Bad News Thread

Grace T. said:
www.wsj.com

Opinion | The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It

There’s a reason no government has done a cost-benefit analysis: The policy would surely fail.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
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Your previous link was better.

The WSJ editorial is from a philosophy student with no particular qualifications. He starts off using an anti-lockdown argument to justify ending the Texas mask mandate. He never explains why a mask mandate qualifies as a lockdown. It just gets worse from there.

Eventually he notes that the cases graph is not exponential up through herd immunity. Of course, no one expected it to be an exponential that ends in a hard cutoff. People expected a logistic curve: growing exponential early, and declining exponential late. Total cases look like a sigmoid.

A phil student who doesn’t hang out in biostats classes wouldn’t know this. This is why phil students who avoid biostats classes should also avoid writing epidemiology editorials.
 
apnews.com

Olympic host Japan will not take part in China vaccine offer

TOKYO (AP) — Japan will not take part in China's offer — accepted by the International Olympic Committee — to provide vaccines for “participants" in the postponed Tokyo Games and next year's Beijing Winter Games.
apnews.com apnews.com

www.theguardian.com

IOC reveals China has offered vaccines to Tokyo and Beijing Olympic athletes

The IOC president, Thomas Bach, says the Chinese Olympic Committee has offered vaccine doses for the Winter and Summer Games
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

The Chinese vaccine hasn't been approved by most western governments so don't know why any would give it to their athletes but the third world may not have much of a choice (though a few central and eastern European governments are getting panicked by the EU response and are accepting the Sputnik vaccine). Given the vaccination situation in the EU and third world, not sure how Japan could open up the games to foreign non-official travelers at this point.
 
dad4 said:
Your previous link was better.

The WSJ editorial is from a philosophy student with no particular qualifications. He starts off using an anti-lockdown argument to justify ending the Texas mask mandate. He never explains why a mask mandate qualifies as a lockdown. It just gets worse from there.

Eventually he notes that the cases graph is not exponential up through herd immunity. Of course, no one expected it to be an exponential that ends in a hard cutoff. People expected a logistic curve: growing exponential early, and declining exponential late. Total cases look like a sigmoid.

A phil student who doesn’t hang out in biostats classes wouldn’t know this. This is why phil students who avoid biostats classes should also avoid writing epidemiology editorials.
Click to expand...

May be an image of text that says 'Social distancing spectator chair'
 
Eu update. Hard hit Sweden and the Czech Republic join spain and Belgium in having declining cases. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe (with the exception of anomalies Portugal and Ireland which remain flat) have rising cases at this point. Norway Finland Estonia and Hungary which had to this point been spared the worst of the epidemic are hitting all time peaks.

I read an interesting conspiracy theory about why the triangle from Bangladesh to Singapore to China is, despite widely different intervention policies, doing better than the rest of the world: they all have wet markets where exotic animals such as bats are eaten. Don’t know if it’s true or not but it’s pretty clear this triangle hasn’t been as hard hit as the rest of the world including Japan.
 
Grace T. said:
Eu update. Hard hit Sweden and the Czech Republic join spain and Belgium in having declining cases. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe (with the exception of anomalies Portugal and Ireland which remain flat) have rising cases at this point. Norway Finland Estonia and Hungary which had to this point been spared the worst of the epidemic are hitting all time peaks.

I read an interesting conspiracy theory about why the triangle from Bangladesh to Singapore to China is, despite widely different intervention policies, doing better than the rest of the world: they all have wet markets where exotic animals such as bats are eaten. Don’t know if it’s true or not but it’s pretty clear this triangle hasn’t been as hard hit as the rest of the world including Japan.
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I know so much Grace, no one believes me.
 
The mask is and soon, the vaccine will be the most divisive BS ever put on Americans. I already see the politics of "yes" for mask and bat vaccine and "no." This is going to get a lot worse before people stop being scared of a man made fear bomb. My buddy says what they really want are folks guns. I have none and never will have a gun. I shoot with my mouth only :) God, please come help us with an intervention. I see no other way out of this.

