Does the coronavirus merit investment, or personal, concern or consideration?

5708

It’s a multi-tiered analysis:

First, it’s an effort to avoid contracting COVID-19 at all. From the jump I have believed COVID-19 is the virus from hell. It is worth my effort to avoid it. However, failing that:

Second, it’s an effort to avoid serious illness should the misfortune of contracting the virus materialize. Vaccinated people, should a breakthrough infection happen, nevertheless have a measure of protection . . . because we have the antibodies, and the primed T cells, which aid the body in fighting the virus.

Third, it’s an effort to minimize chances of hospitalization, and also of death.

Finally, it’s an effort to be a responsible member of society by not endangering others. Unvaccinated persons, as we learned at the outset of this pandemic, can act as unknowing carriers of the virus. I do not relish the notion of harming other people.

So bottom line, with all those reasons rather self evident, vaccination was a no brainer. Except:

As I wrote in my earlier post, it all comes down to evaluation of probabilistic considerations. And that is a tough assignment for some individuals. Let’s face fact: the various vaccines all carry a very small measure of risk. Much of that risk can be mitigated by careful and thoughtful vaccine selection. The remaining risk is vanishingly small, and is overwhelmed by risk of contracting the virus itself.

It is heartbreaking, for me, to witness what this horrible virus continues even now to do to persons who prioritize avoidance of the vaccines. And that goes double when it is younger people who become seriously ill or even lose their lives.

Oh, sure. Absolutely. I’m placing most of my orders now with walmart.com. But I have given a few orders in the past to target.com. It’s the same damage risk. Of course if you telephone them they will make everything right. But I’m a fairly busy person and straightening things out like that can be time consuming. I prefer to hope for the best and make do if at all possible with whatever I receive.

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5709

At the present time here in the USA, right now today, roughly 1750 persons are perishing from COVID-19 per week.

These are not mere hospitalizations. These are deaths.

Obviously the number of new cases/week and the number of hospitalizations/week is higher. But many of those people end up recovering, albeit likely following fulfillment of their role as virus spreaders.

5710

I wonder how many people hear this, and think it is in fact higher than the 1,000 per day last summer? Reporting only 250/day would send the message that we are on the tail of this…

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5711

Some credit to the Washington Post for taking the WHO to task for the various errors and inconsistencies in their heavily Chinese government edited and approved report on the origins of the Wuhan virus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/covid-wuhan-outbreak-who/2021/07/15/51e7e8a6-e2c6-11eb-88c5-4fd6382c47cb_story.html

The WHO has since admitted to various inadvertent “editing errors”, involving things like who the first known case was (earlier than the report first claimed) and how close they were to a particular Wuhan Institute (closer than originally claimed). Honest mistakes I’m sure, and for which we are getting good value for our generously resumed WHO contributions as US taxpayers.

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5712

I agree with all of your post, but especially the quoted line above.

I was also, not very elegantly (or apparently clearly), trying to point out that the vax was sold as the answer to our covid problems. It obviously is not.

5713

Thank you very much for taking the time to clearly, even to me, explain your rationale. I think it makes perfect sense for you to follow it, as you are obviously most comfortable with the logic and thought behind it.

I only have one tiny issue with the rest of your post.

To me, it’s a small measure of known/published risk.

Much of that known/published risk

The remaining known/published risk is vanishingly small.

As mentioned before, I am probably the poster child for someone who should not get covid - comorbidities abound. I had almost convinced myself to get the vax in a 2 or 3 years, but am now much less inclined. If I had already gotten it, I would probably have buyers remorse. By the time they decide to force it down people’s throats, I should be able to prove antibodies are already present … or I’ll be dead.

Oh, lest anyone think there is a death wish lurking here, I have taken steps in the last couple of months to mitigate exposure. I now limit myself to interacting with less than 50 people per week.

5714

Broad recap on research on the India / Delta variant is suggesting several things -

  • viral loads are much higher than before (increasing transmission)
  • related, symptoms arrive faster than before, after 3-5 days instead of more like 6
  • vaccinated people can still get sick and show symptoms more often (maybe only 40-60% protection, hard to tell?; protection is still good against serious health outcomes)
  • vaccinated people can spread the virus to others, and while this is at a somewhat reduced rate, the baseline rate is very high
  • symptoms in vaccinated people are cold-like (runny nose, sneezing) not covid-like (fever, cough)

I suspect the mask mandates in light of these are justified, even for vaccinated people, although so far the CDC is leaving that to each location.

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5715

So the current “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is actually the “pandemic of giving free reign to the vaccinated”?

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5716

Well given we’re at about 50% vaccinated, I’d say we’ve got about half of each. The unvaccinated, to the extent they are in an at-risk group, are very much in danger of getting the virus and needing hospitalization, etc. the vaccinated, to the extent they’re not being careful in their lifestyle and/or wearing masks, etc, are at risk of getting this new variant and spreading it on to others around them.

This spreads super fast. Looks at India where it’s already hit something like 2/3 of their population, as measured by antibody surveys.

