Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures
brusselstimes.com
brusselstimes.com
(I'm no virologist but given that the common cold didn't seem to be impacted by the severe lockdowns in the UK at all, whereas flu was, I've gotten the - uneducated - feeling the cold is a bit like some STDs in the way it can linger around in people and pop up whenever the conditions are right. Maybe some COVID variant will end up similarly persistent and endemic?)
But again, not my area of expertise. Or even in the same ballpark.
That depends on who you ask. Different people have different hypotheses and concepts they explore.
There's a few different frameworks people are working within. From my experience, linking or forwarding to any "outside the box" ideas in this sphere will only invite more downvotes, argumentation over the details, and flamewars. Any linking of these ideas would be interpreted by some to be an endorsement of them. In my parent comment I made sure to mention that none of them were worthy of my endosement at this time, though I do find them interesting. Anyone reading this comment, buried deep in "hacker news" is capable of finding alternative ideas outside the norm. You can do your own research, if you like.
I mentioned them because the idea of people disagreeing on this was actually more foreign to me than "flat earth" which I find "pretty far out there", when I first stumbled upon it. It's very uncommonly discussed, and I don't have the clout to either endorse or properly antagonize these ideas. It's intriguing to me that something as preposterous as "the earth is flat" can be much more widely known and discussed than "maybe the way we frame viruses is incorrect".
First off, I am impressed by your credentials, very nice work, you should be proud.
But this segment in your about: box is oddly hilarious to me. Maybe I've just had too much champagne. Happy New Year, from a West Coaster posting at 12:05 AM.
>yt code channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlistlist=PLf5mA1y1vDNlydJ8d5CmSt...
>[censored by desine] dot [also censored] at the only useful google service
Really? Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't match the experience of myself and others that I know. Everyone I know was talking about how great it was that they hadn't had a cold for so long, during the lockdowns.
From this I made an uneducated extrapolation that the common cold pretty much stuck around somewhere and began to rapidly spread again as soon as people got out and about (I got one first week of schools going back in September, as per usual), whereas flu clearly did not.
Flu cases are tracked due to its severity. Cold cases are likely not often even paid attention to by many of those experiencing them.
Anecdotally, I and my friends and relatives hunkered down for COVID in 2020, and we had more cases turn out to be actually COVID-19 than common colds.
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-ebola-outbreak-l...
Until then unlikely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipah_virus_infection
Read that and be afraid.
virons = a complete virus particle that consists of an RNA or DNA core with a protein coat sometimes with external envelopes and that is the extracellular infectious form of a virus.
For me, the intrigue centers on my personal realization that I pretty much never think about individual pieces. And that is what this word is all about.
It's everything needed for Covid to happen, no less, no more.
Apparently PCR tests and antigen tests differ in this regard, but RIP to our insurance providers paying for millions of redundant tests
In this case a medical dictionary might help. For reference here’s what the Merriam Webster Medical Dictionary says:
To discharge usually gradually from the body (e.g. exposed persons may shed virus from the oropharynx)
There's nothing "peaceful" about pneumonia. It's a very frightening strangling feeling. The only thing "peaceful" about it is that you don't have the energy express the horror.
> The term is attributed to William Osler, who in the first edition of his book The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) wrote:
> In children and in healthy adults the outlook is good. In the debilitated, in drunkards and in the aged the chances are against recovery. So fatal is it in the latter class [i.e. the elderly] that it has been termed the natural end of the old man.
https://pneumonia.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41479-...
I do a lot of scuba diving. There are many anecdotal reports of divers who briefly experience cold / flu symptoms after failing to decompress correctly. The popular hypothesis is that tiny bubbles in the bloodstream trigger an inflammatory immune response, but who knows?
There is a well known research paper from years ago showing that both exposure to cold temperatures and exposure to cold virus could cause cold symptoms, if I recollect right 30% probability when subjects were intentionally exposed to virus, 10% when exposed to cold temperatures. I don't recall the control group results.
This is consistent with covid appearing as an outbreak out of nowhere.
If COVID-19 were to evolve to become milder, it could become a fifth coronavirus that causes the common cold.
