COVID 45: Those Are Rookie Numbers

[Varysblackfyre321]

22 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

A group of people taking the govt to court to try to force them to remove availability of vaccine for 5-11 year olds because the WHO website still says there is insufficient evidence to support safety and efficacy for that age group. The WHO web https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/who-can-take-the-pfizer-biontech-covid-19--vaccine page still says this:

The reason stated by a WHO rep when approached by news reporters here was that they want countries to prioritise older more vulnerable age groups and to consider global vaccine distribution equity. However to try to achieve these quite reasonable goals by essentially lying (or more charitably failing to update the information on recommendations of vaccinating 5-11 year olds) is extremely irresponsible given the degree and vehemence and even violence of anti-vaxxers. Every day this statement remains on the WHO website after the USA, Canada, the EU, and other countries have approved the vaccine and there are millions of children in that age group who have been safely vaccinated is simply giving aid and comfort to anti-vaxxers and COVID conspiracists.

Another disappointing failure of responsibility and leadership by the WHO.

Can we all just acknowledge that if even if the WHO had said there was sufficient evidence this group would dismiss it as conspiracy?

[Mlle. Zabzie]

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I just saw an interview with the president of a wastewater testing company, Biobot. She was saying that they saw the rise of Omicron in wastewater well before the rise in case numbers in the US (a couple of weeks) and now they are seeing a sharp drop in wastewater. They are taking that as a good sign. And the move in both cases started in the east and moved west, a pattern we’ve seen before.

Poop don't lie, apparently.  

[TrueMetis]

4 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Poop don't lie, apparently.  

At least we still have some data? I've been watching the numbers in Canada go down the past couple weeks, but given the deliberate fuckery with tests I can't be sure if numbers are actually going down or not.

ETA: Though it does concern me that if the numbers are true it's going to give people the idea that "do nothing" was actually the reasonable course of action.

[Fragile Bird]

Just now, TrueMetis said:

At least we still have some data? I've been watching the numbers in Canada go down the past couple weeks, but given the deliberate fuckery with tests I can't be sure if numbers are actually going down or not.

Have to watch the hospital admissions.

[The Anti-Targ]

The greatest sin of science communication is the mis-representation of facts, or the presentation of a raw fact.

An example is this.

Quote

Since January 2020, number of deaths in the UK where COVID-19 is the only thing mentioned under cause of death on the death certificate: 17,371.

I'll leave it to you to decide how this fact could be mis-used.

[Soylent Brown]

5 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Poop don't lie, apparently.  

It's the most honest thing that comes out of many of us, it seems.

[A True Kaniggit]

Heard this from my sister.

Her non-vaccinated friend that works in a hospital was told by the HR Department that as long as she turns in any exemption form,  it would be approved.

How is this CMS mandate of any use if the hospitals can just approve any exemption?

 

I suppose it at least gives cover to those hospitals that actually want to release their non-vaccinated workers. (Unless it's a Florida hospital)

[Zorral]

Which is probably why even all of us who are fully vaxxed are staying home and the restaurants. etc. are screaming.  When everybody's kids are coming home positive from school, helps with that determination to try and stay out of crowds . . . .

Not what's going on elsewheres, but it sure as hell is here.

And our numbers are starting to fall -- tourists gone too.   So, as of yesterday's number of positive testing in our zip code, we've dropped from nearly 23% to  below 17%.

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

It's the economic consequences of self-imposed personal lockdowns that I keep having to point out to online dingbats. For all the (unjustified) pooh-poohing of government lockdowns, at least then businesses are propped up by subsidies. If you open up, and people are still trying to avoid social contact, you get a recipe for instant recession, since there are no subsidies.

[rotting sea cow]

13 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Heard this from my sister.

Her non-vaccinated friend that works in a hospital was told by the HR Department that as long as she turns in any exemption form,  it would be approved.

How is this CMS mandate of any use if the hospitals can just approve any exemption?

 

I suppose it at least gives cover to those hospitals that actually want to release their non-vaccinated workers. (Unless it's a Florida hospital)

 

Tell me, in the Omicron era, when health care workers (and many others) are being forced to work despite being infected due to the severe shortages, what is the difference with unvaccinated ones? Probably that hospital is just desperate and they are trying to cover themselves the best they can.

In Canada, Ontario (maybe) is trying to force hospitals to rehire unvaccinated nurses and are putting infected and uninfected patients in the same rooms, but somehow, unvaccinated US truck drivers are a "threat to public health" and thus banning them is the "right thing to do" despite the known problems on the supply chains and ramping inflation. 

