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COVID-19: Winter 2021-22
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FrozenLVFan



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PostPosted: 12/26/21 9:40 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

There's very little scientific rationale to impose travel restrictions. Omicron is a perfect example. It was promptly reported to the WHO and rest of the world, and it was still too late for the restrictions to be effective. Those restrictions placed on southern Africa only served to make the politicians look like they were doing something useful. Global travel has left zero lead time for restrictions to be effective for most of the world. This is particularly true for an airborne virus with a 2-3 day period of asymptomatic contagiousness.

A good case can be made that less American travel and congregation would have helped to prevent the uncontrolled spread of both Delta and Omicron this winter and its impact on our healthcare system, but that's a political non-starter. We can't even get past the need for masks, social-distancing, and vaccines.


Howee



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PostPosted: 12/26/21 2:42 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Luuuc wrote:
Since the first wave ended in my state in May 2020 we've had zero Covid deaths. And barely needed to touch a mask or socially distance in the subsequent 18 months.
Travel restrictions are the primary reason for that success.
So to say that they are political and not scientific does not gel with me at all.

I dunno....do you see the same degree of resistance in Oz to mandates we see here? I'd say this entire situation is a product of BOTH flawed politics and flawed science. Here, Americans faced the first many months with political leadership that literally prioritized re-election possibilities over The Best Practices implementation. This created a polarization that led to more casualties than needed. The flawed science was unavoidable: a New Unknown Entity with capabilities of spreading more quickly than we could comprehend, made for production of "facts" that changed daily, and continue to change.

pilight wrote:
Travel restrictions are easier when you don't have thousands of miles of land border with foreign countries

M'thinks there's a few more layers to it all than just the geography OR travel restrictions. First of all, pilight's claim implies that most/much of our Covid has arrived via the Canadian or Mexican border. I'd be far more inclined to credit our very porous, high-volume airports in population centers.

And yeah....size DOES matter. Australia has far fewer people, and a far lower population density than we do. There's at lest some relevance to that.

Re: travel restrictions, it's true (as mentioned above). We're a day late and a dollar short if we're imposing them once we've *confirmed* something new is afoot: it's already ALL OVER THE PLACE, before we even knew it existed.

But *We Americans* have something in greater supply than any other country: arrogance. I do believe our vastly higher number numbers of cases, deaths, etc., are the result of MORE testing and MORE diligence and transparency in reporting numbers (think: N. Korea, Russia, Brazil, etc.)

However, *we* also have a population where large segments insist on their "rights" and freedoms to NOT follow mandates that might mitigate the situation. It MUST be a higher percentage than any other country I can think of....can you think of one single country where simple compliance is so openly defied?

Add to that an extraordinarily mobile society that probably travels more, per capita, than any other country I can imagine (I have no facts to corroborate that, but....what other place consumes as much gasoline, for example, as we do?)

More arrogant defiance. More mobility. More statistical transparency. This is a perfect storm for The Highest Numbers for the good ol' USA.



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jammerbirdi



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PostPosted: 12/27/21 11:23 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

PUmatty wrote:
I do not understand how we are almost two years into this thing, and I, living near the center of the third-largest city in the country, cannot find a test to purchase. I know there is a significant demand right now, but how is this not figured out?


Vanity Fair:

The Biden Administration Rejected an October Proposal for “Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays”

With omicron cases spreading like wildfire, the White House is finally taking steps to make free antigen tests available to all. But this fall, Vanity Fair has learned, it dismissed a bold plan to ramp up rapid testing ahead of the holidays. Frustrated experts explain how confusion, distrust, and a single-minded fixation on vaccinating Americans left testing on the back burner for so long.

By Katherine Eban
December 23, 2021

On October 22, a group of COVID-19 testing experts joined a Zoom call with officials from the Biden administration and presented a strategy for overhauling America’s approach to testing.

The 10-page plan, which Vanity Fair has obtained, would enable the U.S. to finally do what many other countries had already done: Put rapid at-home COVID-19 testing into the hands of average citizens, allowing them to screen themselves in real time and thereby help reduce transmission. The plan called for an estimated 732 million tests per month, a number that would require a major ramp-up of manufacturing capacity. It also recommended, right on the first page, a nationwide “Testing Surge to Prevent Holiday COVID Surge.”

