US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?
I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.
2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic.
3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity.
4. There is now a large portion of the population that has natural immunity.
5. It should be abundantly clear that case counts is no longer a meaningful metric.
6. Covid is a disease that has markedly different effects based upon the host’s age, medical condition, etc. There is no equivalent level of risk.
7. Most of the population, think working class and kids, cannot sustain continued lockdown conditions without serious mental/economic effects. They don’t have the privilege of the laptop class to just dial in from an office.
8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions.
Re hospital capacity, Hospitals run close to their limit. I have been in and out of the medical system my whole life and can assure that delays, cancellations, etc are nothing new. Is there strain during the new waves? Of course. But these are waves and they will come and pass. As well perhaps firing unvaccinated nurses wasn’t a good idea? People can choose to isolate during the waves if they want, but if they feel they feel like they have no need to (vaccine immunity, natural immunity). And as a father of small children, I cannot in good conscience continue to deny them a childhood for a virus that they themselves have extremely little risk of. The human brain is only developing during its childhood years once.
Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy.
As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday.
We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions.
She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.)
Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations.
There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK.
TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.
China has done it for pre-omicron variants, so it is possible. You and I are not willing to accept the restrictions necessary to do it and that's fine, but you cannot say it is impossible.
In January of 2020, a Chinese born coworker of mine who is now a citizen had her father die in Beijing. Every symptom of how he died was obviously COVID, but the authorities officially classified his death as cardiac arrest. She was enraged by this but that was the common thread in Beijing.
Sure. It's an anecdote but it's not like you can get any real data about this. Who is going to collect it when the entire nation state is turned against you?
It's interesting to watch how this thread changed once people on the West Coast woke up. The branch covidians are in full force.
I used to do work for the Democratic party many years ago. It was sort of a given back in 2014 that we were going to get the vast majority of Latino votes going into the future. These unsustainable policies have caused Latinos to shift dramatically away from the Democratic party. It is politically unsustainable and destructive. It is politically, unsustainable and destructive.
Regarding the unvaccinated nurses getting fired, should be noted that virtually all of them had natural immunity. My sister-in-law is one of these who did not want to get vaccinated because she had already contracted the virus and had attended several patients suffering from adverse events as well as friends who had their menstrual cycles disrupted. There was no scientific harm from this decision because her natural immunity was more protective than the vaccine based on multiple studies, including a CDC study that was just released last week.
Your comment on being a father is also 100% correct. People seem to think that children's brains continue to develop at the same rate between the ages of five and eight as they do between the ages of 3 and 5. That's just not how it works. You have these tiny windows of time where the brain is going through rapid development and you can't make up for these windows in a later time period.
History will likely not be kind to the policies against children that were pursued to protect unionized teachers and elderly people who will long be dead when the repercussions of this horrible policy towards children are fully felt. But perhaps I have too much faith in the people writing the history to be honest, considering that the laptop class are the most powerful and the most paranoid and frightened.
How do you know that? My question, really, is how do you know what you know and are not being misled? (A la WMD to use an easy, universally understood, example?)
“2000 people are still dying every day,”
No, they’re not. According to the CDC (why do I trust them?) its currently 500/day [1]. It hasn't been > 2000 since September in the midst of the Delta spike. But even before I looked at the CDC I doubted your claim because:
- The vast majority of adult Americans are vaccinated. (>70%?). Its far greater in the vulnerable population.
- Of the unvaxxed, a great number of them are already recovered (or dead)
- You agree, this leaves a significantly reduced pool of people for the Grim Reaper to harvest.
Therefore, 2000 dead/day in January 2022 would have been far far worse than the all time high of 25 000/ week (>3000/day) we reached in Jan last year because the normalizing population was much higher then.
For your figure to be correct then, omicron would have to be, not just more contagious (it is), but a spectacularly more deadly variant than Delta instead of being relatively benign.
“and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?”
We’re not OK with it, we’ve made peace and learned to live with something that has become endemic and will never go away.
