Two Years Is Long Enough
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
New people to work in hospitals isn’t enough because the amount of ones leaving are making the net effect zero. The disease and overwhelming numbers of people sick burned them out. Nothing that I can say is new.
Either we slow burn through this with restrictions while keeping a medium level of services available to society or burn fast while allowing many services to simply fail to deliver.
I for one would rather not visit a late night bar for months rather than worry about where I could get food to cook at home for weeks. If you didn’t experience the empty shelves due panic buying in the beginning of covid then I wouldn’t wish it on people. As a person who also needs regular medication I don’t want to think how many weeks worth of meds I need my local pharmacies have left if logistics chains would suffer from shockwaves of too many workers out sick at the same time.
So I don't think that what the Nordics attempted is applicable at current situation
In my opinion countries who reached 80% of vaccinated people should remove all the restrictions, but again, this is just my opinion, and I don't have any decisional power over it.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
The raw number of hospitalised is still high though due to the 10x increase in daily cases due to the new variant (delta was already doing a good job) and health centres and hospitals are filled to the brim with people who are feeling unwell enough that they use health care resources.
In my country there have been around 21k deaths from COVID (officially). 0.9% of those deaths were people that were between 0-49 years old. That’s ~200 deaths, in two years. The age group 0-49 represents 59% of the population in my country.
I wish we’d get some numbers that we can work towards, in terms of when we can open up society again. This is a very hopeless situation.
> I wish we’d get some numbers that we can work towards, in terms of when we can open up society again. This is a very hopeless situation.
I'll give you a number that is kind of pulled out of thin air, but it gets the point across: 95% fully boosted.
I mean, why would you worry about if others are unmasked when you already are vaccinated and wearing an N95 mask on top of that?
The psychological damage being done, in a society which doesn't have the tools to deal with it properly (and with this I mean pretty much the entirety of western society) is not even being taken into account. Quality of living for a good deal of society has gone to hell, I can't even take a walk in the park without a mask on (I happen to be Spanish). It's madness.
Public healthcare psychology is not even brought up by GPs anymore unless you risk suicide, and even then there is a waiting period of several months. Suicide attempts are at an all-time high and the amount of depression and anxiety backing it up can't be overstated.
I feel like we are pretending we solved the trolley problem all of a sudden.
https://twitter.com/kombatliberlism/status/14815700214909747...
I am astonished how many people prioritize the social/pub/restaurant/movie theater scene over the literal survival chances of millions of people. I guess I should stop being astonished and accept that people are driven primarily by their desires and self-interest. Cast them into the pit, I want a cheeseburger.
We all do. We have always done this. That's why drugs exist. That's why transportation exists. Life is not a "maximize your lifespan" game, it has never been.
Is it that we should be more aware of the long term deleterious effects of contracting a virus?
Because then I think we agree!
(Also, this doesn’t address the reality that we don’t know if long Covid is the same as with the flu. I just wanted to point out that even if we accept this premise, we would still se a decrease.)
We don’t know that COVID is any different—in absence of evidence it’s always best to assume the null case.
Omicron is already less deadly by 10x. Covid has a 0.5% death rate pre-omicron. With vaccinations it brings the death rate down to negligible.
At thus point I think we need to stop trying to protect everyone. Some people as going to die. It’s tragic. But we can’t keep locking down everyone.
I am currently going through Covid. I could die from it. I probably won’t. It’s an annoying cold at this point. We have to change policy to accept that for 99.99% of people omicron will be mild and will confer immunity. Some people will die like the flu. We have medication now that works. We have vaccinations that work. We have masks that work.
Let’s move on.
To put another way, if you are right (I haven't seen definitive numbers, other than hopes/preliminary findings that the variant seems to be less deadly), the Omicron variant is about half as deadly as the annual flu (about 0.1% IFR).
1. What was the total excess mortality during that period? In many countries, the official totals are significantly lower because they only include lab-verified cases or don't cover things like, say, someone dying of a heart condition they had been successfully managing before contracting COVID.
2. How many people would have died without safety measures being in place, especially people who would have been unable to get unrelated medical care they needed because the medical system is over capacity.
