Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory | Hacker News Reader

Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory

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435 pointsTomte1,623 comments

What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.

The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then. Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.

FSJ is a year-long volunteer program for young people typically organized and funded by NGOs like the Red Cross and similar. I worked with small children, plenty of the other volunteers I met regularly worked in hospitals and nursing homes. They all talked at length about how atrocious the working conditions were and how they were asked to do things they weren't legally allowed to (e.g. taking blood, handing out medication) because the staff shortages were severe enough that people didn't have enough time to adhere to very reasonable safety rules anymore. That was 17 years ago.

This is a well known, widely publicized[0] and not at all new problem, and the unvaccinated are not to blame for it. Let me repeat, we're talking about one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of 83M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients.

[0]Some random articles from 2018/19 (German):

https://gesundheit-soziales.verdi.de/themen/mehr-personal/++...

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/wenn-aus-notstand-panik-...

https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2018-05/pflegenotsta...

https://www.rbb-online.de/kontraste/ueber_den_tag_hinaus/bil...

I don't know why you are voted down. This is very much true for The Netherlands as well. Ever since the year 2000, possibly before, ICU beds have been scaled down.

Diederik Grommers, one member of the Dutch Outbreak Management Team (OMG) states: "it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not; 60% of the beds are occupied by vaccinated people; the problems we will encounter in the coming weeks are caused by the fact that we totally hollowed out our health care" [0].

The Netherlands has about 6 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens. Germany has almost 30 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens [1]. Now I know Germany did accept patients from The Netherlands on their ICUs and perhaps Germany is doing the same for other countries, so perhaps that is causing a capacity problem in Germany as well.

---

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFg78PgDgu0

[1]: https://cdn.nos.nl/image/2020/03/30/640384/3840x2160a.jpg

Thanks, that was an interesting video. I had to rely on auto-translated subtitles but from the little Dutch I can understand, it seems like they got the gist across.

Yeah, Germany has a ton of ICU beds in comparison, and yet, we're struggling exactly the same as any other country. I find it strange, too. In early 2020 I expected we'd see big differences between different countries based on ICU capacity, but we saw the same story everywhere (regional overload around the peak of a wave), with a few minor differences (whether some patients are transferred within the country or to other countries). Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.

High total number notwithstanding though, our ICU capacity actually decreased during the pandemic, see:

https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

The graph under "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten" shows total capacity (light blue) + emergency reserve (green), dark blue is occupied beds. There was a pretty sharp drop-off in the total capacity a year ago, and a slower decrease all throughout 2021. Apparently, that's mostly due to nurses quitting in droves since the pandemic made their already bad working conditions even worse.

Our politicians didn't lift a finger to prevent or revert this, and now they're blaming a minority for this massive, massive failure. Just makes me really angry, I'll take downvotes for that if I have to :)

> Perhaps countries have different standards for when they put patients in ICU's, allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't know.

There's different standards in different countries for sure. In The Netherlands there's a focus on quality of life. If a patient cannot have a decent quality of life after staying on ICU, there's a preference to provide the patient with palliative care instead. In (e.g.) Italy this approach would not be accepted.

The number of ICU beds may have been inflated. At the start of the pandemic, hospitals had to report available ICU beds, and they received money for the number of beds they reported. I know of two hospitals that reported all of their beds (the physical objects) when the intention of the law / regulation was to have only those beds reported that could be operated / staffed.

>"[...] we totally hollowed out our health care"

Weird move for one of the richest countries in the world, no?

Privatization of infrastructure in Germany has always led to a, at least perceived, decline in quality. This has been true for postal service, railway, telcos and now health care.

Except he was talking about the Netherlands.

Health care in Germany is a not-for-profit endeavour and is strictly controlled by the law, with ministry of health oversight.

It sounds like you read that off the government shill brochure.

The decline in public healthcare quality has nothing to do with the lack of government oversight but it's due to the lack of funding and personel (which is also funding related). Ask any overworked healthcare worker in the public system.

It’s a lack of personnel because the population pyramid is going from a triangle to a rectangle. This is what that transition does to the labor force.

People are dying friendo, please wise up.

When was healthcare in Germany not private?

More than 10 years ago

From what I've read, it has always been a heavily regulated private system (which is mostly non-profit in practice).

Counter argument: Medical personel is hard to find and expensive, as is IC infrastructure. Why would we've needed to keep spare IC capacity for decades only to find out we need it in case of a pandemic? The German argument could be re-constructed into an argument that any country will run into IC shortages regardless of the level of IC availability. In an exponential curve it's only three or four cycles (8-12 days?) away, regardless of capacity. Hence, keep your IC capacity at regular efficient rates and use vaccination to get out of the hot seat. IC's save some but lose many. Vaccinations save many.

I can't say that I like the Dutch approach to covid in general, but in my first job I was deep into governement budgetting of hospitals (just before the introduction of the current Dutch reimbursement system) and it was a whole lot about 'keeping beds' and keeping patients in them to fulfill the budget. That was not what I'd call a generally efficient system. Even the health outcomes were worse since outpatient treatments usually have fewer side effects. What I've learned in that job is that doctors are like people. They respond to incentives. If that incentive is to have beds filled with people, you get just that. Beds with people.

You can’t throw a stone without hitting a nurse in the US, but I’m guessing they’re paid far better here as well just as doctors are.

I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me that socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes care. The increase in costs in the US is also unsustainable. There might be a happy medium in there but it might be too early to tell.

> I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me that socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes care.

You can see this happening in Canada too. We have a hybrid system in healthcare where the majority of critical care is paid for via taxes/government subsidies however secondary/tertiary stuff is either out of pocket or through insurance agencies (prescriptions, out-patient care like physiotherapy, etc).

Over the past 20-30 years, our system has seen the typical government thought process of throwing more money at problems but not actually having someone be accountable for the actions of the government over decades. You end up with a bunch of overpaid, under-worked management at the top while the actual front-line workers suffer with low staffing, not enough beds, budget cuts for the front line but raises for management etc. etc.

Not to mention the number of students coming here for health education (doctor, nurse, specialist) - then immediately saying sayonara for another country like the US or in the case of foreign students, their home country.

I don't understand why we keep cutting healthcare budgets - one possible reason could be because corporations have slowly been taking over every aspect of society as they move faster and make smarter decisions than government officials.

This is accurate. The socialized health care system in Germany worked fine for multiple decades, until a few years ago our government decided to reimburse hospitals not based on days a patient spends there (which created perverse incentives, agreed) but rather based on diagnosis. So, a hospital earns X euros for every patient with condition X, creating other perverse incentives, and resulting in less money for the hospitals, which of course trickled down to nurses.

The same happens here in Sweden. Since the implementation of more neoliberalist policies on healthcare, allowing more private clinics and paying clinics based on diagnosis created a perverse incentive to overdiagnose patients.

There was a case of a clinic that performed unnecessary surgeries and procedures just to rake in more tax money.

The problem isn't socialised medicine per se, it's trying to mash a socialised medicine system with "market forces", it's the ideology of the Third Way [1] to appease to these neoliberalist policy desires that is crumbling the Swedish healthcare (and welfare) system for the past 2 decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

How expensive is it as a percentage of overall healhcare spending?

There is no easy answer to that question to my knowledge. All of what hospitals do is translated into the Dutch equivalent of diagnosis-related groups. Those DRGs are standardized across the hospitals doing procedures. Insurers bargain with hospitals (usually on a higher level) for price-setting. So while there are DRGs that probably have a large IC-component, most have only a little. So the costs of IC are reimbursed via all treatments that have an average IC-component.

A hospital with a good cost based activity system could probably tell you more, although that would require a very high measure of control.

Dutch press just reports the general direction of (internal) prices for IC-days (about € 3k / night). That really is nowhere close to the proper answer to the question "How much would expansion cost?" The sum based on that € 3k would be: €3k * 365 * 65% * 1200 = about € 850 million for the whole of IC-care. That is a low figure for the Netherlands (€ 25 billion total medical specialist care), so I expect a lot of the IC-costs are absorbed by other DRGs or the other way around: that price doesn't include all of the fixed costs and is a marginal price.

USA is probably the country with the highest cost for an hospital visit. I am sure the hospital are able to afford hiring more staff :)

Germany has "only a few thousand" ICU beds (and while this nber has trended downward over time, it was never more than 10,000). It's misleading to not phrase this as a percentage, which is something like a sudden 50%+ spike in need for ICU capacity.

Of course that will overwhelm the system.

(Also paradoxically, an improved healthcare system should need fewer ICU beds, so the decrease is probably a good thing)

Thanks for the insight. I'm curious; is the problem staffing, "beds" (which I assume means actual physical beds, or is this a term of art?), or a combination?

Also curious how one squares the resource constraint issue with the exceptional nature of the events of the past couple years. What I mean is, did anyone think it made sense to massively increase capacity before the pandemic began? I'm not in health care so I don't have any special insight here; i.e. I'm asking, not challenging. From an outsider's perspective it seems like it would've been a tough sell to advocate for what was, in the "before times," an unnecessary increase in capacity.

It's staffing. See my other comment. Germany lost > 4000 ICU beds during the past year.

Could you source that claim?

I’m comparing the numbers from the DIVI registry:

2020-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/7522 2021-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/9047

I’m getting 24,949 beds for today, 27,543 as the year ago number (in both cases including a couple thousand ICU beds for kids which were later split out in the more current DIVI reports since ICU beds for kids aren’t helpful for this pandemic).

That’s a difference of 2,594.

Also, as the DIVI themselves explain: “Consequently, several factors play a role in influencing the number of beds that can be operated. A deliberate reduction of beds during the pandemic cannot be assumed. The reduction in available beds can be explained by the various points mentioned above, among others, and is supported by other data collected. The decisive factor for the operability of a bed is the medical staff.”

This is under a FAQ entry where they list five different reasons for the reduction in capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/faq/18af7107-e098-43e7-a9f...

Staff themselves being affected by COVID-19 and becoming unable to work is just one of them.

The others are changes in how much staff is allocated per patient (this was increased), hospitals being more precise in their reporting and only reporting beds that can actually be staffed, changes in the criteria for a bed to be actually countable and the high effort ICU therapy of COVID-19 patients requires.

So I had this number from the (reputable) news but I googled it and found e.g. the Ärzteblatt as a source: https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/128476/Intensivmedizi... (German)

TBH I would not be surprised if the actually don't know the exact numbers. But even if it's "only" 2594 it's still too many.

You could call it deliberate however if the working conditions for people under such heavy load are not improved.

"Beds" means "staffed beds", not just physical places to put patients. It's a combination of facilities and staffing.

Thanks for the clarification. (I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this spelled out before, considering how much ink has been spilled over this issue, but I digress.)

Staffing, mostly. There are a lot of "beds" still available, just nobody to tend to them.

But another thing that always gets scrambled in the newspapers is the "level" of ICU beds.

The ICU at my town's hospital (and it's not small) has patients that would lie in a normal station at a big university hospital.

ICU bed != ICU bed. In smaller hospitals, ICU means "post-op, needs surveillance" or "gets oxygen".

At a large hospital ICU means "ECMO" or similarly severe conditions.

So when you're reading that there are x thousand ICU beds still available in the country: most are not really up to the task when it comes to a severe covid case, and furthermore, an ICU bed at the other end of the country doesn't help you much.

Analog phone networks break down (you get no dialtone) if everyone in the service area picked up their handset and want to dial-out, they have much fewer lines than handsets, because they calculated what capacity they might need (how many calls would be ongoing at one time) and just have that many lines, plus maybe a safety margin.

I'm guessing it's the same with ICU beds... And now we have a situation where a high percentage of people have picked up their handsets...

Yes, but do you really think we should manage our health system like a windy cell phone network provider? By the way, the cell phone networks and internet connections in Germany are on the level of some 3rd world countries.

> By the way, the cell phone networks and internet connections in Germany are on the level of some 3rd world countries.

There is no need to insult 3rd world countries like this.

So true and not mentioned enough by the media. The fact that we lost more than 4000 ICU beds over last year (during the Corona pandemic!!) because of personnel shortage is mind-boggling.

Instead of rewarding those who worked these horrible jobs and maybe attract new workers with better conditions (e.g. more holidays), better pay or tax reduction, our politicians did campaigning and ignored the upcoming winter.

Now they blame it on the unvaccinated and want to force high-speed vaccinating as many people as possible. But it won't help now. And it won't work either because they also messed up the whole vaccine supply chain.

I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress.

I might be working from old info here but my understanding is that vaccination reduces the ICU burden. Assuming that's still good info, is it totally unreasonable to blame the unvaccinated for ICU overload?

Yes because no effort was made to increase ICU capacity which was continues to be the biggest issue

No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease.

The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.

Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.

Vaccines reduce severe courses of the disease by about 90%. The number vary depending on what you look at exactly, and for elderly people boosters are really mandatory to keep the vaccine effective.

Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is very from from not working.

That's like saying, people are still hospitalized after car crashes so seatbelts and airbags are useless.

The safety of modern cars has been shown to lead to more aggressive driving, so this metaphor may track on more levels than you realize.

>Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.

What "narrative"? What are you even talking about?

No-one, including the person you responded to, has claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer duration.

You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.

True, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized at a higher rate and for a longer duration.

However, we are not talking about "the unvaccinated", rather about "a tiny unfortunate fraction of unvaccinated people". There are 4,690 covid patients in ICU beds and 25M unvaccinated people. Assuming all covid ICU patients are unvaccinated, the covid ICU incidence rate within the unvaccinated population is 0.02%.

For an analogy, we could reason that because the prison population skews 90/10 male/female, all males should either undergo a vasectomy, or pay a recurring 10k euro fine. I hope this is obviously unethical.

Your prison thing is widely weird and not sure at all how you relate those two.things.

Yes the point is to make sure that those ICU capacity which is very small and normally enough would and is struggling due to covid and vaccination helps.

What is so hard to understand?

Vaccine mandates enforced by heavy fines and/or prison are criminalizing being unvaccinated with the number of "boosters" the authorities deem necessary. Justified by group "crime" statistic differentials. We may argue that it is done in service of a good cause, but it is still criminalizing. Our weird reality.

We are allowed to enforce a lot of things as a society.

We banned toxic paint, we enforce certain vaccines (polio, measles)

It's only logical to enforce a vaccine on people.

Same as you will get reanimated when you have an accident.

We formed and created rules around our society for a long time and those limitations are here for the good of all of us.

A society can't be forced to have a medical oath and in parallel has to watch when people don't play along.

You expect us to do the best to help you in an emergency and in parallel expect total freedom?

Not how our society works. Srsly get over it.

Could you please not post flamewar comments to HN? I'm afraid you've already broken the site guidelines more than once with this account.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It just makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People wearing seatbelts still die in car crashes. When will you stop buying into the narrative that seatbelts saves lives?

When all houses have sprinklers only sprinkler equipped houses will burn down. Still in absolute numbers there should be much less fires.

Right, but the point is you still need more ICU capacity.

The analogy is “every house has sprinklers so no need for a fire department any more”.

Do you, though? I see lots of numbers around hospitalizations, but how many (vaccinated) people hospitalized end up in the ICU?

From all the local reporting the overwhelming majority of people in Czech ICU are not vaccinated. A few examples - listing from a hard-case ICU in Ostrava for a week in November:

https://mobile.twitter.com/VojtechGibis/status/1463608271378...

NEOČKOVÁN - not vaccinated OČKOVÁN - vaccinated

The last 5 patients are those that have been released from the unit in that week. The first two were move to less severe case ICU. The last three died...

One more: https://mobile.twitter.com/VojtechGibis/status/1465783542982...

Czech ICU occupancy - blue unvaccinated, orange vaccinated. And yes, we had several cases <30 years old and unfortunately even children on ICU.

Singapore does a great job of testing and the vaccination rate is >95% for the eligible population. Despite that, they have introduced restrictions due to ICU overload.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics

Look at "Proportion (%) of cases ever critically ill in ICU or died, by age and vaccination status"

Looking at the high risk group of 80+ year old (43% of all ICU cases and/or deaths), the numbers are: unvaccinated (24%), partially vaccinated (16%) and fully vaccinated (3.2%).

They don't define partially vaccinated (typically 14 days after 2nd dose). So clearly the vaccine reduces the risk of ICU/death, but the "truly" unvaccinated make up only 50% of ICU cases in that age group.

Sure, but how many vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU, compared to unvaccinated? How many are dying?

Also consider that a population of 100, and 90 of those people are vaccinated. Uf 15 vaccinated people end up in the hospital, and 5 unvaccinated people also end up in the hospital, vaccination is still clearly better for you. But people will still say "75% of the people in the hospital were vaccinated; clearly the vaccines aren't working!" Yeah, well, out of vaccinated people, only 16% ended up hospitalized, while 50% of unvaccinated people ended up hospitalized. Those are the real numbers that matter. Percent of cohort hospitalized, not percent of total hospitalized.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

ICU itself causes massive damage too. Side effect like died of hands and feet are not uncommon.

Training an ICU nurse takes about 5 years. The only realistic option during the pandemic would be to encourage immigration of ICU nurses from poorer countries, but that just moves the problem elsewhere.

I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if there were fewer people making excuses for those who ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit across the Western world.

A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that come from those.

Then train 3 nurses in respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, and secondary complications separately. Put them under an experienced nurse, and incentivize them to add to their skills when they're not working.

Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.

Well, mistakes by ICU personnel can easily kill - and that's on top of a significant, often >50% death chance for covid ICU patients. Better make sure the people don't get as far as getting intensive care in the first place.

So does developing a vaccine usually. We should be taking extraordinary measure not saying "oh that will take too long don't even start"

Assigning ten teachers to a student won't make the student learn ten times as fast.

Modifying the procedures and allowing people to work before they're through arbitrary redtape does. The EUA the vaccine received is the same concept. The reason the vaccine was developed faster wasn't just the number of scientists working on it, but the amount of funding directed towards it. Increasing money to education programs would increase the amount of people they can train, allow for further optimizations to be developed etc.

How long does it take the army to train a field medic? (Serious question, I don't know if there's some extended training involved, I just assume it's far less than, say, a nursing degree.)

I think that training people to handle 90% of the issues you see in Covid-related illnesses could be done relatively quickly, if we wanted to do that. The ICU bed shortage really refers to a ICU-staff shortage, and anything we could do to relieve that burden would be a good thing.

The US Army takes 16 weeks to train a field medic. However most of that training isn't applicable to treating COVID-19 patients.

Thousands of ICU nurses quit on the past few years. They are still trained and would just have to be convinced to return.

Vaccination does reduce the proportion of people that need ICU beds, but there are pretty rapid diminishing returns on just vaccinating more; countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination. Also, vaccinating younger lower-risk people doesn't help because they're at substantially lower risk of needing the ICU even unvaccinated than someone older or higher-risk who is vaccinated and because the vaccines aren't really useful to stop the spread of the disease either. Countries have generally had significantly higher vaccine acceptance amongst older people who need it more. (Though I think one of the big problems Germany has is their vaccine uptake amongst the elderly is somewhat low compared to other countries.)

> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination

Which countries? I find it hard to get data at vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically, but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated).

> in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated)

For the 80+ group the latest data for hospitalisations is 47% vaccinated, 31% non-vaccinated, 22% unkown.

https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status

Well yeah, for 80+ with a vaccination rate of 92 %.

If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 % of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest seven day average puts that number at 27 %.

I was just giving a number consistent with the 80+ vaccination rate quoted.

For the broad population is 28% vaccinated vs 57% non-vaccinated. The remaining 15% is "unknown". But Switzerland has a relatively low vaccination rate at 67%.

Edit: looking at deaths instead of hospitalisations in the broad population:

  Fully-vaccinated 46%, partially-vaccinated 2%
  Non-vaccinated 41%
  Unknown 12%

Yes, those are the numbers for _hospitalizations_ in general, but the higher percentages I've been seeing (and for which I've been unsuccessful finding official documentation) are for _ICU_ patients specifically.

But they were not for 80+ patients specifically, or were they?

Edit: I can't find ICU numbers but the latest death stats for 80+ are 46% vaccinated, 33% non-vaccinated, 21% unknown.

Right now in my province, unvaccinated individuals make up 11.2% of 12+ population but more than 66% of hospitalizations. I don't expect the ICU rates to be more favourable to the unvaccianted than total hospitalization rates. If there is a point of rapid diminishing returns, it is not at ~90% yet.

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

Are they hospitalized for Covid or all reasons?

These are only COVID stats.

Your missing the vaccine injured in those stats because they define unvaccinated as anyone less than two weeks after vaccinated.

What do you mean? The immunity doesn't kick in the second the vaccine is injected into your arm. How else should they count vaccinated vs unvaccinated? (Also note that there is a category of partially vaccinated in the stats that is people who have only received the first dose of a two-dose vaccine).

It means the stats aren't as useful.

These stats do not show the difference between taking a shot but still being infected within two weeks after it, and not taking any shots at all and being infected. If you're going to blame the second group for filling up ICUs, you cannot lump them together.

Its probably just time delayed. Give it a few months. The vaccine protection seems to wear off rather quickly, based on data from UK and Israel.

Protection from hospitalization and death, particularly in under-65 or so, does not wear off. Neutralizing antibody levels naturally wane and can allow infection, T-cell and B-cell populations don't (unless you get infected with measles or have some other conditions, and assuming you form a robust T-cell response to begin with and aren't immunocompromised or just quite old).

I think the vaccine is probably as effective as two doses of a laxative. Any 75+ year olds that survived the two doses of the laxative, will now have better outcomes against covid.

Keep in mind the effectiveness is measured in tens/100,000. An there are some very sick people given the vaccine, that die before the 14 days of the second dose.

> I think the vaccine is probably as effective as two doses of a laxative.

Well at least people know how much weight to give your opinions.

My views are based on science

https://mobile.twitter.com/MartinNeil9/status/14668143477626...

Correlation does not imply causation.

> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination.

Which countries are you talking about? It's certainly not the case for Germany, and I don't know any other European country for which this would be the case.

Right now, young people take the "booster shots" that should be given to the elderly, first. Politicians will be very proud that "XY percent of the population are already boostered". The dying will continue.

Which country is that ? Here in Czech Republic there is clear priority for 60+ years for the third doses. Also a big vaccination drive based on volunteers to vaccinate ideally up to a milion eligible people with the third dose till Christmas.

Here in Berlin for example, in the first week of september my 85 year old grandparents received a booster shot invite letter from the Berlin senate. It said something like starting 20th september you can get the 3rd shot from any doctor or you can go without an appointment to a vaccination centre across the city.

what did they do? nothing because case numbers were low, I did push and push to finally get my grandpa to get is 3rd shot mid november while go to the doctor for something else... by coincident the rush to get the booster started 1 day after that.

I bet this happened a lot.... As far as I know just like for the 1st shot sverybody above 70 got that same letter. Meaning they had more than 2 months head start to get the boostershot.

So at least in Berlin I wont have sympathy anymore for taking away the shot from somebody else (got my appointment in january)

I dropped in to a local clinic this week to get my booster (no appointment, even) and was given the shot in about 15 minutes. Most of the other people there waiting looked relatively young. Seems that we're doing a terrible job of reaching out to the elderly to get them their boosters. Or they just don't want it.

Yes, and this is another example of the really bad management skills of our government. If you announce the wrong KPIs (XY percent vaccination regardless of personal risks) you might be performing great according to them and still fail miserably on your actual goals.

You make a good point re vaccinating lower risk patients. In the UK, not only the population has a high vaccination rate, but the rate is particularly high among the population at risk (~95% for the >70yo [1]). As a result, hospital cases and deaths are a fraction of the Jan 2021 peak, even though infection levels are high.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55274833

Its never unreasonable to blame the victim, just bad taste.

Also consider its their tax dollars being squandered and mismanaged.

It is not totally unreasonable but there is a component of blind blame to it. It will become a discussion after the pandemic and I don't think this will be too beneficial for our public health care system and health insurance.

With exponential spread, the actual number of ICU beds really doesn't matter, because whatever you've got will be overwhelmed across a similar timeframe anyway. The only way to actually fix the problem is to get the R-value below 1, which requires mass vaccinations.

The spectre of exponential spread is summoned way too often. Yes, an epidemic spreads exponentially when it starts, but also it's self limiting after a while. The 4th wave is wearing of already. Every wave so far has worn off in every country, with our without measures. As a recent example, compare Latvia and Estonia in the past few months. The former imposed strict measures, while the latter didn't, and yet the two curves match very closely.

Mankind has a tendency to not accept what it cannot control. Our politicians and virologists often said something along the lines: "we need to do X to keep control of the situation".

In the end we never were in control of the situation but people cannot accept that.

Most of the measures we took were nothing more than modern day rain dances. Feeble attempts by humans arrogant enough to think they could defeat or control a natural phenomenon that is well beyond ours to control.

Yep… “There’s nothing we can do” is just flatly unacceptable to the majority of the population. That’s when religion gets invented to create rituals to ward away evil.

Yeah, and a major function of the church is to help people deal with death.

San Francisco has had less than 1/3 as many deaths per capita as the US national average, and somewhere between a third and half of the deaths SF did have can be attributed to one terrible policy mistake – re-opening indoor bars and restaurants in fall 2020 – which immediately kicked off 2–3 months of fast exponential growth. If the rest of the USA had been even as fast acting and careful as SF, more than half a million dead Americans would still be alive.

And there are plenty of countries around the world which have done a much better job than SF of testing, contact tracing, vaccination, etc. We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.

* * *

“We haven’t tried anything and we’re all out of ideas” is easy to sell to grumpy people tired of a really shitty year or two, on the back of an unprecedented wave of anti-public-health propaganda, but it is an absolutely terrible pandemic response.

> San Francisco has had less than 1/3 as many deaths per capita as the US national average...

What do you believe this comparison means? I'm not sure its saying much of anything. Perhaps you could come up with another similar sized city, with same socioeconomic/population-type makeup, with same latitude and seasonality profile to compare against? I'm not familiar with SF data sources on this, but I'm curious if you can provide a source for current IFR? My state here in southeast US's IFR is .012. That includes people who died in car accidents, of poisonings, of falls and other injurious actions while having tested positive for COV in last 28 days. My county is comprised of mostly older folks (median age 44), small at 186K people, and we haven't had a COV death registered in the last 11 months.

>We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.

Can you show some data sources for this? Everything I'm seeing is pointing to Sweden's last 2 flu seasons (encompassing COVID years) showing the same or lower all cause mortality than their previous 15-20 years. With 2018 being the major outlier not just in Sweden but all around the world, for which we still have no explanation.

San Francisco has done significantly better than any other city in the continental USA, despite being one of the most internationally connected, transit dependent, and densely populated. Honolulu is the only similarly successful large US city.

> IFR is .012

Do you mean CFR (case fatality rate)? IFR (infection fatality rate) is always only speculative, because we don’t ever have complete knowledge of the number of infections.

In total throughout the pandemic SF has had ~670 Covid deaths and ~54,000 confirmed Covid cases for a population of ~880,000.

For the same population, the USA average would be ~2090 deaths and ~110,000 confirmed cases. Except those are both dramatic underestimates of the relative numbers because SF has consistently had a much lower percentage of positive tests, and hasn’t had anywhere near the US gap between confirmed Covid deaths and total excess deaths.

0.012 would be too low to be a CFR. That roughly the right number for COVID IFR (maybe a bit too low), which can be calculated in ways that make it less speculative e.g. sero-surveys. Even so CFR is also speculative because so many cases aren't reported: that's the reason IFR exists as a separate concept.

In science you're really meant to use all the data because the problem with this sort of cherry-picking is that it can go both ways. Florida removed all its restrictions and was predicted to become a bloodbath just like they predicted that for Sweden. It didn't happen, results appear to have been unaffected by the changes. Studies that look at all the data find no correlations between lockdowns and COVID mortality (but lots of correlations with other bad problems).

This is the correct take. At this point, since we've already vaccinated the only control groups we had in the trials, we no longer can draw valuable conclusions. The only statistic that we should now rely on, in order to account for all positives and negatives from government's COVID response (vaccinations, lockdowns, hysterics and tantrums) is year-over-year (preferably flu season) all cause mortality, in a specific location, for a specific population.

> 0.012 would be too low to be a CFR.

0.012 is the San Francisco CFR. 0.016 is the USA CFR, if we go by confirmed cases/deaths as reported by the New York Times.

The IFR should be substantially lower than either of these; many deaths go uncounted, but a far larger proportion of infections never get a confirmed positive test. I would guess IFR to be in the 0.004–0.008 range. (Which is still scary high!) I’m sure if you do a search of the academic literature you can find more careful analysis and better informed estimates. It obviously varies from place to place and is substantially dependent on demographics and availability of medical care.

* * *

Florida was a bloodbath! It has had among the worst outcomes anywhere in the USA since mid 2021. Tens of thousands of avoidable deaths after the universal free availability of extremely effective vaccines and better understanding of viral transmission. The state government not only stopped any state-level public health action, it actively prevented state/local public health departments and local governments from acting. It is hard to imagine a more complete failure of state leadership.

Florida has had something like 4x more Covid deaths than San Francisco, per capita. And if we only look at deaths after widespread vaccine availability, Florida has had >10x more.

Of course, the virus eventually burned through a large majority of the unvaccinated population, and without enough remaining hosts to infect, flamed out. Fingers crossed that future virus variants don’t have enough immune escape to burn back through the state again.

>Florida was a bloodbath! It has had among the worst outcomes anywhere in the USA since mid 2021.

Yet, despite being significantly "older" than CA, it did significantly better than CA in 2020 with regards to all-cause-mortality. 2021, seems to be a different story at this point and I'm very curious as to the 10% difference between years (certainly seems to imply the virus has not burned through the population, assuming the virus had anything to do with mortality).

You're right. I dropped a zero by mistake, I was seeing 0.0012 (0.12%) but that's not what was being written.

The usual credible figures I see for IFR are between 0.1% and 0.3% - higher figures tend to be using bad methodologies like including estimates from the very first days of the pandemic when people were trying to estimate IFRs using random Chinese media reports, etc. If you restrict yourself to more rigorous methodologies and sample sizes, IFR falls a lot.

As for Florida being a "bloodbath", lol. That word doesn't mean what you think it means. Nowhere has been a bloodbath, and if there's one thing that's been consistently true about Covid data it's that you can make anywhere seem worse or better than anywhere else by choosing what to compare against. Use all the data and Florida seems pretty good, especially as Europe is busy proving that vaccines appear to have accomplished nothing at all in terms of total numbers, despite the many claims of efficacy.

I do mean IFR. I hope you understand that the CFR numbers you're quoting, are also speculative estimates. :-) Almost certainly the number of infections is vastly undercounted as recognized by CDC's footnotes on their Data Tracker. As of middle of last year, the CDC estimates that 45-55% of all Americans had been infected with COVID.

> CDC estimates that 45-55% of all Americans had been infected with COVID.

If we take 330 million people as an estimated US population, an IFR of 0.012 and 0.44 of everyone infected (CDC estimate from 1 October), that would be 1.74 million deaths. But the number of Covid deaths in the USA is probably only around 1 million (CDC estimate is 920 thousand as of 1 October), putting the US IFR at ~0.006. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

I’d estimate a US IFR somewhere in the 0.004–0.008 range. We missed counting a significant number of Covid deaths, but we didn’t miss 60% of them. (In US counties with the highest proportion of elderly people, the IFR might locally be closer to 0.012.) But that is still a very high IFR!

Covid is a scary, scary disease. Deadly, highly contagious even before symptoms, and indistinguishable from common respiratory diseases during the part of the infection when most spread happens. Fortunately we have extremely effective vaccines (if only we can convince everyone to take them), and spread takes place almost always between unmasked people indoors making it relatively inexpensive to dramatically reduce the reproductive rate of the virus by avoiding indoor spaces and wearing masks when they are inevitable.

“Covid is a scary, scary disease. Deadly, highly contagious even before symptoms…”

Getting really tired of hearing this. To a HEALTHY human, it’s like a bad cold. Me and my family have had it in the last month and confirmed with tests so I know what we had. It’s gone through a bunch of friends too and the worst they experienced was feeling miserable in bed for a couple of days.

I have no doubt that for some it IS scary, but let’s not chuck around emotive language that isn’t an accurate description in the majority of cases.

What you may be missing is just how high of a percentage of the population of most western countries are not classed as healthy by any metric. Overweight, unfit, damaged through nicotine or alcohol abuse or even simple naturally occurring diseases where our health systems are able to keep them alive but not make them healthy again.

Is unknowingly transmitting a disease that could kill someone you love (or even that you don't) without your knowledge not scary to you? Great, you have a healthy family and friends. What happens when one of those friends or family members isn't as healthy as they were the last time they caught covid? Still seems pretty scary to me.

Thats just wrong. There are more than enough healthy humans for which it is much more than just a bad cold, which end up in the ICU eventually. To my understanding it is not possible to know upfront who is such a human and who is not, even perfectly healthy people have bad outcomes. And yes, I am aware its just a small percentage of people in certain age groups.

> In US counties with the highest proportion of elderly people, the IFR might locally be closer to 0.012.)

Yes, I do live in one of these older counties and specifically in my region of the county. Obviously words such as 'scary' are useless and subjective. Anti-biotic-resistant strep nearly killed me 3 years back, so to me, that was a scary disease. The COVID I had was milder than my yearly flu, and this is effect on the overwhelming majority of the population even considering the obesity rate in the US. Scary is not the word I would use.

> But that is still a very high IFR!

I mean, perspective is everything. What are you comparing this IFR to? I consider this a very low IFR, especially when you realize what we in the US classify a "COVID death". We do not count deaths of any other diseases using the same methodology as we have with COVID as far as I'm aware, and I believe this is the primary reason for our inflated mortality vs. most of the rest of the world.

I think it's wrong to describe this as saving people's lives. You have only reduced one particular kind of risk for a short period of time, while other similar risks continue to arise and affect the same people.

During the complete pandemic I never heared a so good fiting wise word like this.

It's called "illusion of control", most prominent example being rain dances.

Why are you so certain that the fourth wave is leveling off?

Estonia re-imposed strict measures as well because the ICU was becoming overwhelmed. This means mandatory masks everywhere, no public activities without proof of vaccination (restaurants, gyms etc) and limits on opening hours and strong police enforcement of these rules.

The wave started leveling off about 2 weeks after and the rules are still in force.

Not sure where you got your information.

self-limiting by death?

It's getting down because you are hearing those numbers in the news every day.

What expert are you? What are your numbers to determine that corona without measurements would not create a new york or Italy event across Germany?

There is probably a reason why you are not a virologist. Or do you have your own model numbers?

There is some self-limiting, but this limit is way above 1x/2x/3x ICU capacity currently.

As of 12/02/2012, Robert Koch Institute, roughly the German CDC, estimates 7-day R-value at 0.92

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

Index page: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

Not the only way. What is with the north korean way? Just shot anyone that has covid?

not true - infection rate grows sigmoidal and not exponential. that's why at the moment you can observe a stabilization despite few changes in regulation as of now compared to the summer. infection spread saturates periodically after suceptible clusters are depleted.

what would make sense is a steady and controlled Durchseuchung with specific protection of vulnerable people (like old and sick) - b/c the best immunity is gained by infection.

but Durchseuchung never sounded good - that's why that term got so popular. it sounds ugly and brutal. but it's what was happening all the time with many diseases in the past thousands of years.

That's a bit misleading. As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential. That follows directly from how the R-value is defined. What you mean is that the curve will take a sigmoidal shape for a while once the number of immune people has reached a certain threshold. In that case, the R-value is slowly approaching 1 again, and finally will go below 1 (which finally results in a curve that is not sigmoidal, of course). Other measures like lockdowns do the same to the curve, as is easy to observe by overlaying the measures over the curve, just not with an initial increase of cases that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Estimated Infection Fatality Rates during the first Covid wave - where there was full hospital care available - ranged from 0.5% to 2%. So for Germany's 80M people that would be in the ballpark of 400,000 to 1.6M deaths - under medical care. Even if you take the original estimates of around 0.3% the results wouldn't have been flattering.

In a nutshell, the German government and every other country on earth is doing what you propose, except that they are vaccinating at the same time and try to keep the curves flat (but your use of "slow" also suggests this, so it's not clear what else you're suggesting).

Exponential implies a doubling of R value. Starting with an R value of 1.1 the length of time required for doubling of the infected population is longer than other factors which will lower the R value to under 1.

> As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential

No, this is only true if the R value is constant in time. Not all functions with a positive first derivative are the exponential function.

Are you talking about a situation where the R value approaches 1 from above? e.g. R(t) = 1 + 1/t?

Because otherwise the growth is indeed exponential, yeah?

That’s one possibility, but there’s no reason it has to converge to 1 (i.e. linear). R(t) = 100/t is also not exponential.

Of course, the epidemic curve described by that function would indeed bounded below by an exponential function on part of its range, but the same is true of any function with positive derivative, and calling for example f(x) = x^2 exponential for that reason makes the term meaningless.

This is presumably what the OP meant by “as long as R>1, the curve is exponential”. But this is literally equivalent to saying “as long as f’(x) > 0, f is exponential” which is just not a useful concept.

You're nitpicking out of context, I didn't give a definition of an exponential function, I was talking about the spreading of the Covid 19 disease. For example, the R0 value of SARS-CoV-2 was estimated 5.8 in the US and "...between 3.6 and 6.1 in the eight European countries"[1] Obviously, it depends on many factors like population density and contacts of persons/day, but generally the disease will start spreading exponentially with R_t values approaching this number or staying constant.

The initial spreading will be exponential in the beginning - as every actual curve illustrates - if the disease is left unchecked as OP suggested, until R_t values go down again due to immunity. That's all I meant to say.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...

Can you explain the difference between a function being "exponential in the beginning" and "having first derivative bounded away from zero at the beginning" ?

How about this:

exponential in the beginning == this part of the function can be approximated by a function ae^xb where a>0 and b>1

vs.

first derivative bounded away from zero in the beginning == any function that increases, including linear functions with constant first derivative and polynomials with linear first derivative

Or do you think all increasing functions are the same..?

Consider for example the functions f(x) = x + 1 and g(x) = e^{ln(2) * x}. Then f(0) = g(0), f(1) = g(1), and f(x) > g(x) whenever 0 < x < 1.

It is easy to show that for any function whose derivative is continuous and positive at 0, there is an exponential function (properly translated such that they agree at 0) that has similar properties.

> that has similar properties.

You should be specific about what properties you're talking about. What you're saying is that any function increasing function grows faster than some exponential function on a finite interval.

Still, you can observe f(x) on x ∈ [0, 1] and see that it is growing linearly. And you can observe g(x) on ∈ [0, 1] and see that it is growing exponentially.

I do not see the value in discussing the rate of exponential growth of f. Where as for g, there is a parameter with value ln(2).

If data looks like f, don't try to fit an exponential function to it (whether it's a least-squares fit, or any other objective f > g.

Are you trying to say anything else?

> b/c the best immunity is gained by infection

That doesn't help if you die of the infection first, and COVID is extremely lethal among the demographics that most need the direct benefits of immunity.

That's not what they're saying. They're saying we should have protected those demographics and let the rest get infected.

> the best immunity is gained by infection.

Source? I think there's plenty of peer-reviewed scientific articles claiming the opposite.

So do not think, and go and look. Turns out that's exactly what scientists have been saying for a few months already.

I think the first person doing the claim should provide evidence, but anyway:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-disease...

Here you can find linked three studies by the CDC that support the idea that natural immunity is harder to get and less effective (besides, as others have said, there's the non trivial chance of side effects or not even surviving the virus)

I don't care about what the "experts" think or say, I care about studies.

Update: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 reports many studies that claim that we should be vaccinating people after a natural infection to get "super immunity", but that is different from what the OP was claiming (natural immunity > vaccine immunity)

Even if it was, it still means risking death or permanent organ damage + good chance of passing the infection to others. Not the best value proposition & definitely not webscale.

I think it could be technically accurate, if you include that vaccination before getting infected gives better immunity than most other options. (It is almost like a booster shot, but worse in almost every possibly way)

Also probably true without the vaccine first, but the initial survival rate without vaccination is a lot lower.

There are studies that say otherwise too.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

> This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

wrong - many countries kept everything opened and the curve subsided after a while. It doesn't go to the infinite.

People who claim that "people don't understand exponential growth" don't understand it themselves, most of the time.

They're so proud that they can answer the question about what happens to the pond that is half-covered by sea lilies the next day but never think about what happens the day after that.

tldr: There is no persistent exponential growth in nature.

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." —Herbert Stein, economist, 1986

I can't believe people still think herd immunity is possible.

Delta. Omicron.

Our technology sucks and is slow, we can't achieve R < 1 this way.

It can’t be all that bleak.

The mRNA technology would let us inject omicron-specific boosters tomorrow, but then there is a lot of other safety hurdles that have to be met before it gets authorized and then distribution hurdles to convince people to take it…

Mathematically, we will get to R=1 this way, some day or another, with some percentage of people getting it via illness and some via vaccination. The choice is still ours on how and when.

Take a look at history to see how bleak it can get.

At this point I'm less worried about covid and more worried about the global rise in authoritarian trends.

At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations. Although there is still skepticism regarding duration of the protection.

> At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations.

So you say that at some stage there will be vaccines for COVID-19 that are not nMRA (Pfizer, Moderna) or Viral vector (AstraZeneca)

Why? The people who are happy with vaccines are fairly happy with these vaccines and might refine them, but not about to dump them entirely for a different technique. in fact mRNA vaccines are the new hot thing.

And the people who really aren't happy with these vaccines, will never be happy. They'll find a way to object.

So what's the incentive for such a classical vaccine? Who's going to root for it?

What do you mean? We need better vaccines for any long term strategy.

And those will likely also not be "classical vaccines".

Moderna and Pfizer (1) and AstraZeneca (2) are getting ready for the next round, still using their current technologies. They're not planning on going back to "classical vaccines" for COVID-19.

1) https://fortune.com/2021/11/29/covid-19-omicron-vaccine-prot...

2) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/omicron-oxford-covid-a...

I can't believe people still think that mass vaccinations is not part of the solution

Vaccination is of course imperfect and cannot be the sole measure, but we can't achieve R < 1 without a lot of it.

> we can't achieve R < 1 without them.

So then what happened summer 2020?

Are you saying that we shouldn't vaccinate, because strict lockdowns worked, against the COVID-19 original strain, for a while?

It's technically true that this worked then, but 2020 is gone, not to return. a) new COVID strains were inevitable and b) prolonged strict lockdowns unpalatable and c) mass vaccination has a huge benefit. As part of a multi-pronged strategy, of course. Depending on only one measure, be it lockdown or vaccination, is not going to work.

I can't believe people still think after 2 years we're at a point technologically and logistically that we can control nature and just make this "go away".

Delta came out of India. Omicron came out of South Africa. How do mandates in the West stop variants elsewhere?

And variants aside, the vaccinated are still getting sick and dying at significant rates [1]. This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised. Until some miracle cure comes along, R < 1 is simply not possible.

If you think full vaccination is a necessary goal despite all this, OK fine. You know what might go a long way in terms of achieving mass vaccination? Open sourcing the vaccine recipe. Not just the RNA sequence. The whole recipe.

This should be a no-brainer.

Governments have no qualms with mandating lockdowns, masks, and vaccines for the masses.. but for some reason they hit the brakes when it comes to mandates for pharma. Not only is this a good idea in terms of improving supply side logistics, but also for the sake of re-building trust.

But no, common sense is too hard and "blame and shame" is too easy.

Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.

Hospital collapse has been liminal for 2 years now, it's a manufactured crisis. Instead of bolstering our healthcare staff and paying our front line workers more, we have done.. the exact opposite. We funnel tons of money to pharma, while frontline workers have effectively had their pay cut in half.

We're quite literally being force fed lies. But I guess that doesn't matter because at the end of the day the Milgram experiment prevails and all these attempts to question the narrative and hold authority accountable is pointless.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

page 15

> Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.

This is, on average over large numbers, not correct. Higher rates of disease spread harms everyone, the vaccinated included.

> This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised.

Which expert promised you that?

> it's a manufactured crisis ... We're quite literally being force fed lies ... Milgram experiment ... question the narrative

Cranks write like this. That is a shame as some of your other points are very correct, particularly around the need for Intellectual property waiver, which some have been calling for for some time, to no avail (1). BTW, they don't generally call it "open sourcing" in that field.

Hospitals genuinely are in crisis and doing difficult triaging, anyone working in them can tell you that.

1) https://reliefweb.int/report/world/time-runs-out-break-trips...

>> Which expert promised you that?

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.

> Cranks write like this.

Apologies I'm new to being a social pariah, being under pseudo house arrest, and psychosis in general.

I don't want hospitals to collapse. I'm afraid if we give up this freedom now, we'll never get it back. I'm afraid of the unknown and putting my life in the hands of people (our dear leaders) that really have never cared about my health before.

Even now its not about care for my own health, but for "the greater good".

I can only speak about where I am (UK) but the health care crisis is a complex topic, but there's no mystery at all to why it came about: decades of under-investment are 100% predictable given the party that has been power for a while now. It's what they always do. People should not be surprised that their votes have this obvious consequence.

But there's no easy fix to help us now, because it takes a long time to train doctors, nurses and other staff, or actually build hospitals. Yes, the crisis is entirely predictable but also entirely real. It is possible, even likely for a "liminal" crisis to persist at that level, as the safety valve that keeps it there is that patients without sufficient care just die off. These are the "excess deaths". Yes, I am appalled.

This is BTW one way how "Being unvaccinated could harm the vaccinated": If I (very much vaccinated) need urgent treatment for any reason, and can't get it because all the beds are full of unvaccinated COVID patients, then I am harmed thereby.

If your main concern right now is the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic then you have been misdirected, and should reconsider your media diet away from conspiracy-mongers.

Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others. This pandemic is making it clear to those who can see, that stubborn selfish refusal, and paranoid anti-mask and anti-vax "freedom" rhetoric harms not just yourself, but also those around you. Rugged individualism is a complete bust in this context. Collective action is what works.

Sure, this is a general problem with finite limited resources that are collectively owned. The more you have, the less I get. When demand exceeds the supply, harm is unavoidable. And yes we should do what we can to drive down the demand, but I don't see what that has to do with forcing restrictions on people that are not at risk?

This deadly pandemic is not deadly for everyone.

People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population but 93% of covid deaths. I imagine this number is roughly proportional for hospitalizations by the same age groups. We can do some handwavy math and say if everyone under 50 was unvaccinated, they would only ever take up 7% of ICU beds.

Is 7% the difference between collapse or not? "One size fits all" doesn't make sense.

Further, I'm so confident I will never get sick and be hospitalized with covid that I'm happy to forgo my right to an ICU bed. Thus I'm decoupled from the dilemma. Or at least in an ideal world I would be able to make that choice. This was my assessment the first time I got covid, and now I likely have some level of immunity, so I'm even more confident now.

And as far as your hospital scenarios go, my point is we haven't seen the things you describe materialize. I'm sure there are a handful of cases, which is a tragedy, but if it's marginal then we shouldn't hold it up as a liminal crisis like we have been.

> Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others.

Tell me the magic number for risk tolerance. If everyone self-quarantined from driving, and we switched to a delivery only economy, we could drastically reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities. Do we not owe that to the greater good? What about for climate change? We should continue living like we did in 2020 forever.

> Collective action is what works.

It always works when your leaders are competent and have your best interests in mind. My country doesn't even recognize natural immunity, which I envy the UK for.

But free choice works too. Look at Florida, Sweden, people will still choose the vaccine. You don't need a mandate.

> If your main concern right now is the "freedom" ...

I can't believe the "vaccinated" are completely unconcerned by the trends regarding freedom right now.

You know its not an either/or situation, you can be concerned about both, right?

Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt. But immunity wanes, and variants will continue to emerge.

Governments never relinquish their emergency powers once they're enacted. This is just the latest "WMDs in Iraq". I can't speak for the UK, but in the US we still have the patriot act, and we just recently pulled out of Afghanistan.

20 years later we still live under the boogeyman of terrorism. Imagine if all the money we put into the war on terror went into better healthcare and other social goods?

All of this is to say, I don't have absolute trust in the vaccine or the plan or the people in charge, I don't trust them to make good decision nor to be honest.

If you want me to be onboard with "the plan", governments need to tell me - What's in the vaccine. - Exactly when they'll declare this over. - That they'll undo all of their emergency powers afterwards.

Otherwise, just like the war on terror, this will never be over no matter how much we comply.

There are so many questionable things in this rambling waffle that it's hard to know where to start.

The idea that most people "not at risk" is wrong.

The idea that collective action is all about trusting government is wrong, it's primarily abut supporting the other people in your community. it's a very USA'ian line of thinking to jump to "Imma screw over my fellow citizens because the government can't be trusted. Freedom!".

The idea that Florida and Sweden are good examples is wrong.

And as above, the idea that the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic is wrong. Do not confuse the one crisis (of democratic ideas) with the other (of infectious molecules) or your responses will not be appropriate. They operate at completely different levels of abstraction.

The idea that "we haven't seen the hospital scenarios you describe materialize" is, in my local area, wrong.

> Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt

I have no idea of the point you're trying to make, and please to make no assumptions at all about me.

I googled "Howard Springs" but I have no idea what crazy talking point I am supposed to be nodding along with now.

> governments need to tell me - Exactly when they'll declare this over

You can't vote on the virus's timeline. The only politicians who have tried to declare "it's over" are charlatans.

> governments need to tell me - What's in the vaccine.

Do I need to go into the reasons why this is paranoid delusional, confused idiocy? Governments don't design or manufacture the vaccines. Without a bio-medical background that you and I both lack it's just not comprehensible. And lastly, can you not google the layman's explainers and research papers? I understand why you didn't post this line alone in a comment - it would be flagged and deleted.

All in all, I feel like someone at a party who has engaged a stranger in conversation, and now regrets it, as they speak a lot but say absolutely nothing worth hearing.

It's been an honor and a privilege having a difficult dialogue with an enlightened stranger.

I hope you stay safe, healthy, and have a wonderful holiday this year.

Most people are "not at risk" in a sense that their risk is clearly much less than for others. There is no zero risk of anything, so we should not aim for that.

It would help if you explained what is wrong.

As it looks now, you just don't like what the stranger said and declare him not worth listening.

To me it is clear that vaccine passports is clearly not working and all this has become a big failure for politicians who don't know how to exit this failed strategy therefore double down on their plans.

There have never been a real shortage of ICU beds even in the worst days of Covid. Check stats, now situation is even better.

It doesn't requires mass vaccination. It requires people to be a little smart.

What if we all respected the first confinement? 6 weeks everybody at home, period.

The disease would be gone.

But no, oh no. People just can't be reasonable. So instead of 6 weeks, we've been dealing with this shit for almost two years.

And now you blame those who are unvaccinated, while vaccinated people go partying and spread the disease.

No, you should blame unreasonable people.

this disease is also spreading through animals and wildlife. Locking down humans would have most surely not put an end to it

Why doesn't the same argument apply to other corono-viruses like influenza and the common cold? And why ignore the role of asymptomatic people (who can transmit) and those with symptoms so mild they can't be distinguished from the normal ups and downs of bodily functions. How then can one be 'smart'? These diseases wouldn't be and won't be gone. We are going to have to live with them as we've lived and thrived with untold thousands of viruses throughout our evolutionary journey.

There is also a small subset of the population who doesn't build an immunity to the disease. A friend's mom caught Covid last December before a vaccine existed. Her body isn't creating antibodies so -- as of the last time I texted that friend -- she's had it for at least 8 months. She was an incredibly friendly and social woman who has basically been turned into a Typhoid Mary that does experience Covid symptoms (and has intensely self-quarantined).

I don't know how many other people this has happened to but I too have my doubts as to whether there was ever any hope of containing this.

> 6 weeks everybody at home, period.

If taken literally, how is that supposed to work? People working for the emergency service still need to work, and they certainly can't work from home. Same for most of the medical sector, nursing services etc. and of course the various bits of infrastructure. Some industries cannot be easily shut down (you cannot stop or start a steel works on a whim). Most people involved in food production, too. Maybe you can blame people for not keeping at least two weeks of provisions (although blaming them won't change anything), but expecting them to go six weeks without buying any food or other provisions is certainly unrealistic. Things break, and not all of them can be left for up to six weeks to be fixed. (If your fridge breaks, or the heating breaks or your roof springs a leak, that cannot really wait. Same if things break in any of the critical industries and services that cannot be shutdown and need to keep working). All this residual activity still needs some amount of transportation and all the infrastructure that that entails. Etc.,etc. …

It is mentioned enough by the media. Thank you.

But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes that acceptable for many.

With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex, you would want to quit.

It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News style lies.

More money and better shifts and not firing unvaccinated would fill the gap.

You can't have people who are not vaccinated working at a hospital. This has been known for years and has been practiced for years. Vaccinations prevent the spread of disease. Surely you aren't questioning this.

Before the vaccine (less than a year ago) they prevented the spread by using n95 masks and ppe.

Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Knowing that the point of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness in the person receiving it. I struggle to understand why you would not even question how important they are in that setting unless you are worried they have dropped that extra safety component.

>Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid.

Vaccines reduce the risk of spreading the virus. People who are vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. This absolutely doesn't mean you won't die if you are vaccinated. Think seat belts in car accidents. It is all about reducing risk. On mass, at population levels, this means ICU have capacity to take in other seriously ill people. If ICUs are full and there is a plane crash or whatever where many people are seriously injured we are screwed.

People who get vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. Seriously ill people withdraw from society. Those with mild illness continue to go out into society and increasing the spread.

You could make the point that increasing the spread when everyone is protected is fine but that allows for increased mutations.

No, they really didn't. Healthcare workers got COVID in large numbers, causing severe absenteeism, a number of deaths, and many with ongoing Long Covid conditions.

It's part of the reason that bed capacity has been so difficult to keep constant or increase.

> You can't have people who are not vaccinated working at a hospital.

Except for all of 2020.

and this?

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccine-requir...

At some point there are diminishing returns. Eg if you fire everyone then more people will die because there is no hospital.

If the problem in Germany is anything like in Sweden, then the issue is not that "people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die". It is 100% a lack of funding and poor management.