2 years of pandemic implies 1/40th of an average lifespan. Thats not insignificant. But it gets worse
2 years is 66% of my toddler’s life. A toddler that doesnt know what a peer’s smile is since she’s masked all day.
2 years is 33% of my first grader’s life. Who luckily avoided any long term school closures, but goes crazy whenever there’s a two week “virtual learning” session.
What happened is, therefore, that peoples lives cannot be put on hold indefinitely. There are worse fates than death [2]. We have the tools and knowledge to deal with COVID and we want to return to normal.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
[2] ironically, a person who doesn't understand that doesn't have much to live for.
How would you (or really anyone I suppose) evaluate whether to trust the CDC or some other equivalent?
Also, thanks for those numbers. I don't know why that breakdown isn't more widely pushed.
- Do the numbers add up? Fake numbers often don't.
- Does the narrative have a logical flow? Lies often break apart (careful! Consipracy theories are often very consistent)
- Aethetics. Lies are often repulsive to our soul (Nazism, socialism -> see nihlism). Careful again; sometimes its “the ugly truth”
- Dialectic (for lack of a better word. Not Hegel’s type. Whatever that was). Engage and hear out someone who disagrees
- Meditate. Close your eyes and release. And overlooked Truth might pop up.
- Look around you. Does the narrative fit your observed reality? Careful! There’s observational bias.
Keep tabs of who has the courage to defend positions they disagree with.
Keep tabs of those who reveal themselves sycophants
Known personal flaw.
(Im also on the tail end of a week of COVID fever. I’m literally delusional?)
Now, you are an exceptional reader to have spotted that as a general trait as opposed to a once oversight. This is very rare and, despite our disagreement, kudos to you!
Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Counts by NCHS often track 1–2 weeks behind other data."
Your source itself says that it does not yet have complete data for January 2022.
It's a bit rich to go on about being misled by mysterious forces and trusting the CDC and so on and then "do your own research" and fail to understand the basic reporting methodology of the source you land on.
Pray, do share. Polls show the (vast) majority of Americans want to know the names of reputable news organizations.
A news org that peddled WMD or Russiagate (lets be bi-partisan) doesnt count
What's the point of concluding with such a cynical and subjective-at-best remark?
What is worth living for that isnt also worth dying for?
On a more serious note, I may be misunderstanding the nuance of what you are saying/asking, but for me there is relatively little overlap between "things worth living for" and "things worth dying for". A few people in my life, that's it. There are plenty of things to live for. Seeing technology advance, traveling, experiencing things, meeting people, creating something of value and/or meaning, having a positive impact. Ultimately, none of those are things worth dying for. I'd rather not have them, than not have them and be dead.
Thank you, you lived up to your nick :)
I believe that, if not for the things that you would die for the things you enjoy in life would, eventually, become insipid. Then, we (maybe not all of is) are liable to enter into a spiral of existential despair at the realization that our lives are meaningless to the universe.
My daughters’ play, my parent’s affection, my wife of ten year’s love have never gotten old. I don't care what the universe doesn’t think about me as long as I have them (and time away from them to spend all morning on HM pontifying to strangers as if I had a clue ;)
Can you say the same for the sparkle you felt unwrapping iOS7? the sparkle of (secular) Christmas vanished when I was 13 and I realized that nothing I received for Christmas made me happy, and nothing I could ask for would. But knowing that in 10 days Id be back in school and get to see my crush… wow!
Cheers! Hearing that is a first on HN, quite the occasion. :)
> I believe that, if not for the things that you would die for the things you enjoy in life would, eventually, become insipid. Then, we (maybe not all of is) are liable to enter into a spiral of existential despair at the realization that our lives are meaningless to the universe.
I think you are spot on, and it may well be why the remark in the GP stuck out the me. Things like depression can accelerate that process and can force us to have this conversation with ourselves much sooner. To me now having a (self-assigned) purpose is only one thing: Less boring than not having one. It is quite freeing, and was the shift in perspective I needed to find some semblance of joy again in the world around me. Still, for better or worse, it has left me without things to completely give myself up for.
Also, clue or not, your comment is a wholesome read and I appreciate that you took the time to write it.