The antigen tests at the center of the plan can detect the virus when patients are at their most contagious. Though less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory tests, which can detect the virus’s genetic material at any stage of infection, antigen tests provide a quick snapshot in time for those seeking assurance that they are safe to travel or won’t accidentally infect vulnerable relatives.

On December 2, with omicron threatening an imminent wave of new infections, Biden announced a smattering of smaller-scale plans that included requiring insurance companies to reimburse privately insured patients who buy at-home rapid tests, which sell for as much as $35 for a box of two tests—if you can find them amid widespread shortages.

Four days after that, White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed to deride the very idea of free nationwide home tests. “Should we just send one to every American?” she mused sarcastically from the briefing room podium. “Then what happens if you—if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?”

The fury with which public-health experts greeted Psaki’s comments reflected their longstanding frustration with an administration that, in their view, has put almost all its focus on vaccinating the American public, at the expense of other critical aspects of the response, from getting shots into arms overseas to making high-quality masks widely available. The rapid-test push, in particular, seems to have bumped up against the peculiar challenges of fighting COVID-19 in the 21st-century United States.

Difficulties include a regulatory gauntlet intent on vetting devices for exquisite sensitivity, rather than public-health utility; a medical fiefdom in which doctors tend to view patient test results as theirs alone to convey; and a policy suspicion, however inchoate, that too many rapid tests might somehow signal to wary Americans that they could test their way through the pandemic and skip vaccinations altogether. “It’s undeniable that [the administration] took a vaccine-only approach,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a vocal advocate for rapid testing who attended the October White House meeting. The U.S. government “didn’t support the notion of testing as a proper mitigation tool.”

On Tuesday, faced with a terrifying omicron surge, a stampede of holiday travel, and images of Americans waiting in hours-long testing lines from Brooklyn to Miami, Biden finally announced that his administration would do what many experts had been urging since the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic: Give Americans the ability to diagnose themselves. The federal government will launch a website next month where individuals can request free rapid tests that will be mailed to their homes. That plan requires 500 million test kits that the administration has yet to procure.

“The administration has been focused on expanding testing since the very beginning,” Dr. Tom Inglesby, who in January will become senior adviser for testing on the White House COVID-19 response team, told Vanity Fair. “It has always been a major pillar of the approach.” When Biden took office, there were no rapid, at-home COVID tests on the market; there are now 13. And the monthly supply has almost quadrupled since late summer. The administration has invested more than $23 billion on expanding testing, surging manufacturing capacity, and improving genomic sequencing, according to Mara Aspinall, cofounder of the biomedical diagnostics program at Arizona State University.

But the president’s announcement on Tuesday struck many experts as “an exemplar of too little, too late,” as Dr. Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, put it in a Substack post on Tuesday. Topol called the plan to make 500 million free rapid tests available sometime next year “totally inadequate,” writing, “We need several billion of these, and have needed them for over a year to help prevent spread, as validated and relied upon in many countries throughout the world.”

“The White House, in baseball terms, was playing small ball. When it comes to rapid testing, they’re bunting the players along.”

Critics say the Biden administration has been slow to act on testing, in part because it saw vaccination as the best pathway out of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assured Americans early this summer that, once vaccinated, they could shed their masks and forgo testing. Those declarations quickly proved untrue as breakthrough infections have risen. “We put all our eggs in the vaccine basket and it’s not enough,” Dr. Jay Wohlgemuth, chief medical officer at Quest Diagnostics, told Vanity Fair.

It has fallen to a small but determined group of advocates to argue that rapid testing is an essential strategic tool, and should be pursued as aggressively as vaccinations. Chief among them is Dr. Michael Mina, who until recently worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology and immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and as an associate medical director of molecular virology diagnostics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is now chief science officer at a Miami-based diagnostic company, eMed.

His journey began as early as January 2020, when he saw clearly that Boston was going to need COVID tests it didn’t have. He sought funding from Brigham and Women’s Hospital to build a test. “They thought it was a joke,” he said of some of the hospital’s pathology officials.

