The truth is that Germany's government is to blame for this problem in the first place; if you are losing infrastructure during a prolonged crisis instead of bolstering it, you are failing/losing/incompetent. To put restrictions on the population instead of addressing the problem might as well be criminal.
While no country is perfect, and many governments made mistakes, you just can't fight an exponential problem (viral epidemic) with linear means (more hospitals). More beds doesn't help, you need the personnel, the training, and upkeep all of that when there's no pandemic. It's unfeasible.
Without restrictions in place, and with the current omicron spread we're seeing, doubling hospital capacity magically, with doctors and nurses and ventilators, lasts you for an extra whooping 3 days. 10 times? You'll have around 10 days more before it collapses.
You're saying they can't mobilize themselves to solve this comparatively tiny problem now? They can't build a few dozen field hospitals for Covid patients with basic therapies, like providing oxygen, which is what the vast majority of those patients need? None of the Western European countries have the capability for this? Is this some kind of joke?
This is not an exponential problem: it comes in waves. I'm sure you know what an exponential function looks like, and it's not visible here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
Field hospitals that stick around for a few months would be totally fine in handling this. That's what they're for.
Is this tiring you? I don't really know what to say to that, except that it seems there's nothing anyone can say to change your mind.
And if we want to be technical it's a sigmoid, but we only see the exponential part of it.
Many governments just do not want to put effort and money towards that. Some of them even talk about reducing hospitals and let thousands of doctors and nurses quit (Slovakia). It is disgusting and reveals what kind of people are in charge.
1) Do they actually work
2) Are they worth it (cost/benefit)
You say "the end of each wave aligns neatly with restrictions" - can you prove that it's not just that the restrictions follow the waves? You know, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. I haven't seen any real discussion of this by governments, they just claim it works.
Obviously each country does restrictions their own way, but I feel like the concept of "lockdowns" is pretty ubiquitous, and if you're going to do something that seems stupid, you should have a lot of supporting evidence for its efficacy. So far I haven't seen much persuasive evidence in support of lockdowns or masking, but people keep throwing it at me like it's gospel. They don't seem to think Sweden or Florida are real, or any of the other places that never did lockdowns.
Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that lockdowns are putting millions of people into starvation. I haven't seen any governments put out cost/benefit analysis, probably because it wouldn't look very good.
I wonder honestly whether you, and others like you, are arguing in good faith. The truth is I'm not necessarily against many of the restrictions - if it turned out they were actually appropriate and worth it. The problem is that the way you argue, the incentives involved, and the reality of the outcomes, I don't believe a fucking word you say. You'd have to provide indisputable evidence at this point, and you'd have to really make me want to hear it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0
And that's just the most cited, most exhaustive study on effectiveness of restrictions. Some work, some don't, but certainly most do.
Do you have any study at hand that indicates that restrictions generally don't work?
But they can't scale to infinity, there's always a limit on the number of medical personnel you can actually train. At some point you will hit that limit with unchecked exponential growth.
For the last three days I have been seeing more and more bad faith or distorted arguments like this on HN regarding Covid. And way less comments from professional virologists or epidemiologists weighing in.
Covid is a serious disease and it does increase load. That will cause problems because the system was finely tuned to always be near to 100% workload in normal operation. That ICU beds were reduced with financial incentives! by the state no less just last summer is a complete joke.
Cough... Omicron being “mild” refers to the double or triple vaccinated.
Even then, the problem is it’s so damn contagious that even a small percentage of severe cases puts pressure on health systems already at breaking point.
> Why do we still have these silly mandates?
That's hardly specific. There’s plenty things governments can do at this stage, some good, some bad.
For example, I’m not a fan of criminalising private mixing of individuals. I think governments should be funding healthcare, UBI or furlough, and mandating decent ventillation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Is that true? It was mild in South Africa, where vaccine rates are low.
> Covid patients infected by the Omicron variant, whether vaccinated or not, usually experience mild symptoms, though in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer, said Dr Angelique Coetzee, who is among the physicians who first flagged the highly mutated strain in South Africa.
Dec 16, https://torontosun.com/news/world/small-south-africa-patient...
> A small study of seven COVID-19 cases in South Africa shows the Omicron variant can break through booster vaccine shots, one of the scientists involved said on Thursday.
> usually experience mild symptoms, though in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer
"Usually" is key, as is "in the unvaccinated, they are more intense and last longer".
Fact is, 2 vaccinate doses decreases hospitalisation by Omicron by 70%.
