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Covid 44: The Sickening


Mlle. Zabzie

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Interesting interview on the radio yesterday, from a market professor who was doing research into anti-consumption attitudes and behaviours who turned his research into anti-vax attitude and behaviours as a subset of the anti-consumption phenomenon. Anti-consumption is really any concerted decision not to by a good or service for reasons other then the inherent quality or price of the good or service. Like not buying certain goods because of sweatshop working conditions in the producing factories, or not using amazon because Jeff Bezos is a worker oppressing, tax dodging arsehole.

The professor categories anti-vaxers into 4 broad categories: The ideologically anti-vax; the freedom of choice anti-vax; the risk/benefit anti-vax; the uncertain about safety and efficacy anti-vax.

The interesting thing about the ideological anti-vax is the further subdivision within that camp. On one side you have anti-capitalist, nature provides all, healthy living protects us, man-made drugs/treatments are inherently bad people. On the other side you have God protects the pure, clean moral living, anti-government. Essentially both ideology groups are faith based, but they put faith in different things. Anti-big pharma is common to both groups. The likelihood of convincing these groups to change is essentially zero. If you need this group to become mostly vaccinated to achieve herd immunity you are pretty much out of luck.

The freedom of choice group is probably fairly small until vaccine mandates start coming along, and they will simply refuse to vaccinate simply because they won't be told what to do. This group is more amenable to being convinced through education, but regardless will mostly flat out refuse if presented with an ultimatum. They will prioritise freedom of choice over personal safety. Once vaccination rates are high enough, eliminating most mandates might get some people across the line. The freedom of choice group also reacts negatively to things like vax passes, which while not a vaccine mandate directly it is an attempt at coercing them to get vaccinated, so it's still being told what to do. So eliminating vax passes, at a certain level of vaccination might also remove a barrier. They are also the slippery slopers, if we let the govt tell us what to do here, then what will they make us do next?

The risk benefit people will attempt to rationally calculate the risk and severity of side effects to the vaccine vs the risk and severity of being infected. They can be mis-lead into over-estimating the risk of side effects (cue the anti-vaxxers citing VAERS to try to claim vaccination is a major risk). But with a calm, fact and evidence based, non-judgemental conversation many can be brought around to realising vaccination is the better risk-benefit option. Of course, as a population becomes more vaccinated, the un-vaxed risk-benefit person starts seeing even less reason to become vaccinated, because the risk of catching the disease is very low. So unless you can appeal to a sense of community spirit and collective responsibility, the higher the vaccination rate the harder it is to convince a person that the risk-benefit still sits with being vaccinated.

The uncertain about safety and efficacy group are highly susceptible to mis-information and being convinced it it too unsafe to be vaccinated or it is not effective, but they are also very amendable to being convinced with a calm, rational and non-judgemental conversation.

Any group is susceptable to believing conspiracy nonsense like magnetism, 5g, and micro-chipping.

Unfortunately for me I think, all the anti-vaxxers I know are the ideological or freedom of choice people, so they are the hardest nuts to crack, and some have bought into conspiracy thinking.

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I suspect the numbers of risk/benefit anti vaxxers are greatly bolstered while you're succeeding at maintaining zero covid as they manage to fool themselves into thinking it can last indefinitely so they don't need to risk the vaxx. We had a decent number of 60+ that didn't get the AZ vaccine for months after they were able to as they had become convinced it was dangerous and ineffective so they were waiting for Pfizer. The number of these dropped considerably once the Delta outbreak started in June/July and the risk of covid went from negligible (due to no transmission in the community) to substantial.

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2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

So each U.S. household can get four free tests, and it will take a week to a week and a half to get them after they're requested. Just great.....

Here in Canada you have to either fill out an application explaining why you need them (and it seems every pharmacy has none anyway) or wait for news of a pop-up handout clinic, line up for three hours or more and pray they don’t run out before you get to the head of the line.

I think I like your method better.

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"‘I have no intention of getting infected’: understanding Omicron’s severity
Experts on whether getting Covid is inevitable and why, despite claims of ‘mildness’, the variant is highly dangerous"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/16/no-intention-of-getting-infected-understanding-omicrons-severity

Quote

 

.... The US has record-high hospitalizations, and cases are more than three times higher than our previous highest peak, a year ago.

That’s because the other characteristics of Omicron – its immune-evasiveness and transmissibility – more than outweigh its relatively less severe symptoms. When more people get sick, there are more chances of the illness going very wrong.

“A small percentage of a huge number is a very large number,” said Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.

Jerome Adams, the former US surgeon general, laid out the math: “If your enemy uses a weapon that’s one-third as likely to kill you, but four times as many people are shooting at you, you’re now 1.3 times as likely to die!” ....

 

 

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7 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Here in Canada you have to either fill out an application explaining why you need them (and it seems every pharmacy has none anyway) or wait for news of a pop-up handout clinic, line up for three hours or more and pray they don’t run out before you get to the head of the line.

I think I like your method better.

Eh, four tests per house isn't that great when you typically want two negative tests for one person. It's simply not enough to achieve accurate testing numbers. 