1615730897691.png
 
So what we're doing by giving imperfect vaccines is to encourage the emergence of vaccine resistant viruses. What will the response be? We need another vaccine, let's make another vaccine, let's make another vaccine, let's make another vaccine. And we saw this with flu, so now people are being given four different flu vaccines every year, because every time they were seeing the emergence of vaccine elusive or resistant strains. And that is in the case of coronavirus a real issue, because I can see as it, it's like cat and mouse. It's a game of cat and mouse, and the question is who is the cat and who the mouse in that situation?-- Andy Wakefield
 
This is beyond chilling. We're playing God, and then in a hubris or an arrogance, saying we don't need any testing. We're smart enough to know how this is going to come out. As you've cited, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. It's not like if they made a mistake, oh, here's the antidote if we're wrong. There is none. It's something that can't be reversed. Is there any danger that if one person gets one of these types of these vaccines that you've just described, can they shed or can they spread it to other people, or is the danger and the risk just within themselves? (Pat Gentempo)

The first type, the RNA type of vaccine, no, I don't think so. It's not a live virus, therefore it doesn't reproduce and get passed out in saliva or respiratory secretions, for example. But if the adenovirus construct vaccine encountered another adenovirus naturally that then enabled it to reproduce, then the answer is yes. If it then restored its ability to reproduce in the human host, then you have a situation where, yes, it may well be shed and spread horizontally to other people in the community. (Andy Wakefield)
 
Grace T. said:
Eu update. Hard hit Sweden and the Czech Republic join spain and Belgium in having declining cases. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe (with the exception of anomalies Portugal and Ireland which remain flat) have rising cases at this point. Norway Finland Estonia and Hungary which had to this point been spared the worst of the epidemic are hitting all time peaks.

I read an interesting conspiracy theory about why the triangle from Bangladesh to Singapore to China is, despite widely different intervention policies, doing better than the rest of the world: they all have wet markets where exotic animals such as bats are eaten. Don’t know if it’s true or not but it’s pretty clear this triangle hasn’t been as hard hit as the rest of the world including Japan.
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The other thing I wanted to talk about was the emergence of new strains of the coronavirus that are dissimilar in their behavior and their characteristics to the parent strain that really dominated the first 12 months of this epidemic, because I think this is an extremely important thing that we've overlooked. It really comes down to evolutionary biology. What we're seeing in the news now is new coronavirus in the UK, more contagious, more infectious.

UK, more contagious, more infectious than the original strain. Then it emerges in South Africa and emerges in Colorado in California, and suddenly it's everywhere. This new strain that appears have a greater propensity to spread, it's more contagious, it's more transmissible, has emerged as a new strain. And why would that happen? In terms of evolutionary biology, RNA viruses mutate all the time. They're much more labeled than DNA viruses like herpesviruses, for example, because they don't have what's called a proofreading function or an effective proofreading function of the gene when it's replicating. And so we see mutations emerge with RNA viruses all the time, but for the vast majority, they confer no advantage and therefore they die out. And the parent strain, the dominant strain remains just that dominant.

Now this infection has not behaved like a typical respiratory infection. What will usually happen with a respiratory infection like this, as we see it's margin, it's a rapid increase, a peak, and a decline and it disappears. But that hasn't happened, and what we've seen instead is a flattening of the curve, a protracted infection, and now the emergence of new strains. And now was this the hand of man? And the answer is largely yes, even though masking and social distancing and lockdown are totally imperfect in terms of controlling the infection and it's spread, they nonetheless will have modified it. And in modifying it, in making it more difficult for the virus to spread, what that does is put a genetic selection pressure on the virus. In other words, amongst those mutations, if there are mutations that are more easily spread, then they will have a survival advantage in circumstances where man is trying to prevent the spread.
 
So what you'll do is encourage by virtue of lockdown, masking and social distancing, you will encourage the emergence of new strains with the survival advantage of being more transmissible. They will survive, and so what we've done through our imperfect interventions have created, I believe these new strains which are highly transmissible. Now that doesn't necessarily make them more dangerous, but they are more easily spread. And I believe that we've done that. And I think the case for allowing this virus just to emerge, go up, pick, go down and disappear while protecting those at highest risk was obvious from the very beginning. And we've said this from the very beginning, let it happen and get rid of it. But we haven't done that. We interfered, we put a genetic selection pressure on the virus, and now we have strains which are more transmissible.
 
And to add insult to injury, this new strain is hopping on the third wave of the second set of waves out of New Zealand. These waves of the new virus strain are not like other waves in the past. These are waves that will sneak up on you as you lay on da beach with no mask on because you took your eyes off the waves.
 
crush said:
@kickingandscreaming and anyone else. If you feel the desire to inject vaccine, I pray for you and those who follow your lead. Were all leaders to influence. Stay safe everyone :)


View attachment 10384
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5&6 on this list are a little cheeky. While none of the vaccines are 100% effective the research that’s coming out shows that they are substantially effective in preventing covid and preventing onward transmission so that’s just misleading. 10 at the current time is a purely theorectical concern but women have gotten pregnant after taking mRNA vaccines. 8 is true...if you don’t like gmos don’t know why you’d take an mRNA vaccine but the bigger question then is why don’t you like gmos.
 