In the last 20 years the standard "joke" (ha ha, only true) about the universal health system is that you need to be in good health in order to have enough energy to fight for your right to get help. The health care debt was an all time high at the start of the pandemic, and has since sky rocketed.

The faults are many. Poor wages has create many empty seats at the university programs. A lack of available personal has created a demand for labour hire employees, creating a system where many are moving to those in order to get pay rises, furthering increasing the cut that the middle men takes. An sharp increase in populations has increased demand, without any corresponding supply or funding. Employees has had an increase in paper work, with technology solutions that has caused additional work rather than optimized the work flow. Those same technology solutions has also been expensive to the point of corruptions, with some deals being actually corruptions that gone to court.

The situation is so bad that my own health clinic is sending every patient that calls them on non-mondays to the emergency department, as they are by law required to redirect the patient somewhere and all their own doctors are booked for the rest of the week, a pattern that been going on every week for the last year. Vacations has been removed as an emergency decision at many hospitals, and in one case the "compensation" for lost summer vacation was a fruit basket.

The expected time frame to raise the standard and actually train enough workers, as calculated by researchers a few years ago, was (if I remember right) somewhere around 10-20 years into the future. One pre-panedmic solution was to encourage skilled immigration directly from hospitals of nearby countries, a fix that obviously is not going to work now. If Germany is anywhere similar, then the blame isn't disinformation. It is systemic problem that has existed for decades and is now being pushed to over the edge.

I'm in a Berlin medtech company closely related to GPs and have multiple other connections to area hospitals. From this perspective I would say everything you've said is entirely accurate for at least this part of Germany, if not the whole country.

It's really a shockingly well kept secret, especially to the outside world. Much like the utterly dysfunctional rail system.

Before the pandemic, I would have said that the country's healthcare system was about a decade away from resource-crisis. Now, it may have already started. I'm terrified of ending up in a hospital, even if there's no covid-wave ongoing. I do not want my life in the hands of the overworked traumatized remnants.

The way this country treats healthcare workers is shameful.

Fortunately there is now COVID, so the ruined health care system can be framed afterwards as having been caused by the unvaccinated.

No the unvaccinated just gave the health care system a few good kicks in the ribs after it was already down.

It's quite interesting that the main tabloid here in Czech Republic is doing very solid covid reporting - still kinda in the personal stories people can relate tabloids do - just this time telling stories of people severely ill with covid, mostly unvaccinated or interviews with medical personnel about what their hell looks like. Frankly I did not expect that from them and I'm sincerely hoping it helps at least someone to stop believing in bullshit.

This is seeking someone to blame honestly, those "Querdenker" didn't influence anything else but themselves. The truth is we always had a form of triage in emergency admission rooms even before the pandemic.

Media and politics are way more responsible than the craziest idiot.

In Germany, the majority of the cases are from unvaccinated people getting sick and infecting other people

https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/

That is one paper from a couple of postdocs.

As are pretty much all papers ever written

Never trust a model whose parameters you did not pull out of your own ass.

I'm sure what you are saying is true but it doesn't really address the problem at hand. The bird has flown the coup and now action needs to be taken to save lives.

Absolutely agree with you about hospital/medical resourcing though, we have the same situation in Australia. In the name of efficiency these services get paired to the bone, and we have no capacity to respond to unusual events.

The Neo liberal worldview posits that redundancy is bad. I think Western countries in general are suffering from this Anorexia. It cripples innovation as well.

What would save lives would be a lockdown again.

And what did you to help out?

Did you suddenly switch your job to become a nurse?

How do you think we would have been able to ramp up everything while in a pandemic?

> I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress.

I posit that any sane and intelligent person would choose NOT to go into politics. Because of the system we as society have created around the job.

Something like 50% of the people in intensive care for COVID still die.

Even if we were able to handle the load on the healthcare system, that still would be a very large amount of unnecessary suffering and death. And even though there are some fundamental issues with working conditions and pay in this area, fixing them would not be enough to be able to handle the load that an exponentially growing viral disease could cause if it remains unchecked. If you do not stop the exponential spread, even with twice the capacity you'd only gain another 1-2 weeks until you're at capacity anyway.

The vaccines work well and are safe. The problem is that too many people didn't take them. There's plenty of problems with how this was organized in Germany, but in the we simply didn't manage to convince enough people to get vaccinated.

The problem isn’t simple and certainly not a matter of just vaccinating. A big part of the problem is that govt was confident that two jabs in the summer would be sufficient because of two faulty assumptions: that immunity would last and that fully vaccinated people would not spread covid.

Also, more broadly, that people would actually be willing to get vaccinated at a rate high enough to reduce the R-value below 1.

The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread, were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about reducing susceptibility, not infectivity. I don't think there were any numbers available on the vaccine's effect on virus transmissibility. It was implicitly assumed that fewer symptoms would translate to fewer transmissions, but was this ever proven?

Point being, we didn't know what vaccination rate would reduce the R-value below 1, and FAFAIK we still don't know. Not even for the original Sars-cov-2 virus, and not for any of the variants.

Vaccination reduces transmission: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2106757

> Cases of Covid-19 were less common among household members of vaccinated health care workers during the period beginning 14 days after the first dose than during the unvaccinated period before the first dose (event rate per 100 person-years, 9.40 before the first dose and 5.93 beginning 14 days after the first dose). After the health care worker’s second dose, the rate in household members was lower still (2.98 cases per 100 person-years). These differences persisted after fitting extended Cox models that were adjusted for calendar time, geographic region, age, sex, occupational and socioeconomic factors, and underlying conditions. Relative to the period before each health care worker was vaccinated, the hazard ratio for a household member to become infected was 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.63 to 0.78) for the period beginning 14 days after the first dose and 0.46 (95% CI, 0.30 to 0.70) for the period beginning 14 days after the second dose. ... Not all the cases of Covid-19 in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker; therefore, the effect of vaccination may be larger.1 For example, if half the cases in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker, a 60% decrease in cases transmitted from health care workers would need to occur to elicit the association we observed (see the Supplementary Appendix). Vaccination was associated with a reduction in both the number of cases and the number of Covid-19–related hospitalizations in health care workers between the unvaccinated period and the period beginning 14 days after the first dose.

Given that vaccination reduces asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2,2,3 it is plausible that vaccination reduces transmission; however, data from clinical trials and observational studies are lacking.

> The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread, were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about reducing susceptibility, not infectivity.

Populations where people are less likely to get infected are less likely to spread. You have to be infected before you can spread.

The psychology of the vaxxed asymptomatic COVID carrier cannot be left out of the equation. Whether this psychology leads one to engage in risky disease-spreading behaviour, this is for the experts to elucidate.

Maybe. On the other hand, a lot of anti vaxxers seems to think Covid-19 is a hoax, and that undoubtedly influences behavior.

Do you have a source for that? This is the first time Ive heard someone call it a hoax that was an antivaxxer. Most antivaxxers are hesitant due to the speed at which the vaccines were made, the new technology used to make them, and the fact that the companies making them can’t get sued if they kill people.

There are those type too, yes, but there are also people who think Covid is a hoax, or at least that its danger has been drastically exaggerated. There tends to be a lot of overlap between beliefs here.

So no source. Interestingly if you look up the list of global epidemics however COVID is #6 of 20, and if you sort by total global population list, COVID is #11. So it seems we have actually had worse pandemics. Maybe you’re seeing people reading the actual stats?

I haven’t seen any studies diving into anti vaxxer beliefs that deeply, no.

> Maybe you’re seeing people reading the actual stats?

What kind of reasoning is this? So because Covid-19 isn’t the worst pandemic in history, then it makes sense to believe it’s a hoax or overhyped?

I was under the same impression that vaccine would not reduce the spread or carrying of the virus. It would just greatly reduce the change you landing on the IC.

What would be the rate in question for Delta? My understanding is that it was feasible for earlier variants, but Delta has R too high to begin with.

If your focus is on R value for transmission, then you will also need to eradicate it from every single cat and deer on the planet. Good luck with that.

Also, the government knowingly ignored warnings by the RKI (german institute for public health) saying that numbers and hospital admissions will go up rapidly in autumn.

The argument always is that there are not enough beds for non-corona patients. More beds would certainly help.

It is nonsense to vaccinate young and very healthy people, especially kids. Their risk from COVID is minimal to non-existent.

Also the spread is not stopped by vaccinating. Vaccinated still spread the virus. If it is reduced is still unclear. There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated. The sample sizes of vaccinated and unvaccinated were equal as they should be. Reports in Germany about these numbers forget to mention that vaccinated people are basically not tested.

> The vaccines work well and are safe.

They do not work well enough. First of all people still transmit the virus after only about 2 months after the vaccination. Then the protection goes down extremely between 2-6 months after the vaccination (that is why we need boosters all the time). It is still unclear if we continue to need boosters after the third shot.

Vaccines do reduce spread.

While vaccinated people who get infected still spread the virus, they’re less likely to get infected in the first place, which is a necessary precursor to spreading.

Not necessarily true with the new variants, and it won’t be true for future variants either. The virus jumped to wild animals so it’s freely mutating in unvaccinated hosts outside of the human population.

IIRC the effectiveness is reduced for delta, certainly, but not to zero.

But yes, we’ll probably need updated vaccines, similarly to how we update the flu shot every year.

> There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated

I would like to see the source for that if you have the link?

A bit late reply but I was asleep. You can find the report here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

There is a lot to digest and probably it's easy to come to the wrong conclusions from this. I was referring to Figure 2.(a)

>...fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.

Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Vaccinated people don’t transmit as much, nor are they as likely to contract the virus. Current estimates are 85-90% of transmission in Germany involves someone unvaccinated

https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/

* Chance of catching it?

* Peak viral load, GIVEN catching it?

* Duration of peak viral load, GIVEN catching it?

* Severe disease, GIVEN catching it?

* Hospital stay, GIVEN catching it?

* Death, GIVEN catching it?

There are many relevant parameters that the vaccines might affect. And the vaccinated people have a few parameters: number of shots, time since last shot, age, etc. People seem to focus on one or two of these questions at a time.

From your link, actually, related to duration:

"Fully vaccinated individuals with delta variant infection had a faster (posterior probability >0·84) mean rate of viral load decline (0·95 log10 copies per mL per day) than did unvaccinated individuals with pre-alpha (0·69), alpha (0·82), or delta (0·79) variant infections."

Clearly it's not going to stop transmission, but it could slow it down. People on both sides of this issue seem to undervalue partial measures and tradeoffs.

> The argument always is that there are not enough beds for non-corona patients. More beds would certainly help.

"beds" is a proxy for "health workers", if you put a bad covid case in a "bed" they just die, they need constant attention

> Something like 50% of the people in intensive care for COVID still die.

I don’t think this is too far from the survival rate of those admitted to intensive care in general.

But I think the point is that COVID really increases your chances of being admitted there in the first place.

ICU survival rate is highly dependent on the cause, diagnosis, and/or disease that the patient is admitted for. It can range from 70-10%.

>But I think the point is that COVID really increases your chances of being admitted there in the first place.

If you're in a certain age range, and have several comorbidities.

So far I know 4 that have contracted COVID and all explained it felt like a bad flu but no where near enough to go to the hospital. But mileage will vary here for sure.

You forget one, the people that are dying have taken the risk for ther own and didn't want to get vaccinated. It's ok when they die, it's their decision that's gone wrong. Other people didn't got vaccinated and will never get covid anywhere. This is a decision that not the government has to make for the people.

Those people don't refuse to go to hospital and they don't refuse the ICU bed.

Would you support a comprehensive healthcare opt-out, where an unvaccinated person would forego right to treatment, and also not have to pay taxes for public healthcare?

No, because at the end of the day, we're not going to literally let them die on the sidewalk outside the hospital just because they can't pay.

That means that somebody has to pay for them. Given that unavoidable but inconvenient fact, basic health care and life support might as well be organized under the auspices of the state and the costs shared among all residents.

If you aren't willing to do your part to protect yourself and your community, why should your community protect you, when doing so would endanger others' lives?

The same can be said if many STDs though, drug use, and obesity.

That reflects a deep socialist mentality.

those people still paid their taxes, health plan care and they should be treated. Stuff like this https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/sw/Intensivmedizin?s=... should be better investigated. I thought as German, something that we learned from our past was not "oben buckeln und nach unten treten" or something like "to crawl to the bigwigs and bully the underlings". Winter 2021, and we still don't have a plan, the schools still offline and the numbers are much worse now than winter 2020 when the numbers of unvaccinated were almost 90% of the population.

The smallpox and polio vaccines worked well. The corona shots have people still getting sick and transmitting live virus. That was not success even a couple years ago.

>What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.

So I'm kind of surprised to see this. I was under the impression Germany was the opposite.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/hospital-beds

Germany is #2 out of those reporting. Crushing Canada by like 300%.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/medical-doctors

Germany #1 for doctors, beating Canada by 100%

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/nurses

Germany #2 for nurses, beating Canada by ~75%

I kind of step back, how terrible is Canada doing?

>The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only gotten worse since then.

Oh ya big time. I can't remember a time when nurses/psws/doctors weren't in huge demand here in Canada.

Before covid: https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/07/toronto-hospital-fraud/

During covid pre-vax: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-hospital-lays-off-97-regi...

Antivaxxers fired: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/11/28/were-on-the-brin...

You can't be on one side in huge demand for nurses but also be firing them willy nilly.

Firing them for not getting the vaccine isn't true at all. They've been reducing nurses and such for long before.

>Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody should support it.

I propose that Canada and Germany probably have the same problem. That we are on the same page.

I am curious what you think is that problem?

> Furthermore Bill 124, introduced in 2019, disincentivizes nurses by limiting wage increases. Many nurses have said repealing the bill would go a long way in retaining nurses. Others say removing barriers for internationally educated nurses would help fill in gaps.

Wow, why is there the wage cap when nursing has long been an issue in Ontario? I wonder who thinks this stuff up and thinks they are somehow saving money by doing this. It just generates inefficiencies and unintended side effects.

Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to be a long trail of government interference that's counterproductive.

>Wow, why is there the wage cap when nursing has long been an issue in Ontario? I wonder who thinks this stuff up and thinks they are somehow saving money by doing this. It just generates inefficiencies and unintended side effects.

Bill 124 has nothing at all to do with Nurses. The word 'nurse' does not show up even once. This bill is effectively what put doug ford into power. That is to say, he was elected to pass this one. It is more than required.

As you likely know Ontario is the highest debt subnational in the world. The mcguinty government was in power for ~10 years but did so by buying votes. They had so many gigantic scandals and might be one of the worst governments ontario ever had. Hilariously, the PCs approach was to tell ontario he was going to fire 100,000 people. That obviously didn't go well giving Wynne a majority.

However, Hudak was right, 100,000 less people in government. Because we didn't... we are in a far worse situation. Pre-covid ontario was very bankrupt. It was so bankrupt Wynne was forced to sell off highly profitable assets like Hydro1. Now that covid happened? I dont even know what will happen.

>Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to be a long trail of government interference that's counterproductive.

The consequences of decisions in either way is difficult and rarely properly assessed. As Greece knows, someone eventually ends up holding the garbage bag and has to clean up.

These are the consequences of decisions made.

I'm all for reduction in the size of bureaucracies and addressing financial issues realistically. I just strongly dislike when they create inflexibility with things like wage increase caps. It's a strong hammer aimed at a few well deserved targets but hits broadly across a wide group where it doesn't always make sense. It's like a one size fits all approach.

But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.

>I'm all for reduction in the size of bureaucracies and addressing financial issues realistically.

I feel people misunderstand these issues so often, everyone just wants bigger government always. What happened during Mcguinty was well forecasted. He upon coming into power increased taxes on manufacturing. The consequence was that manufacturing dropped significantly. Ontario shed somewhere around 800,000 jobs because of that move and mcguinty trying to hide his shame increased the size of government to artificially hide abysmal unemployment. Population of Ontario was roughly 12 million at that time i believe. Labour participation was roughly 60%. Dropping 800,000 is more than 10% increase to unemployment. 10% unemployment is pitchforks at the capital.

The consequence? You converted tax paying people to tax deficit. It broke the balance by alot and it was all to hide the bad idea of raising taxes and harming ontarians.

Flipside, while this is an obvious failure, it shouldn't detract from a big government. Healthcare was obvious context above. What exactly is OHIP? It's a crappy basic health insurance provided by the government that has much less coverage today compared to years ago. It's not that we shouldn't do that, we simply don't cover everything. We know it's a good thing to cover the basics. It's just a definition of 'what are the basics'. Should diabetes meds be included? Type 1 vs Type 2? On top of that, it being single payer means most of society receives their healthcare from the rich.

>It's a strong hammer aimed at a few well deserved targets but hits broadly across a wide group where it doesn't always make sense. It's like a one size fits all approach.

It does make sense. What comes in bankruptcy? If we don't control those costs we are forced into austerity measures. Greece's Syriza is a communist party and they chose austerity out of their options. If we go into that, it will mean way more than 100,000 jobs fired abruptly. Which wasn't Hudak's plan. He was going to allow anyone who wants to keep working to keep working. Retirements, job hopping, etc being the plan.

The reason why you dont hear much of a chirp from the ultra strong unions is that they know the alternative is far worse.

>But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.

When Wynne got a majority. She took this power as her winning and not hudak losing. I called exactly what was about to happen. Wynne who was at the feet of all the scandals was going to be even worse because she would be under much more scrutiny. Not much of a prediction obviously, no future sight needed.

She actually was not bad besides the obvious corruption, she very nearly balanced the budget. Yet she made history books. She's the lowest approval rating for ontario premiers ever, and she provided the worst election result for the ontario liberals.

When doug ford got into power, I predicted exactly the same. doug ford didnt win, wynne lost. He's going to make decisions to fix the disaster of the liberals and take the blame. Flipside, he seems to be highly approved of because of covid and his response being objectively good. So I might be wrong on that front but he didnt fix the liberal corruption.

This is such a bizarre take. If the ICUs are filling up, the solution should be to prevent people from getting sick, not to make the ICUs bigger. There are undoubtedly many problems in the German healthcare system, but the current surge is clearly due to the very large number of unvaccinated people.

the two weeks were to build up health care capacity. We erected field hospitals to manage the sick and then closed them because they weren’t being used.

If this truly is an energy and hospitals truly are at risk, find a way to build more capacity even if it is temporary. Blaming the public for the failure to do this is wrong. And if you aren’t building this capacity… maybe this really isn’t an emergency?

But if we do that then the media doesn't have a scare tactic

You understand what exponential growth is? Yes? No?

You know that is hard to get people? You know how long it takes to teach someone? Especially while a pandemic is ongoing?

> the solution should be to prevent people from getting sick, not to make the ICUs bigger.

Why not both?

No country in the world has the capacity to take care of more than “a couple thousand” ICU patients (well, it’s more like a couple of ten thousand ICU patients for the best equipped and richest large countries in the world, like Germany). Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times.

Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn’t be much of a help.

We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if that (simply because it’s not as though Germany’s existing ICU capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it’s quite large, actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but wouldn’t really solve the underlying problem.

And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It’s completely misguided. Not least of which because it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people for that …

Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.

We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination. However, in the very short term even that won’t be good enough, we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is necessary (and already happening).

Think about time frames.

Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks, vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.

In three months, the booster efficiency might start waning again, we don't know that yet. These vaccines so far aren't looking like they are the solution to the pandemic either, better vaccines or better treatment might be. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to get vaccinated if you want to help with the situation, but I do find the way our politicians deflect blame and openly insult a not so small segment of the population completely distasteful. They shouldn't be surprised if the people they're insulting are not willing to help anymore, now or in the future.

A strategy that would make sense would include BOTH vaccination and ICU capacity, one of which could have been started in March 2020, and it would have put us in a much better position today. Letting capacity decrease while waiting for vaccines that may or may not end the pandemic is negligent. Not getting vaccinated may be seen by some as negligent also, but different standards apply for governments and citizens.

The pandemic comes in waves, we do not need to plan for endless exponential growth. A few weeks of extra capacity would make the whole thing much easier to handle, given that we might be already at the peak and cases seem to be going down again[0]. The RKI weekly report[1] currently lists 1700 ICU cases, a month ago it was 1100[2]. So the 4000 beds we lost throughout the year[3] could have made a big difference.

[0]https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-infektionen-103.html

[1]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

[2]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

[3]https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen

Please source the 4,000 number properly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29422105

As I point out in my other comment, you cannot interpret that number in any to imply as though we ever actually had those 4,000 beds.

Fair enough, thanks for the info, I'll check it out. But let it be 2594 then, that is still too many given that we should have increased it by any means possible before starting to publically insult 20% of the population. I'm not assuming a deliberate reduction, I am assuming negligence.

20% of the population is, however, behaving stupidly and irrationally and in a very antisocial way. Insulting them is perfectly fine.

Just as with opposition to seatbelts it’s important for politics to create facts and just decide this issue. Everyone should be vaccinated and that’s just how it is.

... yeah, okay, I disagree with everything. I don't think it's acceptable for a government to insult its citizens, and I do think boundaries should be respected.

Nothing more to say, our worldviews are too far apart.

Vaccination is not a signal of intelligence or rationality :-)

There are many many reasons why one would or would not get a vaccine. For many, the reason was to go on vacation without too much hassle. Or because of social pressure. Or because they’re caring for someone who’s vulnerable.

If someone gets tested, uses masks properly and avoids groups of people they’re doing just as much as the average vaccinated. Definitely more than the truly antisocial which went into YOLO mode after getting vaccinated.

>Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times.

Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen, because we always knew that it would hit us eventually, people have been warning about this for ages, this is not some black swan.

More healthcare capacity would help, just like more supply chain capacity would help, or the ability to manufacture some masks, the entire problem is we've been running on the idiotic 80s managerial efficiency mindset for decades and now we're running on fumes on every front.

If we had any appreciation for crisis management, robustness, redundancy and had some shock absorbers in our system many people would not have needed to die. And no it's not just the unvaccinated. Plenty of countries this year, including the US, will lose more people in total to covid in 2021 than in 2020. Vaccines help but they are not pandemic ending, and our systems are deeply screwed up.

This is also about appreciation. The main bottleneck for increasing capacity is not machines, rooms or beds, those are available. It's hospital staff that's lacking. ICU beds are the most staff intensive beds in a hospital. It's a job that requires years of training, so you can't just scale it up. Also, the willingness to be a nurse has decreased during the last couple months. A lot of hospital staff has burned out during the first few waves and either reduced their contracts to part time, or quit entirely. The remaining staff has to work hard, until exhaustion and beyond, in order to fight for the patient's lives. Covid stations require proper hygiene which puts extra stress on the hospital staff. And they put in all of this work because some people couldn't be bothered to seek out vaccination, often even the patients themselves. This is the main difference to the first few waves where vaccination has not been available to everyone.

> Also, the willingness to be a nurse has decreased during the last couple months

this was entirely preventable by providing nurses and those keeping hospitals running with the support they need to do suchs jobs during a time of crisis.

In the netherlands for instance, many nurses have been running 12h shifts during the peaks, and there has been very little practical support in helping those people.

I am not even talking about monetary funds, but mainly practical stuff. (for instance, some volunteers decided to do grocery shopping for nurses during peaks).

If people are busting their ass off to prevent the healthcare systems from collepsing, maybe the goverment should have done far more in its power to prevent those people from quitting.

Buying groceries for a nurse is a nice thought but it is not going to erase the misery of working in a COVID ward for months or years.

I really wonder if any of the people here talking about massively scaling up ICU capacity have ever even been in or visited someone in an ICU. It is called an “intensive care” unit for a reason. Extensive resources are required. Putting aside the physical space, equipment and pharmacological needs, the teams of people are specialized and have extensive knowledge and training.

> Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen

You can't keep the staff and maintain the gear needed to handle 100x "once in a century" event all the time, it just doesn't work. Most health systems are already huge money sinks and on the brink of collapse in normal times... This isn't a "a bomb injured 300 people" event, we can't live 100% prepared to every single potential threats.

you don't need to 100x it, but you can keep 20-30% of slack in the system, instead of literally cutting or not even keeping up funding for one of the most important sectors of the country. Nurses and healthcare workers have been overworked for ages in Germany, and not just here. With the NHS in England it's the exact same situation. Most of the countries had higher capacity ten or twenty years ago then we have now. What's the point of getting richer and growing if your public infrastructure decays?

And the other thing you can do is, actually have a prepared and tested response plan to a crisis. Our reaction to this was to dust off some plans from the the shelves, every individual state had different systems in place, two years in we don't really have a functioning digital app, but ten different solutions none of which more than a fraction of people have adopted, and so forth. Completely avoidable chaos if anyone was actually in charge of readying the country for these situations.

The same is said in the Netherlands, but if you double the number of available IC beds, with associated staff (good luck with that), all you've bought yourself is two weeks before those are full as well – because of exponential growth.

Growth isn't exponential forever, cases appear to be going down again in Germany already. Delta waves seem to be only about 8 weeks long (check data from different countries, or here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/briefing/delta-peak-covid...), so two extra weeks would help a lot.

I agree that vaccines are part of the solution. I disagree that stripping citizens of their rights and insulting them on TV is part of literally any solution for anything. If a government feels the urge to do that, it should look for alternatives instead. Maintaining ICU capacity from one year before (decreased by 4000 in 2021, see: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihenht... - "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten"), is the lowest-hanging fruit, I'm sure there are additional alternatives that I'm not qualified to comment on.

Edit: It was pointed out to me that the DIVI numbers have some complexity that I did not account for. So grain of salt on the actual ICU number, but I've not yet seen anyone deny the trend. Here's a fact check that confirms that beds were lost: https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-praesident...

I’ll not take a stance on the correct number of free ICU beds as I do not feel qualified to judge these numbers without more insight on the intricacies of what would qualify fully operational beds, but regarding the stalling case numbers I feel confident enough (after looking at some raw numbers from the municipalities themselves [1]) to dismiss the apparent trend as a statistic artifact.

PCR test units and hospital bureaucracy are past their limits - e.g. regions like Bonn, Essen or Recklinghausen reporting zero cases on multiple consecutive days (Nov 29, Nov 30), which is _very_ unlikely w.r.t. the case numbers of the surrounding regions and those very regions reporting more than one hundred cases today.

The published indicators do not count cases that are reported late [2], which leads to apparently stalling case numbers. Growths may not be exponential forever but given that roughly one quarter of the population is not vaccinated, I would not take bets that the virus runs out of hosts before the health care system collapses.

I agree to the sentiment made that the balance between economic efficiency and damaging austerity for profit margin gains in the German health care system (especially for worker’s loans) has been tipping way too far to the latter in the past decades.

[1] https://www.lzg.nrw.de/covid19/download/laborbest_faelle_sar... (updated each day at 0:00 CET)

[2] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

edit: some formatting.

Yeah, it's possible. I tried to word it carefully. There seems to be a trend in Bavaria though, Saxony maybe, but it's too soon to tell. Those two were the first to be hit by the current wave, and some areas of Bavaria had the highest incidence for a decent while I believe, so that might be an indicator of having reached the peak at least in some parts of the country. But you are correct, it's absolutely not clear yet, and could be due to lack of testing capacity.

> What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were never addressed.

Also one that collects high income taxes and high health care contributions (~14% of the income). So one can't really blame it on lack of funds.

Germany was long criticised for its overcapacity of intensive care wards. Just up until the pandemic hit.

Is this the ventilator fallacy? You know, it's march 2020, and everyone is rushing to make more of those damn ventilators?

If you end up on a fucking ventilator in an ICU bed, the damage is long done. The goal is not to maximize the number of people we can have on ventilators. That is an absurd idea on the same level of the "natural immunity is better than the vaccine!" insanity we got in 2021.

No, it's not the goal. The goal is also not to split society in two and create a group that'll hate everyone forever, just because our leaders can't own up to their mistakes. The goal is to get through the pandemic best we can, and keeping societal values and principals intact should be an important part of that.

what values? half the population doesn't value science, rationality, wisdom, progress etc. I don't wanna be governed by science deniers. I also don't wanna spend years in lockdown because people are refusing to get pricked by a needle

They value all those things just as much as you do, they call some of them different names. And they don't believe that 'the other side' actuals exemplifies or actually values those things. Every lie they see coming from people in power (masks don't work, two weeks to stop the spread, the vaccine will fix this all) makes them less trustworthy.

Values such as politicians not insulting a group of people on television, not taking their rights away because they might potentially get sick eventually, generally not judging before proven guilty, not forcing someone to put something in their body that they absolutely do not want, not punishing one person for another person's crime. Last one is what they're doing to you if you feel like unvaccinated people are holding you hostage.

Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them, there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances, or to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.

> Values such as politicians [...] not taking their rights away, [...] not forcing someone to put something in their body that they absolutely do not want

Vaccine mandates have been a thing for well longer than I've been alive. I wasn't allowed to attend public school as a kid without having been given several vaccines.

Sure, there were anti-vax people and people with religious exemptions then, but the vast majority of the people who are up in arms and crying foul about COVID vaccination mandates didn't blink an eye when told they had to vaccinate their kids against the measles as a condition for sending them to school.

Why the hypocrisy?

> Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them

We have lockdowns because we think they slow the spread of disease and save lives, not "just because". That's like saying "birthday parties end when we stop having them". Well, yeah, but that's a tautology and not a very useful point to make.

> there is no reason [...] to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.

That seems like a straw man, though. Who is saying we have to lock everything down until everyone is vaccinated? What country has even tried to implement something like this? Some areas have certainly tied the relaxation of restrictions in some ways to vaccination rates, but the main concern for restriction levels is mostly other metrics, like new-case rates, hospitalizations, percent of ICU capacity used, death rate, etc.

> there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances

Everyone who gets sick is a host for the virus to mutate in. Everyone who gets sick, or is even merely unvaccinated, runs a higher risk of passing on the disease to someone else.

I am really really tired of the "it doesn't hurt anyone else if I don't get vaccinated" argument. Yes. It. Does. Full stop.

Assuming you’re in Germany, you’re governed by people which managed to screw up every single aspect of handling this pandemic. From masks don’t work, to masks availability in healthcare, vaccine availability, to booster availability to making tests fee-based and much much more.

The health minister was throttling Biontech/Pfizer deliveries just as demand started to go up for crying out loud!

It could always be worse, but I’m not at all surprised about lack of trust in the government.

You will spend years in lockdowns because that’s the only thing they’re capable of. See Portugal or Denmark for the vaccination happy case. Better than Germany but nowhere near life-as-usual.

Finally, if half the population doesn’t value all those things… Germany is proper fucked. You're exaggerating by a lot, which tells me you don’t value science and rationality.

im not from germany. in my country the vaccine uptake is less than 50%. at this point everyone who wanted the jab could have gotten it. so im not exaggerating at all actually

You’ve replied to a guy who is in Germany on a topic about Germany and then made some claims without specifying you’re from somewhere else though. That was very confusing…

"natural immunity is better than the vaccine"

Has this been studied? I have natural anti-bodies and will participate in a study.

Did you know that the immune system reacts to more than just the spike protein? It will create a dozen or so antibodies against all the different parts of the virus.

If the spike protein mutates like it did in Omicron, most of the other antibodies will still continue to work while new spike antibodies are created. In contrast, if the vaccine-induced antibodies are avoided, immunity in vaccinated people drops to zero.

This leads to another consideration. As I understand it, antibody tests only check for the spike protein antibodies. This implies that if there are 10 other antibodies not being tested, then actual protection is 10x higher than the test indicates. Any antibody count falls over time because the body is efficient. If the disease enters the body again, it will just start pumping out the antibodies again as long as it knows how to make them.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People with just natural immunity in Israel are 10-15x better off than people who just got the vaccine. As this is the largest such study and encompasses pretty much the entire population, you can eliminate common sample size and selection bias issues that happen when you hand-choose a couple hundred people to look at.

It's such a dumb take because natural immunity requires you to contract real Covid. I wish this was obvious, but it seems required to state it outright? I feel you should take this revelation straight to the vaccine makers and tell them they wasted all their effort and should have hosted infection parties instead.

On this topic, it's worth noting that most vaccine side effects -- which are largely "your immune system kicked into high gear and exploded" type problems -- are an order of magnitude worse when fighting an actual infection than when responding to a vaccine.

E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.

> E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.

In relation to what? An average Covid infection? We don't even know how many go undetected to know what that average even is. Or the average out of hospital cases? Or simply confirmed cases? What are the numbers when comparing young healthy people vs old people with co-morbidities? What about children?

For what it is worth, in the UK there were similar concerns.

They set up "Nightingale Hospitals" (reference to Florence Nightingale) - basically convention centres were converted into field hospitals with ventilators. One in London had 4000 beds, and there were others elsewhere in the country. It took 9 days to build the London one (I was impressed!)

After all that, the 4000 bed one in London treated 20 patients during the first wave: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214 Most are now shutdown or being used as vaccination centres from what I know.

If the UK can pull this off in 9 days, I am sure other more sophisticated countries can do the same if they need to.

Those hospitals were a joke. Ask anybody who worked in the NHS and they would have told you no way in hell could they have found sufficient numbers of staff to actually run them. A publicity stunt. The country went crazy thinking people were dying in the street and we needed emergency hospitals/morgues

We had similar ones here in Czech Republic and it was the same - if we had to use them, there would really not be enough people to run them. :P

Same thing happened here in Italy especially during the first wave. They started building these temporary hospitals that hosted very few patients and some of them even finished during the end of the wave when there was no need for extra beds anymore.

this!! It's unbelievable that these wealthy western countries find "cheaper" to stop their economy than to build few more hospitals, beds and employ / pay more these guys running this. It's hundreds, maybe thousands, of billions wasted in Germany alone, versus. no idea but definitely not hundreds of billions to increase the ICU capacity to keep the economy open no matter what.

That's not really the problem though. See, no matter how many ICU beds you have, the people going to the ICU are about 40% or so likely to die from COVID and the remainder will recover but will take a very long time to do so and have a significant chance of having long term residual effects and/or complications.

You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always the case).

That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of countries that stripping your health care system is probably a bad idea.

Yeah, but then the unvaccinated would only be risking their own lives. The most prominent argument for compulsory vaccination right now is that they're taking away scarce ICU beds.

It's a factor, but not the whole story. A lot of people are immunocompromised and for them just getting infected immediately raises the risks to unacceptable levels. We all owe the weaker people in our societies (from a health perspective) to take care of them, and if that requires us to get vaccinated to create a cordon of safety then so be it.

That there are a bunch of egoists that would rather have us all fend for ourselves doesn't change that, and usually those are exactly the people demanding we take on their burdens when the situation is reversed. It's called a social contract for a reason: taxes, vaccination against communicable diseases where possible, compulsory education and so on, it's the flipside of the coin, you get a lot of rights, but you also have some (sometimes moral) obligations.

The dead comment is unfortunately correct, there will probably be no herd immunity with these vaccines. That's what I hear from every virologist/epidemiologist lately anyways, and the real world data with highly vaccinated countries having record surges appears to confirm it.

I agree that it would be a much stronger argument. However, I also find it cruel to force people into an injection that they do not want, and would probably still oppose a universal vaccine mandate for that reason. I'd be okay with a mandate that allows people who really don't want the vaccine to opt out. I'd even be okay with that for the COVID vaccines if it wasn't for the 2G stuff and the awful rhetoric against unvaccinated people that preceded it. Enacting the mandate now makes the whole thing feel too much like "we'll get you somehow". Like I said, I find it cruel. It's not my idea of a humane society.

Vaccines by themselves won't do miracles. But vaccines combined with some reasonable level of restrictions can get us through this to the point where we've caught up with the virus to a degree that we have other means to reduce the number of serious cases.

Keep in mind that there is plenty of precedent for mandatory vaccinations, in almost every developed country and in plenty that are not young children are vaccinated against a whole raft of diseases that would otherwise cause serious problems. The only people that are exempt are those that do not want any vaccinations for religious reasons because it apparently interferes with 'gods plan'. If you want to deal with this at the same level of ignorance then that's fine with me but I personally have absolutely no problem with a mandate and I also would not have a problem with rescinding the exemption for religious purposes.

While I don't disagree with what you are saying in the abstract, there are limits and the demands really should be rational.

I don't see that with this series of vaccines. They do not stop transmission. The ICU issue cannot be addressed fairly without addressing the other causes that put large numbers of people in ICUs.

We pay every year as a society in deaths for the assumption of some risk. We manage it, make laws, or just leave it alone and some people die (for example, we don't ban cars or eating too many calories or swimming pools).

In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection, most especially when it appears the health authorities either didn't understand or didn't communicate the effectiveness over time of the injections.

There's a point were everything can't be all about what someone at the top proclaims is for the social good. Otherwise we wind up in corruption and dictatorship.

> In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection

This was the same with every vaccine in the past, very few vaccines have received as much scrutiny as these, the biggest risk is the long term one and even there we have a fairly good idea of what the possibilities of materializing are.

None of these weigh up against the damage that a COVID-19 infection does.

If you think mandatory vaccination equates corruption and dictatorship then I am not sure we are on the same wavelength regarding the meaning of those terms.

I think, (or hope rather) that the mandates are well meaning, no I don't think this is dictatorship, rather I'm addressing your more "meta" point about social responsibility and the perils of one group being able to dictate to others without input.

As in, we can't just say "We have some social responsibilities so you must XX per the authorities" when XX is self serving, counterproductive, useless or harmful. We have an individual right, and responsibility, to weigh the dictates we are given at some point, perhaps not on all issues, but on some.

Other vaccines were not taken in to market in this manner. It is a novel vaccine.

> the perils of one group being able to dictate to others without input

This is pretty much the norm in any country that is a democracy but that does not have coalition governments. You get a kind of see-sawing effect where one group will enact a bunch of stuff and then when the tables are turned it all gets undone. It's stupendously inefficient.

Democracy is quite flawed but it still is the best mechanism for government that we have that is sustainable over a longer period of time.

Democracy in itself is nothing more then the dictatorship of the majority. It certainly doesn't constitute a just society, alone. In addition, you need at least fundamental, untouchable civil rights, protection of minorities and the rule of the law.

I don't understand why this batch of vaccines is being compared to vaccines for other diseases as if they are the same thing. Other vaccines are generally mandated for children with extremely high efficacy, have an extremely low chance of adverse events, prevent community spread perfectly or almost perfectly, have an exactly known quantity of doses required and are deployed as prevention (not in the midst of a pandemic). Importantly, they treat diseases that cause extremely bad outcomes in children at very high rates. This current generation of covid vaccines is more like a drug that works well for some and not so for others, doesn't prevent transmission, aims at moving target, requires an unknown amount of doses, only modestly discourages continued spread and represents one of many ways for society to treat, tackle and prevent the disease. This is a disease that is trending downwards in its mortality rate, while being of fairly low risk for the majority of the population, with the lowest risk found for young people. The diseases we mandate children to get vaccinated for are not declining in their disastrous health effects as far as I know. The risk of adverse events from the current set of covid vaccines is lowish but not particularly low. All that doesn't make the vaccines we have for covid any less important, but the comparison really does not wash and is a highly dubious way of engaging around the topic of body sovereignty.

There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.

Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.

Thank you! Every crazy axe murderer receives more empathy then the people who simply stopped trusting the system after being lied to one time too often.

Two things drive me crazy: 1. How easy it is to dehumanize a significant percentage of the population. 2. How willingly politicians embrace that in order to find a scapegoat for their own failures.

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, however in the long run that won't protect the immunocompromised. The virus is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect. Everyone will be exposed eventually.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

That's true. We missed our chance to contain it early on, thanks to those that tried to spare the economy at the cost of 'a few lives' which has now harmed our economy for a much longer period than an initial effort at containment would have caused, not to mention that at that time we didn't know exactly how bad it would get (it could have been a lot worse than it was).

But reducing the amount of active infections does have a beneficial effect because even though everyone will likely be exposed that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will also get the disease (even the the worst diseases viral do not necessarily spread to 100% of the population), and there some chance that later strains may become milder. And if fewer people are ill at the same time that should increase the level of care available.

But it's a rearguard action at this point.

> We missed our chance to contain it early on, thanks to those that tried to spare the economy at the cost of 'a few lives'

Illusion of control. The chance was never there. Even countries who are way more suitable for isolation like australia didn't manage to keep the virus out. Attributing that to "those that tried to spare the economy" is just another toxic blame game.

They didn't manage because the rest of us fucked up.

It's like a fire. If your house is the only house in a row of houses that is well prepared against fire then you're going to go down, in spite of all of your preparations.

The fatalism that many people exhibit is a self fulfilling prophesy: we won't be able to do it so we're not even going to try. But you know what? Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and China showed that it is possible.

> Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and China showed that it is possible.

No, they just moved themselves into a corner that they will be trapped in for the next 10 to 20 years.

You're missing the point.

The reason people are even mentioning ICU beds are because they're trying to shift the vaccination argument from "do it for yourself, if you want to" to "you have to do it for others".

If we had enough ICU beds, there would be NO argument to force people to get vaccinated, just like there is no argument to force people to not smoke or not be fat.

If we had enough ICU beds there would still be an argument because it will cause a bunch of people to die. If you don't care about that then that's your problem, but personally I'd like those old people to stick around for a bit longer, and keep in mind that one day you too will be old.

The arguments for vaccination go a lot further than just a lack of ICU beds.

The old people should get vaccinated and self-isolate.

Right, maybe we should stick them on an island somewhere so they don't have contact with the rest of society then. Really, the degree of selfishness here is incredible. Don't you have parents or grandparents? Would you want them to be isolated from you and the rest of your family, their friends and neighbors for the foreseeable future just so you can pretend that there is no problem?

There is a problem. The problem is that they're old and frail, and the world is out to kill them.

To be frank, I'm in favour of mass cryogenics. Build mausoleums under mountains and fill them with the frozen heads of the dead, to be revived later.

> To be frank, I'm in favour of mass cryogenics. Build mausoleums under mountains and fill them with the frozen heads of the dead, to be revived later.

Science fiction has no place in policy determination.

So, we have a climate crisis, uncontrolled health care and college costs, decades of pointless war, mass incarceration, and a variety of other crises that cause a lot of death and suffering.

Yet isn't it strange that the one crisis we have chosen to pull out all the societal stops for, to radically reorient all of society and put it in stasis for, is COVID-19. Odd coincidence that most of the first list affects young people, COVID-19 primarily affects old people, and the political leadership of the developed world happens to be comprised of old people.

And the subset of old people responsible for handling the pandemic hasn't even managed to do that properly. This is the same category of people who hollowed out unions, induced globalization, and generally kicked out the ladder beneath them in a variety of ways.

I do care about my parents/grandparents, I've been vaccinated, and I'd wear a mask around an old person. That's the absolute maximum I'm willing to do voluntarily and feel fine about that. I'd even venture to suggest that if someone has a problem and demands that all of society radically realign itself to fix/prevent it in a way that's disproportionate to society's other needs, it's not society that's being selfish.

By not getting vaccinated aren't you a danger to others who are not vaccinated?

On the other hand, I don't care if you choose to be fat or smoke yourself to death, that won't harm anyone.

second hand smoke is a thing.

Same story in UK (and about bed numbers in general).

"The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly." [0]

[0] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/nhs-hospital-bed-n...

Still, get the vaccine

The egregious part is that they reduced ICU beds last summer, they even had monetary incentives to reduce them.

Meanwhile vaccinating anyone < 60 has a very small benefit and it should be up to choice. Myokarditis side effects from the vaccine are probably bullshit, you can get it from almost all infections, so I expect it to see for every vaccine. We probably have no data since we lack operation of this scale.

But people here are afraid (typical) and even demand harsher policies. They also seem incapable to hold political leaders to account. Politics basically failed to prepare for the next wave, which was known to be happening quite a long while ago. Instead we had an embarrassing slap-fight between different states. One more stupid than the other.

Also you cannot just get a vaccine, you have to actively search for places that administer them. Pretty sure that I won't renew mine again, since this is just not acceptable.

I would advise you to ask a doctor, even if those aren't too keen to get another patient with vaccine trouble, but getting a vaccine in an active wave might not be the best health recommendation.

>Also you cannot just get a vaccine, you have to actively search for places that administer them. Pretty sure that I won't renew mine again, since this is just not acceptable.

Very true, last month for the booster there was only one place in Stuttgart (large city for German standards) offering appointments within the year. It's gotten better again, but it's not like they didn't know that there would be a new wave of vaccinations once the first people are 6 months in (or had J&J).

Sooo any proof for your thoughts on the missing benefits of a vaccinated person u der 60?

Wild statement to make without any numbers.

The numbers of people dying from Covid. Germany has 100,000 dead people and ~5000 are under the age of 65. But you cannot stop there, you need to incrementally look at age correlated data to see a picture.

Here is a start:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi...

Covid is a serious disease, but we are talking of mandatory vaccination and I don't think that it can be justified for younger age groups.

So you don't think it's critical for younger people to be less infections?

Having also less risk from the vaccine itself (which got injected into over 4 billion people) in comparison to COVID?

I disagree.

Lucky for me in this discussion, experts and politics are also now more inclined to have mandatory vaccination.

Mandatory vaccination exists in Germany for other things as well. I totally think it is reasonable.

This isn't exactly true. People under 60 have a smaller risk to get to the Hospital/ICU but it's definitely not 0. There is also still a very real risk for Long-Covid and other complications from it. This gets even worse when said <60 person has obesity, smokes or other underlying health issues.

For your reference, in the Netherlands about 89% of 18+ people have been fully vaccinated. Yet the 11% unvaccinated make up 50% of Hospital beds and more than 70% of ICU beds. Looks at this image from our Minister of Health: https://twitter.com/hugodejonge/status/1466482208995164175

It's in Dutch but you'll get the message.

Furthermore, even if you are somehow not at risk of Covid, and you would magically know this about yourself it is STILL a good idea to get the shot because it reduces your chances of getting it (and passing it on!) and even if you get it your viral load is lower so the chances to spread it are reduced.

Stop making up arguments and get your bloody shot.

I'm terrified by the fact that there are so many antivaxxers in Germany that they're showing up here too, as supposedly educated and intelligent peers. It is absolutely the fault of unvaccinated that they're unvaccinated and putting society at risk. It doesn't matter how many ICU beds and staff you have, an unvaccinated population would quickly overwhelm it simply by virtue of how incredibly long it takes to recover and how quickly new strains would develop.

Vaccinated people get the disease and transmit it about as well as unvaccinated people.

This means the virus is busy making copies of itself in their body. Those copies not only have a chance to mutate, but have evolutionary selective pressure to mutate around the vaccine.

If you don't have the vaccine, it has no pressure to mutate around the vaccine.

This is imo not true. Ofcourse there could be more ICU beds, but the real problem is something called exponential growth. Doubling your ICU capacity only will give you a week or two until you need to have restrictions again. Failing to include the concept of exponential growth is cherrypicking facts.

It is exactly the same in Greece. They transition from public to private, they try to hide it and make profit over the deaths with the vaxxes.

There maybe more depth in their motives. But this is the surface.

As a double vaccinated German, I am very disappointed and angry about this move.

Our politicians have failed to prepare the country for the Winter (who could have known...). We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.

And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.

Genuine question: given the current situation, what's the alternative? A lockdown for everyone? Vaccine mandate? Doing nothing and removing restrictions? Something else?

Is it worse than last winter?

Quite likely, yes. And no.

In the part of Germany where I live, 7-day incidence among the unvaccinated is 1726, which is much worse than last winter, and it's 112 among the vaccinated. Hospitalisation tells a similar story: The unvaccinated are suffering.

If that 1726 would rise as it did last winter, a lot of unvaccinated fools would die. A hundred thousand dead in three months, perhaps.

Imagine a world in which the vaccine does not exist. What would you do then?

That is the alternative.

We don't live in a world without the vaccine, so I don't see the argument.

A possible answer to your question of what we could do if we do not want to force people to get vaccinated is the same as what we could do if people could not be vaccinated.

You said it was your ‘genuine question’. So I’m not sure why you need to see the argument. It’s an answer to your question, not an argument.

So basically lockdown for all, because restricting the rights of everybody is better than restricting the rights of some. Good luck convincing the courts that that's the minimal necessary restriction.

There are more options than ‘lockdown for all’, but yes, it would be one of the things you could do if vaccinations were not available.

But vaccinations are available, so you likely can't do it legally.

That’s for the courts to decide. Is a lockdown not allowed because forcing people to vaccinate is an option? Or is forcing people to vaccinate not allowed because lockdown is an option?

Forcing people to vaccinate is not really a tool to control infections right now, and more of an independent (also currently hotly debated) longer-term question. (I'm fairly certain its going to come for some jobs at least)

And if applied as here, I doubt many would argue that "forcing people to vaccinate" is a weaker measure than "impose some restrictions on unvaccinated" (although the former is of course going to be a strong form of the latter)

Use my immune system, like people did for millions of years. Unfortunately everyone can’t but the vast majority will be fine after having covid and will have built up immunity.

Does managing indoor humidity help? It seems to with other respiratory viruses.

Yes! Indoor humidity helps in at least two ways: 1) Humidity prevents aerosol transmission 2) Humidity helps the cillia in your airways function better and remove foreign particles, including viruses faster before they have a chance to infect you.

Probably not much. All KPIs are heading down now anyways, just look into the RKI dashboard [1]. Doing a quick math exercise underscores this: 70% are vaccinated, 6 million had it (at least, the number is probably higher), so in total 80-85% of the population already had it or is vaccinated by now. Numbers should go down now from now, which they actually start to do, if you look in the dashboard.

[1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

It's not great, and I do wish that the current coalition had prepared a bit more for this winter, rather than assuming 1. enough people would get vaccinated, and 2. that it wouldn't come back seasonally like last year. They really should have prepared months ago.

I can't think of a better alternative given the current situation if the end goal is to get people to reduce contact and get vaccinated, short of a full lockdown for everyone (which I think is a lot less preferable). Whether this form of lockdown will have any effect remains to be seen.

It’s absurd to believe that this will actually do anything additional to reduce infections on the short term. People don’t get infected while shopping. This is just meant to pressure the unvaccinated to get vaccinated which might help next year.

Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and get infected. It’s just the wrong move at the worst possible time.

> Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and get infected.

they are anyways

> People don’t get infected while shopping.

What's so special about shopping that it prevents transmission of a relatively communicable disease?

The same force that prevents covid from spreading while you are sitting down at a restaurant but can get you as you walk in and when you use the restroom

Mask wearing is well adhered too, and shop visitors stay only a short time, leaving less droplets in the air than maskless visitors to, say, a restaurant or bar.

While shopping, people wear masks, talk (and breathe and cough) less, and are generally not packed into small spaces breathing a lot of the same air, so the risk is lower than at a house party or bar or dance club.

Focus on early treatment. Drugs like ivermectin, hcq, fluvoxamine

Ivermectin and hcq do nothing for covid. No idea what fluvoxamine is.

It's an antidepressant. I don't think it has any effect on COVID, either proven or rumoured.

There have been several small studies which show fluvoxamine is an effective COVID-19 treatment.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=covid+fluvoxamine

Results are still somewhat preliminary and it isn't formally approved for that use but I know that many physicians are prescribing it off label and report positive results. The safety profile is good as a temporary acute treatment so there's little reason not to use it.

Huh I hadn't heard of that yet. I wonder if the same goes for other SSRIs. It's a pretty big class.

I hope you or someone close to you never get as desperate as I was. Saved my life.

Control the media to stop the panic, that only worsens things with a nocebo effect. Gradually remove restrictions since numbers are going down anyways.

Not only are they forcing the unvaccinated to get the shot, they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to get booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future. When the vaccines were first introduced their validity was fixed at 12 months and their was talk about extending it ("because they are so incredibly effective").

Not sure what to say without being labeled an anti vaxxer...

I was very sick for a week after each shot. I'm 30, I work from home, I work out, I'm lean and only go out when running in the forest and buy food.

I can't possibly know what would happen if I caught covid, but I wish the vaccination (I'm already vaxxed, but I mean the boosters) was my choice. With my reaction to the vaccines, it's two weeks a year guaranteed sickness vs a very low chance of getting covid with an even lower chance of getting very sick from it.

The pros and cons just don't make vaccination every six months an obvious choice for me.

Yes I had a horrible reaction to the 2nd dose. So did everyone I know. Yes it's possible the real thing might be worse for me but I'm going to take my chances. I will not be taking a booster. I'm healthy, exercise regularly and I'm not in the age group that's high-risk.

There are studies showing the vaccine isn't even effective at 3 months. There's no way I'm dealing with that shot every 3-6 months.

Just please cite the studies you mentioned. There is way too much nuance to be boiled down to such general claim.

The only thing I mentioned that has anything to do with a study is the 3-6 month boosters.

The rest is my personal choice to not take a booster.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34706170/ https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114?query=fe...

It looks like it possibly starts waning at 2 months. So if we're requiring everyone needs to be fully vaccinated with mandates then boosters start at 2 months to be safe. By that measure large portions of our population are not fully vaccinated at this point. No thanks...

This is the same argument my Germany friends made (and used to get fake vaccination certificates). The studies say it’s not effective after 3 months!! People that are vaccinated get infected again!! I’m young and healthy!!

Yes people get reinfected but how many die from it or run into serious conditions? Vaccines don’t block the virus from entering your body, but they help with you not dying or using up ICU beds, even after those 3 months.

Please do your part of the swarm and get vaccinated. If you know you’ll have a odd reaction you can prepare in advance. Also Germany has sick-leave from work everywhere.

I'm already vaccinated. I'm not getting the booster. My age group has like a .0007% chance of dying from COVID. A booster isn't necessary. Stop with this anti-science cultish behavior. It's weird. COVID is not going away, getting boosters indefinitely is not a sound plan. I'll take my chances and get the natural immunity which is better and longer lasting.

I don't want advice from Germany. You'd think after what your country did they'd be less inclined to go down the authoritarian route....

Why do you assume you’ll have the same reaction to the booster?

Why should I assume it won't?

I'm not in a high risk group. I do not need to worry about COVID. Until like a few weeks ago there was no one telling me I needed a booster no data backing up anyone taking it in a low risk group.

It seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

I had no reaction to the first 2 or boosters, nor my friends. The plural of anecdote is not data.

What I can say is the Corona I had between the 2nd and booster lasted 1 day, the fastest cold I've ever had. That I had a light infection being due to my vaccination, is backed up by the data.

You're straw-manning.

I didn't say it was data for anything. I said personally I won't be taking a booster for those reasons. Data for what it does on average to everyone else is not data for what it does to my system.

