Sorry about this fatalist and flippant tone.
Sorry about this fatalist and flippant tone.
And their response will be "Finally! This is all we've wanted this entire time!"
I don't think most here understand just how much "this class of people" value freedom over safety.
People made their decision then looked for reasons to support it.
Get off your high horse.
People complaining about masks taking away freedom don’t seem to be rioting about freedom of drinking and driving as an example.
I’m all for freedom. Heck I donate to EFF and ACLU annually. I’m also for personal responsibility when it affects others as we live in a society.
No, the problem is that we do, and also see the selfishness of the position with regards to highly communicable diseases. "My body, my choice" is a fantastic principle when the outcome of the choice has negligible impact on people breathing the same air. Many of these same folks would raise a stir if their neighbor started throwing their trash over the fence. In my mind there is no distinction. Their choice to not be vaccinated or wear masks results in people we love dying. It's not their individual freedom that is the risk. Their choice threatens our collective freedoms to life and liberty which we individually enjoy.
It's hard to see how vaccines stop the spread when places like NYC or Israel (some of the most vaccinated places in the world) had record setting numbers in the recent wave.
If vaccines work, shouldn't the "people you love" be vaccinated and thus not impacted by unvaccinated people?
I understand masks can be effective in some cases, but is it really reasonable to demand people wear surgical or N95 masks all the time to prevent "people you love" from getting an illness with a 99.99% survival rate?
This is an extraordinary claim that runs counter to all available evidence and should be backed up by extraordinary evidence.
Our analyses included 52,297 cases with SGTF (Omicron) and 16,982 cases with non-SGTF (Delta [B.1.617.2]) infections, respectively
I forget the source but survey's suggest the average american thinks if they catch covid they have like a 10% chance of dying. This is in some cases 1000x wrong. People are badly, badly mis-informed on how survivable covid is.
If people knew the actual statistics around covid severity, I don't think we'd be doing any of this at all.
0.1 out of 1000 of the entire U.S. population has died of COVID just in the past 19 days.
You are the first person to assert “of” COVID. Substantiate it. Cite primary sources.
If they are one of the 146 million Americans who recovered from Covid, they are at low risk of reinfection and thus transmission.
The same cannot be said for Covid-naive, vaccinated people who can be infected and silently infect others due to symptoms being suppressed by the vaccine.
> To the end of week 43 in 2021 (to 31 October 2021) 72,264 possible reinfections have been identified ... 7.9 million first positives
For Delta transmission from vaccinated individuals, a study of Vietnamese healthcare workers found that 70% of infections were pre-symptomatic, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3897733
> 69 healthcare workers were tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. 62 participated in the clinical study. 49 were (pre)symptomatic ... Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated people. Physical distancing measures remain critical to reduce SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant transmission.
The issue is not vaccine denial by itself, its resistance to any public health measures, including vaccines, masking and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, and so forth. In short, these folks actively pursue a course of not behaving rationally because (usually) of misguided politics.
It's ill-informed. If you have a prior COVID infection, you should still maintain active vaccination status, including boosters. If you get COVID, you should get tested and try to not get others sicks.
Instead, the pantheon of behaviors we observe from anti-vaxxers is spiteful and irrational. Which supports my initial point that this is a self behavior.
Effective treatment is considered a public health intervention if it prevents the spread. Otherwise its medical treatment. This is why vaccination is far superior to post-infection treatment.
Assessment:
I'm deeply suspicious of this website. It uses pooled effects across several studies, which is an improper approach for this type of meta-analysis. For example, it lists hydroxychloroquine as effective. Some initial underpowered studies showed potential, but further research showed it was not effective.[0]
Items:
[1] By forcing a random effects design, you may give inappropriate weighting to under-powered studies showing an effect (low power results in higher effect sizes). 10 studies of 10 people each, with effect averaged via pooled regression, may well show a pooled effect significantly larger than one study with 100 people.
[2] People not deeply familiar with the treatment literature (such as you, me) cannot confirm that the meta-analysis is appropriately comprehensive (they claim to scrape paper sources, but not the inclusion criteria). Since this is a random website presented without context, without bonafides, and so forth, even if the information presented is real it may be cherry picked. Here is the documentation of some of their exclusion protocol -- note if they were intending to be persuasive instead of objective, exclusion of negative meta-analyses would be intentionally phrased objectively: https://hcqmeta.com/#exc
[3] Differing definitions can impact results. "Early treatment" is prophylaxis typically, but why the individual ends ups in a treatment or control group (and what the term means) may be systemically biased depending on the treatment standard of care adopted locally. The differences may not be random, resulting in selection bias (and other forms of bias, but simply put not an apples-to-apples comparison). And because we're dealing with people with will, the uncertainty compounds. By way of example, prophylaxis "treatment" group might be fully self-selected people who are just scared they may have been exposed, and a "control" group (from a matched pair example selected on few if any demographics) that was known to have the disease -- causing immediate positive bias. RCT designs can help with this approach, but again showing solely the pooled effects instead of reporting fixed effects assessments and other regression output is in err.
