angelzen

Probably the OP refers to a large scale Israeli study from late summer.

https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

Edit. While googling around on this topic, I stumbled upon a decent comparison between the Israeli study and a CDC study that claims the opposite, specifically that covid recovered are five times more likely to be hospitalized for covid than the vaccinated.

https://brownstone.org/articles/a-review-and-autopsy-of-two-...

Covid is dangerous. Media hyperbole is also dangerous. Western Europe countries are experiencing a covid wave, hopefully it will peter out in a couple of months. Though we will never hear "cases falling through the floor" in the media, they'll just shift the attention to the next hotspot. Austria, which is a bit ahead of the curve, is seeing deaths plateauing at 5/day/M. Hopefully they already crested the peak.

Be wary of "skyrocketing" claims from questionable sources.

Precedents:

* Florida, which was hypermediatized in late summer, then silently recovered.

* Balkan countries, which had an early wave, and are on a recovery course. Note how their case numbers didn't go that high, most likely because they are poor and testing penetration is not that high.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/florida

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

"Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten (Betreibbare Betten und Notfallreserve" chart shows the ICU stats over time. Occupied beds are roughly a flatline around 20k, with a small 3k seasonal (covid?) variation. OTOH, the total number of available ICU beds have fallen from ~32k to ~24k, 25%. We are all nervous to see how the medical system will weather the winter covid waves, sadly the covid pandemic is far from over. But I'm confused: the data indicates the system has lost significant ICU capacity, a few times more than the seasonal (covid?) utilization variation. What is going on? Is this something Germans also openly worry about?

Admittedly, this is anecdote. I grew up in a poor country, but raising my kids in the US. I can count the number of times they had to see a doctor because of fever/cough/vomiting/diarrhea using one hand (each). Had recently one of them struggle taking oral antibiotics because he never had to take oral pills before. My childhood recollection is packing the same amount of misery in one year, year after year. Not saying this is a bad thing, just that my kids grow up facing comparatively minor disease challenges. Life is a giant game of tradeoffs, etc.

The risk of testing positive for covid is conditioned on the probability of being tested in the first place. The CDC guidance skews towards testing unvaccinated people more aggressively, hence the numbers are predictably skewed towards the unvaccinated. Further confounding the issue, vaccination among kids and teenagers is recent, their VE numbers are going to decline over time.

Medical research indicates VE against infection of about 50% after 6 months, which is 2:1.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/t...

* People who have symptoms of COVID-19.

* People who have come into close contact with someone with COVID-19 should be tested to check for infection:

* Fully vaccinated people should be tested 5–7 days after their last exposure.

* People who are not fully vaccinated should get tested immediately when they find out they are a close contact. If their test result is negative, they should get tested again 5–7 days after their last exposure or immediately if symptoms develop.

* Unvaccinated people who have taken part in activities that put them at higher risk for COVID-19 because they cannot physically distance as needed to avoid exposure, such as travel, attending large social or mass gatherings, or being in crowded or poorly-ventilated indoor settings.

* People who have been asked or referred to get tested by their healthcare provider, or state, tribal, localexternal icon, or territorial health department.

The charts offer an age breakdown. Click the "Change age group" button.

The numbers are small and the risk concentrated in the elderly ailing population such that an outbreak in nursing homes can skew the overall numbers one way or another, depending on lack of PCR tests or over-sensitive PCR tests. These numbers are mostly useful for detecting general trends, e.g. are the cases going up or down, what is the O(death risk)?. Strictly comparing different locales is not going to be very informative

We have eliminated every single chance for kids to experience adversity. They don't roam the streets, forget about the woods. We chaperone them to pre-approved activities under constant adult supervision. We pad their playgrounds in 1ft foam boards. We don't give them grades in school, lest they find out other kids work harder. We vaccinate them against everything under the sun, so they very rarely get a cold. We willfully ignore that kids are amazing "pick yourself up and go harder at it" machines. Instead, we are treating them like frail 80 year olds.

There is no wonder that new generations can't handle even the whiff of risk. This won't end well.

https://48156919-c823-48bd-a34e-f15f9b6e20f2.filesusr.com/ug... (chapter 1 of The Coddling of American Mind)

Deep sigh. WW2 was prefaced by the Spanish civil war, which gave us Guernica and George Orwell. Stumbled recently upon a fragment of an account of the era. A society fractured along familiar fault lines, each side demonizing the other at levels difficult to comprehend, but becoming more and more plausible. We have to lower the temperature somehow.

I forgot to mention that an in-depth resource like the OA is invaluable complement to terse cheatsheets for the 1% of the cases when the common commands are not sufficient. Thank you :)

I love nix as a concept. I have a couple concerns in practice.