Your anecdote is also not data. It's entirely possible you would've experienced the same light symptoms even without the shots. After all, plenty of people who have contracted covid were completely asymptomatic.

I think the key issue is hospitals being swamped. Once that happens, death rates will skyrocket even among people not at-risk. Until that point however young and healthy people don't really benefit themselves from the vaccination. It's essentially a tragedy of the commons situation.

My story is very similar to yours. As a result, I am also reluctant to get the booster because I do not have a support system whereby I can have another severe reaction that causes me to be incapable of helping the people who depend on me every single day.

I am working on getting my mother in law to be on call to stay with us for a 10-14 day period, if need be, so that I can get the booster. It's quite ridiculous.

All of that having been said, I know that I need it.

if this is your body's reaction to the vaccine, what makes you think your chance of getting very sick from actual covid is very low?

The vaccine is not the virus? If you are under 60 without serious health issues COVID is indeed no worse than a bad flu for the vast majority of people. Certainly not a guaranteed death sentence, let alone guaranteed hospitalization. Especially if treated as soon as detected instead of letting people sit around and get worse until they have to be hospitalized.

https://aapsonline.org/covidpatientguide/

okay, i get that mRNA vaccines are not introducing weakened versions of the actual virus like a conventional vaccine, but what explains the sometimes severe side effects people receive? those symptoms aren't related to covid at all, and there's zero relation between how one reacts to the vaccine and how one would react to covid?

i understand things are very politicized now, so to be clear, genuine interest. i thought there was some relation just based on how regular vaccines operate.

While I don't know the connection between the two, we also need to be realistic and not expect everyone to read 50 papers and be a disease and vaccination expert.

Honestly, I don't know, but it's interesting that when I say I had very bad side effects to the vaccine, some people are convinced that it is because I would also react to covid similarly.

Will those people say to a 70 years old obese smoker who didn't get any reaction after the vaccine? I know many like that. Should I tell them "oh you didn't get a severe reaction to the vaccine, so I guess that's how you would react to covid, too"? Of course not, it's nonsense.

One of the more common causes of vaccine related injury is allergic reaction to one or more of the adjuvant or carriers, rather than to the antigenic load.

i see. some people get really severe reactions though, like the people here talking about a week long; does that explain those cases? is there no relation b/w vaccine reaction and reaction to the actual virus?

Well, I personally had a >2 week long reaction, and after the second shot, was informed that yes, it probably was some sort of allergic reaction. What was it? We still don't know

Regarding correlations between the two, it's a bit difficult to tell. After all, you can't really get a correlation between the intensity of vaccine reaction and actual virus exposure for... obvious reasons.

However, (I'm a bit rusty on my allergy and autoimmunity, so if someone catches a mistake, please call me out on it) allergic reactions and the viral reactions tend to present themselves differently. The common image of swelling and inability to breathe are almost completely associated with allergy, while the fever, tiredness and so on tend to be more standard.

I was also very sick after my first dose. Completely fine with the booster. Don’t assume you will react the same with the booster as you did the first dose.

I was pretty fine after the first dose, but booster wrecked me.

> Don’t assume you will react the same with the booster as you did the first dose.

Works both ways unfortunately.

What were your symptoms?

Not the GP, but I also had a severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. All in all, I felt ill for 8-9 days. It was the most unusual illness I have ever felt, though I should say that I do not get sick very often.

It started in my head and progressed it's way down to my legs. The day after the shot, it started with headaches and eye strain with a tremendous amount of head pressure, not dissimilar from an ocular migraine. That developed into a full blown head cold of congestion, coughing, stuffy, runny nose, and continued headache. The headache went away and it began to feel like strep throat, the coughing fits, while not excessive, were pretty rough and were burning my throat. From there it went into my chest and I felt like I had bronchitis. This was the worst phase of it. That burning sensation in your chest cavity when you have bronchitis? It felt exactly like that except I was also extremely, extremely tired. I slept for almost 2 days straight while this was going on. I took time off of work during the throat and chest phase of this. After that, I had stomach cramps and diarrhea. Then, after all of that wacky bullshit ended and I started to feel like a human again, I was left with cramps in my legs.

I was also extremely tired the entire time. Just the simple act of walking both hurt and made me more tired. It was fatigue like I've never experienced before. I'm a veteran and I've gone through some sleep deprivation training and that was nothing like the fatigue that I experienced from my reaction.

My wife was 5 months pregnant while all of this was going on and our twins were about 22 months old. It was, honestly, complete fucking bullshit. Being sick coupled with the fact that I had so many people reliant on me really stressed me out. I was able to get my mother-in-law to lend a hand but we went from thriving to surviving until I was on the tail end of the thing.

But what bothered me the most was that I couldn't even report the fact that I was having a reaction. I called up the UC medical system where I received the shot and they told me to follow up with my GP, except that at the time I didn't have one. I called them back a couple of days later and I could basically hear the person shrugging their shoulders.

Goodness! I'm so sorry to hear that. I also had a terrible, week-long illness after the same second shot, which is why I'm extremely apprehensive about our governor mandating boosters for myself and others working in this particular industry. They've become extremely draconian about not allowing exemptions, and in your case at least, I hope you'd be eligible for an exemption for a following shot. But the way things are going, the powers that be want to force everyone to get a new shot every 6 months. I want to opt out of that system entirely.

I'm in the same boat, except I had Covid in the spring. Got my second shot a month ago.

I didn't think I would get a large benefit from the vax, since I had covid, but did it mainly because of pressure (family, employment, government). But I think I draw the line here; I'm not going to take any boosters. Getting horribly sick for several days, running a high fever... that can damage you. It's not as bad as Covid, but my threat from Covid is also greatly diminished already.

I am still not back to normal after my second shot. I have shortness of breath and horrible headaches I didn't have before. I can't imagine getting another shot especially when access to doctors is very limited currently and they have been generally useless for my problems. Something like this being mandatory is crossing the line for me. I would take measures to never take it, even if it means fleeing the country or finding other ways if the borders were shut.

you experience isn't the same as 99.999% of the population though. I'm old and fat and the vaccine didn't do much more than make arm sore any of the 3 times I was injected. However I took the shingles vaccine and felt like crap for several days, not once did I complain about it. I consider it part of my duty in sharing the ups and downs of living in a society.

When you get a COVID vaccine you are getting COVID. That’s literally all a vaccine is: a copy of the disease you want protection against, so that your immune system can gear up to fight it.

The only difference is that the vaccine will not multiply out of control in your body the way the live virus would.

So it’s crazy to think that you’ll have “an even lower chance of getting sick from” live COVID. You already got sick from it, and that was only the limited version.

This is like complaining that a punch from a 5 year old hurts, and you’d rather risk getting punched by a heavyweight prize fighter.

I’m not trying to put a label on you, I’m try to explain how things work. Having such a strong reaction to a vaccine is a warning that you could risk more serious complications from an infection by the live virus.

> When you get a COVID vaccine you are getting COVID. That’s literally all a vaccine is: a copy of the disease you want protection against, so that your immune system can gear up to fight it.

Whoa, hold on there buddy.

You might want to look up the difference between mRNA vaccines and traditional ones.

Both introduce a version of a virus protein into your body and your body has to fight.

That you are used as the factory for the protein with mRNA doesn't make a big difference IMHO.

> That you are used as the factory for the protein with mRNA doesn't make a big difference IMHO.

I'd beg to differ, or at least make a slight distinction. The mRNA vaccine targets the spike protein specifically, which is the important target in the virus, at least now, but not the only one. The actual virus is more complex than that, and it can mutate. From this POV natural immunity is better. But natural infection obviously comes with the downside of added risks (depending on your immune system) and it's tough to guess how you'll react the first time (although you can make educated guesses) you get infected. Later infections will be milder though. And a clear upside being not having to run for jabs a couple of times per year.

mRNA COVID vaccines use the organelles in your cells to make partial copies of the novel coronavirus, which is exactly how the live novel coronavirus grows in your body.

The big difference is that the copies cannot make copies of themselves (they are only partial copies) so the viral load does not grow geometrically within your body.

Again: if the small viral load of a vaccine makes a person sick for a week, that person likely has a higher risk for severe illness from the (much larger) live viral load from a full infection.

Science does not yet understand why some people have more severe COVID illness than others, but it is an observed fact that some do. In some cases, even if they are otherwise fit and healthy.

If you took Moderna or J&J, it's possible the initial high dosage (100mg for Moderna) is the main cause. Their booster is now 50mg and Pfizer's is 30mg. If you did take the lower dosage, there's still hope that newer ones from Novavax or Inovio coming out later which is very different from MRNA vaccines won't produce so much side effects on you.

Well, thank you for the encouraging words (though I didn't have the vaccines you mentioned)... I will get back to this comment and try to convince myself that you are 100% right, when the German government makes me an outlaw / outcast when they decide to go with the vaccine mandates, and I can't go shopping, to the gym, to restaurant...

It's so strange how that differs so much. I'm not as healthy as you and the vaccine didn't bother me at all. Ok the second time it felt a bit like I had bumped my arm a bit.

Sorry to hear it gets so bad for you though. I understand that makes it a much harder decision.

That’s wrong information.

Twice-vaccinated people will have to get a booster shot and there are discussions about a six month expiry date if you don’t get the booster shot.

What happens beyond that we do not know right now since can’t look into the future. We do not know how effective the booster will be in terms of long-term protection.

All of that is not surprising. A bit annoying but not surprising.

if it's the same shot as the originals, which is my understanding, then it's reasonable to assume a similar expiry

No, not at all. That’s not at all how it works.

Other vaccinations are also given three times (second dose after a short interval, third dose after a longer interval), so it might well be that this vaccine turns out to be one of those, we just do not know. That’s the point.

> booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future

This is the most stupid thing about vaccination plans. It's one thing to get vaccinated once, it's another thing entirely to need frequent boosters.

I expect a lot of confusion and operational carnage when people who don't get a booster become "unvaccinated".

But this is just conjecture that we might need another booster so soon. Many vaccines require 3 shots initially and then boosters every 10 years.

> they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to get booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future.

There is no obligation (or force) to get a booster shot. It is available and recommended but not forced. Some groups like older age and immune-compromised people are highly recommended.

Yes, and if they had boostered the old in September/ October we would not be in this situation.

Now, everyone wants to get a booster and many old people I know need to wait until December or January to get a booster.

It’s the worst case that could have happened, because politicians didn’t do their job

You sound dismayed that vaccines don't work in a more simplistic manner. These CDC charts on vaccine schedules may provide a better picture of the general complexity of immunization.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/index.html

You feel like Germany is lacking basic strategy?

I'm Czech and we wish here we would be as prepared and forward thinking as your representatives are. If it was not for one of the highest rate of ICU beds per capita in the world and all the high quality nurses and doctors we export to Germany, our health care would have already crumbled.

Yet still the toll this is taking on the doctors and nurses in Czech hospitals is so sad. And to add insult to injury hardly anyone from the outside thanks them anymore & the antivaxers they often take care about are often very rude or even aggressive - often literally on deaths bed.

Nah. Germans love to complain but not as much as they love having things decided for them decisively and following the rules begrudgingly. There will be no uprising. People are going to complain, as per usual, no matter what the change, and then fall in line without any upset that could begin to rival the downside of them not doing so.

> And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.

You could say this about any law that enforces some uncomfortable behavior change. Anyone who remembers when seat belt laws became real, sees history repeating itself, down to the exact same arguments about effectiveness and rhetoric about choice and tyranny and government overreach.

COVID has been a challenge for the same reason Climate Change is challenging: They both require collective cooperative action from people, and you can't rely on everyone having a natural desire to do the right thing. Laws can't make people want to do the right thing--they can only provide incentives or disincentives for specific actions or behaviors.

You can take the seat belt off when the car ride is over. Also if you are caught without one you get a small fine, but you don't lose your job and the ability to participate in society.

Because your refusal to wear a seatbelt presents no risk to others. But vaccine refusal does present a risk. So the stakes of the game are not the same.

Refusing to wear a seatbelt does, in fact, present a risk to others because in a crash, you can become a lethal projectile should you fly and hit someone else.

This happens how often, exactly?

More often than you think.

Every time someone is unbuckled in a car crash, there is a high risk they will hurt others. Someone in the back seat could fly forward and hit the driver, for example.

"X poses risk to others therefore you have no choice" is a statement that can be made for nearly any scenario. To wit:

Uncontrolled flying bodies pose additional risks when there are multiple people in the vehicle. There's also the risk of driving to begin with, for people both in and outside the vehicle.

The risks of harm to you _and_ others from crashing a car are probably higher at this point than that of a vaxxed person getting seriously ill from covid.

But anyway the point I was making was to refute GP's statement that seat belt laws and the pushback around them are the same as for the vax mandates. They are not, because the vax is permanent, and the consequences for non-compliance much higher. The fact that you can't "take the vax off" is part of these stakes that are not the same.

> COVID has been a challenge for the same reason Climate Change is challenging: They both require collective cooperative action from people, and you can't rely on everyone having a natural desire to do the right thing

No, it's challenging because people know they're being manipulated and taken advantage of.

As with COVID, as with climate change. Mayor of SF enacting mask mandates while dining/partying unmasked. Elites flying private to Davos to discuss climate change.

Resistance exists because politicians refuse to implement obviously sensible, effective and, most importantly, fair policies - no lockdowns (Sweden style) & care/protection targeting the vulnerable for COVID, and revenue neutral carbon tax for Climate Change.

People are manipulating themselves to win the Howard Cain award.

Ironically, this probably proves their point of "this being a slipper slope", since now the fact that we agreed to wear seatbelts is used to force us to do other things.

It’d be nothing strange about a road company demanding seat belts on their roads. Currently that business is run by a state monopoly, and only then do seat belt mandates become an issue to discuss.

but they have their scape goats now. the infections rise b/c of the unvaxinated.

Our politicians have failed to prepare the country for the Winter (who could have known...). We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.

Your politicians HAVE prepared the country. There is a VERY BASIC strategy: get your bloody shot!

That's not a strategy, that's wishful thinking. We have a vaccination rate of not even 70%. AND: forgot to booster the old and still don’t manage to booster them effectively. That's a huge failure. Every manager would get fired for this.

And then add to this that we have reduced capacities in hospitals compared to last year...

Why aren't you angry at the anti-vaxxers instead? If they would have gotten the jab, this would be mostly under control.

> We lack a basic strategy how to cope with Covid.

Getting everyone vaccinated is the only strategy, everything else is either worthless or swaps COVID deaths with mental health an economic casualties.

> And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two.

It was already divided, it's just that the government stopped caring about the side that doesn't care and fails to listen to the actual professionals.

> This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections

Look at literally any statistics or read any paper made by any credible person.

> it will just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.

They'll cave eventually and accept that their stubbornness is not above other people's well being.

This is not just a stupid debate about which politicians each camp likes, anti-vaxxers make everybody's life miserable and even kill people for exactly no benefit, they have no arguments other than Facebook conspiracy theories and other fake news.

If we were a serious society, then the conversation would be about:

immune vs non-immune

high risk vs low risk

infectious vs non-infectious

But no, it's jabbed vs unjabbed. It doesn't make sense. Everyone in Germany who wants the vaccine has had it, and if you've had Covid, you're about as protected as the vaccinated. Furthermore, leaky vaccines don't prevent transmission, can't eliminate the virus (animal reservoirs) and may even make it more virulent. See Marek's disease: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15757475/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vac...

This is not a rational, science-based policy. This is about punishing the non-compliant, mostly the under class. As the upper class continues with their events surrounded by masked servants, with endless examples of officials breaking their own rules. Worse, we are normalizing the dehumanization of a group of people who we're told are diseased and dangerous and it's all their fault. Germany of all places should be absolutely allergic to such rhetoric.

>Germany of all places should be absolutely allergic to such rhetoric.

You would think! Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it and all that...

Maybe we shouldn't want Germany to repeat the 30's? Just a thought.

Your logic does not work. If people in a developed country would simply become vaccinated and boosted, then only the vaccinated or not condition would typically apply in mainstream society--and not the 3 other above conditions.

While all 4 are discriminatory, the first 3 are not inherently due to personal choices or preferences. People choose not to get vaccinated harming society as a whole--and make the other 3 above conditions come into play.

You're still just talking about jabbed vs unjabbed.

The point is that jabbed versus unjabbed takes precedence over the 3 above listed categories. If everyone who can be jabbed is; then the above 3 categories need not apply, even in the case of omicron. This is especially the case if a booster is given, creating secondary immune response to Sars-CoV-2.

Yes, there will be some immune escape but many of the antibodies that are acquired via boosters will cross react with omicron.

> Furthermore, the vaccines don't prevent transmission,

They do prevent transmission, since they make people less likely to be infected, and if you're not infected with the virus you won't transmit it. The vaccines are somewhat less effective at preventing people from being infected at all than they are at preventing hospitalization and death, but still significantly effective. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/11/science/vacci...

> They do prevent transmission, since they make people less likely to be infected, and if you're not infected with the virus you won't transmit it.

Incorrect. Intramuscular vaccines induce antibody production at nearby lymph nodes inside of the body; and these mRNA vaccines in particular also cause S-antibodies to circulate in one's blood (even though that's unintended and the long term effects are still unknown).

Because the intramuscular route of administration, S-antibodies are not present in significant quantities inside the lungs of vaccinated individuals. Thus with covid-19 being an airborne disease, vaccinated people can still exhale virus-containing breaths and transmit the disease to others, who can then go on to contract the illness, whether they're vaccinated or not. So while the vaccines offer protection against serious illness to those who receive it, it certainly does not prevent transmission.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v... (And this is broadly corroborated by other studies)

The consensus from studies is that, while not 100% effective at preventing tranmission, vaccines do reduce the transmission of Covid, even considering Delta (Omnicron is too recent for there to be data, but there's no reason to doubt transmission would also be reduced).

Lower probability of getting infected != prevent infection.

Lower probability of getting infected == lower probability of spreading the virus != vaccines prevent transmission.

Preventing transmission is not binary.

Reducing the probability of transmission is preventing transmission, as it is preventing [some] transmission.

They reduce transmission but don't prevent it completely.

> Germany of all places should be absolutely allergic to such rhetoric.

It is the German gene.

As a foreigner living in Germany I could live with it if there were otherwise sound measures, but it's mostly been a bunch of wishful thinking. There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over". Even this I could understand, but this year they do the same thing again! Surprise, surprise that there is a record wave now. People have mostly given up and follow no rules other than the most basic ones (masks etc).

I am also starting to think this country is not really built to work in a crisis like this. Regulations are maybe good in general, but this tendency to regulate every possible detail does not work when you have to change the rules every month because almost nobody really knows how to fix this.

"open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early"

It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the effects of covid-lockdown measures, they show a small increase in total mortality. So we should have done as the Swedes and kept everything open from beginning to end.

Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.

Indeed, and the lockdown and other impositions have introduced numerous ills that don't necessarily register, at least not immediately, as deaths.

What about all the negative outcomes from continuing all the restrictions?

Still less severe than long covid, sorry.

Persistence of various symptoms in people who recovered from COVID-19 (collectively called Long COVID) is a major health issue worldwide. It could be due to various mechanisms such as post-intensive care syndrome, post-viral fatigue syndrome, permanent organ damage or others. Proper clinical evaluation will help identify the etiology, and to customize treatment. As the disease is new, it is too early to know the true long-term outlook.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/

Your point being?

I was somewhat skeptical about long covid. The linked article summarizes the known facts well and outlines conjectures for causes.

That's saying long covid is bad but we don't know just how bad until more time passes.

I think mask mandates and ratcheting up the pressure to get vaccinated is a far better use of the "restriction budget" than full lockdowns on the entire population, yes. Lockdowns on people who aren't yet vaccinated by choice seem pretty great to me.

Why should a vaccinated person wear a mask? Do vaccines not work? What is the point of getting one if I still have to wear a mask?

Naw. Masks need to go away.

It's not binary.

Because all of these things work at population level, not necessarily at an individual level.

Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in any given situation.

As a side benefit some masks protect the wearer to an extent, particularly N95s, but the main purpose is to reduce spread from infected people in the first place.

Vaccines, similarly, are not a magic shield that protect you from even getting COVID. Instead, they dramatically reduce your likelihood of getting severely ill and being hospitalised and reduce the duration of disease therefore also reducing transmission. But that only works if enough people are vaccinated that the cumulative effect of that reduced transmission can meaningfully bring down the R0 value.

This pandemic has exposed how few people are able to consider issues or questions at a broader community level versus merely how it affects them directly.

Your living in delta but the vaccine doesn't help as much in this new variant era. That means lockdowns for all. Still sound great?

What is the evidence to suggest that? Seems like vaccinated people have had pretty mild cases so far.

And lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a doctor has determined are required medically, some are elective but England doesn't do many electives because of cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil.

There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).

How many people is "extremely large" in your opinion? And who?

Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-parent?

Isn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none, and media has instead shifted to infection rate.

If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?

What? There has been significant excess mortality, as summarised here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.

This is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation.

"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.

No, I'm providing what you asked for: A measurement of excess deaths.

That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average.

If those excess death calculations are perfectly acceptable to calculate the effect of bad flu seasons and other mortality-affecting events, why are they suddenly not okay now?

Yeah like every other article they use a formula to calculate what is "excessive" which is not explained at all, and is used as the whole basis of the article. I took a peak in the github repo and I can't really read R well enough to make anything of it, but from a quick look and reading the article "take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years" it could be a well defined prediction, or it could just be an average. It's unclear as the method section here is completely unknown, and I'm sceptical how you could ever calculate a fixed number prediction without obscuring the standard deviation.

Why not just show standard deviation, median, average, percentile. Show the standard deviation in the graph.

You know that's just an article providing an overview, right? It's not the official source of excess mortality statistics.

For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records when preparing statistics. The figure I quoted, for instance, is from the South African Medical Research Council, who publish their methodology. There's also EuroMOMO and many others.

Did you really think that statisticians and scientists have just magically forgotten about how to do basic statistics, for decades, when preparing these reports?

Why should I put any weight to statistical results that are made with some unknown "formula" and is not presented in a standard way.

Instead of using the normal measures of mean, average, standard deviation and percentiles, we just used "formula" and voila, here is answer. Ok I'm going to continue to be sceptical of such results..

It's not unknown, all the groups publish their methodology in the open.

I'm now convinced you just want to be a contrarian, rather than learning about a system you don't understand.

You need at least to include the standard deviation for that to be of any importance, and at least for 10 years in the past

Now you're just shifting the goal posts.

Excess death tracking is hardly a new thing, most countries have been doing it for decades to measure the effect of things like flu outbreaks. Therefore when those same statistics being done using the same approach suddenly show huge climbs in 2020 and 2021 it means something.

Stop trying to minimise the pandemic. If your arguments about how to deal with it are rational they should stand up to the reality of how serious it really is, rather than a pretend reality where people haven't been dying in large numbers and filling up hospitals for two years.

I'm not trying to minimise the pandemic, I'm pointing out obvious ways that it is exaggerated, such as lacking basic statistical scrutiny and throwing around huge scary numbers with no comparison or explanation.

Another example from the media (now I am shifting goal posts, but defending my point of proving that it's exaggerated and manipulative): Why are they reporting running totals of number of deahts? And making big headlines of when they reach "new grim milestones"? How is that not a completely irrelevant manipulative misinterpretation? A running total of deaths, really? When will that ever go down? And using that to support a case that "things are getting worse" somehow.

Nope. You may think you are, but in reality you're ignorant of how these statistics are calculated and you that's why you think you're smart for finding what you think are mistakes. This has, actually, all been taken into account, and more, for excess mortality statistics.

I'd recommend you spend some more time learning how the scientists and statisticians calculating these figures actually work, and maybe speak to a few, before commenting further.

It's not my job to find out how they made their secret calculations, it's up to them to show it if they want to present credible results, otherwise it should be ignored.

> Isn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none

It isn't reported because it takes more explanation than the media likes to give, and direct COVID-19 death counts are less complicated, not because “there is none” which is just false:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2021/10/PE21_481_12.html

Direct covid-19 deaths are irrelevant in relation to deciding about lockdowns, that's deliberately making an issue more complex than it is, in order to obscure it. If covid deaths are simply a proportion of expected death, which are not higher than usual, then there is no need for any measures at all.

> expected death, which are not higher than usual

Again, as stated in GP (with supporting data) in neither Germany (the context of the article) nor the US (the context and source of much of the political debate in the thread) is it true that actual deaths are not higher than expected from pre-pandemic experience.

Replying to sibling: There's PLENTY of excess mortality: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Summer of this year was close to normal again, though it is of course easy to imagine it wouldn't have been in a zero-restrictions scenario.

That doesn't say anything, it only counts death during one single year: 2020. And concludes that the death rate is excessive during the flu season, compared to not in the flu season.

It expects death rate to be constant over the year, which is wrong.

You need to take the total number of deaths per capita, for 2020, and compare that to the same number for 2019, 2018, 2017 etc. And look at the standard deviation.

What on earth are you looking at? The default view is US weekly excess deaths for 2018 through October 2021, and uses historical estimates from 2013 to present to estimate per-week thresholds: it's most certainly NOT using a single threshold per year. Go read the methodology section, please!

You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous years, but because flu season happens every year since before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-Covid measures these last two years.

You are correct, I looked at it again, it's actually using historical data.

But I'm still not sure what I'm looking at, overlaying a single year over an average is always going to look "excessive". I want to see previous years as well, why not just extend the graph? That's the one single most important number that you never get so see. Here they have buried it in a complex algorithm which looks honestly suspicious at first glance, upper bound for excessive death is basically the same as average. Is standard deviation really that low?

EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?

> EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?

Because that statistic makes the whole thing seem very mellow. Same thing as average life expectancy by year; the change from 2019 to 2020/21 is very slight.

Yeah but then the whole thing is very mellow, and showing that to people is the right thing to do, and not misinterpreting to blow something out of proportion to spread panic. But I guess it doesn't get enough clicks, and it's too late now to point out that the emperor is naked...

Based on your earlier misreading of the data, please notice that you have a conclusion that you're projecting into the data. As they say, you can torture the data until it speaks. But it's very easy to look up yearly flu deaths (~40k, up to 60k in the exceptional 2017-18 season), and see that there's an order of magnitude difference between that and what we see here.

In other words, Is the emperor actually naked, or are you simply fishing for the conclusion you want to hear?

I don't think you need to outline a number in advance (if you are familiar with the UK's response, one very big problem has been that forecasts of deaths has consistently undershot estimates even when England wasn't in lockdown and had no mask mandate). We had excess mortality around 10k/week in April, that probably did require a lockdown (to be clear though, if the govt had handled the care home situation better than maybe not necessary) but the bump in December last year was very minor. I am not sure what you mean by who...whoever gets Covid.

Yes, no issues at all. I support lockdowns and have had relatives who became very ill because of lockdowns (delayed/ineffective hospital treatment, I am actually not well myself either for the same reason). I think trying to argue that someone should only support/oppose something because they have something to gain personally is the reason why politics in some countries is totally fucked (the UK is probably the worst for this, somewhere around 2017/18 most of the media became tabloids and every politics story contained some hyperbolic bullshit from some random person claiming their life would be destroyed by X minor policy change...it is just a waste of time and energy for all involved).

I agree that the NHS is fucked, but that's because of:

* COVID itself

* its funding and delivery model making it vulnerable to politicians acting in bad faith

far more than restrictions on gatherings.

By the way, an "elective" surgery is one that can be scheduled in advance. Most elective surgeries are not optional. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...

Right, and how do you explain what has happened in Scotland then? The SNP gave ample rope to the NHS, and they promptly hung themselves with it. I agree there are structural issues but those aren't separable from the funding issues. A few months ago, the Tories said the NHS was getting £20bn in extra funding, and journalists were being briefed by NHS lobbyists/BMA that weekend that it wasn't enough...at some point, the public has to recognise that the resources problem isn't separable from the structural problems.

My comment about electives was for the US audience. The US does a huge amount of quality-of-life, elective surgeries that don't happen in the UK (i.e. giving an 85-year old a knee replacement). So when you write something like: the waiting list is long, people from the US might not understand that the mix of surgeries in the UK is very different from there, and it largely represents people who need prompt care (for example, I have a relative who is a high bowel cancer risk and needs a regular screen, in the US this would likely happen annually but hasn't happened for about three years now because they were overdue in early 2020 and then everything stopped).

You should add Mortality + mortality in the following year. Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.

Interesting, I did not know. Have a source?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-i...

> Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.

I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected".

I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.

Agree there are disentangling challenges.

However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...

Hm, I think that article references this paper[1]. It looks like their "control group" was patients who were tested for COVID-19 for any reason. They then checked whether the age distributions and distributions of Charleson Comorbidity Scores were the same for people who tested positive vs those who tested negative (of positive tests, 65.3% were under 65 vs 64.5% of negative tests, 53.5% had a comorbidity score of 0 or 1 among positives vs 49.4% among negatives). However, they then checked the age distributions between mild and severe cases, found very large differences (54.5% of severe cases were over age 65 vs 20.3% of mild cases, and 74.2% of severe cases had a comorbidity score of 2 or more vs 26.4% of mild cases)[2]. And then if I'm reading correctly, they just decided that was fine and they'd calculate the hazard ratios for mild vs severe COVID without adjusting for underlying confounders anyway?

Their methodology doesn't look super sketchy when it comes to COVID vs no COVID, but I am not sure what they're trying to do by comparing mild with severe COVID without even controlling for counfounding factors.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/778434/fmed-08-77...

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...

Yeah because people who get severe covid are immune compromised, and that means they get are at high risk for severe illness/death from any infection, not just covid. And remember that most people who "die from covid" are old and frail and more or less at end of life. Median age for covid deaths in germany is 85.

You are missing point to the study.

Even if I use your position that people were to die without being infected due to their health already being somewhat compromised (which isn't the case here but I will suppose it for your trollish statements) - the point is that COVID-19 has serious and significant impacts on the cardiovascular system beyond your immediate infection and more so than we previously thought.

Sweden did not keep _everything_ open.

We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.

And by 'Sweet Spot' we mean a materially higher death rate than immediate peers ...

The lockdowns were imminently effective.

In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we cloistered again and the numbers came down.

If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down drastically.

Here you go [1]

In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

Lockdowns in Canada were ridiculous, particularly in Ontario. People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. My parents couldn't drive to their cabin up north in fear of being ticketed.

My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband who resented her for going to work because he thought she was going to get him killed.

Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to disregard rules later on?

> People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes.

If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).

https://globalnews.ca/news/7757913/cherry-blossoms-high-park...

> During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering.

to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-ski-...

> Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.

I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup could be much worse than in the US.

It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just because those particular places have an increased risk of infection but also to stop people from traveling to and from those places.

I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk.

I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.

So shut down the trains. If someone is driving to their cabin, there is no reason to stop them. It was always completely irrational to prohibit solitary or family-oriented outdoor activities. They did that around here for a while, in a largely rural state in the US Pacific Northwest region.

Senseless "do something!" edicts like that give a lot of rhetorical ammunition to the denialists and antivaxxers, while doing nothing to address the spread of COVID.

Another reason to keep people from traveling is to make sure they stay where there's available healthcare. If everyone traveled to their cabin and got sick, the local hospital wouldn't be able to handle all the cases.

Sorry, that's unconvincing at best.

Not anymore, as the virus is already anywhere. But there absolutely was a reason to stop potentially infected from travelling large distances and carry the infection into other regions.

Where am I more likely to spread the infection? In a crowded city, or in a private cabin in the woods?

> So shut down the trains.

Ok, so mandating work from home and closing down public parks is too heavy-handed but shutting down all public transport is fine?

Assuming you're trying to stop the spread of a communicable disease, yes. Do you disagree?

COVID spreads poorly outdoors. That was understood well before they reopened the public parks in my area.

People were allowed in parks. The hyperbole comes here in that the parks closed during certain seasonal events that tend to draw huge crowds.

So those videos I watched of teens being arrested for skateboarding or playing hockey weren't real?

Or the guy drinking coffee in a timmies parking lot

That's not true. I tried to go to provincial parks in Ontario and they were gated off and closed...

It's a tiny bit glib to lament 'science denialism' in a pandemic for which we do not have any living memory of dealing with, a new kind of disease for which there are many unknowns, serious concerns with equipment and personnel shortages, high mortality, time constraints, a state of emergency, and most evidently the very low social cost of 'not gathering in groups' outdoors.

In hindsight, they probably didn't need to go that far, but that's hindsight.

Along with the vaccine denialism, the other thing that has surprised me among the concerns of the plebes, is how they have difficulty grasping what an emergency implies.

There is a term called 'Fog of War' that military people are aware of, hinted at in the term 'No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy'.

Running government is like running a company - it's operational. But governing in an Emergency is more like running a startup but where all your personnel are 9-to-5 functionaries not used to such situations. It's managed chaos at best, nothing will be optimized.

Nobody has ever dealt with these problems before in living memory there are far too many unknowns, and there are very serious consequences i.e. death, hospitals overflowing, staff shortages, it's a very real emergency.

If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers, it's visceral.

It's managed chaos at best.

Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same time encouraged people to 'get out'.

But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but if we can bring a national emergency down to something more bearable, so be it.

If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to get outdoors).

>" People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes"

This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns. What was discouraged is big companies having party in the parks.

I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking from experience.

"Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear?"

???

If you look at the data fro Our World in Data you see exponential spikes, implying any group facing them is on the precipice of disaster.

The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm.

That for a few weeks 'you couldn't go to the park' is relevant, but not hugely material, neither is that they caused a bit of fear.

The 'no parks' bit is maybe an excessive feature taken in an emergency context but it's not a big deal.

Whatever we want to call them and whatever the mechanism, they were mostly useful.

I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were). And that was my point -- such people may be less inclined to follow certain guidelines in later phases of the pandemic.

> The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm.

I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't been locked down at all with zero mandates since last June and while it's certainly not rainbows, it's not nearly "untold harm" either.

Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?

"I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were)"

'That you can't visit some parks' is not material in the face of the fact that you 1) cannot go to work 2) cannot gather with people 3) must wear a mask 4) cannot go to restaurants or cinemas 5) numerous other restrictions and especially 6) Must stay at home unless you have a reason to leave.

Most of those restrictions are legitimate in the fact of a drastic spike in COVID cases, which makes the 'Don't Go To A Park' a footnote in that context.

"The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes" -> "But Florida didn't have Lockdowns"

"Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"

Every situation is a bit different, and the data is not perfectly clear, but the evidence points to 'the total social changes due to lockdowns' do actually work, moreover, none of that was known in May 2020.

We had no examples but the crisis in China and Europe back then.

Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason even if they erred a bit too much on the side of caution here and there. 'That we cold not go to parks' just isn't very relevant. If we have to do another lockdown, we will probably be able to go to the park.

> That you can't visit some parks' is not material

Disagree. Being in California I was grateful to comfortably meet with friends to go for a hike. The risk was trivial and I value social interaction. The fact that I cannot go to work or gather with people made things that you regard as immaterial in this context a lot more important to me.

> Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason

Certainly, but it was clear within a few months (Jul 2020) that being outdoors was reasonably safe, especially if you are decently distanced. But you still had places restricting people from laying on a beach, or swimming in a beach. There was no scientific support for either of these stupid policies.

> "Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"

this is a silly analogy because health policies have multivariate outcomes, it's just about deaths, etc. and it's not something you can readily experiment on scientifically; these are people's livelihood, wellbeing, and prosperity. Optimizing for a single variable is foolish.

Sweet spot being 3-5x as many deaths as Norway/Denmark/Finland?

The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though.

1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse for Sweden than its neighbors.

Why would the rate be higher in higher population countries?

That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population - but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden.

The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population.

The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates

That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure how effectively a nation's health care system treated infections.

Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors:

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

You're absolutely right. I should have looked at the deaths per 100k population column.

Where do you think these deaths come from? Do you think the health services in Sweden were overwhelmed?

At times, yeah. The closer you get to capacity the more the staff are overworked, the more likely you are to be attached to the old/cranky/unreliable ventilator, the more likely you are to be seen by fill-in staff pulled from other departments, the more likely it is that your hospital will run out of some medication and have to substitute, etc...

So all other things being equal, you'd expect CFRs to rise with case load. Probably not linearly, but measurably.

Please check out this data, section "z-score by country": https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Sweden indeed has a worse z-score compared to Norway or Denmark, but better compared to France, Netherlands or Belgium (or Germany, for that matter). And much better than Italy or Spain. I say they indeed found a sweet spot and escaped lockdowns.

People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter. I think that has a big impact on how sick people get

> People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter

huh?

Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, north of France and Germany had a closer climate (and more accustomed to heating), that's why I looked up their z-score first.

> [People] in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter.

Really?

I live in the UK and have spent some time in Sweden and I would agree with this. Swedish homes are amazingly warm and cozy in the winter.

Yeah, and in germany using the heating in your home is basically considered an unnecessary luxury, while in Sweden it's always included in the rent, and always on.

Every country had to find some balance between freedom and health. I don't think Sweden is to blame more than anyone else. They had less death than most European countries.

Following you reasoning, how many more death did the US have compared to China? would you advocate to lock up people like China did?

Did china get less freedom because of covid lockdowns? That is, surely people faced absurd restrictions, but given the length of the restrictions, which is better for people?

I know that I would prefer 1 month hard lockdown than 1 year soft. But idk how it actually went there (curious to know!)

Talking to friends in China, they've been mostly open since the initial lockdowns. Every once in a while there are hard localized lockdowns, but majority of people majority of the time is life as normal.

And not just freedom, but more important things such as a functioning society in general with regards to childrens education, babies being born, the economy doing well etc etc. It's not like lockdowns are only affecting some dude's ability to go and drink beer. And they are actively harmful to people's health too, so actually it's about finding a balance between everyone and everything, and the immune compromised people at risk from cold viruses.

With "big gatherings" being defined as 50 people.

A sweet spot, were the elderly first were not properly protected, and then euthanized instead of given at least a treatment effort? Not even C-Pap, just panic-relieve and pain-medication. Not even given a choice, just scratched out of the book by politics.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG

It was a reckless betrayal of the elderly population of sweden.

I'm all for the freedom of self-euthanization, if a person longs for that and no, this can not be compared with what went down.

Which can be best described as a remnant from a horrific pre-worldwar 2 "survival of the fittest" mindset being dragged into the light.

The Swedes wore their masks and got vaccinated. What worked for them would not necessarily have worked for us.

> The Swedes wore their masks

No such thing happened.

Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And far worse then the neighbouring countries.

I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the policies were not worse than other bad policies.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Such a relief to live in Sweden. No one is pretending to wear masks and we're doing just fine. If i wasn't reading the news i wouldn't even know there was a pandemic.

As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending to wear masks but only as chin diapers.

You get used to wearing masks very fast and it's no big deal. They can be inconvenient. So what. Independently of the question whether masks are needed or not, it's bizarre and unreasonable that people still get heated about this topic. There are plenty of things worth discussing other than minor inconveniences like wearing masks or washing hands.

I personally don't think wearing masks are a minor inconvenience, and never got used to it. I like to see people's faces.

Blessings to you, all that tells me is that you've never had a real inconvenience in your life.

I wonder if someone dares to say the same thing to a victim of any crime.

I'll assume you replied to the wrong comment and didn't intend to insinuate that mandating the wearing of masks is a crime.

Wearing masks are huge deal. They are depressing as fuck and make everybody look ugly. We aren’t doing heart surgery… masks are silly rain dances.

I really hate mask religion. Especially the branch of it that likes to gaslight and minimize the idea that masks suck.

Absolutely not. I’m Swedish and lived in NO and DK during the last 2 years. Every time I went home and could live life like normal was godsend.

Is tattooing a religious symbol on one's forehead "a minor inconvenience"? How about less visible part of a body? What if said symbol is a Hindu swastika? What if it's just a washable decal of a Hindu swastika? What if it is mandated under threat of a fine and imprisonment?

Maybe we have to agree to disagree on "inconvenience" of mask wearing. It is, clearly, an irrational but very powerful standoff. Masks have a marginal effect on protection (11% relative reduction in transmission, according to best recent study? So the abs risk reduced from, say, 20% to 18%) while having an enormous symbolic meaning, made even bigger by turning into political token. Washing hands is not even in the same league of religiousness. We'll see how it goes when it is made mandatory with govt-appointed "hygiene inspectors" at every workplace and fines up to a few grand...

Surely, fogging glasses and alike are minor things, but instinctive revulsion, panic, "brain shutting", "blood boiling" and suicidal tendencies aren't something to dismiss. I'm not particularly proud to be having such reaction, and I honestly tried to rationalize myself out of it, but to no success. At this point I also try to avoid seeing masked faces. I close articles or posts where author's photo is masked, blacklist YT channels and switch off TV when masked reporter or anybody pops up. That's the only thing I can do to keep some sanity before it overcomes me. And it will, because the mask mandates are looking to be with us for years...

The analogy you don't have to accept, but may help to illustrate how we (people, resisting "minor" inconvenience for "greater good") feel. Consensual physical intimacy is a great thing, very pleasant, absolutely harmless if practiced with proper care and contraception. People always sought it and it is still very much a driver of life, and will be forever. In wild nature our close relatives, bonobos, practice it widely and casually for stress relief, and it works great for the cohesion of their society! They known to have much less aggression than their bigger bros or humans. Surely the solid rational case can be made that adopting such practices could improve human society as well, maybe in major way. How would you feel if such "minor inconvenience" is mandated, with proper rules and protocols, of course? It must bizarre and unreasonable that the foolishness of "muh freedumb" standing in the way to "Greater Good"? How foolish it is of humans to make non-consensual intercourse a crime, sometimes worse than murder!

I'm not sure who "us" is for you, but Swedes are not vaccinated at an especially high rate.

They're at about the EU average. 8-10% above the US average, 5-7% above California, but a few percent below New England, for example.

Why would you get vaccinated for something that you're not in a risk group for anyway, it doesn't make any sense. And even double vaccines and boosters. If you did this pre-covid the doctor would have diagnosed you a hypochondric

Do you know that it's very normal for people not in a risk group for the flu to not only get double vaccines but to actually get a new one every single year? OMG, doctor's must be going crazy with all the hypochondriacs doing that.

It may be very normal in the US but it’s not the case in Europe.

No I've never heard of anyone doing that, and I have never read anything about it or seen it in the media. The only thing I've ever heard is that elderly people over 70 has the option to take one dose of flu vaccine per year

And two of those New England states have among the highest case rates in the country right now (which isn't the same as death rates of course).

We certainly got vaccinated, but it could be better. But masks are few and far between. There was a recommendation to wear them on some public transport for a while (and might come back, due to Omicron), but my very unscientific anecdata I'd say less than 1% of people I see wear masks. Going through the central station in Stockholm in rush hour, seeing hundreds if not thousands of people, and you can probably count the number of mask wearers on your fingers.

I would follow any mask mandate, but the experience here (from my point of view) is that they don't seem to help that much. Otherwise we should have an absolute explosion of cases right now, compared to other European countries. My personal theory is that people don't use them properly; look at people on tv, constantly adjusting them, or wearing them under the chin, reusing single-use masks, etc.

There's been an uptick in cases during the last week or so[1], but compare it to eg. Germany[2] that have had a strong mask mandate for a long time. I don't understand it either.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ (do note that when looking at the chart for deaths, we have always been lagging a couple of weeks)

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/

And everyone always forgets those politicians who had to resign after making millions on the mask deals, and pretend that this corruption has nothing to do with why Germany has the mask mandates...

Sweden had mortality rates nearly 10x those of their neighbours.

Not really, though:

* Sweden: 1,485

* Denmark: 500

* Finland: 244

* Norway: 199

* Iceland (not really a neighbour, being a 1000 miles away, accross an ocean): 102

Some more random cherrypicking:

* USA: 2,414

* Italy: 2,221

* Belgium: 2,322

* UK: 2,124

* Russia: 1,901

* Peru: 5,984

Deaths per million capita, as of 2nd december 2021, from[1].

[1] All numbers from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Pretty sure 1485 is nearly 10x 199.

You said "neighbours", when in reality you mean "one neighbouring country".

What useless nitpicking. How does that affect the actual argument in any way?

Sweden has the highest density pockets of all of them. Meanwhile Norway has more fjords than people.

The VAST majority of deaths there are people over 70, and Sweden like the US warehouses old people in cramped retirement homes where the virus can spread rapidly regardless of the public health approach outside. Their deaths fell off precipitously once vaccines got to the old.

The lesson here seems to be that nursing homes probably cause some amount of excess mortality, and need special attention during epidemics/pandemics.

You think that is different in any other country?

Yes, very different. Starting in the 90's Norway started transitioning from large crowded buildings with long corridors to more home based care and other approaches that seek to keep people out of settings that look like nursing homes. In southern Europe more people live with family when they're old. This is common in lots of Asia as well. In the US it varies a lot regionally and by income.

What difference does it make, they all get the virus eventually anyway

The crowding can cause a lot of morbidity before anyone knows what's going on or how to treat the new infection. This is what happened in New York, the pandemic ripped through nursing facilities killing thousands of seniors well before any treatment was available.

If things unfold more slowly, you have more time to develop treatments. A lot of the deaths in NYC occurred before we figured out that just laying people on their sides reduced the risk of dying significantly.

Moreover, now that we have the ability to rapidly produce vaccines, it isn't a forgone conclusion that everyone will necessarily "get the virus eventually anyway."

The numbers in Russia cannot be believed. My entire extended family (in Moscow) caught what was almost certainly COVID (Most of them twice, my grandfather was at death's door over it), and not a single one of them got a positive diagnosis.

Sweden did worse than the other Scandinavian countries that enacted stricter Covid restrictions, including lockdowns. Sweden had roughly 5-7x as many deaths per capita as its immediate neighbors of Norway and Finland. Germany had less deaths per capita as well:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

I'll be curious to know what these numbers are in 5 years.

What is this obsession with limiting comparison of Sweden with "other scandanavian countries"? Is there some sort of special risk factor that only applies to scandanavia? Does COVID know what people look like? Why not compare stats of major metro areas with other similar metro areas in the world?

Because the density of the metro areas are similar. Stockholm is not comparable to Paris or London when it comes to density for instance.

Culture is also very similar between Scandinavian countries and much different from western Europe, with people much more isolated (which is tough to adjust to for immigrants there actually).

People work in offices and go to shops in Scandinavia too. Maybe compare to the dozens of US states with lower population density than Sweden?

Sweden has much higher ethnic & cultural diversity than Norway & Finland, and hence more people passing through it's borders potentially bringing in new infections from abroad. It also has fewer hospital beds per population, and higher population density. All these factors and more need to be taken into account when doing country comparisons. We won't really know how much effect the difference in policies had until someone has done a proper causal analysis using some regression model or other econometric technique.

I got the stats from here: https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/norway.sweden/de...

For the same reason that their vaccination rates and wealth and gini coefficients and all types of other metrics closely resemble each other more than some random country like Ethiopia or Peru.

We’re talking about Germany and France. Right across the water. Sweden had lower deaths in earlier years than their neighboring countries and this was a reversion to the mean. Speaking as a Norwegian people in this country like to look smart but they’re not getting the last laugh this time.

Because they have similar risk factors, which are much, much lower than the other countries people are noting Sweden appeared to have fared better than. The UK, which imported a lot more cases, has more crowded commuter trains and bars and probably a less sensible population tried the Swedish strategy for a few weeks, but gave up because the deaths were mounting.

Yeah and avoiding looking at the statistics for mortality to see if it's actually higher than usual, which it isn't. I looked at the statistics of mortality for sweden, 2020 was high but well within standard deviation, and there were several more deadly years in recent history, 2008 and much more deadly years in the 1990s, without this ever even making headlines.

What stood out the most in the statistics, actually, was that 2019 had an unusually low death rates, if you add up 2020 and 2019 they basically even out to an average death rate.

I bet mortality has been abnormally low during 2021 so now we have a bunch of dry tinder again which will cause another "crisis" and lockdown as soon as weather is cold and viruses making the rounds again. Never ending cycle of panicking when old people die.

It's always cherry picking to deliberately misinterpret statistics to make the most dramatic headline, it has been during the whole pandemic. Nobody is even trying to make accurate and relevant conclusions with the numbers, quite the opposite it's like a sport now who can lie the most with statistics.

A lot of that can be attributed to a relatively huge early spike in deaths at nursing homes.

Rightly, Sweden decided it was a bad idea to do go about business as usual at nursing homes. After this, their relative difference to other Scandinavian countries is much smaller.

And are those spikes in deaths at nursing homes not normal? Is that not how things always and usually work? Do people at nursing homes not die mostly in the winter and flu season, since forever? What are the statistics of excess mortality, is it higher than usual or not. Old people die. I read headlines in the papers "10 people have died since moving into a nursing home" That's what nursing homes are for. Everyone who moves into a nursing home dies...

The average death rate for people in nursing homes for an entire year wasn't even as high as the death rate was for just a few week period: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

Almost ~3200 people died in nursing homes in a couple of months at the beginning of the pandemic. There's ~95k people in nursing homes. That's 3.3%...

These deaths still account for ~1/5th of all Sweden's covid deaths.

Hence, when people say 5x as many people died in Sweden - a full 1x of that is from the early nursing home no-strategy.

Doesn't say anything, death rates are not constant, it always varies a lot ever year by year. Did 2020 have excessive mortality per capita compared to other years or not? No it didn't. It doesn't matter if you find some anecdote.

Everyone knows death rate was high in peak covid. As it always is in peak flu season, so what, the year was well within standard deviation

This is false, you have been misinformed. See here, and compare for instance Sweden with their neighbours Norway and Finland.

https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/17/eu-excess-deaths-in-2020...

It doesn't make any sense to compare it to neighboring countries, you need to compare the same country to previous years. That's the real interesting statistic, and the one that nobody is showing you. Because it's not dramatic enough..

The graph is exactly that. Each country’s excess mortality compared to that countries previous years.

The comparison with neighbours is to gleam the effects of their differing mitigation strategies.

I looked at it again, it's only comparing to the average, without knowing the standard deviation it doesn't really say much. "2020 was above average" yeah we know that, but was it higher than a "usual" year? No it wasn't, and you can't draw that conclusion by comparing it to the average.

Also it looks like they are doing the comparison month by month which doesn't make much sense since this will vary a lot of course...

This data is compiled by professional statisticians.

Deaths aren't evenly distributed throughout the year. High-traffic seasons will cause a spike, very cold or hot weather, etc. So month-by-month comparison is reasonable. Doing that also shows in the graphs when the waves hit various countries.

I agree, it's missing the standard deviation though. (But again, look at the graphs, you'll see a difference of 10, perhaps 20% fluctuating around zero, and then suddenly a wave of 60,80,100% more deaths. It's unlikely a coincidence.

month-by-month doesn't make sense because the flu doesn't happen at the same month each year, and yes without at least also the standard deviation, it doesn't say anything.

Just seeing that the temperature is below average outside doesn't say anything about the question: do we have abnormal weather? Is there a crisis? And even if this years winter is colder than the last three years, still doesn't mean that it's abnormal.

It needs to be a statistical outlier to be abnormal, it needs to be statistically significant. Why are they not showing previous years? Why are sample sizes deliberately small when we have more data? Why don't we see basic required numbers such as standard deviation, median, percentiles? It's all clickbait bullshit

This is all public data. If you think there’s some big conspiracy you can look it up yourself, calculate how the data show COVID is no big deal and then share the results.

Yeah I already looked at the public data and did the calculations, and I am sharing the results as I've said in other comments, and I challenge anyone to disprove me with another opinion that holds up to normal basic statistical scrutiny, and not some misleading clickbait bullshit

I looked through your comments but can't find the link to your calculations. Would you mind sharing it again here?

Here's the source data I used (only Sweden): https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

You don't even need to make any calculations really, just take a quick look at the table to see that the death rate was unusually low 2019 and only slightly high in 2020 (Edit: sorry, almost compensated by 2019's low numbers, not completely). And if you go back in time, you can see that in fact every single year between 1999-2012 had a higher mortality rate than 2020.

Thanks for the link!

Yes, I see that. I calculated the mortality rate for all years, then the average and standard deviation for the last 10 years preceding 2020.

The average is 0.92%, standard deviation is 0.03%. The mortality rate in 2020 was 0.95% or exactly one standard deviation above the average for the last 10 years.

There is also another clear trend from the data which is slowly but steadily declining mortality rates. Obviously since 1749, but this trend is especially noteworthy during this century (since 2000). Then only one year has increased mortality (by more than one least significant digit) which is 2020.

2020 saw 10% higher mortality than 2019.

So to conclude: I'm by no means a statistician but I'd say this is probably not a random fluke.

> Did 2020 have excessive mortality per capita compared to other years or not? No it didn't.

Yes, it did. The statistics are pretty obvious: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I'm saying compared to other years. That link does not compare to other years, it only compared 2020 to itself.

> Counts of deaths in the most recent weeks were compared with historical trends (from 2013 to present) to determine whether the number of deaths in recent weeks was significantly higher than expected, using Farrington surveillance algorithms (1).

I just want to know year by year death rate per capita, and average, and standard deviation. That's the only way I can draw the conclusion "is there anything abnormal going on"

All cause mortality in Sweden is flat and significantly lower than the last 20 years or so.

And what is expected deaths per capita? That relative measure is irrelevant unless you compare it to some kind of normal death rate in the past. Are you expecting deaths per capita to drastically drop and be kept much lower from 2020 and forward, compared to the past?

This is often repeated fake news.

Take a look at this graph - cumulative deaths since, I don't know, start of 2021 or something.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Sweden is just barely worse than other Scandinavian countries (definitely not 5-7x). Germany is 50-100% worse than Sweden.

So while you might use "total deaths" as an argument that the Swedish "no lockdowns" strategy was worse at the beginning of the pandemic, it's clearly superior now.

The linked graph shows Sweden at 7x norway's rate, 5x finland's rate and 3x denmarks rate. Am I reading that right? How are you concluding that Sweden's strategy was clearly superior?

To paraphrase you: it was great to have all those vulnerable people in care homes die immediately from Covid in 2020 since it avoids a few of them dying in 2021.

You realise how nonsensical (and callous) that sounds?

What exactly do those studies compare? How countries without lockdown coped in the same wave?

