Covid 47: Waving Invisibly

[VigoTheCarpathian]

On 10/12/2022 at 2:45 PM, Raja said:

Really like infographics like this one

I worked with Dr. Radecki for a few months in Portland, specifically on data viz and provider variation!  I didn’t keep up with him, he wasn’t in our ED for long - random encountering him here on the board.

[Raja]

8 hours ago, VigoTheCarpathian said:

, he wasn’t in our ED for long

I work in ED and follow a bunch of ED docs, he's done some interesting data analysis stuff which is useful and posts lots of useful ED stuff for youngins like me.

[Fragile Bird]

On 10/14/2022 at 5:16 PM, Zorral said:

The City reports today that -- who woulda thought it? -- covid cases are ticking up again.  Already.  Just as in Europe, They Said.

Get your boosters and flu shots, folks!  Wear those masks.

I took a quick look at the weekly numbers on Worldometer and wow, 500,000+ cases in Germany last week, and the US number jumped by 100,000. Italy and France up large as well.

This is just a wild guess, but I assume a lot more testing is going on in Germany than say, the US or Canada.

[Luzifer's right hand]

29 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I took a quick look at the weekly numbers on Worldometer and wow, 500,000+ cases in Germany last week, and the US number jumped by 100,000. Italy and France up large as well.

This is just a wild guess, but I assume a lot more testing is going on in Germany than say, the US or Canada.

Well it feels like there is a scale from not recommending testing at all(Sweden recommends you should no get tested even if you test positive at home with a flow test) to forced tests like China.  Comparing numbers between countries or even global numbers is completely impossible at this point. There are obviously also a lot of countries which have no tests for economic reasons unlike the ideology based differences in testing between wealthy countries.

I can see it even inside my country with test positivity hitting close to 90% a short while ago in my right leaning part of Austria and Vienna never exceeding 10% test positivity. We only track PCR tests

From personally anecdotes it feels like at least half the population got it in the last two weeks. I'm trying to stay in the control group myself.

The current estimate is up to 400k cases per day in Germany I believe.

[The Anti-Targ]

I think the only people here getting PCR tests is people who end up in hospital. The boffins are keeping track of the variants we have circulating in the population by testing waste water. So we know we have the newest BQ.1(?) variant because waste water testing has found it.

[Luzifer's right hand]

11 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I think the only people here getting PCR tests is people who end up in hospital. The boffins are keeping track of the variants we have circulating in the population by testing waste water. So we know we have the newest BQ.1(?) variant because waste water testing has found it.

You can still get 5 PCR per month just for fun and unlimited PCR tests for other reasons here. But even our numbers are pretty meaningless as one group tests often and others only when they are tested at the GP/hospital. 

We have waste water testing but that has been reduced which means numbers are difficult to compare.

[Kalbear]

Family survey of the new boosters since we've all got them:

- Two family members who had an incredibly bad reaction to the first set of vaccines (multiple days of basically being out of commission) had one day of feeling bleh, another day of light fatigue, and then were fine

- Two others who had bad reactions had a bleh day and then were fine

- Last one (young adult male) had no real reaction

Arms were not appreciably sore either. 

[Corvinus85]

I got both the flu shot and the new Covid booster at the same time, one in each arm. I can conclusively say that the Covid booster is worse for me. Like the predecessor shots, I had a full day of feeling fatigued and a sore arm. I had no reaction to the flu shot; I usually never do.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Might be interesting to some as we still test a lot compared to most countries. Time between wave peaks seems to be 3-4 months at this point. More or less what scientists expected about a year ago at least around here.

[Zorral]

 

from the Wall Street Journal, behind sub paywall:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pfizer-expects-their-biontech-covid-shot-will-cost-dollar110?

Quote

Pfizer is making preparations to sell its COVID vaccine commercially as early as next year, and predicts the price per dose will be around $110 to $130. Angela Lukin, Pfizer’s U.S. president, said Thursday that a commercial rollout depends on when its existing U.S. supply runs out and when its federal government contracts expire. The U.S. government is set to end offering free vaccines soon after Congress cut billions of dollars in COVID funding in September. Lukin said it’s unlikely people will pay out of their own pocket as health insurers and employers will likely cover the cost, similar to flu shots. However, the proposed price is far greater than previous doses. The U.S. government paid $19.50 a dose for the Pfizer vaccine under its first contract, and $30.50 under its most recent one. Julia Kosgei, policy adviser to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a group that advocates for free access to COVID vaccines, called the price hike “obscene” and said experts estimate it costs Pfizer $1.18 to make each dose. “While health workers and the vulnerable continue to go unvaccinated in developing countries, Pfizer is shamelessly fleecing the public for ever-greater sums of money,” she said. Prices for vaccines in the U.S. vary from about $12 to $268

Now that it costs so much, maybe the reichlicans will demand everybody get vaxxed.

[Heartofice]

Feeding time in China during Covid. If this is real it’s.. scary.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

19 hours ago, Zorral said:

 

from the Wall Street Journal, behind sub paywall:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pfizer-expects-their-biontech-covid-shot-will-cost-dollar110?

Now that it costs so much, maybe the reichlicans will demand everybody get vaxxed.