So he went to the Broad Institute, got approval to use its sequencing platform, and helped establish what became a prodigious testing laboratory there. From the Broad, he went back to top Boston hospitals, including Brigham and Women’s, Tufts Medical Center, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, to offer the Broad’s new testing capacity as an additional resource. “The pushback I got was amazing and swift,” he said. There were “pissing contests everywhere,” as the physicians worked to protect their turf running hospital-based tests.

Once Mina began to advocate for rapid home tests, he encountered the same mindset: doctors “trying to guard their domain.” Some doctors had long opposed home testing, even for pregnancy and HIV, arguing that patients who learned on their own about a given condition would not be able to act on the information effectively. Testing, in this view, should be used only by doctors as a diagnostic instrument, not by individuals as a public-health tool for influencing decisions.

A similar view prevailed within the FDA. The agency had approved PCR tests with perfect sensitivity that could tell people for certain whether they were infected with SARS-CoV-2. Those tests, while crucial, were expensive, hard to access, and tended to take days to yield results, meaning that they had little mitigating effect on spread. By contrast, low-cost antigen tests, which patients could administer themselves at home, were less sensitive. And sensitivity is what mattered inside the agency. As one FDA medical device reviewer told Vanity Fair, “We review data. If the data we’re presented with aren’t great, we’re not going to want the public to use that device.”

Mina understood that mentality. That’s why he told the Biden-Harris transition team in late 2020 that the FDA should have a separate, streamlined pathway to approve devices—such as less sensitive at-home tests—that are crucial to public health. “We had rapid tests last summer and fall, but the FDA wouldn’t authorize them,” said Mina. “But they were completely fine with PCR tests giving back results seven days later.” Ultra-accurate tests that take a long time to process have a clinical benefit for treating patients, but they are of no help in deciding if you should go to work or get on a plane that day. “If our goal is defined as public health, every test run last year was practically useless.”

“We put all our eggs in the vaccine basket and it’s not enough.”
Speaking for the administration, Inglesby said of Mina’s idea, “There is a strong scientific consensus in the administration that there should not be a second, lower public health standard for some tests. Not only would this be confusing, but members of the public will use these tests to make very serious decisions for themselves and their families and so they need to meet the same standard.”

To address the misconception that rapid tests are all but uselessly inaccurate, Mina developed a chart that has made the rounds on social media. It shows that while a PCR test will detect an infection for many more days, rapid tests specifically indicate whether you are actively contagious at the time—a status that can change quickly, which is why it’s necessary to test often if you want to avoid infecting your grandmother at the Christmas party.

As the FDA lumbered along, rejecting antigen tests that inevitably failed to compete for accuracy with PCR tests, rapid home tests became ubiquitous in Europe. Private industry had leapt into the antigen home-testing market, with European governments from Germany to the United Kingdom becoming its biggest customers. “In Germany, you could take one [free] test a week,” said Peer Schatz, managing director of PS Capital Management, a venture fund for clinical diagnostics. “The U.K. was even more liberal. They flooded the market with these tests.”

With roughly 200 different home tests approved in Europe, the price is as low as $1.50 a test, said Schatz. “You go to offices and meetings, you see these tests lying around. It’s a free giveaway, like masks.” Schatz says the prevalence of home tests reflects a different mindset: “I really like the aggressive use of testing and the acceptance of this being a key pandemic tool and embracing the value of information, which tests provide, and accepting some of the weakness.” By contrast, some of the biggest testing companies, from Siemens to Roche, have not had rapid tests authorized by the FDA yet.

The U.S. is not the only country facing a shortage of rapid tests, as omicron sweeps the globe. This month, the British government ran out of rapid tests that it distributed through an official website. In Spain, pharmacy shelves were empty of rapid tests, after demand rose 500 percent in November. In Canada, after provincial governments vowed to distribute millions of rapid tests at pop-up sites, many citizens seeking them went away empty-handed.

Once the Biden administration came into office, Mina, like many experts, saw an opportunity to transform the nation’s testing infrastructure.