Maybe some sinus washes would help.
Then we learned that viruses cannot spread like that, and so that old theory is basically invalid.
But some time ago I read somewhere that this theory might still hold true somehow, because our nose stores all kinds of viruses, and they might burst out when we are weakened.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable about this might chime in here ;).
For making fire, there is the rule of three, the triangle, and you need all sides to keep combustion going:
- Heat
- Fuel
- Oxygen
knock one out and it falters.
We should describe infections the same way. Needed for infection:
- Virus/pathogen
- Outer defenses penetration (skin/mucous membranes)
- Immune system defeat
Seeing it that way, it doesn't have to be so mysterious. Some viruses are dormant or almost omnipresent. The infection may be triggered by other conditions changing, including factors that affect your immune system status or efficiency of your outer protections!
1) The atmosphere is in an unusual state (lots of fast moving water droplets, probably with a lot of backscatter as they hit the ground fast or bounce off leaves). Maybe bacteria use that as a travel mechanism.
2) Maybe an immune system defence is weakened by high humidity.
3) Maybe wet weather causes changes in behaviour unrelated to being wet, but that lead to higher disease transmission and the correlation is being misintepreted.
4) Maybe the bacteria really like rain and multiply like crazy when it is wet.
5) Maybe some people have an unrelated non-infectious illnesses that are triggered by the cold, damp weather and that is being misinterpreted as a cold.
6) Maybe grandmothers just say that because it seems like good advice and they don't like water being traipsed through the house.
There are enough different options there that any correlation is not actionable. Leaving aside whether any correlation even exists.
Wikipedia (I don't link cause unpretty images):
"Worldwide rates of either HSV-1 or HSV-2 are between 60% and 95% in adults. HSV-1 is usually acquired during childhood. Rates of both increase as people age."
"Following a primary infection, the virus enters the nerves at the site of primary infection, migrates to the cell body of the neuron, and becomes latent in the ganglion"
"The causes of reactivation are uncertain, but several potential triggers have been documented. A 2009 study showed the protein VP16 plays a key role in reactivation of the dormant virus. Changes in the immune system during menstruation may play a role in HSV-1 reactivation. Concurrent infections, such as viral upper respiratory tract infection or other febrile diseases, can cause outbreaks. Reactivation due to other infections is the likely source of the historic terms 'cold sore' and 'fever blister'. Other identified triggers include local injury to the face, lips, eyes, or mouth; trauma; surgery; radiotherapy; and exposure to wind, ultraviolet light, or sunlight."
(Note how even your wording of the grandma theory is surprisingly in line with infection principles: the wet hair makes you "catch" a cold, from someone else, not directly causing the cold)
I also feel like lockdowns are a red herring in discussions like this. People not being locked down by force of law doesn't mean that a huge amount of people are minimizing their contact with other people.
Critical part of the conclusion for those not wanting to skim the article:
> Virus might have persisted in the respiratory tract of one or more men at the Base. If such were the case it would be necessary to postulate a triggering mechanism to precipitate symptoms, and it is interesting to note that symptoms occurred 4 days after a precipitous fall in outside temperature, and during one of the coldest months of the year, which Hope-Simpson (1958) and Lidwell, Morgan & Williams (1965) have correlated with increased incidence of respiratory disease. There is disagreement about whether the viruses which cause common colds can be carried by adults, and how important this is in epidemiology. The pattern of virus infection revealed by long-term studies, such as the virus watch programme (Elveback et al. 1966), is of a series of short infections with different viruses, and in the case of influenza virus disappearance of the current strain when a new serotype appears. On the other hand, adenoviruses may be shed by children for periods of months and recove"ed from the tonsils in a high proportion of cases, without evidence of acute respiratory infection, and non-respiratory viruses such as those of the herpes group often persist for the lifetime of a man. Furthermore, observations in animals have shown that pigs can carry swine influenza and transmit infection to other pigs 3 months later (Blaskovic et al. 1970), turkeys may carry and shed influenza virus A after apparent recovery (Robinson, Easterday & Tumova, 1972), and cattle which have recovered from foot and mouth disease still reproduce virus in the pharynx, and can initiate epidemics on contact with non-immune cattle (Graves et al. 1971).