Lockdowns were called because hospitals were at capacity and immediate risk of failing to keep up service - as is currently again the case e.g in Germany.

Remember, the first lockdowns in Europe were mandated after hospitals in Italy were forced to conduct triage. (The "who do I have to let die" kind of triage)

Why did that not happen in whatever control groups the studies were looking at?

If Swedish hospitals exceeded capacity as has happened in other nations (like the US) then there would have been more severe restrictions. The name of the game is and always has been "don't let this very contagious virus collapse our healthcare systems".

The "we should have never shut anything down" contingent doesn't seem to understand this.

No, we should have strived to get everyone vaccinated (by making it mandatory) and then this pandemic would be over in Europe.

"Opening up" would have killed more people than it killed in the UK.

The people driving this wave, who are getting seriously ill and dying are the unvaccinated.

How would you enforce this mandatory vaccine? Would you go as far as killing the unvaccinated?

Like you enforce anything: by passing a law which makes it mandatory, by introducing a fine and by assigning somebody to monitor it.

It is not going to be a crime to be unvaccinated just a lot more inconvenient.

It is worth remembering the "let people get on with it and they will work out" viewpoint within Europe was widely discredited by April 2020 (and ignoring the fact it worked in countries like Japan that have quite significant constraints on govt power).

My conclusion from this is that, in this area, regulations are path dependent. In some countries, people will make the right choices themselves. In others, they won't. I am in the UK, in 2020 it was evident that the hands-off approach really wouldn't work. But it did work this year.

Also, I don't think there is any question about fixing it. You have to test (most countries still don't test enough), you have to give people the information to make a choice, and you have to keep vaccinating. Imo, and I thought the opposite in 2020, lockdowns/heavy regulations aren't a long-term strategy (outside of China).

I think in general, the gap between what regulations say and what people will do anyways will be small (as long as the regulations are more strict than "default" behavior).

At the beginning of the pandemic, where I was, people mostly stopped going to restaurants before regulations said they couldn't. When restrictions have been relaxed, I couldn't really observe any changes in behavior.

Japan didn't "let people get on with it and they will work out". The immigration policy is one of the strictest in the world. We've had numerous "lock downs", which weren't legally enforceable, but when the government makes a request of businesses and people, the compliance rate is very high, and though it's not enforceable, the government will publicly shame companies, and companies take their reputations extremely seriously.

People's willingness to comply with lockdowns over time has waned, because the government's response to covid has been pretty incompetent. The thing that has finally started turning things around is the high rate of vaccination.

There was a paper recently circulating the media which shows the immense amount of "esoteric" people in German speaking countries. Those people are responsible for the staggering vaccination numbers and spreading of conspiracy myths around this crisis. It's so prevalent, I can't remember anyone who at least once spread some unscientific bullshit in the last 2 years here.

The handling of those people in the media and the way their opinions are presented equally with scientific facts result in this reluctance politicians displayed in this crisis. Now we all have to suffer because of it. I hope we finally mandatory vaccinations...it's overdue.

By esoteric you mean pseudoscience believers, homeopaths and the like?

Recently moved back from Germany after five years there, homeopathy depressingly common and accepted there, even by many medical professionals.

Yes this is what I meant.

We still have homeopathic pills and "treatments" which are being paid by the health insurance. Something which goes back to some politicians wife who believed in it and was able to influence the political process. The huge Steiner tradition in here is catastrophic. We just recently had COVID running wild in a Waldorf school. Turns out, faked vaccination certificates were very popular...

It's quite embarrassing and it's actually the first time the side effects of this madness come up in public discourse.

The problem with this claim is that vaccine fanatics spread vast amounts of misinformation themselves, and often rely on it for their core arguments.

Just in this thread alone, we can find people saying:

1. Vaccines would let us wipe out COVID (wrong).

2. Even harsher lockdowns would let us wipe out COVID (wrong).

3. Vaccines stop people transmitting it (wrong).

4. Vaccinated people don't end up in ICU with COVID (wrong).

5. Sweden had unusually bad outcomes (wrong).

6. That it's "very normal" for people to take yearly flu shots (wrong, only ~35% uptake amongst at risk patients in 2019).

And that's not even a full list. There's not only a large set of factually incorrect beliefs amongst vaccine mandate fanatics (and that's the only word for you guys now), but also a generalized incorrect belief that it's the other side who are badly informed.

Excellent list!

I fail to see your point.

On the other side we have anti-vaxxers here too. Who's more harmful?

While most of those points you made here are just overblown generalisations (and probably not even stated in this fashion), none of them are completely wrong. On the anti-vaxxer side we have claims which are not only completely wrong, people literally die because they or others around them believe in them. So again: what's your point?

If you are vaccinated how is an unvaccinated person a threat to you?

Seriously - how?

Spiritually, you represent threat. I am holy and those around me must be holy as well.

By causing hospitals to be overloaded so I or people close to me can't be treated in an emergency? Not to mention all the hospital personnel having one more wave of hell to endure. By giving, possibly repeatedly so much viral lead to old people I know that they might end up in a hospital even when fully vaccinated? By being essentially a petri dish for creating new harmful variants?

The only potentially valid point here is hospital overload. Everything else you listed applies to the vaccinated as well.

Let's start by agreeing that hospital overload is definitely a bad thing.

Vaccination should help reduce the load, but has anything else been done? Hasn't staff in hospitals decreased over the course of the pandemic? Aren't we funneling tons of money to pharma instead of Frontline workers? What about setting up field hospitals? What about altering the priority access to emergency health care of the unvaccinated?

Hospital overload has been a liminal crisis for the past 2 years, but has yet to materialize as a real issue.

Have we just been getting lucky? narrowly avoiding disaster each wave?

Because this is almost starting to look like a boogeyman that pops up on a regular basis that reminds us that we need to live in fear.

> Vaccination should help reduce the load, but has anything else been done? Hasn't staff in hospitals decreased over the course of the pandemic? Aren't we funneling tons of money to pharma

People can go and get a jab. This is easy. Can be done in minutes. No harm done.

You can't build a hospital like that or get personal cloned from some pool of educated personal. Even if we'd have started 2 years ago. Wtf do you want with a field hospital? Those people don't need bandages...what are you talking about??

I know this smokescreen it just came up all over the anti-vaxxer scene. It's a hilarious attempt to cloud their own responsibility and divert the anger away from them. It won't work because it's so cheap and stupid. Especially coming from people who refuse to accept the easiest and fastest solution.

And NO, hospital overload is the only valid point. By spreading and keeping the pandemic running you also ruin peoples lifes economically. People who depend on crowds coming to their store for example or doing sports with them. Than there is long COVID...

Man...this topic is not new. All those ways this is harmful has been presented in the media over the last years. How can you still be so ignoran December 2021????

Breathe.

Field hospitals were proposed early on in 2020, they even sent the medical ship to NY up the Hudson. Its not my idea and it's not a new idea. If you're not aware of that, then I'm sorry for assuming the extent of your awareness.

We don't have to clone anyone. We can do 2 very easy things: 1. Rehire the unvaccinated that were let go. 2. Pay our front line workers more.

Everyone should support this. It's an easy win.

As someone who's unvaccinated and had covid, I honestly don't know what long covid is or why we should be afraid of it anymore than the long term effects of the vaccine.

Though if you fell for one boogeyman, it makes sense that you'd fall for another.

Covid is out of the box, economic damage is inevitable. How much is up to us. If you look at Florida, Sweden, or even the Amish, it's clear lockdowns do more economic harm than covid does.

Last but not least, I'll say it again.

Hospital collapse has been a liminal crisis for 2 years.

We have more vaccinated than ever before yet were still somehow on the brink of collapse. Nothing has been done about it except to scape goat the unvaccinated. People are going to be unvaccinated. The vaccine is going to wear off. Try doing something about it instead of dehumanizing people you disagree with.

Enough is enough.

> Field hospitals were proposed early on in 2020, they even sent the medical ship to NY up the Hudson.

So this ship was manned by robots or where is the connection to what I wrote?

> We don't have to clone anyone. We can do 2 very easy things: 1. Rehire the unvaccinated that were let go. 2. Pay our front line workers more.

Why would you hire somebody who is unable to do the most basic stuff to protect their patients (get vaccinated). Those people are obviously not suited for their job and I'm happy they are gone. There should be a list so those people never ever end up in a responsible job like that or at least need to get some MPU before they attempt it.

@2 you still won't magically conjure them out of nothing just because you pay them. You need to learn that stuff. It takes time.

> As someone who's unvaccinated and had covid, I honestly don't know what long covid is or why we should be afraid of it anymore than the long term effects of the vaccine.

I can't imagine how somebody can write such a thing December 2021 and still expect to be taken seriously.

I have zero expectations about people's ability to take the right thing seriously.

You've made up your mind. You have complete confidence and conviction in the vaccine.

That's fine. I respect your right to choose based on your own risk tolerance.

So of course you and other fanatics won't take these points seriously, you think the alt premise is completely illegitimate.

It's a fool errand to try to change the mind of someone who's certain they can't be wrong, so I'm not going to try.

What I am trying to do is explain that after 2 years of worrying trends, events, and numerous unknowns.. it's reasonable to believe we're not getting the full story about the vaccine.

But you know what, I hope I'm wrong. Let's chat again in 5 years, and then we'll know for certain.

I wonder if you didn't get the point or intentionally play stupid here because long COVID is a thing already. You don't have to wait 5 years for it. It's happening. It's documented. You can google it up. It's easy. Everybody can do it.

Just because YOU didn't have it, doesn't mean nobody else didn't.

Actually no, and I'd love to be proven wrong.

I've seen zero convincing evidence of "long covid".

Mostly I see it defined as vague psychological effects .. hard to imagine any universal confounding factors that might result in everyone having a poorer psyche in general in recent history.

The effects last a few weeks on average, 3 months in rare cases. While its odd an ominous for the effects to last that long, there's no reason to believe it will last for years.

And while there are some real permanent effects, like loss of smell + taste, these are extremely rare. Like vaccine induced myocarditis rare, maybe even more so.

Meanwhile, "all cause of death" rates are on the rise, despite ATH vaccination rates. Is that definitely because of "long covid", and definitely not because of the vaccine? That doesn't make sense to me.

So it's "play stupid" than.

Sad.

You're taking extreme talking points on this and making it seem like it's the norm.

Vaccines don't stop being from transmitting, but it reduces the length of infection by about 2 days, it drastically reduces the likelihood of infection, which drastically reduces the transmission rate, and recent studies have shown that it does also reduce the likelihood of transmission directly.

Vaccinated people with breakthrough cases may end up in the ICU, but the rate of hospitalization, admittance to the ICU, and cases of death are considerably lower than those who haven't been vaccinated.

Using the extreme example, and pointing out that each argument is wrong, rather than extreme, while not discussing the facts is just another form of misinformation.

I think what he/she is saying is that there are fanatics on both sides, and platforms, parties, and people tend to side with one over the other when it aligns with their agenda. Trust and truth are the casualties.

The reasonable choice is to disallow all fanatics, but the world is too polarized on this topic. The center cannot hold.

Classic "both sides"....useless.

It would be nice if they're extreme talking points, but these are routinely presented by the media and public health agencies. For example up until very recently claim (4) was being made in Germany, and claim (3) is basically the claim underlying any implementation of vaccine passports - of course, we may suspect they are in reality merely means of extra-judicial punishment, but governments officially deny it.

Regardless, whilst these claims are "extreme" in the sense of being phrased in absolutes, they aren't "extreme" in the sense of being rarely believed, are they? Not only do they crop up all over this thread but in the very article the thread is about, Angelas Merkel, not exactly famous for being the Queen of Extreme, says "The fourth wave must be broken and this has not yet been achieved" which is simply another way of saying (3) and strongly alluding to (1) and (2).

Also:

"it drastically reduces the likelihood of infection, which drastically reduces the transmission rate, and recent studies have shown that it does also reduce the likelihood of transmission directly"

Let's break this down:

1. Infection rates. Health agencies claim it reduces the likelihood of infection, and at first it genuinely seems to, but the only one that is willing to show the actual raw data before they wildly alter it using statistical techniques, is the UK HSA. Their data shows that by now the rate amongst vaccinated people is actually a lot higher than among the unvaccinated for some large age groups! This sounds like it should be impossible, but it turns out to have been observed in pre-COVID times with other vaccines.

They have been reduced to claiming that comparing case rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people isn't a valid way to determine if the vaccine works, due to vague behavioural differences that they speculate must exist but have no proof for.

2. Rate of transmission. Not for the first time, we find that epidemiological studies aren't worth much. Can you cite yours, so we can see when it was written? Because once again UK data contradicts it (or it does now at least):

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."

No real difference in transmission at all. Actually slightly higher for vaccinated people but let's assume that's not really significant.

Germany had elections at the end of September, and I feel that this is the main reason for the catastrophy that is unfolding now. It has prevented the ruling parties from imposing stricter vaccination requirements more early on. They could have easily required everyone to be vaccinated by November first, and this current situation would have been spared. Now the government still has to do it, but they need to rush it, and they impose unrealistic goals like 30 million vaccinations until christmas.

After Macron's speech in July to put vaccination requirements for the medical industry, there was a major surge to the vaccination centers. Meanwhile Germany was in pre election mood.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-d...

You can see the effect of Macon's speech clearly on this graph: it led to a major surge in per-day vaccinations in mid July 2021 while Germany stayed in steep decline, and the "corona is over" mentality spread. Germany has reduced its distance to France in the last few weeks, but France still has more vaccinations than us, and it's far away from european leaders like Portugal.

At the start of covid, everyone in europe admired Germany for its good covid response. They flew ICU patients from Italy to Germany as the italian hospitals were way beyond their capacity. Now we might have to fly Germans the other way.

Yes, you can say that there has barely been public support for vaccination requirements up until the start of the current wave. And indeed it's been quite unpopular in the autumn. But if politicians had been more courageously trying to sell vaccination requirements, maybe it'd have worked out.

This current wave moves from the east to the west. In fact, Germany has probably peaked, we have 4 days in a row of declining number of infections. France is at the beginning of the next wave, their number of today's infections is approaching German numbers.

source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/

Note that German infrastructure is at its limits in terms of how many tests can be done or whether the health office can track down the people a known covid case has been in contact with. Due to the sheer size of the wave, the percentage of unknown covid cases has increased.

source (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-zahlen-corona-125.html

But yes, there is a strong west/east and north/south gradient in terms of incidence.

I'm not so sure how valid the argument about test capacity limits and underreporting is. While laboratories for PCR tests might be above capacity the 2G+ requirement (recovered or vaccinated AND tested) must have increased quick antigen tests dramatically, which also get registered and positive tests reported. E.g. to enter a public pool I had to get tested and they had a test tent right next to the entrance. The week before I could just enter with my vaccination certificate. Many people have to get tested more extensively now for work or travel. So I would be very surprised if the test coverage hasn't actually increased and declining numbers with more tests certainly looks like a good sign.

Everyone will get this virus. Countries that do good now will do bad later and countries that did bad now we do good later. It's all inevitable. All you can do is take it on the chin or delay it. Every country has predetermined number based on their population demographics and health, that they will hit and there's no thing we can do about it.

Nothing we can do about it?

Vaccines work.

Yes they do. But total deaths will always be the same over x amount is time. For instance instead of a 5 year old just getting COVID and never worrying about it again we delay it so they get it when there 80 and die from it. We’ll never have a good enough vaccine. We’ll cure most cancers before this thing. Lol

History will show that the only right choice was to let this thing rip. Come to this thread in 10 - 20 years. Unless an actually deadly virus hasn’t wiped us out by the

> But total deaths will always be the same over x amount is time.

Can you elaborate? That does not make sense to me.

No democratic country is built to handle something like a pandemic. That much became clear the last two years. You need to be able to mandate strict laws that take away a lot of liberties that we have learn to consider as standard.

Many countries do currently mandate strict laws that take away a lot of liberties. Australia, Canada, Europe, parts of US. Are they still democracies?

Absolutely not, have you seen Fox News. Us over here in Australia are absolutely needing to be liberated by the US. I can't wait till the Marines roll in.

Its terrifying, over here in Brisbane, Queensland. We've had one locally acquired case from Covid in the last few months.

We're going to pubs, no masks, No Covid. But we're sorely missing our freedom. /s

While I don’t believe this was true across Australia at certain points in the pandemic, your point is definitely taken and I would agree with the message.

However, I don’t understand the US-centric (satirical) perspective in a comment like this. The article is about Germany, the person you replied to made no specific mention of the US as far as I can tell, and their view is not unusual in many other regions of the world (such as the one I live in). Does the radicalism of Fox News really need more attention or notoriety?

Fair comment. Fox News certainly does not need any more attention.

No they are not. If you can declare a state emergency in the name of public health without quantifying it in any way, and bypassing any forms of debates or elections or votes (one expert said something), that's for sure not a democracy.

North Korea also claims to be a democracy.

Vietnam had zero covid deaths until summer of 2020.

> No democratic country is built to handle something like a pandemic. That much became clear the last two years.

Much of the measures have been justified by saying they're temporary in place under the emergency. Two years of temporary measures, and now people are saying they need to be permanent.

We had to have stricter rules from day one. Also make vaccination mandatory. Take the hard decisions in the start instead of let this thing dragging for years before you decide to take the political cost. I live in Europe and watching this thing unravel it has been one clusterfuck after another. Lockdowns which weren't actually lockdowns except for closed shops, mandatory masks without any supervision so it's all comes down to personal responsibility, summers where all rules were suspended so we can welcome tourists, and so on and so forth. I'm sick and tired of it all. We need politicians to act like adults.

Ex-paramedic turned comp sci researcher here.

> There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over"

I totally agree. Last week saw a dentist and this morning (10:02) two sales ladies at a baker's embedded in an EDEKA supermarket with no mask, one of them coughing. When pointing out politely that they should really put their masks on, my comment of mine was ignored. The unfair thing is that it won't be these people dying, but likely third parties that did nothing wrong (like the elderly couple behind me in the queue).

There is a huge debate focusing on vaccination, about forcing people to do it etc., but schools are open, kindergardens are open (every parent knows that's where stuff spreads), people shop, socialise, eat together, work together almost if there was nothing going on.

The government failed to point out that vaccinated people can still get CoViD because they were afraid it would stop people from getting the jab, so they assumed they were safe and went back to pre-CoViD behavior patterns. The government is reducing the testing regime, so future numbers will be less reliable.

Public TV station ARD/Das Erste started to lose credibility with me when they claimed on Twitter that medical masks don't protect. That is false/"fake news": the truth is they are designed to protect the patient when worn by staff, so their protection is asymmetric and biased against the wearer and in favor of the person talking to the wearer. But they do provide a little protection even for the wearer, as the larger droplets get caught by them, and catching a virus also depends on the amount and concentration of viral material exposed to. (The reason the posted the tweet was because at the time, there was a shortage and they did not want that non-medical staff buy them up so there was enough of a supply for medical staff. It's okay to ask people to stop buying them for that reason but not feeding them with false information to make them stop.)

The new government put a general in place to run a task force and instead of saying "fantastic, why didn't the previous government think of that?" the press questioned why leaders who all declined military service on the grounds of conscience appointed a military man (the candidate seems to be a supply chain expert, so not a bad choice - although I personally would pick a paramedic because pandemic training is part of one's education, at least it was back in the 1990s when I did mine).

Despite all of this, in fairness the situation in Germany is much better than in other countries (I can only say that from personal knowledge about the UK, France and the US), and I would say that at the beginning, the government did a good job in absolute and relative terms.

Two major components for this winter wave:

1.) We just had our federal election so politicians were super cautious not to alienate anyone with though measures. Because we didn't have the transition of power to the new chancellor yet, this is still holding us back.

2.) If vaccination rates would just be another 5% higher (meaning 20% less unvaccinated people), the speed of the 4th wave would have been so much damper that we would have gotten through this winter without any hard restrictions (see France). I think there was a lot of wishful thinking involved that thought that those 5% would come around eventually.

What I really like about all these different threads and topics on COVID is the mastery of control that is shown. We have viable treatments that work and could be prescribed en masse. Not discussed, not mentioned. The sole discussion topic is "vaccines" and mask theatre. Totally ignoring any inconvenient data about either.

Everyone's focus is to tear each other apart about which level of destruction is best for the non-vaxed. They are the problem and need to be crushed. Just excellent demonstration of media control and emotional manipulation.

Here we see the Germans following the leaders of human rights: China, Austria, Australia in preparing further legal frameworks to make the non-vaxed into non-people. Their futures will be fines, imprisonment and hopefully their lives permanently ruined. With cheers from the vaxxed.

After this we will be imprisoning or maybe just hanging from lampposts those who don't get enough boosters. For the safety of the children.

> "We have viable treatments that work and could be prescribed en masse. Not discussed, not mentioned."

Can you explicitly mention what those treatments are? I'm genuinely curious.

There are various antiviral drugs which are orders of magnitude more expensive, have mediocre efficacy and a worse side effect profile compared to any of the main vaccines, and must be started within days of initial infection to work properly.

They are a great addition (besides vaccines and non-pharmaceutical public health measures) for treating high-risk patients for whom the vaccines don’t provide perfect protection (e.g. the very elderly and immune compromised), but a poor primary response.

We have excellent outcomes with monoclonal antibody-based drugs (the expensive route). Monoclonal is interesting because we may be able to take it preemptively. We have excellent results with steroids, vitamins, weight loss and exercise (low cost).

One way to search (and ignore random people like myself) for this, is to look for different countries treatment protocols (they are often published into other languages). There is a lot of serious people working hard trying to find good solutions.

The anti-covid pill from Pfizer looks impressive:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pfizer-s-good-news...

I thought I remember reading something early on about protease inhibitors and COVID, cool to see that is coming out now.

Here are the latest COVID-19 treatment guidelines. They are very effective in preventing deaths when applied early and aggressively. Unfortunately many patients wait too long before seeking care, and many physicians still don't follow the protocol.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/about-the-gui...

We are in the worst timeline. At first I didn't had too much anger again the people willing to take part in the phase III trial, they were mostly just a SNS annoyance with their virtue signaling. Their choice, my choice. Now they're writing literal hateful messages all over the internet about people like me who made an informed choice but moreover fully supports authoritarian measures that are taken just to fuck with people. A government role is supposedly to help people, not to ruin their lives. Not to mention the huge toll on social relations and mental health of the population. It's since a long time since the covid question is not a health issue anymore, it's an excuse. The most infuriating things is how dumb the arguments of those people are, because if their vaccine were working they would be protected anyway and won't have to fear anything (also remember when 70% vaccinated was supposed to grant herd immunity? This have been memoryholed hard as well). It makes no fucking sense to push it to people under 30 who have like a chance over 300,000 to die from covid.

You mention ‘informed’, but are you aware of the delta variant and that scientists sometimes learn new things?

> We have viable treatments that work and could be prescribed en masse. Not discussed, not mentioned.

Because the real problem are going to be people that will be far too sick for any treatment to help them avoid hospitalisation. And overloaded hospitals will not benefit a lot from the fact there is some treatment available.

The system will benefit much more from people not requiring hospitalisation in the first place, and currently that can only be achieved by having a large percentage of population vaccinated.

'... that can only be achieved by having a large percentage of population vaccinated.'

Only?? The mortality profile is grossly _weighted_ by lifestyle choices such as low cardiovascular health, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

I am in decent health, got quite sick with the 'rona this year, and toughed it out at home. I later got blood test to confirm anti-bodies and a recovered letter from Dr.

These cohorts are the cash cows for pharma industry. Surprise surprise they'd rather sacrifice 99.9% of healthy population to save their major source of perpetual income. No hate against chronically ill, obese and diabetic, just pointing out the incentives here.

40% of Americans are obese, and 75% are overweight. Pretty far from "99.9% healthy population".

You have a good point, thank you for stating it clearly. My contention here is that instead of promoting treatment steps, and working towards helping each other we are tearing each other apart and the discussion is oriented completely wrong. Punishing people, fines?

I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated. However the monoclonal antibody treatments are given on an outpatient basis and are highly effective at preventing hospitalization.

They do help, but you need give it early enough.

Most unvaccinated patients do not seek help until they are clearly more sick than a normal flu. They wait until they have trouble breathing. And at that time it is already very likely they are going to be hospitalized anyway. They might react better with antibody treatment but they are still going to have to be admitted.

Whereas vaccine does not need to be given at exactly right time to be effective.

Not an option for many americans that can't afford insurance. vaccines are free and more effective.

Bullshit. The Federal government pays for monoclonal antibody treatments, the same way they pay for vaccines. Uninsured patients aren't turned away. In high risk patients Sotrovimab has about the same effectiveness as vaccines in preventing hospitalization.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2107934

I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated but you need to stop spreading misinformation about other treatments.

> vaccines are free

... No

yes.

The issue here is really cost to public. Non vaccinated has high chance to get severe complication when infected. They will utilize hospitals and healthcare whether public or private. For private, we can choose to ignore as the price will adjust by themselves to determine who lives and who dies. Nobody will bat an eye if a high-end boutique clinic let a poor Covid patient dies because bed and ventilator is too expensive. However it is expected hospitals must admit these patients and cure/care them whether they can pay or not. For public healthcare, this will turn into ethics and politics issue because government "killed" them by refusing "universal human rights" healthcare to them.

The easier way to solve this outcome is basically mandating vaccines which will reduce the loads on healthcare and hence general public cost. The correct thing to do on the other hand is to force all non vaccinated to sign away universal healthcare for Covid. They will bear the full cost and can be turn away from hospitals to die if hospitals have little beds, prioritized over vaccinated and if they too poor to pay full unsubsidized cost. No western countries leader will dare to implement the "correct way" even if non vaccinated wants to. And to top it all, many non vaccinated understood this is the correct way but still want government to cover their just-in-case severe complication hospital bills for free or extremely heavily subsidized bills. Basically a lot of non vaccinated wants to eat the cake and still have the cake. This is the actual situation now. And no media wants to discuss about it publicly. MSM probably have no appetite to discuss intelligently these days anyway.

Sure, as long as people who eat excessively, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, etc. also sign away their healthcare. Why should we enable their bad decisions?

Those things don't infect others.

The argument being addressed is that unvaccinated COVID pacients are not different from some of the other pacients. You're changing the argument for which there is a different reply

There is a reson why in germany and other european contires have sugar limit's in sodas an other foods. To try to mitigate the bad decisions.

There is no limit how much sugar you are allowed to add to your own food.

This is a bit hyperbolic. Wide scale COVID vaccination is needed for a functioning society.

It's clear that waves of death won't stop without it. Especially now with Omicron, the fourth wave. In the US, average life expectancy dropped more than 1.5 years in 2020-2021. More than any year since WWII.

Right now, COVID vaccine is more important than wearing clothes in public. And being naked in public checks more of your boxes for making you a non-person than nonvax restrictions. Being naked in public you go straight to jail.

So is forced wearing of clothes even more authoritarian than nonvax restrictions?

Well, no. Neither are authoritarian because they're both needed for a functioning society. Unvaccined are a literal danger to the public with how contagious and deadly COVID is.

If you don't want to wear clothes or be vaccinated that's fine. But expect to be pushed to the edges and marginalized for not following basic requirements for a functioning society.

I was born in Soviet Russia, where the party line was: there is no God, there is no Soul, there is no Truth, and truth is what we tell the people. My family came to America to get away from that savage society and to live in a free country, based on voluntary cooperation (free market) not force and violence and coercion. In communism, the group is all and the individual is nothing.

I do not believe it is okay to violate my individual liberties (such as forcing me to undergo a medical procedure) for the common good.

I was also born in Soviet Russia.

It's hard to unlearn toxic ideas and relearn to trust in rational thinking, but it can be done. Don't let your upbringing fool you.

Vaccine mandates are already ubiquitous across the Western world (and the non-Western world). In most cases, it is infants and children having a "medical procedure" forced on them. Your point still stands, but in reality an overwhelming consensus exists that vaccines are an acceptable exemption to bodily autonomy.

EDIT: I didn't make an argument, I only stated uncontroversial facts. Would love an explanation of downvotes.

You think there’s an overwhelming consensus that bodily autonomy ends when a vaccine is concerned?

In practice, yes. It is codified into law in countless nations and there are no major movements to change those laws. So in terms of the reality of being a living human being in any given society (free or not), yes, bodily autonomy is limited by many, many things by the state, one of those being vaccine mandates. You may not like it, but that is simply the reality.

based on voluntary cooperation (free market) not force and violence and coercion

Yeah, that's also an untruth. Western capitalist societies are no more pure capitalism than the Soviet Union was pure communism.

Democracy is fundamentally coercive: the majority gets to rule, and everybody else lives with the result. Some of those rules force people to do things they don't want to do in the name of being able to live together: pay taxes, obey police, obtain permission to operate a motor vehicle. Those who don't obey are subject to force.

It's the worst system except for all of the others. It works best when there's voluntary cooperation, and there's a lot of it. But there are limits to it, and anybody coming to it thinking that they're absolutely free and without obligations and restrictions is going to fare very poorly. Such people force them to pass even more rules to codify what is and isn't allowed, and make the system worse for everybody.

The legality of the government forcing a medical procedure for the common good been decided by the supreme Court nearly 100 years ago. There is no specific "liberty" that is being violated here.

That decision revolved around a one-time $150 fine (in today's money) and was used to justify forced sterilizations. And it was overturned later. And it was for the authority of a state, not the Federal Government.

Not the same thing at all.

The same decision (Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 1905) is what allowed the Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924 and to force the sterilization of the undesirables.

If a law would be proposed today to disallow covid-unvaccinated people from having children, I bet you a good number of leftists would agree with it.

Not saying that I advocate for the following, but from reasoning logically, I've arrived at the following based on simplified assumptions. I would love to hear any possible counter-arguments against this hypothetical outcome:

Assuming that unvaccinated people are more likely to die from covid (and hence reproduce), then over time, they would naturally be written out of the gene pool. Or at least drastically dwindle in numbers compared to those vaccinated.

I have seen violations of human rights. Those are the freedoms I was referring to.

See the UN Declaration of Human Rights: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

Article 13 - right to freedom of movement (lockdowns, anyone?)

Article 20 - right to peaceful assembly (lockdowns again)

Article 24 - right to work (mandatory vaccination as a condition of employment)

Where is the line (for the common good)? Prevent you from using indoor public spaces? Your right to not want the vaccine infringes my right to life and safety, does it not? I'm seriously curious where you draw the line.

How old were you when you left USSR?

I was twelve.

Somehow I think these super heavy handed measures toward covid are a big mistake.

My opinion:

- Remove all restrictions, let people assess their own risk tolerance and voluntarily follow country's health guidance (or not).

- If ICUs start getting maxed out, implement bed rationing, with unvaccinated patients having lowest priority.

- Tell everyone to go on with their lives and that covid is here to stay. There's no eradicating it. Vaccines will be updated periodically just like the flu for those that want it.

Does anyone have a better endgame? I'd love to hear it. Because currently "the plan" I'm hearing from governments is "wear a mask and social distance until the end of time and get boosters every 6 months until the end of time"

That's the most rational plan. However pharma companies can just buy media presence, create panic and criticize their authorities(this happens to Bolsonaro in Brazil for example). Then riots begin, generating a whole other set of problems for the authorities who have no other choice but to save their neck and concede pharma companies demands.

I am personally in favor of what you've stated. I don't believe we will ever be rid of covid, it is likely endemic. To add to your list, I would like to see additional measures put in place to provide adequate ventilation and filtering of the air. I am becoming increasingly convinced that promotion of cleaner air would serve well to reduce the impact of airborne diseases.

Problem with this is that bed rationing is seen by many as unethical. Plus there are gray zones, you're putting young people in horrible moral conundrums on a day to day basis.

What about people who are forced to be near unvaccinated people? Like at school and work? For those who are immunocompromised it would mean either a death sentence or banishment from large parts of society.

> What about people who are forced to be near unvaccinated people? Like at school and work?

I'm not sure what the concern here is, but if the concern is that vaccinated people might infect and kill their unvaccinated peers... again, the unvaccinated made their choice, and there may or may not be consequences depending on their symptoms and whether the ICU is full.

Immunocompromised people who can't get vaccinated... they are already effectively banished from society with or without my plan because vaccinated people can spread it to them (and kill them). I don't see a way for the immunocompromised to return to normalcy ever. It is impossible to eradicate covid. Luckily (from what I understand) people in that situation are extremely rare.

71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for COVID, this is from a poll published today.

Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave, which is why we now need to take more drastic measures again when the entirely predictable course events would take this winter became apparent even to our politicians. But at a point were planned operations for other diseases like cancer get cancelled all over the place, when people requiring acute care get long delays until they find a free intensive care bed somewhere, you can't ignore this any longer.

Requiring vaccinations for non-essential activities with many people is something we should have done much earlier, it's long overdue. It's the least restrictive measure that has a good chance of doing both, reducing the spread and encouraging more people to get vaccinated.

The failure to organize the vaccine boosters is another big issue. It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care and were to some degree avoidable.

>It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective

Looks like you are really a optimist. I would say, 'It's clear now that the vaccines require one dose every 5-6 months to be effective against hard covid symptoms'.

Additionally I would not say 'Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave', instead I would say 'Our governments failed hard during the complete pandemic'.

4 months or could be even less. I don't know if we need to debate that vaccines are not the way out and we need heavy stress on therapies

We simply don't know. There are other vaccines that require a delayed third dose, so I don't think it is that unlikely that the boosters could cause a much longer-lived immunity. But it could also be that we'll need yearly boosters, or maybe only for the elderly.

I'll accept "Our governments failed especially hard this wave", the problems were more predictable this time and the responses were worse.

In the very beginning Germany was doing _extremely_ well, until the protesters showed up.

Which is crazy, because Germany managed to do well by good organisation and mass testing, not by lockdowns.

Uh, Germany locked down pretty hard, several times. "Good" organisation and mass testing came later.

Source: my last two years with three kids at home

The couple of months of schooling at home wasn't really a hard lockdown when compared with other countries in Europe.

Our governments should have done nothing. People, doctors and clinics would have taken care of this easily. Also, it would be a good community building exercise. But no. Once the Governments stepped in, it was all lockdowns, prohibition and ban of repurpose drugs, soldiers marching through streets, 80 years of ethics preaching tossed out the window in a heart beat.

While I do feel the restrictions have been widely overzealous, to say "People, doctors and clinics would have taken care of this easily." is an absolute falsehood. The failure of the healthcare system to keep up in many places is what caused many restrictions to become a necessity in the first place.

Sorry, but what healthcare system has even tried to keep up? Instead of adding capacity and implementing targeted, fast training programmes they have been firing healthcare workers, and letting the rest get burned out. In most areas of life companies that suddenly face a surge in demand would come up with dozens of creative ways of meeting that demand - instead, governments enforced lockdowns which pushed hospitals deep into the red.

Just today there is a story about how the NHS in the UK bought all the private sector health care capacity at the start of the pandemic, and then didn't actually use any of it!

https://unherd.com/thepost/the-nhs-covid-beds-that-were-neve...

In neighbouring Switzerland the healthcare system did in fact add lots of emergency ICU capacity in March 2020. They spent the next 1.5 years getting rid of it again because it wasn't necessary. Look at their dashboard to see this.

Healthcare management is the failure nobody dare name in all this. They've had 18 months to find ways to add capacity, for a disease with no cure and that doesn't even require surgery. Instead they expect all of society to become slaves to the god of hospital beds.

It's not the government who cried for help because of overflowing ICUs, it was the hospitals.

Via polling, you can conjure a majority for most stupidest shit. That is why founding fathers invented the constitution and the bill of rights.

>71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for COVID, this is from a poll published today.

From the article:

>Germany, much like Austria, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in western Europe, with 68.4% and 65.6% of eligible adults vaccinated respectively, according to the ECDC.

More Germans support mandatory vaccinations than are actually vaccinated? Seems like it should be the opposite. There are many vaccinated people (like myself) who oppose mandatory vaccinations, but are there unvaccinated people who support vaccine mandates? If so, I haven't met one.

>It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care and were to some degree avoidable.

That's not clear at all. In fact, all the data shows that incidence of mortality and severe illness among those with 2 vaccine doses and 3 is virtually nil. Reducing your chance at mortality while fully vaxxed from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000 is hardly significant, even though its technically correct that your chances of dying are "double" without the "booster". Nor is there any data that multiple shots reduce transmission rates.

The 68.4% number is wrong or outdated or maybe relative to the whole population including minors. Currently, 79.3% of German adults are vaccinated. This is according to official numbers with actual numbers estimated to be up to 5 percentage points higher.

These political polls are typically only include people 18+ (people who can vote), and among those the vaccination rate is around 80 percent.

> 71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for COVID, this is from a poll published today.

how does that match up with only 68.7% being fully vaccinated?

me f.x. I am fully vaccinated and do not at all support mandatory vaccinations. I doubt I'm the only one.

(https://impfdashboard.de/)

I'm not sure I buy that the 71% number is representative either but-- presumably they don't poll children, who have lower vaccination rates.

Your own link puts it at 79,3% of eligible adults with at least 2 shots, from this I would strongly presume that the poll was mostly asking adults and excluded (pre)-teens.

> I am fully vaccinated and do not at all support mandatory vaccinations.

Why?

> how does that match up with only 68.7% being fully vaccinated?

It's a poll, they didn't ask every single German citizen about their opinion, you'll always get 0-10% variation depending on the sample

My partner was diagnosed with cervical cancer a couple of months ago and is now on the brink of starting radio- & chemotherapy.

Due to the covid situation here in the Netherlands the treatment may not go ahead as planned, and treatment might get delayed, due to the new measures.

I then know of people who's heart surgaries have been delayed 5x times due to the stress covid is putting on the health care system in another country.

Please, get vacinated/boosted and if possible convince a close one to do too.

With the recent evidence of spiking infections and other events, I am no longer convinced vaccines are a good measure. The Netherlands is 85% vaccinated. They said we would get herd immunity at only 70%, and yet here we are with talks of "boosters", at the brink of yet another lockdown, due to yet another spike in infections. I think we need to simply get sick at large, get better and stay immune. We need to get it over with. Yes, some will die. People are mortal. Can we get over it and end this madness? It's nature. You are not going to win against it.

Let's get mass sick. It will suck for, what, 2 months at most? And then the strong have survived and we can get back to normal. Covid is inevitable. Let's face it.

no thank you. you let your body be ravaged by an exotic viral disease from asian bats. I will take my booster

Would it be less bad if the virus was bred on Dutch grounds by another animal? Otherwise I am not sure what your are implying or why you bring it up.

What if the virus was man-made from a lab? Big Pharma, the ones who have the most to gain from selling vaccines, are also the ones most capable of genetically engineering modified viruses. This is just a thought that I've had in the back of my head, and I'm not saying that this is the case, since the ethical implications of this would be severe. But I do often hear in media that tech companies prioritize profits over people...

Or you can get the same result from vaccines, without having to kill a few %.

So far I have gotten sicker from my vaccines than the coronavirus. I am NOT going to get boosters, fuck that. I'm not going to get revaccinated every once in a while. Sorry, humanity can deal with it. Vaccines don't work well enough, clearly.

I did everything right. I got vaccinated. I isolated. I endured lockdown. I did not go out frivolously. I wore masks when I needed to go out anyway. What could I have done differently? This whole thing, it's just not working. I want freedom back.

The plural of anecdote is not data. I am sorry for your negative reaction, but in aggregate the vaccines are much better than catching covid. "This whole thing is not working" because of the 30% odd who prefer not to do their part and walk around as potential virus factories.

I literally don't care. I want freedom back. I'm done with this whole thing. Also, you meant 15% since we (I at least, see GP) was talking about the Netherlands.

This is what democracy looks like. 15% does not want it. The country should form itself to support that, to support what the people want.

I got my vaccines, we'll see how well they protect me if (when) I get sick. Shit happens.

I see.

Well if you are going to be the steriotypical self centered prick of a person that I'd expect those who think like that to be, then do me and everyone else who needs a working healthcare system a favor;

If and when you become ill from the virus, stay at home. Don't call the emergency services nor go to a clinic/hospital.

You don't deserve their services if you are, as you describe, going to be playing a game of roulette with other people's health as the stakes.

If you have that shit happen to you, then own it. You made that bed for your self.

Nice, holding me accountable for a virus. Sickness is not my responsibility. It just happens. I'm not going to rant on someone who infected me with a super easily spreadable disease, such as the yearly flu, and now the yearly covid. that would be insane. It's just nature, man, calm down. And of course the sick do deserve care.

You are being irrational about this.

On the countrary, I'm being very rational about this.

Social healthcare (at least where I am from) is created and paid for by society as a whole. It is provided to all given we follow the set rules. Which have been that we pay our fair due to run it.

Now we have extra rules ontop of that to help keep the healthcare system from buckling under the enormous strain it is experiencing.

And you are deciding that you will personally not follow those rules, and potentially help spread both a disease that might directly kill someone, or keep a person from being able to seek medical aid due to the strain this disease places on the system as a whole.

Which to me clearly invalidates any privilages you might thing you are entitled to from the social system.

Do you also say this to people who couldn't put down the bottle or the 5th piece of pie in a row and cost us shit ton of money in healthcare?

Do you also say this about criminals who get sick in prison, that they shouldn't get healthcare because of their crime? Not that those who don't want to get vaccinated are criminals, far, far from it. But you get the point.

No, I have no clue what point it is you are trying to make.

What I mean is we shouldn't refuse to treat people with covid or whatever else simply because we disagree with their actions or their choices.

That's like saying we shouldn't perform first-aid rescue on someone who had an accident after they crossed red light and they endangered themselves and others. That's fucked up.

If you do not see the difference between somebody requiring immediate first-aid due to a car crash and somebody that willingly is not going to vaccinate, wear facial masks and keep his distance from others because that party wants freedom back then I can't help you.

Sorry to hear that MrDresden. I hope your partner's care is successful going forward and it can be expedited as a high priority case.

Thank you. We are hoping that as well, everyday.

'"We have understood that the situation is very serious and that we want to take further measures in addition to those already taken," Merkel told reporters at Thursday's news conference. "The fourth wave must be broken and this has not yet been achieved," she added.'

You do not need special measures. Florida and Sweden didn't have any and have the best graphs right now. Outbreaks stop by themselves.

Of course, if you lock down the unvaccinated right when the bell curve is at its natural top, you can take credit when the numbers go down. This is exactly what is happening right now.

in the netherlands they just implemented measures to shut down non essential things at 5pm.. that lead to gyms/restaurants/swimming pools PACKED with people.. half the space, twice the density. in the very same day they implemented the measures the cases stopped growing..

the fact that a scientist can recommend "lets shut down gyms at 5pm" instead of "lets make gyms 24/7" makes me distrust the whole corona committee

when i look at the lockdown+cases graph, i dont think there is any causal link between them. e.g. https://www.uni-konstanz.de/polver/zuber/covid-19-student-wi...

It was myopic cargo-culting since day one. I used to think that over the years I'd gotten smarter and subtler from my initial libertarian leanings, but this has opened up my eyes on how bad authorities can mess up, and more worryingly convince their people they're doing the right thing.

As libertarian leaning and someone who wants the state at a good distance, I believe that in many cases people are doing what they can, sadly, it fails to be enough. However, what’s the alternative?

The alternative would be doing it with some honesty. The measures don't work, but they were a nice attempt.

You want honesty, but what is the cost of that? Would that make things better or worse? Is honesty for honesty’s sake valuable? To put it in another way, how many people would be saved or how many would die just because we want honesty?

To clarify what I’m saying, if you’re honest with the public and say, we’re doing this but we aren’t sure if it actually works. Will that help? Or just freak people out, making any later, hopefully more helpful, attempt at establishing policy less effective, hence more people dead.

Just some thoughts. I don’t want to be lied to, I want my rights respected, and I want authorities to be as transparent as possible, but these are some of the issues I can imagine exist when I put myself in their shoes.

Take a look at Russias covid situation to see how this pathos plays out in the long run.

Crisis or not, no truth, no trust.

It's not that hard to see why a scientist working for a Pharma company would recommend that, considering Pharma companies make money selling cures for ailments...

I think the biggest unsung problems in this saga, is actually one of marketing.

The average person has experience with vaccines that have 3 properties: (1) long lasting, (2) prevent contagion (3) and major symptoms. By calling the mRNA shot a vaccine , the WHO and CDC transferred such properties to the shot. That may have been great for encouraging adoption, but also comes with consequences particularly if two vaccine properties fail to hold, and a 3rd is not flawless.

This was never made clear by anyone of relevance - instead the mantra was "take the shots and all will be well". We oversold the solution.

People took the shots, then behaved as if nothing else mattered. Dropped masks. Started going nuts.

Now we see the results.

The flu shot needs to be updated yearly, and it mostly prevents hospitalizations and deaths. Seems pretty similar.

The flu vaccine is about 70% effective against getting flu[0], but it varies wildly by year. The Pfizer mRNA vaccine is about 50% effective against catching COVID five months later[1] (for the delta variant, anyway), but the third dose seems to push that up substantially.

[0] https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Regarding 2 and 3, it feels like a major factor here is the huge number of people who have forgotten (or never knew) that vaccines as a category aren't automatically 100% effective, because all the hard work to wipe out diseases like measles from the general population has already been done.

this has been a worldwide problem - the fact that it even happened in germany is concerning. Governments were looking for easy way outs left and right, but more importantly, did not take the time to create an international scientific task force to research treatments. The Manhattan project started 2 years after the start of WW2. Maybe the time is right to consider large-scale responses to this war as well. Or at least to realize that epidemiology isn't really as good as it should be and we need to fix that fast.

And also (4) prevent you from getting sick. Which the mRNA does not, the vaccine itself makes you really sick.

Right. Even knowing the facts it's hard to not buy into the hype to some degree.

In the end, the only things I personally care about regarding the benefits of any vaccine are:

1) not having some horrible/painful/debilitating long term condition from getting sick

2) not dying

3) not spreading it to others

Even if the marketing said it would only prevent severe disease but you'd still catch it just as easily, I'd have still have been among the first to show up for the shot. Promising it as some panacea is going to leave people disappointed.

I can't grasp what mix of societal factors is causing the lack of will to be vaccinated. The two best cases for widespread support of vaccines that I can think of are Smallpox and Polio. Smallpox was a worldwide effort to eradicate a disease that had been a scourge on society for a thousand years. The wealthy countries of the world sent doctors to every corner of the Earth to vaccinate people to ensure its eradication.

"Normal" smallpox killed 1 in 3, the rarer hemorrhagic form killed >90% of those infected. The survivors also faced a lifetime of hardship from damage it inflicted.

Polio had a fatality rate of 2-5% in children and 15-30% in teens and adults. Of all the cases, 1 in 200 had permanent paralysis.

I just don't get it. No one is dying horribly of measles, mumps, rubella, typhus, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, etc. because of vaccines and antibiotics. It's almost like COVID's lethality is at a magic point where most people are extremely concerned about it, but it's low enough where doubt persists because people aren't keeling over in the streets.

It's primarily trust, or lackthereof.

Some of its political, and some of its misinformation.

But mainly people think their governments are either being dishonest or incompetent, or some combination of both. I'll let you decide whether you think that's justified.

But my point is this, when you lose trust in the experts to tell you right from wrong, you will instead resort to making sense of the world by your own ability. Therein lies a whole class of problems that lead to conspiracies and alt remedies.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is the lasting change to the society. I would like to argue that the point of no return has passed a long time ago.

A sizeable chunk of people I talk with aren't going back to the office (and by extension to any kind of socialization) for the next couple of months. I understand and accept the sentiment, but I have to wonder why they would ever change their minds. Idealistically speaking, restrictions will be lifted in several months with the pandemic ending. But from an individual point of view there probably won't be a change at all: the virus itself stays by becoming endemic, so there is still a chance of infection; if you are vaccinated already, you are mostly protected just like you'd be after the pandemic -- in a way, we are even safer now than later because of general awareness, masks, distance, smaller crowds etc.

So what's the real difference in leaving home now as opposed to after the pandemic? What changes after the pandemic ends? Do we need to complete some kind of coping process? Do we need to accept the coronavirus as we accept the influenza? And what happens if a person can not do that, how many people will fail to cope? How do we help them out? Will we ever be able to?

Very thought-provoking this mistreatment of the unvaccinated.

The process started with demonizing them to the point of being singled out and blamed for how the disease is impacting society. When the discrimination started, there were very few willing to speak for them. Particularly malicious was the expansion of the term anti-vaxxer typically used for a fringe minority which “rejects all vaccines for everyone” to all of those that “reject one single vaccine for themselves”.

Now a measure that will come too late and impact the entirety of society is sold as a means of finally forcing them to conform.

From the outside, this may look like a perfectly executed propaganda campaign. One can’t exclude that the government (like the Canadian gov which actually got caught I believe) took advantage of the chaos and flexed its propaganda muscles a bit. But the more scary possibility is that a frightened and manipulated population + incompetent government in CYA mode is enough to try to override the constitutional principle of bodily integrity.

And it’s precisely this principle which seems to be the last thing preventing the state from forcing or punishing the unvaccinated too hard, limiting them to a fine.

I’m not vaccinated, this is how I feel. I am not militant or political about it. My wife and whole family are vaccinated and I helped them to do it. As a young man, the risk of heart issues does indeed outweigh the risk of hospitalisation from the virus (as I’ve weighed it, anyhow). Victoria, Australia has hit 90% double vaccinated and case numbers have not changed here. To see this underwhelming effect in light of the anxiety the mandatory vaccination has caused, it is sad. I am lucky enough to be studying remotely, and so I just stay at home, I don’t go out other than to exercise in a park. I am not able to go anywhere with my wife right now (shopping, restaurants etc.), which is difficult, but it was my choice. If I am further forced to undergo vaccination I’m really not sure what I would do. I would want to leave Australia and live somewhere that I can have my own decisions. I don’t care if you think I’m selfish. Where did freedom of choice go? I’d like to move where it’s gone.

"Das Recht, mit der Faust um sich zu schlagen, hört auf, wo die Nase des Mitmenschen anfängt."

This counts for everybody. Being forced to be vaxxed with mRNA is probably also very "fisty" for some people.

And what about my nose?

What makes you think the risk of heart issues is higher from the vaccine than the risk of heart issues from a non-hospitalized incidence of covid?

I'm a Victorian too, this is exactly me.

Everyone still laying judgement on my choice but 1) I can't go anywhere anyway 2) where is the promised herd immunity?

I'm lucky to have a big house and garden, just gonna keep waiting for this to end.

Looks like there are more of us than I thought :)

My problem is that mandate is weighing so much on the "bad" side, that the "good" side is completely dwarfed. In other words, I'm unable to reason about the vax, as I never was able to make good decision in similar situation. That mandates are introduced on top of previous completely useless and hostile measures like curfews, outdoor playgrounds closures, etc. and generally divisive rhetoric doesn't help to build any trust either.

Exactly. There has just been constant appeals to ‘science’ but how can I trust this science if I can’t inspect it? Even in a simple system, a small change can create chaotic consequences. I absolutely have a right to know what I am being forced to take into my body: an incredibly complex system. And I don’t care if someone calls me “selfish”, all human behaviour is selfish. There is no such thing as a completely altruistic decision. People pushing for mandates just want “things back to normal” (not realistic), which is fine, but it’s their personal prerogative that I don’t have to care for. Every decision a human makes is self-centred.

guess if u drive/ride your own transport you are set as they are gonna let only vaccinated on public transport (italy? germany? already doing it i think)

A friend works in a major hospital in Melbourne. All their cardiac, cancer patients and others are vaccinated.

The "heart issues" are a mild inflammation. You take some NSAIDs, rest for a few days, and you're completely fine. My friend compared it to inflammation of your finger if you get a cut. It's a non-issue.

Train left the station as soon as orders were placed for massive amounts of vaccine well before it was ever developed.

I think this is a ridiculous opinion to have.

I actually think unvaccinated people were treated way to well in Germany. They are a very loud minority in society and have managed to really hamper the progress against covid.

Compare this to Canada where the government implemented much bigger restrictions on unvaccinated people (no restaurants, no train travel, no air travel) and the overall vaccination rate is ~10% higher. And the current rise in cases is nowhere near Germany.

They are not treated well, they are treated according to the constitution.

Being willfully unvaccinated signals that you simply don't care about the people you come in contact with. I'm not sure how, exactly, I'm supposed to treat someone well if they won't care if I live or die from something they can prevent.

Yes, I understand the vaccine isn't perfect, but none of them are. Yet here I am, not catching polio and other things because of them. (Polio was less lethal, btw, and some folks were fine - yet others lived out their lives in an iron lung).

Just a heads up about what is happening in Germany: (Just got back Monday from Hamburg)

1. Entry restriction: You must be vaccinated to enter from nonEU countries (Vaccation must be in the approved list)

2. Most restaraunt/bars/outdoor gatherings are either 2G/3G. The bahn is 3g (so testing as well). Nearly everything else is 2G. This includes the food hall in the airport. Enforcement is at entry. You must show your personal|lebenlingsausweiss and your coronapass. (identity license, and vacination evidence.. CDC vaccine card can work.. but get it converted and your life will be easy)

2g = genesen, geimpfung / recovered, vacced 3g = 2g+ gettestet

3. Many restaurants expect or require you to use Luca to participate in contact tracing. If that is not possible they do a manual collection of info.

These rules are even enforced at outdoor gatherings such as weihnachtmarkts.

Denmark/Coppenhagen: Only ate inside at one place. They only wanted to see my coronapass.

Just to clarify on the 2G / 3G labels, since I don't think it's 100% clear in your comment:

2G is recovered (PCR-validated infection in past 6 months) or vaccinated

3G is that or (quick-)tested

2G+ is 2G and tested (exception: I've once earlier seen it used for 2G or PCR-tested)

Quick-tests at test centers (which are all over the place) were free for residents for a long time, then that got removed (IMHO a mistake), then made free again.

Actual proper checking of requirements was pretty terrible for a long time, from what I hear that's gotten a bit better.

Nearly everywhere I went required a few or test of the Coronapass app. Some scanned, some saw, and most required to see your id.

Went to St Pauli Weihnachtmarkt and the person I was with was rejected because he didn't have his id, but he did have his bank card with his name on it.

Does this vaccination entry requirement exist for residents?

