14 deaths in UK so far, ICU and deaths are a lagging indicator.
Why is it so damn difficult to figure out what’s really happening? I’ve read about 10 stories today all telling me I should be very worried about Omicron and not a single one has any data.
If a lot of people had it and were ok, why the continued mask hysteria? It is beginning to seem like people don't want to move on.
From an individual, bottom-up perspective, most people don't have a high risk of death from COVID. The majority will avoid spreading any disease to others, usually by self-enforced quarantine. Some individuals will die, but all of us will die of something some day and we should come up peace with that.
The only top-down mitigation to death of a specific cause is legislation. For an endemic disease, legislation to avoid the spread of that disease must necessarily approach tyranny.
I've addressed the overtaxing if the health system I'm reply to a sibling. It is unclear to me that any overtax if the health system (which is, from what I can glean from the CDC limited, in the US, to a few states) is due to COVID directly rather than institutional responses to COVID.
I bet you a lot of fake internet money that when the fire is out and cooler heads prevail, most of the overtax was institutional responses to COVID.
We won't be able to know how true this actually is until years (perhaps decades) after this all calms down. There is simply too much pressure to maintain the current narrative and do true root cause analysis.
This is a major story because all across the country, our health care system has been stretched to its limits. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 started, but this pandemic has only made our nurses and doctors even _MORE_ overworked than expected, as they deal with case-after-case of COVID19.
There is much more at play here than the disease itself. Government, media, and institutions should be held to account for their role in exacerbating the situation.
This past week, COVID-19 cases are triple what they used to be and flu cases are doubled in my county.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problem. Same clinic, same staff, just one month apart with a sudden COVID and Flu surge.
It was even the same nurse who administered the two shots.
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And the receptionist said, sorry for the wait, we've had an explosion of COVID-19 cases. EDIT: "Overrun" was the receptionist's word actually. But you get the gist.
There's no ICU at this facility I go to. Just a neighborhood clinic. But enough people are taking COVID19 tests that they're having issues keeping up.
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Everyone around me was in for non-COVID19 reasons. We all came in on maybe Thursday/Friday/Saturday, saw the 4-hour wait, and decided to come back on Sunday to stand in line before the clinic opened.
But the number of COVID19 walk-in patients was clearly big enough to cause all of us in line to postpone our health care (again, mine was pretty whatever, just a TDAP/Wooping Cough booster, the person in front of me had mysterious pains and the person behind me had a mysterious blister). So nothing "serious" mind you, but... there's a lot of self-selection bias here since we all came back another day.
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Furthermore, the clinic has temporarily suspended its giveout of flu shots. Its really overrun right now and quite evident. I drive past it every day to work and I can see that its parking lot is completely packed.
The sign-in line took 45 minutes to clear after the clinic opened. That's just walk in, type in your name + problem into the computer, and sit down. A lot of us standing outside in the cold waiting just to get to the damn computer screen to sign in.
It's likely unknowable, but I'd be curious to know how many of those coming in for COVID tests are being required to test.
We all know at this point the symptoms of COVID. It's a generally good idea (as well as the most comfortable option) to avoid the public when ill. Exercising a sick day or call-out option to rest and recoup seems more sensible and causes less risk to the public and the capacity of healthcare institutions than sending every case of the sniffles for a test.
The data that's important is "percent positive".
When the covid19 cases are 5% positive or less, you've got accurate statistics. When its above 5%, then things get less-and-less accurate. That is to say: you want roughly 95% of people getting COVID19 tests to be negative, to ensure you're "counting" as many people as possible.
We're at 10%+ positive now. Which means our county is no longer with accurate covid19 counts.
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Its a local goal that's been emphasized. Test as many cases as possible so that we get as accurate a picture as possible. I'm not sure if this is applicable to the rest of the country. But we really do strive for 5% positive around here, and its kinda bad that we're failing that now... and is highly indicative that we're undercounting cases severely.
I mean... 4-hour wait times, amirite? If you've got (maybe) COVID19, and the receptionist says "4-hour wait before your test", will you really sit there? Or will you go home and just take off of work for a few days?
Its a natural behavior, but that's the sort of thing that leads to dramatic undercounts of COVID19 during these times.
Right now the hospitalization number is already too high, and is putting massive strain on nurses. When Ventilators and ICU beds run out people die that normally wouldn’t.
It’s not so much mask hysteria as hysteria of a large number of people refusing to protect themselves or their communities from the virus or spreading it.
It would not be a problem if unvaccinated people simply agreed to not be treated by a hospital when they get covid. That will never happen. So wear a mask to slow the spread.
So enough with the fear mongering, if you're not high risk, go get Covid and be done with it.
Oh, and we're not refusing to protect ourselves. Our bodies already do that, it's called an immune system and when I caught Covid all the little immune workers showed up and took care of business. You don't need the vaccine unless you're high risk.
And another thing, before vaccines the hospitals and their staff were doing just fine without the vaccine, yet some were fired later for not taking it. It's insanity and it's profit and politically driven hysteria.
Masks keep us from spitting on eachother. They help.
Now, obviously the above is anecdata, but there’s a real chain of causality from the standpoint that if my friend had been vaccinated, this probably wouldn’t have happened. If the people within his immediate social circle were vaccinated, this might not have happened. If his community at large was vaccinated, not only would he be less likely to catch it, he would be less likely to end up in the hospital, and even in the hospital, he would have received more attentive care.
