COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

1 Like
13 Likes

I blame this nearly 100% on the terrible media coverage. It’s been awful with respect to boiling the vaccines down to a simple “efficacy” number.

3 Likes

Sorry I was responding to the guy who said he lives in west la, which I just assumed was Thousand Oaks or some shit

Anyways you already know to just take rosecrans to Hawthorne or the 405 to Florence and get out of here!

1 Like

Agree. That said though, even in this thread which is certainly not…representative of the average citizen’s COVID-19 knowledge, we had some questions around which vaccine we would want and whether it would make sense to wait for certain ones (consensus was to take whatever).

Obviously Detroit guy is a moron and shouldn’t have done that, but it is also natural to compare the vaccines especially with the differences in technology, dosing schedule, etc.

We talked 6 months ago about how it might get weird if there were multiple vaccines and whether you’d get to pick the one you wanted or get stuck with whatever your pharmacy had.

Not sure it was ever going to be possible to thread the needle between being open and transparent with the scientific data for emerging vaccines that couldn’t go through standard approval in order to convince people to take it, and telling people that all of the vials are the same.

I have a friend that puts a piece of stretchy athletic tape (the gauze type stuff) instead of a clip. Not good if you are in on/off situations but we wear masks to play tennis and he wears glasses. So for those times when you need to wear it for longer periods.

Politicians should all be singing from the same songbook called “take any vaccine you can get as soon as possible”.

As you said, there are interesting discussions to be had outside the political sphere.

3 Likes

Lol I was annoyed I had to go ten minutes to get mine.

Sometimes it’s good to have my perspective realigned.

1 Like

Grats Suzzer.

I was just thinking they should have five golden vaccines that bestow obscene rewards on the winner in order to up vaccination rates.

But we wouldn’t want another V Fraud crisis.

#WillyWonkaPfizer

1 Like

Yeah one thing the citizens of Detroit expect from their elected officials is “the best.”

It’s crazy. I won’t lie. If I were to have gotten a JJ shot I might have been a little bummed at first but the reality is it’s effective at the most important parts.

I think someone else itt laid it out pretty well earlier. Risking death or debilitating illness for a period of time to avoid getting mildly sick is a bad trade off.

Plus with it being one shot there is a period of time after getting it where it is actually more effective than its counterparts.

This seems like another politician trying to score cheap points at the cost of their constituents lives. Seems to be plaguing America these days.

2 Likes

Is there any evidence that this is true? Since the control group is living in the same environment, there is no obvious reason why the efficacy would change under different conditions afaict. Maybe it will even increase. I don’t understand how much practical use the efficacy rate has in terms of knowing how safe you are going to be going forward.

2 Likes

IMO the only way back to any semblance of normal life is to get the risk of contracting COVID-19 to be on par with or less than that of contracting seasonal influenza.

I think everyone (maybe perhaps except the extremely immunocompromised) is down for taking almost zero mitigation against contracting the flu. It sucks, it kills a bunch of people a year, but we’ve all kind of opted into that one.

As soon as the combination of vaccination protection and medical treatment brings COVID-19’s risk down to that or below influenza, I see no practical reason why we won’t all resume life more or less as it was before the pandemic.

Question most of us have now as we have begun to be vaccinated is whether our science juice has brought our risk level down to that sub-influenza acceptable level. I feel pretty sure that is the case, but pretty sure won’t get me into an Applebee’s anytime soon. Now we play the part of the game where we monitor the outcomes of the vaccinated against those that aren’t, observe the results over long periods of time, etc. To me, that probably means a year of wait-and-see on variants, fading immunity, boosters, etc. Will probably be a slow creep back to normal over that period if [HOPEFULLY] we run good.

Is this from the SNL sketch?

1 Like

I’ve been trying to help my brother get a vaccine appointment in D.C. and dear lord their system is atrocious. Wait until 9:00am every day when they release about 5k appointments. Refresh the page >100 times on multiple devices. Finally get in to a waiting room screen that refreshes every 30 seconds and if your lucky puts you through to schedule. Get through, fill out 3 pages of info on eligibility, demographics, contact info, etc. Move on to find appointments screen using your address, a maximum distance, and a map. Then you click “search” and literally nothing happens. No clue if it’s in progress, if there are no appointments, or it’s just broken. Try again the next day.

Oh and D.C. just announced they are moving to a vaccine pre-registration system next week. Great, right? But they have not yet selected a vendor to actually host/run the system. WTF.

@Bigoldnit any advice you can give?

Ah, ok. Still worth it IMO.

My state is now open for BMI over 30, which I’ve been my whole adult life before losing a bunch of weight during the pandemic.

22 Likes

Honestly, I just got super lucky with the hitting refresh lottery, so I don’t have any super secret tips, but, here are a few things that might help:

  • Assuming your brother is flexible in terms of when and where he goes, don’t necessarily click on the first site or the first time on the results list. Most people do that out of a desire to just grab whatever is available, but that usually leads to multiple people clicking on the same appointment and the system can only book one so the others get error messages and have to go back to the search results. If you scroll down just a bit, you should have a little less competition for the appointment.

  • At least when I got mine, the default calendar search result was only showing one week, but some sites had uploaded availability for two weeks. So, if it lets you select a site but the next page displays no availability, try changing the date range by going another week out.

  • Also, you probably have already done this, but sign up for the email list that’s on the vaccination website. It’s not perfect but they’ve done a pretty good job of laying out when new appointments will be opening up and who is eligible. Also, popville.com is a good local blog that has been doing lots of good coverage and has a very active base of commenters that have been sharing their tips and tricks for navigating the system.

Good luck. I know the process is super frustrating. On the plus side, they seem to be getting more doses every week, so, hopefully, the system can become a little less like The Hunger Games soon.

5 Likes

Ain’t nobody going to weigh you

7 Likes

Thanks for the tips. Very happy you were able to get one already! We’ll keep trying every day and hopefully get through to the list of sites soon.

1 Like

Pillow. Shirt. Tucked in. Vaccine. Riverman happy.

Nobody will know or care.

4 Likes