As for break through infections? Doesn't change the fact vaccination decreases the severity in people who end up infected.
Would you happen to have a reference for that South African stat?
One article mentioned that out of 43 cases documented by the CDC in the USA, only one person was hospitalized.
The 70% figure is readily available. It's in this article somebody else quoted when failing to make an opposing point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...
> He said private hospitals reported that most patients were unvaccinated and many were initially admitted for non-covid-related illnesses. There was less evidence of respiratory infections in omicron-infected patients, compared with the other variants, with fewer patients requiring oxygen, Noach added.
and hospitalization is down across the board, even before the additional benefit of vaccination:
> Adults are experiencing a 29% lower admission risk relative to South Africa’s first wave of infection, dominated by D614G, in early 2020. Furthermore, hospitalised adults currently have a lower propensity to be admitted to high-care and intensive-care units, relative to prior waves.”
Move on to what? Close doors at hospitals and deny help to those in need? What exactly is this place some people want to "move on to" exactly during a f*cking, unsolved pandemic?
Edit:
This also means unsolved to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjU6zwL_4GU
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-ra...
A small sample:
https://khn.org/news/article/ambulance-resources-911-demand-...
https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/2021/12/16/york-coun...
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2021/12/16/massachusett...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/health-care-workers-min...
https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-north-country-hos...
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2021/12/14/covid-sur...
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2021/12/15/covid-19-ov...
https://boston.cbslocal.com/2021/12/15/salem-massachusetts-h...
https://wsbt.com/news/local/memorial-hospital-overwhelmed-at...
> “Local public health workers are burnt out from nearly two years of round-the-clock contact tracing, a massive vaccination effort, nonstop demands for information and guidance from businesses, residents and town governments, and the stress of having mask mandates become a local responsibility, and much more,” Walker said.
This article is about health workers being exhausted for having to do things that they probably shouldn't be doing anymore now that vaccines have been generally available for almost a year and the latest variant is not more dangerous than the regular flu. Again, an argument that we need to move on.
After skimming the first 3 it doesn't look like I should spend any time on the rest.
Vaccines have been generally available for almost a year. That doesn't mean that everyone that could get vaccinated has done so. There are plenty of counties in the US where the vaccination rate is still below 50%. There are even plenty of counties where the vaccination rate among those 65+ is below 50%.
You are right that health care workers should not have to be doing those things anymore--we should have been at 90+% vaccination rate pretty much everywhere in the US by mid-2021. But we aren't, and so they do have to keep doing those things.
And as long as that keeps happening we can't move on, because people need hospitals for things other than COVID. Even those of us in places with good vaccination rates can be affected because the places that are overwhelmed are transferring the overflow to places that aren't.
If you're willfully unvaccinated, society owes you nothing.
+: And IC people, which is effectively involuntarily unvaccinated.
I assume (based on other countries data) that we’re basically accelerating deaths in the 80+ year old group, heavily weighed to the sick. So basically same as the flu in 2018 when 100,000 Americans died.
If 5 years from now we see a dip in deaths we’ll know we didn’t kill of a segment of health in population but rather accelerated the deaths of the morbid elderly by a year or two.
Not to say those deaths aren’t tragic but it’s very different than 800,000 deaths of people j the prime of their lives.
Sauce: https://alltrendsonline.com/what-was-the-population-of-the-u...
Your argument framed relatively instead of absolutely: "COVID has only killed a third as many Americans as the Spanish flu"
Might also help to remember that NYC built 10,000 ICU beds in five days (that were never used). Our ability to surge hospital capacity is unparalleled. We put men on the moon, FFS.
This is not what people mean by "beds". It's adequate staffing ratios. In March 2020, there were few hotspots in the country and it's not at all comparable to the situation today.
Also, you're being very obtuse and deflective in this thread, bordering on misinformation.
What is an "unsolved" pandemic?
And what statistical features of endemic equilibrium do you view as sufficiently absent to judge that this pathogen is still pandemic rather than endemic?
I call this unsolved.
New data out of South Africa showed that the risk of hospitalization from Omnicron was 29% less than the original strain which was already pretty unlikely for young, healthy people . And another study just showed that this new strain multiples faster in the airways than in the lungs, which would contribute to less severe outcomes. But yet, there are talks of more restrictions, more panic, and more fear due to omnicron.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...
How does the part after the comma follow from the part before the comma?