In January, Mina and Dr. Steven Phillips of the COVID Collaborative sent the new administration a 23-page document outlining a national rapid-testing strategy that they argued would enable the country to reopen safely even before the vaccine rollout was complete. It made a case for rapid testing as the most powerful tool to reduce transmission and case counts quickly. But the Biden administration, said Phillips, lacked “the imagination to have an Operation Warp Speed-level program for testing.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/the-biden-administration-rejected-an-october-proposal-for-free-rapid-tests-for-the-holidays



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PUmatty



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PostPosted: 12/27/21 1:44 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

As I sit at home, recovering from COVID (it's been like a nasty cold), this Twitter thread from Andy Slavitt does a really good job of capturing a lot of my thinking.

https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1474898899001241605


jammerbirdi



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PostPosted: 12/27/21 2:52 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Feel better.



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Howee



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PostPosted: 12/27/21 4:20 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

PUmatty wrote:
As I sit at home, recovering from COVID (it's been like a nasty cold), this Twitter thread from Andy Slavitt does a really good job of capturing a lot of my thinking.

https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1474898899001241605

Yeesh. Here's to a speedy (and complete!) recovery.



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insidewinder



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PostPosted: 12/27/21 6:33 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

PUmatty wrote:
As I sit at home, recovering from COVID (it's been like a nasty cold), this Twitter thread from Andy Slavitt does a really good job of capturing a lot of my thinking.

https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1474898899001241605


I hope you are well soon. Agree on that thread. The Long COVID possibility is what keeps me doing all the mitigation things I can. Plus what they call mild is not really what most people think of as mild, it can just mean you felt like crap for two weeks but did not need the hospital. Do not want.


pilight



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PostPosted: 12/27/21 9:02 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

CDC Updates and Shortens Recommended Isolation and Quarantine Period for General Population

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1227-isolation-quarantine-guidance.html

Quote:
CDC is shortening the recommended time for isolation from 10 days for people with COVID-19 to 5 days, if asymptomatic, followed by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others. The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.



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pilight



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PostPosted: 12/28/21 4:33 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Good news about omicron: It may pass quickly, pose small threat to vaccinated, experts say

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/12/28/omicron-good-news-may-go-quickly-pose-little-threat-vaccinated/9029369002/

Quote:
It's already burned through South Africa since it was first identified the day before Thanksgiving and cases are falling there. In the week ending Dec. 26, the number of newly diagnosed had dropped nearly 36% from their peak a week earlier



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jammerbirdi



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PostPosted: 12/28/21 7:23 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Bad news is that children may be more susceptible to falling ill from Omicron.



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GlennMacGrady



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PostPosted: 12/28/21 7:58 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

I recommend these two YouTube sites of Dr. John Campbell and Prof. Tim Spector for in-depth, objective and thorough analyses of the most current data and tests about Covid, vaccines, therapeutics, nutritional advice, etc. They are UK sites that focus mainly on UK data, but they also discuss US, African, Oceanic, and European data. The info is infinitely more thorough than the superficial clickbait stories in mainstream media or the mealy-mouthed and politicized soundbite evasions of US health bureaucrats.

https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching/videos

https://www.youtube.com/c/ZOE-health/videos
FrozenLVFan



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 9:19 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Other bad news is that people can become reinfected with Omicron. The UK reports they have patients with their third case.


jammerbirdi



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 11:33 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

FrozenLVFan wrote:
Other bad news is that people can become reinfected with Omicron. The UK reports they have patients with their third case.


Where are we going with this?



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Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.” - jammer The New York Times 10/10/17
GlennMacGrady



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 3:44 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

jammerbirdi wrote:

Where are we going with this?


In my unimportant opinion, which hasn't changed since the early days, we are never going to social distance or mask our way out of this kind of world-wide aggressive virus. All these mitigation steps do -- maybe! -- is to slow somewhat, in some places, for some temporary period of time, the inevitable reach of the virus.

It has now also become clear -- and many scientists are now saying it -- that we will never vaccinate our way out of the virus either. This is obvious because: we have a suite of vaccines that are only partially and temporarily effective; those vaccines are and will remain unavailable to large parts of the world; and even if a super-effective vaccine were infinitely available, a substantial sub-population of the world will always be vaccine hesitant/refusenik for a variety of reasons.