> There are thus precedents in both children and animals for persistence of respiratory viruses, but in adults the laboratory evidence for carriage and reactivation of common cold viruses is weak. It may be that such evidence can only be found in rather unusual conditions of isolation and stress, such as occur in Antarctica. It is likely to be a rare phenomenon, but it might well be important in explaining the persistence of the large number of rhinovirus serotypes which make an appearance in many areas when the temperature falls.
To me, that sounds like lots of testing, not strict health measures. There is a difference.
Just spitballing here but to me strict health measures would be something like:
1. Here is the antiviral prophylactic we expect you to take starting X days before you depart and continuing until X days after you arrive.
2. Here is the shower at the entrance to the base that you must use before entering the base proper.
3. Here are the OTC meds or other protocols we expect to keep coughs and such under control in common areas if you are having any issues.
4. Here are your instructions for how to do lung clearance in the shower to minimize coughing and such in common areas.
I'm sure I could come up with more if I really needed to. This is just off the cuff for the sake of conversation with an internet stranger, so not much effort or thought has gone into it.
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/otc-meds
Seriously those are almost all bad or pointless suggestions reflecting a lack of relevant medical knowledge.
I have, in fact, used peroxide to wash my sinuses. The result was that, in addition to being tortured, my sinuses were stripped of mucus and I was now defenseless and more vulnerable to infection. It took a while for my sinuses to heal.
Medically recommended sinus washes are generally based on some kind of salt solution. I've tried at least three different variations over the years. Gentler is better because it is less of an assault on the body.
A xylitol-saline solution was the gentlest and most effective. Xylitol is a simple sugar known to kill infection. That worked far better for me than standard saline, strong saline or saline with alcohol added and it wasn't torture like the others.
I would strongly recommend against using peroxide on your nasal passages.
This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I'm just a factory reject with defective genes who has put lots of stuff up my nose over the years, sometimes out of desperation. So I have, in fact, put peroxide up my nose and my personal opinion is that it's a really bad thing to do as it hurts like a bitch and also leaves you defenseless.
Oh wait, that does not help against catching and transmitting the virus.
I don't think I've seen anyone with any reputation make any claim about "zero covid".
https://www.asoc.org/advocacy/antarctic-governance/overview-...
Which is to say, most of the people who cared enough to sign the treaty already had existing claims they didn't want repudiated by the treaty (which is why Article IV, in its entirety, also says basically "this doesn't affect any existing claims").
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Antarctic_Expedition
The book "Madhouse at the End of the Earth" by Julian Sancton is a great read for this story of the first humans to spend a sun-less winter in Antarctica.
Stay safe & HN(Y) everyone.I don't think it will soon be over, because this "pandemic"[it's actually more like an endemic disease but whatever] has stopped being about health since half into 2020, and politicians & people in any power don't have any incentives and reasons to let the power go.Especially not until the 1984 measures are all put in place.
This is clear evidence that the current paradigm for dealing with the pandemic is ineffective at best.
Whether or not that's "realistic" is another question. It really depends on what's at stake, which is not clear yet. But the point is that governments around the world may face a very similar question in the weeks ahead.
No vaccine passbooks or apps.
Return jobs to employees lost because of vaccine compliance/rebuild small businesses (If this is somehow possible but the damage is already done).
No mask requirements.
Covid-19 Vaccines are available and treated in the same way as flu vaccines once FDA approved.
Yknow, normal.
In the US, omnicron is going fast. Hopefully, and I say this with week old information in a huge information-differential environment that evolves hourly, omnicron itself is a step towards mitigation.
I don't think it's clear evidence of this, but you could definitely say it's not 100% effective. Whether it is useful is not something that you cannot determine from this story alone.
Time will tell if the policies in place will deal with Omicron, though.
The article claims that covid is in all Antarctic bases, but I wasn’t aware that Scott base had any. I can’t find any reports of it either.
Edit: Their report from August had it covid free. https://www.antarcticanz.govt.nz/media/news/antarctica-new-z...
