Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

None of these appear to be about masks as source control. these are all about how well the mask protects those who are exposed to people who are infected. I agree that the mask isn't very effective for protecting the mask wearer, I explicitly said so several times. The value of the mask is in situations like Tilly's wife going to visit her grandfather. She can reduce his risk by wearing a mask.

The mask doesn't protect the wearer, it protects those around the mask wearer.

 

The Great Virtue blinds them of reality. These masks are not stopping the aerosol particles that remain in the air for an extended period of time. And they spew their great virtue all while surely putting their loved ones at risk each and every day at home (sarcasm...as they are surely healthy anyways yet even if they were sick I would bet they do not walk around the house with a mask on). I mean it is inconvenient and all...

 

No it doesn't. There are zero RCT's showing masks work. It's ok to admit it. Can't believe after 3 years of this people still think they work. Amazing.

 

And exploded correlating with pan-panic.

 

There were countries that either didn't lock down, or tried the herd immunity approach. Sweden, for example, never closed any schools below high school, and had very loose COVID restrictions. The results? More COVID deaths in Sweden than all other Nordic countries combined.

In the UK, they first attempted to isolate the more susceptible populations like the elderly, and keep everything open in the hopes to build herd immunity quickly among the rest of the population. As a result, there were no lockdowns at the start in the UK. In the end, this decision was deemed one of the worst public health strategies in the history of the UK.

Thankfully, for the most part, the US didn't follow Sweden's and UK's failed policies. And both these countries had about-faces and locked down after they saw what an unmitigated disaster their respective policies were turning out to be.

As for the vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine was created without a cent of Operation Warp Speed dollars. Warp speed monies were spent on buying doses of Pfizer, but to say Trump brought us the shot is inaccurate.

I do agree the rollout was disasterous. But that's because Trump had no plan at all to roll out the shot. Things got a bit better when Biden took over, but the message should have been we're in a race between vaccine and variant. And if we don't reach herd immunity quick enough through vaccine, there will be a variant that is vaccine resistant, and cause more problems.

 

How do you reach herd immunity through a vax that doesn't keep you from getting or spreading the virus?

 

The more the virus spreads, the greater the chance of a new variant that is vaccine resistant. Had we had reached 75% or greater vaccination rate before Delta took hold, we would have had a good chance of attaining immunity through the vaccine. Once Delta hit, we needed closer to 90% vaccinated rate to reach herd immunity. Once Omicron hit, it became impossible to reach herd immunity through the original vaccine.

These are all estimates, of course. And moot, because we never reached over 70% vaccination rate in the US. Let alone the world. But it's all a probability and math problem. The original vaccine had a 95% efficacy rate against infection of the wild type. Have enough people vaccinated before the wild type mutated into a variant, the wild type would have had such a low number of people it could infect, the rate of mutation would have been very low, thus the probability of a vaccine resistant variant would have been low.

 

I think herd immunity in a traditional sense is impossible with Covid, just as it is with the flu. You would have to get everybody in the world vaccinated in a month or so such that antibodies could squash the virus before it spreads. Again it would have to be worldwide. Antibodies start to fade around 3 months. There is still long term TCell / memory cell immunity but that takes a few days to kick in, usually slower than Covid incubates (as compared to most other diseases with much longer infection incubation period).

Depending on how you define herd immunity at some point almost everybody has some long term protection between vaccine and prior infection, so less people will die and get really sick but the protection against Covid infection and spreading is minimal.

 

Variant.

Variant of what ?

 

Just to be clear, it isn’t so much the vax but the Covid disease. Most diseases incubate 7-14 days, and long term T Cells and memory cells that activate around 5 days block them. Covid incubates in 3-4 days, faster than T cells and memory cells can react. It is probably impossible with current vaccine technology to completely eradicate Covid. But it can keep you from getting severely sick.

 

Remember, the flu had a long head start before any flu vaccine was ever created. And now, there are 4 different types with over 100 subtypes of virus that can cause the flu. We had the chance to cut COVID off at the pass when it was still just the wild type. Probably only a pipe dream that we would have gotten it done, considering that yes, the virus is a global pandemic. Still, we had the opportunity and failed.

 

There is no ‘Covid disease.’ No unique symptoms. No remarkable autopsies.

 

No I don’t buy that. Again you would have had to have 90% of the world population vaxxed in a short time. That’s never going to happen. Many of these variants came from other countries.

More Covid Vaccines could have decreased infections and saved more lives but it’s highly unlikely there is any scenario where Covid is squashed by a vaccine. It is just the nature of the disease.

 

Let’s pretend the virus is real. It’s called Covid-19 for a reason. We’re in ‘23 now. We’ve never seen this sort of interminable hunkered down fear. And this is grown man hunkered down fear.

 

Sweden is the example of how we should have handled this. As we deal with excess deaths. As Europe deals with excess deaths. They are not. Their Covid death rate is under that of Europe.

Europe population: 746.4 million
Sweden population: 10.42 million

Europe Covid Deaths: 2138988 as of Dec 4
Sweden Covid Deaths as of today: 22142

Europe Covid Death Rate: 0.0029
Sweden Covid Death Rate: 0.0021

 

70% to 75% in a short time for the wild type. 90% once Delta hit. Yes, it was always unlikely. But when you can't even hit 70% in the US, no way the world was going to hit it. Maybe we could have staved off Omicron for a time had we hit 70% world wide? But we'll never know.

 

This is pure hogwash considering the shots did not stop delta. On top of that there are concerns not only with safety but to keep using an archaic shot that it will speed up how quickly the new variants come about. Thankfully the it appears the new ones continue to be less severe.

 

fauci would be proud of this LOL!!!

 

Remember when they were screaming about Sweden being an “uncontrolled experiment” ?

 

Other countries had higher vax rates than we did and still had all the variants and infection, mainly just comparatively lower death rates.