* I don't want to learn nix, nor do I want to learn apt, brew, pip, npm, crates etc. beyond a handful basic commands: install, remove, list all, list package (version & deps), update (at version). A one page cheatsheet would be fantastic.

* There is a ton of QA work sunk in standard package manager workflows. Is there a way to leverage this work? You allude it is possible, hopefully there is a one page cheatsheet explaining how.

Regarding obscure command syntax, I use bash aliases to give names to the most common 7 git commands (which constitute 99% of my daily usage) and never have to remember any git command flags.

For example because some got the vaccine shot and got infected too? The vaccine offers middling protection against infection.

Imagine a police officer stopping you at the side of the road. "When was the last time you drank alcohol?" "A couple of months ago at my brother's birthday party, I had a can of beer." "Step out of the car, you are under arrest for drunk driving."

This manichean logic worked wonders last time it was tried.

In King County, for age group >65yo, vaccination rate is >95%, and the percent of vaccinated hospitalizations for this age group is 3%.

In UK, for age group >60yo, with similarly high vaccination rates, the percent of vaccinated hospitalizations for this age group is 82.5%.

These numbers inhabit different realities. I cannot think of any reasonable explanation. Some attempts:

* King County is failing to vaccinate the highest risk subpopulation within this age group.

* King County is hospitalizing comparatively vast numbers of unvaccinated elder covid patients.

* King County, UK, or both, is having serious data collection and/or reporting problems.

* UK is using a different vaccine

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/public.health.seattle...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Edit. Peeking at the Singapore dashboards, they are much closer to the King County picture than the UK picture.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics

It is a tough call. My hope is that in spite of failing to expand surge hospital capacity, the winter delta covid waves will recede before reaching spillover point.

This is a reasonable proposition in principle. But there are other admission criteria. For example, you might end up passing over a 30yo mother of two for a 85yo nursing home resident, just because all nursing home residents get vaccinated, while still having relatively large numbers of hospitalizations. From the UK covid reports (Table 4), notice how hospitalization raw numbers are majority vaccinated >50yo, with 5389 out of 9831 (55%) cases.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

I debunked this in a dupe thread, where someone has similar claims about Minnesota, the actual hospital occupancy rate was 10%. The total covid utilization of Zurich ICU units is 14.6%. 71% of 14.6% is 10.3%. Not great, but a far cry from alarmist statements like "traffic accident victims can't be treated", when 7.5% of Zurich ICU beds are still unused, and 20% ICU beds are free in Switzerland overall.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29290732

https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/icu

Liberal market based societies / economies have many failings, and would be a very interesting conversation to explore some of these.

To refocus on the UC situation, and at the risk of putting words in your mouth, the general idea is that UC is exploring a set of policies, which may or maynot work for them, worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal?

The SU slow moving disaster is relevant insomuch there are moral systems out there that have a mind of their own and are impervious to feedback, if not downright feeding on failure. They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high and no institution can afford to not implement them. With no control group left to highlight failures and moderate excesses, the whole society tailspins and the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse.

The extent to which SU story is relevant to current UC / US situation, anybody's guess. My only job here is to be a witness for past errors.

These are all good points. Perhaps it is time to inquire why did SU run an inefficient state-run economy for 40 years after the manic dictator was gone. Without going into too many details, the justification, even the imperative, for said policies was made in the moral dimension. As tragically exemplified by SU, there are policy systems that feed on failure. The more the policy fails to deliver the desired results, the more it's taken as evidence that the moral problem the policy purports to fix is actually deeper rooted and requires even more radical policies. Until you get to the point where the entire economic activity is controlled by the state because individuals, full of moral failings as they are, can't be trusted with charting their own course.

I have to say that my American friends have a much higher confidence in the pendulum theory. Coming of age near the end of a 40 (70?) year historical tailspin, I have a somewhat less optimistic view.

Life in the '80s in the Soviet Union space was marred by widespread food shortages. Here is a fairly accurate video of how the usual grocery shop looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LtQhIQ2AE When the sporadic food supply truck would show up, people would line up for hours, many only to leave empty handed when the load would inevitably run out.

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin visited Texan grocery store and was positively shocked by the choice and availability. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

But I agree, life in the '90s, post collapse, was even worse. I read it as a warning that embarking on a suboptimal choice course may be hard to steer back until reality forces a very harsh collapse.

Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices. Alas, it took 40 years to do so. There is a lot of inertia, I don't think anyone is arguing that UC (or Google) will collapse next year, but that the weight of poor policy choices compounds over time.

Re "mass de-industrialization", there is a historical reference, specifically the complete bankruptcy of ex Soviet block industry in the '90s, being sold for pennies to Western investors to bulldoze it and build something else in its place. I don't have a crystal ball, but I do wonder how US/China rivalry will play out in the 2040s and beyond.

