[HN Gopher] Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders p...
___________________________________________________________________
Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make
shots compulsory
Author : Tomte
Score : 273 points
Date : 2021-12-02 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I'm confused. I thought vaccinated people can spread the virus.
| Why are they not locked down too?
| krater23 wrote:
| Because a lockdown of all people is more unpopular than a
| lockdown of unvaccinated people. It's election year...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Because it's cheaper to vaccinate people than to hospitalize
| unvaccinated, and hospitals are understaffed everywhere in the
| world.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Because the risk of transmission is understood to be
| significantly lower, and since unvaccinated people are more
| likely to cause the virus to mutate it's in the governments
| best interest to get people vaccinated, a way of accomplishing
| this could be making life inconvenient for the uncompliant.
| hncurious wrote:
| Leaky vaccines can make viruses more virulent, though. See
| Marek's disease:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15757475/
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the virus to
| mutate
|
| Maybe I'm missing something, but the vaccinated population is
| the one that has introduced an additional evolutionary
| pressure, so wouldn't we expect to see mutations (that affect
| vaccinated people) in that population? Vaccine tolerance is
| no advantage in unvaccinated hosts.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Every single person who's immune system eradicates the
| virus causes evolutionary pressure.
|
| If your immune system takes a long time to do this, because
| eg. you didn't have a vaccine so it hasn't got an antibody
| template to work from, then the virus has much longer to
| evolve in the host, under a bunch of weird and wonderful
| new types of antibodies that get thrown against it.
|
| If there's already vaccine exposure then the body just
| needs to ramp up the antibody production, which is much
| faster and will result in total virus eradication to each
| virus as the antibodies encounter them, not halfway-
| measures which might leave half-functioning viruses which
| might self-repair in mutagenic ways.
| mminer237 wrote:
| It would put pressure to avoid the vaccine. However:
|
| 1. There would be fewer cases compared to unvaccinated
| people to give it the chance to mutate. It doesn't have any
| more chance to mutate among vaccinated people. It has less
| chance. Just a lot of mutations that still look like the
| current virus will get killed off by antibodies.
|
| 2. Randomly making changes to the spike protein, this
| virus's most important part, is likely to reduce the
| virus's danger.
| mlazos wrote:
| "Evolutionary pressure" doesn't really exist if the virus
| doesn't get a chance to replicate. The virus is trying to
| find a mutation which bypasses the vaccine, the more
| chances it gets the better. This is why people talk about
| animal reservoirs and immunocompromised individuals. The
| chance of a beneficial mutation occurring increases the
| more the virus is able to replicate within an organism. It
| replicates more in unvaccinated organisms.
| generalizations wrote:
| > since unvaccinated people are more likely to cause the
| virus to mutate
|
| We might get more mutations from unvaccinated people, but
| since the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission we'll get much
| more virulent mutations from the vaccinated people.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Hence the need to isolate the unvaccinated, to protect them
| so they don't get these new breeds and don't make new ones
| based on them that reinfect the larger population.
| nradov wrote:
| The current thinking is that new variants are most likely to
| evolve in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged
| infections. While I encourage everyone eligible to get
| vaccinated, the vaccines aren't very effective in people with
| malfunctioning immune systems.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-
| ma...
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| The link references a specific response to remdesivir, but
| I don't see how the selective pressure isn't the same in
| the broader case of low-level or asymptomatic illness
| persisting in a vaccinated person, particularly when
| they'll be mingling more and taking less precautions.
| angelzen wrote:
| A paper, while not specifically addressing vaccination in
| immunocompromised patients, documents pretty clearly the
| phenomenon of runaway mutation chains in such patients.
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756
|
| Edit: Another piece, specifically addressing
| immunocompromised + covid + vaccines:
|
| "Studies have shown that immunocompromised people are
| more vulnerable to being hospitalized or dying from COVID
| and less likely to develop strong protection from
| vaccination. But there are also some hopeful signs:
| additional doses of some COVID vaccines, strategic timing
| of immunosuppressive treatments and prophylactic COVID
| treatments may boost protection among some
| immunocompromised individuals--and restore at least some
| of the freedoms they have lost."
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-
| immunocomprom...
