Jump to content

Covid-19 #42 Nu Tsunami Incoming


Zorral

Recommended Posts

53 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

People too eager to get their travel bugs on [work related is different, I suppose] the girls have been bugging me for a vacation, and I'd love to oblige [they want to go to Europe, Paris specifically] but I told them I wouldn't even think about trips abroad until the summer. 

Yeah. My in-laws were due to go to Israel in few weeks (both got nationality) and just cancelled.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A draft of the Austrian vaccination mandate has been leaked.

If you don't get vaccinated they will make two appointments for you. If you ignore those the fine is up to a maximum of 3600 €. If you have been fined before this increase to a maximum of 7200 €. Imprisonment for failure to pay a fine is up to six weeks but that only happens if you have no goods or income to size.

No forced vaccinations obviously. Not too different from the law for the smallpox vaccine from what I gathered.

It is planned for 3 years but they can obviously extend that is if the need arises. People will be fined 2 times per year if they are persistent.

For all residents older than 12 and not just citizens. There will be excepions for medical reasons but only if accepted by a public health officer.

Just a draft so far some things might change.

Edit: Background information: The vaccination status of everyone who uses our universal healthcare system is known. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

For once one can learn something from Austrian politics. Curious whether somebody will try to challenge it in court.

It will definitely be challenged.

I also expect that it will be a bit less severe in the final version. I'm surprised that they went for 12+ and not 16+. 

But I never expected our government to go for a vaccine mandate too.

Even now first shots are only rising slowly most vaccinations are booster shots.

If it becomes law by February it might take April or so until someone actually has to pay a fine.

2 G at work if it comes might actually be more effective. Some companies that can afford it have already started firing anti-measure people now that have have 3 G.

Our politicians also wasted the summer completely. But all German language governments did that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2g is probably legally more tricky.

The employer can't legally force its eployees to reveal their vaccination status. And firing unvaccinated employees is defiantely not gonna end well in the courts. 

What they can do north of the border, is to not pay wages to people, who had to quarantine after being in contact with an infected person, for the duration of their quarantine - that's effectively targeting the unvaxxed folks (ask Joshua Kimmich about it). 

Companies who are big enough could and did establish 2g zones, with a loosened mask mandate in those areas. But that's more of an option for office jobs and call centers. Not really working for jobs in production.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

2g is probably legally more tricky.

The employer can't legally force its eployees to reveal their vaccination status. And firing unvaccinated employees is defiantely not gonna end well in the courts. 

What they can do north of the border, is to not pay wages to people, who had to quarantine after being in contact with an infected person, for the duration of their quarantine - that's effectively targeting the unvaxxed folks (ask Joshua Kimmich about it). 

Companies who are big enough could and did establish 2g zones, with a loosened mask mandate in those areas. But that's more of an option for office jobs and call centers. Not really working for jobs in production.

Well the anti-measure people usually piss on other rules too like mask rules which makes them easy to fire if a company actually wants too. I have yet to meet an anti-vaxxer who follows other COVID measures diligently.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Probably, but then the dismissal would be on those grounds, which sounds like legally sounder footing. Altho, I find it amusing that the unvaxxed are now crying about intolerance towards them.

Check Erzgebirge Aue and their banner from a few games ago regarding 2g at Stadiums. Now that UnVaxony, pardon Saxony has shut out fans from attending games completely their club president has suggested to stop the football season altogether. While he refuses to talk about 2g at trainings and matches (because his fan scene would start a riot, if he mentions 2g). Of course the Football league told him to get lost, with his suggestion to stop play. Needless to say I am enjoying going to the stadium at the moment under 2g rules. As long as it lasts and before they pull the plug on that here, too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

The employer can't legally force its eployees to reveal their vaccination status. 

I don't think that's true for Germany anymore. The traffic light coalition changed the law, and they actually changed it for the better in this respect. My employer asked everybody to hand in their vaccination certificate a week ago. Everybody who didn't needs a negative test that's less than 24 hours old if they want to enter the presmises.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Loge said:

I don't think that's true for Germany anymore. The traffic light coalition changed the law, and they actually changed it for the better in this respect. My employer asked everybody to hand in their vaccination certificate a week ago. Everybody who didn't needs a negative test that's less than 24 hours old if they want to enter the presmises.

That's a 3g setting, which was possible before. Tho, I'd phrase it differently.