Opening things up just means essentially everyone gets the virus. I’m not sure at this point that any other outcome is likely given the politics, etc. we’re just very lucky in the US that we got a lot of vaccines out already, because for good protection against Delta you really need both doses and that takes time that this fast spreading variant will not afford us if people are largely going back to normal behavior.

5717

Interesting and noteworthy, I think, are the numbers of health care workers who remain unvaccinated. I concede many of them are relatively young and short on comorbidities. Certainly they are, on the whole, younger than the people for whom they provide medical care.

And without question comorbidities are pivotal. I myself do not need COVID-19 to make me, at times, short of breath. I would not welcome the “one-two” punch the virus could provide, leaving me in an unrecoverable situation.

Still bottom line, you would hope medical workers would accept inoculation for the sake of their patients. But I guess that is wrong.

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5718

It’s basically the same as your reluctance to go out despite being vaccinated. Because the vaccine’s effectiveness in any given person is generally unknown, they need to consider themselves a continued threat to their patients whether they’re vaccinated or not.

The primary purpose of healthcare workers getting vaccinated is to protect themselves from the constant stream of random people they’re exposed to, often with encumbered preventative measures. And “healthcare workers” is an umbrella that includes many jobs where there is no patient interaction and isn’t even medical-related (custodians, food service, etc), where that added risk is negligible if not nonexistent.

5719

I’m sure this will encourage people to get vaccinated. Permanent disability payments beat those vaccine lotteries any day (not to belittle the condition of people who actually do have long covid conditions, which by all accounts suck a fair bit).

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5720

Fauci emails show some of the prominent scientists thought covid was un-natural from the start, but quickly changed their mind to put forward a united, pro-still-getting-our-research-funded stance.

https://twitter.com/InWuchang/status/1418651714526326794

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5721

You think back to the beginning of the pandemic and realize Trump was being impeached and knew from nothing about disease or medicine or the like. None of it! So he HAD to rely on his advisors, among them and most prominent: Fauci.

I cannot be too tough on Trump; probably would have done the same thing myself in that situation. Trump could not have known, at the outset, that Fauci had a vested interest in certain outcomes and would play CYA games whenever necessary.

You do pick a little of it up in Fauci’s own, oftentimes conflicting, statements back at that time. And I guess Trump eventually caught on; he brought in other people after all, trying to work around the Fauci situation.

But not being at ALL knowledgeable personally regarding disease or medicine, Trump was at a huge disadvantage. I worry that Biden is in a similar situation today . . . . not that his advisors are seeking to harm him or make him look bad. But, like Trump, Biden is not a medical guy. He is similarly at the mercy of his medical teams.

Biden is an excellent politician, Trump less so. But neither man could or can be expected to understand the medical politics which has us all in its grip today.

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5722

Or …

Still bottom line, you would hope medical workers have an insight into the medical/pharmaceutical industry that the general public does not, and will make a responsible decision for their health, the health of their families, and the health of their patients.

5723

Maybe some are cautious or uneducated, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of them had (or thought they had) covid already. The best reason not to get a vaccine IMO is that you already got the virus. We’ve seen studies that show natural infection results in a broader, more robust immune response and is more protective against variant reinfection risks than these narrowly tailored spike protein vaccines.

The main reason for a non-high-risk person to take a vaccine is because they think the unknown long term vaccine risks are smaller than the unknown long term covid risks, and I think they probably are but that’s just an educated guess since we only have a year’s worth of data on each. But if you already got stuck with the possible covid risks, why take the separate vaccine risks as well on top of that for no additional benefit?

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5724

Dr. Tom Frieden was Trump’s CDC director.

Here is what Dr. Frieden very recently said:

The Delta variant is believed to be more transmissible than other strains – so much so that it is essentially finding people who are unvaccinated.

This is from CNN in an article dated 27 July 2021.

5725

CDC coming out with “Masks for All” guidance

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5726

Big shock. Mask up again, dudes and dudettes! Heck, I never stopped wearing a mask indoors. Maybe I should be running the CDC instead of the hooples currently in charge there. :rofl:

Listen to the CDC and the delta variant will take you by the hand and lead you to meet your maker!! :roll_eyes:

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5727

I am at an employer that is more “woke” than the average (because of our industry). We just had our first in person full staff meeting (80+) people in over a year. We had food and beverages and we talking to each other in a fairly confined space. I don’t see how well this “guidance” is going to work, even for the democrat voters that are vaccinated (and all those around them are too) while living normal lives day-to-day… until they personally see a significant number of people in their lives start getting covid all over again like they did over a year ago. And it isn’t looking like that is going to happen. Even left leaning folks have recognized at this point that this guidance is pretty "scare-tactic"ish. They’re avoiding reading about it and especially talking about it. These were the sort of folks that would give you a scowl if you dared walk 5 feet into the supermarket before putting your mask on 14 months ago and were constantly talking about masking and how good they were at it. They don’t want to mask again and since they don’t have to pay attention to the news for the latest Trump outrage, this new “guidance” may as well not even exist.

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