Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

You clearly never read it. The point was focused protection awaiting herd immunity. The "focused protection" part relied on the ability to get people who were previously infected into those jobs that dealt with the isolated while the rest of the population let it run through the population until herd immunity was reached.

And there is no logical reason why that would cause faster vaccine development.

 

Annual flu shots are quadrivalent. Seems to me as diseases evolve you work to make the vaccine better. It may be true that the new versions are only modestly better vs infection. But at some point, a variant could, in theory, evolve to the point where long term t memory cell protection also starts to diminish. Seems like it is worthwhile to try to keep up and innovate, even if we will inevitably be behind chasing a moving target.

 

No. I have read it and have heard it spoken about. It does hope to reach herd immunity. Something that appears not attainable in any way now. It does believe vaccines are part of ending the pandemic.

This is the opening paragraph of the GBD…

“The Great Barrington Declaration – As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.”

Later it does say they believe eventually all populations will reach herd immunity. And define it as when the rate of new infections is stable.

“We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine…”

Now we could argue the nuance over that. And maybe I could have done a better job. End of the day this appears to be heading towards the flu that is seasonal. And the key point from the GBD is focused protection.

 

Flu shots are quadrivalent because they do not provoke long term protection. Very different scenario. Everyone agrees that you need to continue to study a virus and subsequent disease that has only been known about for 2.5 years, but the influenza virus has been understood for over 100 years and look how poorly we protect against that. To have been so wildly successful with SARS-CoV-2 vaccines after less than 1 year is mind boggling. Just remember, new does not = better, and in the case of the bi-valent shots, nothing in the data indicated better for more than a few weeks.

 

But if you are bad at statistics, you could see that data as supporting the idea that the vaccines are ineffective.

 

My oldest (recent UF grad still living in G) has covid for the third time. vaxed and boosted.
headache and mild fever are his only symptoms.

 

In a covid thread? I dont find it odd. Is Q taking about it on the recruiting board? That would be odd.

I disagree with Q on a lot of this, but my guess is that his position on the subject means he obsesses less than those who are worried about it.

We took my daughter to orientation at App State a couple of weeks back. Literally 200 parents in the room, no one wearing masks....Except two fully masked parents (a couple) that kept turning every Q&A into an angry covid conversation. I thought the other 198 people were going to run them out.

THOSE are the obsessed people.

 

From Wild-Type SARS-2 to Omicron: Towards a Theory of Corona Evolution

I like the comment below that say's "Covid is a crime story not an epidemiological story."

 

The full comment:

 

Agree with the qualifying phrase "if you are bad at statistics" receiving emphasis.

 

Unfortunately, covid has broken some folks.

 

Too many people will make claims about previous virus response based upon current facts. These new facts will increasingly be used to declare some "I knew it all along" hogwash. Speaking of hogwash, Michael Osterholm knew the GBD was hogwash from the start.

Dr. Michael Osterholm challenges the Great Barrington Declaration and the low herd immunity myth
Dr. Osterholm goes even further in his critique of the GDB and its signers: “The Barrington Declaration will go down as one of the worst moments that anyone who ever signed it will have in their public health career.”

 

The GBD is confirmed more and more each and every day.

It is even more infuriating that we shut schools down when those who opposed the GBD even knew that was bad policy.

 

You can get/create the answer you want with statistics.

And many have created their answer to take as many jabs as possible. Early on the high risk groups should have. But now…

 

The biggest issue with the GBD is the fact up to 1/3 of the people infected were asymptomatic, and were capable of spreading the virus during this time. How, pray tell, do you separate out those who were sick without symptoms, and those who were healthy? The only way would be frequent testing, tracing, and isolation of the sick.

S. Korea did this successfully. And their COVID numbers are far better than any other industrialized nation, especially the US. But not without a cost. They put COVID positive patients in isolation centers, where there wasn't anything to do but watch the most sick of the group die. Not great on the mental health of the people with mild cases.

Without the strong testing, tracing, and isolation, trying the GBD would have resulted in many more sick, and many more dead.

 

One of the biggest problems with GBD was the notion that early in the pandemic, you could just let every healthcare or nursing home staff member who had not had Covid go and replace them with people who had already had Covid. It was such an absurdly naive claim in which everybody is essentially interchangeable (we needed to let go of 75% of our nursing staff, just replace them with waiters who have less work!) that it was beyond absurd.

Of course, what Q is supporting has nothing to do with GBD, as I don't think he really has a handle as to what was in it.

 

No...The GBD is nothing what you keep claiming. You have no clue what you are talking about. Hence your ignoring my response once I showed you had no clue what you are talking about. Or you are lying about it on purpose.

 

How many times do the words "herd immunity" or "immunity" appear in the letter? I know you won't answer, but I figured I would ask anyways.

 

In addition, with people getting sick without symptoms, there was no way of knowing who had COVID and who didn't. We also didn't know how long Natural Immunity would last at the time, and what the propensity of COVID to mutate was. We know more of this today, for sure, but it's revisionist history to take information we have today and say mistakes were made yesterday without accounting for the fact people can only make decisions with the information they know at the time.

 

You don't even have to go that far on GBD. The authors (in other discussions of the topic) argued for a very low herd immunity rate. Basically, they were arguing for long-term immunity provided to the population with a relatively low infection rate and then stating preferred policies on that basis. A complete miss.

The people like this notably always jumped back and forth from Covid being some minor issue to it being so terrible that nothing we did mattered anyway. It always showed that the intent was never about following data and building sound policy on it.