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

[Larry of the Lawn]

17 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I think in the U.S. at this point any unvaxxed are so by choice.

I'd like the govt to, after a 30 day or so grace period (last chance), announce that any and all future vaccines and treatment for newly unvaxxed, infected, to be 100% on their dime. The subsidy period for the unwilling should end.

They are the "personal responsibility" and "Jesus told me it was fake" preacher crowd after all. Why should the rest of us subsidize that behavior?

That's the basis for all insurance.  Would be cool if we took the covid model of of paying for healthcare and did it for all treatment and ailments.  I think it's fucking stupid not to get vaccinated if you can but I think punishing idiots with a ridiculous medical debt is cruel and vindictive.  

 

[Clueless Northman]

There's a free treatment that will protect them right now from covid. Just saying. I don't like to have to pay twice, first for the mio of unused vaccines, next for their covid hospitalizations. Specially not after so much sacrifices made since March 2020, with lockdowns, countless avoidable deaths, most of it avoidable if these same assholes had acted like sensible responsible citizens.

A sensible government could put in place other measures to make sure there won't be any need for global restrictions, lockdowns, or risk of healthcare system collapse. But letting the idiots roam freely, then overburden the hospitals, then forcing everyone under lockdown once again, or merely closing down restaurants, hotels, stores, theatres, museums, is simply unacceptable - unless we face a vaccine-escaping variant.

Besides, obviously I am vindictive against fucking anti-vaxx. When you willingly put other people at major risk, you deserve to be socially shunned, you deserve to be punished. It's long overdue that political leaders denounce them for what they truly are: freeloaders, sociopaths, nutjobs.

[Fragile Bird]

52 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Besides, obviously I am vindictive against fucking anti-vaxx. When you willingly put other people at major risk, you deserve to be socially shunned, you deserve to be punished. It's long overdue that political leaders denounce them for what they truly are: freeloaders, sociopaths, nutjobs.

First of all, most of us who have been posting here live in countries with universal health care, and we don’t punish anyone for their illnesses, whether caused by carelessness or stupidity or heredity or bad habits. We don’t toss drug addicts on the garbage heap and we don’t call people who still smoke psychopaths.

Secondly, as many of us have mentioned, we have friends or family who say they don’t want to be vaccinated. Some of them are hard core anti-vaxxers and won’t get any vaccine, while some are just plain suspicious of this vaccine, like my SiL, as I have said. She got it in her head months and months ago that there was something wrong with the Covid-19 vaccine. I’m not angry at her so much as I am angry at the idiots who have influenced her. My brother and I still hope she will realize everyone around her has been vaccinated and nobody has died or become sick. I have no desire to punish her for her fears, I just wish I could change her mind.

No political leader is going to denounce these people for being freeloaders or sociopaths. They’ll express hope that their minds can be changed instead, through education and support.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

There's a free treatment that will protect them right now from covid. Just saying. I don't like to have to pay twice, first for the mio of unused vaccines, next for their covid hospitalizations. Specially not after so much sacrifices made since March 2020, with lockdowns, countless avoidable deaths, most of it avoidable if these same assholes had acted like sensible responsible citizens.

A sensible government could put in place other measures to make sure there won't be any need for global restrictions, lockdowns, or risk of healthcare system collapse. But letting the idiots roam freely, then overburden the hospitals, then forcing everyone under lockdown once again, or merely closing down restaurants, hotels, stores, theatres, museums, is simply unacceptable - unless we face a vaccine-escaping variant.

Besides, obviously I am vindictive against fucking anti-vaxx. When you willingly put other people at major risk, you deserve to be socially shunned, you deserve to be punished. It's long overdue that political leaders denounce them for what they truly are: freeloaders, sociopaths, nutjobs.

I don't disagree with any of this, other than that using our fucked up, wildly expensive healthcare-debt system to punish them is probably a bad way to go about it.

How do you realistically distinguish between someone who couldn't get the vaccine for medical reasons and someone who's just a douchebag, in a way that you're comfortable sticking them with the pricetag? 

[Clueless Northman]

In the long list of evidences for "Most people are irredeemably stupid":
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/09/poll-covid-wuhan-lab-leak-498847

 

20 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

How do you realistically distinguish between someone who couldn't get the vaccine for medical reasons and someone who's just a douchebag, in a way that you're comfortable sticking them with the pricetag? 