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Hm, so a vaccine that does not stop transmission does not
| create selective pressure on the virus? Wouldn't that be
| unusual from an evolutionary biology standpoint?
|
| Can we at least agree that if infected, as a vaccinated and
| asymptomatic carrier, there is a higher chance of
| transmission than if I were unvaccinated and symptomatic?
| This seems like common sense to me, but I recognize it goes
| against the Covid orthodoxy.
|
| Also, when you say "inconvenient," what do you mean exactly?
| To me, total restriction on movement and segregation from
| society based on medical status seems like more than an
| inconvenience. Maybe I'm just an anti-vaxxer, a victim of
| misinformation... if only I could think for myself.
| mlazos wrote:
| Your assertion about transmission is definitely not proven.
| It all comes down to an expected value. An unvaccinated
| symptomatic individual will shed a lot more virus than a
| vaccinated asymptomatic one. It would probably take fewer
| encounters to infect someone else than in the vaccinated
| case. So although an asymptomatic vaxed person might be out
| and about more, the lower viral shedding could possibly
| account for that we don't know. Also you're overestimating
| the intelligence of the average person, symptomatic people
| do stupid shit all the time [0]. This couple probably
| infected way more people than an asymptomatic vaxed person.
| Again not proven.
|
| [0]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/03/hawaii-
| coup...
| [deleted]
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did with
| Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of vaccination.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| > The point is vaccinating everyone, just like we did
| with Smallpox. Which is essentially dead because of
| vaccination.
|
| It has been shown time and again that the covid jag does
| not prevent infection/re-infection/transmission so your
| talk of eradication smacks of propaganda, not science.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Other countries with Zero COVID policies have been
| successful at suppressing the virus to extremely low
| levels. Their citizens laugh at us on social media.
|
| At extremely low levels, we can begin to contemplate
| elimination/eradication.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| I laugh at you because you are a retard.
| yuubi wrote:
| And time and again the smallpox vaccine also failed to
| protect.
|
| > Historically, the vaccine has been effective in
| preventing smallpox infection in 95% of those vaccinated.
| -- https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/index.html
|
| (Other sources have numbers from about 90% to 97%).
| However, this imperfect protection, in enough people, was
| enough to do the job.
| mythrwy wrote:
| This is an entirely different situation then smallpox
| though. The modes of action are not the same.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Also, the CFR of smallpox is 95%.
| nradov wrote:
| While I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated,
| you're not making a valid comparison. We were able to
| effectively eradicate smallpox (except for a few lab
| samples) because the vaccines are highly sterilizing and
| there were no animal reservoirs.
|
| That situation doesn't obtain with SARS-CoV-2. The
| vaccines are pretty good at preventing deaths but don't
| reliably prevent infection or transmission. And most
| mammal species can transmit the virus; cases have been
| confirmed in dogs, cats, minks, deer, tigers, etc.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| > there were no animal reservoirs
|
| This is a fact vaccine-zealots never address (I am double
| vaccinated by the way).
|
| If the end game is 100% vaccination in human population
| (including the enormous unvaccinated reservoir of the
| developing world, since the rate in those countries is
| often single-digit percentages) we will _still_ get novel
| variants which bypass the latest vaccines. Are we really
| supposed to forcibly administer vaccines every n-months
| to the entire human population for the rest of eternity?
| It seems utterly absurd.
|
| I don't see why the "just build more hospitals" commenter
| was down-voted/flagged in this thread. It at least seems
| more economically viable. Mobilize the national guard to
| do it if it comes to that. Treating those who develop
| covid seems a way better route than attempting the futile
| game of "prevention" via a vaccine regime.
|
| We will never get to Covid eradication. It's just not
| possible. Yet, most of my vaccinated compatriots seem to
| buy into that delusion.
| koolba wrote:
| > (I am double vaccinated by the way).
|
| It's sad that " _I 'm vaccinated..._" became the 2021
| version of, " _I 'm not a racist..._".
| mminer237 wrote:
| The rates of animal transmission are very low. If we
| eliminate it in humans, it's unlikely that the virus
| could sustain itself in animal populations and unlikely
| to reinfect the already-vaccinated humans.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| Judging by the fact that the whole pandemic was
| ostensibly started by an animal->human transmission, I'm
| highly skeptical of your claim.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| We were setting field hospitals last year left and right
| in anticipation, most, luckily went unused. I don't
| understand why can't this be repeated, heck implement a
| protocol for quick deployment of few but massive such
| facilities and let economy of scale take over.
| phonypc wrote:
| Smallpox vaccines were not "highly sterilizing."
|
| https://twitter.com/santiagokique/status/1465014078938628
| 099
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Are there any vaccines that are actually 100%
| sterilizing?
| csee wrote:
| Vaccines probably reduce the chance of a new variant.
|
| A lower viral load means a lower probability of a mutation
| happening, given that the number of mutations is
| proportional to the load over time.
|
| There's some small chance that the opposite is true, and
| vaccines will mean deadly strains are more easily spread
| since the person is more likely to be asymptomatic or low-
| symptoms and will therefore not isolate.
|
| But on net we expect vaccines to prevent variants.
| nazinazinazi wrote:
| Actually the vaccines themselves are causing the variants.
|
| The more you know! :)
| Arnt wrote:
| Vaccinated people can spread the virus. However, if everyone in
| .de were vaccinated the R value would be somewhat below 1. It
| wouldn't be zero, because vaccinated people can spread the
| virus, but 1 is a critical threshold.
| peteradio wrote:
| If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this
| vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out
| of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally
| everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach.
| Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that
| line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time.
| Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the
| cognitive dissonance of being obviously lied to "for the
| greater good".