Conclusion:
So, for these reasons and because the source actually matters in an era of mis-/dis-information, I remain highly suspicious.
Notes [0] Economics is facing its own replication issues, and the paper is an important read for why statistical power matters: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecoj.12461
My dad's physician, of all people, was anti vax until he ended up in the ER. Then he started telling all of his patients to get vaxxed.
Humm, I wish it was that clear. I'm from Portugal, one of the countries with higher vax rate (anti-vax movement here is negligible) and a few days ago we were on world top 5 for new infections.
Disclaimer: I'm fully vaccinated. However I respect who isn't.
We do still need to think about the people who can't get vaxxed for medical reasons. My sister has MS and has been on immunosuppressants which prevented her from getting it. Thankfully she took a break and got vaxxed because now she has covid.
If we get to, say, April without a serious spike in the death rate, I think the protocols will be rolled back. That assumes we don't see a new variant but it looks like the variants are getting less serious, not more.
Trump is actively promoting vaccination.
Trump supports the vaccines that he helped fund and create.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/24/politics/trump-covid-vaccine-...
Predict the time of collapse and define “collapse”. I will take a 1:1 $10k bet for the other side if it’s soon enough and reasonable enough. Soon enough and reasonable enough and I’ll raise it to $100k.
$10k is enough for you to medical tourism to the third world. $100k is enough for you to medical tourism to many parts of the first world. So I think this is fair.
I'm in this category and it doesn't seem particularly rare. Rarely accounted for in these "I am done" type posts though.
I don't see how you can flippantly propose this as an option. How can you be ok with wearing masks for the rest of your life—if it can at all be avoided?
I'm not a medical or public health expert, it's not up to me to figure it out.
But to start with, the idea that you can be "done" because you've already done "enough" and experienced inconvenience and made sacrifices needs to go. People need more from each other still, sorry!
Those people don't have the right to tell you what to do. They are not politicians and they aren't elected. They can tell me to wear a mask for the rest of my life, but it is my right to say "nope".
I've made and used home sewn masks using one of the recommended sewing patterns for the past two years, and I've managed to get a good fit that only fogged up my glasses partly, but since last week these masks have been banned here in the Netherlands. Not because they are proven to be worse than the type II surgical masks that are recommended now, but because the government wants to standardize. So now I wear disposable masks that mean my glasses fog up every damn time I enter a building. Great.
Then there is that constant feeling of not getting enough oxygen, all while being confronted with the 5% who simply refuse to wear a mask in the shops, and shop staff refusing to remark on it for fear of getting into an altercation. I'm thoroughly through with masks. I'll wear them where and when mandatory, but certainly not indefinitely.
Masks can be uncomfortable. My biggest gripe is actually the awkwardness that sometimes accompanies taking them off and putting them on again. Especially when also wearing glasses, a hat, and/or a helmet. But given my girlfriend wears full PPE for her 12-hour shifts treating COVID patients without ever complaining about getting enough oxygen, I hope the rest of us will bear masking up while we're in the AH or on public transport. Compared to the shit she deals with, it's a minor inconvenience, at best.
Also, maybe I'm wrong but my feeling is the fear of altercation over mask wearing is overblown. I live in a semi-rural part of the United States where masks are a very political and contentious issue (probably more so than in NL). I regularly interact with people strongly opposed to them, and am often in crowds where few if any other people are wearing one, but in the past two years have never experienced any kind of confrontation. Perhaps I'm lucky and my size and physical appearance is intimidating to those who would otherwise pick a fight.
I don't know why, but while I can wear a mask for up to half an hour, anything beyond that becomes torture (doubly so when you are travelling with a toddler who needs you as a parent, which means talking through a mask increasing the out-of-breath feeling). This has made travelling longer distances fairly impossible for me, which again adds to the 'so fucking done' feeling that is gaining the upper hand.
I'm not sure how you're convinced it's only the unmasked or unvaccinated people that are responsible for the spread of the virus at this point. In many countries they are not allowed to go anywhere.
How is the virus crossing oceans so quickly if the unvaccinated are unable to cross borders?
Unless regulations across the world have changed drastically in the last couple of weeks, this is just false.
https://travel.gc.ca/travel-covid/travel-restrictions/domest... - the part specifically about "You need to be vaccinated to travel in and out of Canada"
They've made it a requirement to be vaccinated to use any form of federally regulated transportation - plane, train, boat - personal vehicles are the last option, but good luck trying to drive on the pacific ocean since you're not allowed to enter the US unvaccinated either AFAIK.
“How is the virus crossing oceans so quickly if the unvaccinated are unable to cross borders?”
> but good luck trying to drive on the pacific ocean since you're not allowed to enter the US unvaccinated either AFAIK
Until 5 days ago you could: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sandramacgregor/2022/01/24/cana...