They should get a medical certificate proving they have a valid reason not to be vaccinated.

 

34 minutes ago, L'oiseau français said:

Secondly, as many of us have mentioned, we have friends or family who say they don’t want to be vaccinated. Some of them are hard core anti-vaxxers and won’t get any vaccine, while some are just plain suspicious of this vaccine, like my SiL, as I have said. She got it in her head months and months ago that there was something wrong with the Covid-19 vaccine. I’m not angry at her so much as I am angry at the idiots who have influenced her

What makes you think I don't know anti-vaxx, I don't have some among my acquaintances, family, friends? It's not personal, it's a matter of principle. And I'm not mad at some unknown scapegoat, at some invisible all-powerful entity, they deserve my full scorn, because they have free will, allegedly functional braincells, personal responsibility. Many of them have university degrees, they're not uneducated gullible lumpenproletariat, for Marx's sake.

It's exactly because of public healthcare, meaning every sensible vaccinated people will pay for ICU for unvaccinated morons, that I'm pissed off. This whole shit is ruinous enough as it is not to waste billions more on idiots. I'm tired of having to foot the bill for shitty life-choices of people who actually are selfish pricks and actually are freeloaders - people who do nothing to improve the situation, quite the opposite, and expect restrictions to be lifted for everyone because vaccinated people do all the work for them. So, to be blunt, fuck them all. I won't shed a tear over the possible covid-death of any of them - even if it possibly means a cousin, an old friend or a former dear love of mine. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I've drawn mine. After all, we're basically talking about the same people who denied it was any serious and acted like if restrictions were the 2nd coming of Hitler, who didn't give a damn about anyone else's health and well-being and carelessly acted or wanted to act as if there was nothing going on, we're talking about people who caused most of this shit by their 2020 behaviour.

What also really annoys me, apart from wasting healthcare resources on them, is of course that there will be a minority of vulnerable victims who are vaccinated or couldn't, who will suffer and might die due to these selfish pricks. And obviously locking down the whole society, including its vaccinated majority, is absolutely out of question now. The whole point of vaccination is to not have to go through it ever again. So, as I said, it's now the governments' duty to find ways to limit the wave and limit the spread to the sensible part of the population, without going back to previous restrictions model - so they can opt for mandatory vaccination, for limiting social activities and daily amenities (including any store) to vaccinated people, or for incentives like making unjustifiedly unvaccinated people pay for it. I actually don't really care which option they pick - so I would actually go for all of them at the same time to be ultra-effective.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, L'oiseau français said:

First of all, most of us who have been posting here live in countries with universal health care, and we don’t punish anyone for their illnesses, whether caused by carelessness or stupidity or heredity or bad habits. We don’t toss drug addicts on the garbage heap and we don’t call people who still smoke psychopaths.

Secondly, as many of us have mentioned, we have friends or family who say they don’t want to be vaccinated. Some of them are hard core anti-vaxxers and won’t get any vaccine, while some are just plain suspicious of this vaccine, like my SiL, as I have said. She got it in her head months and months ago that there was something wrong with the Covid-19 vaccine. I’m not angry at her so much as I am angry at the idiots who have influenced her. My brother and I still hope she will realize everyone around her has been vaccinated and nobody has died or become sick. I have no desire to punish her for her fears, I just wish I could change her mind.

No political leader is going to denounce these people for being freeloaders or sociopaths. They’ll express hope that their minds can be changed instead, through education and support.

None of this is true for us in the US. Additionally what incredibly priced health care we do have, is under constant threat and pressure, and has in many places gone away all together.  So Biden has been trying to devise a door-to-door team plan to take the vaccines to those who can't get them -- but those states are saying that's illegal and they won't allow it.

[Fragile Bird]

10 minutes ago, Zorral said:

None of this is true for us in the US. Additionally what incredibly priced health care we do have, is under constant threat and pressure, and has in many places gone away all together.  So Biden has been trying to devise a door-to-door team plan to take the vaccines to those who can't get them -- but those states are saying that's illegal and they won't allow it.

I do realize what a big exception the US is, sadly.

I saw an interview with that young “star” Republican who’s in a wheelchair, from NC maybe? He was saying something like “do you know what kind of elaborate expensive system has to be set up to go door-to-door to do vaccines, they’re doing it for other other reasons, to be able to take away your guns!”