Probably not. But the foreigners entry requirements were that you had to be vaccinated or governmentally special. Otherwise you'll be rejected.

https://www.einreiseanmeldung.de/#/2

https://www.germany.info/us-en/coronavirus/2317268

It's very loosely checked according to many reports.

Understand, we're in the second epidemic and headed for the third. Plans made on the basis of the original virus may not be valid. "The enemy get a vote", as the military says.

The original virus had a R0 rate of about 3, that is, in normal conditions, each infected person infects three others. That's about what the first generation of vaccines could control well enough that eventually the virus would die out.

The delta variant has an R0 of about 8. The current vaccines can slow down the spread, but not stop it. Which is why we've had a second epidemic. By last August, delta variant cases were 90% of the cases seen.

We don't know enough about the omicron variant yet.

Which means, vaccination doesn't works. Sounds like the antivaccers are right(?)

When you want to see it like this, we will never know enough to do anything. The only thing we can do with things that we can't change is to accept it. It's time to do...

No, vaccinations prevent you from getting sick. It’s the choice between a mild illness and potentially being admitted into the hospital.

What we’re starting to see is potential for further variants to evade antibodies, reproduce inside you and thus you spread it. Your immune system is still able to fight the virus easier because the vaccine has trained your immune system to look out for contagions like this virus but for a while you’re still actively spreading the virus before you’ve cleared it from your system.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong though.

Fully vaccinated people still get hospitalized and some times die. If you are old or have comorbidity, even the vaccine won't save you. We need to get off this vaccine obsession and start working on early treatments.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

Yes. Here's some tabular data on hospitalizations and deaths vs. vaccination status[1] Those are easy to monitor. How well vaccination prevents infection is harder to determine.

Also remember, this is still the first generation of vaccines. There are some nasal spray vaccines in testing which look to be much more effective in preventing infection.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm#T1_down

Delta's R0 isn't 8 [1]

- 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/#:~:text=The%20Delt....

From the link:

"The Delta variant is now replacing all other SARS-CoV-2 variants. We found a mean R0 of 5.08, which is much higher than the R0 of the ancestral strain of 2.79. Rapidly ramping up vaccine coverage rates while enhancing public health and social measures is now even more urgent and important."

Oh, that's encouraging. That's from October 2021. Early estimates were higher.

> Given that the reproductive number in the studies identified here was estimated at a time when most countries still enforce a variable extent of lockdown measures, there is a risk that the real reproductive number may be even higher than the estimated 5.08.

It sounds like 5 is the optimistic measure.

A recent submission[0] makes me think politicians, media and so-called TV experts should refrain from promising things that are misleading, deceiving and may have disastrous results in the short future. Vaccination shouldn't mean giving up on basic measures, but I believe it has been broadly advertised as such in this current year with, in a personal conclusion of mine, devastating results. In a few countries (such as Italy) in an ironic twist unvaccinated individuals were significantly more monitored due to mandatory testing every 48hrs for any work, while new spread and emerging variants seem to close the gap in transmission between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, as everyone minded their own business in overcrowded public transportation, gatherings et cetera. As others have mentioned in this discussion, hospitals and health services must still tend to a large pool of vaccinated people (significant majority of population in Western countries) that require medical attention and can overwhelm systems in place.

Even if everyone in these countries that are rolling third doses did get wholly vaccinated in a short amount of time to attempt to halt transmission in its tracks, the majority of the world where some of the latest VoCs originated (Delta, Omicron) are largely unprotected.

Everyone wants this to end but most people are also led to believe, willingly or not, something as basic as a vaccination will bring everything back to normal. It doesn't, it hasn't so far, has it?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29412681

Overrun healthcare system and lack of ICU beds is serious cause for concern. No, the vaccine is not sterilizing but it will improve your chances of not getting seriously ill / dying. simple

I wonder as to how far the current crisis is used by 'machiavellian' power players to weaken civil liberties and constitutional rights as was the case with "9/11" to push something through like the "Patriot Act" with its wide ramifications for us all today.

I understand the allure just for this damn pandemic, this state of global health emergency, to force everyone to take their jabs already.

But even without the imagination of a science fiction writer thinking through every "subtle" implications long ahead of its time, it takes little to see the possible dawning - at the end of this tragic ride of a pandemic - of a less free and more restrictive biosecurity world. Once the shots are compulsory, how many boosters are to come? Is there an expiry date (like 6 months) for natural immunity? Can we say definitively we only need 3 shots? Not more like once or twice every year? For how long? And why not additionally for the flu and other seasonal respiratory infections, now that the mRNA platform has proven its efficacy, its scalibility, its tremendous customizability and the compulsory laws being in place.

That's a good point that I've also been considering. It's easy to see how mandatory vaccination could serve as a stepping stone for simply more government overreach into peoples' lives.

First it's a mandatory vaccination against this one disease. Then, why not a mandatory vaccination against all diseases? Next, how about a mandatory serum that keeps you in peak physical condition for your entire life? And then at long last - the holy grail - we will eventually reach the point when a mandatory immortality serum is prescribed. This move would totally be in line with promoting the greater good, as surely death and suffering are undesirable no? And in a similar sense, many who are "vaccinated" will fail to comprehend why anyone in their right mind would choose to remain unvaccinated.

Governments of course would surely rejoice at having removed the first inevitability of life that hinders their collection of the second...

I'd be more open to getting vaccinated when I see people actively making use of hand sanitizers in stores. When people learn to cover their whole faces with their masks. When they learn to keep distance. Vaccinated people who are old, sick or born with bad luck in the genetic lottery are still at risk. Vaccination doesn't mean people can go back to doing whatever they want. The vaccination itself can be a risk to certain individuals too. It's ludicrous to expect everyone to get the shot for the rest of their lives and call that situation a success because "at least everyone is vaccinated".

If you want to force vaccination, start with the people that have a history of covid infection. Why piss the people off that have been actively avoiding to come into contact with the virus and carrying it around?

Hand sanitizer? We’ve know for over a year now that hand sanitizer does nothing against covid because that’s not how it spreads.

News to me! Could you provide sources for this?

Dude, it's nearly 2022. How do you still not know that covid is an airborne virus and hand sanitizer doesn't help anything?

I’m confused. I thought vaccinated people can spread the virus. Why are they not locked down too?

Because the risk of transmission is understood to be significantly lower, and since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate it's in the governments best interest to get people vaccinated, a way of accomplishing this could be making life inconvenient for the uncompliant.

The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to evolve in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, the vaccines aren't very effective in people with malfunctioning immune systems.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...

The link references a specific response to remdesivir, but I don't see how the selective pressure isn't the same in the broader case of low-level or asymptomatic illness persisting in a vaccinated person, particularly when they'll be mingling more and taking less precautions.

A paper, while not specifically addressing vaccination in immunocompromised patients, documents pretty clearly the phenomenon of runaway mutation chains in such patients.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756

Edit: Another piece, specifically addressing immunocompromised + covid + vaccines:

"Studies have shown that immunocompromised people are more vulnerable to being hospitalized or dying from COVID and less likely to develop strong protection from vaccination. But there are also some hopeful signs: additional doses of some COVID vaccines, strategic timing of immunosuppressive treatments and prophylactic COVID treatments may boost protection among some immunocompromised individuals—and restore at least some of the freedoms they have lost."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-immunocomprom...

Hm, so a vaccine that does not stop transmission does not create selective pressure on the virus? Wouldn’t that be unusual from an evolutionary biology standpoint?

Can we at least agree that if infected, as a vaccinated and asymptomatic carrier, there is a higher chance of transmission than if I were unvaccinated and symptomatic? This seems like common sense to me, but I recognize it goes against the Covid orthodoxy.

Also, when you say “inconvenient,” what do you mean exactly? To me, total restriction on movement and segregation from society based on medical status seems like more than an inconvenience. Maybe I’m just an anti-vaxxer, a victim of misinformation… if only I could think for myself.

The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did with Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of vaccination.

This is an entirely different situation then smallpox though. The modes of action are not the same.

Also, the CFR of smallpox is 95%.

While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, you're not making a valid comparison. We were able to effectively eradicate smallpox (except for a few lab samples) because the vaccines are highly sterilizing and there were no animal reservoirs.

That situation doesn't obtain with SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths but don't reliably prevent infection or transmission. And most mammal species can transmit the virus; cases have been confirmed in dogs, cats, minks, deer, tigers, etc.

> there were no animal reservoirs

This is a fact vaccine-zealots never address (I am double vaccinated by the way).

If the end game is 100% vaccination in human population (including the enormous unvaccinated reservoir of the developing world, since the rate in those countries is often single-digit percentages) we will _still_ get novel variants which bypass the latest vaccines. Are we really supposed to forcibly administer vaccines every n-months to the entire human population for the rest of eternity? It seems utterly absurd.

I don't see why the "just build more hospitals" commenter was down-voted/flagged in this thread. It at least seems more economically viable. Mobilize the national guard to do it if it comes to that. Treating those who develop covid seems a way better route than attempting the futile game of "prevention" via a vaccine regime.

We will never get to Covid eradication. It's just not possible. Yet, most of my vaccinated compatriots seem to buy into that delusion.

The rates of animal transmission are very low. If we eliminate it in humans, it's unlikely that the virus could sustain itself in animal populations and unlikely to reinfect the already-vaccinated humans.

Judging by the fact that the whole pandemic was ostensibly started by an animal->human transmission, I'm highly skeptical of your claim.

We were setting field hospitals last year left and right in anticipation, most, luckily went unused. I don’t understand why can’t this be repeated, heck implement a protocol for quick deployment of few but massive such facilities and let economy of scale take over.

> (I am double vaccinated by the way).

It's sad that "I'm vaccinated..." became the 2021 version of, "I'm not a racist...".

The end game should be outfitting enclosed spaces with poor circulation of air with proper and adequate ventilation and filtering. Just as we look back at the unsanitary practices of the past (dirty water, not washing hands), we need to realize the unsanitary practices of today.

Smallpox vaccines were not "highly sterilizing."

https://twitter.com/santiagokique/status/1465014078938628099

Are there any vaccines that are actually 100% sterilizing?

> The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did with Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of vaccination.

It has been shown time and again that the covid jag does not prevent infection/re-infection/transmission so your talk of eradication smacks of propaganda, not science.

Other countries with Zero COVID policies have been successful at suppressing the virus to extremely low levels. Their citizens laugh at us on social media.

At extremely low levels, we can begin to contemplate elimination/eradication.

And time and again the smallpox vaccine also failed to protect.

> Historically, the vaccine has been effective in preventing smallpox infection in 95% of those vaccinated. — https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/index.html

(Other sources have numbers from about 90% to 97%). However, this imperfect protection, in enough people, was enough to do the job.

Your assertion about transmission is definitely not proven. It all comes down to an expected value. An unvaccinated symptomatic individual will shed a lot more virus than a vaccinated asymptomatic one. It would probably take fewer encounters to infect someone else than in the vaccinated case. So although an asymptomatic vaxed person might be out and about more, the lower viral shedding could possibly account for that we don’t know. Also you’re overestimating the intelligence of the average person, symptomatic people do stupid shit all the time [0]. This couple probably infected way more people than an asymptomatic vaxed person. Again not proven.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/03/hawaii-coup...

Vaccines probably reduce the chance of a new variant.

A lower viral load means a lower probability of a mutation happening, given that the number of mutations is proportional to the load over time.

There's some small chance that the opposite is true, and vaccines will mean deadly strains are more easily spread since the person is more likely to be asymptomatic or low-symptoms and will therefore not isolate.

But on net we expect vaccines to prevent variants.

Leaky vaccines can make viruses more virulent, though. See Marek's disease:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15757475/

> unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate

Maybe I'm missing something, but the vaccinated population is the one that has introduced an additional evolutionary pressure, so wouldn't we expect to see mutations (that affect vaccinated people) in that population? Vaccine tolerance is no advantage in unvaccinated hosts.

It would put pressure to avoid the vaccine. However:

1. There would be fewer cases compared to unvaccinated people to give it the chance to mutate. It doesn't have any more chance to mutate among vaccinated people. It has less chance. Just a lot of mutations that still look like the current virus will get killed off by antibodies.

2. Randomly making changes to the spike protein, this virus's most important part, is likely to reduce the virus's danger.

“Evolutionary pressure” doesn’t really exist if the virus doesn’t get a chance to replicate. The virus is trying to find a mutation which bypasses the vaccine, the more chances it gets the better. This is why people talk about animal reservoirs and immunocompromised individuals. The chance of a beneficial mutation occurring increases the more the virus is able to replicate within an organism. It replicates more in unvaccinated organisms.

Every single person who's immune system eradicates the virus causes evolutionary pressure.

If your immune system takes a long time to do this, because eg. you didn't have a vaccine so it hasn't got an antibody template to work from, then the virus has much longer to evolve in the host, under a bunch of weird and wonderful new types of antibodies that get thrown against it.

If there's already vaccine exposure then the body just needs to ramp up the antibody production, which is much faster and will result in total virus eradication to each virus as the antibodies encounter them, not halfway-measures which might leave half-functioning viruses which might self-repair in mutagenic ways.

> since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate

We might get more mutations from unvaccinated people, but since the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission we'll get much more virulent mutations from the vaccinated people.

Hence the need to isolate the unvaccinated, to protect them so they don’t get these new breeds and don’t make new ones based on them that reinfect the larger population.

> and don’t make new ones based on them that reinfect the larger population

The new breeds made by the unvaccinated are necessarily less dangerous and virulent, just based on the relevant evolutionary pressures (the more dangerous breeds that make people bedridden don't spread).

The new breeds made by the vaccinated, on the other hand - those have zero evolutionary pressure to become less dangerous, and can just as easily become more so (someone with a mutation that would make an unvaccinated person bedridden feels no effect and spreads it everywhere they go).

If COVID becomes less deadly but more widespread, and becomes part of the yearly flu season, blame that on the unvaccinated. But if COVID mutates to become more deadly and resistant to vaccines, blame the vaccinated.

> The new breeds made by the unvaccinated are necessarily less dangerous and virulent,

This is not a given. The virus is known to mutate more in unvaccinated hosts and this can make either more contagious or more lethal variations. There would be an advantage to have a longer incubation period.

On the vaccinated the same things are beneficial - longer incubation periods and the ability to infect others who are vaccinated. With a lower viral load, there will be fewer variations in vaccinated hosts, translating into fewer differences from the baseline virus.

> This is not a given.

True, should've said "much more likely".

> The virus is known to mutate more in unvaccinated hosts and this can make either more contagious or more lethal variations.

Of course vaccinated and unvaccinated can produce largely the same mutations. But that's not the point.

As I said, it's the evolutionary pressure which is the problem. If two people, one vaccinated and one not, get the same mutation, then maybe it's a strain which is dangerous enough for the unvaccinated person to go be sick in bed for a week. (Yes, incubation period - but that's the same both ways so it doesn't change the probabilities.) In this case, then because the vaccine mitigates the symptoms, the vaccinated person can go on with their daily life while sick with that more dangerous strain.

The fact that both groups produce similar mutations isn't the point, it's that the people have different reactions to the virus which changes how the mutations are able to spread.

It's not that there's a lower viral load. It's that the vaccinated are transmitting at all which is the problem, because there's no pressure for them to go be sick in bed when they're carrying around a mutation which could kill someone.

> and since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate

If you understand natural selection, then this assertion makes zero sense. Where in the genome do we see the accumulation of mutations in all covid variants seen so far? In their S-protein. Where does Omicron have 30+ mutations? In its S-protein.

What is the single protein that the mRNA vaccines code for??

Yes, if you reason from first principles, it is trivial to see that it is in fact the throngs of the vaccinated who are driving the evolution of SARS-CoV-2!

groups of people who know just a little about a subject tend to cease questioning their reasoning, and a dunning kruger is born. groups of people with more knowledge tend to ask more questions before accepting a new position. therefore, a dunning kruger is born more frequently among the former group. however, migrating pesky dunning krugers then tend to persist in either group.

> unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to mutate

Citation?

Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.

Do you have a citation for that? I haven't seen any high quality studies which directly compare long term R0 for vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. While I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, it seems to have only a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/experts-vaccine-immunity...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v... and... can't find the other just now. Note that population-based studies will find different results, AIUI mostly because of the birthday paradox.

If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach. Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time. Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the cognitive dissonance of being obviously lied to "for the greater good".

What are you talking about?

The vaccines have shown to slow down infection rates and avoid many many hispitalisations and death.

So yes, getting vaxxed helps the graeter good.

Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an accident or a stroke or heart issues.

I assume you read the comment I'm responding advocating for 100% vaccine rates to drop transmission rates below R0 1. If politicians (aka "Science Advisors") claimed this was the requirement from the git go it would have been an obvious non-starter.

I'm afraid you may have misunderstood. I stated that R would be <1 if vaccination were at 100%, not that the threshold is between 99% and 100%.

The virus decides how much is needed, we don't.

>Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an accident or a stroke or heart issues.

They don't put covid patients in the same ward as other ICU beds for obvious reasons.

Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no "non-covid" wards anymore, because no ICU turns a patient needing it now away to "reserve space" for some potential future patient.

>Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no "non-covid" wards anymore

Is that happening anywhere now? I mean, got links? I'm generously curious. There's a lot of fear mongering going around.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/09/bogus-okl...

This has been going on for nearly two years and governments were unwilling or unable to increase capacity in any meaningful way? What a total failure of government / medical system if this is true. The Spanish Flu lasted 3 years, it's not like we don't have a fairly recent example of how long this would probably last.

I realized the wording wasn't good, so just to clarify: "fill the capacity" should be read as "fill up the remaining capacity", not "fill the entire capacity" (that's indeed quite unlikely, simply because of non-covid baseload that will be around). Point remains: a covid patient doesn't get turned away just because a potential car crash victim might need the bed later (and vice-versa), as far as I know there's no reserved non-covid spaces, if there's more covid patients more parts of the ICU get run under covid protocols.

Part of the problem with ICU capacity is that is has to be local: for many things, "an hours drive further away than normal" is annoying but solvable, if you need an ICU now it's a problem. Bottom-right here is a district-level map of Germany, showing free capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich... (there's some arguing how precise that data actually is, in both directions - for starters its only updated once a day afaik). Plenty places where e.g. transporting a few people from a car crash gets challenging. There's also pretty drastic statements/protests from the emergency departments and people working there, so yes, this currently sadly is an issue in some regions and the threat of it becoming worse is what finally caused some things to happen (after way to long of German politics wanting to deal with anything but this, despite it being long-predicted by the health authorities - it's extremely frustrating because it's been kind of obvious for weeks that something will have to happen at some point, the earlier the better for everyone).

Something that would be interesting data-wise would be deaths during or waiting for transportation - one would expect an increase, but I'm not sure if there even is baseline data available, given rules around who is allowed to pronounce death and how it is recorded.

Go on, laugh me out of the room, laugh whoever you want out of the room, the virus doesn't care how much or how little you laugh.

I'm not laughing at all. The politicians who brokered this steaming pile lied about its efficacy to get the foot in the door.

Several of the common diseases require more than 90% vaccine coverage to get herd immunity. Is there any particular reason why this vaccine shouldn't?

I've seen early estimates of less than that, but feh. An estimate from well before the vaccines are in production wasn't going to be accurate.

Gibraltar was 140%+ vaccinated and that wasn't enough to save Christmas there.

https://news.yahoo.com/gibraltar-cancels-official-christmas-...

I thought we already knew that two shots give you 6 months of immunity, assuming people with boosters are the 39.5%, wouldn't the 60.5% be just as susceptible

Gibraltar's economy is tourism- and travel-centric. Just using the population of people who live there full-time doesn't capture anything about the disease spread or vaccinations with temporary visitors (upwards of five million per year).

The argument is that herd immunity for covid cannot be attained via vaccines. Not even 100% vaccination.

The comparison with measles, another contagious airborne disease, is instructive. The threshold for herd immunity is estimated at 94%. This is possible because the vaccine effectiveness against infection is also 93-97%. Unfortunately covid vaccines have waning effectiveness against infection, estimated at about 50% after 6 months, and possibly waning even further.

"Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2

"For example, the measles is a highly contagious illness. It's estimated that 94% of the population must be immune to interrupt the chain of transmission."

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html

"Effectiveness against infections declined from 88% (95% CI 86–89) during the first month after full vaccination to 47% (43–51) after 5 months."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Changing data and changing virus variants doesn't mean you were "obviously lied to".

Coronaviruses have long been known to have this behavior.

A bias towards very positive claims in the presence of little data does, though. All of our expectations around covid would have benefitted from the health agencies being capable of communicating what they know for certain and what they don’t, but unfortunately they decided to make strong claims in the hopes of getting strong compliance.

To a degree, but I've also found that people love to ignore caveats that are presented, or never look at more than the headline version. The amount of times you hear "but risk X is never mentioned" when it actually is clearly addressed in the source statements or "but the data shows Y" but it comes with a list of reasons why it's limited is mindboggling. (and to be fair, lots of media sucks at putting that stuff in context too)

Alternatively, lots of shouting because health authorities are make sooo confusing statements and refuse to give 100% clear cut answers.

1 year ago, we thought that people would actually get vaccinated at a reasonable rate, instead of dragging their feet long enough for multiple more-infectious variants to appear.

1 year ago, the medical establishment was saying that it's impossible to develop a vaccine for a new virus in just a year, so don't even think about seeing a vaccine anytime soon... leading people with halfway-decent memories scratching their heads about how the heck this vaccine was actually developed and getting really suspicious when it doesn't behave like a vaccine at all in that it doesn't prevent you from getting or spreading the disease. And has rare but serious side effects.

> how the heck this vaccine was actually developed

mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses have been in progress since the 70s. This just happens to be when they finally got to the point of being production-ready. It's a useful coincidence, but without it mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses would have been showing up in the near future anyway (at a slower rate without all the emergency COVID funding).

> doesn't behave like a vaccine at all

Sterilizing immunity isn't an inherent property of vaccines.

> And has rare but serious side effects.

All vaccines do that, and as with all widely-used vaccines the rate of side effects is much, much lower than the rate of side effects from the actual disease.

We were also told if we got the shot we would be done with it. Now we need boosters, potentially indefinitely.

Note how all of the variants which health authorities said just needed a reasonably high vaccine rate are now effectively eradicated. It is only the new 'delta' (and upcoming 'omicron') that remain, and these are known to have much lower vaccine efficacy.

Sober people sometimes cause car crashes, but that in itself is a pretty poor reason to permit drunk driving.

I'll also point out that simply driving under the influence is a crime, even if you don't actually cause an accident. The statistical propensity of impaired drivers to cause accidents is sufficient cause to imprison people for this sort of thing.

Because it's cheaper to vaccinate people than to hospitalize unvaccinated, and hospitals are understaffed everywhere in the world.

Because they are less likely to get hospitalised and flood the country's intensive care wards.

Because a lockdown of all people is more unpopular than a lockdown of unvaccinated people. It's election year...

1. incentive - if everyone is locked down, there is no incentive to get vaccinated. 2. lack of contribution to hospital admissions - although some vaccinated people do get ill, once the elderly are boosted voluntarily the burden of this segment will be very low 3. credibility - the government promised and I quote "vaccination is the way back to normality". If they break this promise, they lose future credibility.

You should concentrate on the "can". Vaccinated folks are less likely to develop Covid in the first place, and as such, aren't as likely to spread it. And if they do develop it, it is less likely to be serious and require hospitalisation. This keeps us from having to decide who in the hospital lives or dies and takes the stress of of the medical system, workplaces, and families.

Because this was never about any virus, it's about social control and covering up for political failures of the last several decades.

Another reason, at least initially, was to motivate people to get vaccinated. Still makes sense when vaccinated people transmit less, less likely will get infected and are much less likely to get infected.

I would be very happy if my government did the same. What a relief it would be!

It's a public health measure, like public sanitation requirements, and driving a car that meets safety requirements. Unvaccinated people should be free to do whatever they want, short of risking infecting other people. Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.

You might have a point if the vaccine fully prevented transmission or infection, but it doesn't.

My understanding is it's not going to prevent transmission but it can help in reducing transmissions, thus reducing infections.

If your goal is exclusively to prevent transmission in itself vaccines aren't always they best way to do it. Isolation or biohazard suits are the way to go there.

If you require society to still keep working and for people to not die vaccines generally do a pretty good job of that.

If your goal is to prevent mutation of dangerous new variants vaccines are wildly effective.

I'd say just having the last 2 is pretty good.

Vaccines generally DO prevent transmission, just not this one, coronaviruses mutate too fast, and the vaccines only target the spike.

This vaccine can spark new mutations since vaccinated people can get it and the virus would mutate to attempt to work around the vaccine immunity.

GPs main point was people's freedoms should be restricted to stop the spread. My point was it doesn't stop the spread. So why restrict freedoms?

Vaccinated people will continue to spread the virus, whether it's slower or faster doesn't matter in the end, it will spread until it's endemic. (I believe it already is)

I like the personification of the virus as attempting to work around immunity.

Can you back that up? Reducing infection reduces spread, often to the point where the disease dies out.

>whether it's slower or faster doesn't matter in the end, it will spread until it's endemic.

I'm not sure this is reasonable to assume. Below a certain threshold of transmissibility any virus (including this one) will die faster than it spreads, leading to eventual extinction of the virus.

Passing a driver's test doesn't fully prevent all car accidents, and yet we still require potential drivers to pass a test. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.

Forcing a standardized test is not the same as forcing an injection that people still have to sign a legal waiver for.

If you're talking about taking away freedoms and forcing injections, it better solve something, not "meh it probably helps".

-- edit --

To below, the 14th amendment. Why do you think they keep losing court cases with the vaccine mandates?

My body my choice. Ring a bell? If it's a good enough argument to kill life inside you, it's a good enough argument against forced injections.

Don't be a useful idiot, don't advocate for your own oppression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

There is no “freedom from being injected” or “freedom from spreading a virus” or “freedom from denying a vaccine, getting sick and straining the healthcare system”.

People just love making up “freedoms”.

> There is no “freedom from being injected” or “freedom from spreading a virus” or “freedom from denying a vaccine, getting sick and straining the healthcare system”.

Actually, any authority not explicitly given to the government in the US Constitution is implicitly a right. See the Tenth Amendment. Also, wouldn't those fall under the right of privacy used to justify abortions or the right to due process protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments?

Would you be ok with not allowing unvaccinated people into certain places? e.g. a vaccine "license".

May I voice an opinion?

Possibly yes, in principle. If it is non-punitive, like most of the licenses in existence. For this a few points will need to be satisfied though, which, in my opinion are not, at present.

- It needs to be shown that significant difference exists in the degree of risk/harm reduction between "licensed" and "unlicensed". That reduction must be measured and quantified or qualified beyond reasonable doubt. The threshold of significance also must be socially agreed upon.

- Likewise, the very risk/harm to be reduced needs to be shown as being worth an essentially society-divisive measure. Again, the agreement needs to be reached on where exactly the the tolerance threshold is. Such that it is clear why the same mechanism is/was not applied to other things. Like, why we don't enforce it for seasonal flu, why we don't have blanket 10km/hr speed limit, and why when throwing a BBQ for friends one must not apply for permission and provide proof of recent "food handling safety" certificate.

- At the same time the requirement must be universal, no exception on any grounds, medical or not. Just like blind or mentally deficient person is unable to get PPL or DL, under any circumstances, even though the disability is not due to their choice.

- The latter must be recognized and "unlicensed" people must not be shamed or vilified. Conversely, creation of the alternative infrastructure must be encouraged, in order to bring these people back into society. Just like we do for people with other disabilities.

Otherwise it is just petty punitive crap. Like in Victoria, where "unlicensed" aren't allowed into KMart, but can run wild in Coles across the floor. Or not allowed into restaurant but happy to mingle in the food court. And honestly, so many measures for the last two years were just hostile and punitive and useless otherwise, it is not surprising that they tend to be rejected as a package, even when you can, arguably, sift one or two reasonable things from it.

I would be okay with it if the unvaccinated are still allowed to go places given they can provide a negative test. But ideally, they shouldn't be barred.

I like to think of the covid vaccine as a potentially forced evolution of humanity, of which a certain subset of its constituents favor reducing the rights of those whom refuse it - a group that they were apart of not so long before.

Across Canada, thousands of people have died as a consequence their elective surgeries have been delayed to make room for Covid ICU admissions.

In Alberta ICU admissions are 60x higher for the unvaccinated than the vaccinated in their 50s.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-severe-outcom...

Nothing to do with covid and everything to do with socialized medicine.

Canada has always had very long surgery wait times:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/health-care-wait-times-hit-20-...

edit: not irrelevant, it's yet another problem being blamed on covid when it's really Canada's mismanagement of their healthcare system.

That's irrelevant. I'm talking about what's changed since the pandemic began.

> You might have a point if the vaccine fully prevented transmission or infection, but it doesn't.

No health or safety measure is perfect. By that standard, we wouldn't have any at all - we can't prevent all contamination of the food supply, so we would prevent none?

>Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.

The governments freedom ends where my epidermis begins.

Your government can imprison you, it can do body cavity searches, it can force medical procedures on you, all depending on the circumstances.

You can lose rights after due process, nothing to do with this scenario.

The due process is the important part, you must be convicted by a jury of your peers.

Forced mandates are not due process.

Your lack of understanding of how your rights work is troubling.

I resonate with this quote like a piano does a tuning fork.

> Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.

I see this used every time, if you pay close attention to the phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time by every party.

There will be people thinking that you can't limit their "freedom" because a vaccine is out there at this point and those who fears for their lives can take it and forget about the virus (in most cases).

There will be people thinking that unvaxxed people should loose their "freedom" because they apparently have an increasing probability to infect others (which in most cases are vaccinated and would get a mild infection in most cases?).

I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".

> There will be people thinking that you can't limit their "freedom" because a vaccine is out there at this point and those who fears for their lives can take it and forget about the virus (in most cases).

I don't understand this statement: Who is talking about limiting the freedom of vaccinated people and in what way?

> if you pay close attention to the phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time by every party.

I don't see it at all. If I'm standing still and you punch me in the nose, how could both parties use that argument?

> I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".

Your personal choice and 'respect' are irrelevant. You can not care about and 'respect' them choosing to drive the wrong way on the freeway with you in the car, but so what? They are still risking other people's lives.

> Who is talking about limiting the freedom of vaccinated people and in what way?

Vaxxed would like to limit unvaxxed "freedom" even though they are not threatened at all by them, this is what science has been telling us for at least 5 months: vaccines work, they drastically reduce breakthrough infection and death, I don't think I need to show you the data on that.

> If I'm standing still and you punch me in the nose, how could both parties use that argument?

The fact is that they are not punching your nose at all. If you don't want to get punched you have a free effective vaccine that will put a giant steel wall in front of you and protect your nose from punches. If you don't want to get vaxxed it's your responsibility to consider that you will get a punch in your nose sooner or later.

> Your personal choice is irrelevant.

I strongly agree with this, that's why I will never limit others based on something I want or think, ever.

> You can not care about and 'respect' them choosing to drive the wrong way on the freeway with you in the car, but so what?

Nobody is driving the wrong way, getting vaxxed is not mandatory at the moment so they are doing so legally.

> They are still risking other people's lives.

Let's pretend this is true (in my useless opinion it is not since everybody can take the vaccine and be safe), as far as I know vaxxed can still spread the virus. What we also know is that vaxxed people seems to get _less_ infected, but they could very well be infected too (recent UKHA data shows that on average vaxxed people will get infected with 60% less probability than unvaxxed). Since this is a matter of getting infected or not, I don't see why vaxxed (according to your phrase) are exempt from risking other people's live just because they have a 60% less probability of getting infected and spread the virus. Me and you could very easily spread the virus and risk other people's lives as an unvaxxed.

Well said, I agree with your points. Anyone who want the protection conferred by the vaccine in developed countries likely already has it. At this point, the unvaccinated are just used as scapegoats for why the pandemic isn't over. It's a great way for politicians to shift blame regarding criticisms of how they've been handling covid.

> Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.

I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Can you give a clear and fair number? Obviously people will never fully stop getting sick, but how low exactly before we're content?

In Denmark we have now reached 90% vaccination rate. We have more infected, the same number of admissions in hospital and a 15% higher death rate than all of 2020. I really fail to see why we are blaming the unvaccinated and not Pfizer/Moderna.

Are hospital admissions and mortality rates similar among vaccinated and nonvaccinated individuals?

No. Not at all. .dk is similar to .nl in this, and in .nl its 55/45 unvaccinated/vaccinated (on a 12/88 ratio of vaccinations).

There is a dashboard (in Danish) with current numbers: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/aa41b29149f24e20a40...

The number of hospitalized patients per 100K are as follows:

Unvaccinated: 24.7 Started vaccination: 10.5 Fully vaccinated: 5.9

Sources please?

the 90% vaccination claims of the op are false.

Probably vaccination rate for adults, not everybody.

The 90% figure has sometimes been quoted in Denmark but it doesn't include people not eligible for vaccination. Now that smaller kids are offered the vaccine this ratio has decreased and really shouldn't be used at all. The percentage of people in Denmark that have started vaccinations of the total population is 78% with 76% having completed their vaccinations.

What is the breakdown of unvaxxed/vaxxed in hospital admissions and deaths?

Serious question. I wonder about vaxx effectiveness when I see these numbers. But the breakdown matters.

I live in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our breakdown from Mar 15-Nov 26 is[1]:

- Hospitalizations: 84.4% unvaxxed, 9.6% 1 shot, 6% 2 shots

- Deaths: 69% unvaxxed, 7.1% 1 shot, 23.8% 2 shots

Total admissions and death rate numbers don't tell the whole story - breaking them down by vaxxed/1shot/2shot will help unpack "who to blame".

In fact, you can dig deeper. My province doesn't release the numbers but from what I can tell the 2-shot people who die are generally older and/or infirm. So I believe the 2shot numbers are being thrown off by an atypical population... which means the general population has less to fear from covid if they're double vaxxed. My co-founder informed this is an example of "Simpson's Paradox"[2].

What kind of vaxxed/unvaxxed breakdown are you seeing in Denmark?

1 - https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/204d6ed723244dfbb76...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

The other thing that doesn't show the whole story is using a data set starting in March when there was a quite low percent vaccinated but comparing totals of unvaxxed vs. vaxxed deaths over the whole period, when fully vaxxed in March was only a few percent.

It'd be much more interesting to see a straight comparison over Oct-Nov, say, when the vaccination rate was stable and get the unvaxxed vs 1 shot vs 2 shot vs 2 weeks after 2nd shot vs booster numbers.

This is exactly simpsons paradox. It is a shame so few people have heard of it!

This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on hospitals. That is, if you have 80% vaxxed, a mere 10% increase could halve the number of hospital beds needed. No wonder governments are going so hard on vaccinating the hesitant and antivax.

No, this does not imply that going from 80% to 90% vaccinated could halve the number of hospital beds needed - that reasoning would only work if the vaccine completely prevented Covid-related hospitalizations, in which case zero vaccinated people would be hospitalized and Simpson's paradox wouldn't apply. What it actually implies is that at much less than 100% vaccination, you hit a point where vaccinating the remaining population does very little to reduce pressure on hospitals because most people who're hospitalized have been vaccinated, despite the fact that the vaccines do reduce the risk of hospitalization. That is, the benefits of vaccinating the last few percent of the population actually diminish rather than increasing like they would do with a more effective vaccine.

> most people who're hospitalized have been vaccinated

Is this true? My understanding is that the opposite is true, most people who are hospitalized are not vaccinated by a large margin.

I haven't checked, but I think your understanding is correct. Even if it's not, here's a good explanation https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination

>This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on hospitals.

This ignores the demographic differences between the vaxxed and the unvaxxed. The elderly and those with conditions that made them high risk have a much higher vaccination rate as one would expect.

If you cut the number of vaccinated in half you won't cut hospitalizations in half because subgroups of the population being hospitalized are not present in the same ratios in the unvaxed.

> We have more infected, the same number of admissions in hospital and a 15% higher death rate than all of 2020

Another really, really important piece of context is how human behavior has changed. In 2020, many people were very cautious about covid. For example, in liberal US cities like Seattle and Portland, many indoor activities were restricted pretty hard until 2021. People didn’t dine out in person, or didn’t attend the movies. In 2021, people have more or less returned to normal, less-cautious behavior. While masks are still worn, people are comfortable dining out and going to the movies and all sorts of activities.

My point is that this change in behavior is likely to “blame” for the increased cases. If people were behaving the same way a year ago as they are today, cases would have been significantly worse then.

In other words, vaccinations have allowed us to return to a mostly normal life while stopping cases from rapidly increasing. At the very least, anecdotally, in places with lower vaccination rates, a return to normal life has been accompanied by more covid scares.

> People didn’t dine out in person

I wonder how did they dine out :-)

Order out, take home? Sort of eating out. At least you are not cooking. :)

Your numbers are very similar to Ontario's, and in fact Canada in general as a whole.

But what's strange is out the US doesn't seem to reflect this.

There are states with fairly high vaccination rates where vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU at rates many times ours, and are only showing up as 2.5 or 3 times better protected than the unvaccinated for hospitalization.

I don't know how to explain this other than length of time since injection. But we're heading into 6-7 months here now in Ontario and I'm still not seeing this trend. Boosters will certainly help, I'm sure, but I don't feel it can be the sole cause.

It's so ridiculous just driving across the border... look at Vermont or New York compared to Ontario or Quebec in terms of daily case rates and hospitalization. (Or Maine compared to New Brunswick, etc.) The only way I can explain it is by masking, which is still rigidly followed here in most of Canada, but not as much in the US.

PS congrats on having perhaps the most competent governments in North America in terms of managing this disease. It's not the first time I've found myself browsing for real estate in Nova Scotia, but it certainly became more serious this past year...

My guess is that obesity plays a bigger role than many people realize. Perhaps obese people who are vaccinated are still at a substantially elevated risk? This also explains why Africa is doing pretty well in terms of low casualties: Young people and fewer obese.

Most developed countries have populations with high proportion of elderly people, just look at their population pyramids. Their population is generally older on average, as the country has long life expectancy, a low death rate, but also a low birth rate.

In Canada, we had a longer gap between doses, which may be a factor in extending efficacy. There is also a robust booster strategy, though it does not get much attention here. Not sure how it compares, though.

> What is the breakdown of unvaxxed/vaxxed in hospital admissions and deaths?

85.6% of hospitalized in Denmark are either unvaccinated or "half vaccinated". See https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/aa41b29149f24e20a40... graph 2.

This means that if the vaccination rate grew from 90% to 100% the hospitalized number would drop to very manageable levels.

Even with a 90% fully vaccinated population, the remaining 10% are still enough to fill up the hospitals.

Edit: I think I misunderstood the graph. It is actually already normalized by the size of each population (Unvaccinated, Half-vaccinated, Fully vaccinated).

If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.

When taking the vaccination rate into account, the likelihood of hospitalization still seems to be a fifth after vaccination.

But even if the remaining population got vaccinated it wouldn't be enough to drastically reduce the hospital load.

> If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.

This doesn't mean what you think it means. Imagine if 100% of the population were vaccinated, what percentage of the hospitalized would then be vaccinated?

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination

the point is the beds are being taken up by the vaccinated. the idea was after vaccination these beds wont have to be taken up by the vaccinated suffering COVID and will be vacant for others suffering other diseases.

At least the death stats need to be considered on an individual basis. If this is something like 30 vaccinated vs 70 unvaccinated deaths per 100,000 people. The numbers are so small that the extra 40 people might simply be people with terminal diseases like last stages of cancer, with extremely weakened state not bothering to get vaxxed and dying of the first thing that gets them, which was covid. It does not necessarily mean the vaccine would have concurred any benefit or saved their life.

If there's simply a large number of people in such situations as I suspect there are. It would be deceptive to extrapolate to the general population based on them.

> from what I can tell the 2-shot people who die are generally older and/or infirm. So I believe the 2shot numbers are being thrown off by an atypical population...

People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population and 93% of covid deaths.

The overwhelming majority of people that die from this thing are older and/or infirm. It has nothing to do with an atypical population, that's just how this virus works.

The vaccine can only do so much. We need to stop pretending it's the "slam dunk" our experts advertised it as and get on with our lives.

10% of 5,821,297 is still 58,212 people who potentially get ill (and can die and can get into hospital).

I'm not sure where you get the 15% higher death rate: any sources?

In .nl we are seeing the same numbers (but on a 3x population of denmarks). Hospitals are so full now, they are rejecting e.g. cancer-patients and other "plannable Intensive Care patients". Over half of the patients on those ICs are vaccinated; ergo, from a ratio of 10/90% the patients are 55/45%; ergo: they work. Certainly not fully and certainly less than (I) expected.

I think he's confused about the data. Based on the Google data (from the graph that's visible when searching "COVID Denmark"), there are more Danish cases now than at the previous 2020 peak (3500/day then vs 4300 now), BUT hospitalizations (920/day then vs 430 now) and deaths (32/day then vs. 11 now) are down significantly.

btw - 10% of 5,821,297 is 582k. Therefore even higher number of people that could potentially end up in hospital, ICU or dead.

Is the death rate as high among the unvaccinated or is it just that the unvaccinated die 15% more frequently than before?

> I really fail to see why we are blaming the unvaccinated and not Pfizer/Moderna.

I’d blame both the unvaccinated and new variants that seem to be more lethal than before.

If it is the case that vaccinated are still passing the virus but not dying from it, then isolation of the unvaccinated saves their lives.

That's because two out of three that get hospitalized are unvaccinated, or that's at least the case in Odense.

The vaccines, while not as effective as classics like polio vaccine or measles vaccine, are definitely a net positive and help significantly in reducing the epidemic burden. Perhaps instead of internecine finger pointing we could blame covid itself?

I can't find any data to support your claim of a higher death rate in Denmark than all of 2020. The data I have show:

- Denmark currently experiencing a massive new wave of infections

- Previous large wave of infections was last winter, with rate peaking on Dec 18

- Daily deaths peaked one month later at about 8 per 1000 daily infections

- Current daily deaths, accounting for lag, is also about 8 per 1000 daily infections

https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

The vaccination rate in Denmark is less than 80%. The virus does not care that vaccines have not been authorized for kids yet. An unvaccinated person is an unvaccinated person, regardless of whether the reason is bureaucracy or personal choice.

Also, the effective vaccination rate is usually lower than the average rate. Unvaccinated people tend to spend time with other unvaccinated people, and this is particularly true for kids. The people an infected individual encounters are more likely to be unvaccinated than the general population.

What people aren't typically "mathing" right is that even if you have 90% vaccinated, that's still potentially hundreds of thousands (millions in bigger countries) of un-vaccinated people who are prone to getting seriously sick.

The numbers here in Ontario are clear. Case rates among the unvaccinated are far higher, and ICU admissions are far far far higher.

I never fell for any line that said vaccination would just make the disease go away. Frankly that was never said by medical experts, only implied by certain politicians.

Denmark has 76,4% vaccinated: check on https://www.zeit.de/index

Thanks, something really didn't smell right there.

One is the rate in the total population, the other is the vaccination rate for the 18+ part of the population.

The numbers in the Netherlands are similar but both a bit lower.

Wow both those numbers are lower than here in Canada.

Denmark has 76,4% completely vaccinated.

Source, the data on https://www.zeit.de

Incredible statistic, would love to see the source on this

None of this is true. The vaccination rate in Denmark is 77%, not 90% [1]. The number of hospital admissions and the death rate are lower than during the first and second waves [2, 3] despite a significantly larger infection rate [4].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-people-fully-vaccin...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Probably the difference between vaccination rate in adults, and vaccination rate over the whole population?

On 1: The discrepancy in percentages is usually the difference between "Entire Population Vaccinated" and "Eligible Population Vaccinated." Which, until very recently, was only people 12 and older.

Given the exceptionally low incidence of death in the 12 and under group, it's debatable which figure should be given prominence.

On 2 and 3: The case rate is spiking significantly higher than it has ever before, and the death rate is on an upward trend. It is typically delayed behind the case rate, so we can't be certain that this will be as bad as it gets. It's still very possible for this wave to be more deadly than prior waves, even though the Case:Death rate is lower.

Instead of showing 2 & 3 separately, perhaps the combined chart [1] is a better visualization.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Even if this was true (which it isn't) the main difference is that you have only minor "lockdown"-measures in Denmark right now which is very different compared to 2020. Vaccines push down the R-Value significantly so you can keep everything open while still having a manageable pandemic.

Fairly certain you mean “a higher death toll” and not “fatality rate”, which is in itself absolutely meaningless and typical of the antivax nonsense.

What are the major root causes for the surge in Germany? Low humidity/temperature? New variants? Something else?

IIRC last winter in the US at least, health officials and the media were quick to blame irresponsible citizens and social gatherings – but the major root cause seemed to be a new, more transmissible (delta) variant.

Yes, Delta combined with cooler weather and high percentage of antivaxxers.

Antivaxxers, but also unvaccinated children. In the current Covid wave in Austria children 5-14 years old have the highest 7-day incidence.

School children in Austria are tested three times a week, so the numbers can't be compared to other age groups.

Delta emerged in late spring 2021 though. You must be thinking about Alpha. However, it became dominant in the US only in late March 2021 according to Wikipedia[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Alpha_variant#Sprea...

> You must be thinking about Alpha

Yes, unfortunately I couldn't correct it. I wish HN allowed corrections for weeks rather than hours!

Hmm, as I understood it alpha was circulating in the US in December, but perhaps you are correct that it didn't actually surge until later?

Probably cold weather, Delta, and people getting lazy about their precautions, after 18 or so months of pandemic.

Another factor is that the German government tried to keep infection rates low at all times, leading to very little natural immunity in the population compared to other countries.

We have 57 million fully vaccinated [0] people and 6 million infected/recovered [1] out of 83 million inhabitants. The recovered even have to get a shot later to keep their status as recovered/vaccinated (which exempts from the restrictions that are imposed now), so they might even be considered as a subset of the vaccinated group. More infections therefore would not have increased the total number of immune people but only cost more lives.

Beside that we can vaccinate a multiple of the number of newly infected people per day just fine. It's been about people being unwilling to get the shot, not availability of vaccines for quite a while now. Example: one day of vaccinations like yesterday (~1 Mio) [0] equals two weeks of new infections at levels like today (>73000).

[0] https://impfdashboard.de/

[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e823...

I disagree, over the summer they aimed for low infection rates, explicitly coupling openings to certain infection rate thresholds, knowing full well at that time that the virus was going to be endemic and without any good reason at all believing that sufficiently many people would be vaccinated in order to contain the pandemic in the winter. Other countries such as France or the Britain simply didn't care about high infection rates over the summer and face a smaller wave this winter.

This is not logical. More infections in the younger age groups would have boosted the defense systems of many while keeping lethalities low. This would have helped tremendously.

Would love to know the effect if any of being surrounded by countries with lower vaccination rates. Germany may have 70% vaccinated but how much does it help them when Poland has only 50%? Is there enough mobility between Poland and Germany to make it matter?

Of concern to a Californian who is surrounded by other states with lower vaccination rates. Even internally in California there is a steep gradient between the coastal counties with 80-90% and the inland counties as low as 50%.

Major cause of the surge is that temperature have gotten too low for outdoor meetings/dining and keeping windows open. Same as last year.

After 2 years of Covid, I find it extremely suspect that the covid vaccines are still touted so hard as the only way to manage or exit the pandemic despite it clearly not being the silver bullet it was originally promised to be. The fact that the media and government can't talk about anything other than vaccines tells me people are not really interested in solving for anything other than selling more vaccines.

It's close to a silver bullet. Yes they don't completely stop transmission but who cares about that? All we should care about are severe cases and deaths.

Add the new therapeutics on top and we actually do have the silver bullet. Vaccine + Paxlovid, if widely distributed enough, ends the pandemic, barring some new, more severe variant.

My point was not so much about the vaccine itself but the fact that almost all conversation and chatter about the pandemic is centered around the vaccine and having to get it in order to get anything done (job, travel, etc). People act as if there is literally no other way for life to function like it did pre-2020 without vaccines.

It's not surprising that all convo is around the vaccine, it's our strongest tool against it.

Personally, I don't think there has been a good faith dialog by our media and politicians about risk assessment, at-risk staying home (instead of everybody), therapeutics, treatment, or voluntary vaccinations. And maybe there has been some but the mRNA vaccines have completely dominated mindshare to a such a degree that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and has made me very cynical.

A silver bullet that causes myocarditis (which I have been diagnosed with after 2 pfizer shots) and that requires boosting every 5-6 months.

Yep, Great silver bullet.

How many deaths/complications will it prevent and how many deaths/complications will it cause?

Isn't that ratio dramatically in the favor of vaccines?

If you don't wear a life jacket someone else will drown..

... and this is where the analogy breaks down...

Yes, because you're all tied together for some reason?

Really, this analogy is too much of a stretch to be meaningful.

The vaccine is so effective everyone should get it but stay away from the unvaccinated even if you're vaccinated because its not that effective.

This reminds me of the "no, not like that" meme.

No no, it's because you're all in the same boat...

It's your choice to bring a life jacket or not. You know that you risk drowning if you don't bring one, but you also know that the risk is low for where you are going, are allergic to the material that PFDs (personal floatation devices) are made of, think you know better because you can swim, or have some other ideological reason for not wearing one.

But on this day, your little crew encounter some unexpected rapids that cause your boat to capsize. One person was a guide who knows how to treat this, and quickly gets as many people as they can onto the flipped boat. Despite this, there isn't enough room on the upside down boat for everyone to fit, so some people are left grabbing the edges of the boat.

Those who can hold on survive, as do many with life vests and those on the boat. Unfortunately, since the boat was so small and the rapids so strong, some were swept away - some with life vests and others without - never to be seen again. The rapids eventually calm down and you are able to flip the boat right-side up again. Now, you are joined by another boat coming in from another river that didn't experience the same rapids as you did.

Now, a few of the life jacket wearers are pointing fingers saying that those who didn't wear life jackets "effectively killed" those who wore life jackets but didn't make it. Since by not wearing lifejackets, they "took up too much room" on the boat and weren't contributing their fair share for the greater good and survival of everyone. The other side counters by reasoning that this is theory-crafting much like how pundits argue that Jack could have fit onto the wooden plank alongside Rose from Titanic if they shifted their bodies in the right way. Even though the acclaimed director JAMES CAMERON says that Jack was going to die anyways.

When in reality, no one was to blame except for the natural cause that was the rapids. All the while, life jacket manufacturers line their pockets with money from the increased sale of life jackets.

Remember the Titanic movie? Girl didn’t take the seat in the live boat. Di Caprio gave her his place on the floating wood - and drowned.

I'm surprised to find this many anti vaxxers on hn. I would have expected that the community was a lot more rational.

Don't conflate 'anti-vax' with 'anti-vax-mandate'. The two positions have entirely different scientific and moral bases. I would think the second group is also much larger.

They've changed the definition to obfuscate this very important point.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

>Definition of anti-vaxxer

>: a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination

Thats a lie.

It's been the definition since at least 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20181125060933/https://www.merri...

Probably they made an assumption after the definition of "vaccine" was changed on there earlier this year.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210108224740/https://www.merri...

vs.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaccine

It's a lie? You literally pointed out that they changed it in 2018. Thank you for proving my point.

You claimed that "THEY" changed the definition, based on a dictionary. This would imply that the definition was changed during covid to include "mandate sceptics". The link shows that in 2018 it included "[...] laws that mandate vaccination". The only real difference is that the former definition uses the word "laws" and the current one "regulation". While the two words are not interchangeable, the definition on merriam-webster includes laws as a type of regulations.

Calling this a meaningful change of its definition that "THEY" did is nothing more than pedantic anti-vaxx bullshit.

Well, THEY have also changed the definition of "vaccine" and "pandemic" a long time ago. Go look it up.

It's nice to see so many critical thinkers on here. Aren't "hackers" partly defined by their distrust of authority?

It's wild how we can be vaccinated with two doses and still be considered an anti-vaxxer. Is this not doublespeak?

Precisely. Simultaneously believing that you are free to do with your own body as you like, whilst also inflicting upon others a forced medical procedure in the name of the "greater good"

Yeah, simultaneously believing that you are free to do with your own body as you like, whilst also inflicting upon others a forced medical procedure in the name of the "greater good"

The tech community here is pretty good around software and a limited amount of hardware. Once they venture into the world of biology, health etc they are only marginally more adept than the general public.

It's also predominately American, so you get a lot 'freedom at the expense of everyone else' ideas floating about.

I'm not surprised at all.

This site is a honeypot for anti authoritarian contrarians.

sadly, this is a pretty concise "nutshell".

Is it, to some extent, a problem of naming and terminology?

When vaccines were first introduced in the UK, there was a great deal of discussion about ethics of forcing people to get them. One really cool view was, of course you can’t force people to inject a chemical into their bodies. But if people choose not to get vaccinated, it’s on them to reduce the risk to others - ie basically subject themselves to lockdown.

I think this is harder to argue with than “forced vaccination”. Sure, don’t get the jab if you don’t want to, but what are you doing instead to not endanger others?

would a mask suffice? or how about staying 6ft apart?

So without getting into the weeds of it, I don’t think these offer as much protection as just staying away from people, not going to restaurants, cinemas etc. You’re also risking drawing more resources out of hospitals. UK has free general healthcare, but eg a health insurer would charge you more if you’re a smoker.

While I sympathise with people who refuse vaccines on grounds of free choice, the question stands: what are you doing instead to protect me?

Nothing. I shouldn't need to do anything to protect you. You are but a stranger, as are most people in the world. And quite frankly, I don't care about you. Nor you, I would assume, I. Outside of this conversation, we will likely never meet.

So long as I am not actively trying to harm you, I would think that would suffice. I hope you too don't burden yourself with protecting each and every being you see on the streets. So long as you've bestowed yourself protection conferred by the vaccine, I see no reason for you to go out of your way to jab a dose of Pfizer at each unvaccinated individual you encounter.

I do burden myself with these questions. My car has to be road safe for others. I can’t install razor wire on its outside - maybe makes me safer, maybe it’s just something I fancy, but I can’t. If I drive an oversized lorry into your car, which I can’t drive properly, you’d be justifiably angry, not just that it happened but that it was reckless and avoidable.

Plenty more examples if you like (building regs, gun laws, other areas of health etc), as a society we decided it’s ok to limit some personal liberties so we’re not endangering others.

