> Unlike many medications, which are taken daily, vaccines are generally one-and-done. "Medicines you take every day can cause side effects" that reveal themselves over time, including long-term problems as levels of the drug build up in the body over months and years, Goepfert said. But "vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body," he said. "This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn't expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine."
This is inconsistent with record case numbers in highly vaccinated countries across the globe.
>On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
Publishing literature critical of vaccines is social and career suicide. The science is effectively poisoned, one sided because of social shaming. But Pfizer et al. aren't complaining given that they are raking in the cash explicitly free of liability. Not like that's a huge conflict of interest or anything, we should continue to trust their safety and efficacy data unquestionably. Surely big pharma has a spotless ethical and safety record.
Let's see your data then.
> Publishing literature critical of vaccines is social and career suicide.
Ah yeah, of course, when you don't like the statement, the messenger is part of a giant lying conspiracy. Where's the science to prove otherwise? (Hidden by the money and power, I guess?) The studies that Jenny McCarthy and her doctor Andrew Wakefield[1] made up about vaccines = autism have been debunked. But I guess that's all because the powers that be have decided they need to be made pariahs, right? Sigh, I'm glad I live in reality. But hey, maybe I'm the one who's been brainwashed, and you're the clear thinking one, right?
Talking to the nurses the vast majority of hospitalized cases are unvaccinated and looking it up 40% of the state is unvaccinated but they represented 98% of the covid hospitalizations that were filling up over 1/3 of the beds that night. Exactly 0 beds across the entire state were taken due to being vaccinated.
Thankfully 4 hours of pain is something that is easy to get over and I was able to get treated before it caused life threatening problems, some of the people that were redirected won't be able to say the same.
But there were reports that some Germans were selling the certificates on the "dark web" (i.e. you have to know the WhatsApp number of the seller), and are working with rogue pharmacy employees to issue valid certificates...
As for stores, I don't think they are supposed to check at all. Or at least I hope so. Personally I have never been checked.
another case was that doctors were bribed to sign a document that person was vaccinated even if that person has not visited vaccination center. so yeah, there are attempts, but at the same time, law enforcement works its job sometimes.
My local news had some people admitted to hospital with Covid and despite having the certificate, not having been actually vaccinated (which can be seen in blood tests some time afterwards) which has resulted in identifying some medical personnel who had been issued fake certificates of vaccination without actually vaccinating people; since every certificate "knows" when and where exactly you got the vaccine, which exact batch/vial of vaccine was used, and the institutions' medical records will show who (supposedly) made the injection.
The prosecution for the document forgery is still ongoing, but since some of the affected patients died from severe covid, that's essentially wrongful death through intentional medical malpractice, so the involved doctors/nurses will not only lose their licenses to practice but are quite likely to see jail time, and since a nontrivial ratio of people do get ill as Covid is still spreading, if someone fake-vaccinates a lot of people, they are likely to be identified.
There is also further discussion about requiring PCR-Tests for the non restricted groups.
Austria has a around 60% vaccination rate² and around 12% of the population had an documented infection³.
Herd immunity is a discussion point but scientists are undecided how high the numbers need to be. Estimates from earlier this year did talk about 60% but this number was raised and some experts even say its impossible.
2: https://orf.at/corona/daten/impfung
3: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
The implementation was the following:
- FFP2 Mask mandated in essential services like pharmacies, grocery store and postal offices for everyone.
- No Mask or distancing mandate for anyone who was vaccinated or recovered.
- Mask mandate and a negative covid test that is not older than 24/48h depending on the testing method for non vaccinated for anything outside of essential services.
The minimum time between 2 vaccinations is 2 weeks but it might be better to have a longer interval according to research².
Recovered need to wait for a minimum of 21 days before getting a vaccination.
Vaccination need to be refreshed after 270 days.
If we want to truly protect those who can't take vaccines testing and lockdowns for those who have not been tested is only way.
[EDIT:] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/world/europe/austria-chan...
It is ostensibly for their own good and to prevent the collapse of the healthcare system that, coincidently, has reduced capacity over 2020.
Lost opportunity for some more confusing naming there, like 2gg or 2g+g or perhaps even 2g².
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