The ISS has remained covid free. Kiribati has too. Tonga had one person arrive with covid but it didn’t progress.
I always thought the whole prevention thing is because we want to “flatten the curve”, remember? Not to prevent every single infection, which is impossible.
If you're on an Antarctic base where medical facilities are meager and the time and cost for evacuation is high, zero infections is likely the goal.
As an extreme example, the US grounded an astronaut for being exposed, not infected, by measles:
Medical evacuations are tricky, especially in the winter, and the logic is that the (single) doctor could remove someone else's appendix, but it would much harder for them to remove their own. Leonid Rogozov did remove his own in the 1960s, but I think most stations would prefer to avoid a repeat of that.
It did make for a fascinating BMJ Christmas Article though, written by his son: https://web.archive.org/web/20100925041337/http://www.bmj.co...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10349531/China-Covi...
If I understand correctly, you can mathematically model how effective countermeasures have to be in order to suppress a virus with a given R0. Given that the measles vaccine is 93% effective and sufficient to suppress one of the most infectious diseases we’ve ever seen (R0 of 12-18), I think 99.9% would be in the overkill category.
> The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.
Prevention of Measles, Rubella, Congenital Rubella Syndrome, and Mumps, 2013 Summary Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24832555
> One dose of measles-containing vaccine administered at age ≥12 months was approximately 94% effective in preventing measles (range: 39%–98%) in studies conducted in the WHO Region of the Americas (141,142). Measles outbreaks among populations that have received 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine are uncommon. The effectiveness of 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine was ≥99% in two studies conducted in the United States and 67%, 85%–≥94%, and 100% in three studies in Canada (142–146). The range in 2-dose vaccine effectiveness in the Canadian studies can be attributed to extremely small numbers (i.e., in the study with a 2-dose vaccine effectiveness of 67%, one 2-dose vaccinated person with measles and one unvaccinated person with measles were reported [145]). This range of effectiveness also can be attributed to age at vaccination (i.e., the 85% vaccine effectiveness represented children vaccinated at age 12 months, whereas the ≥94% vaccine effectiveness represented children vaccinated at age ≥15 months [146]). Furthermore, two studies found the incremental effectiveness of 2 doses was 89% and 94%, compared with 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine (145,147). Similar estimates of vaccine effectiveness have been reported from Australia and Europe (Table 1) (141).
No mention of vitamin C. Given that "After exposure, up to 90% of susceptible persons develop measles", it seems very unlikely that differences in vitamin C play an important role.
What are your sources? I found nothing on PubMed nor Google Scholar, though I did find that vitamin C is promoted to antivaxxers (eg, http://www.amcli.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bmj-measles-f... ).
You write "depend strongly on nutrition deficiencies", which my cited article describes as "In low to middle income countries where malnutrition is common, measles is often more severe and the case-fatality ratio can be as high as 25%".
That's calorie deficient, but not specifically vitamin deficient.
Child mortality due to measles is 200 to 400 times greater in malnourished children in less developed countries than those in developed ones. In addition, measles brings about consumption of nutrients in marginally nourished children, so they will also do worse if not supplemented during infection.
That is, it's easy to find scholarly papers published by doctors which don't add the "about" like:
"Measles vaccine is highly effective, with 1 dose being 93% effective and 2 doses being 97% effective at preventing measles." from "Measles Outbreak — Minnesota April–May 2017" by authors from the Minnesota Department of Health, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5687591/
"Based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, one dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against MeV, 78% effective against mumps virus (MuV), and 97% effective against rubella." by authors from The Ohio State University at https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/12/e2026153118.full.pd... .
Yes, I already mentioned malnutrition as a known factor.
I asked for substantiation of your statement "insufficient vitamin C being especially bad."
You cited reference doesn't even mention vitamin C.
And given that precise numbers like 93% is meaningless. One should either give the range or at least describe the population.
