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Covid-19 #34 - Alpha, Delta, It’s All Greek to Me!


Fragile Bird

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17 minutes ago, Padraig said:

Well, that is a twist.  Is that a weird statistical anomoly in a small country?  Weird if gamma takes over now, given how long it has been around.  Delta seemed all conquering.

Maybe. They did link a number of the initial infections to a couple of night clubs, so that could be how it took over. It's from over 600 samples though.

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2 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Unfortunately when that bomb goes off and countries have to reinforce their previous hardline measures—lockdowns.

Most of the people who refused to vaccinate will simply cry overreach.

I think about 30% of the US adult population will never get vaccinated unless compelled.

The majority of which because it’s a political statement towards support towards a political figure they respect.

Or dead. 

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13 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Also, does anyone have any thoughts on a correlation between a lack of reaction to the vaccine, and the probability of becoming seriously ill once infected?

Just to cheer you up about this, apparently the reaction is often down to the delivery mechanism used in the vaccine, rather than the vaccine proper. In those cases the reaction has no correlation with how effective the vaccine will be for you.

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2 hours ago, Padraig said:

Well, that is a twist.  Is that a weird statistical anomoly in a small country?  Weird if gamma takes over now, given how long it has been around.  Delta seemed all conquering.

Vaccine wise, I think gamma is ok.  Beta is still the one to avoid.  But there hasn't been as much focus on gamma.

Remember I said that the most successfully vaccinated area of Canada, the Yukon, had the highest Covid-19 case rate in North America? 93% of the population with one dose, 85% with two, and the cases continue, 7 more yesterday. They only have a population of 45,000, and Gamma found the unvaccinated with ease.

It started with end-of-year parties among unvaccinated high school students, and they spread it to the community.

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2 hours ago, L'oiseau français said:

Remember I said that the most successfully vaccinated area of Canada, the Yukon, had the highest Covid-19 case rate in North America? 93% of the population with one dose, 85% with two, and the cases continue, 7 more yesterday. They only have a population of 45,000, and Gamma found the unvaccinated with ease.

That was Gamma too.  Ok.  Definitely suggestive.

Numbers here seem to have sky-rocketed this week.  Drat.  I hoped we wouldn't be as bad as other countries since we hadn't opened up too much

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5 hours ago, L'oiseau français said:

Remember I said that the most successfully vaccinated area of Canada, the Yukon, had the highest Covid-19 case rate in North America? 93% of the population with one dose, 85% with two, and the cases continue, 7 more yesterday. They only have a population of 45,000, and Gamma found the unvaccinated with ease.

It started with end-of-year parties among unvaccinated high school students, and they spread it to the community.

Unfortunately unvaccinated people will tend to interact a lot with the other unvaccinated people.

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We are starting third vaccines. Not sure if this is going to be as impactful as we hope it to be, with 45% of the general public refusing even one vaccine and with mandatory mask and headcount limit regulations not in place. 

Delta is everywhere, it’s in Romania, the Ukraine and in Croatia. It’s basically a matter of days when our numbers start surging. 

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44 minutes ago, Raja said:

Also, renaming the variants with the Greek letters was a good move. So much easier to talk about and much better than using country names.

I haven't seen the specific data, but there must have been a pretty strong correlation with Trump calling it the "China virus" and the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes here in the U.S.

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17 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Easy to modify =/= easy to distribute. 

The infrastructure for distribution is already existent, tho. Ofc you can't force the good people of Tennessee to get vaccinated. But that's not really a problem of the vaccine or the logistics.

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Not only do we have rising cases, Delta, of course*, here, we are trembling on the threshold of West Nile too.

https://gothamist.com/news/watch-out-west-nile-ideal-conditions-mosquitos

Quote

 

. . . . Dr. Denis Nash, professor of epidemiology at CUNY’s School of Public Health, said that the recent weather conditions may increase human cases of West Nile.

“The rain and the heat that we've had over the last few weeks are setting up some pretty ideal conditions for the proliferation of the adult mosquito populations,” Nash said. “There's some activity in animals now, so the precaution is to avoid mosquito bites.”  . . . .

 

* Last week on the Manhattan covid cases tracking site -- positive tests, cases, hospitalizations, deaths -- my zipcode and the surrounding ones were literally at zero.  By this weekend all of them have at least 12 positive tests, and new cases.

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4 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

We are starting third vaccines. Not sure if this is going to be as impactful as we hope it to be, with 45% of the general public refusing even one vaccine and with mandatory mask and headcount limit regulations not in place. 

Huh.  There has been a question about the effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines.  I wonder what Hungary is going to use as its booster?  But yes, while Hungary had a big head start, a number of countries have passed it out in recent weeks, when it comes to take-up of vaccinations.  It is still way better than countries like Bulgaria and Romania at least!

It is interesting to see where countries tail off at.  The US got to 50% (of total population) and it has inched up since.  Israel got to 60%.  Canada 70%.  Hungary 55%.  

And then Bulgaria 15%.

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2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

The infrastructure for distribution is already existent, tho. Ofc you can't force the good people of Tennessee to get vaccinated. But that's not really a problem of the vaccine or the logistics.

It is in many developed countries, but certainly not all of them, and developing countries are very far behind. The entire continent of Africa is at 2% or 3%, for example.