[Zorral]

Just now, L'oiseau français said:

sadly

Tragically too, as your pull quote illustrates.

If those teams get going as the administration wishes -- which is the only thing we can do, and which we have done before with great success, with the polio vaccine -- I fear for the lives of the health care givers.

[Week]

48 minutes ago, Zorral said:

None of this is true for us in the US. Additionally what incredibly priced health care we do have, is under constant threat and pressure, and has in many places gone away all together.  So Biden has been trying to devise a door-to-door team plan to take the vaccines to those who can't get them -- but those states are saying that's illegal and they won't allow it.

Bring back ice cream trucks - "Vax-Ine" trucks! 

[DireWolfSpirit]

We are at a point where the unvaxxed are selfishly endangering the innocent. Sticking them with penalties is an ethical recourse and responsibility of a compassionate society imo. Protecting the innocent deserves a seat at the table in our policy making.

Also a good infrastructure program, build jails and lock the willingly irresponsible away from the citizens that actually are not willfully endangering everyone else.

[Larry of the Lawn]

I dunno if we can really fix stuff by threatening expensive healthcare and jailtime at people.  Plus once they're in jail you have to treat them anyway.  Like, I understand being pissed at the willfully unvaccinated.  We already have more jail cells and prisoners than any other country in the world.  It's an expensive and ineffective way of dealing with crime and peole you don't like.  I don't think locking up more people is the way out of this. 

It's not even clear that a threat of maybe having to pay for healthcare out of pocket for a disease they don't think they will get is going to motivate peole to get vaccinated.

I'm open to solutions that can get people vaccinated that don't involve jailtime or bludgeoning them over the head with financial consequences that probably aren't a deterent and dont' actually make people safer.  These are two 'solutions' that are just existing problems.  

eta: That's not public health policy, that's just feel-good vengeance.

[Kalbear]

Probably easiest thing is to mandate employers have record of vaccinated status and penalize the employers for noncompliance.

[The Anti-Targ]

13 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Come September, pretty much any adult in any Western country will have had the chance to get a vaccine. A tiny few who stayed abroad for months might not, a few pregnant women might not, a few who got covid early in 2021 might be denied in places stupid enough to not want to give a dose to people who had covid less than 6 months earlier. Overall, it'll still be quite the minority of 18+, and the bulk of the unvaccinated adults will be willing idiots.

I would still keep vaccines free. On the other hand, I'm fully for making anyone who hasn't a legitimate valid reason not to get vaccinated to pay full costs of any covid-related treatment and hospital stay. Fuck them, let them face the consequences of their personal choices. And if, come Fall 2021, hospitals are close to being overcrowded once again, then do mass-scale triage and expel every loon who's unvaccinated without good reason - even if it means kicking them from ventilators and ICU beds.

"Not I" said the fly. Well actually I will be eligible in late-August being older than your average bear, but not old enough to be in a risk group. But anyone under 35 (who is not in a risk group or in an at risk job) won't be eligible to join the queue until some time in October. I think we are still more or less on course to have everyone who wants to be vaccinated have at least their first shot before the end of the year, and fully vaccinated early next year. Then we can talk about gingerly opening up quarantine-free travel to vaccinated people from countries that have things at least somewhat under control.

It'll be interesting to see how big our anti-vaxx population is. Anti-vaxx dragged our measles vaccination rate low enough to cause an outbreak in 2019. Either that lesson has been learned and we will have a good uptake. Or it won't be learned and we won't get the vaccination rate we need. I'm picking we'll get to about 80%, which won't be enough. Still, my whole family will be vaccinated and hopefully therefore safe from the worst effects of the disease should one or more of us get it.

I don't know if it's been explored or not, but one possibly concerning aspect of how the virus-vaccine interaction seems to function (that the vaccine, esp vs the Delta variant, does not prevent infection, mild symptoms or spread but just reduces it) is that this puts selection pressure on the virus to mutate and create variants that are even better at dodging immunity than Delta. In well vaccinated populations you still don't want high exposure rates and the virus freely cycling through the population. You still want the vast majority of people never to come into contact with the virus. Or at least for rates of spread to be low and slow, so it's only a small proportion of the population being exposed in a year.