"I've not got a bigger pile of dry leaves next to my shed than the big pile of dry leaves next to my house, which should contribute to lower risk of my house burning down".
"I was only using log4j on systems that weren't customer facing. Now I'm also using it on customer facing systems, which should contribute to lower risk of getting hacked".
Did they account for previous immunity from other strains when they said Omicron is 29% less severe than original strain? How did they study this? Magically find people who (1) Never had a strain of Covid and (2) Aren't vaccinated at all.
Bold statement. We don’t have enough data for that. All the data is based on situation when mandates are applied. Nobody knows what happens without mandates.
Young people in Africa has still died for this, so it is still quite serious.
To add, it is easy to see biased point of view. In the modern countries there are ICUs which are getting filled already. Once they are full, everyone who is not getting there when needed, will die. If we count every person who went to ICU as dead, how this would change seriousness of Covid?
The jury is still out, but data from SA indicates it might closer to a mild cold than bad cold.
And Norway, and Florida, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591980
From a public health perspective, non-vaccinated populations are a petri dish for new variants to develop in, and those future variants could potentially be more dangerous.
And the policymakers for the most part, have not shifted in the past several years. In the USA, Biden has pretty much carried forward the policy from Trump and Dr. Fauci is still the director of the CDC during this time. If national policy and sentiment were to change the biggest sentiment would be to change the CDC director.
The election was just last year. Now, regardless of the reason why individuals voted for them, politicians feel as if their winning means to move forward on all parts of their agenda. One of the biggest reasons for Trump's loss is how COVID was handled. So the direction that this administration has is to handle COVID differently than Trump, which means, do more to combat COVID.
In the USA, I would not expect anything major to come out at the national level with regards to COVID. VA just had a shift happen with the governor's race (I live in VA) and VA might be a barometer for what changes can happen at a local level.
And sadly, I do think I have to tie my expectations more with politics than science or data.
Not everyone has had access to the vaccine yet. Not saying this can go on forever, but this isn't solved yet.
Has anyone died from Omicron elsewhere?
That's not really true. Here in Germany there's plenty of people who tried to get a booster shot but were turned away because it hasn't been 6.00 months since their last shot[1] (including me, tried to get it before Christmas and the inevitable o'micronwave). Other countries might be more reasonable, Germans gonna German I guess. Come to think of it, that probably explain things like people being turned away on the 25th because they're only eligible for the shot on the 26th and stuff like that.
[1] The "STIKO" says it has to be >=6 months, and >=5 months only in "special cases", EMA says >3 months, federal health ministry says >3-4 months, state health ministries say anything between four weeks and six months. My state says three months. Which one is applicable is basically impossible to know.
In the case of more serious disease (which the Alpha, Delta, and other variants perhaps were), the "mandates" (assuming you're referring here to horizontal interdiction like lockdowns, school closures, etc) make even less sense. They stratify spread acuity by socioeconomic status instead of risk.
Achieving a vertical stratification, where the low-risk cohort (which is enormous in the case of all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and easy to identify by age and comorbidities) experiences a highly acute spread, is a much faster path to endemic equilibrium, and is only disrupted by what you rightly call silly mandates.
HN in particular seems to have quite a noticeable "skeptic" bent about it, so I wouldn't worry!
The new variant is basically a bad cold
This is what I was worried people would start inferring from that headline – it's not really an accurate representation, since this article is just talking about how the UK government describes "symptoms".
Initial data from South Africa does suggest it's possible this variant may be less severe than we saw in previous waves. We don't really have enough data to come to a clear conclusion on that at this stage, because of the pace of change and the number of confounding factors, such as previous infection. The Discovery Health study suggests that hospitalisations may be up to 30% lower than in South Africa's initial Delta wave – if that does turn out to be the case, it's positive. However, the same study also points out that the risk of reinfection is higher, as is the risk of hospitalisation (from a very low base level) among children.
We can also see evidence from the UK that Omicron appears to be significantly more transmissible – the number of cases is currently doubling every 48 hours. Of course that won't continue, but my understanding is that we are likely to see up to about 1m cases a day in the UK by the end of the year. At the moment (very roughly) about 1% of positive (confirmed by test, so lower in practice) in the UK result in hospital admission. So it's not hard to see that a rapid increase in the number of infections could result in a significant spike in hospital admissions, with all of the knock-on effects that this causes – even if the severity of each individual case is much lower.