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Note how all of the variants which health authorities said
| just needed a reasonably high vaccine rate are now
| effectively eradicated. It is only the new 'delta' (and
| upcoming 'omicron') that remain, and these are known to
| have much lower vaccine efficacy.
| Arnt wrote:
| Go on, laugh me out of the room, laugh whoever you want out
| of the room, the virus doesn't care how much or how little
| you laugh.
| peteradio wrote:
| I'm not laughing at all. The politicians who brokered
| this steaming pile lied about its efficacy to get the
| foot in the door.
| [deleted]
| Arnt wrote:
| Several of the common diseases require more than 90%
| vaccine coverage to get herd immunity. Is there any
| particular reason why this vaccine shouldn't?
|
| I've seen early estimates of less than that, but feh. An
| estimate from well before the vaccines are in production
| wasn't going to be accurate.
| angelzen wrote:
| The argument is that herd immunity for covid cannot be
| attained via vaccines. Not even 100% vaccination.
|
| The comparison with measles, another contagious airborne
| disease, is instructive. The threshold for herd immunity
| is estimated at 94%. This is possible because the vaccine
| effectiveness against infection is also 93-97%.
| Unfortunately covid vaccines have waning effectiveness
| against infection, estimated at about 50% after 6 months,
| and possibly waning even further.
|
| "Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably
| impossible"
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2
|
| "For example, the measles is a highly contagious illness.
| It's estimated that 94% of the population must be immune
| to interrupt the chain of transmission."
|
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-
| conditions/coronavirus/i...
|
| "One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against
| measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective
| against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97%
| effective against measles and 88% effective against
| mumps."
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html
|
| "Effectiveness against infections declined from 88% (95%
| CI 86-89) during the first month after full vaccination
| to 47% (43-51) after 5 months."
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014
| 0-6...
| briandon wrote:
| Gibraltar was 140%+ vaccinated and that wasn't enough to
| save Christmas there.
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/gibraltar-cancels-official-
| christmas-...
| the_mar wrote:
| I thought we already knew that two shots give you 6
| months of immunity, assuming people with boosters are the
| 39.5%, wouldn't the 60.5% be just as susceptible
| crooked-v wrote:
| Gibraltar's economy is tourism- and travel-centric. Just
| using the population of people who live there full-time
| doesn't capture anything about the disease spread or
| vaccinations with temporary visitors (upwards of five
| million per year).
| detaro wrote:
| Changing data and changing virus variants doesn't mean you
| were "obviously lied to".
| peteradio wrote:
| Coronaviruses have long been known to have this behavior.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| A bias towards very positive claims in the presence of
| little data does, though. All of our expectations around
| covid would have benefitted from the health agencies
| being capable of communicating what they know for certain
| and what they don't, but unfortunately they decided to
| make strong claims in the hopes of getting strong
| compliance.
| detaro wrote:
| To a degree, but I've also found that people love to
| ignore caveats that are presented, or never look at more
| than the headline version. The amount of times you hear
| "but risk X is never mentioned" when it actually is
| clearly addressed in the source statements or "but the
| data shows Y" but it comes with a list of reasons why
| it's limited is mindboggling. (and to be fair, lots of
| media sucks at putting that stuff in context too)
|
| Alternatively, lots of shouting because health
| authorities are make sooo confusing statements and refuse
| to give 100% clear cut answers.
| chinathrow wrote:
| What are you talking about?
|
| The vaccines have shown to slow down infection rates and
| avoid many many hispitalisations and death.
|
| So yes, getting vaxxed helps the graeter good.
|
| Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an
| accident or a stroke or heart issues.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an
| accident or a stroke or heart issues.
|
| They don't put covid patients in the same ward as other
| ICU beds for obvious reasons.
| detaro wrote:
| Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no
| "non-covid" wards anymore, because no ICU turns a patient
| needing it now away to "reserve space" for some potential
| future patient.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no
| "non-covid" wards anymore
|
| Is that happening anywhere now? I mean, got links? I'm
| generously curious. There's a lot of fear mongering going
| around.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/09/bogus-
| okl...