If these managers and politicians had the brain and soul that the gods gave to a slug, they would have come up with new working contracts with 25% paid raise to any HC worker that abide to the new COVID regulations (aka vaccines). That is what they deserve, no just a congratulation email with a postscript that tell them to come to work with COVID.

 

[Paxter]

18 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Have to watch the hospital admissions.

Testing positivity rates are also a decent (and more leading) metric, though sample size is a problem. Admissions are starting to level off, which is no surprise given that the spreading effects of holiday gatherings will have worked their way through.

[TrueMetis]

6 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

 

Tell me, in the Omicron era, when health care workers (and many others) are being forced to work despite being infected due to the severe shortages, what is the difference with unvaccinated ones? Probably that hospital is just desperate and they are trying to cover themselves the best they can.

In Canada, Ontario (maybe) is trying to force hospitals to rehire unvaccinated nurses and are putting infected and uninfected patients in the same rooms, but somehow, unvaccinated US truck drivers are a "threat to public health" and thus banning them is the "right thing to do" despite the known problems on the supply chains and ramping inflation. 

If these managers and politicians had the brain and soul that the gods gave to a slug, they would have come up with new working contracts with 25% paid raise to any HC worker that abide to the new COVID regulations (aka vaccines). That is what they deserve, no just a congratulation email with a postscript that tell them to come to work with COVID.

 

Well the difference there is one of those is being done by the federal government, who's actions make sense if a little weak, and the other is the province, who hates healthcare workers and seems to be taking this as an opportunity to break the healthcare system.

6 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

It's the economic consequences of self-imposed personal lockdowns that I keep having to point out to online dingbats. For all the (unjustified) pooh-poohing of government lockdowns, at least then businesses are propped up by subsidies. If you open up, and people are still trying to avoid social contact, you get a recipe for instant recession, since there are no subsidies.

And also exacerbates other issues, like the supply chain issues we are having as the virus spreads more easily and really sick people have trouble working. I'm sure we've all seen at least a couple of those stories where a retail worker is the only one there to unload entire pallets so it takes forever. Now extend that sort of thing throughout the entire chain.

[Zorral]

Quote

 

" 'Incredible Morale Boost:' Military Medical Team Arrives At NJ University Hospital"

https://gothamist.com/news/incredible-morale-boost-military-medical-team-arrives-nj-university-hospital

.... Hill: Paint the picture for us of the current state of your hospital. How many staff members have been out recently due to COVID, and in what ways are these absences affecting your operations?

Elnahal: Well, right now, we are in the high two hundreds of staff out of work, both due to COVID or an issue related to COVID like people having their daycares closed or their schools because of staffing issues or outbreaks in those workplaces. So, we are still seeing a real pinch in staffing at the hospital.

At the same time, we still have well over 80 patients with COVID 19 — and that is a marked reduction from last week — but it's still very much a strain on the hospital. And the other thing that folks don't necessarily track is that our hospital is full of other patients that are not necessarily dealing with COVID.

So there's a lot of acuity in the community — a lot of folks who've deferred or delayed their care. And so these women and men in uniform — these heroes alongside ours — will really be addressing the full gamut of patients that we have.

Is burnout among staff a factor?

It's definitely a factor. At this point, I have fewer tools in my belt as a leader to paint the light at the end of the tunnel. In the spring of 2020, the way I like to describe it, that was very much an adrenaline rush.

Of course, it was difficult. Of course, even some of our staff have post-traumatic stress from when we had well over 300 patients with this disease. But at least we could, at that time, paint the notion that we could bring COVID down to zero as soon as that summer.

Now, obviously, that argument is less effective, and we really have to do as much as possible to improve morale — and these troops really help do that. Yesterday, there was an emotional moment where hundreds of our staff clapped for these folks as we walked them into their orientation. It was just an incredible morale boost.

How many members are on this team, and did they immediately jump into action?

We have 25 women and men in uniform across types of healthcare skills — so physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, really the whole gamut of clinical skills, and they will be dispersed across the hospital.

They're already hitting the ground running at the night shift today. They're doing orientation for really less than 48 hours and then getting right to work. So these are folks who are used to deploying and doing that. They are clinicians that normally work on their military bases, and we're so happy to have them. 

The omicron variant has seemingly moved beyond its peak in our area, both in terms of cases and hospitalizations. Do you think these teams are coming in a little too late?

I don't think so. As far as we're concerned, we still have a tremendous load on our clinicians. You already mentioned the morale and burnout issue — that is still here and will persist.

We also have an explosion of mental and behavioral health diagnosis patients — folks who have worsening chronic disease because of delayed or deferred care for the last two years.

No, I don't think it's too late. I think it's just at the right time.