You have to provide a negative test (taken no more than 24 hours ago) to enter. Alternatively, you can provide me (employer) with a vaccination certificate; this would absolve you from the testing requirement.

That's not demanding you to reveal your vaccination status (at least in theory), that medical information is still private. Of course you'd hardly find anybody, who is vaccinated to voluntarily undergo testing, if just flashing your vaccination card saves you from that ordeal. But theoretically, I can't be certain, that you are not vaccinated when you show me your test result. Maybe you get a kick out of somebody poking a in your nose or something. :dunno: 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A bit of a rant.

An elderly aunt of ours is having to move to a care home in the UK. After the fiasco last year of Covid positive people being sent to care homes to free up NHS beds, with the obvious consequences, you now need to have a negative PCR test resu1t before you can move into a care home. The test must be taken no more than 48 hours before you move in. Fair enough, the lab turnaround time for a PCR test result being 24 hours.

However the (private) lab that the NHS uses for PCR test results in our area is currently "overloaded" and test results are taking significantly longer than 24 hours, as far as I can tell without any penalty to them. So my aunt had 5 PCR tests in fairly quick succession, all of whose negative results came back too late, resulting in her move to the care home being repeatedly delayed. An appeal to the care home only resulted in them saying that they could not bend the rules - it might result in them being closed down by the local authority. A great deal of stress for my poor aunt and for everyone else apart from the private lab, which is getting paid for all five of those late tests. Kafkaesque.

Eventually we had to cut the Gordian knot by paying a significant amount of money for a rapid private test. Even there we had to be careful, most of these "rapid PCR test" companies were just using the same private lab and had small print saying that the lab turnaround time was outside their control and so they could not guarantee it. It took us some while to find a company that actually had its own lab on-site.

Still all sorted now, though it does underline that if you are ill in the UK you do need family looking after your interests.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, A wilding said:

A bit of a rant.

An elderly aunt of ours is having to move to a care home in the UK. After the fiasco last year of Covid positive people being sent to care homes to free up NHS beds, with the obvious consequences, you now need to have a negative PCR test resu1t before you can move into a care home. The test must be taken no more than 48 hours before you move in. Fair enough, the lab turnaround time for a PCR test result being 24 hours.

However the (private) lab that the NHS uses for PCR test results in our area is currently "overloaded" and test results are taking significantly longer than 24 hours, as far as I can tell without any penalty to them. So my aunt had 5 PCR tests in fairly quick succession, all of whose negative results came back too late, resulting in her move to the care home being repeatedly delayed. An appeal to the care home only resulted in them saying that they could not bend the rules - it might result in them being closed down by the local authority. A great deal of stress for my poor aunt and for everyone else apart from the private lab, which is getting paid for all five of those late tests. Kafkaesque.

Eventually we had to cut the Gordian knot by paying a significant amount of money for a rapid private test. Even there we had to be careful, most of these "rapid PCR test" companies were just using the same private lab and had small print saying that the lab turnaround time was outside their control and so they could not guarantee it. It took us some while to find a company that actually had its own lab on-site.

Still all sorted now, though it does underline that if you are ill in the UK you do need family looking after your interests.

Where the fuck do you live?? I’ve had several PCR tests, my daughter has had about 15, and apart from maybe very early on, none have raken longer than 24-30 hours. Many within 12 hours

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Ran said:

Huh. Never seen that in Chrome. Is everyone using Firefox getting this problem? Let me see if I still have firefox somewhere to try... Test edit again.

I am mostly using Ghostery and the edit function seems to be working fine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

Now, it's possible that Delta is nevertheless a dead end. South Africa had very low transmission rates before Omicron hit. Same with India. Many other countries are reporting very low rates of transmission after devastating Delta waves.

Certainly Europe isn't reporting very low transmission rates and some countries are having their second Delta waves (although generally, those that avoided a bad wave in the summer are having a really bad wave now).  I think you can explain Japan by saying they have generally controlled COVID very well, except for that one wave in summer.  I wouldn't try to understand India.  South Africa has a very obvious pattern, even if I can't explain that either.

In slightly more positive news, the worst affected Western European countries seem to be starting to come down from their peaks. Not sure will Christmas mess that up but gives some hope to those that are still seeing increases.  A number of Eastern European countries have been in declines for weeks now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

That's a 3g setting, which was possible before. Tho, I'd phrase it differently.