Nor will dictatorial, tyrannical, hysterical or illegal government/institutional orders change any of the above. Some people will comply, others won't, and the virus will laugh at the government/institutional diktats as it mutates forever.

The only thing the world can do is to accept there is a new reality -- that there is one new deadly agent forever stalking the world among the thousands of such agents that already are -- and move on with life.

World: Keep in mind that the average profile of a Covid death is an 81 year-old with two comorbidities. Take whatever precautions seem psychologically comforting and medically rational to your situation, such as masking, distancing, sanitizing and vaccinating. But otherwise, as Epicurus, Isaiah (22:13), Ecclesiastes (8:15), Paul (1 Corinth. 15:32), and Jesus himself (Luke 12:19) have all put it in far more dangerous medical times, "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall die" . . . of something, anyway.
FrozenLVFan



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 4:35 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

The news this week has been so bleak that I can't disagree with that. I do think we still have a chance to produce more effective vaccines, but millions are going to die while we do that.

If we're giving up this fight, we need to change our approach to hospitalizing COVID patients. What we're doing right now is denying care to others, driving our providers out of healthcare, and eventually bankrupting us. Likewise, we need a plan for the millions who will have long-haul COVID and I'm not sure any effective treatment for that problem is even possible.


Howee



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 7:32 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Quote:
The only thing the world can do is to accept there is a new reality -- that there is one new deadly agent forever stalking the world among the thousands of such agents that already are -- and move on with life.


Mmmno -- I don't buy that, in light of pandemic history. Last century, the pandemic ran (by most accounts) from 1918-1920. Many things have changed, for the better:

1. We know what a virus is - they didn't. Vaccines and retroviral meds that greatly mitigate this pandemic have already materialized.

2. Most historians agree that the pandemic of last century was pretty much over in 2 years, 1920; the virus morphed into far less deadly versions. Why can't we expect that same possibility?

3. The spanish flu of 1918 claimed 25 million lives (by conservative estimates - most are significantly higher) The pandemic of Covid 19 has in ~ 2 years' time killed ~ 5 million. Line that up with global population numbers of the corresponding epidemics, and you get an enormously different death percentage per population. (1920: .25 B deaths/1.9 B, 2021: .05 B deaths/7.9 B)

Will *it* always be around? Probably. Must we continue to live in fear? I doubt it. Should we abandon hope? Not me. Cool



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 8:03 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Enough experts are saying this should be the end of the road for the virus. Unfortunately, Omicron happened during the winter when people are mostly indoors. Also, people need to stop flooding the ER just to try and get tested. If tested was more readily available and there wasn't a charge, I'd have to imagine cases would be even higher. There's also the factor of asymptomatic people walking around with the virus and nobody knows it.



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FrozenLVFan



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 9:03 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Howee wrote:
Quote:
The only thing the world can do is to accept there is a new reality -- that there is one new deadly agent forever stalking the world among the thousands of such agents that already are -- and move on with life.


Mmmno -- I don't buy that, in light of pandemic history. Last century, the pandemic ran (by most accounts) from 1918-1920. Many things have changed, for the better:

1. We know what a virus is - they didn't. Vaccines and retroviral meds that greatly mitigate this pandemic have already materialized.

2. Most historians agree that the pandemic of last century was pretty much over in 2 years, 1920; the virus morphed into far less deadly versions. Why can't we expect that same possibility?

3. The spanish flu of 1918 claimed 25 million lives (by conservative estimates - most are significantly higher) The pandemic of Covid 19 has in ~ 2 years' time killed ~ 5 million. Line that up with global population numbers of the corresponding epidemics, and you get an enormously different death percentage per population. (1920: .25 B deaths/1.9 B, 2021: .05 B deaths/7.9 B)

Will *it* always be around? Probably. Must we continue to live in fear? I doubt it. Should we abandon hope? Not me. Cool


I don't think this is comparable at all to the Spanish flu. The latter conferred lifelong immunity to survivors. COVID seems to produce minimal immunity in either survivors or the vaccinated after a few months.


Howee



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PostPosted: 12/29/21 11:10 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

FrozenLVFan wrote:
I don't think this is comparable at all to the Spanish flu. The latter conferred lifelong immunity to survivors. COVID seems to produce minimal immunity in either survivors or the vaccinated after a few months.

