Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Grey Fox]

AR, do you lack patience in all aspect of your life?

I haven't been to work in a year and a half. At what point would a patient person start to complain?

Why do you want to go into traffic?

I suspect you will get your wish of mask less society when there is a vaccine available for the under 12s.

[alfred russel]

Grey Fox, I was always supportive of mask mandates before vaccines became universally available here, but not only do i question the point now, I also already live in a maskless society. It is just some bizarre world now where I can't go into the office, airports have mask requirements, travel is complicated, schools have weird rules, there are bizarre shortages of stuff (including workers), but most stuff is back to normal(ish).

[Grey Fox]

That's my point. They are not universally available. They exclude children under 12.

[Iormlund]

I 100% don't care about a bunch more dead americans that are dumb enough not to get vaccinated. I think it is ludicrous to expect rational society to inconvenience itself in any way because people refuse to get a painless and minor shot.

Nobody cares about them. But the solution is not to double down on stupidity. It might be mostly morons filling up the ICUs, but unless you boot them out, the collapse of the healthcare system means things like cancer, strokes or accidents are going to kill a lot more more people than they should, vaccinated or not.

[alfred russel]

That's my point. They are not universally available. They exclude children under 12.

Who are at very low risk.

Iormlund, I suspect a strong majority would be in favor of kicking out unvaccinated covid patients in the event of bed shortages. But short of that, the solution is vaccination, and if 40% of the population refuses to listen to reason, they should be coerced through a wide variety of pressure tactics. It isn't to tell people to mask up and only get compliance from the people who are already vaccinated (and are much less likely to be vectors of transmission due to vaccine immunity) while 40% lives free and dies stupid.

[Grey Fox]

That's my point. They are not universally available. They exclude children under 12.

Who are at very low risk.

Moving the goal post is not allowed. Be patient.

[alfred russel]

That's my point. They are not universally available. They exclude children under 12.

Who are at very low risk.

Moving the goal post is not allowed. Be patient.

I'm not moving the goal posts.

I posted this a while back, the numbers may have changed slightly, I didn't update the stats. The risk for under 18s is actually comparable to many other things we don't freak out about.

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https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-09-tables-508.pdf

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv

316 people died from influenza and pneumonia in 2019 in the 1-19 age group. That is roughly comparable to the 430 aged 18 and under that have died from covid (the age groups differ slightly, and the covid period is a bit more than 12 months). A few years ago if you wanted to avoid family gatherings because you don't want to expose your healthy children to the risks of pneumonia - it is your call - but that seems a bit risk averse.

Covid is new and it might have worse long term effects on kids or it might not. I don't see why we should approach uncertainty by assuming worse case outcomes, especially when we are talking about multi year periods.

[Barrister]

Government of Alberta posted stats last week:

https://www.alberta.ca/assets/documents/health-data-modelling-fact-sheet.pdf

If you go to page 5 it shows the hospitalization rates for kids under 12.  Covid is more than typical respiratory viruses, less than influenza, and absolutely dwarfed by injuries.

Also interesting is the next page which shows hospitalization rates for vaccinated vs not vaccinated, and further broken down by age category.  So kids under 12 (who of course aren't vaccinated) are hospitalized at about the same rate as vaccinated 60 year olds, while vaccinated 80 year olds are hospitalized at about the same rate as unvaccinated 30 year olds.

The next page (7) shows hospitalization rates for Covid versus other diseases.  In the unvaccinated, Covid has higher hospitalization rates than both heart disease and COPD, but is still not as high as cancer.  If you're vaccinated though the hospitalization rates are miniscule.

[Jacob]

Bottom line: AR doesn't give a fuck about other people's kids.

[Sheilbh]

Bottom line: AR doesn't give a fuck about other people's kids.

I don't know about Canada but I have noticed that there's been a huge disconnect between the US and Europe on schools and kids. I don't really know what drives it. 

I think there's largely been something similar with masks.

But I don't think it's that European public health authorities don't care or care less - on this sort of stuff I don't think there's a clear decisive "follow the science" answer.

[Barrister]

I don't know about Canada but I have noticed that there's been a huge disconnect between the US and Europe on schools and kids. I don't really know what drives it. 

I think there's largely been something similar with masks.

But I don't think it's that European public health authorities don't care or care less - on this sort of stuff I don't think there's a clear decisive "follow the science" answer.

I think there's a huge disconnect within the US too though.  Some jurisdictions had schools closed the entire last 18 months, which seems like astonishingly bad public policy to me.  But other jurisdictions are operating with zero restrictions, including no mask mandates.

[Sheilbh]

Fair. But the impression I get from the US is that in part the general culture war stuff is driving that (and the Federal public health authorities have a view).

The other key difference may be testing - I've read a lot of criticism from all sides (libertarians, centrists, left-wonks) - about the incredibly slow pace of the FDA authorising rapid tests. My understanding is only 6 manufacturers have been authorised. From what I understand one of the issues is that because of the risks in a pandemic context the FDA take the view that a rapid test must be at least as reliable as a full PCR test.

In Europe the opposite approach has been taken where they can be less effective because that's the trade off for speed - and you then confirm with a PCR test. So rapid tests are available for free from pharmacies or health authorities all over - I have a pack in my flat right now. I don't know about schools in other bits of Europe but in the UK I think kids do rapid tests twice a week (and there was a huge randomised study that showed daily rapid testing was as effective at stopping outbreaks as mandatory quarantines). Look at Our World in Data I think it may be similar elsewhere - the UK, Denmark and France all do 3-4x the number of daily tests as the US (adjusted for population).

[garbon]

What's happening with all the waste from these rapid tests? Seems like you'd generate a lot of trash if you actually took one every day which I think the box seems to assume (comes with 7 tests).

[The Brain]

What's happening with all the waste from these rapid tests? Seems like you'd generate a lot of trash if you actually took one every day which I think the box seems to assume (comes with 7 tests).

It mostly ends up in the ocean. Mostly.

[Legbiter]

Some jurisdictions had schools closed the entire last 18 months, which seems like astonishingly bad public policy to me.

Yeah it's atrocious. The teachers' union here tried something very similar, if they'd had their way there would not have been any school, ever, until Death itself had been cured. Even when they'd been fully vaccinated they still whined and sniveled.