Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

For the record, I'm no expert either. It's why I quote and cite those who are. It lends credence to my arguments.

Here's Dr. Foxman's credentials. She is the one quoted saying we're in a race between variants and vaccines. Give my post a come on man rating, you are saying that to her too.

 

Really a worldwide issue, but The Economist has conducted a statistical analysis and estimated that true worldwide Covid deaths are in excess of 10 million rather the official 3.3 million

 

Wow you quoted a Yale doctor. Good for you. I can quote from a Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Oxford doctors who think quite differently than your Yale doctor. You get a come on man because you say the same crap over and over again. You disregard anything anyone says and revert back to we need everyone vaccinated and need herd immunity. You disregard the fact that a significant portion of our population has immunity from already having covid. Since you disregard that info I will continue to call you out on your poor choice of wanting kids vaccinated.

 

Great for her. Do you want me to go over the number of times some “very smart” doctors have been terribly wrong on covid? Seriously, are you related to this doctor? Can’t figure out why this person is so important to you.

 

Find the quotes and link them.

 

And here's why the vaccine is still needed for those who already had COVID-19.

However, some health experts consider vaccine-induced immunity to be better than the protection generated by the infection because it may be more robust, said Michaud. Researchers are still figuring out whether people who were infected with the virus but experienced mild or no symptoms generated an immune response as strong as those who developed more severe disease.​

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites the unknowns surrounding natural immunity and the risk of getting sick again with covid as reasons for those who had the virus to get a vaccine.
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I eagerly await the "expert" links refuting vaccinations for all eligible in our best, safest, and fastest options to beat COVID-19.

 

Because we no longer have children, I am not wading into that discussion at. On the topic of variants, the data certainly is "not enough data", however, three separate studies all have shown similar results at this point. The T-cell response that is provoked from the mRNA vaccines is extremely strong, and shown effective against Brazil and UK variants. My non-medical recollection is foggy, but someone broke it down in idiot-terms for people like me and basically suggested that even if the variants evaded your initial response and the anti-body response, your T-cell response was sufficiently strong to protect you from severe disease. So, much like the vast majority of cases that hysterical media are calling "breakthrough cases", you become positive for the virus, but never really get sick (sure hope I am remembering this properly).

Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 vaccines induce responses against 2 key variants, small study finds

 

This is from U California Davis Medical. Not as well known UC school like UCLA, but generally rates up there and compares favorably. It's an excellent primer on how the vaccines work and why everyone eligible should get the shot as soon as possible.

 

The US vaccinated 600, 000 kids ages 12-15 in the first week, bringing the total number of vaccinated children under 17 up to 4million in the US. Considering all of the unknowns around the new vaccines and questions surrounding whether or not children even need to be vaccinated, I would say that those numbers are pretty strong.

COVID-19 tracker: India's vaccine export ban likely to last until October; U.S. vaccinated 600,000 kids last week

 

LOL, the same CDC who said it’s not safe for kids to go back to school because they were in bed with the teachers unions? That cdc? The same CDC who botched Covid from the beginning? Just checking. Go look up the Great Barrington Declaration and get back to me. They have been right and far out front of any govt officials or any of your awesome “doctors”.

 

I looked them up. I’m curious as to in what ways you think they’ve been right. It seems to me that they just made some very general statement on what should be done rather than any specific predictions.

 

A time honored tradition of not saying anything specific, then interpreting the vague statements to match what happened as proof that you predicted the future. Nostradamus would be proud.

 

Schools being open. People at very low risk resuming their lives. Flat out telling the public they have a miniscule chance of dying from Covid if you are healthy and under 65. And when some scoff at that and say everyone knows that, well you are for sure wrong. Go look at polls showing people thinking they have a 20-30% chance of going to the hospital/and or dying from Covid. Our Media and the CDC/WHO did an awful job of telling the public the risks and how different those risks are for the young versus the old.

 

So no quotes from medical professionals yet. Just a name of a group with general hindsight.

By the way, while there are no official statistics, as of Feb 1, there were an estimated 700+ deaths of educational workers in the country.

Again, I await your links with your expert quotes baited breath.

 

You mean like these?


Opinion | Masks for Children, Muzzles for Covid-19 News


Ingraham: Dems are 'super-spreaders of fear, false information and hypocrisy'

"DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, STANFORD: No, I don't think if there's any good reason to vaccinate kids that young did for kids, they face a vanishingly small risk from COVID itself, near zero from mortality from COVID. At the same time, they haven't really tested the vaccine on enough children to know that with any confidence with the adverse - serious adverse event rate is anything more than zero. And you say you wouldn't the balanced this doesn't work. Why would I vaccinate my kid against something but disease for whom but it's not actually all that deadly? Where there's might be some serious adverse events, I think that it is a mistake to think about this, as good for kids. It's not good for kids.

And for the disease itself, for the spread of the disease itself. It's not necessary to vaccinate kids to end the epidemic. That is just a false idea. What's needed and that what we've done is to vaccinate the old and vulnerable. Once you've done that, they face an enormous risk of disease from COVID, harm from COVID if they get infected, once you've taken - once you vaccinated and taken them out of that pool, we defang the disease. That's really good news. I have no idea, why we're not sharing the good news, we've taken out the pool of people who would normally die from the disease.

Normally, we think when cases go up, that oh, my God, deaths are going to come. But now that we vaccinated the older, the vulnerable, that's not true anymore. We've decoupled cases from deaths, we should be declaring victory."

 

While Dr. Bhattacharya holds a Doctorate degree, and is a professor at a Medical School, his degree is in economics, and he teaches about the economics of Healthcare. Not necessarily a medical professional in any way.