They'll be here for at least a month, and we'll make every bit of use of their incredible skills during the lockdown. ....

 

We are really seeing the self-imposed safety behaviors hitting the local economy really hard -- right along side supply chain and labor shortages.  The restaurants are just empty, including the street sheds, which hasn't been the case since they opened.  True, it is very cold here, and will be essentially below freezing day-and-night for quite some time, but last winter that didn't matter to people somehow.

I wonder if so many others as we have have gotten stories from so many people who got omicron, and learned from their friends, family and personally that even mild is no joking matter at all?

It's odd how as soon as the holidays were over, everybody just stayed home, which they sure as heck were not doing during the holidays.

 

[Padraig]

So we have joined the list of countries that have decided that COVID is now over.  Not all restrictions have suddenly gone but most of them have.  I'm quite shocked.  The trends have been moving in a positive direction over the last couple of weeks but hospitalisations have only begun to fall.  And It is not as if anybody expected this sudden shift (until yesterday).  You would think they would have done things in phases, just to be safe, but nope.

The medical people have signed off on all this.  They should know what they are doing...

Anyhow, the other version of Omicron was mentioned earlier in this tread.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/01/generic-drug-makers-sign-make-merck-covid-19-antiviral

Quote

 

Health officials in Denmark and Norway, in their genetic monitoring of Omicron viruses, report that a subvariant called BA.2 is increasing rapidly and may become dominant over the main type of Omicron, according to government reports translated and posted by Avian Flu Diary, an infectious disease news blog.

Danish officials said BA.2 now makes up nearly half of sequenced samples, and Norwegian officials said the properties of BA.2 aren't yet known, other than that it is more contagious than the parent virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said in its most recent weekly COVID-19 epidemiologic update that BA.2 is one of a number of lineages that it is monitoring under the umbrella of Omicron.

Commenting on BA.2 developments on Twitter yesterday, Tom Peacock, PhD, a virologist at Imperial College London, said the variant appears to be the major Omicron lineage in parts of India and the Philippines and is growing compared to BA.1 in a few European countries. He added that consistent growth across multiple countries may mean that is more transmissible than BA.1.

So far, there is little information on differences in severity and impact on antigenicity, Peacock said, adding that close monitoring is needed.

 

Cases in Denmark have exploded again, so i'm going to be even more concerned about another wild card popping up like that now.  Although fatality and ICU trends haven't followed those trends.  Yet.  So hopefully there is nothing to it.

A lot of countries are still seeing increasing COVID cases (even if at a much slower rate).  And a country with a terribly high fatality rate like Bulgaria is now seeing Omicron hit and fatality rates start to rise again (from a very high level).  It is possible that things will be much better by March but who can be sure!

[rotting sea cow]

On 1/20/2022 at 1:05 AM, Teng Ai Hui said:

Today, the family got a knock on the door at 7am.  That was our 8th test in the last 12 days.

Are you in China? Which city?

[Heartofice]

17 hours ago, Padraig said:

So we have joined the list of countries that have decided that COVID is now over.  Not all restrictions have suddenly gone but most of them have.  I'm quite shocked.  The trends have been moving in a positive direction over the last couple of weeks but hospitalisations have only begun to fall.  And It is not as if anybody expected this sudden shift (until yesterday).  You would think they would have done things in phases, just to be safe, but nope.

I'm not convinced that 'phases' is all that effective any more. There seems to be this thinking that you can mix and match all these measures and that will reduce the R0 a certain, almost measurable amount. I'd say from previous waves, especially Omicron, there are probably one or two measures (making EVERYONE work from home, closing schools bars and clubs and restaurants) that have a noticeable effect, and most barely move the dial. So you are kind of stuck with Lockdown or No Lockdown as choices.

[Week]

 

[A True Kaniggit]

14 minutes ago, Week said:

 

Current surge in deaths is going to break 900,000 total dead here fairly quickly.
 

 Hopefully it slows down enough that we don’t get too close to 1,000,000 dead by the end of this wave. 

[Fragile Bird]

Remember I said my best friend’s husband was diagnosed with cancer the same time I was? He went into 6 sessions of chemo just after he got his first dose of Pfizer. He later got his second shot and then his booster, long before we got ours.

He was recently tested and he has no Covid antibodies.

Sucks.

[HoodedCrow]

Hope that you are okay. His immune system may kick in as time goes by. I was really happy to have obvious immune responses after the 3 shots..second was a doozy. It did come back for me. I challenged it with flu and then pneumonia vaccines, after I was good enough after months.  Nobody will tell you to do that, though, and I don’t know how that would work for anyone else. Someone I met did bone marrow transplants, but I don’t know how that went.