If a humanist argument doesn’t apply, then well, tough. I’m in a majority demanding that a minority doesn’t make life significantly more dangerous for me.

So if you’re not getting a vaccine, what do you do instead?

EDIT the “I don’t care” argument runs out much more quickly. If you don’t care about my safety, why should I care about your convenience?

You're fine to burden yourself, just as I choose to not burden myself. We have that choice. Yeah, we decide it's okay to limit personal liberties, that's pretty fair. But forcing a vaccine onto someone is not a limit on personal liberty. It is much more than that. It's the complete disregard for that person's liberty. This is the forceful application of a medical procedure onto an unwilling participant. That is not freedom.

It's fine to be in a majority demanding a minority doesn't make life more difficult for yourself. Heck, I'd count myself in many of those categories. But unvaccinated people are doing NOTHING to make life more difficult for others. It is expressly the lack of doing anything to harm others. To assume otherwise is simply the misattribution of blame.

And since I don't care about your safety, you shouldn't care about my convenience either. That's the point. Worry about your own safety, and don't self-righteously impose your own ideals onto another. If you want to protect yourself, then you're free to do so - you have the vaccine do you not?

>But unvaccinated people are doing NOTHING to make life more difficult for others.

They are taxing the healthcare system, in some areas overwhelming it. COVID hospitalization and eventual death is typically not quick, often 4 - 6 weeks taking up ICU resources. They are spreading the virus more rampantly than the vaccinated and literally killing people, often each other.

If we could trace viral spread back to each specific individual who passed the virus on and hold that individual criminally and civilly liable for their actions, then maybe we can have the lecture on personal liberties and behaving responsibly at their own discretion, because then they'd actually have some skin in the game. We can't do that, so we're already being forced to socialize the detrimental outcomes caused by antivaxxers. Society can certainly ask for something in return for the limited liability granted to these antivaxxers and place limits on those who continue to make little to no effort to reduce their potential harm to those around them and society in general.

If the healthcare system is being taxed, why are you not pointing fingers at the failures of the healthcare system? Just because someone is unvaccinated does not mean that they are taking up ICU resources. Neither are they literally killing people - that would be the virus' doing.

Your point about tracing viral spread has some merit. But what you would find is that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are both spreaders of the virus. It may lean more on one side, but you're effectively reducing this into an us vs. them problem, and labelling antivaxxers as if the whole spectrum of human opinion can be expressed neatly into two distinct categories.

Look, I'm not saying that we can't ask for limits so that we can feel safe in general as a society. There are certainly those who engage in more risky behavior by not wearing masks, gathering in large groups, etc. But it is important to remember that unvaccinated people are not the ones causing harm - it is the virus. To blame this minority and hence enact procedures to forcefully inject a foreign substance into their body against the subject's will is certainly of no historic precedent in Germany.

When, in many areas, 90% of ICU resources are devoted to unvaxed COVID cases, most of the problem is the unvaxed. Should we build entire hospitals solely for the unvaxed now?

When measuring negligence based on attempted mitigations taken to prevent harm or death of others, antivax would likely be considered extremely negligent, based on little to no efforts taken to reduce risk to others, or even intentional actions that purposefully increased risk.

Saying the virus kills and not the carrier/spreaders is like saying the car killed the person it hit, not the driver of the car. If you want to drive around your body with a deadly and extremely contagious disease, without mitigations, be careful who you crash into.

No one is forcibly injecting anyone, just society limiting access of those who do not care to limit their potential harm.

Should hospital capacity be dependent upon a population's susceptibility to disease? I certainly hope not. If hospitals are overrun by old people with prior medical conditions, do you blame them? You might sure, but I don't. Hospitals being overrun indicates a failure of government spending to adequately allocate proper funds in the case of emergencies. The fact that they are pointing their fingers at the unvaccinated, as you are as well, is precisely what they want to absolve themselves of blame.

Sure, I like your car analogy. But someone who is antivax != they have covid. Assuming thusly would be but a witch hunt. In your scenario, someone who is vaccinated could also be driving around their body with a deadly and contagious disease. If they are out and about because they believe the vaccine bestows them immunity, their repeated and continued exposure to others increases the likelihood of them contracting the disease more so than an antivax who stays at home all the time.

So in this case, I am saying that you are conflating the source of covid with the population that does not want a vaccine. They are not one and the same. Yet you are conveniently blaming this pandemic on your imagined construct of people you classify as "antivax".

Should I blame old people for inevitably getting old? No. We all get old, and the health system normally handles this load okay.

Should I blame someone unvaxed getting severe COVID-19, a well known and highly contagious disease with a free vax that greatly reduces the chance of severe infection? Absolutely.

COVID is particularly unique in its long ICU stays. Even for other conditions which could be blamed on poor patient decisions, 4 - 6 weeks in the ICU, and needing vents or ECMO, is not typical or widespread.

In the car analogy, we still have perfect biomarker tracking to determine exactly who, when and how long someone was infected and who exactly they infected. Perfect information. Obviously we don't have perfect information to hold people accountable, so we end up with tragedy of the commons. We need to protect the commons and the best option we have is through vaccination and limited access to the commons for those who refuse it.

No, you’re still not getting it. My example of old people with a pre-existing condition is just a placeholder for anyone who develops symptoms (of any kind or origin) enough to warrant a hospital visit, through which I point out the inconsistency of your moral positioning by contrasting it with your supposed belief that unvaccinated people are to blame for a hospital’s lack of capacity.

Feel free to blame whomever you choose, it’s not my problem. However, I will point out that the flaw in your car analogy comes when you realize that choosing to drive whilst inebriated (or without paying full attention to the road for whatever reason) is a conscious choice, whereas a carrier of the virus is an unwitting participant.

Are old people with pre-existing conditions consuming 90% of ICU resources in some areas? When comparing resource utilization of getting a preventative vaccine with the resource utilization required from a 4 - 6 week stay in the hospital, and that the health system does not typically need to run at overcapacity except when overrun by unvaccinated patients, we can confidently blame the unvaccinated for straining healthcare resources by ending up in the hospital for a completely preventable disease. It would not be an issue if more people were vaccinated, and we only needed to treat breakthrough cases. The hospitals should not need to grow larger when there is a highly effective preventative available right now for free.

When in a time of a pandemic, with a deadly and highly contagious disease, refusing the vaccine is like refusing the uber or taxi offered to you for free, and insisting on taking your car instead. They are absolutely not unwitting. They are absolutely making a conscious choice to purposefully increase their risk, and the risk of others around them. You like to talk about their personal liberties, but not about their personal responsibilities for the choices they've made.

It doesn't matter whether any distinguishable group of people consume 90% of ICU resources. It is the job of the hospital to treat them regardless. Otherwise, that is discrimination. Nor is Covid a preventable disease, as even the vaccine very clearly does not prevent all hospitalizations or transmission. This is of course, not even mentioning the various mutations that are arising which I bet will no doubt cause the vaccine to be a yearly one like that for the flu. It is very clear right now that there are multiple vaccines available right now, but the fact that hospitals are not capable of handling this is a logistical joke.

You're right, it is a conscious choice to increase risk. I didn't say it wasn't. Just like it is a conscious choice to smoke, or to carry a gun in America. And in each case, there is indeed a fine line that needs to be drawn between their personal freedoms and those of the collective. But as far as I am aware, in none of these cases is the widespread systematic elimination of choice (of taking the vaccine, of opting to smoke, or owning a gun) the logical conclusion.

No, it's not discrimination, it's triage and rationing of care. You act as if hospital resources are infinite and there aren't difficult logistical issues with expanding hospital capacity. Hospitals have already gone to extraordinary lengths to accept more unvaccinated patients. The problem lies squarely on the individuals choosing to not take a preventative vaccine, and opting for the most resource intensive treatment option, when their poor decision catches up with them.

The vaccines are still extremely effective at preventing severe COVID. Hospitalization is extremely preventable with vaccination. Please do not spread misinformation about vaccine effectiveness.

Tons of people are unhappy about guns and are asking for harder limits and controls. Shooting and killing someone is generally still frowned upon. Cigarettes are taxed at an extreme rate, smokers pay higher insurance rates, you can't smoke in buildings anymore and are asked to stay away from buildings when smoking outside in the rain. The world is a better place now that we no longer prioritize smokers damaging "liberties" and "freedoms" over the rest of the population's health.

I would hope that it continues to be a choice that one can opt to make, now and into the future.

two nightingale hospitals in UK were built that were closed down because not enough people to treat. one hospital didnt treat even one patient. this was during the later part of alpha and mid delta surge. they can open them back up surely?

Surely they could re-open them, but they do cost NHS quite a bit of money to run.

No, that's not why they closed down. They closed down because there were not enough staff to safely run them.

not the hospital in yorkshire. they didnt treat a single patient.

...because they didn't have the staff to run it.

because nobody came in to require staff.

Out of intellectual curiosity, how the reasoning about the following concept differ from reasoning about other public health mandates, especially vaccination? Each of the questions represents some model of collective contribution where 100% participation is desirable and every refusal to participate will lead to some bad outcomes earlier or later.

If all people in US give only $10 to cancer research charity, it would be a whopping $3.3bil. Surely it could result in hundreds or, possibly, thousands lives saved. Even more impressive if we count life-years. $10 is a measly sum for most people, not even too inconvenient, especially considering a compounding effect it can produce. It is as "little to no effort to reduce their potential harm to those around them and society in general" as possible. Some people can give more. Society where 100% of people are donating to good cause will be quite thriving, I'd imagine.

1. Should we make charitable donations, to approved institutions, of course, mandatory? On top of existing tax structure, because clearly many people have excess capacity to give? Exceptions to be approved only by qualified financier after thorough audit, because almost nobody can be trusted to assess own financial position fairly.

2. Should charitable donations be made public as a matter of policy?

3. Should hospital triage decisions be made with consideration to the past charitable donations of the patient? What if they did not donate at all? What if they donated to cancer fund, but hospitalized with diabetes? What if they donated regularly but cancelled?

4. Should we ban voluntary cancellations of regular charity payments? Only exceptions validated by commitee of experts are possible.

5. Should we run a shaming campaign branding everyone who refuses to donate "a selfish one"? After all, if they don't donate, they clearly don't care about their fellow citizen and effectively killing them? And their choices, surely attributable exclusively to irrational reasons, must have consequences? And how is it different from parent punishing their child for forgetting to brush their teeth, for example?

And a few more.

6. Should "organ donor" consent be opt-in or opt-out? Should the consent even be considered at all? Aren't those non-consenting "endangering" the society at large?

7. Should blood donation be made mandatory, only excepted by valid medical reason, validated by a doctor guided by central policy? Same questions apply as for charitable donations. I understand blood donation is a huge problem, there aren't enough donors everywhere.

8. Should autopsy be done solely at the discretion of authority, without relatives' consent whatsoever?

And a grotesque one, I have to admit, but would like to hear reasoning.

9. High testosterone level is known to be linked to aggressiveness, drive for power and domination. T influences the "lizard brain", which causes a lot of second-order harm to society, including capital crimes. It has been proven that de-sexing is beneficial for dogs, it lowers the dominance drive, aggression, makes them more mellow and convenient. It raises life expectancy as well! It is not unfeasible that it may be statistically proven, taking guidance from animal models, that overall lowering of T level in society does more good than bad and lowers overall crime and "toxic masculinity". Should we mandate full neutering of human males upon reaching 40yo? Or routinely cut one testicle from every male infant? Or only do the operation to those showing "abnormally" high T level? Should we brand "selfish" those who refuse to contribute to such scientifically-solid model?

The last one is extreme, but would help to perceive where exactly the line between socially acceptable and unacceptable violation of one's body is.

It's not hard. I don't know why you wrote all these unrelated questions. This is simply about direct personal injury from COVID infection caused by those who took no mitigation steps to prevent harm to others(COVID specific harm). They should be held liable like any other personal injury or wrongful death due to gross negligence. Simply a matter of taking individual responsibility for your individual choices. Do we actually do this? No. Unvaccinated get a special waiver to not be held accountable for their actions. All the freedom, none of the responsibilities or accountability for their actions. That is quite selfish and entitled.

Curious what you think of the flu. There isn't a flu shot mandate, but presumably you'd be pro-mandate for the flu vaccine. Are deaths caused by the flu similarly gross negligence?

The way I see it, it is selfish to force others to take a vaccine just so you could feel a bit better about your odds of survival. Now, I'm not saying that collectivist ideals are not to be pursued - just different perspectives.

We should consider mandates in cases of severe disease outbreaks, so a bad flu season could see such mandates, especially if healthcare resources were being strained.

At the moment mandates are a compromise due to lack of ability to ensure accountability for individual choices explicitly related to COVID.

Personal injury or death liability, if it was technically possible, seems like it could usurp the need for mandates, since now reckless behavior would have consequences, and those directly harmed would have recourse for compensation, so maybe no mandate would be needed.

Makes sense. I would envision a whole bunch of logistical issues associated with holding accountability. As well as complications from potential privacy implications.

I believe they tried that, they didn't get their desired results, and now we are caught up to current events.

Realistically:

1) Mandatory vaccination, all age groups, boosters etc.

AND

2) permanently reconfiguring our society to reduce social contacts such that with the vaccines, COVID is suppressed. If the vaccines work well, then small (maybe no) changes will be needed. If they don't, then large changes. WFH, no indoor hospitality etc.

We can cycle through lockdowns, we can wring our hands about vaccinating children, we can even pretend it isn't happening, but the formula is the same:

vaccines+restrictions=suppression

We don't know what the LHS needs to add up to, and we don't know how much vaccines can give us, but this equation must hold, as the alternative to suppression is complete failure of our healthcare system.

To put another way, suppression is the only steady state. If you allow the virus to run unchecked, then eventually restrictions have to be reimposed. If you release restrictions, then the virus ramps up again. Either you tailor restrictions to suppress, or you bounce up and down around that point. Vaccines move that restriction point down.

Despite the wide variety of US state responses, no one is experiencing "complete failure of our healthcare" so I think we'll be all right.

German hospitals are currently transferring patients with severe cases from high incidence regions to lower ones (and the military has to help with nursing roles) because they simply can't stem the number of severe cases in some regions. The situation is as close to "complete failure of our healthcare" as it could be. If you take that as evidence of "we'll be alright", you're playing the white hat guy in https://xkcd.com/2278/.

Do you think, maybe, that has something to do with Germany losing 4000 ICU beds? https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-icu-medics-expect-covid-surge...

That actually has a lot to do with the pandemic itself, as intensive care personnel quit their jobs due to the extended stress.

https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-praesident...

Is that excuse something you'd use as a defense in court? Because that looks like mismanagement to me, and changes nothing. After two years, there should be more ICU beds, not thousands less.

You posted a tangentially related source to your claim and I posted the correct context of this claim.

It clearly shows that ICU beds decreased involuntarily and actually as part of the healthcare system starting to fail due to exhaustion. It actually underlines the point of GP you responded to.

But yes, German public funded organizations are notoriously inflexible when it comes to attracting employees due to tons of bureaucratic red tape.

I don't see the relevance of a defense in court here. How about we stay on topic?

What are these arguments though? This is clearly a failure of the government, not a problem caused by unvaccinated people. If you lose infrastructure during a prolonged crisis, instead of building more: you are failing. I don't understand how you can rationalize this in your favor.

In TFA from the parent comment, it states that the reduction is directly correlated to not having appropriate staffing; not necessarily a count of physical beds.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to about a “defense in court”, but I also don’t know what the appropriate solution is for that situation. Teaching / training people takes time, and compulsory service at the direction of the government seems like overreach.

How much time does it actually take? How much money has been burned by lockdowns? We could have had fewer lockdowns and speed-trained a bunch of overpaid, specialised nurses.

This is what I don’t understand. If this thing was really, truly the emergency people keep saying it is… we’d find a way to staff all this stuff. We’d pull people from retirement, turn foot doctors into Covid doctors, let nursing students do stuff… relax the licensing so it works. Then we’d dump truckloads of money on them, give them teslas each Christmas… whatever. Society would figure it out.

We kinda did that in Czech hospitals in the 2020/2021 winter wave - students of medicine even get forced work assignments (possible in emergency state).

Back then there was no vaccine and there was really no way around that (how well people respected the emergency measures is debatable though).

Now the situation is different- we have a vaccine yet only about 60% took it & the medical personnel has go to hell yet again, taking care mainly for those who did not bother to care for their health & of others who they managed to infect. No wonder they are not very enthusiastic about comming for a second round, that was largely avoidable...

Did they try paying them more? Or did they run out of money paying off pharma?

Patient transfers are also happening here in Czech Republic as well. There was a big convoy moving patients from East to slightly less affected west of the country & since then others are transferred daily via helicopters as hospital capacity dictates.

I think it would be pretty inaccurate to argue that because it's not "complete failure" that it's not a failure. People are dying of medically preventable situations on the basis of triage, and it is fairly widespread in places where COVID is unchecked. I think that's really not ok; especially not when it's unvaccinated COVID patiences.

Because half the population can't afford to see a doctor and would rather die than leave a pile of debt to their families?

I spent over 2 weeks in a US hospital in 3 separate stays this fall, and while its not "complete failure", it is pretty close. ER overflowing, nurses with 2x the patient loads of 2019, etc.

It is not 100% clear to me if this was because of an excess of COVID patients draining nursing staff, or it was because of staff leaving because they did not want to deal with COVID paitents, vaccine/testing requirements, etc, and taking other jobs elsewhere (or just quitting). I suspect that it was a combination, and some of the problems could simply be solved by the hospital paying staff better.

Thank you for your information. It's helpful.

To OP: Define "complete failure" and if it is something we can agree on as "complete failure", I will have a deputy post $200 on longbets.org 1:1 odds (side chain $2k) on whether or not a coming "complete failure" will occur in all US states that perform neither option 1 nor option 2 stated in OP:

> 1) Mandatory vaccination, all age groups, boosters etc.

> 2) permanently reconfiguring our society to reduce social contacts such that with the vaccines, COVID is suppressed. If the vaccines work well, then small (maybe no) changes will be needed. If they don't, then large changes. WFH, no indoor hospitality etc.

If no such states exist by some date, we can just each take our money back. If my deputy can meet you and you will notarize your position, I will up my side chain bet to $25k.

If we can do that and you will post the collateral, I will up my side chain bet to $100k. I will meet all the conditions you have to.

I am willing to iterate down the sum to reflect any changing definitions of "complete failure" till we have agreement. I am not going to donate more than the $200 to longbets.org. If I win, I take your cash. If you win, you take mine. I am willing to travel to make this bet in a jurisdiction where it is permissible, subject to there existing an escrow service we can both agree on there.

Nah, what you saying is not realistical. This is more like wishful thinking and would only work in suppressive utopia (if that’s a thing).

We as a society had only one shot at doing a lockdown that could work and it was at the beginning of march 2020. Some countries actually managed to have almost no cases but they had to do harsh lockdowns and everyone needed to comply. After that with 2nd and 3rd waves we have seen less and less countries do lockdowns and people already worn out stopped to comply. Now everything is half assed and on top of that vaccinated people are extremely unwilling to participate in lockdowns as it was promised that vaccines will help us avoid the disaster of lockdowns we have seen earlier (i got vaccinated based on that as many of my friends).

So no. This is not realistical, nope.

Well this is what is being seen in Germany right now - restriction fatigue -> case explosion -> overwhelmed hospitals -> restrictions.

People may be unwilling, but at some point (i.e. when healthcare systems start failing) restrictions will be enforced, and people will comply.

Restrictions also become either increasingly lax or actively resisted. It's not an end of story. Part of the failure of the last two years was the unwillingness to think what will happen after the latest sure solution arrives and to govern with a goal of doing well across several phases of the pandemic instead of just one.

So uh, maybe we decide that life doesn’t need to be permanently centered around Covid and just move on?

And realistically that is what society will do. Move on. There are infinitely more problems in the world than just Covid. Solving for exactly Covid to the exclusion of literally everything else is complete madness. Any rational person will tell you that. Life is to short to maintain a Covid centric lifestyle… life is meant to be lived.

Oh yeah, and we’ve been wringing our hands about hospital capacity for 2 years now. Perhaps we should ask why there isn’t any effort at all into increasing it? Forcing society to do all these restrictions to “protect hospitals” while doing fuck all to increase capacity is also madness… perhaps hospitals are actually just fine? If they were actually “full” why has nothing been done to address the problem? This is an emergency, right?

Spoken like an able-bodied individual of young(er) age and/or someone with zero co-morbidities. Fuck the rest, eh?

He said what most poor people have been saying the entire time. They're willing to take the risk, because the risk is lower than all the other problems they have now.

Now, the question is: should you care what poor people say?

People from lower socio-economic backgrounds are statistically more predisposed to develop co-morbidities.

Interesting that this uncomfortable truth is downvoted but not refuted. Please show me a study that disproves this. Before anyone says the onus is on me to prove it, you can do a quick google and see for yourself.

> Oh yeah, and we’ve been wringing our hands about hospital capacity for 2 years now. Perhaps we should ask why there isn’t any effort at all into increasing it?

Yeah seriously, it’s been two years, why haven’t we doubled the number of doctors and nurses by now? Just add more conveyor belts to our factorio.

You could start by not laying off workers who refuse to get vaccinated.

You know, the same workers who have been on the front lines exposed to the virus for two years and have unquestionably developed immunity. Forcing mandates onto them is insanity. They are not spreading covid.

That is just an excuse though. Figure it out. It’s an emergency. You don’t get to throw up your hands and say it’s impossible. Figure it out. It’s been two years. Where is the hospital capacity to manage this huge emergency?

Doubling something to fight an enemy that can grow exponentially? Good luck with that...

Also I recommend reading a bit about what working on a covid unit is like - it's hell on many levels. Even just the ammount of death and personal tragedies they witness is insane and easily PTSD inducing.

Increasing hospital capacities is almost pointless because new cases will be exponential. So doubling your ICU-capacities (which is extremely difficult to do, mainly because you don't have the staff) will buy you two-three weeks until the hospital is full again.

It peaks though, and comes back down. Every. Single. Time. Regardless of interventions.

The real world can't sustain exponential growth for too long, other limiting factors come in to play.

It's enough for the peak to swamp the hospitals over capacity for a week or two and the result will be very deadly, even just for non covid related cases.

Why has this literally never happened anywhere?

You mean why nobody doubled hospital capacity? (Easier said than done, and doesn't buy you much at all?)

Or why exponential growth didn't happen? (It did?)

Or why hospitals were never at capacity? (Because measures were taken to prevent specifically that exact scenario?)

So what do you do with the infected people that turn up at the overcrowded hospital? Let them die on the street?

Overall COVID19 mortality is still around 2%. In Germany, for example, we currently have 100k deaths. That would increase fivefold if you let every currently unvaccinated person get infected, and that's assuming we can provide the same level of care for all of them (i.e. hospitals are not over capacity).

> Perhaps we should ask why there isn’t any effort at all into increasing it?

  - Building hospitals generally takes more than 1.5 years.

  - Training nurses does too, although at least there is some elasticity in supply.

  - Mortality among patients hospitalized with COVID 19 is around 10%. Keeping them out of the hospital in the first place is much more effective than increasing hospital capacity.

> Overall COVID19 mortality is still around 2%.

It’s not even close to that. Not even in the same ballpark.

According to the graphs on worldometers.info for Germany (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/):

> Oct 30 2020: 10.5k total deaths, 517k total cases

> Dec 01 2021: 101k total deaths, 5.9 mil total cases

So in the last ~year, we had 5.4 mil cases and 90.5k deaths. That's a 1.67% mortality.

Please show me the error. Also, feel free to engage with the other points I made.

If you are almost 2 years into this and don’t know why IFR is a more valid metric than CFR, I doubt the media, nor the policy makers, nor most of the “experts” don’t either.

The profound lack of understanding the reams and reams of raw data surrounding Covid… no wonder people are scared.

The winter outbreaks in the northern hemisphere seem to disprove these conjectures:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/christmas-cancelled-gi...

They show that the current vaccines lose efficacy after about 6 months (unboosted). The grim calculation remains the same.

Tragically, those most vulnerable were vaccinated first, so lost immunity just as vaccination programs were completed and we opened up.

> 1) Mandatory vaccination, all age groups, boosters etc.

50% to 60% of all the people in ICU with covid related symptoms in the EU atm are fully vaccinated.

It's been lies from day one: "masks do not protect" then "masks are mandatory because they protect" (I don't know which one is correct but at least one is a lie), "you're a conspiracy theorist if you think there's any link between a virus research lab in Wuhan and the fact that the outbreak started there" then now "a lab escape is a possibility", then Fauci commited a crime by lying in front of congress (he then retracted himself after having been called out by senator Rand paul) "I had no idea there was gain of function research done in the Wuhan lab", then "we will never discriminate between vaccinated and non vaccinated people", etc. ad nauseam.

Then the mRNA vaccine (which I got) was sold us as major scientific discovery and as a panacea. Turns out that "vaccine" doesn't confer a long lasting immunity at all (otherwise there wouldn't be 50 to 60% of ICU beds in Europe filled with fully vaccinated people).

I don't think suppression is possible with a non-sterilizing vaccine. I think it's even less possible that it's even less possible with something that is called a "vaccine" but that isn't really one (Merriam-Webster recently changed, by sheer chance, the very definition of what a vaccine is, but I need time to adapt to the new definition).

The virus is here to stay and we won't get rid of it with snake oil (I'm not saying the mRNA Pfizer shots don't work at all, I'm saying their effectiveness is extermely limited seen that ICU beds are filled with vaccinated people).

That's a statistical effect: far more people are vaccinated than not, so they are more likely to show up in the ECU even if the vaccine reduces their infection rate.

> 50% to 60% of all the people in ICU with covid related symptoms in the EU atm are fully vaccinated.

I'm trying to find a reliable/official source for this statistic (not your numbers in particular but numbers at all), but am coming up empty-handed. Can you tell me where you found this?

The pdf below has up to date UK statistics.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Definitely not in the Czech ICUs - the overwhelming majority is unvaccinated and the few people with a vaccine are usually either old, with other serious conditions or both.

And by the way we are barely above 60% vaccination rate and it shows - fighting hard with neighboring Slovakia for the two worst spots in the world for number of cases per 100k people...

Another option is to not reconfigure our society, and accept the fact that life expectancy is now permanently slightly lower than it was in 2019.

I hate this argument I keep seeing, that we have no choice but to do whatever is necessary to stop Covid. Of course we have a choice, and it is a legitimate political question, not a scientific one.

The future looks grim with governments mandating health procedures on the population against their will

I'd rather be vaccinated than someone force Covid on me. To me, if you choose to be unvaccinated, you are showing how little you care about those around you and how little you care if they die.

Those around me, or are vaccinated so it does not matter, or chose not to be vaccinated in which case also does not matter

I would rather no one forces anything on anyone

All kinds of vaccines have been mandatory for generations. You wouldn't have been allowed to attend school if you hadn't had loads of them. In the US for instance all schoolchildren are required to be vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, varicella, measles, and rubella, and almost all states also require vaccinations against mumps and hepatitis B. So please don't act like requiring vaccination is some unprecedented erosion of personal liberty, because it just plain isn't.

All kinds of vaccines are also not required, namely the flu vaccine, which covid arguably has more in common with than any of the other diseases above.

Which is completely beside the point since the post I was replying to is apparently bemoaning vaccine mandates generally as some unprecedented new development, which again, they aren't. If you want to have a discussion about whether this particular vaccine should be mandated, fine, but that's not at all what the person I was replying to was trying to do; they were complaining about mandates of any kind, and apparently don't know that mandates are as old as dirt and just as common.

however, in a hospital setting they are required, by government mandate.

I guess it depends what part of the world you're in, but flu vaccines are not mandated in hospitals here in the US.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccine-requir...

Vitamin D still not being promoted and offered to the whole population shows how incompetent western governments are.

".. individuals with Vitamin-D deficiency were 80% more likely to acquire COVID-19 infection .."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7973108/

I am double vaccinated, pro vax, would get booster if I can, but if this happens in my country I will join the riots. I dont have solution, but if people dont want to get vaccinated they shouldn't be forced, period.

I am afraid this pressure will create people that are against all vaccines, and when we get like 20% of new parents not vaccinating their new lockdown babies (which are a lot, everyone i know who can be pregnant is pregnant), the Pandora's box will open, measles and polio and shit will come crawling back.

I feel we could do more to incentivize people to be less packed, like taxing working from the office and incentivize working from home, or subsidize working longer hours in retail and gyms. And possibly we could do better with masks and more tests, e.g. send families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread quicker.

send families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread quicker

This is a great idea, and I'm really curious why we don't have something like this, just mail a free mask and a free test to every address once a week, with a form to request more for larger households, or to request that they stop.

The US postal service isn't nearly robust enough to handle this. We saw that with physical unemployment checks last year when nearly everyone became eligible.

Somehow I get junk mail delivered reliably every week. Maybe put the tests and masks in with that, rather than individually addressing and labeling every shipment.

The people not getting vaxed voluntarily are the same ones that would never sign up or take the test

5 tests are 14Eur here, me and my wife test weekly, and our daughter we test every 2-3 days, so we can isolate asap, but none of my neighbours do that. And multiple times people didnt even test with symptoms.

It would cost ~50 euro per family per month, which is quite expensive, but possibly if they use some sort of model to give tests to people with higher probability of getting sick (e.g. if your child was in a school that got N positive tests recently) maybe it can be reduced to 5 euro per family per month.

Somehow I feel this is a missed opportunity to get things a bit better, I dont think people will infect other people on purpose.

The UK has done a really good job with this. Anyone can order 7 tests online for no charge.

https://www.gov.uk/order-coronavirus-rapid-lateral-flow-test...

I fully disagree; this matter is not a question of an opinion. There is absolutely not a single convincing reason why shots should not be mandatory.

If people like you will join the riot against it, I will join the riots against the rioters. We finally need Ordnung in society and it cannot be that opinionated people "iT sHoUlD bE nOt MaNdAtOrY bUt I aM PrO VaX, iT iS bEcAuSe oF tHe GrUndGeSeTz" or uneducated should disturb it. Yes, I am a legalist on topics where the collective must work together and not have "opinions".

> I fully disagree; this matter is not a question of an opinion. There is absolutely not a single convincing reason why shots should not be mandatory.

Isn't the the reason of "someone doesn't want it" enough?

Is "I don't wanna" ever a good reason to threaten safety and health of others?

What if I don't want smoking ban in public places? What if I don't want speed limit on public road or giving right of way? What if run a restaurant and don't want food safety laws?

What about [end to end] encryption? By using it we are threatening the safety and health of others. (e.g. the police is slower at solving crime because they don't have access to all private information)

I don't see million of lives lost due to end-to-end encryption, unlike with second-hand smoke, people driving cars like idiots or COVID. Also police mostly doesn't protect and help people and stop crimes, they arrest people after crimes happened. Police being helpful to anyone is mostly a myth.

I mean I generally agree that we should be careful with sweeping "we need X to protect lives" but is global pandemic that killed millions really the case?

But police is total, they would love to prevent crimes before they happen if they could, and would do that at all cost. If only those pesky encryption people stop making this encryption things and we get access to all the data..we will know every crime from domestic abuse to terrorism, we would be even able to predict it, with like 97% accuracy with this 'totally not racist state of the art AI model'.

All jokes aside, of course I agree with you. Including on the police point, but things like the oxy epidemic, or the war on drugs, or the promotion of alcohol, makes me question the "protective" incentives of the state.

If someone says they want to insert something into your body, "I don't wanna" is a good reason to make it not happen. Penises, babies, food, vaccines...

> absolutely not a single convincing reason why shots should not be mandatory.

what if you are wrong?

> There is absolutely not a single convincing reason why shots should not be mandatory.

Human rights are principles which are commonly not given justification. As the US founding fathers said "we hold these truths to be self-evident".

> e.g. send families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread quicker.

I'm afraid you're missing reality, our kids are getting tested 3 times per week already and still we're in quarantine right now for the second week because an unvaccinated child care assistant has infected half the place and now it's going everywhere.

There is no dialogue or discussion going on anymore. We have two factions in this country by now that don't talk to each other anymore, one of which is despising science, empathy, education and any common sense.

And frankly I'm sick of it by now. Like you I wouldn't force anyone from this group to vaccinate against their will, but I'm completely fine with offering intensive care only for the vaccinated by this point.

German army can build up oxygen tents to offer the others a decent chance to survival. I'm really not interested in saving any Nazi or lunatic against their will.

As far as I know vaccinated people (like myself) can also spread the virus, the vaccination helps only your immune system to combat the disease. So don't blame the unvaccinated for this. But I'm with you in the medical care part, vaccinated people should get priority. But they won't...

By your logic, we should get rid of goalkeepers as well, since all goals in football happen despite them being on the playground.

Sadly lot of people (I don't mean you specifically) are dumb and have black and white thinking.

Yes, vaccinated people can still get sick. But they get sick order of magnitude less often and if they do get sick, they are order of magnitude less likely to need oxygen, hospital or ICU.

Yes, vaccinated people can still spread the virus. But they are order of magnitude less likely to do so, and if they do, they spread smaller amount of the virus over smaller window of time.

Yes, one type of the antibodies (the short-term ones that actively look for virus as opposed to the long-term ones stored in bone marrow that look for your own infected cells that take a while to activate) wanes as time passes but that is property of all vaccines and of "naturally" gained immunity as well - bodies don't want to waste energy actively looking for something it hasn't seen in a while.

But in minds of black-and-white people, this means "vaccines don't work!!!11!!!" and that is just sad.

Oh, and because some people told me that would be "unethical" (and how to prioritize against smokers and motorbikers): It's really not, at least not any less unethical than not getting vaccinated.

These people aren't just fully prepared to still take the risk of dying by Covid up to this day, they also statistically kill 0.01 other people by getting infected.

We put people who kill other people in jail here, and increase their risk of dying by suicide about 10x that way. So far, everyone is fine with that.

> they shouldn't be forced

I was under the impression that you'd just get fined if you don't get your shot. It's not like they are going to take you prisoner and stick a needle in you.

Until when? when the next wave comes and the unvaccinated are 40% instead of 30%, do you think they wont start forcing the needle?

How many people would get the booster? and the next booster after that?

I think its reasonable to assume that every 6 months the unvaccinated group with grow with 5% or so, how long until they become more than the vaccinated?

What will happen when they elect the new government in 2 years

I'm not sure what you mean by "until when?".

> do you think they wont start forcing the needle?

The article is about _fining_ people, i.e. negative monetary incentives. Your reply outlined a bunch of positive monetary incentives. There's probably enough research out there which of the two works better (negative or positive), so I won't get into that. I will say that I think it's quite a stretch to say that either is a step-up to "forcing a needle in you", and that I find it a bit disingenuous to imply that this slippery-slope argument only applies to negative monetary incentives.

>send families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread quicker.

these things are incredibly cheap in Europe. Brother in law tests his kids that are in elementary school twice a week. You pick them up at the pharmacy for like $1.50 a pop.

No one is being forced. They're just being told to stay home if you're not going to be part of the greater good.

I would be fine with unvaxxed people remaining unvaxxed of their own free will if it were also a situation where the law said that anyone who does not get vaccinated during a pandemic when a vaccine is available (and obviously has no underlying medical condition that would put them at risk for a significant injury due to vaccination) while incurring significant medical bills for said pandemic would be liable for all medical bills. The rest of us shouldn't have to pay for premium increases because they're being stupid.

Covid hasn't had an effect on insurance premiums so far. In some plan pools it saves money since treatment isn't overly costly and it has put off expensive electives (though this is offset by the general trend for healthcare costs to rise.) This was reflected in proxies such as the reduced profits of hospital healthcare organizations in the US, like HCA.

If you don't enforce vaccination, you have to ration medical care.

Should someone come in to the hospital presenting with COVID symptoms they get tested. If you pop hot and are unvaccinated, you are sent home with your freedoms, liberties, self reliance, and a pain management pack. People who got vaccinated will have the now heavily unburdened healthcare system dedicated to making them better.

I had covid, but have no certificate with PCR test. I had positive home self test. I did not want to ride bus and visit hospital, with 38 degree fever, to get official PCR test. Instead I just self isolated for 2 weeks like an idiot.

They will now force me to take a shot. I have to risk severe alergic reaction.

I am also vaccinated, but Jansen does not count anymore.

Sorry to hear that, but you may overestimate your own risk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34463744/

At this point, we're talking about the most-tested vaccine in all of the world. Even if your chance of dying is increased by 5x, that's equivalent to about 10 hours of driving a car at average Autobahn speeds.

If you're prepared to take that kind of risk every year, I'd invite you to just go do it.

Good you have better information than my GP!

Edit: allergic reaction would be from high level of antibodies. I recently passed hard form of covid.

Please stop giving medical advices! You are not doctor and you did not even read my post!

Note that "unvaccinated" will included all not fully vaccinated 14 years or older. This means that if you have an unvaccinated teenage child, you will not be allowed to meet other families anymore.

I guess it’s easier to pass a law like this, than a law which puts the unvaccinated at the back of the queue when hospital beds run out.

Extremely so. And hopefully also more effective at reducing overall harm short-term - after all triage rules would only decide who dies, not reduce deaths, you don't want to be in the situation that there is a queue! (And remember, you don't get to make a queue over everybody in the ICU, but only whoever is currently incoming)

And yet... if you asked the unvaccinated which they prefer (between being forced to be vaccinated and going to the back of the queue when beds run out), they will probably prefer the latter. It is disturbing to do things against people's will "for their own good"

This could probably be done with a tax.

Just like smoking is a choice and is risky enough to have financial penalties, one could do the same with unvaccinated people (who haven’t caught and survived covid yet, since surviving natural immunity is apparently more protective than the existing vaccines). This is just paying taxes into the system that will help support them later.

This is probably the right course of action. However, it is unfeasible to derive a fair tax level in the current climate. Too many people look to force conformity and/or exact punishment, instead of engaging in a good faith tradeoff negotiation.

This is something I would support (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29401254). At least for me, and probably for (many?) others this would bring the issue from intolerable "fight-or-flight for your life" level, to a much more manageable "oh well, stupid govt is at it again". It is much harder to get suicidal over an extra tax, so the tension will deflate markedly. An extortion act is quickly forgotten, while physical violence is not easily forgiven.

Good. Here's hoping the US follows suit. Thankfully the Supreme Court has already settled the constitutionality issue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

This is "A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an epidemic of a lethal disease".

Now, I'm vaccinated and support vaccination (though, I'm on the fence about forced vaccination - though I do think it can be a fire-able offense, if you can't telecommute). However, does 1.6% reach the bar of a "sufficiently lethal" disease, especially now that our medical system has regained its footing and is more capable of handling the number of patients now that vaccination rates have reached 70%?

Bodily autonomy is an important right. Forced sterilization, as referred to in the article, was a nightmare. Forced mental care facility commitment, was/is fraught with abuse, especially when we consider lobotomies. Granted, this is nowhere near that, I will agree. But, as you say, precedents will be set about what is or is not legal to circumvent for body autonomy due to an epidemic of a lethal disease.

Is social unrest use a lethal disease, caused by social media? Should steps be taken to "inoculate" us from ourselves?

Keep in mind: chickenpox is almost never lethal, and many school districts already require the chickenpox vaccine.

Again, I'm fine with it being a fire-able offense if you can't telecommute. That's a business policy and not a state mandate with punishment for noncompliance. I say this as someone who supports vaccines and is vaccinated.

As far as schooling goes, the infrastructure has been set up for tele-schooling already, should someone choose to not be vaccinated. There are inconveniences with choices, of course. I wore a mask and stayed at home to "stop the spread". It was an inconvenience, but it was a choice I made. The right choice, I think, but it wasn't a choice made at the end of a gun where I'd be put in a cage if I didn't comply.

"Even in an emergency, when there is a rapidly spreading contagious disease and an effective vaccine, the state is not permitted to forcibly vaccinate or medicate anyone."

Related: Counterpart, television show from Starz that is now on Prime. Germany, a flu virus, and espionage are the top themes. Made just before the Pandemic, starring JK Simmons. Spooky foreshadows a lot of the mask mandates, vaccines, and anti-germ mentality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)

At least they're not making the same move as Austria and locking down literally everyone, 24/7. What's the point of vaccines if we all have to sit at home anyway?

This is pretty danged sad.

> Many hospitals are struggling to cope with the increasing number of intensive care patients. There could be around 6,000 Covid-19 patients in intensive care by Christmas -- regardless of any measures implemented by Germany's leaders -- the country's Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency (Divi) warned Wednesday.

The article doesn't really talk about the rate of change to date. An article from The Guardian puts this into perspective:

> Daily new infections in Germany have broken records in recent weeks, with many hospitals operating at or over capacity. Authorities said 73,209 new cases were recorded in the past 24 hours. Deaths have surged from a rolling seven-day average of just over 10 a day in August to nearly 300 this week.

To enforce something like this policy requires:

- laws and penalties

- a method for identifying those who get special treatment

- verification procedures

You'd think a country like Germany would be especially sensitive to the idea of segregating 1/3 of the population for special treatment. I'm going to assume this isn't lost on anybody there.

The question then becomes: what if this doesn't work? What if biology overtakes the law (i.e., a new variant begins sending the vaccinated into hospitals as well)? What if biology has already overtaken the law?

If it does work, when does it end? If it ends, under what circumstances is it Ok to re-impose? What precedent does this set and what unintended consequences might result (e.g., a new strain of a virus with a vaccine emerges)?

Instead of believing the science, why not actually read and understand instead?

For example: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

Bodily autonomy and health privacy are fundamental human rights. No just society should be able to violate a person's body in this manner or coerce them through methods like lockdowns. It is simply not compatible with a free and just society. And I say that as a pro vaccine person with my booster.

Give them one month to take the vaccine. Health care isn't available at cost when they get ill from COVID for those that didn't get the vaccine. Health care is here to prevent if possible and it's currently possible. The governement advices the vaccine. Make sure every minority receives the message clear ( eg. Belgium has a lot of hard to reach minorities concerning the language, the message should be clear for all)

It's your option to take the advice or not, but take your responsibility if you ignore it. Don't cry afterwards.

Distribute the vaccines ( the better ones) to countries that lack them according to population density and lack of vaccine availability asap.

Please, get this done already. Richer countries have their responsibilities too, this is an option that the population should agree with. Everyone can do what they want.

If some % of the people don't want the vaccine. Give them what they want instead of the current indecision. All other options will only fuel their anti-governement thinking. Don't force it on to them, it's their fault.

Honestly this is great.

You can continue to be unvaccinated, but you shouldn't be able to fly across country, be in large groups / large events, or otherwise and put us all at risk.

You should be at home.

The state of this discussion, dreadful: every challenge to any mainstream narrative gets flagged.

It's fairly ironic how the demographics of antivaxxers (mostly right-wingers) are very keen to patriotic duties (and will probably recruit you to war when time comes), but couldn't even take a vaccine to attenuate a pandemy. That will be remembered.

Most aren't anti-vaxxers, they just don't like this pretty novel particular vaccine. In Germany, real anti-vaxxers traditionally have a more left/green background. The sort of people who believe in homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine.

Where I live the most militant anti-vaxxers are from the left (greens / environmentalists / "hippies")

This is not surprising at all considering they're generally skeptical of corporations, GMOs, big pharma, etc.

I don't know if you guys are history buffs but...

as a German I agree, since I don't want to see another 100k people die too early and see many more people suffer after being rescued by long ICU treatments

I find it ironic that there are plenty comments that paint the picture of how mandatory vaccinations divide the country.

Hello? Have you been awake for the last month? How much more divided can a country already be when the absolute democratic majority has made their decision months ago to take the shot but 30% are holding everyone back. Anyone in my family or from my friends that has taken one for the team (and got vaccinated) could receive worse-than-usual ICU treatment because of some egoistic anti-vaxxers. Hell, even anti-vaxxers benefit from better ICU treatment if vaccination numbers are higher.

Yes, this is a democracy and so it can also be deemed legitimate and representative to govern according to the majority decision. Besides, it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated.

I agree that everybody should get vaccinated. Let's make this virus extinct.

But what you describe is majoritarianism. It is a form of democracy but a very weak form. For a lot of people, who are from minority groups, it is indistinguishable from totalitarianism.

Why do 30% of people refuse to get vaccinated? (here in Aotearoa it is 5%). Something is happening, people are getting left behind, in vast numbers. Forcing them to comply is probably a cure worse than the disease - even a disease like COVID

You cannot make this virus extinct. These vaccines do not accomplish this goal, the end.

The goal is to keep serious cases to a minimum so they don’t clog the healthcare system thus making people die of all sorts of other things because they couldn’t be treated.

Vaccines do help with that, tremendously.

Sure, yet since when do I have to undergo an irreversible medical procedure for the sake of the government healthcare infrastructure?

I'll start by saying I haven't been a supporter of vaccine mandates. It's best if people can make this up for themselves. Given the right information it's not really a hard choice. And of course there can be personal reasons why it'd be wise to not get vaccinated, but those are rare.

The procedure is benign. Describing it as irreversible is technically true but practically it's scaremongering.

And it's for the sake of the people around you. Your society. So they don't die waiting for their healthcare services to unclog. Edit: And it's also obviously for the sake of the person getting vaccinated, let's not forget that :)

Because, sadly, we know that's not true anymore.

Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Yes I know, it was clear early on. The study also says:

>Although vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and deaths from COVID-19, our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures.

Which is what we're talking about here, preventing serious cases.

Since we have a global pandemic. This is a completely novel and unusual situation, why wouldn't you think that the solutions will be novel and unusual as well?

Because we know that the mRNA vaccines won't effectively end the pandemic and only provide a prophylactic benefit at best.

Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Good is the enemy of great.

That benefit is hardly "at best". That's a fantastic intermediate step. Why is it decried as horrible just because it's not the final solution to the problem?

Source?

From listening to nurses and doctors, I get the impression that most people in hospitals with Covid-issues lately are vaccinated; and I trust real people with real experiences over authorities with agendas.

> I get the impression that most people in hospitals with Covid-issues lately are vaccinated

I read some statistics over that the other day. It is correct when looking only at hospital patients.

The explanation is that most who need hospital care come from a risk group. And risk groups are fully vaccinated by over 90% (here). So you end up with high absolute numbers of vaccinated hospital patients.

If you look at a somewhat comparable group of people, chances to need hospital care are manyfold for the unvaccinated. It's true for higher risk groups and for lower risk groups.

Vaccinations are not perfect protection against anything, but they reduce risk by a high factor.

Wasn't filling up hospitals the problem we were trying to solve by vaccinating people in the first place?

Isn't that the excuse people use to harass anyone who doesn't feel like being experimented on for profit?

>The goal is to keep serious cases to a minimum so they don’t clog the healthcare system...

Reminds me of 2 weeks to flatten the curve. Yet here we are. Why all the sudden are we at risk of clogging the healthcare system with some areas hitting 70%+ adult vaccination rates? Germany already has given out 124,401,062 doses of the vaccine. All I ever see is the goalposts being moved with this stuff.

I have taken the vaccine, but I am hesitant about mandates and vaccine passports.

I find it exhausting that people such as yourself seem to latch onto missed time frames as a reason to just assume all public health policy is bullshit. Yes, because when I say I'm going to finish some software project in 2 weeks, I absolutely always get it done in 2 weeks.

These are estimates. They are sometimes (often!) wrong. Sometimes they're wrong because the problem was underestimated. Sometimes they are wrong for political reasons.

Yes, "flattening the curve" took more than 2 weeks. Big deal. Doing so did absolutely reduce pressure on ICUs and saved many lives. And hell, if everyone had actually followed all the mandates and guidelines at the time, maybe it would have only taken two weeks. But people don't, and it's always hard to gauge how many people will refuse to cooperate, and in what ways, and exactly what effect that will have.

The reason the goalposts are moving is because this isn't a well-defined game with strictly-set rules. The virus doesn't care about our rules or projections. If it mutates, and the new variant does better against our vaccines, then... yes, the goalposts will move. Our utter failure to get high vaccination rates in poorer countries is likely a big cause of the new variants. It's all well and good to be sitting in a highly-vaccinated city in the first world, but all it takes is one person to fly in from somewhere with a new variant, and you're hosed.

You miss a time frame if you say "2 weeks" and end up having to lockdown for 3 instead. If you say "2 weeks" and end up with lockdowns for years you are either incompetent or lying or both.

"Years"? We haven't even had the pandemic for "years", let alone lockdowns.

"1.5 years", nearing in on "2 years" as opposed to "1 year"

I agree, it's getting old and we want to move on.

If we look at the numbers for Germany they're now getting 60 thousand cases per day, which is three times more than any previous period.

More cases mean more people in hospitals. The situation was bad last winter, it can get worse fast. Now, of course many are vaccinated, so that drops the likelihood of hospitalization, but unfortunately for them 30% of people are still unvaccinated. So I can understand why they're nervous.

The thing about the vaccine also is that the effects drop with time unfortunately, so people need boosters. I've already gotten 3 shots and expect there will be more.

If we aren't to keep the world in lockdown, we need people to be out and about, but vaccinated, so this can truly be treated like a few bad flu years in a row.

Until the virus hopefully mutates towards a less severe thing and we can stop talking about it.

The initial estimate was that 70% of population (not only adult) would be sufficient to achieve herd immunity, but the problem is that while the initial virus had R_0 of 2-3, the Delta variant's is about 6.

Sure, but we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.

I do think it is important to use the correct terminology here. This disease and the vaccines are already a huge spread of misinformation, so lets expand on the “sure” bit from this sentence a little. It is saying quite a lot:

I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind. So we should acknowledge the fact that these vaccines will probably not eradicate COVID. We will have people getting sick from COVID and we will have more COVID variants for the foreseeable future. Even after most people have been thoroughly vaccinated. And given the slow global spread of vaccines we will also probably see more lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus beyond the current vaccine capabilities.

Now that said, remember that with the vaccines:

> we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.

>I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind

I believe I speak for many when I say, "I have no idea what the experts' have in mind" (and that's not a good thing).

So they're trying hard to get everyone vaccinated - a noble goal, perhaps, as our current roster of vaccines diminish symptoms and greatly reduce hospitalization and fatality rates. But..."Stop the spread, get vaccinated"...what? Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate.

Early on, experts probably made an educated guess or wish that these vaccines would be sterilizing and started information campaigns on this premise. When this turned out to be not true, their "Stop the spread, get vaccinated" became "You unvaccinated are the problem, you are holding us back, and you will be locked down immediately". Rather than address their mistake, rather than open up transparently, they doubled down on the lie. Not a good way to build trust.

> Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate.

Multiple studies show that vaccinated people have lower transmission than unvaccinated.

> In studies conducted before the emergence of the Delta variant, data from multiple studies in different countries suggested that people vaccinated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines who develop COVID-19 generally have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(157, 165-169) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(170) Studies from multiple countries found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(171-176) For the Delta variant, early data indicate vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with Delta have similar levels of viral RNA and culturable virus detected, indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 may be able to transmit the virus to others.(163, 164, 177-180) However, other studies have shown a more rapid decline in viral RNA and culturable virus in fully vaccinated people (96, 177, 180-182). One study observed that Delta infection in fully vaccinated persons was associated with significantly less transmission to contacts than persons who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.(181) Together, these studies suggest that vaccinated people who become infected with Delta have potential to be less infectious than infected unvaccinated people.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

We could do that for smoking too, but since smoking is a choice, we let people smoke and die. Why not do the same with the vaccines? As with smoking, the unvaccinated are taking all the risks.

Except that the resources that are going to care for the unvaccinated might block someone who is vaccinated from needed medical care. It also increases the amount of exposure someone who IS vaccinated needs to contend with, and as is mentioned over and over again, vaccines are imperfect. A colleague of mine has an elderly father who is vaccinated and in the ICU with Covid. The odds are much higher that he was infected by an unvaccinated person.

Also smoking is a terrible example - we tax cigarettes highly to discourage smoking because it’s a drag on our medical system. We ban the act of smoking in a wide variety of locations because it has an impact on other peoples health. Some buildings even disallow people to smoke in their private homes, and some cities disallow smoking in offices. We put restrictions on almost every aspect of smoking because it doesn’t only affect the smoker.

I guess the main difference is that covid patients can clog UIT very quickly and there isn't a lot that can be done beforehand. Smokers come in a more predictable and easier to manage way.

Aside from the dangers of secondhand smoke (which we have laws to limit the impact of), you can't "catch" smoking from someone else. Unless they force-feed you cigarettes until you get addicted, anyway.

It has been happening for smoking, at least in some places. Speaking from experience in the US:

Smoking sections in restaurants have all but disappeared, taxes have increased on cigarettes dramatically, warning labels have been placed on boxes/cartons, and so on.

The process has been to try and remove second-hand smoke from those areas where it might affect non-smokers. Traveling abroad to China and Hong Kong a couple years ago it was almost unbearable dealing with people smoking everywhere.

Similar to how as a non-smoker my health risk is non-negligible being exposed to second-hand smoke, so too is my health at risk by unvaccinated individuals running around with higher viral loads increasing the chance and rate of breakthrough infections, and also increased risk of future mutations that could potentially bring about another pandemic.

Very clearly with smoking we've been moving towards a system where you can make whatever health choices you want as long as you aren't impacting the health of others - why should it be any different for vaccines of any kind?

<<Very clearly with smoking we've been moving towards a system where you can make whatever health choices you want as long as you aren't impacting the health of others - why should it be any different for vaccines of any kind?

I think we have long established that just me existing is not something people are willing to tolerate. Hell, just my presence impacts the life of others; sometimes even in a negative way. There is even a system to deal with issues like that. It is called civil law.

But why do we stop at smoking? Why aren't we going after farts and methane. After all, did you know that methane gas poisoning can cause death? Surely, if we researched it a little more, we would maybe find out that it causes cancer of something.

In Louisiana we don't let people smoke in lots of places.

No smoking in schools, no smoking in restaurants, no smoking in workplaces, no smoking in public buildings.

Is that not similar to Germany disallowing unvaccinated (and not naturally immune) from non-essential indoor shopping/leisure activities? Or requiring testing for employees who are not vaccinated/naturally immune?

> the unvaccinated are taking all the risks.

Not if they saturate the health system and you need it for something else.

What do you need your health system for other than treating the sick?

...are you trying to say that unvaccinated people who catch covid are literally the only people that ever get sick of anything? I'm at a loss here...