Grace T. said:
Eu update. Hard hit Sweden and the Czech Republic join spain and Belgium in having declining cases. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe (with the exception of anomalies Portugal and Ireland which remain flat) have rising cases at this point. Norway Finland Estonia and Hungary which had to this point been spared the worst of the epidemic are hitting all time peaks.

I read an interesting conspiracy theory about why the triangle from Bangladesh to Singapore to China is, despite widely different intervention policies, doing better than the rest of the world: they all have wet markets where exotic animals such as bats are eaten. Don’t know if it’s true or not but it’s pretty clear this triangle hasn’t been as hard hit as the rest of the world including Japan.
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Take a look at the variant numbers for b.1.1.7 in EU states. It's over 70% in many places.

I think they are experiencing now what LA saw in December: A high transmission variant that overwhelms the policies which halfway worked for vanilla covid.

Hope the weather helps FL turn out better.

Jimbo
 
Grace T. said:
5&6 on this list are a little cheeky. While none of the vaccines are 100% effective the research that’s coming out shows that they are substantially effective in preventing covid and preventing onward transmission so that’s just misleading. 10 at the current time is a purely theorectical concern but women have gotten pregnant after taking mRNA vaccines. 8 is true...if you don’t like gmos don’t know why you’d take an mRNA vaccine but the bigger question then is why don’t you like gmos.
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Pro Vaccine is all about choice. Let's skip to GMOS. I dont like them because my wife say's their bad. I asked her why and this from her.
"Dear Grace, GMO's are genetically modified and because of that, our body does not recognize it as food. It's better to eat organic food that is bio available and immediately recognized and useful to create the building blocks our bodies need to repair, restore, and replenish for renewed vitality & longevity. My husband has lost over 30 lbs in the last 12 months. I'm so proud of him for finally lessoning to me." Queen Bee wifey :)
 
kickingandscreaming said:
Not if this guy is correct. Even if he's incorrect, it gives plenty of time for "Team Fear" to extend restrictions (6-14 weeks from now goes until May 14). It could be "orange" in March, but based on history, those in power in CA are likely to determine that we have to continue all restrictions until they perceive this threat is zero. If CA really does allow what they say they will in March if we get to orange, it will mark a significant change in their philosophy regarding the virus. Anyone think we will get a new model in the next few weeks based on the spread of the variants, or will Newsome be too busy fighting for his political life?

***

An epidemiologist who advised President Joe Biden’s transition on the Covid-19 crisis warned on Sunday of a looming wave of infections and said the U.S. should adjust its vaccination strategy in order to save lives.

“The fact is that the surge that is likely to occur with this new variant from England is going to happen in the next six to 14 weeks. And, if we see that happen, which my 45 years in the trenches tell me we will, we are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country,” Osterholm said.

www.cnbc.com

Former Biden Covid advisor says U.S. should prioritize first vaccine doses ahead of potential surge

Dr. Michael Osterholm says the U.S. should prioritize first doses of Covid vaccine ahead of a potential surge linked to overseas variants.
www.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com
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Well, here we are. Six weeks ago Osterholm stated that we were 6-14 weeks away from this.

“You and I are sitting on this beach, where it’s 70 degrees, perfectly blue skies, gentle breeze, but I see that hurricane — Category 5 or higher — 450 miles off shore,” Osterholm told host Chuck Todd. “Telling people to evacuate on the nice, blue sky day is going to be hard. But I can also tell you that the hurricane is coming.”

It's interesting that 6 weeks ago he described the situation as "70 degrees, perfectly blue skies, gentle breeze". To revisit, 6 weeks ago vs. today looks like this.

7-day averages
Cases: 6 weeks ago, 146K Now, 55K
--- 62% drop

Hospitalizations: 6 weeks ago, 105K Now, 44K
--- 58% drop

Deaths: 6 weeks ago, 3160 Now, 1419
--- 55% drop

It's not all good news. We have leveled off considerably, but are still trending down. More good news is that vaccinations are accelerating. We will likely see a few down days due to the storm, but we are showing that we have the capacity to handle more vaccines per day. For the past week, 3% more got their first shot. If J&J comes through as scheduled, we will likely be vaccinated at a rate of around 1% of the population per day in April. Also, the rate at which individuals are fully vaccinated will go up with the J&J shot.
 
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