The second number is obviously fuzzy but it touches on the biggest factor for ending it in my opinion: vaccination rates. If you have a high percentage of the population vaccinated, you are still going to see spread but that shifts it closer to something like influenza where you might still want additional measures for some high-risk activities (e.g. indoor dining without good ventilation) but you're not looking at ICUs being flooded. The current vaccines appear to give something like an order of magnitude reduction in that risk so those are what I'd tie re-opening to those rates.
If you calculate this way, you’ll lump the damage done by lockdowns with the damage done by the disease and use it as an argument for more lockdowns.
You can’t simply compare place a to place b because there are no two places that differ in just that one aspect.
You can’t just conclude lockdowns have no downsides because an unquantified ‘very few’ places had ‘lengthy restrictions on seeking medical care’. If you state that you assume that is the only reason which simply is an unfounded assumption.
A very simple basic fact is that if you lock down sports facilities, which happened in a lot of places, people will get less fit and thus more susceptible to COVID with a bigger chance of dying. I don’t think there is anyone who would deny that. But if you lump all excess mortality together, the resulting deaths will be an argument for more lockdowns.
And guess what, if you presumably describing what your favorite ‘actual experts’ are saying is handwaving, the logical explanation is that the thing you are describing is handwaving. Which, if you can look critically at the ‘actual experts’ really is quite a fair description of most of what they do.
Pretending the problems with your “solution” don’t exist and dismissing them as speculation or similar basic, hollow invalid reasoning, that is handwaving.
Further, when it goes unchecked, the hospitals get overwhelmed, which has follow-on effects. People with preventable illnesses are affected by a lack of beds.
Anyhow, keeping that 3 year baseline helped me whether through it better mentally I think. Based on that, I'm still prepared for another year of this stuff. I also think of Smallpox, something everyone dealt with for at least 3000 years and had a 30% mortality rate and was more contagious than COVID. I'm glad it isn't that.
Because there’s currently like 2500+ national guard members deployed to hospitals in my state alone, all elective procedures are cancelled in the major hospitals of multiple states (anything that won’t literally kill you in 3 days is elective, even end stage cancer surgeries), other types of appointments are backed up for months, and quite frankly - for the appointments I and acquaintances have had - providers are burnt the fuck out from two years of this.
Like, seriously. When thousands of national guard members have to be routed to civilian hospitals to keep them running - I don’t think “science” is taking a loss. It said this was going to happen, all of you “it’s just the common cold” people made everybody rage against science and not care, and now nobody can get meaningful healthcare because the person the nurses & attendings are referring to as “the walking dead” just have to be kept alive & filling an ICU bed for 3+ weeks stuffed with a ventilator they’re never going to have removed until they’re dead.
I have a friend, perfectly healthy, who was forced into crashing on their bike during commute in order to not get wrecked by a car.
He fell & broke a few ribs & wrist, was not able to be seen for 28 hours in a major city. He’s still waiting on actual treatment (surgeries) & could/likely will have long lasting damaging from the delay.
Perhaps it’s over except for our entire healthcare system has completely collapsed in the sense that it’s genuinely non-functional, except for keeping wave after wave of people, who workers already know are not leaving the hospital alive, in a bed for a few weeks.
Perhaps I’m a bit angry, but I think it’s not at all considerate of your fellow citizens to say things like this - presuming you’re in the US, that is.
I really thought there was some good data that came out showing that the profits made from elective surgeries that the mid to large hospitals churn out absolutely dwarfs the profits made from COVID patients. I think there were a few of the massive hospitals where COVID patients $ was near breaking even… but it just doesn’t add up.
The summary was that by the end of this a good amount of hospitals will likely go under due to revenue lost from repeated cancellations of elective surgeries unless they get some form of bailout.
I guess we’ll see anyways.
Yes, this isn't in the discussion at all. Hospitals in the US do what's called stacking. Think about your calendar. Every room, every piece of equipment and every medical staff needs to have their calendar stacked with appointments, with no idle space if at all possible. They go so far as to overbook these items as well. If a resource has too much lax time, it's not used, not replenished or laid off (personnel). If a hospital doesn't have enough business to make the desirable amount of profit, it's closed.