|
| This has been going on for nearly two years and
| governments were unwilling or unable to increase capacity
| in any meaningful way? What a total failure of government
| / medical system if this is true. The Spanish Flu lasted
| 3 years, it's not like we don't have a fairly recent
| example of how long this would probably last.
| detaro wrote:
| I realized the wording wasn't good, so just to clarify:
| "fill the capacity" should be read as "fill up the
| remaining capacity", not "fill the entire capacity"
| (that's indeed quite unlikely, simply because of non-
| covid baseload that will be around). Point remains: a
| covid patient doesn't get turned away just because a
| potential car crash victim might need the bed later (and
| vice-versa), as far as I know there's no reserved non-
| covid spaces, if there's more covid patients more parts
| of the ICU get run under covid protocols.
|
| Part of the problem with ICU capacity is that is has to
| be local: for many things, "an hours drive further away
| than normal" is annoying but solvable, if you need an ICU
| _now_ it 's a problem. Bottom-right here is a district-
| level map of Germany, showing free capacity:
| https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-
| lage/kartenansich... (there's some arguing how precise
| that data actually is, in both directions - for starters
| its only updated once a day afaik). Plenty places where
| e.g. transporting a few people from a car crash gets
| challenging. There's also pretty drastic
| statements/protests from the emergency departments and
| people working there, so yes, this currently sadly is an
| issue in some regions and the threat of it becoming worse
| is what finally caused some things to happen (after way
| to long of German politics wanting to deal with anything
| but this, despite it being long-predicted by the health
| authorities - it's extremely frustrating because it's
| been kind of obvious for weeks that something will have
| to happen at some point, the earlier the better for
| everyone).
|
| Something that would be interesting data-wise would be
| deaths during or waiting for transportation - one would
| expect an increase, but I'm not sure if there even is
| baseline data available, given rules around who is
| allowed to pronounce death and how it is recorded.
| peteradio wrote:
| I assume you read the comment I'm responding advocating
| for 100% vaccine rates to drop transmission rates below
| R0 1. If politicians (aka "Science Advisors") claimed
| this was the requirement from the git go it would have
| been an obvious non-starter.
| Arnt wrote:
| I'm afraid you may have misunderstood. I stated that R
| would be <1 if vaccination were at 100%, not that the
| threshold is between 99% and 100%.
|
| The virus decides how much is needed, we don't.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 1 year ago, we thought that people would actually get
| vaccinated at a reasonable rate, instead of dragging their
| feet long enough for multiple more-infectious variants to
| appear.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| 1 year ago, the medical establishment was saying that
| it's impossible to develop a vaccine for a new virus in
| just a year, so don't even think about seeing a vaccine
| anytime soon... leading people with halfway-decent
| memories scratching their heads about how the heck _this_
| vaccine was actually developed and getting _really_
| suspicious when it doesn 't behave like a vaccine at all
| in that it doesn't prevent you from getting or spreading
| the disease. And has rare but serious side effects.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > how the heck this vaccine was actually developed
|
| mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses have been in progress
| since the 70s. This just happens to be when they finally
| got to the point of being production-ready. It's a useful
| coincidence, but without it mRNA vaccines for
| coronaviruses would have been showing up in the near
| future anyway (at a slower rate without all the emergency
| COVID funding).
|
| > doesn't behave like a vaccine at all
|
| Sterilizing immunity isn't an inherent property of
| vaccines.
|
| > And has rare but serious side effects.
|
| All vaccines do that, and as with all widely-used
| vaccines the rate of side effects is much, much lower
| than the rate of side effects from the actual disease.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| We were also told if we got the shot we would be done
| with it. Now we need boosters, potentially indefinitely.
| nradov wrote:
| Do you have a citation for that? I haven't seen any high
| quality studies which directly compare long term R0 for
| vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. While I encourage
| everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting
| vaccinated, it seems to have only a limited and temporary
| effect on reducing transmission.
|
| https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/experts-vaccine-
| immunity...
| Arnt wrote:
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959
| v... and... can't find the other just now. Note that
| population-based studies will find different results, AIUI
| mostly because of the birthday paradox.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Because they are less likely to get hospitalised and flood the
| country's intensive care wards.
| globalise83 wrote:
| 1. incentive - if everyone is locked down, there is no
| incentive to get vaccinated. 2. lack of contribution to
| hospital admissions - although some vaccinated people do get
| ill, once the elderly are boosted voluntarily the burden of
| this segment will be very low 3. credibility - the government
| promised and I quote "vaccination is the way back to
| normality". If they break this promise, they lose future
| credibility.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| Sober people sometimes cause car crashes, but that in itself is
| a pretty poor reason to permit drunk driving.