And it turned out 93% was not coming from the study in https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/12/e2026153118.full.pd..., they just reference https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5863094/ , but that nowhere mention the number 93% and it’s abstract give much more sensible data:
Delivery of the two doses of vaccine needed to achieve >90% immunity is accomplished by routine immunization of infants at 9–15 months of age followed by a second dose delivered before school entry or by periodic mass vaccination campaigns. B
I don't.
So describing the difference between "93%" and "about 93%" as 'much more sensible', in this context, seems excessively nitpicky.
Even more so given that you got the wrong vitamin and it took you a couple of tries until you got the right citation.
And note how much better the claim from the original article sounds: the efficiency of at least 90%. Which tells that even if one follow a reasonable lifestyle that minimizes chances of getting the infection (or at least feed infants in a reasonable way as we are talking about <2 years old), then still the vaccine reduces the chance of infection by a factor of 10.
And yes, it was stupid for me to rely on the memory when claiming about particular vitamin.
I’m sorry, that’s absurd. You will always be picking pedantic fights with people if you expect everyone everywhere to meet the standards of peer reviewed medicine.
From the outside picking a fight over the difference between “93%” and “about 93%” on a technology board is pedantic to the point of being suspicious.
We can be observant and suspicious about the healthcare industry while also admitting that there is science being done. They manufacture vitamin C supplements, too. They make money whether you buy the regulated stuff or the unregulated stuff.
How do you even deal with this? I can have more rational discussions with fundamental Christians.
That said, omicron is apparently insanely infectious, so it could have been something as simple as a member of the ground crew being inside the plane for a bit to stock or check something.
That they focused on the person action (quarantines, tests) and not the environment (transfer shuttles, testing rooms, bathrooms and dressing rooms) kids hints the latter as a source. After all, you drop your mask during testing, and I've seen places doing it in a small, unventilated room with no pause between each person.
But many mainstream trusted sources have been carrying out misinformation/divertion campaigns by focusing prevention on hand hygiene and vaccination, instead of explaining the actual mechanism of transmission. So unless they're curious and proactive about searching for neutral information (which is orthogonal to intelligence), many people by default believe transmission happens by touching surfaces, or cannot happen when one has taken vaccines, for instance.
(And maybe not even that. There could have been an infection between the tests “when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica” and actual departure)
Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.
Another point is that there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2. We've known this since well before the zero-covid debacle, making such a plan was doomed to fail, as it did. It's likely that the virus can live in intestinal tracts of animals, including humans, for long periods without being detected and destroyed by the host's immune system. This makes the use of negative nose/throat swab tests as a guarantee of no subsequent infection a fallacy.
The way we deal with COVID is to stop testing asymptomatic people and use the plethora of effective early treatment protocols we've developed since as early as December 2019 to vastly reduce the need for hospital treatment in those that do develop symptoms.
They are also exceptionally reliable. The home test kit I used had a sub-1% false negative rate.
No, they really don't. Swabbing for RNA picks up gene fragments that may or may not be from infectious virus -- it's why we see positive tests for months after infection in some people.
Swabbing for viral protein is debatably more likely to detect the thing of interest (the virus itself, in some semblance of functioning order), but these tests also have a high false-negative rate (around 10% for the better tests I've seen; I have never heard of a test with a sub-percent FN rate, as you claim). You can be shedding live virus and these tests won't pick it up, either because you're not shedding enough, or because the antibodies in the test don't bind to the protein in your sample for whatever reason.
Either way, you're measuring a proxy for what you really care about. A true test of infection involves taking a sample and incubating in cell culture. Nobody does this, except to validate the original tests and provide clear positive and negative samples. It's slow and orders of magnitude more expensive than even PCR testing. But this is the direct test for infectious virus. Everything else is an approximation.
(Let me be clear, though: I wholeheartedly support the use of antigen tests -- even ones with low sensitivity -- over the insanity we're doing now in the US. It's just bad to misrepresent what they're actually doing.)
However, I’m not sure the value in antigen testing? Sure, when you’re traveling or have to into a higher risk situation.
But Singapore decided to freely give out antigen tests and what happened was people who tested positive showed up at the ER. And the antigen tests weren’t reliable, so PCR had to confirm. And they have a high vaccination rate so after all that testing the answer was “go home and if you get really sick, come back”.