I'm sure everyone hopes this isn't the case, and that it turns out that this wave spikes and subsides quickly with minimal harm – but it definitely seems way to early to be drawing conclusions like "this is just a bad cold". I'm personally a little bit confused about the number of posts I see which seem to want to twist any data they can find into an existing narrative they've already settled on.
It's been less than a month since Omicron was discovered. It's not easy to know exactly what the ramifications are in such a short time, and it's frankly impressive that we even know as much as we do.
As one comedian put it: "Give it a second! It's going to space!"
Also, my spouse and I quote that Louis CK bit all the time. It's a classic.
It's still going to be at least 8 months before everyone in the US can get vaccinated. And that's assuming the Pfizer vaccine gets approved for those under five in January, which seems less and less likely given that we haven't seen any updates on that in weeks.
Your desire to return to "normal" is counterproductive to preventing the spread of contagious disease. A lot of the country has already turned back to normal, and it shows in the fact that we have 140k cases a day and thousands of deaths per day. When 9/11 happened, we vowed to "never forget", but with Covid, it seems that self-induced Amnesia is what people are actually fighting for.
Lets not go back to a world where it was normal to show up to work sick and we had very little in the way prepared for when a deadly disease was spreading. The culture around sickness and disease has to change. This is vastly more important than "getting to Mars" to save humanity.
> We have all the data one could hope to have, vaccines, treatments, we know how to care for those that are sick, and the vast majority of people that are dying are basically at the end of their natural lives anyway.
Really? In the US We have politicians of all stripes actively subverting data from being gathered and distributed. I could write a whole book on how the US failed during this Pandemic.
Which reminds me of this article: https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/1918-pandemic-compared-to-... Covid-19: We're already forgetting the best lesson from the 1918 pandemic - There are individual and collective dangers to this forced amnesia.
All these mandates and lockdowns are just performance art to distract from their abject failures.
> made a difference: increase hospital capacity to care for COVID patients.
Why would they have ? They've been told it's just a cold last year and they are told or tell omicron is just a cold.
2) If there are clear answers to #1, why in tarnation isn't our response, "OK, we need to improve the health care systems in these marginalized communities?" Why instead would we even consider repeating the failed, class-based horizontal interdiction efforts which have terrorized these same communities and cut them off from their centers of support (eg, schools)?
https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_coronavirus-des-hopi...
> Not all hospitals are there yet, but all are tearing their hair out to deal with the situation because it is such a headache. A Chinese puzzle, or a tetris, except that it is not a game. “We have already been making an effort to smooth out the programming for a few weeks,” explains Fabrice Chariot, anesthesiologist, and coordinator of the operating room of the CHR of the Citadel, to avoid having too many operations on the same day. We are now starting to postpone cases. ”
> 2) If there are clear answers to #1, why in tarnation isn't our response, "OK, we need to improve the health care systems in these marginalized communities?" Why instead would we even consider repeating the failed, class-based horizontal interdiction efforts which have terrorized these same communities and cut them off from their centers of support (eg, schools)?
What ?
It’s a mix of covid and antivaxx philosophy though, not just covid, some doctors and nurses who haven’t vaccinated have been suspended and it’s hard to find replacements right now.
https://www.scotsman.com/health/coronavirus/covid-scotland-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/26/late-diagnos...
2) Because you can't improve health care systems within a short time frame. People are quitting their health care jobs in Europe in big numbers due to being overworked due to the pandemic.
2) Yes you absolutely can; it has been done with great success many times in epidemics, including this one. Moreover, longer-term improvements to health care remain an imperative if indeed a completely predictable respiratory pathogen can so easily overwhelm capacity in marginalized communities.
In France, 8% of those deceased from Covid (~10,000) are in the 45-64 age range, hardly the end of natural lives. That's not great.
... for fully vaccinated people.
1. how many people end up in ICU (which for Omicron we don't know yet), and at what point ICU becomes overwhelmed in a given region. Once the ICU capacity is exceeded, the mortality rates for bad cases goes way up.
2. How many illnesses unrelated to Covid go untreated due to load on the health system, and subsequently how many excess deaths this causes.
3. After 5-6 months, a lot of vaccine immunity starts dropping off. A regions capacity to get booster doses delivered makes a difference here.
We actually don't know if the new variant is milder than Delta. And even if it is milder, ir is spreading so rapidly that a small proportion of severe cases could still flood hospitals. IMHO we need STRICTER covid rules in 2022 - shutdown the whole cultural sector, close bars, restaurants, criminally punish anti-vaxxers, impose penalties for unvaccinated, etc.