|
| I'll also point out that simply driving under the influence is
| a crime, even if you don't actually cause an accident. The
| statistical propensity of impaired drivers to cause accidents
| is sufficient cause to imprison people for this sort of thing.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| You should concentrate on the "can". Vaccinated folks are less
| likely to develop Covid in the first place, and as such, aren't
| as likely to spread it. And if they do develop it, it is less
| likely to be serious and require hospitalisation. This keeps us
| from having to decide who in the hospital lives or dies and
| takes the stress of of the medical system, workplaces, and
| families.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| The sooner common stupidity is penalized, the better. Then you
| wouldn't need to worry about anti vaxers and compulsory shots.
| acd wrote:
| Its a global pandemic where a small percentage follow antiwax
| conspiracy. I mean an iduvidual choice might endanger others.
| Thus its induvidual choice versus the good for the masses.
| vibrato2 wrote:
| How does it endanger others when both populations transmit the
| virus, what may be equally
| hogFeast wrote:
| Would love to see stats on what parts of society this is going to
| impact? In the UK, the govt would have had to produce stats on
| the impact on minority groups. Based on what is happening on
| other countries, this looks like an outright assault on the poor,
| disabled, and recent migrants. History tends to repeat...perhaps
| the unvaccinated should be forced to wear badges? To protect the
| vaccinated ofc.
|
| I am in the UK, in a part of the UK that has a badly
| malfunctioning health service. Waiting time for ambulance two
| weeks ago was twenty minutes (and that was just travel time), no
| issues at ICU (not for me, it was a relative the ICU was
| precautionary), no issues getting a bed...strangely, the
| experience was much better than the pre-Covid...significantly so.
| Germany has the same vaccination rate, Germany has a better
| health service...it is strange. No-one places any value on their
| freedom because it is something that is freely given to everyone
| today, our ancestors shed blood for it but we didn't...is this
| worth it? It is a huge change in freedoms for something that is
| unlikely to change things (I am not sure how this kind of thing
| is legal, if it is legal for a govt to essentially quarantine
| citizens in their own home if they refuse to have a medical
| procedure...that is alarming).
| nzk wrote:
| What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in the
| world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a few
| thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that were
| never addressed.
|
| The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have
| existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself
| when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only
| gotten worse since then. Our government is in full CYA mode, and
| doing everything they can to blame a scapegoat for problems they
| themselves have willingly created over decades. It's despicable,
| and nobody should support it.
|
| FSJ is a year-long volunteer program for young people typically
| organized and funded by NGOs like the Red Cross and similar. I
| worked with small children, plenty of the other volunteers I met
| regularly worked in hospitals and nursing homes. They all talked
| at length about how atrocious the working conditions were and how
| they were asked to do things they weren't legally allowed to
| (e.g. taking blood, handing out medication) because the staff
| shortages were severe enough that people didn't have enough time
| to adhere to very reasonable safety rules anymore. That was 17
| years ago.
|
| This is a well known, widely publicized[0] and not at all new
| problem, and the unvaccinated are not to blame for it. Let me
| repeat, we're talking about one of the wealthiest countries in
| the world with a population of 83M people crumbling over a few
| thousand ICU patients.
|
| [0]Some random articles from 2018/19 (German):
|
| https://gesundheit-soziales.verdi.de/themen/mehr-personal/++...
|
| https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/wenn-aus-notstand-panik-...
|
| https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2018-05/pflegenotsta...
|
| https://www.rbb-online.de/kontraste/ueber_den_tag_hinaus/bil...
| skyde wrote:
| USA is probably the country with the highest cost for an
| hospital visit. I am sure the hospital are able to afford
| hiring more staff :)
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Germany has "only a few thousand" ICU beds (and while this nber
| has trended downward over time, it was never more than 10,000).
| It's misleading to not phrase this as a percentage, which is
| something like a sudden 50%+ spike in need for ICU capacity.
|
| Of course that will overwhelm the system.
|
| (Also paradoxically, an improved healthcare system should need
| fewer ICU beds, so the decrease is probably a good thing)
| _moof wrote:
| Thanks for the insight. I'm curious; is the problem staffing,
| "beds" (which I assume means actual physical beds, or is this a
| term of art?), or a combination?
|
| Also curious how one squares the resource constraint issue with
| the exceptional nature of the events of the past couple years.
| What I mean is, did anyone think it made sense to massively
| increase capacity before the pandemic began? I'm not in health
| care so I don't have any special insight here; i.e. I'm asking,
| not challenging. From an outsider's perspective it seems like
| it would've been a tough sell to advocate for what was, in the
| "before times," an unnecessary increase in capacity.
