Octopus Overlords

gilraen wrote:So...interesting. Isn't this very similar to what measles does to your immune system? Except measles nukes your antibodies and (I think) B-cells - but the point where it can take your immune system several years to recover. And you only get measles once. This is insane.

The Biden administration will drop the Covid-19 testing requirement for inbound air travelers from abroad on Sunday, ending one of the longest-running travel restrictions of the pandemic.

The rule, put in place by the Trump administration in early 2021 and later tightened by the Biden administration, most recently required inbound travelers, including U.S. citizens, to show proof of a negative Covid test a day before boarding U.S.-bound flights. Travelers entering the U.S. at land border crossings were exempt.

Smoove_B wrote:We cannot keep doing this. I know we're going to try, but we can't.

RunningMn9 wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:28 pm Of course we can. We just have to not care about consequences, and we don’t.

Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center, who conducted the research, said he was surprised to learn that even people who had mild Covid symptoms and didn't require hospital care "still developed an increased risk of heart problems a year out."

"I went into it thinking that [the risk] was going to be most pronounced and evident in people who smoked a lot or had diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, or some [other] risk factors," he said.

"What we found is that even in people who did not have any heart problems to start with, were athletic, did not have a high BMI, were not obese, did not smoke, did not have kidney disease or diabetes—even in people who were previously healthy and had no risk factors or problems with the heart—Covid-19 affected them in such a way that manifested the higher risk of heart problems than people who did not get Covid-19."

Dr Al-Aly warned health systems "need to start preparing for the tide of patients that are going to hit our doors with heart problems and other long Covid problems".

"We're no longer talking about things that might improve tomorrow—we're seeing chronic conditions that will require care for a long time," he said.

noxiousdog wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 8:32 am Humans have lived with death and disease since humans were humans, and our brains are not equipped to evaluate probability. It isn't surprising to me that we are giving up.

One of the common responses to China’s draconian efforts to control COVID’s spread (which, notably, do not include forced vaccination, or the use of Western vaccines), is that it doesn’t work: SARS-CoV-2, particularly the Omicron variant, is simply too viral. It’s worth pointing out that this response is incorrect: China not only eventually controlled the Wuhan outbreak, and not only kept SARS-CoV-2 out for most of 2021, but also ultimately controlled the Shanghai outbreak as well. The fact there were only 5 community cases over the weekend is proof that China’s approach works!

What I think people saying this mean is something different: either they believe the trade-offs entailed in this effort are not worth it, or they simply can’t imagine a government locking people in their homes for months, hauling citizens off to centralized quarantine, separating parents and children, entering and spraying their homes, and killing their pets. I suspect the latter is more common, at least amongst most Westerners: people are so used to a baseline of individual freedom and autonomy that the very possibility of the reality of COVID in China simply does not compute.

...

I am being, as best as I can, impartial about the choices here: the important takeaway is not simply that China’s approach did in fact work to arrest the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but also that it was the only approach that worked; even Taiwan’s approach, which was far more stringent than any Western country would tolerate, eventually failed. Of course there were benefits, particularly in terms of getting time to administer vaccines, but it’s certainly worth wondering if it was all worth it.
The opposite side of the spectrum were areas of America that, after enduring a few months of (very) soft lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, were mostly open from the summer of 2020 on; I have friends in parts of Wisconsin, for example, whose kids have been in school since the fall of 2020. The price of this approach was far more deaths, particularly amongst the elderly who have always been at far higher risk: over 1 million Americans have died of COVID.

This isn’t the complete COVID story, though, and not simply because there can be no honest accounting of the pandemic until it finally sweeps China; the most effective vaccines in the world were developed in the West, and the U.S. produced and distributed the largest number of them. How many lives were saved, and how much economic upheaval — which isn’t about simply dollars and cents, but people’s livelihoods, sense of worth, and even sanity — was avoided or reduced because of vaccines? That must be recorded in the ledger as well, and in this accounting the West comes out looking far stronger.

...

To further expand on this point: if people in the West would not accept truly strict lockdowns, then they certainly wouldn’t accept centralized quarantine (which didn’t work), which means they absolutely wouldn’t accept forced testing and the inability to leave your house for months. Ergo, people in the West would never accept the reality of zero-COVID, which is why it makes sense to go in the opposite direction: open up, and forgo the massive costs of zero-COVID as well. Don’t get stuck in the middle, enduring the worst outcomes of both.

...

COVID, alas, seems to have been a worst case scenario in terms of both points: we suffered the aforementioned economic, socio-political, and development damage associated with strict control, while controlling nothing; meanwhile private platforms went overboard in controlling information, and ended up only deepening the suspicion of skeptics about COVID and its vaccines, leading to many more deaths, but also increased skepticism about vaccines generally.

RunningMn9 wrote: Sun Jun 12, 2022 1:09 pmWhatever is going to happen is going to happen. There’s nothing we are going to do to stop it. You don’t have to like it or accept it, but it’s what’s happening.

LawBeefaroni wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 10:06 am Had to help my parents move over the weekend. I can tell you that South Bend/Indiana is not giving any fucks at all. I saw zero masks the entire time I was there. Huge graduation parties were happening everywhere and indoor venues were packed.