You can’t just hand wave away the societal impact of having a novel virus circulating through the community. And even if you want to shoulder the risk yourself, what about the impact your contribution to spread has on other people? Where’s your obligation to your community at large?
I met another person, friend of a friend, last week, who can barely speak above a whisper. She caught Covid (runner, vaccinated), and ended up with lung damage. It was two months before she could walk around without being winded. She did everything right, and still ended up severely harmed by Covid.
Now, one can turn around and say, “well, look, the vaccines were pointless!”, but obviously that’s ridiculous- it’s just the law of large numbers. The data clearly shows that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely to get sick, end up in the hospital , and die of Covid. If everyone around you is vaccinated, it’s less likely you’ll need to depend on the vaccine to make the odds work out in your favor.
There’s all kinds of aspects of life where we collectively decide to look out for each other for the benefit of all. It’s frankly shocking that so much death and pain is handwaved away as “getting old now”, and even more so that it’s political.
Edit: I realize there’s no changing anyones mind here, so I could have saved my breath. But I think it’s worth calling out that the arguments put forth in the parent post are just ridiculous, and if we applied the same logic to drunk driving, or smallpox, or personal property rights, people would think the argument was ludicrous.
My ex-wife knows two people who've died after taking the vaccine. One at the 2 week mark and the other the day after. She also knows a body builder, in excellent condition, who ended up on a ventilator from Covid. He was in that condition for months and has less than half of his lung capacity now. Those two would be alive if not pressured or forced to take the vaccine. And that is one category of people (dead from vaccine) that gets hand waived by the numbers, as if those people meant nothing. We all have stories...
I had Covid and recovered nicely at 51 years old, as did my ex-wife at 50. So there's another counter story. And I never said or advocated that vaccines are pointless. They absolutely work for the purposes of reducing severe illness and chance of death. I encourage people who think they're in a high risk category to get vaccinated, but not everyone needs it. But that's what's being pushed right now because if we can just vaccinate everyone, it will effectively go away. No, it won't. The vaccinated get Covid and spread it to one another because they don't get sick enough to stay home. I didn't have the energy to go any where. I had to get in bed and nap every two hours.
Why can't you show the data and allow everyone to make a choice? If you want to talk numbers, it's very rare that you'll end up on a ventilator or in the hospital from Covid. And don't talk to me about the collective good. People don't give a shit about me or you. I get one chance at life and I'm making choices for me, not for strangers. And I won't blame anyone else for doing the same thing.
My condolences to the loved ones of all who've died from Covid and the vaccine. I encourage all to make their choices without consideration of outside influence. It is your one life and you must do what you think is best. It's better to die free than live in collective chains.
Good luck and godspeed.
Likewise, I’m going to stop allowing minorities to live in my apartment building - I’m making choices for me, after all, not for strangers.
Let’s get rid of ALL vaccine mandates for the same reason, I’m sure you’d agree that we would be better off if everyone got to decide whether they got a measles shot or not (btw, measles deaths are on the rise for this exact reason). Maybe we shouldn’t have mandated polio vaccines?
I eagerly await the removal of consumer protection laws, because I can make the decision for myself about what is safe for me.
No more hand washing for restaurant staff - that’s an infringement on their personal choices. Ditto with food storage guidelines - refrigeration is expensive. Gotta do what I think is best
“Better to die free than live in collective chains.”
Ridiculous argument, and one that AGAIN if we made about basically any other societal rule that is for the collective good, we would be laughed out of the room. After 800k deaths in America alone, for sure, personal “freedom” stands above everyone else’s welfare.
Is that pro-mask hysteria or anti-mask hysteria?
The knee-jerk reaction to bad faith interaction (from all people) is "I don't know what, but not that." The knee-jerk response of the powers that be to mutiny is to exercise more power. The feedback worsens the situation.
If we would stop trying to manage rapidly-evolving situations with to-down legislation, returned individual freedoms, and all took a deep breath, I'm sure the populace (who certainly don't desire the death of their friends and loved ones) could find a reasoned solution that is at least as effective as what we have now.
I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that.
However, 1500 people in the UK die on an average day. Remember back in the days we were able to point to the number of excess deaths in the UK? 14 people dead in 2 weeks is very near the noise floor. Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.
Similarly, someone with well managed diabetes, do we write them off as having a comortality even though they may have lived for decades longer by all available indications.
It is likely that a significant percentage of people are dying with incidental Covid infections. Depending on how significant, that completely changes the dynamics.
As you can see from this[1] Freedom of Information (FOI) request, the ONS makes a distinction between "Involving COVID-19" and "Due to COVID-19".
> Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.
It's also interesting to see in that FOI answer the average age of death is higher than the average life expectancy in the UK. It might give an indication of whether people are being taken to meet their maker early.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
> Because of COVID or with COVID when they died?
I'm afraid this question is impossible to answer due to uncertainty but...
I - Outliers like immunodeficient and morbid obese could be excluded.
II - If you want to know the probability of someone dying due to having COVID you can use the Bayesian theorem to find it giving that you have (1) the incidence of people dying that have Covid (2) the incidence of any kind of death, (3) the incidence of Covid (lack of testing is an issue).