| fileeditview wrote:
| It's staffing. See my other comment. Germany lost > 4000 ICU
| beds during the past year.
| arrrg wrote:
| Could you source that claim?
|
| I'm comparing the numbers from the DIVI registry:
|
| 2020-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/7522
| 2021-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/9047
|
| I'm getting 24,949 beds for today, 27,543 as the year ago
| number (in both cases including a couple thousand ICU beds
| for kids which were later split out in the more current
| DIVI reports since ICU beds for kids aren't helpful for
| this pandemic).
|
| That's a difference of 2,594.
|
| Also, as the DIVI themselves explain: "Consequently,
| several factors play a role in influencing the number of
| beds that can be operated. A deliberate reduction of beds
| during the pandemic cannot be assumed. The reduction in
| available beds can be explained by the various points
| mentioned above, among others, and is supported by other
| data collected. The decisive factor for the operability of
| a bed is the medical staff."
|
| This is under a FAQ entry where they list five different
| reasons for the reduction in capacity: https://www.intensiv
| register.de/#/faq/18af7107-e098-43e7-a9f...
|
| Staff themselves being affected by COVID-19 and becoming
| unable to work is just one of them.
|
| The others are changes in how much staff is allocated per
| patient (this was increased), hospitals being more precise
| in their reporting and only reporting beds that can
| actually be staffed, changes in the criteria for a bed to
| be actually countable and the high effort ICU therapy of
| COVID-19 patients requires.
| fileeditview wrote:
| So I had this number from the (reputable) news but I
| googled it and found e.g. the Arzteblatt as a source: htt
| ps://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/128476/Intensivmedizi
| ... (German)
|
| TBH I would not be surprised if the actually don't know
| the exact numbers. But even if it's "only" 2594 it's
| still too many.
|
| You could call it deliberate however if the working
| conditions for people under such heavy load are not
| improved.
| crooked-v wrote:
| "Beds" means "staffed beds", not just physical places to put
| patients. It's a combination of facilities and staffing.
| _moof wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. (I'm a little surprised I
| haven't seen this spelled out before, considering how much
| ink has been spilled over this issue, but I digress.)
| Tomte wrote:
| Staffing, mostly. There are a lot of "beds" still available,
| just nobody to tend to them.
|
| But another thing that always gets scrambled in the
| newspapers is the "level" of ICU beds.
|
| The ICU at my town's hospital (and it's not small) has
| patients that would lie in a normal station at a big
| university hospital.
|
| ICU bed != ICU bed. In smaller hospitals, ICU means "post-op,
| needs surveillance" or "gets oxygen".
|
| At a large hospital ICU means "ECMO" or similarly severe
| conditions.
|
| So when you're reading that there are x thousand ICU beds
| still available in the country: most are not really up to the
| task when it comes to a severe covid case, and furthermore,
| an ICU bed at the other end of the country doesn't help you
| much.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Analog phone networks break down (you get no dialtone) if
| everyone in the service area picked up their handset and want
| to dial-out, they have much fewer lines than handsets, because
| they calculated what capacity they might need (how many calls
| would be ongoing at one time) and just have that many lines,
| plus maybe a safety margin.
|
| I'm guessing it's the same with ICU beds... And now we have a
| situation where a high percentage of people have picked up
| their handsets...
| krater23 wrote:
| Yes, but do you really think we should manage our health
| system like a windy cell phone network provider? By the way,
| the cell phone networks and internet connections in Germany
| are on the level of some 3rd world countries.
| fileeditview wrote:
| So true and not mentioned enough by the media. The fact that we
| lost more than 4000 ICU beds over last year (during the Corona
| pandemic!!) because of personnel shortage is mind-boggling.
|
| Instead of rewarding those who worked these horrible jobs and
| maybe attract new workers with better conditions (e.g. more
| holidays), better pay or tax reduction, our politicians did
| campaigning and ignored the upcoming winter.
|
| Now they blame it on the unvaccinated and want to force high-
| speed vaccinating as many people as possible. But it won't help
| now. And it won't work either because they also messed up the
| whole vaccine supply chain.
|
| I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are
| ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in
| their own progress.
| crooked-v wrote:
| With exponential spread, the actual number of ICU beds really
| doesn't matter, because whatever you've got will be
| overwhelmed across a similar timeframe anyway. The only way
| to actually fix the problem is to get the R-value below 1,
| which requires mass vaccinations.
| krater23 wrote:
| Not the only way. What is with the north korean way? Just
| shot anyone that has covid?