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11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It is in many developed countries, but certainly not all of them, and developing countries are very far behind. The entire continent of Africa is at 2% or 3%, for example.

Yeah, but that is really a secondary problem for those countries. The primary problem is access to the vaccines in the first place. The best infrastructure in the world doesn't help with the distribution, if there's nothing to distribute.

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Sheesh, I read about people in vaccination centers actually setting up sales of fake certificates, faking vaccine shots and getting paid a few hundred bucks. At such times, I begin to think that, maybe, Stalin had a point. Great job there from healthcare workers faking vaccines, letting plague rats go out in the open as if they were genuine vaccinated mindful citizens, and screwing up the fight against covid and vaccine trust, since in a couple of months we'll get headlines about how vaccines aren't as effective because we have many vaccinated people in ICUs, when in fact they'll be scumbags with fake certificates... (I wonder how common this has been in Israel, since it might explain why their studies show lesser vaccine effectiveness than in other places)

 

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I haven't seen the specific data, but there must have been a pretty strong correlation with Trump calling it the "China virus" and the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes here in the U.S.

Nobody had any problem when people were talking about the English/Kent variant back then, or if UK had a problem, nobody gave a damn, WHO included. It's only when that fool Modi screwed up that it became bad to call it "Indian variant". But I still see some kind of use in pointing out that the risky variants appeared in countries who totally messed up the response to the pandemic - might push other governments to act more responsibly to avoid the stigma. But of course, it's unfair and unwise to seem to put the blame on a whole country or people, so it would've been better to stick with naming variants, but instead of country name to pick the heads of government instead, to publicly shame them - we should've called them "BoJo variant", "Bolsonaro variant" and "Modi variant", it would've been way more accurate.

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1 hour ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Yeah, but that is really a secondary problem for those countries. The primary problem is access to the vaccines in the first place. The best infrastructure in the world doesn't help with the distribution, if there's nothing to distribute.

There will be plenty to distribute as time moves on and we get better at mass production. That still doesn't solve the fact that it will be hard to administer it en masse, and that failing to do so will just lead to more mutations. 

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55 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Nobody had any problem when people were talking about the English/Kent variant back then, or if UK had a problem, nobody gave a damn, WHO included. It's only when that fool Modi screwed up that it became bad to call it "Indian variant". But I still see some kind of use in pointing out that the risky variants appeared in countries who totally messed up the response to the pandemic - might push other governments to act more responsibly to avoid the stigma. But of course, it's unfair and unwise to seem to put the blame on a whole country or people, so it would've been better to stick with naming variants, but instead of country name to pick the heads of government instead, to publicly shame them - we should've called them "BoJo variant", "Bolsonaro variant" and "Modi variant", it would've been way more accurate.

It's apples and oranges to compare calling it the English variant to the Chinese virus, 

The idea of naming it after a country's leader is a funny one though. 

Ty: "Hey Stranger, did you catch that BoJo?"

Stranger: "Nah, I caught that piece of shit Bolsonaro."

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11 hours ago, Padraig said:

Huh.  There has been a question about the effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines.  I wonder what Hungary is going to use as its booster?  But yes, while Hungary had a big head start, a number of countries have passed it out in recent weeks, when it comes to take-up of vaccinations.  It is still way better than countries like Bulgaria and Romania at least!

It is interesting to see where countries tail off at.  The US got to 50% (of total population) and it has inched up since.  Israel got to 60%.  Canada 70%.  Hungary 55%.  

And then Bulgaria 15%.

There is (was? Not sure how long it’s open) a campaign going on to test elderly people who received Shinopharm for antibodies and identify those who didn’t develop any. I’m not sure if they get a third dose of the same thing or a different type of vaccine. I should probably read up on this. And I’m also not sure about the participation rate. 

yeah. It’s really frustrating because if there was willingness, we could have 90% vaccinated by now. There’s a new vaccination campaign starting that targets those above 60 and with compromised immune system - they’ll be personally contacted by GP’s offices and offered a vaccine. It’s also open to ages 12-16 now.
 

No idea how the rest of the adult population could be persuaded - without social media riots and mass protests at least. It’s mandatory for healthcare workers to be vaccinated at least. 

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12 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Sheesh, I read about people in vaccination centers actually setting up sales of fake certificates, faking vaccine shots and getting paid a few hundred bucks. At such times, I begin to think that, maybe, Stalin had a point. Great job there from healthcare workers faking vaccines, letting plague rats go out in the open as if they were genuine vaccinated mindful citizens, and screwing up the fight against covid and vaccine trust, since in a couple of months we'll get headlines about how vaccines aren't as effective because we have many vaccinated people in ICUs, when in fact they'll be scumbags with fake certificates... (I wonder how common this has been in Israel, since it might explain why their studies show lesser vaccine effectiveness than in other places)

A similar organization in France was just dismantled. I understand the certificates were sold for between 350€ and 500€.
It seems no actual healthcare worker was involved though, only administrative staff (which is bad enough, I suppose).

For some reason, I'm not even mad. So a few hundred guys were willing to pay to fake something that is free, got caught, and are now facing humongous fines and possibly jail time for some. And they are also vulnerable to the virus - of course.
At this point, that's natural selection at work.

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