"10% is taking up two-thirds of hospital space". This is incorrect, by a large margin.

There is a separate resource that tracks hospital bed use by covid status. Right now indicates 1074 out of 7327 beds are occupied by covid patients. The Minnesota breakdown of hospitalization cases is vax 216 / unvax 493. The sum is not 1074, but we can adjust using the ratio. We end up with 764 beds used by covid unvaccinated individuals out of 7327 total, for a 10% of the total hospital capacity.

I cannot find resources with precise data on what the other 90% of the beds are used for (other than 5% are unused), but from an late Aug article: "Minnesota’s hospitals report they are at 92% capacity, including patients with COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), traumatic injuries and other medical complications." One further context point: there are 5,900,000 people living in Minnesota.

https://mn.gov/covid19/data/response-prep/response-capacity....

https://www.startribune.com/wintertime-virus-keeps-minnesota...

"It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this"

Think for a bit how many things that were hard to imagine 10 years ago are now common place in the corporate world. Social conformity pressure is a real b*tch. The best we can hope is that the occasional larger-than-life professor will be left alone to teach his craft the way he sees fit. Pray that your kids have a chance to meet one of them and the wisdom to subject themselves to the gauntlet.

Growing up in a communist country, the further removed from the standardized college entrance exam you are, the more connections matter. Standardized college entrance exam will get you into a good university, but connections decide your first job after graduation. It only gets worse from there.

Everything has flaws. Everything is game-able. The question is to find the least game-able system. Where is the line between "tests can be gamed" and "one can prepare for tests by educating themselves"?

If grade inflation was already a pernicious problem, once any semblance of an objective test is removed, the pressure on HS teachers to grade everyone at A+++++++ will increase even further. We are stunting generations of kids by not offering them any feedback on the quality of their effort.

"Nearly half of American high school students – 47% in the class of 2016 – are graduating with grades ranging from A-plus to A-minus. According to the Department of Education, the average high school grade point average was 2.68 in 1990. By 2016, it had risen to 3.38, with the biggest inflation occurring in private independent schools."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/08/24/cla...

There has been a study a month ago looking into B/T cell response for the covid vaccines. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0829 Article is hypertechnical, fortunately there is a more approachable twitter thread from the first author, https://twitter.com/rishirajgoel/status/1448711946010710023. The HN thread is pretty bare, and I remember a more active conversation, so perhaps either that happened on a dupe, or there is another article along those lines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881923

"To summarize:

- Antibodies decrease but memory B/T cells are stable for ≥6 mo

- Immune memory is still effective vs. variants

- "Boosting" from memory = significant (but temporary) increase in antibodies w/ less impact on already durable memory cells"

Not surprisingly, the population of STEM graduate programs is vastly dominated by foreign students. "81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are."

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

polio vaccines != covid vaccines

* Covid risk is highly age dependent. 1000x so. An unvaccinated kid has less chance of death than their vaccinated 40yo parent. Covid mortality is concentrated in the >50yo population. Please take a look at the very nice charts Singapore ministry of health put together to get a sense of the age-dependent behavior. https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics

* Covid vaccines do not fully stop transmission. Even the highest vaccinated places on Earth still have regular outbreaks in the winter season. At least a couple papers from reputable sources indicate that the vaccine effect on transmission is "negligible" after a few months. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...

* Vaccine efficacy against infection wanes over time, the medical literature estimates VEaI at 50% after 6 months. Fortunately, VE against severe disease holds much better. High risk populations greatly benefit from vaccinations. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01548-7 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410

* Covid mutates: original, alpha, delta. Every time a new mutation took over, the vaccines have proven less effective. Where is the delta vaccine?

* There is no bottom to how not effective a vaccine can be. UK epi data indicates negative VEaI for delta, and nobody has a definitive clue as to why, though many suspect statistical artifacts. Just to be clear, US and Germany epi data indicate the opposite, the only point here is that the possibility exists. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

To recap:

polio: disease that mostly affects young people, crippling them for life, vaccines are highly effective in granting herd immunity and eradicating the disease.

covid: disease that mostly affects old people, has almost no effect on children, vaccines cannot stop transmission, the disease is widespread and undergoing active mutations.

If you are an adult, especially near or past retirement age, please strongly consider a covid vaccine for your protection. OTOH, it is not that clear that forced covid vaccinations for kids are a longterm net positive.

Sorry. I fully agree that we should contain covid discussion in covid threads, so people can easily avoid this topic altogether. And make a better effort. As to "ideological battle", it simply dawned on me that I see no reasonable exit condition for masks. It is not meant as a swipe, other than perhaps at Mother Nature.