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| wrong - many countries kept everything opened and the curve
| subsided after a while. It doesn't go to the infinite.
| angelzen wrote:
| As of 12/02/2012, Robert Koch Institute, roughly the German
| CDC, estimates 7-day R-value at 0.92
|
| https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronaviru
| s...
|
| Index page: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartige
| s_Coronavirus...
| marton78 wrote:
| The spectre of exponential spread is summoned way too
| often. Yes, an epidemic spreads exponentially when it
| starts, but also it's self limiting after a while. The 4th
| wave is wearing of already. Every wave so far has worn off
| in every country, with our without measures. As a recent
| example, compare Latvia and Estonia in the past few months.
| The former imposed strict measures, while the latter
| didn't, and yet the two curves match very closely.
| fileeditview wrote:
| Mankind has a tendency to not accept what it cannot
| control. Our politicians and virologists often said
| something along the lines: "we need to do X to keep
| control of the situation".
|
| In the end we never were in control of the situation but
| people cannot accept that.
| krater23 wrote:
| During the complete pandemic I never heared a so good
| fiting wise word like this.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Most of the measures we took were nothing more than
| modern day rain dances. Feeble attempts by humans
| arrogant enough to think they could defeat or control a
| natural phenomenon that is well beyond ours to control.
| teeray wrote:
| Yep... "There's nothing we can do" is just flatly
| unacceptable to the majority of the population. That's
| when religion gets invented to create rituals to ward
| away evil.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| self-limiting by death?
| Zanfa wrote:
| Estonia re-imposed strict measures as well because the
| ICU was becoming overwhelmed. This means mandatory masks
| everywhere, no public activities without proof of
| vaccination (restaurants, gyms etc) and limits on opening
| hours and strong police enforcement of these rules.
|
| The wave started leveling off about 2 weeks after and the
| rules are still in force.
|
| Not sure where you got your information.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Why are you so certain that the fourth wave is leveling
| off?
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| not true - infection rate grows sigmoidal and not
| exponential. that's why at the moment you can observe a
| stabilization despite few changes in regulation as of now
| compared to the summer. infection spread saturates
| periodically after suceptible clusters are depleted.
|
| what would make sense is a steady and controlled
| Durchseuchung with specific protection of vulnerable people
| (like old and sick) - b/c the best immunity is gained by
| infection.
|
| but Durchseuchung never sounded good - that's why that term
| got so popular. it sounds ugly and brutal. but it's what
| was happening all the time with many diseases in the past
| thousands of years.
| 13415 wrote:
| That's a bit misleading. As long as the R value is above
| 1 the spreading _is_ exponential. That follows directly
| from how the R-value is defined. What you mean is that
| the curve will take a sigmoidal shape for a while once
| the number of immune people has reached a certain
| threshold. In that case, the R-value is slowly
| approaching 1 again, and finally will go below 1 (which
| finally results in a curve that is not sigmoidal, of
| course). Other measures like lockdowns do the same to the
| curve, as is easy to observe by overlaying the measures
| over the curve, just not with an initial increase of
| cases that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
| Estimated _Infection Fatality Rates_ during the first
| Covid wave - where there was full hospital care available
| - ranged from 0.5% to 2%. So for Germany 's 80M people
| that would be in the ballpark of 400,000 to 1.6M deaths -
| under medical care. Even if you take the original
| estimates of around 0.3% the results wouldn't have been
| flattering.
|
| In a nutshell, the German government and every other
| country on earth is doing what you propose, except that
| they are vaccinating at the same time and try to keep the
| curves flat (but your use of "slow" also suggests this,
| so it's not clear what else you're suggesting).
| crooked-v wrote:
| > b/c the best immunity is gained by infection
|
| That doesn't help if you die of the infection first, and
| COVID is extremely lethal among the demographics that
| most need the direct benefits of immunity.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| > the best immunity is gained by infection.
|
| Source? I think there's plenty of peer-reviewed
| scientific articles claiming the opposite.
| oezi wrote:
| It is mentioned enough by the media. Thank you.
|
| But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do
| a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the
| course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes
| that acceptable for many.
|
| With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the
| developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed
| know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are
| call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell
| you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex,
| you would want to quit.
|
| It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the
| politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame
| should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the
| usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News
| style lies.
| _moof wrote:
| I might be working from old info here but my understanding is
| that vaccination reduces the ICU burden. Assuming that's
| still good info, is it _totally_ unreasonable to blame the
| unvaccinated for ICU overload?
| makomk wrote:
| Vaccination does reduce the proportion of people that need
| ICU beds, but there are pretty rapid diminishing returns on
| just vaccinating more; countries have reached the point
| where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are
| vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination. Also,
| vaccinating younger lower-risk people doesn't help because
| they're at substantially lower risk of needing the ICU even
| unvaccinated than someone older or higher-risk who is
| vaccinated and because the vaccines aren't really useful to
| stop the spread of the disease either. Countries have
| generally had significantly higher vaccine acceptance
| amongst older people who need it more. (Though I think one
| of the big problems Germany has is their vaccine uptake
| amongst the elderly is somewhat low compared to other
| countries.)