LawBeefaroni wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 10:06 am Had to help my parents move over the weekend. I can tell you that South Bend/Indiana is not giving any fucks at all. I saw zero masks the entire time I was there. Huge graduation parties were happening everywhere and indoor venues were packed.

Kraken wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 1:21 pm
Just found out that my niece and her whole family are in their 10th day of covid brain fog.

hitbyambulance wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:21 pm there is a part of me that wishes suspended animation was a thing, so i could go under and emerge in a decade to see what the results of this self-selecting culling looks like

Smoove_B wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:29 pm

hitbyambulance wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:21 pm there is a part of me that wishes suspended animation was a thing, so i could go under and emerge in a decade to see what the results of this self-selecting culling looks like

Yes please.

LawBeefaroni wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:34 pm

Smoove_B wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:29 pm

hitbyambulance wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:21 pm there is a part of me that wishes suspended animation was a thing, so i could go under and emerge in a decade to see what the results of this self-selecting culling looks like

Yes please.

The first power cuts when we run low on capable power plant workers will be to suspended animation pods so don't count on waking up.

HHS @SecBecerra has tested positive for COVID-19 again, the agency just announced. Last time he tested positive was May 18, after attending the G-7 Summit. Becerra was just in LA for the Summit of the Americas. Canadian PM @JustinTrudeau also just tested positive for COVID-19 after coming home fro the summit

LawBeefaroni wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 3:26 pm Just got a note from kiddo's kindergarten classroom. A kid who was in his classroom yesterday just tested positive. They have class pods, where each classroom is separated from the others. So they're just closing his classroom. They require 5 days of closure and kids have to wear masks for 5 more days. Since this is a long weekend, they'll get 8. Unmasked kids require 11 days.

On the plus side, they're now crediting us for COVID closure days.

Smoove_B wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 9:00 pm Not even a month. When the right person gets COVID-19 for the umpteenth time and suffers immediate and then long-term health consequences, maybe something will change.

Zaxxon wrote: Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:50 am It's like they don't even perceive the irony of basing 'winning' immunity on a process that involves getting the virus.

I don’t think I would have ever been able to construct a dystopian reality as disturbing as the current one.

A zombie-like virus that invades the brain & blood vessels—that we know how to prevent but governments & corporations have convinced populations that it’s the cold. WTAF

Clear-eyed thread about what the risks from covid are now.

TLDR: if you're vaxed and boosted, risk of death is nil. But you're still at risk for long covid, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. In other words, covid won't kill you in the short term, but it might in the long.

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Jun 14, 2022 11:57 am

TLDR: if you're vaxed and boosted, risk of death is nil.

Max Peck wrote: Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:34 pm

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Jun 14, 2022 11:57 am

TLDR: if you're vaxed and boosted, risk of death is nil.

For how long after you were fully vaxed/boosted?

Also, "nil" is an odd way for them to spell "greatly reduced."

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:48 pm Just to clarify, I didn't use "nil"; the person I quoted in the Tweet (for those that can't see embedded Tweets) did.

Emergency physicians like us have seen the worst of Covid-19, from children gasping for breath to death on an unimaginable scale. So you might expect us to be cautious about attending large public gatherings and set a standard by establishing careful guidelines for organizing them.

You’d be wrong.

During the second week in May, the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), a large medical organization, held its annual meeting in person in New Orleans after canceling the event in 2020 and holding it virtually in 2021. The meeting brought together emergency physicians, residents, fellows, medical students, clinical researchers, and corporate exhibitors from across the U.S. at a time when the country was enduring yet another Covid-19 surge, this time from the Omicron BA.12.1 subvariant.

Organizers of the conference reported expecting more than 3,000 attendees, one of the largest events the society had ever hosted, and social media images from conference events showed large, closely packed indoor crowds in close contact and without masks on.

The week after the conference, news of Covid-19 cases began circulating among our colleagues. Some shared stories of becoming ill, others described how they were pulled in to cover the shifts of others who were struck by Covid.

To come up with a back-of-the-envelope estimate, we reached out informally to 15 emergency medicine programs across the country to see how many of their attending physicians, fellows, residents, and research staff attended the conference and how many cases were thought to have resulted from the conference. Among the 11 programs that responded, the number of attendees ranged from five to more than 50, and Covid-19 case rates ranged from 18% to 67%. While there are many caveats to the data (it’s a nonrandom, convenience sample, the data are self-reported estimates), they suggest that this single academic event was responsible for many hundreds of cases.

The argument for individual responsibility has been increasingly present over the past few months: Informed individuals can decide to add layers of protection as they see fit. It’s hard to argue that a group of academic emergency physicians isn’t well informed about the dangers of Covid, as well as about the best measures to mitigate risk. Yet the majority of attendees did not layer in mitigation strategies, ask the conference organizers to consider changing their policies, or cancel their trips to the conference after witnessing the minimal protections in place.

It is easy to blame individuals for taking high risks. But most people have personally witnessed how easy it is to fall in step with the lowest level of mitigation — even when they know better. Instead of blaming individuals, the focus should be on the systems in place that encouraged “throw caution to the wind” decision-making at events. Organizations should work to protect their members by requiring mitigation strategies, providing the appropriate technological and material resources, and making safety the norm. It is much harder for the individual to make the right choice when it entails increased effort and there is no incentive to be responsible.