So about that Vietnam “super-covid” hybrid variant from a few days ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/03/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/
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I mean, I don’t disagree with you? I’m still masking and in favor of not relaxing mask mandates, so I’m not sure what we’re arguing about, other then I think you’re drawing a more pessimistic conclusion then you should be from the state of Covid in the US, and I think to constantly be so pessimistic about such a traumatic thing is not healthy.
The Vietnam variant is so dangerous that it disguises itself as other variants. Devious!
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The outrage directed at people not wearing mask at the beginning was because people were scared for themselves and their family, not because they cared about other people.
The super covid comment was more directed at Churchill then you.
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We’re all concerned about our families everywhere.
I’m not spiking the football on anything, but we have months on end if Churchill doom posting about the next End Of Times variant and there is a media bias to fear mongering. Those things should be ridiculed
Wow. It’s like they read a couple of posts itt.
yeah, the big problem here Johnny is that you are on the same side of an issue in the Covid thread as Churchill. This should at least cause you to reassess your position a little.
JT
Sadly the places that did great so far but have not had vaccine access are ripe for the virus to surge.
Double mutant vs hybrid is a science geek debate (plus hybrid sounds scarier). The implication of a more aggressive strain attacking a vulnerable population like Vietnam is scary regardless of the origin.
The first world needs to get the vaccine out to the rest widely ASAP.
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There’s no conspiracy against you and churchill. Y’all just saying wrong and ignorant things. The bit that you refer to here is a mash-up of the churchill quoting ‘covid spreads quickly through the air’ as if that’s new at all and the bbc pushing nonsense about a third wave.
Thread is damn near unreadable right now.
I mean what more is there to post about regarding covid? The news is pretty stagnant. It’s getting better in developed countries while getting worse in developing countries. I mean you can only dress that up in so many ways before it gets boring to read and think about. So fearmongering takes over in order to maintain interest.
So here we are.
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It is strange to see after it was generally worse in developed countries.
Fearmongering has been around basically the entire time though, even when it was right.
A few posters were making unverifiable claims about SUPER COVID a few months back but that’s mostly simmered down at this point. The news about vaccine effectiveness vs. new variants has been better than expected so far, but I’m still pretty concerned about it circulating around at low levels and having more and more time to evolve.
Whether new variants are “hybrids” or not is interesting but mostly academic. This thread continues to be a great resource when it comes to clarifying science reporting.
Obviously people who can’t get the vaccine because of immune system issues or socioeconomic reasons are a serious problem. The fact that people ITT aren’t posting thousands of words and swearing constantly shouldn’t be taken as a sign that no one here cares about other people.
The #1 problem in the US continues to be the enormous body of brainwashed COVIDiots who could get the vaccine but won’t and won’t take any basic precautions because basic science is now a partisan football. I;m guessing we’re like a month away from hitting a hard ceiling on people in the US of 60-70% getting vaccinated and the rest going YOLO:
“The people who are not vaccinated are the ones who are not wearing a mask or washing their hands. Those are the very people who often times will socialize and be around similar like-minded people. You’re going to have the pandemic continue in those clusters.”
Sorry bud, I don’t remember what you’re talking about and I probably just rolled my eyes and decided to ignore you, just like I’ll do with this post.
I hesitate to jump in here, and I want to be clear to say that I am not disagreeing with JT’s general message that we should continue to take precautions and encourage vaccinations. However, the Post article really rubbed me the wrong way for two reasons, one of which is directly related to this point that Johnny raised.
- For literally any metric at the national level, there will be state-level variation - some states will have higher values of that metric while other states will have lower. So when an article says, “Yes, the national numbers are good, but some states are worse than average” that’s trivially true, but (imo) the article seemed to point to that as evidence that maybe things aren’t as good as one might think. Why point to only the states that are doing worse than average when it’s equally (trivially) true that there are states doing even better than the national average?
Moreover, the interpretations the story draws seem quite odd and again (imo) try too hard to be negative. In particular, the story focuses on a few states:
The adjusted rates in several states show the pandemic is spreading as fast among the unvaccinated as it did during the winter surge. Maine, Colorado, Rhode Island and Washington state all have covid-19 case spikes among the unvaccinated, with adjusted rates about double the adjusted national rate.
and says that their (adjusted for vaccination) case rates are as bad as they were in the winter surge. But the graphics presented, if I understand them correctly, imply that these states were dramatic outliers in terms of their winter surges:
That is, for each of those states they focus on, the “winter surge” reference point is substantially below the overall U.S. rate. So a more balanced statement would be “current case rates in these states are similar to their January numbers, which happened to be well below the national average”. In fact, it makes me wonder if we’re just seeing a statistical artificat - that the states with the lowest January case rates are mechanically going to look worse now because their reference levels are low, and not because their current case rates are high.
- The second issue I had was the focus on the “steady” death while ignoring the very warning included in their story:
Looking at the death rate is not a good measure of the current spread of the pandemic, experts said, because it is a “lagging indicator” — people dying are usually infected at least a month earlier, which means deaths don’t reflect current community spread of the disease. The steady adjusted death rate, however, shows that unvaccinated people are not yet getting safer.
In the very same paragraph, they present a warning to not over-interpret the death rate because it’s a lagging indicator, then the last sentence just goes ahead and over-interprets that steady death rate. When the overall case rate was fairly steady (even slightly increasing) about a month ago, it isn’t surprising that the current death rate is fairly steady:
but look at that sharp drop in cases in the last 4 weeks or so. Unless something extremely unusual happens, that drop should lead to a significant drop in deaths in the very near future.
Overall, I appreciate that this article is sending a “we need to convince more people to get vaccinated” message. However, I think the way it presents the data is significantly biased to give an overly-negative impression of the current status.
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Maybe, but maybe the variation is just random noise. I mean, I completely agree with you that the vaccine rollout was it well done and that it heavily privileged the privileged. And we still need to work on expanding access to the people who were passed over. That said, the pandemic is basically beaten in the United States, and it’s not beaten in the rest of the world. The upshot of Churchill’s much-maligned posting is that the new, apparently non-hybrid COVID strain is absolutely terrifying. We should absolutely be exporting vaccines as fast as we can to places that are at much greater risk even than underprivileged communities in the west.
Yeah but people literally saying I’m not wearing mask anymore because I got mine is.
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If you can’t see a difference in Churchills posting and JT’s posting you are not really trying.
They are not even talking about the same things.
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Maybe I’m reading with rose-colored glasses, but my impression was that people ITT were saying, “It’s ridiculous that I should have to wear a mask considering that I’m already vaccinated. But I’m still doing it.”