It finally dawned on them that could just be the message anyways - if you don’t feel bad, don’t worry. If you do, you can test but don’t seek medical care unless you have severe symptoms.
That said, your point is well-taken that people can be idiots about testing positive. We do need to get over this fear and accept that the virus is endemic, and that vaccines work to prevent serious illness. We're now talking about miniscule risks that we would have rightfully shrugged off in any previous year, but folks have been terrorized, and they're desperately looking for control. Any tool that can calm that fear is a good tool.
On the "shedding" point, not necessarily. The virus can be present in but contained by the immune response from the mucosae of the upper respiratory tract in such a way that it is unable to spread into the lungs and cause COVID-19, yet not shed in large enough quantities to infect others. Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing. Such a situation would set off a PCR or rapid test but not present a meaningful COVID-19 infection risk to the others. (In fact, one hypothesis for why positive cases rise soon after vaccination and booster campaigns start is because of the well understood phenomenon of reduced immune response for a short time after vaccination, giving such virus already present in the upper respiratory tract at time of vaccination the edge it needs to get into the lungs.)
And the cycle thresholds on PCR tests are often set nonsensically high making them sensitive to quantities of virus and viral debris far lower than the quantity required to meaningfully infect either the host or someone else via shedding. They can also trigger positive on not just virus but viral debris for months after recovery from COVID-19 infection. (A test can be too sensitive, especially when used as the only evidence to force someone and their contacts to isolate and in some cases not earn an income for weeks.)
> It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.
I agree, but I'm not sure if the Belgian authorities, who seem to use PCR positives as a COVID-19 diagnosis, and PCR negatives as a guarantee of safety from infection risk to others, would. The article does what most articles these days do, conflating presence of SARS-CoV-2 debris on a swab with COVID-19 disease diagnosis. It incorrectly claims 2/3rds of the 25 staff have COVID-19, when given that none seem to have symptoms of the disease it's likely a case of oversensitive tests. Let's not also forget that these tests are mostly (at least all the ones I've seen) called COVID-19 tests.
Ah ok, so that might explain why there's a significant number of people who say that they had covid without difficulty, at least of they didn't test false positive.
Thanks for explaining the nuance - I've heard a lot of this before but it's refreshing how succinctly you captured it.
I completely disagree with your statement. The goals of the current paradigm of dealing with the pandemic is to minimize the strain on various processes from a public health perspective. Anything moving the needle is effective. That's why guidelines are like 'gatherings of 20 people or more'. It's to minimize spread, not completely obliterate it.
Comparing this incident with public health directives is disingenuous at best. It's the exact same line of thinking about masks. Oh, masks aren't 100% effective in preventing infection. Therefore, they're useless so nobody should wear them, ever.
We've also sent some people to the IIS and they didn't test positive. What does that say about the current paradigm?
What can go wrong?
Edit: I missed the 10 day quarantine in South Africa. So it is not so bad.
But of course, there could have been more quarantining.
The word choice foe describing covid over these years (!) is quite exaggerated.
If you read the article, where is the suffering?
It’s torture to take an already isolated group and isolate them with “strict measures” which apparently do nothing to stop infection.
Im sure when are fighting the 200th variant whose symptoms are a day of fatigue we will almost be ready to end the restrictions.
And just for the record, im 2x vaccinated, not an antivaxxer or denier or something.
The decision to terminate unvaccinated individuals reeks of bureaucracy, not an understanding of science or medicine.
There’s a long history of this type of sanction. If you are a provider or nurse in a hospital who fails to get a measles, hepatitis, or rabies (after exposure) shot, you’ll be terminated for cause in many places.
The reason why recovery doesn’t “count” the same as vaccination is that immunity doesn’t last very long - 60-90 days typically. Some countries, such as Israel will recognize a single Pfizer dose and recovery as immune, if you have a negative PCR test.
In a vacuum, that makes sense. But in the midst of genuine shortage of healthcare professionals, it's myopic foolishness. And I'd guess your comment about the lasting effect of actual recovery is going to turn out to be very wrong and already contradicts most everything I've seen recently regarding the immune response to reinfection after Covid recovery.
edit: Here are a few links that contradict your statement that immunity doesn't last very long:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
https://www.futurity.org/covid-19-survivors-immunity-viruses...