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2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Eh, four tests per house isn't that great when you typically want two negative tests for one person. It's simply not enough to achieve accurate testing numbers. 

We've given up on accurate testing in Ontario. Only health care and high-risk individuals are eligible for a PCR. And rapid tests are virtually impossible to get hold of. 

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38 minutes ago, Paxter said:

We've given up on accurate testing in Ontario. Only health care and high-risk individuals are eligible for a PCR. And rapid tests are virtually impossible to get hold of. 

People accepting the notion of giving up on doing what it takes to properly combat the pandemic has always been one of my biggest fears. I think that's only going to get worse with time.

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1 frikken case of omicron in the country, 1 weekend visit to Auckland, and my wife comes back finding out a friend she hung out with all day Saturday and part of Sunday was on a bus with that one omicron case. It was only part of Sunday because the friend got a call from the contact tracers telling her she is a close contact and she needs to isolate and test.

The Sunday test has come back negative, the friend got her day 5 post exposure test taken today, so by Thursday hopefully we will know if we can mix in polite company again.

Also, now it's 2 cases of omicron, with one of the household members of case 1 being confirmed today.

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The media is in quite the omicron frenzy and half my colleagues are either sick or direct contacts after weekend get-togethers/class quarantines of their children. 

The numbers don’t really reflect this though we have the same curve we did with delta and similar numbers (7000ish daily cases) to the upward tendency of delta. Of course one’s never going to get 15-20000 positive cases as we see in other countries, if one runs 15000 tests in total. I have a feeling that the majority of omicron cases will never show up in the stats (which only reflect PCRs). Curiously sewer samples don’t indicate an exponential rise in cases either. I don’t understand. 

Oh and the media is still publishing starkly contradicting headlines with a single day apart. If life was an HBO show, I might as well suspect that this is a conscious effort of sabotage. But life isn’t an HBO show so it’s just incompetence. 

I’m rather curiously watching UK covid news. is omicron really leaving as quickly as it came? whatever is the case, very happy for the UK. 

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5 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

 I’m rather curiously watching UK covid news. is omicron really leaving as quickly as it came? whatever is the case, very happy for the UK. 

Yes cases and the amount of hospital admissions are dropping quite fast. It seems the pattern that was seen in South Africa, of massive numbers all at once, and then a steep drop is being followed. I'm still not clear as to whether Omicron is actually milder or that the UK simply has very high level of boosters in the elderly which has meant that this winter wave has not been very serious. It does make a lot of the predictions in December look like doom mongering however.

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The police union announced that they do not want to enforce the vaccine mandate and that they dislike enforcing the measures that are already in place.

No surprise there I have personally seen the police not enforce anything.

They are completely on the side of the anti-vaxxers.

You call it a failed state I guess when the legislature loses control of the enforcement apparatus.

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18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

So each U.S. household can get four free tests, and it will take a week to a week and a half to get them after they're requested. Just great.....

 

18 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Here in Canada you have to either fill out an application explaining why you need them (and it seems every pharmacy has none anyway) or wait for news of a pop-up handout clinic, line up for three hours or more and pray they don’t run out before you get to the head of the line.

I thought this was appropiate :P . To be on the clear side, I'm the last guy in the picture.

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23 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Yes cases and the amount of hospital admissions are dropping quite fast. It seems the pattern that was seen in South Africa, of massive numbers all at once, and then a steep drop is being followed. I'm still not clear as to whether Omicron is actually milder or that the UK simply has very high level of boosters in the elderly which has meant that this winter wave has not been very serious. It does make a lot of the predictions in December look like doom mongering however.

Where you getting that? Gov.uk shows they have plateaued, but no updates since 11th Jan. 

Deaths have also plateaued but that data is up to date. 

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1 hour ago, RhaenysBee said:

. Curiously sewer samples don’t indicate an exponential rise in cases either. I don’t understand. 

Omicron is only now coming to Poland. I think Germany began to see increases quite recently. Luxembourg's wave started at the beginning of January. It spreads fast but it still takes a while to move through Europe, and it's moving from west to east.

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2 minutes ago, Filippa Eilhart said:

Omicron is only now coming to Poland. I think Germany began to see increases quite recently. Luxembourg's wave started at the beginning of January. It spreads fast but it still takes a while to move through Europe, and it's moving from west to east.

It arrived here around the holidays and turned the downward delta curve back up in the first week of January. Since then the majority of cases are thought to be omicron.

 

 

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Unfortunately I didn't have the time to follow some previous interesting discussions regarding the evolution of the virus (and thus of the pandemic). Dealing with a number of personal and work related issues... on top of rising numbers of infections all around.

Two little tidbits.

1. There is growing concern about BA.2 (also dubbed "stealth" Omicron) rising in prevalence in a number of countries (e.g. Denmark). Compared to vanilla Omicron (BA.1) is has enough different mutations to get a different greek letter. In fact, the differences between BA.1 and BA.2 is larger than among other variants of concerns. Little is known regarding immune escape (expect to be high), cross-immunity and disease severity. Something to watch.

2. First results from Israel regarding a second booster (4th dose). It raises the antibodies but it's unclear yet if it does something else.

 

 

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