Of course from a purely business perspective, it doesn't make sense to keep these things open, especially for a once in a century pandemic. Unfortunately the government hasn't done much (if anything) to ensure we have enough medical facilities even in good times, much less have them somewhat affordable. I was hoping the pandemic would show the cracks in our medical foundation, but for the most part they have been ignored, shifting the entirety of blame to the unvaccinated.
This article is about rural hospitals, but when you close a rural hospital, you overburden the nearest city hospital.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/why-rural-hosp...
[1]https://donnees.banquemondiale.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?...
Like, I actually do not get this idea of "oh ur fucked if you get hit by a car" because it should be obvious that 80 years old grandma whose anti-vax has a lower value to life than I, a boosted young person does.
We have to do value to life calculations all the time every day, even if it is unpleasant for us to say things like this outloud.
Patients mainly need oxygen, no need for full ICUs.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-coffee-and-covid-monday-ja...
Anyway I hope the whole thing won't be memoryholed and that a special tribunal will judge the people involved in stripping citizens rights (undue lockdowns and vaccine pass) and forcing a dangerous and ineffective product on the people. One can dream...
Correct. This is a rational stance, even if you disagree.
Over the decades, I've observed that US society starts to break down when there is a danger of an unknown origin or bounds. People become irrational and panic, resulting in all sorts of defensive behavior in the face of uncertainty (some of these rituals are helpful, some not). This is true at both the macro and micro level; eg fear of getting sued, fear of computers, fear of selling collectibles.
US society has an expectation of informed consent. Crossing the street has inherent dangers. Juggling chainsaws has inherent dangers. Skydiving has inherent dangers. If US society has been largely convinced that there is codified information that both sets relative-risk and laws regarding liability exist, activities are considered "normal life" with whatever inherent dangers are "known".
I would call this known state, a narrative, but it's more like the meta-narrative across all areas. There are constant changes to these qualities, over time and space, so this affects it; eg It used to be illegal for a vehicle to turn right on red in some areas of the US, without prohibitive signage. Is that still true? The meta-narrative says that laws between states are kooky and you might want to look it up. Spoiler: it's legal in all 50 states since 1980ish. edit: not in NYC, among other cities as tootie has pointed out.
For now the meta-narrative around COVID has stabilized to: We know it's a virus. We know it's communicable by air. We know the risk groups (or can look it up). We know the defensive protocols. et al.
> Personally I think the Omicron wave is still extremely serious and we need to wait a few more months.
This doesn't require a retooling of society, reaffirmation of doubting the science, or theorizing about potential worst case scenarios. A large portion of the US public is done with the handwringing and fearmongering. You can wait as long as you want. It won't change anything about the world you adopt as the new normal. Life is more dangerous than it was a few years decade ago because there's a new vector. There is no end, much like if you get cancer or lose a limb. Life is just harder now, for everyone for the foreseeable future.
When it comes to crossing the street, we accept an unreasonably high degree of risk even though we invest billions of dollars in enforcing extremely complex and rigid safety protocols that suck the life out of me on a daily basis yet they are "normal". And no one says the stop signs and seatbelts exist due to hand wringing and fear mongering. I'm still sitting her waiting for the bane of traffic mortality (and smog) to end, but I'm going to look both ways crossing the street until it does. People 100 years probably protested their heads off to keep cars off the road and it didn't work. The much milder Omicron variant is killing way more people than traffic. You'd be better off wearing a mask and jay walking than vice versa.
I certainly could have lived without the hand wringing and fear mongering over terrorism.
And incidentally, right on red is actually still illegal NYC.
Prior to 2020 the consensus was that these pandemics can be prolonged by measures that spread out the cases. Now we see that this is true.
> Disasters don't end when you get bored with them.
True, and they don't end after arbitrarily chosen time frames ("Gosh, I can only live with this for 2 years max!") and they don't align with political milestones and dates. This could be the early years of a 20-year-long pandemic. It could disappear in a few months. I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows at this point, and you can't give the disease an arbitrary deadline.
I read these threads and it's surreal--like people sitting outside of their burning house and saying "OK, my house has been burning for 2 hours. That's long enough for me, I'm moving back in! Time to get back to normal!"
I’m actively recovering from what appears to be Omicron. I cannot A/B test my experience as an unvaccinated person, but it feels like a light seasonal cold.