[The Anti-Targ]

6 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

I dunno if we can really fix stuff by threatening expensive healthcare and jailtime at people.  Plus once they're in jail you have to treat them anyway.  Like, I understand being pissed at the willfully unvaccinated.  We already have more jail cells and prisoners than any other country in the world.  It's an expensive and ineffective way of dealing with crime and peole you don't like.  I don't think locking up more people is the way out of this. 

It's not even clear that a threat of maybe having to pay for healthcare out of pocket for a disease they don't think they will get is going to motivate peole to get vaccinated.

I'm open to solutions that can get people vaccinated that don't involve jailtime or bludgeoning them over the head with financial consequences that probably aren't a deterent and dont' actually make people safer.  These are two 'solutions' that are just existing problems.  

eta: That's not public health policy, that's just feel-good vengeance.

Pay Tucker Carlson $100,000,000 to become fanatically pro-Vaccination. Just give him an angle that allows him to still sound rabidly right wing. I mean all he has to really do is say our hero and saviour Donald Trump personally oversaw the fast tracking of the vaccine, and if Donald did it you know it's good. Don't listen to Antifa who have infiltrated our information networks to convince all right-thinking, God-fearing, conservative Americans to ignore the disease. They are trying to kill us and reduce our political influence. Don't let them! Get vaccinated now and protect America from the radical left.

Won't work on lefty anti-vaxxers who are probably almost as numerous as righty anti-vaxxers. But at this point one's politics are not important, getting the vaccination % up as high as possible is what's important.

No idea what to do with the anti-vaxx left. They are the other side of the same coin as the anti-vaxx right, but they don't listen to anyone in the media since they are not captive of corporate right-wing media, and they believe every corporate news organisation is corporate right / neo-liberal brainwashing on behalf of "Da Man".

[DireWolfSpirit]

Geezus there's an antivax left as well, that's really, really, depressing and annoying.

The vast majority of the nutters are from the right in this region.

I condemn any lefty antivaxxers with the same passion though. Left, right, it doesn't matter to me, it's reckless and selfish from either group.

[The Anti-Targ]

For sure there are anti-vaxxers on the left. The right doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity, it's just been more on display lately. I unfortunately have lefty friends who are very big into chemtrails and global big pharma conspiracies.  Our PM just announced that all border workers (private and govt) must be vaccinated. If you are anti-vaxx find a different job. You can have your medical freedom but that choice doesn't come without consequences when there is a deadly pandemic on the loose.

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

"Not I" said the fly. Well actually I will be eligible in late-August being older than your average bear, but not old enough to be in a risk group. 

Have you forgotten that New Zealand isn’t a “Western country”?  

[DireWolfSpirit]

If you keep going east long enough you end up in the west, maybe NZ'ers are what's west of Westerosi?

[Fragile Bird]

I saw on CNBC this morning that the 7-day average of daily new cases in the US has gone up by 30% from Monday to Monday. It’s still far lower than what smaller European countries are seeing, about 17.5k, no, 19.5k a day. What was shocking was seeing the case map, Missouri, Florida and Kansas, I think, looking significantly red.

[Zorral]

"'Surprising amount of death' will soon occur in these US regions from increased Covid-19 cases, expert says"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/health/us-coronavirus-monday/index.html

Quote

 

(CNN)As the Delta variant rapidly spreads, US hot spots have seen climbing case numbers -- and an expert warns a "surprising amount of death" from Covid-19 could soon follow.

The US is averaging about 19,455 new cases over the last seven days, a 47% increase from the week prior, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And a third of those, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said, come from five hot spots: Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Nevada.

"In places like Missouri where ICUs are packed, you're going to see a surprising amount of death," Reiner said on Sunday.

At Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, 91% of ICU patients are on ventilators and many are in their 20s, 30s and 40s, Chief Administrative Officer Erik Frederick told CNN Saturday. That is especially concerning, he said, because at the peak last year there were only 40 to 50% of ICU patients on ventilators.

Typically, increases in Covid-19 death rates follow three to four weeks behind spikes in cases, Reiner said. It takes a week for patients to get sick enough to need hospitalization and then often another couple of weeks for the infection to become fatal.

"We will start to see an increase in mortality in this country," Reiner said. . . .

 

Herd immunity USA YA! Covid doesn't exist! Vaccines are how the government takes away your guns so you cant kill them Others with impunity! YAY YAY YAY!!!