My wife and I in May of 2020 decided that a hug from our grandchildren and children was worth way more the minimal risk we had of dying from Covid should we have caught it. We ended our exile in May day and decided to let fate be fate and not let fear consume us and prevent us from enjoying our family.
I don’t begrudge others for their own decisions, but for me, the pandemic ended for me mentally on Mothers Day 2020. Time with my family is worth dying for…so if I catch it and it kills me, so be it.
In early summer 2020, my mom passed in hospice from cancer. 4mo before that she had a fighting chance, but faced intensive surgeries (ICU for sure based on experience) and chemo — all in isolation. Literally the hospital made it that choice - family has to leave. They basically gaslighted her out.
I was furious, and because the hospital was not overwhelmed. there were precautions obviously, but no - it was not filled with Covid or people dying from Covid. Utter bs.
The pervasiveness of dying or suffering alone has exploded in the last two years. It is one of the worst fates.
Hopefully, this pandemic will have served to shock us to take better care of our seniors who have been neglected for too long.
No one cares until it affects them.
While many don't care until it affects them, that is not even close to universally true.
I was surprised at the number of people who didn't care, and it seems to be about 50%, but characterizing everyone that way is incredibly unfair to all the people who worked tirelessly to try to convince people to get the vaccine.
If the self righteous cared about peoples lives instead of pushing people with relatively lower risk to get a vaccine they would have sent those vaccines to the third world to vaccinate the vulnerable there.
Instead the WHO complained in early 2021 that we gave our vulnerable a double dose
In the summer of 2021 WHO complained when we vaccinating our healthy young
In the fall of 2021, the WHO was shocked when we rolled out boosters
By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
> By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
Or both.
As bad as US health care system is (and it is bad), it is ridiculously over capitalized. Compared with Canada, the US normally has 50% more ICU beds. More Dr. per capita (slightly) and a ridiculous larger number of nurses and secretaries.
Therefore, Ontario’s health care system gets overwhelmed during bad flu seasons.
In this scenario, Ontario’s recent lockdowns make (material) sense, but that doesnt mean that significant health care resources are being diverted in the US.
By over capitalized, I mean the US has insane medical facilities everywhere people live. I live within a 5 minute drive of three major hospitals, and who knowns how many minor medical centers
EDIT:
Please dont take this to be a judgement on Ontario’s health system. Before COVID both my parents were successfully treated in Ontario for cancer, for which Im grateful.
My comment is merely an illustrative example of how differences health care systems do and must affect government response
Omicron is being called 'mild', but it's not mild for a lot of people in absolute terms (even though it may be milder compared to what earlier variants might have been for that individual).
If you are at risk of dying from covid and you didn't get vaccinated it is kinda your fault now. And if you are vaccinated and dying from covid, well there is not much more you could have done.
Full vaccination is at about 65%, boosters are at about 25%, lower than much of Europe.
Percent of US Population
At least Fully
one dose Vaxed Boosted
Total 75.4% 63.3% 39.5%
Population ≥ 5 Years of Age 80.1% 67.3%
Population ≥ 12 Years of Age 85.3% 72.1%
Population ≥ 18 Years of Age 87.3% 73.8% 42.6%
Population ≥ 65 Years of Age 95% 88.2% 62.7%
It's reasonable to be measuring against eligibility when evaluating progress in administering boosters, but not being eligible for a booster doesn't really make someone less susceptible to infection, so it isn't the right thing to compare across countries.
One year, not two.
There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".
A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.
But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.
Well, about that. A few governors have admitted what has been known by “conspiracy theorists” for the past two years: that included in the count of Covid hospitalizations are people who come to the hospital for something else entirely and happen to test positive [0]:
> Officials from New York City-based NYU Langone Health told The New York Times in a Jan. 4 report that about 65 percent of its COVID-19 patients were "incidentally" found to be infected after admission for other reasons. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked hospitals to adjust their reporting on COVID-19 hospitalizations beginning Jan. 4 to make the distinction between those admitted for the virus as their primary condition and those who incidentally test positive.
...
