Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

I have looked it up, I'm wondering why you haven't if you are going to be making these comparisons.

 

I think you miss the full extent of the danger, which is that this novel animal virus is still uncontrolled, which makes it a danger to all of society, regardless of whether or not if some people are at low risk. In causing an excess of at least 700k deaths and due to continued community spread and vaxx resisters, this means that there will continue to be too many who will needlessly get sick and die.

We have 330m people in the US. The only way we have a chance to beat it is to get people protected from the virus. Neither vague notions of people "getting healthier" or of achieving herd immunity through simply letting the virus spread to build up immunity naturally are anything that can be considered responsible strategy. Indeed, it would be a dereliction duty, which might sound nice but is wishful thinking.

 

whatever they are those diseases incubated slower than tcells and memory cells so long term defenses prevented infection. With Covid it incubates faster than long term defenses so you will still have some infection, but much less severe sickness.

 

Oh it will happen, especially when the crazies don't get the numbers they want. I think cali is already mandated for next year.

 

Vaccines are the best option for the whole of society. That they might be leaky or wane some, thus requiring boosters, is more of a reason to get everyone vaccinated. Despite breakthroughs increasing the more that covid spreads, hospitalizations & deaths are way down among the vaccinated. Just think if we had everyone vaccinated already, where we would be right now.

 

This exactly, wes. It's what several have been trying to point out for quite a while.

 

The polio vaccine, after two doses, is considered to be 80% to 90% effective against the paralytic variant, and 60% to 70% against all polio variants. Guess this vaccine is "leaky" too, and thank goodness, past generations weren't against "boostering up." Because they did, and not polio is all but eradicated from the planet!

And no, Delta wasn't around when the vaccine was being developed. How do you develop a vaccine for a variant that doesn't exist yet? And in the US, Delta didn't become the dominant strain until June, after many people were fully vaccinated.

The charts in the link say it all. 6X more times likely to catch COVID if you are unvaccinated, and 12X more likely to die! Go down to the age graphs, and you'll see practically no deaths from vaccinated under 50, but see a spike in the same age range for the unvaxxed. And in every age range above 50, more deaths from those unvaccinated than those with the vaccine.

The vaccine isn't perfect. Nobody with any scientific background has ever said that. Most have parroted what the WHO Director said. The vaccine isn't a silver bullet, but it is, by far, our best weapon against COVID. The graphs show this. The vaccine doesn't prevent all cases and all deaths, but it's done a hell of a lot of good.

 

No need to compare apples and oranges.

Too many here keep trying to compare polio/smallpox/chicken
pox to these brand new drugs.

The other drugs have decades of long term data. Polio/smallpox/mmr are seen as perfect.

‘Leaky’ Vaccines Can Produce Stronger Versions of Viruses

These new drugs are nothing close to the same thing.

 

Yeah, who would do that...

BTW, as pointed out, neither MMR nor Polio are 100% effective. They work "perfectly" because enough people have taken them to get to herd immunity even with their ineffectiveness rates. Vaccine effectiveness is a function of the percentage of the population that takes a vaccine.

 

My parents are 78 and turning 80 this week. Both remember standing in line to get their polio shots. Did they have long term data back then?

No. In fact, they had significantly less data. "Smaller" world in terms of communication around the globe. And much less sophisticated computers and other tools to help. Scientists at the time had no idea of the efficacy of the polio vaccine, and that data really wasn't figured out until about a decade later after the first shots were given. It's revisionist history to say we have data now for an event that happened decades ago, and compare to something we're witnessing in real time.

 

And we are doing what we can. We have new drugs that offer some therapeutic protection if you get the disease but are not working well at all when it comes to preventing disease. We have therapeutic new drugs for those that get the disease and symptoms justify taking them to keep people out of the hospital. They appear to be working much better but are expensive. Thankfully we don’t need that many as most recover without needing them. Granted we are probably using them more than necessary out of precaution right now (vaccinated and unvaccinated). But that is reasonable based on the situation. There are other treatments that some believe work. Others don’t.

The good news is that most people are fine when it comes to this disease. It is a terrible disease. And we need to be prepared to live with it. I hope it goes away. But I think this one is going to be endemic.

 

Okay?

 

I'm fine. I'm just trying to stay within the board's rules calling your comparison of polio vaccine data we now have, decades after it was developed, to the COVID vaccine, we are witnessing in real time, one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Of course we have a lot more data, today, on the polio vaccine. It was developed 70 years ago! But compare what they knew back in 1955 of the polio vaccine and what we know today about the COVID vaccine, and it's no comparison. We know a lot more about the COVID vaccine than they knew in the same time frame about the polio vaccine.

People trusted medical science and the government more back then. Thankfully, Facebook "Doctors" spouting crap about demon sperm didn't exist, and anti-vaxxers were an outlying group of morons. Both my parents said everyone in their respective classes took the polio vaccine, with no exception. So did all the teachers and staff. And the result? We beat the disease through herd immunity.

Why can't we do that today with COVID? Because there's too many people who simply won't get vaccinated.

 

So what would you do to protect the public against a novel animal virus?

 

Latest CDC report:

Vaccination protects against Covid-19 more strongly than previous infection does, CDC study finds - CNN

 

Oh because these vaccines are not working like the polio vaccine. Covid is a completely different disease in who it affects and how. People should be able to make decisions for themselves on whether they want to take a new drug based on their risk profile and risk tolerances.

 

You seem to have been making an argument against doing what we can. The point of vaccines is so that we can significantly decrease the need for treatments after people get sick, which is to say such treatments are a secondary line of defense.

It's the exact reason why public health strategy has put vaccines first. It's not the only component, but it's the primary one.

If this were a football team, we'd kind of think of it like vaccines being the defensive line and other treatments being the secondary, with free safeties playing center field being the ICU/ventilators in a last chance effort to keep the patient from dying.

 

Actually, the COVID vaccine is working very similarly to the polio vaccine. Two doses of polio are about 90% effective against the paralytic type of polio and about 70% effective against other variants. The COVID vaccine is 90% effective against the wild type, and about 70% effective against Delta, the most prominent of variants.

COVID is a different disease, but virology is virology. Take the R0 rate of a disease based on how contagious it is, figure out the efficacy of the vaccine, and that will get you an estimate on where herd immunity should begin. You should also consider the rate of mutation as well.

What you can't factor for are those who refuse to understand the science, or refuse the vaccine for whatever reason. And if similar numbers of uniformed existed back in the mid-50s and later, we'd likely still be dealing with polio, having never reached herd immunity numbers.

 

For the poster that rates "funny" inappropriately to information posts, all I see is the out of control laughing hyena's from Lion King. Just saying.

edit: posters

 

The covid vaccines are one of the most successful program rollouts of all time.