Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Razgovory]

Christ, the US has lost more people to Covid that it lost in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW1.  Or all of those put together.  And the weird part is that many Americans are basically fine with that.  The appropriate respond to a fuck up on this scale is <checks notes> hanging the leadership from a light post.  Yet nobody is advocating this common sense measure.

[alfred russel]

Christ, the US has lost more people to Covid that it lost in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW1.  Or all of those put together.  And the weird part is that many Americans are basically fine with that.  The appropriate respond to a fuck up on this scale is <checks notes> hanging the leadership from a light post.  Yet nobody is advocating this common sense measure.

Wars are a odd comparison to a disease outbreak. The US is still less than half the deaths from Spanish Flu. We are at about half of the annual deaths from smoking.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm#:~:text=Cigarette%20smoking%20causes%20about%20one%20of%20every%20five,annually%20among%20women%20(including%20deaths%20from%20secondhand%20smoke)

We are less than half the annual deaths due to heart disease, and also less than half the annual deaths due to cancer.

[crazy canuck]

Christ, the US has lost more people to Covid that it lost in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW1.  Or all of those put together.  And the weird part is that many Americans are basically fine with that.  The appropriate respond to a fuck up on this scale is <checks notes> hanging the leadership from a light post.  Yet nobody is advocating this common sense measure.

So long as there are voters like AR there will be politicians who allow hundreds of thousands to needlessly die.

[Duque de Bragança]

BTW is it normal in the West the way UK nurses administer injections, and by that I mean not doing a quick disinfectant wipe of the immediate skin area before stabbing?

Just got the 2020 flu and a Tetanus/Diphteria/Pertussis vaccine yesterday and they definitely wiped with disinfectants before.

Can't remember a vaccine shot, or any blood sampling without wiping with disinfectants beforehand.

[Barrister]

Christ, the US has lost more people to Covid that it lost in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW1.  Or all of those put together.  And the weird part is that many Americans are basically fine with that.  The appropriate respond to a fuck up on this scale is <checks notes> hanging the leadership from a light post.  Yet nobody is advocating this common sense measure.

Wars are a odd comparison to a disease outbreak. The US is still less than half the deaths from Spanish Flu. We are at about half of the annual deaths from smoking.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm#:~:text=Cigarette%20smoking%20causes%20about%20one%20of%20every%20five,annually%20among%20women%20(including%20deaths%20from%20secondhand%20smoke)

We are less than half the annual deaths due to heart disease, and also less than half the annual deaths due to cancer.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm (smoking is not broken into its own category here - I assume it is covered by cancer, heart disease or chronic respiratory disease)

So yes, Covid has killed less than half as many people as cancer or heart disease.  But those are your #1 and #2 killers.

Covid, at 285,000 deaths so far, would be a comfortable #3, way ahead of accidents, chronic respiratory disease, strokes and the rest.

In fact it's killed almost as many people as everyone who died from accidents plus strokes put together.  Plus there's reason to think it's being under-counted.

[alfred russel]

Christ, the US has lost more people to Covid that it lost in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW1.  Or all of those put together.  And the weird part is that many Americans are basically fine with that.  The appropriate respond to a fuck up on this scale is <checks notes> hanging the leadership from a light post.  Yet nobody is advocating this common sense measure.

So long as there are voters like AR there will be politicians who allow hundreds of thousands to needlessly die.

I voted for neither my president nor my governor. Seems odd to blame voters like me.

However, politicians have been constrained by a significant segment of the population seeing this as "no worse than the flu", especially in the critical early days. With such profoundly ignorant fools, many of whom are now on their high horse pointing fingers at others, the public response was never going to be great.

[Sheilbh]

Not sure for 2020 but there's been 73,000 deaths with covid on the death certificate and 62,000 deaths within four weeks of a positive test.

By comparison in 2019 the leading cause of death is dementia/alzheimers (we count cancers separately) at around 66,000. So it's the second highest or the highest cause of death in the UK this year.

[alfred russel]

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm (smoking is not broken into its own category here - I assume it is covered by cancer, heart disease or chronic respiratory disease)

So yes, Covid has killed less than half as many people as cancer or heart disease.  But those are your #1 and #2 killers.