Because you have a better understanding of this than they do?
That seems like a strange position to take.
I would take a different position, like "what do these highly qualified health care workers understand that I don't?"
>I would take a different position, like "what do these highly qualified health care workers understand that I don't?"
Examples?
Even though over 99% of practicing doctors and something like 99.9% of hospitalists are vaccinated, they hold up that 1/1,000 as some sort of “truthsayer”.
If 999 experts in a field told you they trusted something and 1/1,000 said they didn’t —- you’d have to be an absolute fool to blindly follow the 1 and I'm a bit surprised how common this argument is on HN.
So, that's more than one.
I’m all ears. On the face of it, getting vaccinated is a no brainer. I’d love to hear a medical reason for healthy individuals not to get vaccinated.
So far I’ve only heard arguments about vaccine mandates infringing on peoples rights, even though they never batted an eyelid at other vaccines. Why is this one a problem?
So far looking at the death rates, cases of severe illness, vaccination is the way to go. So I’d love to hear a compelling argument why you’d avoid it.
(Aside: it is worth noting that vaccination also induces "natural immunity", as it introduces viral units [via various mechanisms depending on specific vaccine type] that cause the immune system to work more or less the same way as it would if presented with a regular viral infection. So using the term "natural immunity" when what you really mean is "prior infection" smacks quite heavily of chemophobia.)
I think that the vast majority of doctors that have taken the vaccine to protect themselves are probably smarter than the tiny minority that have refused, yes.
Initially, those folks are “super immune”, but it fades much quicker than expected last summer. Around November data started indicating that those individuals were much more likely (10x iirc) to contract COVID than a person fully vaccinated in the same timeframe.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Note that this is not like not hiring someone who likes to go mountain biking and therefore are more likely to hurt themselves and not work. Hobbies like that have real benefits. Vaccine denial not.
EDIT: Sorry that might have come off a bit blunt. But the entire pandemic response has been frustratingly insufficient in my opinion. A variant like Omicron was long predicted and expected. How are we not prepared with a plan to end lockdowns?
And blaming unvaccinated or anti-maskers is not a good answer. Modeling of acceptance should’ve been done. It’s not like these contrarian sentiments were surprising either.
All together it feels like this response to omicron is a public health failure.
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/uk-lacks-nursing-staff-to-...
* Spend tens of billions training new medical staff so you can save hundreds of billions / trillions on not having to lock people down
* Stop admitting COVID patients at government subsidized hospitals when there is a shortage of hospital beds, with the exception of essential and frontline workers, so that hundreds of millions of people don't need to be locked down
* Make those who are not vaccinated, or do not have recent booster shots, ineligible for care for COVID at government subsidized hospitals, when there is a shortage of hospital beds, so that hundreds of millions of people don't need to be locked down
But the go-to solution seems to be: massively violate the civil and economic liberties of the entire population, to prevent COVID surges from causing a shortage of hospital beds.
So we got what we wanted, the best nurses are making $300/hr in COVID hotspots and leaving new grads and understaffed facilities in their wake.
CDC is taking cues from places like South Africa and Israel now. It’s pathetic.
How would socialized medicine help in this specific case? More power to the government? The government already has plenty of power to influence outcomes through spending. However, that power has been applied poorly.
We need mass repeal of old government regulations and the appointing of technocrats (as in people concerned with low level details of regulations). Additionally we need new highly adversarial independent regulatory bodies to prevent capitalistic interests from causing market collapse.
The current agencies are too in bed with industry, and it’s not beneficial to the public.
Giving more power to the current government systems which rolled out this poor response seems like the wrong answer.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
Aren't 99% of unmatched, graduates of sketchy overseas medical schools?
https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/match/if-you-re-...
As for overseas medical schools, the National Committee on Foreign Medical Education and Accreditation is supposed to ensure they meet the same standards as domestic schools. I haven't seen any real evidence that they're sketchy.