We don’t get time back. IMO I want my life and city back.
Omicron is less severe, but also more widespread, so the overall effect is as bad as delta and alpha.
Everyone else who is vaccinated is just getting sick, like a strong flu or cold.
GET VACCINATED. At this point, it's the only way this pandemic will end.
The things you learn on hacker news.
I took the overall effect to mean deaths. Based on CDC statements, it seems like they are finally trying to divide hospitalized “from” vs. “with”. I’d expect a more contagious variant to show up more in hospitals for people who have come for unrelated reasons.
Also there's been a lot of doctors and nurses that have left the profession this past year from burnout (and not enough people champing at the bit to take their place...for obvious reasons) so many places were short-staffed to begin with.
I want my life back NOW
I've had more than enough with 8 quarantines, and all of us already had COVID, we are vaccinated, and we are FED UP with rules and restrictions
It is pointless to be alive and well if you are not allowed to enjoy life
In the US about the only thing I'm aware of is vaccination mandates for certain jobs and activities and indoor masking in certain states. Otherwise you can do pretty much whatever you could before the pandemic. Indoor dining, bars, theaters, gyms, flights, cruises, sporting events, offices for work, whatever.
Unless, of course, the business is short staffed and has to close for a while, which is not a "rule and restriction" but a fact of life right now, which doesn't go away just because you or the government wills it to be so.
At the moment is the 2g+ regulation, which basically means the if you are twice vaccinated of recovered + 1 vaccine dose you need to do a test every 24h to have a social life.
Tests are free, but you have to queue outside and spend time to get them.
Tests are not needed if you "boosted", i.e. if you had a 3rd dose (or second if you had only one), or as in my case you also recovered despite having 2 doses.
Also there is a social craziness, where schools can close because there are cases, kindergartens also can close etc. and there are limits in the number of people can enter a venue, you have to book everything online, and there are very few places always fully booked... this de facto limits your life quite a lot.
All this despite the numbers are comparable with a seasonal flu
I think that's a key point and it really needs to be frankly communicated that way: vaccination mandates are what makes it safe enough to re-open safely. The U.S. has relatively low vaccination rates thanks to a well-funded political movement but as soon as there are personal consequences for those decisions most people do the right thing.
In other words, we can have a shorter, more miserable end to the pandemic, or we can have a longer one with less chaos. Am I missing something here?
The actual problem is that blue collar workers aren’t getting paid enough to risk getting Covid. So as much as you might want to go out and re-create a feeling of “normal”, that doesn’t work if people aren’t showing up to work because they’re sick.
The lockdowns let us blame the government, but individuals are making decisions about their own health and service levels suffer as a result. And in many cases, the risk of getting sick and permanently disabled (yes omicron still has long-term side effects) is not worth $10/hr. We still effectively have lockdowns with many stores and restaurants closed, they’re just driven by low customer traffic or worker call-outs.
Never mind that a lot of people’s buying habits have changed to purchasing more online and via delivery — it’s convenient enough I don’t think we’re ever going back. Same with remote work; city centers are never going to open back up the way they used to be if the wealthy parts of their workforce are working from home. Remote work is here to stay. It is the norm already and companies trying to force workers back are having extreme turnover issues.
Unless you’re planning to compel workers back to their jobs at the end of a gun, we’re probably not going back to the version normal we had in 2019 ever again. We’ll eventually hit another island of stability, but given the political situation and immediacy of climate change effects, we will probably be jumping from crisis to crisis for the rest of our lives. Get used to it.
But people have been getting sick as long as there have been people, and civilization was somehow able to deal with it until two years ago.
This is the first widespread pandemic in most of our lifetimes, but definitely not the first one. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was much worse and disruptive than this.
We could go back to what they did in 1347, during the Bubonic plague, and cover our bodies in a robe from head to toe and wear beaked masks stuffed with herbs, spices and straws to filter the air, and examine people using only a cane to keep their distance, like doctors did back then.
https://www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/whats-viral...
People will locally optimize in the absence of government intervention, which means lockdown-like conditions are inevitable as people simply stop going to work in large enough numbers they cannot be replaced.