Not "comparable at all" is right in several ways....in 1920, far MORE people (raw numbers and percentages) died than in our current milieu.
....and then there's THIS though it's already over 10 days old! Razz It implies that degrees/levels of immunity can be heightened. Who knows?



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PostPosted: 12/30/21 7:52 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

I talked to a woman Monday that had had COVID. She walked/shuffled about 30' and plopped down on a bench. Then between gasps for air she said that she needed to catch her breath.

It took her 2-3 minutes before she looked "comfortable" again and began speaking without stopping every couple of words to take a breath. Even then she could only get through short sentences (5 or 6 words max) without stopping for a couple of breaths before continuing. She had been hospitalized for 35 days. Her hospital bill is over $500,000. She's only been out of the hospital about a month, so you can imagine that that will go up as bills will continue to come in. She's doing rehab now, at least 4x a week. She's 39 years old.



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pilight



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PostPosted: 12/30/21 8:50 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

FrozenLVFan wrote:
I don't think this is comparable at all to the Spanish flu. The latter conferred lifelong immunity to survivors.


No it didn't. It's a century later and people still get flu shots annually. Thousands still die from it every year.



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FrozenLVFan



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PostPosted: 12/30/21 11:24 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

pilight wrote:
FrozenLVFan wrote:
I don't think this is comparable at all to the Spanish flu. The latter conferred lifelong immunity to survivors.


No it didn't. It's a century later and people still get flu shots annually. Thousands still die from it every year.

Antibodies in survivors of the Spanish flu persisted for decades. We give vaccines to immunize people that haven't had Spanish flu before. People that have either survived or been immunized against COVID can still get the disease.

Howee wrote:
FrozenLVFan wrote:
I don't think this is comparable at all to the Spanish flu. The latter conferred lifelong immunity to survivors. COVID seems to produce minimal immunity in either survivors or the vaccinated after a few months.

Not "comparable at all" is right in several ways....in 1920, far MORE people (raw numbers and percentages) died than in our current milieu.
....and then there's THIS though it's already over 10 days old! Razz It implies that degrees/levels of immunity can be heightened. Who knows?


And I don't think you can compare a "completed" event to one that's still ongoing. Who's to say, at this point, whether COVID produces more or fewer deaths than Spanish flu when this pandemic is finally over, one way or another.

That letter is interesting but until it's backed up by some well-designed studies, it's just more noise.


Howee



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PostPosted: 12/30/21 12:05 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Ex-Ref wrote:
I talked to a woman Monday that had had COVID. She walked/shuffled about 30' and plopped down on a bench. Then between gasps for air she said that she needed to catch her breath.

It took her 2-3 minutes before she looked "comfortable" again and began speaking without stopping every couple of words to take a breath. Even then she could only get through short sentences (5 or 6 words max) without stopping for a couple of breaths before continuing. She had been hospitalized for 35 days. Her hospital bill is over $500,000. She's only been out of the hospital about a month, so you can imagine that that will go up as bills will continue to come in. She's doing rehab now, at least 4x a week. She's 39 years old.

How utterly sad. The 37-year-old father of five in my community that was hospitalized in September is still in the hospital, with no expectation of returning to work within a year.

FrozenLVFan wrote:
And I don't think you can compare a "completed" event to one that's still ongoing. Who's to say, at this point, whether COVID produces more or fewer deaths than Spanish flu when this pandemic is finally over, one way or another.


There ARE reasons one can't draw certain parallels between 2 such events, with only one still ongoing. But, simple math proves that the spanish flu was far deadlier in its 2-year run than covid has been in ~ 2 years.



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PostPosted: 12/31/21 9:49 am    ::: Reply Reply with quote

South Africa says fourth wave, Omicron on decline. Resulted in very few deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/world/south-africa-omicron-decline.html?auth=login-email&login=email



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PostPosted: 01/01/22 4:12 pm    ::: Reply Reply with quote

Is Omicron a New Wave or a Parallel Pandemic?


Quote:
I’m saying that there are red flashing warning signs, that we underestimate this virus at our peril and that even the best-case scenario is still bad.”


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