We don't have lockdowns, and haven't had lockdowns in America
> And blaming unvaccinated or anti-maskers is not a good answer
Blaming the unvaccinated, who comprise the overwhelming majority of those that get hospitalized, spread it and die, is a good answer. I think a lot of this is solved by deprioritizing them at triage time or letting them recuperate at home.
Due to EMTALA, hospitals in the US are required to treat unstable patients regardless of vaccination status. Changing that would require an Act of Congress. Also note that there is no 100% reliable way for hospitals to determine a particular patient's vaccination status; the registries have some data quality and record linkage problems.
Poor leadership only plans for things going how they want.
As far as lockdowns are concerned, we have had the mass shutdown of in person school and work, as well as the forced closure of many restaurants and entertainment venues.
I was using the shorthand.
That is correct, and that's why they proposed the OSHA rule for mandating vaccinations after months of incentives. I think some % of non-compliance is understandable, but the remaining unvaccinated seem to be doing it for political reasons over anything else.
> As far as lockdowns are concerned, we have had the mass shutdown of in person school and work, as well as the forced closure of many restaurants and entertainment venues.
Right, we had those last year. Not since, in America at least.
We barely ever had anything approximating lockdowns and they ended long ago. We don't generally make plans to do things after they are already done.
Nursing is hard and takes years of training, but 2 years would have been long enough to teach people how to manage the average case of 1 disease.
There have been a lot of people sitting around doing not much, they could probably use the work.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
1) total hospital admissions (not just those with covid but those without) and how that compares to a normal winter. If 4% of the country test positive for covid at the moment and 4% of hospital admissions have covid, that’s to be expected for example
2) age of those being admitted compared with covid by age
4) vaccination of those being admitted
There’s a chance that the Hugh number of cases is in those who are young and vaccinated and less likely to need hospitalisation, and we’ll soon reach peak transmission and cases will drop come January without it overwhelming hospitals.
There’s also a chance that it will spread to more vulnerable people, especially once school returns next week and grandparents start babysitting again, and hospitalisations will shoot up about 3rd/4th week in January as it spreads throughout the over 60s.
It’s not just a matter of dividing infections by hospitalisations a week later, getting a number, and plugging it in to calculate capacity. Not is it a matter of comparing those going into hospital with covid with last year, as more cases means fewer people going in without covid.
Surely that shouldn’t dictate whether you’re allowed to express your thoughts on a subject or the factual accuracy of your statements.
So at a minimum, dismiss me if you want, but not because I'm in the evil other camp, because I'm not.
That’s just a convenient fallacy to dismiss criticism.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/current-covid-patients-ho...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Your faith in the government acting benevolently is surprising. There is the phrase "never let a good crisis go to waste"
There were 60,000 US fatalities of people younger than 50 (1 Vietnam War's worth of US casualties, or, if you prefer, 15,000 Benghazis).
Yes, for many of the dead, you can retroactively point to "health issues", but those are _extremely_ common, even among people who generally don't consider themselves "chronically ill" at all. And some of the "health issues" might come down to having a bad set of certain genes that up to now have never caused any significant issues.
Finally, there are other Covid consequences than death. I personally know several people (some of them perfectly healthy people in their early 20s) dealing with fatigue/loss of taste for a year (and counting). Personally, I'm fairly confident that the risk of severe outcomes of an acute COVID-19 infection are minuscule for me, thanks to vaccination (So that's a vast improvement over a year ago), but the risks of chronic complications are not as well managed with vaccines, are not particularly closely correlated with severity of the acute infection, and are, as of yet, practically unknown for the omicron variant.
Even at 0.1% over 7b population that's still a couple million body bags so measures even if only partially effective at preventing transmission are still worthwhile
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
False: https://khn.org/news/article/fact-check-cdc-pcr-covid-test-d...
And the page says nothing about the now-withdrawn test being unable to differentiate between Covid and Influenza (which is not true). It encourages the development of tests that test for BOTH (since the patient is being tested anyway), but points out that those results must be reported separately.
The cynical take would be that that would mean they can order quarantines for the flu as well, of course.