Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Well considering cases exploded even in highly vaccinated states or countries with Omicron, can you show me what it’s doing?

Before Omicron, chance of hospitalization was less than 1% even for unvaccinated. Now it’s even less. The flu is worse than Omicron.

Some countries are now starting to abandon testing with how fast it spreads but how little danger it has for most people regardless of vaccine status.

It will help anyone who happens to get Delta but that has quickly become almost non existent.

also just yesterday I replied to you with a study that shows NI shows better response by a good amount against Omicron than any vaccine. It’s because of the reasons I have stated many times.

 

Apparently you didn’t read the responses by other posters and me to your reply. So end of discussion. I don’t want to keep repeating myself.

 

This article looks at hospitalizations, vaccinated versus unvaccinated in NYC and Seattle against Omicron. Unvaccinated faring much worse than the vaccinated. Same story in Denver. 82% of COVID ICU patients are unvaccinated. Same story in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale.

All across the country, hospitals are filling up with mostly unvaccinated. Even as cases rise for all. The vaccine is less effective at stopping infection, but it's still highly effective at stopping hospitalizations. And that's more than nothing. That's huge.

 

I sure did, and proudly so. Nothing special about Biden though. It was voting against the other guy that was so satisfying. And Trump continues to do all he can to destroy our democracy. Not a peep from you about any of that though. Instead you're criticizing Harris for 'cackling'.

 

Too much for you to read the paper I guess.

Also, I love how the closet anti-vaxxers continue to throw around the "vaccine is doing virtually nothing against Omicron", yet every bit of data from S Africa to Denmark and from New York or Texas flies in the face of that, unless you are equating a common cold vs ICU stay and death.

 

nc’s posts and some of my posts show this “it is doing nothing” is just not true. The vaccines have had significant efficacy against severe illness including omicron. The immune response appears to be wider against severe illness than antibody response vs infection.

 

There is simply more data to show that unless you had a booster in the last 2-3 months, the vaccine provides very little protection when it comes to Omicron. I have provided actual studies and data to back up what I am saying.

3 weeks ago it was hoped the vaccines still had efficacy in preventing severe disease.
Well more and more data is coming out now.
Omicron thwarts some of the world’s most-used COVID vaccines

“Iwasaki and her co-authors studied blood samples from 101 individuals who received two doses of CoronaVac followed by an mRNA booster. Before the boost, the samples showed no detectable Omicron neutralization. Afterwards, 80% of analysed samples showed some Omicron-blocking activity9. But the quantities of antibodies that had Omicron-neutralizing potential were not much greater in this group than in a separate population that had received two doses of mRNA vaccine and no booster. The work has not yet been peer reviewed.”

With that said, they might provide a little benefit particularly those recently boosted and I’m still a fan of 65 plus and those with health issues to get boosted since why not, the risk still outweighs any potential vaccine related reaction.

I am just simply against any forced government vaccine mandates or vaccine passports.
By the way, look at every state on the NYTime website. No matter vaccine rate, every state experienced or is about to a massive spike compared to any other point in the pandemic.

Than look at the age breakdown for hospitalization. 70+ group by far above any other age group despite the fact that age group is typically the highest level of vaccines in every state.

 

Which paper are you referring to?
Funny you use S Africa. Have you looked at their vaccine rates? I guess not.

Denmark is a highly vaccinated country. One of the highest actually. Yet cases continue to exploded. Hospitalizations highest they have been all pandemic.

 

I'm curious why the people avoiding the vaccine and drinking their own urine instead rush to the hospital when their Covid case gets severe to be treated by people whose training is based on the very medical science they ignored in the first place?

 

According to that nature article, it was inactivated virus vaccines that had the most problems, not the mrna vaccines. Anyway, my underlying point about all of this is that people need to do better in appreciating the danger this virus still poses and of the destruction it has done. It's as if we look around, see nearly 900k dead and shrug. This imo is a terribly misguided way to react to what is/has been happening.

If we think about it through the lens of how cases have increased nearly 28k% and deaths over 13k% since April 1, 2020, we get a better idea of the destruction, one with no sign of abating despite some rumblings about omicron possibly signaling covid becoming endemic.

Or in other words, the more this infectious virus continues to spread among the human pop, the more people will continue to get sick and die unnecessarily--especially unvaccinated. And those excess sicknesses & deaths means plenty of younger, previously healthy people.

The big kahoona difference: Vaccines. Remaining unvaccinated is to play Russian Roulette, but with a virus that has become super-highly transmissible. Too many have already seen their demise because they misunderstood the threat of covid and the benefits of vaccines.

 

You keep accusing people of ignorance about microbiology. So I assume that you have expertise. Yet you keep throwing out serum antibody studies in a grossly misleading way. And ignoring disease infection rate, severity rate, and outcome studies. Basically, your premises are false. Every vaccine produces anti bodies that fade. Once they fade, they no longer act on virus in cells. Instead, the B sells and T cells have to remember and respond. Eventually, the anti bodies are produced and the body prevents the virus from attaching to cells or begins to help defeat the infection. The idea is to reduce the time it takes the body to respond and to minimize the cells that attack to the body. The serum studies are designed to identify the time period of waning initial antibody protection. Which always happens because the bloodstream can’t be full of antibodies all the time. Ankle why breakthrough infection happen but are milder. Because the immune system responds quicker if it has prior experience. And, oh, the Japanese study reviewed an initial vaccine series that is not used In this Country.