That's because you apparently can't read. The only thing I said was that treating sick people is why we have the healthcare system. If you think treating COVID patients is too much just triage differently and lower the priority, treat more important things instead. Don't force me to get a medical procedure against my will for the sake of the government healthcare infrastructure.

I can read words, but not minds. You asked a rhethorical question that didn't illustrate your position in the slightest. If you wanted to say "let people with COVID die on the streets so I can remain unvaccinated" then please just say that.

What are you going to do about the 50%+ of americans who are oversaturated with fat and sugar, and the massive drain they put on the health system?

I guess we are pretty lucky that we don’t all have heart attacks simultaneously or it could be a real drag on the hospitals. But yes, the risks and concerns are absolutely equal between those two scenarios.

Obesity is costly and deadly, no doubt about that. But it is not saturating the health system as in filling up all available life support equipments.

Also, obesity "epidemic" is slow, therefore easy to manage, compared to the covid epidemic that is governed by power laws.

Finally, there is no vaccine against obesity.

This is only true, because we've built enough rooms and trained and hired enough teams of people to take care of fat people. In my country, nurses are still paid more working as store clerks than in hospitals, so yeah...

And if many countries can mandate curfews, lockdowns, mandatory quarantenes etc., why not ban sugary foods, sugary drinks, fast food, etc.?

I mean.. I'm against any sort of bans, but generally, more people die from being fat than from covid itself.... if every life matters, why no theirs?

My best guess is that the power law governing covid epidemics growth poses a greater threat (in terms of costs and casualties) than slow evolving obesity crisis.

We have no real studies, but if covid does "irreversible" small damage, even in vaccinated and that accumulates, it could lead to a life-expectancy drop of 30 years.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8

We could all dance the Darth Vader after 20 years of Covid even with vaccination. But we certainly will without.

> We could all dance the Darth Vader

Er... what now?

How can you do that by only vaccinating humans. You do know COVID is carried by animals too, right?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/ind...

You going to vaccinate all the animals too?

Or just dogmatically stick to the "unvaccinated people are selfish" because it best fits your political world view - damn the science?

Want to make this virus irrelevant? If Omicron is as mild as the doctors in South Africa are reporting then here is our path to herd immunity. Which is going to happen no matter what governments fuss and fume about. Even New Zealand finally gave up on their ridiculous quarantine strategy.

I’m just confused about the argument you are making here - that if our options are:

A) let’s all get a couple of shots to reduce our risk of death, serious illness, and make it less likely that other people get sick, not to mention making it less likely that new variants will emerge by making transmission harder

B) let’s have no vaccinations and let the virus sort it out, like we did with, say, the 1918 flu? Or polio, measles, or smallpox?

C) let people get vaccinated or not, it’s their business, but putting societal pressure on them is overbearing and eventually pointless

That of those options we should choose either B or C? Because B is how we dealt with illnesses until we had vaccinations to make them harder to get and less deadly. Then we started…vaccinating people. And now measles is still a thing, but no one worries about it, except that cases are going up because people aren’t getting vaccinated. So B seems like a bad plan, because we tried that and it sucked, and then we did A with measles and things got a lot better.

C is certainly a lot more personal liberty-oriented, which I get the appeal of, but society is fundamentally about giving up some amount of individual liberty in exchange for shared and communal benefits. C is actually what is happening in some places with measles vaccinations, where individuals say, “I don’t need to be vaccinated because herd immunity will save me”, which not only means that (despite claiming personal liberty) those people are relying on the vaccinated people to protect them, but that they’re willing to put others at risk (because vaccines aren’t perfect) in exchange for their individual liberty. This seems like C is a pretty raw deal for the liberty and rights of the people who would rather not get infected by, say, measles. Or Covid.

B and C both seem like bad plans. A seems pretty good, but I realize you’re not going to be convinced of that. B is pretty indefensible, I don’t think anyone would argue we should just let Covid run through the world and kill millions and millions more people. Or maybe you do, I don’t know. Seems bad.

But with C, the only way you can argue it’s not selfish to look after your own preferences is if you believe that the outcomes of option A, B, and C are the same. That it doesn’t matter - the same amount of people will die, and the same amount of people will get infected, and the same amount of people will permanently lose their sense of taste or smell, and the same amount of people will end up in the hospital. That fundamentally the outcomes of all three scenarios are identical. But there’s no way that’s the case, right? It just doesn’t make sense.

So if there IS a difference, then A is everyone doing as much as reasonably possible to make things better, B is everyone giving up and accepting whatever happens, and C is valuing your interests above the opportunity to help others. That’s the definition of selfishness.

> but putting societal pressure on them is overbearing and eventually pointless

> ...

> and C is valuing your interests above the opportunity to help others. That’s the definition of selfishness.

This, I think, highlights the fundamental blind spot in reasoning of many who pushes the vax or other measures to 100% "uptake". What do the people think will happen once somebody submits to the pressure? Masked and vaxed and fine and dandy? Quite the opposite, I believe. The resistance in the remaining population is not at the rational level, it is very visceral, primal, fight-or-flight feeling. Even though, I think, it was largely provoked by the initial torrent of equally irrational measures, it is not something that is going to change. Submitting to pressure doesn't mean forgetting or forgiving. The solid foundation is being laid for a very broken society for a generation to come. The internal trust in society is as shaken as never before. Society with 5-10% of people broken, bitter and vengeful is not healthy. The fallout is going to be very bad, in unexpected way. Cruel and unusual.

Sure, you may say it is selfishness. It is not rational selfishness though. As I said, it is a visceral reaction which is very hard to explain, to put into words, therefore all you hear is "we don't want it". It is sort of a mental condition, and pushing through to the end won't cure that condition, only make it worse. Such condition is nothing to be proud of, but punitive correctional measures aren't known to work against diseases, mental included. Even criminals are not prosecuted if suspected to be in acute mental condition.

I would hope the nature of the resistance is properly recognised and not vilified. After all, we've complied with all the past vaccine "soft-mandates" for our children and ourselves, but always thought that generous exemption provisions were very good! Letting people make choices without pushing them into the corner is beneficial for society. I always thought the society's capacity for compassion was bigger than my own. Unfortunately, it is not what transpired.

At this moment I'd be ok with increased insurance premiums, testing regime for travel and high-risk settings, tax surcharge or even mandatory community service as alternative to vax. Something we can rationally discuss. "Bodily autonomy" - face masks included - is simply not something I can engage with rationally.

But what is the end game?

I’m not arguing that everyone should be forced to get vaccinated - I’m saying that people who choose not to are selfish. And they shouldn’t be immune to some level of personal impact, lots of people make personal choices that have negative impact. I once turned down an incredibly lucrative opportunity because I disagreed with the products I’d be working on. The father of a friend of mine was a professional pilot who never got above flying for a regional airline because his cigarette addiction meant he struggled to go more than three hours between cigarettes. Personal choices have impacts.

The argument that you make is odd, though, which seems to be that people have been so pushed around by these horrible, unreasonable asks that they have a “visceral fight-or-flight” response and hence have a “mental condition” that prevents them from adapting - and not accepting that demonstrates a lack of compassion.

That argument, for what it’s worth, has been trotted out to justify everything from segregation, to fighting gay rights, to objecting to seat belts. Just because people don’t like something they find objectionable doesn’t make them irrational. Saying they are robs them of their agency as humans, and also conveniently obviates them of their responsibility to their community.

“But what is the end game?”

To get to where almost everyone is vaccinated, which is where we are with measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, typhoid, etc. It’s not that complicated.

“ I always thought the society's capacity for compassion was bigger than my own.”

Man, me too. If you had asked me in 2019 if there would be a controversy about adding one more vaccination to the roster of vaccines we give almost everyone (and invest billions in encouraging and distributing), I would have said, “no way - in most of the world, most people see vaccines as something that’s important to help themselves and their community “. In 1947 there was a smallpox outbreak in NYC and millions of people showed up to get vaccinated because it was the right thing to do to protect their community. Their compassion was for others.

To be clear, I don’t think people who don’t want to get vaccinated are monsters or evil. They don’t need to be vilified. No, they’re more in the realm of the person in the community who once in a while has a drink too many and drives home when they shouldnt - probably nothing bad will happen, but it shows a real lack of personal responsibility for their impact on others.

Thank you for the civil answer. I found enough in it to agree with and upvote.

> That argument, for what it’s worth, has been trotted out to justify everything ...

It may be a tired argument, but it doesn't make it false. Sometimes people really do have deep convictions they cannot be rationalized from. Looks like I do, and I'm not happy about it. Only it was never a problem before covid. I was brought up in the spirit of never asking for help or claiming any deficiency until you absolutely, positively, completely unable to handle the situation on your own. Also you must be sure that who you ask is able and willing to provide such help. I thought society progressed enough to tolerate conscientious objection of sorts. Turns out I was wrong. I struggled to keep up and cried for help, first time in my life - and received a good lesson to never ask for compassion again.

> Personal choices have impacts.

They certainly do. I just disagree that it is purely personal. The other side absolves itself from any consequences of the choice pushed upon individual, while being very happy to trump on them if the "natural" impact of "inferior" choice is not bad enough.

> people have been so pushed around by these horrible, unreasonable asks

I haven't said that. Some may very well be reasonable, but it is very hard to see in the pile of punitive-only measures.

Well, at least I have tried to explain how some people, myself included, see and feel in the situation. I'm getting more hints of my inability to communicate this, and nobody in a position to influence the measures gives any consideration to it. This is why I stand with my belief that the side-effect of "where almost everyone is vaccinated" will be not what these people are expecting, in a cruel and unusual way.

“ it is very hard to see in the pile of punitive-only measures.”

Aka unreasonable. Which sort of makes the point. But also - it’s tough for me to be civil when your argument is, “why isn’t anyone taking my feelings into account?”, when that has literally never been the standard for anything related to a common good. I don’t care how you feel about being allowed to drive drunk, because it’s dangerous to others. I don’t care if you don’t want to allow minorities to live in your neighborhood, they have the right to live wherever they want. And I don’t care if you don’t want to get one more vaccination on top of the 5+ we require for work and/or school, it is part of participating in a functional society.

If no one hears you “crying out for help”, think of how the people whose lives have been affected by this disease feel, knowing that there are people who COULD be helping but don’t want to.

Sorry, I seem to have mistook passive-aggressive for civil.

My point is not that anyone should care how I feel, in particular. I only give it out here, on a semi-anonymous forum, never IRL.

The point is, quite the sizeable proportion of people feel like that, and it is a pain for them which they won't forget or forgive, even if they choose to submit to demands. In fact, many voluntarily vaccinated people feel exactly the same, for them cooperation with any future government initiatives is out of question now. It doesn't invalidate the pain of those catching or dying from the disease, it just another pain in it's own right.

"Common good" cannot be built on pain, history is littered with unsuccessful attempts. Governments all around the world are choosing to ignore this (proving them incompetent) for some reason, and in doing so they may find themselves very unpleasantly surprised. Unless this is the end game they are looking for (proving them evil), but that would be too much of a conspiracy to suggest.

Thank you! It’s this myth that keeps perpetuating that makes people think mandates are acceptable.

And I say that as someone vaccinated.

I have literally only seen people opposed to vaccine mandates bring this up. It's a fake talking point to paint people in favor of mandates as misinformed.

You're saying that a handful of your anecdotes are a perpetual fake talking point? I have seen the exact opposite. People are generally misinformed. In case you need a counterpoint to your anecdotes, read the upthread:

> I agree that everybody should get vaccinated. Let's make this virus extinct.

The person you're quoting was arguing against a vaccine mandate!

However, they do accomplish the goal of stopping it from being a pandemic. With enough people vaccinated to reduce the R-value below 1, reinfections from animal reservoirs will become inherently self-limiting.

Why not? We eradicated smallpox.

Are you serious? Let me ask you why we haven't eradicated influenza?

Not all viruses are the same, and neither are all vaccines.

The smallpox vaccine is a sterilizing vaccine, meaning you cannot be infected and cannot transmit it once you are vaccinated.

The MRNAs are non-sterilizing, as are many vaccines. They may reduce symptoms, reduce infections, and reduce transmission, but they are not considered a sterilizing vaccine.

Secondly, coronaviruses mutate much faster than smallpox, and have other hard to deal with stuff like asymptomatic transmission.

The only diseases we ever eradicated were polio and smallpox. I think we got rid of the guinea worm too. Out of all the many many diseases we have fought over the years.

> The MRNAs are non-sterilizing

The vaccines we have are non-sterilizing - and my understanding is that the reason is mostly because we needed at least something very quickly and sterilizing vaccines for respiratory virus are harder to research. It is not inherent property of the technology as far as I know.

Sterilizing vaccines for COVID seem to be theoretically possible. "Natural" infection generates stronger immune response on mucus membranes as well as deep inside the body and that provides higher protection against infection. There's no reason why that wouldn't be possible to replicate using a vaccine. But nobody succeeded at making one yet, so we'll have to see if it's practical.

Thanks to some Af-Pak mullahs, the world still has polio in the wild. [0]

[0]https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-dev...

You can thank the CIA for justifying their suspicion of vaccination drives.

Because unfortunately the current generation of vaccines doesn't completely stop the spread - they certainly slow the spread in the weeks after the second shot, but then antibodies start to wane over the next months (which is why booster shots are being administered). Vaccines still protect from hospitalisation and death, though.

If you believe most virologists the only realistic scenario is that the virus becomes endemic, similar to most flu strains or other human corona viruses (which makes vaccination even more important!).

There are many treatments other than just the vaccine that can prevent hospitalization and death too. Some countries like India rely on them daily since the vaccines aren't widely available to them.

If you get infected with COVID there are far more options than "Sit around with a thumb up your ass until you have to be hospitalized and put on a ventilator".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM

Every person spreading the "horse dewormer" nonsense should be charged with manslaughter. The politicization of this whole thing is beyond a fiasco.

It's generally considered impossible to eradicate a pathogen that can survive in "reservoirs" among wild animals, which this virus can.

There's at least one exception to this; rabies. Wild animals can be vaccinated using baits containing an oral rabies vaccine.

Yes the vaccine doesn't kill it, but what would kill it is a REAL lock down.

Give everyone 2 months of salary, and 2 months of food. Nationalize food production for a month, give everyone shelf stable terrible food, the same crap that the majority of the anti-vaxxers have been hoarding for decades.

Its like a pretend apocalypse. They should LOVE it.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't really help long term, because the disease has spread through animal populations by now.

The only way to reliably stop this from being an ongoing pandemic is measures that reduce the R-value below 1 in a long-term manner, like mass vaccinations.

The high rates of breakthroughs mean even very-highly-vaxxed populations have had case surges. Rt is going to oscillate around 1, forever.

Even if it’s around 1 forever, if the effects are mild as they are with vaccinated people, it’ll be manageable as flu is.

Since the weaker among us died with the first wave, it was already as manageable as the flu.

The mortality under 70 is pretty low.

Would we be happy to let 1% of the survivors die? Would 2% be acceptable?

As I already replied elsewhere in this thread, as of 12/02/2021 German CDC estimates 7-day R-value as 0.92. That is below 1.

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

The 7-day R-value with current vaccination rates and local restrictions, yes.

And, additionally, with overwhelmed laboratories that are underreporting the infections because they can no longer test all samples.

True. Thank you for acknowledging the point and adding further qualifications. Public discourse is rather disheartening. The options are either 100% vaccination or 0% vaccination, either strict house confinement or nightly clubbing, either masking while hiking in the woods or no masks ever. Life is a rich tradeoff of a myriad factors, somehow we reduced it to a handful of black/white binaries.

COVID fear creates that sort of warped fantasy. But few nations are totalitarian enough to carry that out.

And large reservoirs of COVID would remain in wild animals, and other countries, and groups (like the elites & their children, or remote communities) that can't practically be forced to comply.

One leak in the population of 7 billion and the whole plan is a waste.

Utter insanity. Who told you a "real" lockdown would stop the virus? Where did you get this "fact" from?

In theory, if no household has any contact with any other household, the virus will be unable to propagate and will quickly die off.

A perfect lockdown would stop a human-only pandemic immediately by stopping all transmission.

Unfortunately, this virus infect other animals as well. Good luck locking them down.

There are numerous reasons why we are incapable of a perfect lockdown of a region of any reasonable scale even before economic concerns. So it's use as a solution is more of a whataboutism for not considering reasonable actions.

How will you address the animal reserves? This virus is not eradicable.

Do we know it can actually stay in animals long term in a form compatible with humans?

I don't think this is true. The virus can survive in some for a long time. Same as with the flu. I think the endemic phase is absolutely inevitable. The only question is how long does it take, and how many people will be killed in the process. Both can only be reduced with vaxxination.

>> Yes the vaccine doesn't kill it, but what would kill it is a REAL lock down.

>>> Give everyone 2 months of salary, and 2 months of food. Nationalize food production for a month, give everyone shelf stable terrible food, the same crap that the majority of the anti-vaxxers have been hoarding for decades.

> Utter insanity. Who told you a "real" lockdown would stop the virus? Where did you get this "fact" from?

It stands to reason. An extreme lockdown as described will cause a virus to go extinct provided: 1) animal reservoirs are insignificant, 2) the immune system can clear the virus within the lockdown time, and 3) people actually comply.

Exceptions to 2 & 3 can likely be dealt if the lockdown is paired with and intensive testing and contact tracing program.

All of these things are likely true, because China and other countries have actually been successful at maintaining a Covid-zero policy (at great cost).

How do you keep things like "power plants" and "water systems" running in this proposal? Either you allow so many exceptions that it's worthless, or you literally shut down modern civilization. It's far from clear that it can be blackstarted.

I agree that is the only way but it better be my day off when the lockdown happens. How would nursing home staff stay locked down? Or other people critical to ensuring we have power or that our water treatment plants keep running. But I do agree a more aggressive lock down could work but we will never be able again to do something like that. Not unless it starts killing people like Ebola and everyone in those jobs says screw it I quit and walks away.

You ignore that this virus lives and will persist in animal reservoirs. It can creep right back in after any real lockdown you could imagine.

Also people with weak immunity e.g. HIV positive, can stay infected for months.

Why stop at that?

Let's just switch to Universal Basic Income and enforce total lockdown to kill COVID and then to save the environment!

Enough of those pesky tourists as well with their polluting jets!

\s because people may, sadly, took it seriously

You can't send everybody home for two months, even if you give everybody two months of shelf stable food. Somebody needs to keep the utilities running. People still need fresh water to bath with, to wash their shit away. You might expect people to buy enough bottled water to drink for two months, but not enough to stay sanitary. And it's not just water; the power companies still need manpower to stay on, garbage still needs to be collected, plumbers still need to clear clogs and fix broken pipes. You clearly haven't given this idea of yours much serious consideration, so why should anybody else take it seriously?

Yep, shut down energy production as well, these key workers will also stay at home. Just 2 months without electricity and internet, I am sure you will manage cowboy.

No, it's not totalitarian.

In Germany we have a constitution that protects all human's right equally. If there's good reasons why you can't receive a vaccination, I'm pretty sure nobody can force you. Not even the state. Go to your doctor to get an attest that exempts you from the mandatory vaccination. Nothing easier than that in Germany.

And again: You are just speculating. Nobody knows if a vaccine mandate leaves people behind it tropes. You cannot know it, because it hasn't happened.

I'd rather make decisions based on facts than just speculating about hypotheticals.

> In Germany we have a constitution that protects all human's right equally.

If Germany's constitution allows vaccine mandates, then your insistence that it protects all human's rights will be of little comfort to the people who are forced to take the vaccination without their consent and in violation of their conscience.

At best you are saying "Having control over what medical treatments are done to you is not a human right", and at worst you are saying "Antivaxers aren't human". Either way, you are putting too much trust in a system that claims to protect human rights, and totalitarians generally manage to find a way to twist the law to justify what they are doing, whether the excuse is "military necessity", "medical necessity", or something else.

> the people who are forced to take the vaccination without their consent and in violation of their conscience.

Your imagination got the better of you here - nobody will be forced to vaccinate, especially not without their consent. Similar to how nobody comes to your car and forces you to wear a seatbelt.

Germany's constitution is quite clear about this, for apparent, historic reasons.

So, how is paying a fine (as in eg. greece) not a form of "force"? In one way, if you're rich, you can pay for your right not to wear a seatbelt.. i mean, get the vaccine, but for normal people, the current measures are basically them being forced to do something that they don't want to do.

The fine is a punishment, not a force.

Come now...

You won't be physically forced to, but you also won't be allowed to do most of the things we normally consider that people have a right to do unless you comply. That's really a non physical way of forcing compliance (like saying I'll fire you from your job unless you agree).

The article says that Germany is planning to make the shot compulsory, literally this article that these comments are ostensibly discussing, in the second paragraph, so I'm not sure where you got the idea nobody is going to be forced to get vaccinated, but the gaslighting isn't appreciated

You won’t be forcefully vaccinated. But you can be fined for not taking the vaccine and you can be restricted in what jobs you work in. That’s how it works with the current limited vaccine mandate for measles.

And how is that not forcing?

Because this is not forcing?

When someone is "forced into early retirement" do you think that means that police dragged him away?

Yep, police or a guard can drag him away if he will show at work. He cannot pay a $100 fine or take a shot and continue to work like before. :-/

I don’t think you are aware of the definition of “to force”. It does not refer only to physical force.

I'm going to stand in front of you and not let you into your home until you give me $100.

I'm not _forcing_ you give me $100, not at all. It's just that if you _choose_ not to give me $100 I will continue to stand in your way and prevent you front getting inside.

It's really disgusting. Some politician invented that "obligation is not enforcement" talking point and now all those tag-alongs just repeat it without thinking about it for a second.

An obligation that is not enforced is not an obligation. A decision that only stays voluntarily as long as everybody complies was never voluntarily in the first place.

I'm usually a very phlegmatic, law-abiding citizen but man, where does this love for newspeak and doublethink come from, all of the sudden?

But it is. All laws are "enforced" in some way, just because sometimes it's not physical force doesn't change that. As soon as there are artificially created "consequences" and penalties, you are forced.

I think I'd rather some people be vaccinated without their consent with a safe vaccine than have some people be infected without their consent with a deadly illness.

We know mask mandates, vaccines, and other medical interventions save lives, reduce transmission, reduce hospitalizations, reduce long term symptoms and long covid rates, and reduce deaths, and they may even reduce mutation rates. So the choice to vaccinate, that you paint as one of conscience and consent don't just affect the individual making the choice, but all the people around them.

Why?

I mean... we let people smoke and die due to that... why not due to covid too?

The vaccines are too weak to actually achieve herd immunity, so pretty much everyone will get in contact with covid, sooner or later,... some will beat it by themselves and some will, sadly, die.

If people want to take the risk of covid, why force them? I got vaccinated and I don't care if some people don't want to do it.

We no longer let people smoke in places where others are affected. If COVID would only affect the unvaccinated person, I’d agree with you. But vaccination reduces the risk of catching the disease and thus the risk of passing it on to others. If unvaccinated people would all stay home and enter voluntary lockdown, this wouldn’t be a discussion. But they do not. They get infected. They pass it on. In Berlin, there’s a recommendation to not engage in dangerous activities, because there might not be an ICU bed if you have an accident. Planned surgery for cancer patients is postponed, because there’s no bed for aftercare. They’re all taken by mostly unvaccinated COVID patients. If the unvaccinated would all voluntarily stay home and suffer there, I’d agree with you. But they don’t. They’re taking the bed that I’ll need if I get run over by a car in the street.

Vaccinated people get infected and pass it on too, what's your point here?

But they are far less likely to get infected in the first place and even less likely to block an ICU bed. If you look at the statistics for Germany, the regions with the lowest vaccination rates have the highest COVID rates and are transferring patient out because all ICU beds are occupied.

I am well aware that's the official story.

But I prefer reality, and I haven's seen any definitive proof that's the case yet, quite the contrary.

It looks to me like the more we vaccinate, the sicker we get.

Because the ICUs are at maximum capacity?!?

With unvaccinated people?

Sources?

Many hospitals in Germany are out of ICU beds: https://www.thelocal.de/20211116/covid-surge-the-german-dist...

I have been unable to find an official/authoritative source on vaccination rates among ICU patients with cursory search. Help for clearing this aspect up is appreciated!

> I think I'd rather some people be vaccinated without their consent

Read the book "Ordinary men" (by Christopher R. Browning). Normal people, like you and me, had "very good" reason to do what they did when they did it.

The vaccine does not reduce transmission; heck it doesn't even prevent infection!

This is really bad since vaccinated people can be infected and shed the virus without showing symptoms! You are far more likely to be unknowingly exposed to the virus from a vaccinated person.

The rest of your assertions are rather baseless and unfounded propaganda not backed up by science in the least.

If the Omicron variant is indeed as mild as the doctors in South Africa are reporting, Omicron is the path to herd immunity. Especially since COVID is carried by animals. You going to vaccinate every animal any human could come in contact with too?

This whole "you are affecting all the people around them" is the biggest lie of all and the biggest pile of utter bull $h!t in this whole fiasco.

Yeah, tag-alongs are always okay with other people being forced to something they themselves don't mind. Often they're even okay with other people being forced to somehting they themselves would hate. That's why they're tag-alongs.

It seems you're not understanding the German situation. But also: consider that your theoretical argument made out of anxiety for some imaginary totaliarism makes, in today's context, no sense:

Triage is happening and people with better chances of survival (e.g. everyone vaccinated) are getting the beds. So already "antivaxers are treated less like humans".

In fact, germany had a vaccine mandate against smallpox until 1975 https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impfpflicht and we have one against measles, though the mandate only requires children and people in certain fields of work to be vaccinated (teachers,caregivers etc.) The German constitutional court ruled in 1959 that the vaccine mandate against smallpox is constitutional.

> If Germany's constitution allows vaccine mandates, then your insistence that it protects all human's rights will be of little comfort to the people who are forced to take the vaccination without their consent and in violation of their conscience.

There is no rational reason not be be vaccinated. Anyone who refuses deliberately chooses to endanger themselves and everyone around them, and ultimately the majority is paying the price for the reckless behaviour of a minority in more than one way.

Mandatory vaccinations are an instrument that has been used effectively and repeatedly throughout history. It has also held up in courts including in the US where SCOTUS has argued that individual liberty is not absolute and finds its limits where its exercise can harm the health and safety of others.

It is not about rational debate or legal argument. Both are red herrings.

> Nobody knows if a vaccine mandate leaves people behind it tropes. You cannot know it, because it hasn't happened.

An immigrant friend went homeless after Berlin required places like hotels & accommodation houses to be 2g (tested or recovered) only.

He got his vaccine as he wasn’t against them in the first place, he was just a wreck less dumb person. I would argue that other measures would have been less catastrophic while still “punishing” the individual.

Isn’t this an example of being left behind on a similar policy? If I misunderstood you, then my apologies.

So I could go to a doctor and ask for exemption on the grounds that I'm a young male and I'm most susceptible to getting Myocarditis from the shots? Or that I've already had Covid and there's good evidence that I don't need a shot?

I don't think so.

I Germany you can go to a doctor and get an attest about practically anything. If you fail, just visit the next doctor.

Your argument appears to be that people should be forced to be vaxxed but with a bureaucracy that allows them to not get vaxxed (by visiting various doctors until one acquiesces) if they don’t want to. What am I misunderstanding here? And what then is the point of having a mandate, why support it?

Myocarditis risk from Covid-19 is 4x higher than from BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475

Vaccination was most strongly associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 3.24; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.55 to 12.44; risk difference, 2.7 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 1.0 to 4.6)

SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantially increased risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 18.28; 95% CI, 3.95 to 25.12; risk difference, 11.0 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 5.6 to 15.8)

To be fair, rates are higher in certain age groups (particularly in the 20-30 age range). Here is the WHO advice from July: https://www.who.int/news/item/09-07-2021-gacvs-guidance-myoc...

> In Germany we have a constitution that protects all human's right equally. If there's good reasons why you can't receive a vaccination, I'm pretty sure nobody can force you.

I've received lots of vaccinations in my lifetime, but I ask the question, who decides what the "good reason" is for vaccinating every eligible human?

We know the Covid vaccines aren't 100% effective in stopping spread, or getting ill, but for the sake of argument, let's assume the vaccines are 100% safe and effective.

The reason I don't think it should be mandated is because it sets a precedent for future mandates where the political climate may be different.

Everyone should have the right to choose what happens to their body. Unfortunately that may mean people make stupid decisions (forgoing life-saving treatment, or possibly even making others sick), it's infuriating at times, but the alternative is far worse.

The same argument applies to free speech and personal privacy. Taking away those rights, for what most would say is "obviously the right thing to do" may be all well and good in today's political climate. But it sets a precedent for the future, in which the political climate may be a lot different.

Obviously, this is just my opinion :)

> Why do 30% of people refuse to get vaccinated? (here in Aotearoa it is 5%). Something is happening, people are getting left behind, in vast numbers.

It's an interesting question and there is lots of debate in Germany at the moment as to why. Some factors are:

* Germany did very well during the pandemic so people didn't experience a Bergamo or Madrid moment

* Germany has a strong esoteric / anthroposophical movement (Steiner, Waldorf et al.)

* Federalism: Vaccination rates vary a lot by state

None of those are the right answer. These are the answers people come up with having never talked to anyone who disagrees.

The right answers are:

1. They don't trust the medical authorities to be honest about the risks.

2. They don't feel a need for it because they're at low risk of COVID and know it.

3. They don't believe it will change anything.

> The right answers

The right answers, but for the wrong question ;)

Not disagreeing with you, but parent was asking why is Germany so bad relative to their European peers.

Pacific peers actually!-)

And

1. The recommendation to take the vaccine goes exactly against anything the doctors said pre-covid. Before covid, nobody would recommend you to take a vaccine against something you are not in a risk group for, and double doses and boosters were unheard of. This makes me suspicious, and I don't think that is unreasonable. 2. You get really sick from the second dose of the vaccine, which also is not normal, you are not supposed to get sick from vaccines, you are supposed to take them to avoid getting sick

So the whole vaccination situation is something that's new and confusing, why do what my doctor always said to not do? Why get sick from vaccines, aren't they supposed to stop you from getting sick? Why double and triple vaccines?

> and double doses and boosters were unheard of.

Double doses and boosters are very common in standard vaccination practice. Your kids should be getting them.

Within two weeks?

This is an exceptionally bad disease and we had to develop vaccines in a very short time.

They aren’t perfect.

Yeah except it's not an exceptionally bad disease. For a person who is not in a risk group, it's the same thing as the flu.

> it's the same thing as the flu.

Not at all. How many people experience long-term crippling effects from the flu?

BTW, the care we are taking has reduced the number of flu cases too.

And even if it were just a flu for you, there’s a 3% chance each person you infect will die a horrible death after a month of agony.

3%? I'd take that risk any day, even if I was in a risk group. Who want destroy society over that, only a lunatic

Great. If you want to take that risk, self infect and isolate. You have no right to make this choice for others by willingly being a host that can infect others.

Steady on. Hyperbole does not behove you. Nobody is destroying society. Nobody here is a lunatic.

3% is too high.

Yes, not at all. For young kids flu is way worse.

It's good, then, that the measures we took to contain COVID also reduced the incidence of influenza.

COVID is still new, while flu has been with us for millenia. Give it time and opportunities and it'll perfect itself.

> You get really sick from the second dose of the vaccine

What? That's not a universal truth at all. Anecdotally just a few people I know felt a little run down for a day, but everyone else (myself included) experience felt zero ill effects

Everyone I know got really sick from second dose of mRNA, myself included. Probably the people who already had covid in the past and were recovered.

That was exactly my experience! So you think it’s linked to a previous infection?

From what my limited research could find, is that the more immunity you have, the worse the side effects.

So a booster shot would make me feel even worse. I wasn’t gonna take a booster anyway. My heart hurt like hell after both shots. Both times exactly after the same amount of days.

Yeah my heart hurt as well, and it's associated with heart inflammation especially in men and athletic people. I really really don't want to take the booster shot since it's only 100% negative for me with no benefit whatsoever, and an extremely far fetched and vague benefit for society/someone else.

Opposite experience for me. I only knew one person who felt a little under the weather, and they have cystic fibrosis meaning they are immunocompromised, so not surprising. For them they felt a little sweaty one night, that's all

What do your anecdotes matter? The original clinical trial for Pfizer mRNA vaccine has 20% of the treated group (younger than 55) reporting moderate or worse side effects. We don't know how long these last because they did not release any data on that. Could be days, could be a year for some people. for all I know.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

20% is _not_ the same as the general and extremely broad statement made by GP. Making such a broad statement is either ignorant or disingenuous. I'll let you decide which

I didn't get sick from Biontech/Pfizer at all. I was a bit sleepy for a day, that was the whole extend of it.

Truth is, we have no idea about long term consequences from these novel vaccines yet, it's a pretty crazy experiment really.

The actual truth is "long term consequences" from a vaccine, besides immunity are just not a thing.

I bet you can't name one vaccine that has had a "long term consequence" that has emerged more than a few months after the vaccine was administered. It just doesn't happen.

Its a bit like saying I've just developed an upset stomach, from that dodgy curry I ate last year.

Ok, find some significant published studies that tracked side effects (like headache or arm ache) of BNT162b2 over time (not just the typical "there was XYZ in first 7 days, and we don't care further") since the first dose. And tell me what % of people still reported the new onset symptoms still present say 3 months later. I'll wait. :)

Or are you just sharing an opinion?

That's easy. Pandemrix caused brain damage in teenagers and it took five years+lawsuits for the authorities to finally admit it and pay compensation. Obviously, nothing was learned. That was for swine flu which was also subject to a mass hysteria at the time.

Imagine the horrific consequences if Pandemrix had been mandated!

I just read up on Pandemrix, thanks for the info.

However, this does prove my point: The people who developed narcolepsy after this vaccine started showing symptoms one to two months after their vaccine.

I am aware of Pandemrix, but do you know that the likelyhood of getting narcolepsy was much higher when contracting the swine flue than from getting vaccinated? Of course it was not mandated, as the swine flu didn't become that large as initially feared. But if it had, the number of cases would have been orders of magnitude larger than those caused by the vaccine, as they were based on the same effect. And yes, a completely new flu is something to be afraid of, it can have very high death tolls.

You really believe that?

Then why are the hospitals filling up with vaccinated people?

How about developing cancer from whatever?

Yeah and becoming really sick from taking the vaccine is not really a positive sign in any way.

Depends how you define "sick". The purpose of a vaccine is to create an immune reaction. That can be unpleaseant for a short time, but does not qualify as being "sick" in the deeper sense. Especially it doesn't compare to the effects a Covid-19 infection has, up to long suffering or death.

I'm sorry but your post is completely wrong. >Before covid, nobody would recommend you to take a vaccine against something you are not in a risk group for How about the Flu vax? I'm a healthy middle aged guy with no risk factors who gets a flu vax every year. Why wouldn't I?

>double doses and boosters were unheard of Completely wrong. Gardasil, the HPV vaccine is given in two doses. The Chickenpox vaccination is I think three doses? Same with hepatitis B. You need a tetanus booster every 10 or so years.

>You get really sick from the second dose of the vaccine Uhhhh myself, my partner, my kids and nearly everyone I know and work with has had two doses of the Pfizer covid vax. No-one I know has gotten really sick from either dose. A bit of a headache and sore arm and perhaps feeling a bit blah for half a day after is the worst I've heard of.

I've learned that it's more common to get flu vaccines in the US, so I have to adjust that statement to Europe where I live. And even if you do get the flu vaccine, isn't that purely a nice to have? Did they really recommend you to take it?

Yeah but you didn't have mRNA, which makes you really sick.

I'm not in the US, I'm in Australia.

And I picked the flu vax just as an example. I should have instead questioned your statement that I wasn't in a risk group. Everyone is at risk from covid, admitedly some much more than others.

According to this data: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort... I'm at a 0.4% risk of dying of Covid, and a 8% risk of hospitalization. Those aren't small risks, the vaccine reduces that approximately 10x so clearly its a good idea

Actually, I've just thought of another good example - Whooping cough. Adults are actually at no risk whatsoever of this, but small babies are at severe risk so parents are reccommended to get this vaccination to prevent them passing on what is a very mild or unnoticeable disease for them to their babies. Oh and when I looked up info on this and the vaccine, yes you should get booster shots for this as well https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/whooping-cough-pertu...

And, uhh yes Pfizer, which was the main covid vaccine used in Australia, is a mRNA vaccine.

Few years ago we asked a GP doc in Melbourne if we should get a flu vaccine, free and widely advertised back then. The doctor said:

- If you really want, go ahead, but it is mostly a waste

- The vaccine is unlikely to help much because it only partially protects against few variants out of hundreds in circulation

- They do not generally recommend flu vax outside of risk groups (small kids, elderly people and medical workers)

- Vaccine is generally safe, but not completely without risks.

Exactly. And I'm just not willing to accept that these recommendations change overnight and now politicians are making these recommendations in place of doctors.

Question is, how much are you going to decrease your risk of hospitalization by force-vaccinating the rest of the unvaccinated population, given that the vaccine doesn't really do much to stop the spread with delta?

If the vaccine was sterilizing - i.e. vaccinated people wouldn't be contagious and spread it symptomatically or asymptomatically - then every vaccination would count. But given the current state vaccination is just going to reduce symptoms and ultimately reduce hospital capacity. Anyone who is in danger (or scared) of Covid can get vaccinated. There's little point in vaccinating children (or even non-consenting adults, although this depends on hospital capacity).

Also, that chart is based on averages. Unless you have co-morbidities (you're fat, have diabetes, heart condition, whatever) the risk is way lower.

You're a 48 year old male? If you're healthy the risks are way lower than the chart indicates (off the top of my head maybe 1% hospitalization, <0.1% death?).

> You're a 48 year old male? If you're healthy the risks are way lower than the chart indicates (off the top of my head maybe 1% hospitalization, <0.1% death?).

And if you're healthy and think about what kind of people are included in the remaining 99% you should feel quite safe.

Your point (1) cannot be true, as Italy has barely better vaccination rate.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Roughly 10 % more people doubly vaccinated (78 vs 71 per hundred) is barely?

Vaccinations are too leaky to "make this virus extinct". Within a few months of vaccination, half or more of people can get mild, but still transmissable, cases of Delta. (Omicron is likely worse; there are already multiple reports of mild cases among those with recent 3rd booster shots.)

Honest epidemiologists have been warning about this risk since 2020, and more forcefully when confirmed by early vax results in 2021. But many people are still on the warpath against the unvaxed, as if that can make a difference.

Well, it can for the unvaxed themselves – winning them a less-severe case.

But every vaxed person is going to be exposed to, and have mild cases of, COVID – via waning immunity & multiplying variants. There is no net increase in protection from harassing the last ~15% (a more honest count of hardcore holdouts) into a vax they don't want. (Most of them have probably had COVID already, or soon will, giving them an immunity just as good as vaccination.)

>Most of them have probably had COVID already, or soon will, giving them an immunity just as good as vaccination.

Immunity from prior-infection was worse than vaccination at protecting people from Delta.[1]

1. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

By how much? It's really disingenuous to say "more" or "less" or "better" or "worse" without qualification.

Source? The papers I have seen show the exact opposite!

Would you mind sharing which papers you are talking about?

"There is laboratory evidence that persons previously infected with the original lineage of SARS-CoV-2 have reduced neutralizing antibody titers against certain variants (i.e., Beta, Gamma, and Delta variants)"

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

That's an outdated source.

Your reference undermines your claim. From your reference:

>In this review, observational studies appeared to show protection to be higher following infection.

In the executive summary, which lays out how we should interpret the total body of data collected so far:

"The body of evidence for infection-induced immunity is more limited than that for vaccine-induced immunity in terms of the quality of evidence... There are insufficient data to extend the findings related to infection-induced immunity at this time to persons with very mild or asymptomatic infection or children."

We literally don't have the evidence needed to say with certainty that infection (of all levels of severity) provides "an immunity just as good as vaccination."

The data only suggests that people that are severely affected by COVID may have higher peak antibody titers. It's a huge gamble to play with yourself and the people around you.

You are shifting the goal posts.

First you said:

>Immunity from prior-infection was worse than vaccination at protecting people from Delta.[1]

Now you are saying :

>We literally don't have the evidence needed to say with certainty that infection (of all levels of severity) provides "an immunity just as good as vaccination."

Meanwhile, all the data coming out of countries with centralized covid tracking suggests natural immunity is as good or better.

Here is another link if you are interested: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

Reviewing health data for 2.5 million Israelis, It found:

>SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021

>Conclusions This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.

This study has a rather strange design that might be miscategorizing people who’d both been infected & vaxed (counting them only as vaxed), & among other things, misses the risk that more unvaxed people might seek medical care, or receive more aggressive treatment, for the same level of symptoms.

It’s also an outlier result, as larger analyses from Israel suggest longer & stronger protection from infection.

What we can say confidently is that both the vax & prior infection provide some future protection, ut both fade against re-infection fairly fast, while remaining helpful against severity.

Also more generally: the CDC has not, in this pandemic, proven very reliable in its reporting, recommendations, or weighing/updating of evidence, & its choice of what to report & emphasize has been highly compromised by shifting political pressures. I think their highlighting of this result, over evidence suggesting otherwise, is suspect - more a reflection of them wanting to boost the vax campaign than an honest assessment of all relevant scientific evidence.

Biontech has proven to have 93% efficacy against hospitalization after 6 months [1].

- 1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Which has nothing to do with making the virus extinct.

Making the virus extinct has nothing to do with reality; it's an utterly unrealistic expectation.

If you sincerely think we can make COVID extinct you might want to do some more research into real science and less propaganda.

The optimal outcome preserving both health and bodily autonomy is an asymptomatic highly contagious variant. That is essentially a communicable vaccine.

But everything with avoiding ERs from getting overloaded, which is what‘s motivating the discussion in Germany.

First of all, there are many millions in Germany, who are neither vaccinated nor recovered (if you have medical proof of recovery, like a positive PCR test in the past, you are treated like a vaccinated person for 6 months). So there are millions which can still be hit by full force. As a consequence, get sick, require ICU care. In some parts of Germany, all ICU beds are currently occupied, patients moved to other parts of the country as we speak. That is the critical situation at the moment. Also, all data available shows, that unvaccinated people are spreading the virus faster than vaccinated people. Those two parts in combination create a situation, where the unvaccinated part of the population do mainly contribute to the severity of things. That is, why the majority of the population cares about high vaccination counts.

Forget how leaky they are - COVID can also be carried/transmitted by animals. For anyone who thinks all we have to do to vaccinate everyone - "everyone" includes all the animals humans do or could come in contact with. You going to do that too?

It's a tyranny of the majority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

I simply don't understand why one person needs to undergo a medical procedure to enable someone else to experience the safe conditions they want. These vaccines don't even grant immunity in the traditional sense (see CDC's revision of definitions here) - all the vaccines do is move things from one nonzero probability of risk to another nonzero probability of risk. If people are SO worried about their health, they need to behave honestly and either quarantine themselves or wear a full body protective hazmat suit everywhere. But requiring others to get a vaccine to attain some arbitrary risk ratio just doesn't make sense.

> I simply don't understand why one person needs to undergo a medical procedure to enable someone else to experience the safe conditions they want.

Me neither, I think it's completely unreasonable.

I think it’s completely unreasonable that people complain about an explosives factory next to a school. The risk of explosion is very low and the economic impact on the company would be devastating. Why do people think their right to be a little more safer trumps the right to manufacture high explosives?

I don't see how that's an accurate comparison at all. It doesn't require people to undergo medical procedures, doesn't violate their right to their own bodies or their basic freedom

It’s about the right to expose others to a risk without their consent.

You don’t have the right to expose others to a deadly disease. If you undergo the “medical procedure” (an injection, not surgery, brain transplant or anything complicated, expensive or risky) you reduce risks for you and others, as well as you avoid the risk of using my taxes to pay for additional medical care you wouldn’t need if you just had the very minor inconvenience of two injections.

Yeah but I'm not responsible for that deadly disease, and I don't control it. It's everywhere all the time. And it's really unclear if me getting vaccinated actually helps anything. It's a completely different thing if you are in 100% control of where a factory should be placed. The equivalent would be to argue that the factory should be banned because someone somewhere are in fact misusing these explosives for evil purposes, and therefor it should be closed forever.

With that reasoning, you are always exposing others to some indirect risk by any activity you do, everything must be banned. There's a certain limit to what is considered within your direct control and can be considered your personal responsibility.

You are expected to allow yourself to be subjected to whatever injections and suffer whatever loss of human dignity for the purpose of some vague "risk-reduction" that ultimately will contribute little towards the actual goal which is never clearly defined and is subject to eternal revision (only in good faith though :)). You are expected to do this to your children as well.

The clearly defined goal is to reduce the number of deaths and avoid exhausting hospital capacity.

Vaccines are helping with that.

Put another way, you have so little faith in the efficacy of the vaccine's ability to protect you from the effects of covid that you want others to take that same vaccine just so that you can feel a little better about your odds. And the other side is the selfish one. That sum it up?

>> But requiring others to get a vaccine to attain some arbitrary risk ratio just doesn't make sense.

Uhm, we do this all the time: licensing, seat belts, etc. Welcome to modern society.

At least with seatbelts it is the idiot who gets hurt. In the case of vaccines, it’s the others, mostly those who, for valid medical reasons, can’t be vaccinated.

Admittedly, it's not a great example, but maybe it can facilitate understanding a bit?

Why do we take away the right to drive a car (free movement) from those who are intoxicated? All that banning of drunk driving does is it slightly decreases a nonzero probability of risk. The risk to be hurt by an intoxicated driver is very low, and the risk to die is even lower. If people are really concerned about street safety, and traffic is inherently dangerous as it is, they should just stay at home.

Everything in life has a non-zero probability of killing you.

We weigh up the probabilities.

Which is why it is a good idea to get vaccinated.

In the US, it's because a bunch of demagogues have decided that they will make a lot of money (or retain political power) by saying that vaccines don't work and/or are harmful. Fox News regularly spews this kind of nonsense in its programming and a number of Republican politicians are happy to go along with it.

We should remember that the freedom of the press exists because a well informed population is necessary for a functioning democracy.

The moment the press starts spreading disinformation, it starts to be detrimental to democracy and should be treated as that.

> We should remember that the freedom of the press exists because a well informed population is necessary for a functioning democracy.

The text of the First Amendment does not contain this or any other justification for itself. And rightfully so I think; such a right does not require utilitarian justification.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

> Let's make this virus extinct.

Here's the core problem - unrealistic expectations. Even the CDC has backed off from the whole "make the virus extinct" mantra; they haven't spouted it for over a year now. Which is a good thing - it was utterly ridiculous from day one.

This virus isn't going away. It is carried by animals. You going to vaccinate every animal that we all come in contact with? Ha! You are not going to shelter in place or vaccinate away this virus. We had better figure out how to coexist with it in a rational and reasonable manner.

The good news with the Omicron variant there are no reported hospitalizations in South Africa. So it's more virulent, but less bad. Here is the perfect path to herd immunity - a variant that people can get a mild infection from and have stronger natural immunity to than the vax would give, as well as broader protection to variants. Actually any protection to variants would be an improvement over the current vax - there has be zero confirmation from the CDC or vax makers that the vax provides any protection against Delta, let alone Omicron. All they make are vague promises about it reducing the reaction. Big deal! If the reporting by South African doctors is correct and Omicron is as mild as they have seen then what exactly is the vax doing? Nothing - except exposing you needlessly to potential side effects.

BTW that Omicron is more virulent but less bad is totally unsurprising to anyone familiar with viruses and who wasn't politically motivated or shamed to pushing the ridiculous narratives around COVID right now; this is totally expected behavior as viruses mature in the wild and was predicted by many virologists last year. Virologists who were then quickly derided as quacks, truthers and worse since they dared to challenge the widely accepted groupthink. Same crap that happened with the lab leak, changing stances on masks, ignoring of massive spike in reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and more - hot takes that turned out to be VERY wrong later but amazingly the corrections never get the same amount of publicity as the initial propaganda.

> no reported hospitalisations

There are lots of hospitalisations, they are ramping up drastically. See SA regional hospital data.

> totally unsurprising to anyone familiar with viruses

Actually no human virus has ever evolved through selection pressure to become less virulent. This is just a (convenient to the deniers) myth.

Lab leak is just as fanciful as it has ever been, masking advice was updated as soon as we knew better, vaccines have been proven very safe.

I am going to accept that you are commenting in good faith. I would ask you to consider your sources, your influences, and the ever rising toll of sickness and death caused not least by the kind of misinformation you are propagating.

> Lab leak is just as fanciful as it has ever been

Could you please recommend me more reading material on that particular point? Thank you.

Hospitalizations with Omicron? Yes, I could have been more precise. If you have actually stats on Omicron hospitalizations, then please share. The more information the better.

Here's an actual doctor in South Africa reporting the opposite of what you are claiming: https://twitter.com/KoenSwinkels/status/1465906474270531589/...

Traditional vaccines have been proven to be very safe, mRNA vaccines are entirely different technology that has been in development for over 40 years and not deployed - widely or otherwise - until now. If mRNA vaccines make so much sense than why have none been brought through clinical trials before this "crises"? If it's so safe then why is the approved vaccine nowhere to be found, but all vaccine being pushed still the vax that is only under the EUA? Why did the FDA violate their own protocol and not revoke the EUA as soon as the approved vaccine was approved?

As for misinformation, sickness and death - have you looked at the dramatic spike in reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)?

Since you are so keen on stamping out misinformation - do you think people who already had COVID should still be forced to be vaccinated? If so, under what rational?

Since you want to talk sickness, who's going to apologize to this mom for advocating a perfectly healthy 14 year old get the vaccine when the possibilities of him having a major reaction to COVID are infinitesimal - yet now he will likely face heart problems for the next decade if not the rest of his life: https://imgur.com/a/NeonlLV

Who's going to apologize to all the families for family members killed by secondary effects to the sustained overreaction to COVID in the face of much better information? Sweden would like to enter the chat.

Just curious since you are basically insulting *I'm* causing sickness and death, since it's becoming more and more apparent vax apologists such as yourself are the real ones causing more problems than you are solving.

> So it's more virulent, but less bad

I think you mean more transmissible, less virulent.

Yes, I couldn't pin down the exact terms - thanks.

> there has be zero confirmation from the CDC or vax makers that the vax provides any protection against Delta

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm

For the next secondary analysis, aORs for hospitalizations that occurred before and during SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant predominance (June–September 2021) were compared, beginning on the date the Delta variant accounted for >50% of sequenced isolates in each medical facility’s state (2).

...

In this multistate analysis of hospitalizations for COVID-19–like illness among adults aged ≥18 years during January–September 2021 whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, the adjusted odds of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 were higher among unvaccinated and previously infected patients than among those who were fully vaccinated with 2 doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine without previous documentation of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Secondary analyses that did not adjust for time since infection or vaccination or adjusted time since infection or vaccination differently as well as before and during Delta variant predominance produced similar results.

...

In this U.S.-based epidemiologic analysis of patients hospitalized with COVID-19–like illness whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, vaccine-induced immunity was more protective than infection-induced immunity against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, including during a period of Delta variant predominance.

> Why do 30% of people refuse to get vaccinated? (here in Aotearoa it is 5%). Something is happening, people are getting left behind, in vast numbers. Forcing them to comply is probably a cure worse than the disease - even a disease like COVID

Yeah, please please come here and find a way to "unloose" these people, I'm out of clue. We have a lot of failures here in Germany that surface, everything is too slow, from bad organization to corruption (like most western democracies), behind in digitalization, behind in taking the right measures, slow decisions even after 2 years into this pandemic situation.. true, a big chance to clear up and maybe hopefully do better in the future.

But those people (the last 10-20% radical idiotic percent that drives the rest forward)? I really start hating my country and fellow citizens, so many spoiled brats living in prosperity, complaining about everything, believing in total bullshit, it is unbelievable. If you attempt your best in an open and honest discussion, you are called a liar with the first word that comes out of your mouth....

> Want a war? That’s what you’re going to get if you persist with this paranoid hypochondriac fascism.

That's a perfect description for those people, not the vaccination, phew..if we get a war it will be by further catering to the far right. And btw, most of these people who go demoing right now (except the few violent far right ones that are under them), I bet most have never been to a real demonstration in their lives - now standing up for their personal party freedom while limiting the freedom of everyone else - again and again.

And btw please.. everyone who gets triggered by the word "lockdown" get your facts right first - there are lockdowns and there are lockdowns. We had very strict lockdowns over the last year in most our neighbors (e.g. France, Italy, Spain) - fines when you went out on the street at the wrong times .. we in Germany were up to that once close, though I believe noone here ever got fined for anything.

What we discuss and have as "lockdown" right now in Germany is actually just the "lockdown of the unvaccinated" - means 2G in shops that are not essential - oh yeah, poor unvaccinated crowd cannot go Christmas shopping, while health personal is crying for help, ERs and intensive cares are filling up, and a newspaper already appealed to stop driving unless totally necessary, because of injury risk.

Yeah sorry, I'm totally fed up :( Read too much on twitter and also here again, and I feel also a little bad and dizzy. Have been waiting 1h in the cold and another hour inside today to get my booster shot - bad organized Germany, again, but not complaining today! I'm happy to see so many people still trying to do their littlest part to relieve the health care workers and try to help get the hospitals some space for people that really need it for reasons that couldn't be avoided. And a little proud to be part of it - In that sense, the dizzyness is appreciated and better than a Feierabendbeer, the injected chip is working, the 5G in my brain is getting activated and well welcomed. gn8

>I really start hating my country and fellow citizens, so many spoiled brats living in prosperity, complaining about everything, believing in total bullshit, it is unbelievable.

So what do you think getting 100% of humans is going to do, especially since the virus is carried and transmitted by animals too? You aren't going to wipe it out.

And for the vast majority of the population - especially those under 60 and without any co-morbidities the chances of COVID requiring hospitalization, let alone ICU admission is negligible. At worst equal to the flu. Yes, for the vulnerable COVID is not good - but that's hardly unique to COVID too.

So not sure where YOU get off casting aspersions that anyone who doesn't get the vax is selfish - there is ZERO to back that up and rhetoric such as this is the yellow star of David crap reborn in modern clothing.

