The hard time I have with any of the Omicron stats is that what is the baseline level of hospitalization? For now it’s got to be against historical info, not omicron specific??? Also does hospitalization mean the same thing now in terms of severity? Lots of reports of differing symptoms- less O2 crisis???
Still way better to be vaxxed than not.
Gamechanger
89 percent effective at preventing hospitalization, 100 percent effective at preventing death
This needs to get approved and mass produced everywhere immediately. It just needs to be given within 5 days of the onset of symptoms.
He should get a Nobel for this one.
Regarding Omicron:
I didn’t read the article, but that’s actually surprising to me. If someone asked me what I thought the NZ to US ratio on excess death was, I’d have pounded the under on 1/6. I thought they were doing an even better job than that.
A flurry of laboratory studies and real world data showed the neutralising antibodies you have after two doses of a Covid vaccine were far less effective against Omicron.
Prof Danny Altmann, an immunologist from Imperial College London, said you were left with “absolutely zilch” and were a “sitting duck for infection”.
You’re probably overlooking that these are UK Profs mainly talking about the AZ vaccine widely given here (though not as boosters, for the same reason).
If you want to argue that Professors in this specialised area from top universities are wrong, carry on.
No, you are still wrong because you don’t understand the difference between neutralizing antibodies and t-cell immunity. Your UK professors are not saying what you think they are saying, and the protection offered by AZ against severe infection and death has still not been shown to be reduced to “basically nothing.”
No, I think he’s saying that NZ had a mortality deficit during COVID, the size of which is 1/6 of the US’s excess.
Ah, well, that’s what I get for not reading the article.
At least it’s good to know that I would have been correct to pound the under.
It’s so god damn depressing that we have truly astonishing scientific shit happening with some truly brilliant heroes doing incredible work yet we keep shoveling thousands a day to their graves because of equally astonishing stupidity and selfishness and general asshattery.
There’s an immense amount of stupidity, selfishness and general asshattery, to be sure, but the real villain here is political decay. A lot of the asshattery is an epiphenomenon derived from the underlying fact that our ability to collectively do anything is heavily degraded. Basically, our two-party system requires the parties to disagree about stuff. When it works, they disagree about what policies can be enacted to accomplish shared goals. But if no policies can be enacted, then the disagreement has to be something meta. Think about this. In WWII, there was a substantial Nazi sympathizer population. During the Cold War, there was an even more substantial communist sympathizer population. But there was no pro-fascist or pro-communist tendency, because there was plenty of space for argument about how to fight the Nazis and the Soviets that the relatively small sympathizer population could be disregarded.
COVID is literally an inhuman virus. It has no sympathizers. Polling shows big majorities in favor of greatly expanding our anti-COVID initiatives through vaccine mandates and other means. But the political system is largely incapable of delivering strong action. COVID dovishness is largely about rationalizing the system’s inability to handle the challenge. To be clear, the actors involved in this are absolutely sociopathic shits, but in a healthier system those sociopathic shits would be hitting Biden for not doing enough to contain COVID. In the system we have, it’s much better for the sociopaths to frustrate every effort to contain the virus and then whine about masks.
I’m sufficiently shook about Omicron that I’m going to stock up on nonperishables/paper products today. In all likelihood this is an overreaction, but:
Things could get pretty crazy. Or this could all be NBD. At a minimum, everyone ITT who has living parents should pester the hell out of them about boosters if they haven’t gotten them already.
This part doesn’t conform with any of the actual information coming out on this topic. It’s up to you how cautious you want to be, but if you are fully vaccinated plus boostered you have as much protection as you ever did.
A lot of the article itself is trash, but the headline and main thesis is true. The large majority of the country doesn’t care about Covid anymore, and this is coming from both sides of the political spectrum. The people who never cared, still don’t. A large portion of the people who took precautions, got vaccinated, got boostered, are at the point of saying fuck em to the other group.
I mean, I fully understand its a wildly unpopular viewpoint around here, but your last sentence basically sums up how I feel.
Can this thread talk me out of taking my daughter (fully vaxxed) to see Spider-Man this weekend?
Apparently theaters are requiring proof of vaccination for everyone 5 and older, but they are also back to full capacity. We would both be wearing N-95 masks the whole time, but it still seems like kind of a bad idea.
TIA
Go to the movie.
I’m not even sure it’s unpopular, much less “wildly” so. You can basically count me in this group.
Okay, but why frame things in this way? We’re nearing 2,000 dead per day and who knows what this new wave will bring, why not lead with that info?
idk what happened to The Atlantic, they’ve been gaslighting their readers this whole pandemic.
If you’re fully vaxxed and masked, I see no reason to not go.
Yeah, I’m confused as hell why the Atlantic would run that article.
They hemorrhage money and are desperate for clicks? The same reason all media is complete trash? All media is basically now Skip Bayless.