/s if it's not apparent
Yeah, a lot of it has moved to delivery apps. Which represents a fundamental realignment of large segments of our economy. I personally believe this was always going to happen anyway, but the pandemic forced it so quickly a lot of people haven’t realized we’re never going back.
Maybe another version of OWS is coming, hopefully one that actually results in change and doesn't get co-opted by stupid identity politics this time around.
For better or worse, the way the laws in America are written, violence is the way we deal with problems. When someone who desires an outcome can use violent means to get you there, the second amendment ensures you have violent means to resist them.
I went to see Spider-Man at a 4pm matinee -the first movie I've seen in a theater since this all started and I was the only person in the theater wearing a mask.
And my state attorney general is going on tv saying he doesn't believe the statistics and the state legislature is says that teachers need to be impartial when teaching about nazis...
And people wonder why I'm such a misanthrope.
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https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-herd-immu... > "If you have 75%–80% of the people get vaccinated, you create an umbrella of herd immunity — that even though there is virus around, it is really almost inconsequential because it has no place to go, because almost all of the people are protected," Fauci says.
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I mean they're even now just distorting the term "immunity" to mean something new, but still pushing it in relation to vaccines:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220111/Third-dose-of-mRN...
They claimed milder symptoms, less complications, and less hospitalizations.
This really isn't true — actual experts never claimed that you would be 100% immune to everything forever. The vaccines performed as advertised against earlier strains and even with Omicron's substantially greater immune evasion compared to those earlier strains they're still quite effective at keeping people from having severe cases, which is exactly as the scientists described them — and that still seems to be better than natural immunity.
The end game here is vaccination: the U.S. has a low rate and that means that we're seeing the same medical system overload as before. Vaccination mandates are what will keep that from happening so that's what we should be focusing on as the metric for relaxing safety measures.
It seems a little late in the game to be banging the mandate drum.
[0] https://coloradosun.com/2022/01/12/colorado-covid-omicron-ho...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/for-covid...
> It seems a little late in the game to be banging the mandate drum.
I think it’s other way around: vaccines are what’s making it close to the end by reducing the severity of cases. Mandates avoid delays and reduce the collateral damage — once we get <5, that should be enough to keep the hospitals running smoothly.
If a mandate came out tomorrow in the US, and you got everyone their next shot that day, what do you think would happen?
It takes 2 weeks for the effectiveness to fully kick in, and I think I recall hearing that there may even be a potential little temporary dip in immunity directly after the shots. Omicron will likely have peaked in the States by then, and at best you end up with no better results. At worst you end up worse off because of the temporary dip (if that is a thing).
In any case, mandate + everyone jabbed tomorrow is beyond impossible anyway. Even if it was possible, there would be minimal benefit for a hefty cost (that I think a lot of people don't realize).
Let's do some napkin math for the US and see how this works out.
Assumptions (all from worldometer and ourworldindata):
"Most estimates have put the number of undetected cases at several multiples of detected cases".
Roughly 43 million confirmed cases recovered so 120m if we use the smallest multiple for "several".
330m total population.
74.5% with at least one dose (245m)
The set of people who are likely to have an immune system primed enough to stave off severe illness (all else equal, many will have preexisting conditions that make them at risk anyway) should be (#dosed + #recovered) - #(dosed AND recovered).
(#dosed + #recovered) is 365m (using 3x cases underestimate factor).
#(dosed AND recovered) has an upper bound of 120m if all recovered got dosed, and a lower bound of 35m (not 0 because the whole equation has to add up to total population).
So (if my math is right, no promises) the US has between 245m and 330m immune primed people today. If its anywhere near the 330m end of the spectrum today, it will be there in the next 2 weeks/30 days as the confirmed case counts go over a million per day (thats only counting confirmed cases).
The best case for mandates out of this: if we had the max of 85m seronaive and you could jab them all at gunpoint tomorrow, a huge chunk of those people will have gotten omicron before the shots take effect. You might prevent some hospitalizations before omicron burns itself out. Good luck ever getting these people to vote for you again.
In the minimum seronaive case, you prevent very few hospital visits, you create a bunch of adverse effects, you waste doses that could have gone to undeveloped countries, and you still really hamstring yourself in future elections.
Everyone's immune system is going to be primed anyway. The mandates are only an expensive footgun at this point.