Covid, at 285,000 deaths so far, would be a comfortable #3, way ahead of accidents, chronic respiratory disease, strokes and the rest.

In fact it's killed almost as many people as everyone who died from accidents plus strokes put together.  Plus there's reason to think it's being under-counted.

The government response (in the US and most of Europe) has been bullshit. Anyone who looks at this with any sort of reflection knows that. In March and April, when cases were far lower than now, many of us were outright confined to our homes. Now we are at record breaking levels of transmission and we have sporting events in stadiums with fans, open gyms, travel is coming back, families are getting together for the holidays, etc.

Much of the public's goodwill was burned back in March and April and then over the summer and now when it is actually needed it is shot. A zillion people are going to die right before the vaccine is released because the population has ditched precautions and won't go back.

[Barrister]

The government response (in the US and most of Europe) has been bullshit. Anyone who looks at this with any sort of reflection knows that. In March and April, when cases were far lower than now, many of us were outright confined to our homes. Now we are at record breaking levels of transmission and we have sporting events in stadiums with fans, open gyms, travel is coming back, families are getting together for the holidays, etc.

Much of the public's goodwill was burned back in March and April and then over the summer and now when it is actually needed it is shot. A zillion people are going to die right before the vaccine is released because the population has ditched precautions and won't go back.

I'm a lot more sympathetic to government action in the spring that you are.  We forget just how much infinitely more we now know about Covid compared to then.

And I don't think the public goodwill has burned out - not in my country at least.  Max wearing is nearly universal.  Everyone I know is planning very small Christmases, not travelling, etc.  Hell in Alberta I hear more grumbling there should be more restrictions, not less (Alberta having one of the worst outbreaks in Canada).  Incidentally my family is planning to break the "no one at your house" rule over Christmas by inviting over a mom and daughter we're close with.  HOnestly the mom works from home, and now the daughter in junior high is now doing distance learning so it's more us putting them at risk than the reverse.

[Barrister]

Apparently in 30 minutes Alberta is going to be in a near-shutdown.  Bars, casinos, restaurants closed.  Retail at 15% of capacity, max.  Mandatory work from home (not sure what that means).  Personal wellness services like hair salons closed.

We'll see how well this goes down.

[alfred russel]

I'm a lot more sympathetic to government action in the spring that you are.  We forget just how much infinitely more we now know about Covid compared to then.

Go back through this paper from March and tell me that we didn't really know what was going on back then.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

In March it seems we also had the current vaccines that are to be rolled out: obviously testing is critical before you roll it out to the population and I'm not implying it should have been rolled out then. But we basically knew the fatality rate, we had the vaccine (though subject to testing), we knew schools would not be the major vectors of transmission, and we roughly knew the timeline to a vaccine (though it seems we were a bit pessimistic on that front - with an 18 month benchmark rather than the more likely ~12-15 month).

[Razgovory]

Christ, the US has lost more people to Covid that it lost in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW1.  Or all of those put together.  And the weird part is that many Americans are basically fine with that.  The appropriate respond to a fuck up on this scale is <checks notes> hanging the leadership from a light post.  Yet nobody is advocating this common sense measure.

So long as there are voters like AR there will be politicians who allow hundreds of thousands to needlessly die.

This is intolerable.  Maybe the French were on to something with that guillotine thing.

[DGuller]

Who do you want to guillotine, AR or CC?

[Valmy]

I knew you guys would eventually see that virtue requires terror.

[Sheilbh]

So interesting in the vaccine news - there have been issues with people a history of severe allergic reactions having allergic reactions so it's being restricted for those people. I imagine it's quite a small group of people but, inevitable is "BREAKING NEWS" which is probably not helpful.

But then there's the comment today from the Chief Medical Officer:

Chris Whitty predicts a "gradual retreat" from social distancing rules once 20 million or so high risk people have been vaccinated.

As risk of NHS  being overwhelmed recedes, it will be come a political decision of how many ongoing Covid deaths we will tolerate, he says.

Which is an accurate but stark way of putting it. But it also gives a sense of the scale of vaccinating the high risk in a country like ours - or any Western country - with lots of elderly people.