> "We have a few patients in the hospital for COVID, but not many, thank goodness," Dr. Jha tweeted. "More common on our service is folks admitted with COVID. That is, they came to the hospital for something else and found to have COVID."
So the count numbers have been exaggerated for who knows how long. An accident, I’m sure.
0: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...
To top it off, healthy unvaccinated nurses can't work, but capacity is so low some hospitals are asking covid positive nurses to come back to work before they fully recover or had the full quarantine period.
Also, it's entirely up to people themselves if they want to be protected or not: Omicron is so transmissive, it doesn't matter for transmission if people are vaccinated or not - whatever impact it has on transmission is of little consequence - everyone is going to get infected, anyway (maybe a few weeks later but it doesn't matter at all).
On the other hand, vaccines are universally available, and free, for a very long time now.
Together it means that if you are unvaccinated, it's on one hand, only your own fault, and on the other hand, only your problem - effectively you no longer endanger anyone but yourself by staying unvaccinated (big difference from what it was a year ago).
Which means, there is no point for anyone but unvaccinated themselves suffering. If you got the vaccine, Omicron is about as dangerous as flu, and no one closes economy because of flu.
Almost all unvaccinated are Republicans and Democratic administration is in power...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
I'm sure that have different opinion hurts a lot of people.
Imo the only thing that really matters is the hospitalization rate of the vaccinated. If it's near bad flu numbers, then there's no more concern
However, even though I'm fully vaccinated and boosted so personally have no reason to fear COVID from the point of view of landing in the hospital or dying directly from COVID (and all my friends and family are in a similar position) it is still an indirect concern because the unvaccinated are taking up hospital resources that I might need.
Even in my county in the US, which has been in the bottom quarter for case, death, and hospitalization rates in my state, which has been in the bottom 5-10 states for all of those statistics for the entire pandemic, there are enough unvaccinated people in the hospital now with COVID that hospitals are almost unable to take new patients. Omicron looks like it is peaking here, so it will probably be OK to go ahead and have my heart attack or get hit by a drunk driver without worrying about whether I'll be able to get treatment, but there are a heck of a lot of places in the US right now where this is not the case.
The good news is that after omicron, enough of the unvaccinated will have some immunity via omicron that it should bring their hospitalization rates down enough that it is no longer a problem. That's when we reach the "it can be treated like a a cold or flu from a public health perspective" stage. A recent NTY covid briefing email looked at the data from places that are ahead of the US on the omicron curve, and that's what they concluded.
The solution to this is to bump the unvaccinated to the lowest priority of hospitals. If beds are full they should be removed from the hospital.
The effect is that these decisions result in a small increase in the steady state hospitalization levels. If obesity or smoking increases the effects of that increase on hospitalization will be spread out over decades giving plenty of time for hospital capacity to be adjusted to deal with it. (Same if obesity or smoking decreases--hospitals won't suddenly be laying off staff. Hospitalizations would fall over several years giving hospitals plenty of time to reduce capacity by simply not replacing as many workers who retire or change professions).
COVID-19 is bad for hospitals because it is short term. That's why in the US we are currently getting about 20x as many daily COVID-19 hospital admissions as we got cancer admissions before COVID-19 (that's for all cancers, not just lung cancer).
I’ve learned of many cancer diagnoses in my circle of family and friends and can think of only two that had a hospital admission related to it (most were treated as outpatient procedures, including most of the surgeries).
So no, even if those ethical questions would be resolved in favor of it, it is at best a solution during a future pandemic. It is not one for this pandemic.
If you disagree with this statement, then here's hard proof: See page 7 of this UK report (latest data) tracking the vaccination status of Covid hospitalizations and deaths: https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publication...
I've actually had a look at the document you pointed. It's very confusing. The last line of the report at page 7 states:
Rates of hospital admissions in the time range (8/nov - 5/dec):
- fully vaccinated: 493
- partially vaccinated + unvaccinated: 267
Rate per 100k admitted to hospital, same time range:
- fully vaccinated: 39
- partially vaccinated + unvaccinated: 208
I'm not sure how to reconcile the numbers above. Page 8 is a graph plotting the second metric (rate per 100k).
Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated.
And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
Page 38 https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11223/22-01-19-covid...
Again, the fact that the numbers don't reconcile still stands, and without clarifications, that table and any references are meaningless.
From page 7:
- Rates Admitted to Hospital per 100,000: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 39.0
- Northern Ireland population: 1.9 millions
Expected admitted in the whole N.I: (39 * 1900 / 100) = 741
- Total admissions: All adults, Fully vaccinated: 493.
The numbers 741 and 493 don't match.
The rest of the table is inconsistent as well; for example, the proportions between fully and non vaccinated, between the rate per 100k (right), and the absolute values (left), are inconsistent between each other.
Futher, on the second page:
> During this 4 week period there were 790 hospital admissions, 36 (4.6%) of which had received a third dose.
The number 790 and 36 are other two who add to the pile of inconsistency. Until everything is explained with exactness, that report is essentially garbage.
> And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
In absence of correct data about N.I., the CDC report is a reasonable source, also by mean of being considerably larger scale. It can be acceptable to refute it when referring to Northern Ireland, but in this case valid data is required.
---
Additionally, about this:
> Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated. This is not an indictment against the vaccines, they prevent hospitalization, but the sheer number of vaccinated people still means they're the majority in the hospitals and ICUs, and the unvaccinated are a minority across the board.
This is a common mathematical mistake; see conditional probability notions.
To explain the mistake using extremes, if all the population except one was vaccinated, and one not vaccinated, hospitals would have 100% of vaccinated people, but the conclusion that because of that being vaccinated is less effective than not being vaccinated, is wrong; one needs other variables to make this conclusion.
The issue is that if you're gonna try to blame unvaccinated people for your problems, they should actually be the source of your problems - which they're not.
The data on page 7 also shows hospitalization is overwhelmingly for populations aged 60+ and up. Which is unfortunate, but I think people, parents especially, are having to decide between tradeoffs of prioritizing elderly versus benefits kids get from ending restrictions.
Myself and my family all have the boosters. As long as transmission is high and masks are recommended we will wear masks. Other than that though, my preference would be that there are few other restrictions in place. What I am tired of is waiting for everyone else to get the vaccine and wear a mask. At this point it seems like a lost cause and not worth my effort to spend energy on.
I still have a lot of sympathy for healthcare workers and really anyone else that has to work in a highly public setting where they are at higher risk of exposure.
After two years and now 4 shots being discussed it’s clearly apparent:1) people will still get infected, 2) despite the lower risk of death with vaccines, plenty will still die, 3) we can’t keep borrowing money and giving to people when we shutdown their businesses.
And I feel like the protests in Australia, Canada, US, Europe are making it pretty clear people aren’t willing to make major sacrifices for another year, or two or three.
Far smarter to pretend this was the plan all along then watch people blatantly disregard your rules.
Clearly at some point, we’re going to end the pandemic-related restrictions, right? It seems a valid question to ask periodically “is now the right time to stop doing X?” Whatever X is and whether or not you think X is effective vs X’s downsides are all factors into your answer, but factors that shouldn’t preclude asking the question.
There are going to be a range of people’s answers from “YOLO!” to “but think of the children/grandma!” Society (with government as the instrument) would do well to decide based on the science and stats, not on what the extremists on either end would prefer.
At some point, we’re going to stop wasting everyone’s years all together, but that’s inevitably going to take all the years away from (kill) at least one person who would have survived if we’d stayed locked down. It’s a living Trolley Problem.
Some haven’t and are paying the consequences.
For US probably a couple more waves and it’ll go through the unvaccinated.
If we didn’t have vaccines how much larger would the numbers be?
"90% of the people in this hospital for COVID today are unvaccinated" is a very different statement when, for hypothetical examples,
- 90% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is same as general population.
- 10% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is mostly drawn from the unvaccinated.
And points in-between, and the other way (what if - for sake of example only - 95% of local people are unvaccinated?).
And then there are further confounding effects - what if unvaccinated people are younger and than average, as vaccines are given preferentially to older people who are more likely to require a hospital visit in normal times.