You have to provide a negative test (taken no more than 24 hours ago) to enter. Alternatively, you can provide me (employer) with a vaccination certificate; this would absolve you from the testing requirement.

That's not demanding you to reveal your vaccination status (at least in theory), that medical information is still private. Of course you'd hardly find anybody, who is vaccinated to voluntarily undergo testing, if just flashing your vaccination card saves you from that ordeal. But theoretically, I can't be certain, that you are not vaccinated when you show me your test result. Maybe you get a kick out of somebody poking a in your nose or something. :dunno: 

Isn't that a bit of a catch 22-esque kind of thing? You are basically forcing someone to do one of two things that you can't legally enforce on their own. You can't force someone to undertake a test (a medical procedure), and you can't demand that a person reveal their vaccination status. But somehow you can demand that they do one or the other? If the law allows you to demand one of two (or more) things, then it would surely allow you to demand each thing individually.

And if you can't demand someone reveal their vaccination status, can you demand to know someone's COVID-19 infection status?

I read an article published this morning that there have been no recorded deaths due to the Omicron variant. If this holds true for some time, then it may well be a mild form of the virus, with very low or even no risk of death and become something more like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Though I believe it is still causing hospitalisations, so it might be that we are just too early in the rise of this variant to yet see any confirmed deaths.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, The Anti-Targ said:

I read an article published this morning that there have been no recorded deaths due to the Omicron variant. If this holds true for some time, then it may well be a mild form of the virus, with very low or even no risk of death and become something more like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Though I believe it is still causing hospitalisations, so it might be that we are just too early in the rise of this variant to yet see any confirmed deaths.

South Africa has a very young, and at this point is hardly a covid naive population. And as you point out there's lag.

I'm on the omicron rollercoaster. The wastewater data from South Africa looks fucking horrific. Extremely rapid spread if this isn't just noise (or a change in sampling methodology). However it has been almost certainly circulating for a couple months, and hasn't caused this kind of a spike otherwise. Lots of conflicting data points.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Isn't that a bit of a catch 22-esque kind of thing? You are basically forcing someone to do one of two things that you can't legally enforce on their own. You can't force someone to undertake a test (a medical procedure), and you can't demand that a person reveal their vaccination status. But somehow you can demand that they do one or the other? If the law allows you to demand one of two (or more) things, then it would surely allow you to demand each thing individually.

And if you can't demand someone reveal their vaccination status, can you demand to know someone's COVID-19 infection status?

I read an article published this morning that there have been no recorded deaths due to the Omicron variant. If this holds true for some time, then it may well be a mild form of the virus, with very low or even no risk of death and become something more like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Though I believe it is still causing hospitalisations, so it might be that we are just too early in the rise of this variant to yet see any confirmed deaths.

No, a simple corona test isn't really putting an undue burden on you. So I (as an employer) can tell you, you want to enter my premises (your workplace), prove to me that you are not a walking health risk for my other employees (and my business as a whole). That argument should withstand any legal challenge. 

The vaccination status is like I said, a medical information, that is confidential. I can't force you to reveal that information to me. You can ofc waive the confidentiality, and reveal your vaccination status to show me that your are not walking health hazard (and avoid the tessting regiment). Side note, that same 3g rule atm also applies, when I play league games for my chess club. Last season one player for another club had forgotten to take fresh test to the game (his second shot was less than two weeks prior to the game IIRC, thus he needed a fresh test), thus he was not allowed to play, and lost his game by forfeit.

I mean, if I want to go to a bar/club/restaurant or a football game, I actually have to provide my vaccination status to get in. Which is on a privacy level way more intrusive. But then again, that's (like playing chess games) is a way to spend my past time, I want to be there. Domicillary Rights (? I hope that's the right word) apply. Of course the employer could try to force you to reveal your vaccination status on the same grounds, but that's probably a bit tricky with regards to work laws. You could probably/reasonably argue in court, my work contract stipulates I have to be at my workplace and to offer my workforce to my employer. I did show up, and I wanted to work, but he turned me away, despite my best endeavours to live up to my end of the deal. It's not my fault my employer prevented me from working. So I still expect to get paid. 

So what do I do as an employer?  Provide you with paid leave? All you did was to deny me medical information I have no right to.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

No, a simple corona test isn't really putting an undue burden on you. So I (as an employer) can tell you, you want to enter my premises (your workplace), prove to me that you are not a walking health risk for my other employees (and my business as a whole). That argument should withstand any legal challenge. 