Doesn't need to be 100% - has been well modelled 85% would be enough.

Also the pressure on the health care system would be much lower then - alternatively, if everyone who is unvaccinated would just sign off that he doesn't want hospital treatment and stays home I would be almost fine as well (still annoyed by the innocent victims they maybe infect..).

> especially those under 60 and without any co-morbidities the chances of COVID requiring hospitalization, let alone ICU admission is negligible.

So wrong, please look again at our numbers, small percentage on big numbers is unfortunately still too much.

> anyone who doesn't get the vax is selfish

Here, in this situation, with all we know, it currently 100% is, 110% YES.

>Doesn't need to be 100% - has been well modelled 85% would be enough.

I can't believe anybody seriously believes that. In addition to the fact that different expers have quoted different figures, and prominent health officials have admitted to deliberately lying about the percentage needed, you have to realize that many of the parameters that go into such a model still have huge error bars.

If the quoted figure was '85%, plus or minus 10%, has a 95% chance of granting herd immunity', I _might_ take it seriously. I think that's still overstating the confidence we have.

Thanks for this. I was stressed out by all the bullshit comments here. This replenished my faith in humanity so I can go to sleep now.

Chur!

In a democracy nobody has absolute freedom and minorities do not enjoy protections of the rights to threaten others. If 30% of the people do not get vaccinated without valid reason, they violate the right of others to live and stay healthy. It is scientifically established fact that vaccination reduces health risks for the public, so vaccination mandate will be based on the same constitutional grounds as speed limits and other limitations of personal freedoms. Noteworthy is that it cannot be enforced for the people who just stay at home. Anti-vaxxers can lock themselves up for a few years and be free from vaccine if they want.

How do unvaccinated people violate vaccinated people's rights?

If you have so little faith that the vaccine can protect you, then why did you take it and why are you advocating others should be forced to?

Also even if 100% of all humans were to take it you do realize that vaccinated people can carry and spread it (asymptomatically, no less) and that animals can carry and spread it too?

Thinking that unvaccinated people violate anyone's rights is utterly ridiculous; it's far more selfish than what your ilk love to accuse those who don't want to take the vaccine of.

This virus is NOT going away. So people might as well get that pipe dream out of their heads right now. It's time to stop letting emotion drive these conversations and get rational as well as realistic.

Amen

>If you have so little faith that the vaccine can protect you, then why did you take it and why are you advocating others should be forced to?

This question has a really simple and well-known answer, so if you are unaware of the basics, maybe you should educate yourself first? Vaccine does not offer 100% protection to the individual who takes it, but, according to the scientific research, it significantly reduces: a) the risk to get infected, b) the risk of infecting others, c) the risk of complications or death. Only first of those risks is related to the freedom of personal choice, other two impact public health and public is in their right to restrict personal freedom for those, who do not comply - because chances that people may die are increasing. Yes, vaccine is not the ultimate protection. More lockdowns will be necessary and we will have to wear masks for few years more. Virus will not go away. But 5-10 million people are already dead and we must take all chances to prevent as many deaths as possible, until it mutates to the point where it is no more dangerous than a flu. If this means that some libertarians and anti-vaxxers will be pissed off, well, majority of people in many countries apparently does not care.

That is a rational argument. But it is not the only one. There are trade-offs and rational people can disagree.

There is a point at which people cannot be made to do things. That point is not fixed and depends on a lot of things (obviously).

The question is is this going to push many people past that point?

It's 30% of the whole population, including small children who cannot get vaccinated at all.

My younger son (14 years old) is not vaccinated. He will be banned from entering shops, probably from playing tennis, and our family will not be allowed to meet other families this winter.

The reason why he is not vaccinated is that in Germany he would get the same amount of vaccine as a 150kg person. In the UK and Sweden they only give one dose to minors, not so in Germany. He is healthy, and does a lot of sports, so for him I see a higher risk from the vaccine (myocarditis) than from COVID-19.

Also, the federal vaccination commission (Stiko) has explicitly demanded that there should be no social discrimination for minors based on their vaccination status as a condition for recommending the vaccines for 12 to 17 year olds. We trusted this recommendation.

Do you think the % of unvaccinated would stay the same next year? My gut feeling is that it will increase, every 6 months when the new booster is needed we will get more and more people not wanting it.

How long until the unvaccinated are more than the vaccinated? 18 months?

What happens when they are the majority and ban all vaccines?

In that fantasy world they'd still need to provide evidence that the ban us justified, otherwise people can challenge it in court. The vaccine people have the "benefit" of a collapsing medical system and am absence of a similar load and collapse in countries with high vaccination rate.

Well if they are 30% now, they must have the 'evidence' that convinces them they are right, when they are 60% they would have even more 'evidence'. Why wouldn't they blame it on, the eastern europeans or something?

No,they do no need to have evidence. People don't always act rationally, and if you spend any time talking to a person with anti-vax beliefs you'll notice their belief isn't founded on evidence but on narrative, distrust and emotions. Which does not make them stupid, but it does make them wrong. If they had evidence, they could present it and we'd act on it, as was seen in Germany when there were concerns about a vaccine slightly increasing heart muscle inflammation risk, it was almost immediately halted and they stopped recommending it.

And I'm assuming we still have the same rule of law as now and they don't just make shit up, because I'm modeling my fellow humans as having a different (in this case, empirically and from a risk calculus wrong) perspective, not as evil. So they can't abandon democratic principles. Vaccine mandates are coming as a last resort now due to exactly those principles

Why? No evidence is needed that vaccine mandates are justified, as if evidence were required it'd fail immediately given the low and falling efficacy, that vaccines are individual protection so it doesn't matter what other people do, and given that hospital capacity is the problem of the hospital providers to solve and not their customers (this is fairly basic).

But hey, if you disagree with that last bit and think hospital staffing is everyone's problem, be aware that this sword cuts in both directions. It actually makes it super easy to argue for banning vaccines. Here's the argument they'll use:

1. Vaccines aren't entirely safe. They can cause blood clots, strokes, heart attacks and many other kinds of injury.

2. The injured end up in hospital, consuming medical system capacity which takes it away from the people who opted out and didn't take the vaccines. Possibly for life, in some cases.

3. This is selfish because many of the people who took vaccines and got injured are young and weren't at any meaningful risk of COVID. They did it to themselves despite knowing there were risks, because they were incorrectly scared, or authoritarian, or whatever, but now society has to take care of them anyway.

4. And in addition the unvaccinated are now almost all recovered, and they have natural immunity for life. The vaccinated on the other hand, are now dependent on endless booster shots which not only injure new people on every round but are also are extremely expensive and taxing on the healthcare provisioning system, meaning less resources available for everyone else. Proof: the UK has just started cancelling operations to free up healthcare resources for booster shots!

Thus, the vaccinated are a drain on the healthcare system and should have their freedom to choose endless boosters removed - or at the very least, they should be forced to pay for them themselves (and any subsequent healthcare issues they experience).

You may not like the above argument (I don't!) but it is not fundamentally different to the ones being deployed in this thread. And if the unvaccinated become the majority, as may easily happen given that vaccinated people will constantly be joining them as their status expires, then nothing in theory stops such an argument being made (although in reality the public health establishment would never go along with it).

0. The vaccines are incredibly effective, as evidenced by the almost zero rate of bad progressions. You can look up the studies for exact number, but I think mRNA was something like 80-90% effective against the original COVID-19, that's amazing 1. The risks you describe exist, but they also exist orders of magnitude higher when you catch COVID-19. So the choice isn't vaccine risk or no risk, the choice is vaccine risk or COVID risk. There is no if anymore, we will all get COVID. You can just get it without or with vaccine 2. The unvaccinated have much higher rates of bad progressions and might die before even reaching the hospital (for mistrust as well as medical reasons) and right now we have much more vaccinated than unvaccinated so we have more vaccinated people in the hospital than unvaccinated but look at who dies/gets damaged and which of the unvaccinated cases would have been preventable. 3. This argument is just empirically wrong https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/opinion/covid-vaccine-kid... 4. This argument is also wrong even if recovery immunity was for life (which is unsure), since as I said, we'll all get COVID, just that the vaccinated cases will be much milder and much less likely to wind up in the hospital.

These arguments are, fundamentally, not sound. And there are big difference between vaccine mandates, no mandates and bans. For mandates and bans to stand up in courts and democratic review, even as the ruling party you need to show evidence for your position since you'll force it onto other people. For the effectiveness of vaccines, we have that evidence, as well as a collapsing medical system. For a ban, we don't. So unless people with anti-vax beliefs completely abandon democratic principles (which I hope they wouldn't in those numbers) they could not institute a ban. In any case, my comment was aimed at highlighting this distinction: a vaccine mandate, like a lockdown, is/was justified by the conditions, not just dictatorial abuse, no matter how much those that don't like it scream about it. A ban would not. So it's a completely different thing to institute a ban at 60 % anti vax sentiment vs. a mandate at 60% evidence based decision making

I think it's worth to point out here that since "it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated" you can't really call it taking "one for the team".

People getting vaccinated are taking "one for the team" and at the same time "looking out for number one". That's the beauty of it, really: aligned incentives.

Perhaps this is true for covid19, as the vaccines do not seem to stop the vaccinated from getting infected and spreading the virus. But for vaccines that actually stop the majority of vaccinated from becoming infectious the risk reward calculation changes.

All vaccinations have some level of risk. If you are surrounded by unvaccinated, your risk of not getting the vaccine outweighs the risk of catching the disease from the herd. In this instance you have aligned incentives.

However, if you are in a entirely vaccinated population, your risk profile changes, and it is now possible for your incentives to become unaligned with "the team", or at least more blurry.

Unfortunately the average antivaxer's mental model is probably not so well defined that they realise is what they have been doing. I would not be surprised if the majority of them don't realise/agree that they've been selfishly coasting on the coat-tails of the crowd with other vaccines/diseases, and therefore they have trouble realising their currently "successful" strategy is not going to work so well this time round.

Well yeah, but what you said is exactly the problem here... Vaccines were promised to be safe and effective against infections... then astrazeneca killed a few people, Jansenn killed a few people, moderna was stopped in finland, sweden, denmark etc., and of course people lose trust. In slovenia, for girls under 25, we currently have 1 death due to the vaccine (jansenn) and zero deaths due to covid (with a bit over 50% of the population getting covid - around 1mio). Also the changing the definition, from "preventing infection" to "preveting hospitalizations" doesn't help.

I got vaccinated to protect myself. I am aware that even with 100% vaccination rates, sooner or later i will get in contact with covid (and/or i probably already have), and the vaccine is protecting only me. I am not afraid of the unvaccinated, and I don't care if they choose a greater risk, it's their life, and their choice.

> the absolute democratic majority has made their decision months ago to take the shot but 30% are holding everyone back

Were people really asked to cast their vote by vaccinating themselves?

no. That was a rethorical device I used in my comment.

it 's rhetoric based on false equivalence though. I vaccinated myself for purely selfish reasons, to save my ass since the vaccine was the only available preventative pharmaceutical, and at the time i did, it was already becoming clear that herd immunity was not possible. I couldnt care less if others want to save themselves nor do i think everyone should do it.

No, they were rather locked out of participating is all life outside of the home or forest unless they accept the injection

You have a strange understanding of democracy...But if we are at it, would like to propose a public citizen petition: Requesting by democratic mandate that we remove the only immunity to come out of this process, the one from vaccine producers....

Its worth remembering that division is due to the other side always.

This is an absolute statement as division is literally caused by dividing between "sides". You get a divided country when the people within it divides each other into sides. Its never been the case when people have said "our side has caused the division". never.

That is the irony you should be finding! If you do finally see this irony you might find more nuance, but maybe more frustration and more uncertainty and confusion but less anger and possibly more empathy to the other. That's why its so easy for people to divide, as its less painful. Dividing and categorizing is how we make sense of the world, but it can be a curse too.

And how exactly does this statement now help to address the situation?

I suppose by helping people become open to other, possibly more reasonable, options.

Well it seems to follow pretty naturally that if you think that division is a problem, then being aware of how your attitude is the definition of division seems pretty important.

I would hope it might help you with your observation about the division of the country, and with your feeling of irony on another subject, and using both of these skills towards understanding.

So for the situation in general: if enough people are less divisive, perhaps a less divided country can occur.

No, vaccinations are how we get out and people who are medically able to get them and don’t are hurting each and every human on this planet due to their own hubris.

If 70% want one thing and 30% want another, it doesn't matter who "caused" the division; in a democratic society you should be doing the thing that 70% of the people want.

Except! And this is a big "except": when doing the thing the majority wants would violate the civil rights of the minority. The problem (in the US, at least; I can't speak for Germany) is that the minority is trying to paint vaccination as a civil rights issue, essentially. I can see the argument, but it all feels a bit hypocritical, as I expect most of the minority who are complaining now were vaccinated (by mandate) against other diseases when they entered public school as children (and vaccinate their children by mandate before enrolling them in school). And while there is still some resistance to even that in some quarters, it is nowhere near the size of the resistance toward COVID vaccinations.

It's not exactly hypocritical because we know that the Covid vaccines were both rushed and lied about. We still don't have full transparency about them, and the companies that made them are trying to make it as opaque as possible.

What most people expect is a vaccine that works as it was said it would, and isn't in a quagmire of censorship and profiteering. I think those are very real concerns that have not, and will not be addressed - and so, you will never get everyone on board.

Yeah, mostly lied about by the anti vax guys.

Did the antivaxxers lie about how the vaccines would make us reach herd immunity and stop transmission? Or that they would end the crisis? Or that there are no risks involved in taking them?

They may have over-exaggerated and come up with bullshit counter-narratives, but they were right about the core of the issue: we can't trust leaders who lie all the time.

> we can't trust leaders who lie all the time

This is applicable to every issue we face as a society, but most people ignore most major issues most of the time. There's something else going on with this pandemic and the vaccines. It's been extremely politicized, in part due to the social/political context it started in. It's sad that we can't all come together to figure out the best course of action. Instead, wearing or not wearing a mask, for example, has become an overtly political act.

Also, let's say everyone in the U.S. had gotten vaccinated as early as possible, by last July or thereabouts, what would the impact of that have been? Things were opening back up, and then the Delta wave hit. Perhaps if 90%+ had been vaccinated we wouldn't have had to shut back down again (although it wasn't really a shutdown this time, since pretty much everything is still open).

I have been getting the sense that this is a continuation of Trumpers vs. Democrats, and their respective apologists throughout the west. Whatever the hell this is, it's getting hot and if we don't figure out a way to cut through the shit it's going to get worse.

I'm all ears for a civilized discussion, but until we can agree on some epistemic framework (or narrative) we're not going anywhere except where the current ruling class pushes us.

4.29 billion people worldwide have received a vaccine

We've done a huge scale test -- it thankfully has worked -- and I'm not sure what evidence you are looking for at this point.

It mostly feels like the unvaccinated at this point are 1) cowards, 2) selfish, or 3) believe in some sort of voodoo. Not sure which is worse honestly.

Because its a bad deal for anyone under 50. The risk potentially greater than reward. Also how many vaccines? Israel is on the 4th shot now. 30% of drugs get recalled due to safety. Natural immunity is the superior immunity anyway.

Should and must are very different things. One implies I get a choice to opt out. One implies some sort of coercion.

I don't buy this phrasing, or the rule. Even if read with best intentions. I can't even imagine how ridiculously bad US would be if it was actually ruled based on what 70% of the population wants.

I am not even joking. I think you may want to rethink your argument.

Is agency over ones body not a civil rights issue? I'm fully vaccinated and even boostered, but I'm extremely uncomfortable telling other people that they have to do something to their own body.

And I don't think taking vaccines (usually as a child) by mandate in the past changes the ethics of it.

I think it's fair for there to be consequences to refusing the vaccine. Your work may decide they don't want to expose their staff to an unvaccinated human... so you may lose your job. Government may decide that the risk of sitting inside with someone unvaccinated is too high so you may not be welcome at certain businesses. Maybe you have to wear a mask when others don't.

That doesn't cross a line to me, but saying "you absolutely must take this vaccine or we're going to use the force of government to make you" does.

> That doesn't cross a line to me, but saying "you absolutely must take this vaccine or we're going to use the force of government to make you" does.

You're absolutely right about that but there is a cost-benefit analysis here. If we don't want the government to be able to track our every move (to make sure that the unvaccinated don't violate the public interest) then it's simpler and probably more democratic to just mandate vaccination.

> I'm extremely uncomfortable telling other people that they have to do something to their own body.

I'm extremely uncomfortable with granting a novel coronavirus a gigantic reservoir of freely available incubators to infect and try out new ways to use the human body for its own goals, all the while having a way to largely prevent it. The concept of "individual rights" as you present it here is at odds with best practices learned from epidemiology. Is that in-and-of-itself a troublesome fact? Absolutely.

I am vaxed but… this reminds of the abortion argument. If one is against allowing someone right to bodily autonomy (remain unvaccinated) because then exercising that right could lead to the suffering and/or death of another, then that person ought to also be against abortion, as there should be no right to bodily autonomy in that event either, given that the death of another is guaranteed.

Yet on the left we have many who anti-anti-vax while pro-abortion. I don’t understand the consistency of that position.

maybe try once more, focussing on the differences rather than the similarities between the two scenarios.

What’s your argument for it, if I may ask? I cannot convince myself that abortion is a judicial matter as opposed to a legislative one. If it’s an innate right, there shouldn’t be any issue aborting an 8 month old fetus.

I doubt your sincere participation in the argument unless you attempt to see differences between your scenarios.

In effect, the parent comment is attempting to argue their position through proof by lack of counterexample. Now, whether this is a valid proof construction technique, and hence, whether their stated position is of any meaningful merit besides an exquisite example of doublethink, is left to the interpretation of the reader as an exercise.

> I'm extremely uncomfortable with granting a novel coronavirus a gigantic reservoir of freely available incubators to infect and try out new ways to use the human body for its own goals

Then you should be extremely uncomfortable with vaccine mandates, because this is exactly what mass vaccination is doing. Since none of the vaccines prevent people from getting COVID or passing it on to others, the vaccines are creating an evolutionary environment where there is high selection pressure for the virus to evolve variants that resist the vaccines. Mandating vaccines just makes that worse.

the vast majority of viral replications take place in susceptible infected bodies, i.e. predominantly those of unvaccinated individuals. variants, therefore, mostly arise among unvaccinated. sometimes, by chance, a variant then may emerge that is able to evade some of the vaccine induced immunity. unvaccinated individuals therefore represent a source of escape variants, and therefore jeopardize the success of vaccine campaigns.

> the vast majority of viral replications take place in susceptible infected bodies, i.e. predominantly those of unvaccinated individuals.

I'm not sure this is true, but even if it is, this...

> variants, therefore, mostly arise among unvaccinated.

...does not follow from it. The key thing driving evolution of variants is not number of replications but selective pressure. Selective pressure is much larger in a vaccinated individual than an unvaccinated individual (or at least an unvaccinated individual that has not had COVID and does not have natural immunity).

Selection can drive evolution, and in a vaccinated body there exist other selection pressures than in an unvaccinated body. Variants which may by chance be suited well to strive in a new environment need to arise first. This will happen only when replication occurs. The unvaccinated population is the major breeding ground for variants, not the other way around.

> The concept of "individual rights" as you present it here is at odds with best practices learned from epidemiology.

No, it isn't, because science cannot make value judgments. Epidemiology can tell you things like: if you do A, B will happen; if you do C, D will happen; etc. That's all "best practices" based on epidemiology or any other science can amount to. But no amount of science can tell you whether doing A to make B happen, or doing C to make D happen, is worth the cost of doing those things or the other side effects they will have. Those are value judgments, and value judgments should not be forced on people.

That's why we start with a value judgement that everyone agrees on, instead of leaving it implicit. Consider the following value judgement:

> The evolution of a novel coronavirus that is both highly infectious and deadly must be avoided at all costs.

Barring any reasonable objection to this (of which I can think of none), the ball is in science's court to prescribe a course of action. If that course of action is mandatory vaccination, then so be it.

> Barring any reasonable objection to this (of which I can think of none),

Then you haven't thought very hard. "At all costs" is way, way, way too strong. We already have viruses that are much more infectious and deadly than SARS-CoV-2, for example Ebola, and we have not taken this "at all costs" attitude towards them. We expend some effort towards fighting and containing them, but only in proportion, since there are so many other things we also need to expend effort towards doing.

> the ball is in science's court to prescribe a course of action

No, it isn't. Choosing a course of action requires attaching value to different possible future states of affairs. Science cannot do that. It requires value judgments, and science cannot make value judgments.

To take your example, science can to some extent tell you what will happen if you impose mandatory vaccination or if you don't--although since much of what needs to be predicted involves second, third, fourth, and higher order effects and includes various aspects of human psychology and free choice that are not at all well understood scientifically, science's ability to make accurate predictions about such outcomes is limited. But science cannot tell you which of those two possible states of affairs is to be preferred, all things considered.

I feel the same hesitation around bodily autonomy, but there's a VERY important point: the decision impacts more than your own body. It's the same logic we use to outlaw certain substances like heroin or PCP--you have a right to do things with your body up until the point where that decision impacts the health and safety of people around you.

Looking at things through that framework is how we end up with controlled substances, anti-smoking laws, DUI laws, and a whole host of other things.

One's rights in the US usually stop at the point where they impact the ability of people around you to live their life without undue interference.

This is a Trolley Car problem: you're going to kill someone: do you flip the switch to kill the baby, or let the Trolley plow through the crowd of people?

Now you know why Philosophy professors teach this problem in Philosophy 101.

Yes… Democracy isn’t two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.

That being said, if you declare any consideration of the actual policies to be off limits for supposedly being subjective, you won’t ever be able to make any decision.

Specifically, in this case, vaccinations are safe & beneficial. And even if governments are subject to elections, and their powers are subject to frustration even by minorities opposing them, reality is not. A principled argument cannot be made in the abstract, leaving the wisdom of vaccinations open. Opponents pretend that it is possible because they do not stand a chance on those merits, and seek to instead shift the debate to “freedom vs. safety” or whatever safe in the knowledge that it is impossible to argue for either of those conflicting values to ever ‘win’.

>> I find it ironic that there are plenty comments that paint the picture of how mandatory vaccinations divide the country....

>> How much more divided can a country already be when the absolute democratic majority has made their decision months ago to take the shot but 30% are holding everyone back.

> Its worth remembering that division is due to the other side always.

That's an unhelpful muddying of the waters. If some clear minority is undermining a popular policy, especially if it's doing so for irrational reasons or out of spite, you can definitely point to that minority as the cause of the division.

If only we could apply such a black and white view to things like racism and LGBTQ rights.

> If only we could apply such a black and white view to things like racism and LGBTQ rights.

You shouldn't read a pithy comment as a complete statement on any manner, and mine certainly indicated there's more complexity that wasn't being covered.

That said, in this case, the COVID anti-vaxers are the source of this division.

That’s literally the opposite of a black and white view - why the minority is blocking the majority is what creates the gray area.

It’s the difference between small c conservatives who have reasonable concerns about how affirmative action might worsen the problem and flaming racists who think they’re fundamentally superior.

Are you under the impression that only a minority cares about minority rights and, for example, heterosexual people would uniformly oppose LGBTQ rights?

In that case I’ve got news for you. But first, I need you to stay strong: President Kennedy was….

I think you missed the point.

I think assuming that it's out of "spite" is an example of not realizing how "your side" might be causing the division.

There are a lot of people who have already had covid and now have antibodies, who were also never in, and continue not to be in, a risky demographic. The risk for these people is very, very low already.

On top of that, the vaccine is not entirely without risk. There have been many reports of side effects, specifically heart issues in young males. There have been some deaths.

The counterargument might be, "okay, that may be technically true, but the risk is very, very low." And the people who do not want the vaccine, who are not in a risky demographic, might say in reply to you: exactly, that's the same thing we're saying about the virus.

>> especially if it's doing so for irrational reasons or out of spite

> I think assuming that it's out of "spite" is an example of not realizing how "your side" might be causing the division.

With "out of spite," I was specifically referring to things like "owning the libs."

> There are a lot of people who have already had covid and now have antibodies, who were also never in, and continue not to be in, a risky demographic. The risk for these people is very, very low already.

So? Getting a vaccine isn't only about managing personal risk. Also, from what I understand natural immunity is often weaker than vaccine-induced immunity, and "hybrid immunity" (natural + vaccine) is superior to either alone.

> On top of that, the vaccine is not entirely without risk. There have been many reports of side effects, specifically heart issues in young males. There have been some deaths.

Is that risk higher than that from COVID infection? No: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133462-800-myocardi....

This is a good example of an irrational reason: I'm scared of a choice that has a very small chance of producing myocarditis, so instead I'll make a choice that has a greater chance of producing myocarditis.

> This is a good example of an irrational reason: I'm scared of a choice that has a very small chance of producing myocarditis, so instead I'll make a choice that has a greater chance of producing myocarditis.

This isn't true.

"Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

I think the problem is that the stakes are higher for one side...

Cool - We'll save this kind of discussion for when we're choosing ice cream flavours. Not making decisions that affect the health of not just the nation, but the follow-on global ramifications due to mutations.

As for the "other side" - this is what democracy is about. So if the elected representatives and majority of the nation are for it, then that's the decision made.

One of the most salient thing about rights is that the majority isn't permitted take them away whenever it suits them.

Access to healthcare is considered a right in Germany.

They're mandating vaccines so that they can continue to provide all their citizens with this human right.

Sometimes rights clash, which is why you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater despite having the right to freedom of speech.

An individual's right to do X on principle can absolutely be overruled by the right for a larger group of people to continue living on this earth.

> Sometimes rights clash, which is why you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater despite having the right to freedom of speech.

The decision about yelling fire in a crowded theater originates from Schenck v. United States, in which the Supreme Court decided it's OK for the US Government to suppress anti-draft protests; consider if you wish to build arguments on this foundation.

> Access to healthcare is considered a right in Germany.

> They're mandating vaccines so that they can continue to provide all their citizens with this human right.

This is exactly why those people are wrong. True rights never clash.

True rights never clash. People need to be forced to be vaccinated because nobody has a right to spread a deadly disease, so, even if they think they won’t, vaccines will help preventing people from killing others by not being vaccinated.

> nobody has a right to spread a deadly disease

Including the vaccinated, who can still spread it, so I guess we must lock them up since they are already vaccinated, and we can't stop them from spreading the virus otherwise.

Saying that people don't have a right to spread the virus is disingenuous. The reality is that people don't have a right to be free from sickness or death. You can only make personal decisions about risk you are willing to take. To force other people to do things to make you safe is not a right.

> Including the vaccinated, who can still spread it

True, but when vaxxeds spread to other people who are vaccinated, nobody dies. It’s the unvaccinated who endanger themselves (their problem) and others (society’s problem) with their unwillingness to help. We should isolate the unvaccinated for their own protection.

> Saying that people don't have a right to spread the virus is disingenuous.

Try to deliberately infect someone with a disease such as AIDS, HPV, or smallpox and let me know what the law says about that.

> You can only make personal decisions about risk you are willing to take.

You can’t, for instance, drink and drive. It’s not your personal decision the moment your decision endangers others.

> To force other people to do things to make you safe is not a right.

Someone who insists in DUI and kills people regularly will end up being forced to live in a prison.

What's even more ridiculous about this line of "reasoning" is it completely ignores the fact that animals can carry and spread COVID too.

Are they going to advocate that we capture and vaccinate all the animals that humans can or could come in contact with?

It's utterly preposterous - but anyone that doesn't agree with them are the irrational ones. Propaganda and emotions running amok.

Well… some animals are dangerous. You can get deadly diseases from them, or simply be directly killed by them for lunch or the lulz.

So, I strongly suggest people get vaccinated so, at least, they don’t infect the bear that eats them.

> The reality is that people don't have a right to be free from sickness or death.

May I recommend you read article 2(2) of the German constitution at your convenience.

Read it, and I think you missed the irony that the right of "physical integrity" could also be, and is more likely to be, the right to not have the government control your body, such as forcing people to take a vaccination. If you believe that the right to physical integrity in the German constitution is to make it your right to not get sick, how much more is it the right of others to not have you make medical decisions for them?

Your question has been answered by a German appellate court in 1959 in regard to a smallpox vaccination mandate, in BVerwG I C 170.56 paragraph 21.

https://openjur.de/u/2347742.html

Wikipedia says there are cases pending in German supreme court regarding a recent measles vaccination mandate; the court has so far refused to issue a preliminary injunction against the mandate and left the question open for decision in the main trial (see paragraph 18).

https://openjur.de/u/2201133.html

Please stop spreading lies & anti-scientific propaganda. Vaccines don't prevent the spread of COVID.

The parent specifically said "help prevent," not "prevent." You've deliberately misrepresented their words.

At this point you're borderline rage-baiting / trolling, which isn't super welcome here.

From a philosophical perspective, you're not wrong, but real life constrains us greatly.

Germany could theoretically disallow unvaccinated people access to their ICUs without trampling any rights. It would get messy.

Germans aren't fond of messy solutions. They are a very practical people, and they've decided to take a more practical approach (vaccine mandates) that might respect individual rights less, but also results in much less death for those very individuals and the rest of society.

You not wrong either, but I seem to remember that the Germans had a mighty neat, i.e., non-messy "solution" (some would say a "final" one) for a "problem" they thought they had.

Throughout history, making people second-class citizens has never resulted in anything good. If you can name one instance in history where making people second-class citizens was a net benefit, I will eat my words.

I'll suppress the obvious Godwin's law call-out to just state that "unvaccinated" is not a protected class, and we probably both agree that carrots tend to work better than sticks.

Oh, it's not a orotected class?! That's fine, then! If we take nonrepentant apostates off the list of protected classes, do we get to lock them up, too? :)

Ironically, the ruling that spawned the "fire in a theater" meme about limits on free speech was largely overturned: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

If it weren’t, Fox News would be unable to operate.

Thankfully so, since "shouting fire in a theater" was an incredibly lame euphemism for telling people to dodge the draft.

How exactly does forcing teenagers to be vaccinated help with the situation on the intensive care units?

Fewer disease vectors (the teens that avoid infection due to vaccination) and smaller disease vectors (the teens that get less sick) leads to less spread.

So this justifies treating teenagers the same way as 60 year olds who are not willing to get vaccinated and actually have a high risk on ending in the ICU? Even worse, a pensioner can live quite well with the new restrictions while the teenager's family is not even allowed to meet other families anymore. You can twist it all you want, this is absurdly inhumane (and in stark contrast to the federal vaccination commission's recommendation).

They are in the UK

One of the most salient thing about rights is that people constantly disagree about them and they often disagree with each other. For example

* My right to speak freely and say cruel things vs the right of someone else to live a peaceful life free of terror.

* The right of a privacy for a politician vs the right of the pubic to know about their character & personal life.

* The right of a capitalist to buy out all the competition vs the right of the consumer to have choice.

Well, there's always civil war. That'd be a bit more divided. We should probably try going in the opposite direction, which usually involves less trying to impose our wills on each other.

"War" is a pretty strong terminology for the civil discourse currently happening.

Not everybody who hasn’t taken the vaccine is an antivaxxer.

I think a distinction needs to be made between anti vaxxers and people who are just naive/“dumb”.

I have seen more of the later group. Which is why I’m surprised when someone here or in mainstream media says this has anything to do with a political side.

This distinction is useful IMO in creating sound policies.

Literally people who are eligible and do not get the vaccine are anti-vaccination.

Dunno if I agree. It's like being in the stock market. Talk is cheap and so actions carry way more signal.

It's a stronger statement to be vacccinated than to argue online for vaccinations.

And it's a stronger statement to not be vaccinated than to argue online against vaccinations.

> ... but 30% are holding everyone back.

Not at all and I can turn that argument back: I know non-vaccinated people who stay at home and "evil" fully vaccinated people who go out. It is a fact that vaccinated people can still carry and transmit the virus.

It is also a fact that in the EU 40 to 60% of all ICU beds are filled with fully vaccinated people (40% in Spain atm but the number is going up, 50% in Belgium, 60% in the Netherlands, for example).

So evil, fully vaccinated (like me btw), people going out, spreading the virus, then falling ill and ending up on an ICU bed.

Do you really want to shame people like that? Because if we play that game, then I'll shame the vaccinated people who still have a social life: they do spread the virus.

How did these evil fully vaccinated people who are on ICU bed get the virus? Who did they give it too? Why didn't they stay at home / live less of a social life? They're putting an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system...

Countries like Gibraltar with 100% vaccination rate still just experienced a wave.

Same in Israel, one of the most vaccinated country on earth.

> Besides, it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated.

That is not clear at all. Why not lock down hard, very hard, the old and those known at risk why letting the virus circulate among the healthy population: this, and that is a known fact, creates a much better immunity than the one conferred by the "vaccine". The studies published showed 12x less risk to catch the Delta variant if you had had Covid before compared to someone who just had the shots.

If anything: maybe that that "vaccine" which still let people carry and spread the virus is part of the problem.

The problem is the old and those at risk have been sold a lie by politicians and big pharma: that by getting the vaccine they'd be safe. So they let their guards down and now they're fully vaccinated... on ICU beds.

There are more vaccinated people than not, and people with prior health conditions are more likely to be vaccinated so it's not surprising they would be represented in the ITU population.

You'd think so but it's actually the other way around: the people most likely to die are not given vaccines (because there's no point). This can be seen in the UK data where increasing vaccinations causes an increase in deaths in unvaccinated people from non-COVID causes. Clearly that's not a biological link - rather, what's happening is that as the vaccinated population grows, the really sick and dying people get concentrated in the unvaccinated cohort, which then experiences higher death rates.

Data is tricky, especially with something like this.

This effect may exist, but it's dominated by the wider UK population in which vaccination rates for over 80s are 95% and vaccination rates for under 40s closer to 60%, and care homes and immunosuppressed people were priority targets for vaccination. There are people who are too sick to be vaccinated, but they don't tend to make it to ICU beds for COVID.

The UK data also shows that all age groups are proportionately far more likely to be admitted to an ICU bed if unvaccinated. I don't think the majority of under 40s admitted to ICUs who were unvaccinated were unvaccinated because they were already expected to die soon.

This effect may exist, but it's dominated by the wider UK population in which vaccination rates for over 80s are 95% and vaccination rates for under 40s closer to 60%, and care homes and immunosuppressed people were priority targets for vaccination. There are people who are considered too sick to be vaccinated, but I don't think they feature significantly in COVID ICU admissions, not least because ICU isn't likely to save them for the same reason they weren't vaccinated

The UK data also shows that all age groups are proportionately far more likely to be admitted to an ICU bed if unvaccinated. I don't think the majority of under 40 ICU COVID admissions who were unvaccinated were unvaccinated because they were already expected to die soon.

That's irrelevant to the points being made. We all know this at this point, it's been said over a thousand times.

> 40 to 60% of all ICU beds are filled with fully vaccinated people

Though correct, this is a dumb statistic used to peddle antivax propaganda. As vaccination rates rise, this number also rises.

If 100% of people were vaccinated, 100% of all Covid ICU patients would be vaccinated.

Spain has quite high vaccination rates, which is why this ratio is so high there.

You missed the point of op. The point was that it is not unvaccinated people who fill up icu beds. That's everyone. If you kill all unvaccinated people you have 100% vaccination rate and icu beds will still fill up

The point is that if the majority of ICU beds are filled with vaccinated, you cant scapegoat the unvaccinated for your ICU shortage. If they aren't hurting anyone but themselves, who cares!

Also 40-60% is a big margin. Is that Covid ICU beds, or total ICU beds?

What percentage of ICU beds are treating strictly Covid patients? My understanding is that it's <50% most of the year. I don't have a source. Does anyone?

~73% of people in Netherlands are fully vaccinated.

If this is all ICU beds (and not just Covid ICU patients) - then you would expect 73% of x% (where x is greater than 50%) to be fully vaccinated patients.

Therefore, you're still in a world where unvaccinated patients are 9-10x more likely to be in an ICU bed. But you get this "data point" anti-vax people can spread that "It's actually the vaccinated people clogging up the beds!!"

Last weekend I was at a Japanese history museum, and part of the exhibit was on 1600s-1800s medical technology.

In the 1870s, Japan had vaccine passports and kept logs of unvaccinated people in order to track them down. It was deemed a huge step forward in developing the country.

It’s interesting how some people today think mandatory vaccination is some massive, unprecedented destruction of freedom, when it’s historically nothing new and something that was essential to helping your country stay strong.

Given Japan was a nation where a certain class could execute summarily anyone below them, for something as germaine as insulting them, and given what Japan did to Chinese civilians during World War II, you'll forgive me if I don't look to their 1870s ideals as inspiration for living in 2021.

Neither of those were happening in that era.

They’re also as irrelevant as bringing up European colonial horrors or ongoing American foreign intervention.

It's actually directly relevant in this context, because Japan does NOT in fact have vaccine passports today (as opposed to the 1870s as you allege). Furthermore, the reason is causally due to the behavior of Japanese authorities during World War II.

See eg https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/covi...

> Unlike in Western countries, it is not possible to carry out lockdowns or forcibly isolate patients. Due to unchecked enforcement measures during World War II, there has been a tendency in Japan to strongly discourage the government from having strong coercive power, especially from interfering in ordinary people’s lives, so as not to repeat what happened during that period. The power of the Japanese government to intervene in individuals’ lives, even during an emergency, is constitutionally and legally limited. The Infectious Diseases Control Law, for example, was enacted with the utmost consideration for individuals’ human rights and it limits the public sector’s power to intervene in a person’s life, even for the purpose of infectious disease control. Besides, tracking infected people has many privacy considerations, and it is legally difficult in Japan to use GPS tracking or credit card histories to track activities, as it is being done in other Asian countries. The government’s ability to access individual citizens’ data is minimal, making infectious disease control difficult.

Japan is currently implementing vaccine passports. Some towns already have registration and mine will soon.

> Besides, it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated.

No. Some are OK with the risk.

> this is a democracy

If all the possible choices for the vote are supported by all the parties. If there are unacceptable choices, this is just a dictatorship of the majority.

What about compulsory seatbelts?

No one is forced to drive.

Wearing a seatbelt doesn't expose you to potential life long side affects to your health for the rest of your life.

Just one example of one kid screwed up for life now: https://imgur.com/SNMhlBg

There was ZERO reason for an otherwise healthy 14 year old to get the vaccine. Too bad this mom found out the hard way.

> If all the possible choices for the vote are supported by all the parties. If there are unacceptable choices, this is just a dictatorship of the majority

I noticed that some have an interpretation of democracy as "the majority shall dominate you". They seem to be forgetful of the principle of "costitutionalism": all powers shall be preliminary limited through a social contract.

30% are holding everyone back

Are you still talking about Germany, because that's exactly the situation we have in the U.S., too. Same ratio, even.

I just became fully vaccinated and each day since I am dealing with dizziness / lightheaded-ness spells.

Everyone should take one for the team you say but do you know what the future holds for the team? You just trust emphatically what the early science says vs. waiting over time to see all of it's effects on a huge population? That and time is the true bellweather but we are forced guinea pigs to join the experiment or lose our livelihoods.

Can you tell me Why is the FDA want 55 years to process and release all the vaccine data they have.... shouldn't they be getting that out ASAP ... from Reuters (non-biased or sided media) https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants...

You either believe everything your govt says and the very early science says (time is the bellweather and the large population data that comes with it) or you live life on the fence questioning things before making the best decision for yourself or you go completely agaisnt the ones who just buy, soak up and believe everything their side says.

Try ivermectin. It helps with vaccine injury too.

Not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not but I sit in the middle ...on the fence and there's no better bellweather then time ...long periods of time and it's data to make the best decision for me!

He's being serious. There is so much medical information being suppressed because it doesn't fit certain political narratives - that's the real crime right now.

Luckily there are at least a few doctors who remain dedicated to science and the Hippocratic Oath and who are unbowed by political and social pressure. Some great resources here: https://aapsonline.org/covidpatientguide/

And if you can't find a rational doctor locally, they can arrange for telemedicine visits from doctors who aren't pretending the vax is the end all be all one size fits all solution to the exclusion of anything else.

Yes, I'm serious. Ivermectin is very safe.

That's cool I dislike taking medicine in general ...try to avoid any and all of it best I can as one of my organs was damaged from a med I took sometime in my life per my doctor. She advises take a little as possible which I do and really didn't want the vaccine especially cause it's so new. There's so many examples of new meds on the market that are later taken off but no choice with this junk.

> I just became fully vaccinated and each day since I am dealing with dizziness / lightheaded-ness spells.

May I ask: how long have these apparent vaccination related symptoms been going on?

Are you looking for a reason to discount his comment because it doesn't fit within your worldview but he hasn't provided enough data for you to discount yet?

Go it Saturday night… Tuesday at 3 PM I start feeling lightheaded dizzy tired… Yesterday around the same time dizzy lightheaded… Same thing today

Signed angry Guinea pig

That sucks, sorry you're going through that.

I reacted fairly strongly to all three of my Moderna jabs, the most recent was the day before Thanksgiving, and I basically slept all the next day and felt like crap the next two. But fortunately ever since alls well.

Thank you and That's cool you got all 3 yet ha two jabs is all they'll do me .. ill find another job if they mandate that crap! His stupid mandates are flailing now anyway even the one in which mandated me to get this crap. The mandates probably have no bite behind them just pushing people to get this crap injected in them and it will be withdrew or defeated when they get the population where they want it. Yet this crap each year LOL.

Also those who believe everything their side says the early science don't you think it's odd the FDA wants 55 years before releasing the vaccine data they have?

> this is a democracy and so it can also be deemed legitimate and representative to govern according to the majority decision

Not if the decision violates the constitution.

>30% are holding everyone back.

What do you mean by this?

Your logic is insane. There are countries were a majority agrees with female/male circumcision. I guess you'd be the first to go slashing at people's genitals because the minority is holding everyone back.

You way of arguing is exaggerated. Of course, I'd strongly oppose such decision.

It's an entirely separate issue that has nothing to do with ICU beds, vaccines and a pandemic.

I don't understand this line of thinking. Voluntarily taking the shot yourself is completely different from making a "majority decision". Off course I got vaccinated, but I'm totally opposed to forcing it on people.

It is absolutely crazy how easy it was for our incompetent politicians to blame people WHO ARE NOT EVEN BREAKING ANY LAWS for their own disastrous communication (just remember those "mask are actually bad for you" talking points when there weren't any) and overall pandemic management.

They constantly lied to us on every step of the way and now they're surprised that some people don't trust them?

> They constantly lied to us on every step of the way and now they're surprised that some people don't trust them?

I’m sorry to say this but that is just plain populist. I do agree that pandemic management surely wasn’t optimal, but insinuating malice is simply misplaced. The situation was chaotic because a pandemic is chaotic. Lots of federal offices that are known for being low-intensity workplaces - such as public health offices - suddenly had more work due than in the last 40 years combined. Politicians without any experience in managing world-scale catastrophes had to perform, often 80+ hours per week. International supply chains collapsed, decades of ridiculous IT politics started showing. Due to Germany‘s federalism, states had way too much sovereignty for way too long into the crisis. Public health institutions, healthcare professionals, Pharma companies - all had different opinions on what might be the best next step. Masks were not going to be deliverable in the quantities required to provide for the entire population. At some point, a decision had to be made to reserve contingencies for hospitals.

Solutions to all these problems may be obvious in hindsight, but I ask for a little respect to all the people that had to find them in a dynamic, completely unknown environment. Lots of things went smooth as fuck, you just didn’t notice because you took them for granted. We’re talking about humans after all.

> I’m sorry to say this but that is just plain populist.

No, it's a fact. I understand why they were lying about things, e.g. the usefulness of masks, but that doesn't make it less dishonest or patronizing.

You simply can't say one thing today, the opposite tomorrow and still expect people to just believe you the day after that.

And please don't buy into that "it's all new to us" narrative. Not knowing how to handle things is not a license to just make stuff up.

And if you still think you have to, at least remain consistent about it.

And if you can't do that either, at least don't complain when people don't trust you, anymore.

And if you have to complain about people not trusting you, anymore, at least don't blame them for the consequences OF YOUR OWN CLUSTERFUCK.

>but insinuating malice is simply misplaced.

Maybe initially - but at this point?

Shall we talk about Sweden?

How about this South African doctors utter shock to Omicron by many western governments? https://twitter.com/KoenSwinkels/status/1465906474270531589

Yeah, at this point anyone overdramatizing COVID is doing so for purely political and financial purposes at this point.

If Omicron is indeed as mild as it appears then this is the path to heard immunity - not the vaccine. That would cut off the non-liable money train to big pharma though; in that context the disproportional response to omicron makes a hell of a lot more sense. The real threat it presents is to the perpetual vax/booster gravy train.

I agree that the real reasoning is political - it's all about saving face. But what's wrong with letting "big pharma" earn a dollar or two? They did a really great job, here, they're not selling snake oil and a vaccine is very likely still safer then even a "mild" variant of the disease.

1. There's little concern about those with natural immunity who have recovered from COVID. It makes zero sense to induce extra risk of side effects from a "vaccine" if the patient already has natural immunity.

2. Research is indicating that in breakthrough infections to fully vaccinated people, the viral load is the same. [1]

3. The vaccines don't _prevent infection_ unlike the "classic" childhood vaccines. They are merely prophylactics that are incorrectly called vaccines to encourage people to get them and reduce hospitalization rate.

4. Everyone has their own individual level of risk. Healthy, young people have an infinitesimal rate of death from this virus compared to the old and infirm.

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Honestly, I think it's time we start splitting countries.

I don't want to live in the same country as people like you who have no concern about human rights, freedom and individualism.

I don't want a majority controlled with biased media and internet to decide for my life.

The polarization has been accelerating like mad lately, pretty soon we won't be able to live together in peace.

And I suspect that's the problem they're aiming for to get an excuse to implement the police state solution.

You're confusing majority of one statistic for majority of another statistic.

As far as I know, the majority didn't "vote" for mandatory vaccines, even if the majority have received vaccines.

It's just I'm not gonna take it is all

You are equating not taking the vaccine to being anti-vax. That makes a nice slogan but that is not true. For instance it makes zero sense for people who already got covid to get vaccinated. By now that must be 20-30% of the population in most western countries. The benefits for a healthy 20-something are also spurious. This is not the population that will flood ICUs. So you can perfectly decline to take that vaccine without being anti-vax in any way.

There are many people who decline to be vaccinated who are irrational (and I think anyone over 60 who does is just not looking at their risks right). But you won’t convince them by forcing their hand or making obviously untrue statements.

> The benefits for a healthy 20-something are also spurious.

They can get it and spread it to others who are more vulnerable. Unbelievable that you and others still don't know the most basic facts about diseases, even two years into a pandemic. Please get educated and stop spreading misinformation.

I will pass on the derogatory comments.

Except that it doesn’t look like the vaccine is doing much to prevent transmissions. The UK has been near 90% vaccinated since this summer, and despite that it experiences a high number of cases, of the same order of magnitude than pre-vaccination. And it seems to be the same in other high vaccination countries.

Also if you are vulnerable and unvaccinated, you own the risk.

The only thing vaccines seem to be efficient at is reducing hospitalisations, which at the end of the day is what matters.

> but 30% are holding everyone back

If you truly believe squashing the number of unvaccinated people will result in any significant benefit for the rest of us you are undeserving of the first place in this comment thread.

You could wait a few months for those vaccine laws to go into effect in Europe for proof. Or you could just look at the existing body of data that's staring at you in the face and are deciding to ignore because faulting someone else is one of the most primitive endorphins kicks you can get.

Signed: a fully vaccinated (and disgusted) user.

Thay's why constitutions exist. So that any 1% cannot be abused by the 99%. Pure democracy means 51% can wipe out the 49%, Rwanda style.

In most countries a 99% majority is very much sufficient to amend the constitution.

Talking about majority ruling what happens to the bodies of a smaller minority... sounds like a good fascist principle. No matter your good intentions.

Well said.

It's a civic duty to be vaccinated. It's the rational, sane, and most personally and socially beneficial policy. Were this a game theory context we would be saying that getting the vaccine strictly dominates not getting the vaccine.

I’m pro-vax. I’ve taken the shots and the booster. But I fail to see the point of this lockdown. If you are 70% vaccinated as a country and the remainder of the 30% is possibly low risk why lockdown? You’ll never get to 100% vaccinated or even 90%. If the 70% vaccinated isn’t reducing the load on the hospitals we have an issue with vaccinations.

They need to reach 100% to eliminate the control group before everyone starts getting sick from them

- You can be against mandatory vaccinations and not be an anti-vaxxer.

- "Herd immunity" is only a secondary desired trait for the vaccine. The primary one should be that the individual that gets the vaccine will have a stronger immune system and less likely to be severely sick. I got it for my own benefit, not because I want to be nice to others.

- The vaccine was sold as a one-shot thing. I think that the vaccine is safe enough for its risks to outweighs the benefits if it was only once. If periodic boosters start getting required, the calculus changes.

- Where does it stop? Let's not forget that the whole thing with lockdowns was to flatten the curve and to avoid the health care system to collapse. These should've been seen as temporary measures so that we could improve the healthcare system so that it could respond properly. Instead, it has become a perma-threat with no end in sight.

While I offer no opinion about whether vaccinations should be compulsory, it must be stated that if they should, it certainly isn't because of your argument about pure democracy. In a pure democracy, 90% of the population can choose to oppress the other 10%, and they have, many, many times throughout history.

If vaccinations should be made mandatory in a free society, it is solely due to the externality imposed by the unvaccinated on others (like you mentioned with ICU capacity, as well as general pathogen propagation), and avoiding that violation of the broader public's freedoms.

Sure, but the two qualities:

- 70% of population vaccinated

- and ICU beds clogging up because of unvaccinated

don't have to be considered separately. Instead, they are nice facts for making an informed decision about what to do next.

Disclaimer: I am fully vaccinated and have had the booster shot.

From US perspective...

What I find ironic is:

President Biden, Anthony Fauci, White House Press Secretary all said they would "never mandate vaccinations" and it's "not the place of the federal government to mandate vaccinations" and that they believe "it doesn't have the authority to do so anyway"...

And since when do we not care about the minority? Also when it comes to medical decisions about my body the government shouldn't have a say in it.

On top of all that the effectiveness of the vaccine and it's longevity leave a lot to be desired. This ain't no polio silver bullet and the virus continues to mutate and break through even the most vaccinated populations.

It's terrifying how many things I used to be told in my youth about the "free world" have turned out to be blatant lies in the last few years. It's one thing to be forced by ruthless government but ordinary people demanding to be left without a choice is a sight to behold.

I'm ashamed to admit that for a couple of months early last year I actually believed in the "pandemic". I was really confused because so many countries acted along the same lines. And then I had. It was a basically a flu though my sense of smell has been degraded since then. My parent (70+) had it this last fall, my father ended up in hospital (no ICU or anything drastic). Still, my mother had had a much closer call with a flu a few years ago.

Now the company I work for forces me between undertaking experimental medical procedures and getting much better at leetcode. You know what's funny? They require we get pricked and go back to the office in Jan. But even though everyone will be fully "vaccinated" they still demand masks in the office. You know what's really funny? Of all our offices across the globe (including China of all places) only American ones require "vaccination". Most others at worst recommend masks.

Speaking of "pandemics". You know what you'd see if there were one (aside from bodies lying in the streets)? How about hermetically sealed borders? Including our southern one. With the border patrol shooting anything approaching it with no warning. Last time I checked the news, they were not even demanding "vaccination" papers.

Also I kind of remember "masks are necessary for medical professionals only", "2 weeks to not overload the ICU", "it's just a pinch", ".. or two", " .. and probably a second booster", <you are here>, ".. possibly every 6 months?".

Also, do you recognize that the government peddling all this "pandemic" propaganda is the same we have seen in action for the last couple of years? They have spectacularly failed at their core business of maintaining rule of law and fighting wars. Well, at least not losing one more humiliatingly than the Soviets. Why would you trust your health to them? My body my rules, anyone?

The only argument that is viable against vaccination is that one might already have natural immunity. I get that some will try to get infected on purpose, but those will be the minority of the minority. Maybe there is also the argument that higher vaccination rates will not help. I heard that 90% UK's population has antibodies. People say that Spain has low rates now b/c they have a high vaccination rate, but they also had a high number of cases previously, and they were probably underreported. Personally, I gladly increased the average antibodies count of the population by getting vaccinated despite already having some immunity, but people are frightened, and we can't really change their minds. Force will only make them more stubborn.

Tons of misinformation and bullshit numbers as top comments here. Scary to witness. HN, be aware, this is how fake news spreads. Please stay safe and double check numbers in case the sources are dubious or missing.

It’s pretty shocking the number of contradictory comments from people on both sides of the argument. I wonder if this is a case of a lot of “smart” people knowing a little but thinking they know it all.

Would love to see stats on what parts of society this is going to impact? In the UK, the govt would have had to produce stats on the impact on minority groups. Based on what is happening on other countries, this looks like an outright assault on the poor, disabled, and recent migrants. History tends to repeat...perhaps the unvaccinated should be forced to wear badges? To protect the vaccinated ofc.

I am in the UK, in a part of the UK that has a badly malfunctioning health service. Waiting time for ambulance two weeks ago was twenty minutes (and that was just travel time), no issues at ICU (not for me, it was a relative the ICU was precautionary), no issues getting a bed...strangely, the experience was much better than the pre-Covid...significantly so. Germany has the same vaccination rate, Germany has a better health service...it is strange. No-one places any value on their freedom because it is something that is freely given to everyone today, our ancestors shed blood for it but we didn't...is this worth it? It is a huge change in freedoms for something that is unlikely to change things (I am not sure how this kind of thing is legal, if it is legal for a govt to essentially quarantine citizens in their own home if they refuse to have a medical procedure...that is alarming).

time to flee ...

Just went through this thread and I have only one thing to say:

WE REDDIT NOW

It's a kind of bikeshedding

Any other thread on HN might only attract comments by people with a genuine interest and knowledge of the subject, because if I don't care about some thread about Rust I just won't comment.

Of course, everyone has an opinion on vaccine mandates, so this thread has about 50x the average responses.

Its a global pandemic where a small percentage follow antiwax conspiracy. I mean an iduvidual choice might endanger others. Thus its induvidual choice versus the good for the masses.

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