Will the price really impact developing countries? From what I gathered between barriers in administration and distribution and vaccine hesitancy donations are mostly thrown away even now when they are actually being donated long before their expiration dates(because of collapsing demand in the EU and the US). I mean I know nobody who goes for anything else then the Pfizer B4/B5 booster the rest ist mostly waiting for donation or disposal. Nobody I know who was unsure about the 3rd shot or got vaccinated for entry reasons is going for a 4th unless they work in health care/caretaking. Everybody else either had their 4th or 5th shot already. 

[Zorral]

The Bivalent Shot Might Lay You Out
But double the spike proteins doesn’t mean double the fevers and chills. By Katherine J. Wu

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/10/bivalent-covid-booster-side-effects/671819/

[Luzifer's right hand]

The 5th shot (4/5 booster) is in.

I actually got a huge number of shots recently because of travel and I'm curious if react I stronger to this than to my travel shots. Only boosters apart from rabies though.

[Kalbear]

It is completely insane to me how we just...don't care. It's barely newsworthy. 5000 deaths a week and we are just not doing a single thing about it.

 

 

[Zorral]

49 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

5000 deaths a week and we are just not doing a single thing about it.

Elections!  Elections!  Elections!  Cannot mention the disease that has no name for fear ... for fear of ... I dunno? People dying?  Or is it just death which has no name and can't be spoken?

[Luzifer's right hand]

17 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It is completely insane to me how we just...don't care. It's barely newsworthy. 5000 deaths a week and we are just not doing a single thing about it.

 

 

But that is the new normal. Just because people pretend that things are kinda like before the virus that is just getting more and more infectious is still around. Only the abilities of the human immune system (aided by vaccines) have prevented worse. Unknown long term effects of the virus are also utterly irrelevant to most people unlike long term effects of vaccines.

[The Anti-Targ]

On 10/25/2022 at 5:55 AM, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It is completely insane to me how we just...don't care. It's barely newsworthy. 5000 deaths a week and we are just not doing a single thing about it.

 

 

 

On 10/25/2022 at 6:46 AM, Zorral said:

Elections!  Elections!  Elections!  Cannot mention the disease that has no name for fear ... for fear of ... I dunno? People dying?  Or is it just death which has no name and can't be spoken?

Not to be cynical or anything, but it suits both Democrats and Republicans to pretend COVID no longer exists: Republicans because, well they've been trying to say it's barely a thing for almost the entire pandemic and they have the lion's share of vaccine and pandemic conspiracy nutjobs in their voter base, so anything at all negative to do with COVID is either nasty Democrats trying to remove your freedoms, or sneaky Democrats trying to do sneaky things. Democrats, because it seems that COVID is disproportionately killing likely Republican voters, and mostly based on those people having made fully informed (or mis-informed) decisions, which nothing the govt can do will change. Might as well now rely on sensible people making sensible choices and everyone else let the chips fall where they may. We're not really all that far away from this position ourselves, it's just that we managed to keep a lid on infections before mass vaccination was possible, so our total casualties is a lot lower.

And now...

I thought the lab leak hypothesis was mostly put to bed a month or so ago, but apparently not: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/10/26/23425272/covid-origins-lab-leak-sars-cov-2-washburne-wuhan-virology

Quote

How to read a controversial preprint paper on Covid’s origins

A trio of researchers claimed they found likely evidence that the virus that causes Covid-19 was synthetic. And then scientists went to work picking the theory apart.

By Kelsey Piper  Oct 26, 2022, 4:20pm EDT

 

On October 27, Valentin Bruttel, a molecular immunologist at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, and co-authors Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen released a preprint — a scientific paper that has not yet gone through the process of peer review — with a shocking claim: The original SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic did not emerge in animals and jump over to humans, as most scientists assume, but had most likely been synthesized in a lab. And they had developed statistical tests that they said backed up their claim.

This was an all-time “big if true” claim. The ultimate origins of Covid are one of the biggest open questions in science, and if clear evidence emerged that a pandemic that has killed millions began with the work of researchers in a lab, the ramifications for science would be unimaginable.

I have now spent much of the last week looking into the work of Bruttel and his colleagues, and I think their analysis doesn’t hold up — meaning the paper doesn’t help resolve the question of how SARS-CoV-2 originated.

But while usually I wouldn’t bother writing about a preprint that doesn’t stand up to in-depth scrutiny and may never be peer reviewed and fully published at all — for one thing, there have been tens of thousands of preprints on Covid alone — in this case I think it’s worth it. That’s because the researchers’ original claim circulated widely and is worth thoughtfully answering, and because the preprint and the response represent both the best and the worst in how our scientific institutions and processes converge on truth.

 I guess the general view among most of the credible scientists in the relevant fields is a natural animal to human jump is the most likely origin. But that the possibility of lab leak still can't be confidently excluded.

[Raja]

58 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I thought the lab leak hypothesis was mostly put to bed a month or so ago, but apparently not: 

A random preprint, of a terrible study, does not reopen the debate at all. I do not understand why it would. Deeply flawed studies do not count, and I wish people would consider that before stating what you have stated above.

[Zorral]

18 minutes ago, Raja said:

does not reopen the debate at all.

Immediately proven bull shit.