The vaccination status is like I said, a medical information, that is confidential. I can't force you to reveal that information to me. You can ofc waive the confidentiality, and reveal your vaccination status to show me that your are not walking health hazard (and avoid the tessting regiment). Side note, that same 3g rule atm also applies, when I play league games for my chess club. Last season one player for another club had forgotten to take fresh test to the game (his second shot was less than two weeks prior to the game IIRC, thus he needed a fresh test), thus he was not allowed to play, and lost his game by forfeit.

I mean, if I want to go to a bar/club/restaurant or a football game, I actually have to provide my vaccination status to get in. Which is on a privacy level way more intrusive. But then again, that's (like playing chess games) is a way to spend my past time, I want to be there. Domicillary Rights (? I hope that's the right word) apply. Of course the employer could try to force you to reveal your vaccination status on the same grounds, but that's probably a bit tricky with regards to work laws. You could probably/reasonably argue in court, my work contract stipulates I have to be at my workplace and to offer my workforce to my employer. I did show up, and I wanted to work, but he turned me away, despite my best endeavours to live up to my end of the deal. It's not my fault my employer prevented me from working. So I still expect to get paid. 

So what do I do as an employer?  Provide you with paid leave? All you did was to deny me medical information I have no right to.

Your coronavirus infection status is also medical information, which is also subject to doctor-patient confidentiality. And the nasal swab is as much a medical procedure and damned site more painful. And if you are going on rapid antigen testing, they have don't have good sensitivity or specificity, so are not reliable on an individual basis.

Just looking at our vaccination situation, we are at 78% of the total population single dosed. I think 80% is within reach, which I was doubtful about without the 5-11 year olds being eligible for vaccination. We're at 72% of the total population double dosed. The gap between single and double dosed is closing with second vaccinations outpacing first vaccinations by about 2:1. 94% of the eligible population is either single dosed or booked to have the first dose. I wasn't too confident of getting to that kind of number before the end of the year.

I think there are 2 reasons for vaccination numbers still going up at a decent-ish rate. mandatory vaccination for certain types of jobs, and introduction of the vaccine passport. Despite prominent stories about some people choosing to end their decades long careers rather than helping out everyone by participating in an important public health measure, it would seem that a lot more people are choosing both career and helping out as the better option. Good riddance to, esp, teachers and health workers who are deluding themselves that they are standing on some weird contrived principle. One thing the govt has also mandated is that all people working in the hospitality sector need to be vaxed (possibly back-office staff don't need to be, but front of house definitely), whether or not the business participates in the vaccine pass system. The justification is that where a business requires vaccine pass for customers it makes no sense for the workers to be allowed to be unvaccinated. And where a business does not require a vaccine pass for customers its a bad mix for workers to also be unvaccinated, since transmission is most effective between unvaccinated people it is not desirable to have unvaccinated people in close contact.

It seems that up to 70% of the workforce is now covered by a no jab no job requirement. Also a lot of businesses that are not covered by a legal vaccine mandate are mandating it for staff anyway. If a person refuses to inform the employer of their vaccination status then employers are entitled to assume the person is not vaccinated, and apparently the advice is the employee would go through a process whereby if they do not accept a position which does not require vaccination, or there are no positions in the business that don't require vaccination then a 4 week (paid) notice of termination is legal. Though an employee is always entitled to take a dispute to the employment tribunal.

My own employer is planning to make a policy of anyone (employee, visitor, contractor) entering one of our buildings must be fully vaccinated by some time in January, I think. Those sorts of policies for organisations like mine (not a public facing work environment) will also drive more vaccination. Export businesses wanting to send food products to China (which accounts for a lot of employment, especially outside of the big cities, will need all staff to be fully vaccinated otherwise China will simply ban imports from those companies. 

Hospitalisations as of today: 89 people in Hospital, 9 in ICU. Vaccination status of people in Hospital: 11 (12%) partially vaccinated, 16 (18%) fully vaccinated, 62 (70%) unvaccinated. If our health system is going to be overrun when we end our lockdowns (on Friday this week) then it will be thanks to the unvaccinated, I think. Hopefully a warm summer will mean a slow spread among everyone, and so by the time we hit the real danger period in late autumn and winter vax number (and boosters) will be way up and a decent number of the unvaxed will have been infected and recovered, hopefully with few deaths and not too much long COVID.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...