 

I'd be careful about throwing around the "ignorance" word if I were you.

You keep saying the vaccine "does nothing" against Omicron but leave off the object of the sentence. Does nothing against what?

An exercise:

- "The vaccine does nothing against Omicron" - false (see below)
- "The vaccine does nothing to prevent infection" - mostly true.
- "The vaccine does nothing to prevent symptomatic illness" - false. ~70% efficacy
- "The vaccine does nothing to reduce the severity of illness" - false
- "The vaccine does nothing to prevent hospitalizations" - false.
- "The vaccine does nothing to prevent deaths" - false

Given these benefits in mitigating illness severity, hospitalizations and deaths, how can you say it "does nothing" and call others ignorant?

 

Nice. For the last couple of years, we have a few people camping at the peak of Mt Stupid.

 

Hey keep positing what the msm throws at you. Realize everything you just listed out was prior to Omicron.
Literally three papers I have provide showing exactly why the vaccines are struggling to provide much of any help against Omicron.

what is really sad to me is people like you will sheep on exactly what you are being told and not be open to the possibility that maybe just maybe it’s wrong.

It’s a sad day when science is considered settled. If that’s what the take will be for now on, new scientific discovery is going to take a big hit.

Now just continue to watch as the narrative changes.

It started with cloth mask.
Then it was only isolating for 5 days.
Next it was don’t worry if you are asymptomatic, you can carry on.
Soon it will to end testing even if mild symptoms.

Don’t let the data hit you too hard on the forehead. You might actually learn something.

Again I have stressed many times that I still think 65 plus and those with health issues should get boosted as it's still the best option we have even against Omicron for serious illness.

 

Can you provide source paper for this?

Curious if they attempted to look at those who have no prior infection and vaxxed to those with prior infection and vaxxed.
I am also curious about any age adjustments.

 

AP Tells Staff to “Avoid Emphasizing” COVID case counts amid shift in covering pandemic.

The outlet previously considered case counts as 'barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world'

Due to the nuances of how COVID tests are being administered, the AP suggested the number of cases can't be added together and that the actual number of cases would likely be "substantially higher" than what's being reported at a state and federal level.

"For that reason, The Associated Press has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasizing case counts in stories about the disease," the AP wrote. "That means, for example, no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable."

These numbers were important 18 months ago but not now I guess.

 

You completely misunderstood that article you linked above.


Inactivated-virus vaccines elicit few, if any, infection-blocking antibodies — but might still protect against severe disease


It is talking about inactivated virus vaccines. Not MRNA. Plus it still says even they protect against severe disease.


The world’s most widely used COVID-19 vaccines provide little to no protection against infection with the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, laboratory evidence suggests.

The findings are prompting many scientists and public-health researchers to re-evaluate the role of inactivated vaccines in the global fight against COVID-19.

Such products remain crucial for preventing hospitalization and death from COVID-19. And they can still serve a valuable immune-priming function for as-yet unvaccinated individuals.


But as molecular virologist Rafael Medina at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago points out: “There are other parts of the immune response that are also playing a role.” T cells destroy infected cells; B cells remember past infections and strengthen immune responses for the future; and binding antibodies contribute to viral control.

In a preprint published in December5, Medina and his co-authors — led by immunologist Galit Alter at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts — showed that people immunized with CoronaVac maintain non-neutralizing antibodies that both bind Omicron and assist immune cells in gobbling up infected cells.

Those kinds of result show that recipients of inactivated vaccines, although not necessarily protected against infection by Omicron, should still be shielded from the worst ravages of COVID-19 triggered by the variant, says Murat Akova, an infectious-disease specialist at Hacettepe University School of Medicine in Ankara.

Experiments conducted by Pan-Hammarström and her colleagues found that, after two doses of inactivated vaccine, an mRNA top-up hoists levels of binding antibodies, memory B cells and T cells6. And studies of samples from China3,7 and the United Arab Emirates8 have shown that a protein-based booster triggers higher numbers of neutralizing antibodies than does a third shot of an inactivated vaccine.



Iwasaki and her co-authors studied blood samples from 101 individuals who received two doses of CoronaVac followed by an mRNA booster. Before the boost, the samples showed no detectable Omicron neutralization. Afterwards, 80% of analysed samples showed some Omicron-blocking activity9. But the quantities of antibodies that had Omicron-neutralizing potential were not much greater in this group than in a separate population that had received two doses of mRNA vaccine and no booster. The work has not yet been peer reviewed.



In your quote they are comparing antibodies of an inactivated vaccine plus mRNA booster to two mRNA shots with no booster.


This one of the biggest fails at interpreting a quoted source that I have ever seen.

 

I think that's reasonable position for the AP.

The case numbers for Alpha and Delta were more meaningful at the time than the Omicron numbers. For example, The relationship between reported Alpha cases and the risk to a community was more direct than where we are now with Omicron.

With Omicron, we have more cases being unreported due to mild symptoms and at home tests. We also have varying vaccinated populations across the country. Total reported cases now have more error and it's harder to equate to community risk.