Here Dr. B's biography. Nice try by you and Fox News. They trot out a man with a Doctorate degree that works for a renowned medical school, and we all assume he's an MD. But do 15 seconds of research, and you find this guy has as much medical training as I do. Which is none.

 

And by the way. The Stanford Health Clinic associated with the medical school is vaccinating everyone 12 and up who wants the vaccine. And are encouraging all to do so.

 

LOL. Now you don't like a Professor at Stanford's Medical School's take. How about Harvard?

I get it, you think kids with as close to zero risk as there is with covid to take an experimental vaccine that doesn't hardly help them at all. Makes zero sense. And to just say well that's what these hospitals are saying to do is not enough for me to send my kids to get vaccinated. Doctors and drug companies have made many many mistakes over the years saying something is safe and then with more research it's proven it's not. And one should ask why are drug companies not liable at all if something goes wrong when you say these drugs are super safe? Seems the drug companies aren't as confident as you are. But what do they know? You know more than them I guess...

https://twitter.com/martinkulldorff?lang=en

Covid vaccines for children should not get emergency use authorization - The BMJ


"Trials for covid-19 vaccines are also underway for children as young as 6 months. These trials are not powered to measure decreases in severe covid-19 infections, due to their rarity in this age group. Instead, these trials are examining safety, the immune response, and, as a secondary outcome, the impact on the incidence of covid-19 infections. As for adults, these trials are not designed to assess rare or delayed adverse events. Unlike for adults, the rarity of severe covid-19 outcomes for children means that trials cannot demonstrate that the balance of the benefits of vaccination against the potential adverse effects are favorable to the children themselves. In short, given the rarity of severe clinical courses and limited clarity of risks, the criteria for emergency use authorization do not appear to be met for children.

Emergency use authorizations for child vaccinations can make sense for children for whom the benefits are greatest, and thus for whom it is clearest that the benefits outweigh any unknown harms. In the near term, emergency use authorizations should be considered for children at genuinely high risk of serious complications from infection. It is also worth considering whether emergency use could be authorized for children whom especially concerned caregivers are sheltering from school or social interactions. The small risk posed to children by covid-19 does not merit restrictions on any regular child activities in a context where adults are protected by vaccines, but individual children who find their lives curtailed in this way may obtain significant benefits from vaccination."

 

Who didn't see this coming besides the Coronabros? These inflated numbers affected policy decisions and caused undue stress on parents of children. Absolutely terrible.

New Research Suggests Number of Kids Hospitalized for COVID Is Overcounted

"The reported number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, one of the primary metrics for tracking the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, was grossly inflated for children in California hospitals, two research papers published Wednesday concluded. The papers, both published in the journal Hospital Pediatrics, found that pediatric hospitalizations for COVID-19 were overcounted by at least 40 percent, carrying potential implications for nationwide figures.

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Amy Beck, an associate professor of pediatrics, also at UCSF, wrote a commentary for Hospital Pediatrics that accompanied the two studies. They wrote, “Taken together, these studies underscore the importance of clearly distinguishing between children hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 found on universal testing versus those hospitalized for COVID-19 disease.” The studies demonstrate, they said, that reported hospitalization rates “greatly overestimate the true burden of COVID-19 disease in children.” Gandhi told Intelligencer that while the studies were both conducted with data from California hospitals, “there is no reason to think these findings would be exclusive to California. This sort of retrospective chart review will likely reveal the same findings across the country.”

The implications of the findings of these two studies are enormously important, as reports of pediatric hospitalizations have regularly made headlines over the past year, greatly affecting public perceptions about risks to children. Untold numbers of parents have kept children home from school or limited playdates and other activities out of fear their children would be infected and fall seriously ill. The hospitalization numbers for children were already extremely low relative to adults — at the pandemic’s peak this winter, it was roughly ten times lower than for 18-to-49-year-olds and 77 times lower than those age 65 and up. But cutting the pediatric numbers by nearly half is a striking difference, making the actual rates vanishingly small. Pediatric hospitalization figures for COVID-19 also influence policy on school openings and guidelines, camp recommendations, and other political decisions. Gandhi and Beck’s commentary noted, “Children have suffered tremendously due to policies that have kept schools and recreational facilities closed to them, and the burden has been greatest on children who are low-income and English-language learners.”

In one study, conducted at a children’s hospital in Northern California, among the 117 pediatric SARS-CoV2-positive patients hospitalized between May 10, 2020, and February 10, 2021, the authors concluded that 53 of them (or 45 percent) “were unlikely to be caused by SARS-CoV-2.” The reasons for hospital admission for these “unlikely” patients included surgeries, cancer treatment, a psychiatric episode, urologic issues, and various infections such as cellulitis, among other diagnoses. The study also found that 46 (or 39.3 percent) of patients coded as SARS-CoV2 positive were asymptomatic. In other words, despite patients’ testing positive for the virus as part of the hospital’s universal screening, COVID-19 symptoms were absent, therefore it was not the reason for the hospitalization. Any instance where the link between a positive SARS-CoV2 test and cause of admission was uncertain the authors erred toward giving a “likely” categorization."

 

From the article...
As of February 1, the site estimates that at least 707 retired and active teachers, coaches, custodians and other staff members have died of Covid-19.

Crucially, that number doesn't account for whether an employee was exposed to the virus at school or in some other setting. There's also no evidence to suggest more teachers are dying than people in other professions. In fact, recent studies have concluded that in-person classes aren't significantly contributing to coronavirus spread -- an in-depth look at two US schools released last week found that there "was no evidence of student-to-teacher or teacher-to-student transmission" when proper precautions were taken.