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Right now in my province, unvaccinated individuals make
| up 11.2% of 12+ population but more than 66% of
| hospitalizations. I don't expect the ICU rates to be more
| favourable to the unvaccianted than total hospitalization
| rates. If there is a point of rapid diminishing returns,
| it is not at ~90% yet.
|
| https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-
| statistics.htm...
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| Are they hospitalized for Covid or all reasons?
| smnrchrds wrote:
| These are only COVID stats.
| Pyramus wrote:
| > countries have reached the point where the majority of
| Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below
| 100% vaccination.
|
| Which countries are you talking about? It's certainly not
| the case for Germany, and I don't know any other European
| country for which this would be the case.
| microtherion wrote:
| > countries have reached the point where the majority of
| Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below
| 100% vaccination
|
| Which countries? I find it hard to get data at
| vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically,
| but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of
| patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the
| population being double vaccinated).
| kgwgk wrote:
| > in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of
| patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the
| population being double vaccinated)
|
| For the 80+ group the latest data for hospitalisations is
| 47% vaccinated, 31% non-vaccinated, 22% unkown.
|
| https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status
| martneumann wrote:
| Well yeah, for 80+ with a vaccination rate of 92 %.
|
| If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 %
| of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest
| seven day average puts that number at 27 %.
| kgwgk wrote:
| I was just giving a number consistent with the 80+
| vaccination rate quoted.
|
| For the broad population is 28% vaccinated vs 57% non-
| vaccinated. The remaining 15% is "unknown". But
| Switzerland has a relatively low vaccination rate at 67%.
|
| Edit: looking at deaths instead of hospitalisations in
| the broad population: Fully-vaccinated
| 46%, partially-vaccinated 2% Non-vaccinated 41%
| Unknown 12%
| microtherion wrote:
| Yes, those are the numbers for _hospitalizations_ in
| general, but the higher percentages I've been seeing (and
| for which I've been unsuccessful finding official
| documentation) are for _ICU_ patients specifically.
| kgwgk wrote:
| But they were not for 80+ patients specifically, or were
| they?
|
| Edit: I can't find ICU numbers but the latest death stats
| for 80+ are 46% vaccinated, 33% non-vaccinated, 21%
| unknown.
| throwntoday wrote:
| Yes because no effort was made to increase ICU capacity
| which was continues to be the biggest issue
| fabian2k wrote:
| No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last
| resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts
| of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of
| still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and
| others likely will have permanent damage from the severe
| course of the disease.
|
| The biggest issue is that not enough people got
| vaccinated.
| throwntoday wrote:
| Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer
| will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so
| many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.
| mthoms wrote:
| >Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer
| will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so
| many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.
|
| What "narrative"? What are you even talking about?
|
| No-one, including the person you responded to, has
| claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim
| (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being
| hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer
| duration.
|
| You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Vaccines reduce severe courses of the disease by about
| 90%. The number vary depending on what you look at
| exactly, and for elderly people boosters are really
| mandatory to keep the vaccine effective.
|
| Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is
| very from from not working.
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| That's like saying, people are still hospitalized after
| car crashes so seatbelts and airbags are useless.
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| Training an ICU nurse takes about 5 years. The only
| realistic option during the pandemic would be to
| encourage immigration of ICU nurses from poorer
| countries, but that just moves the problem elsewhere.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific
| nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or
| basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if
| there were fewer people making excuses for those who
| ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit
| across the Western world.
| crooked-v wrote:
| A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of
| training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory
| disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that
| come from those.
| deft wrote:
| So does developing a vaccine usually. We should be taking
| extraordinary measure not saying "oh that will take too
| long don't even start"
| crooked-v wrote:
| Assigning ten teachers to a student won't make the
| student learn ten times as fast.
| deft wrote:
| Modifying the procedures and allowing people to work
| before they're through arbitrary redtape does. The EUA
| the vaccine received is the same concept. The reason the
| vaccine was developed faster wasn't just the number of
| scientists working on it, but the amount of funding
| directed towards it. Increasing money to education
| programs would increase the amount of people they can
| train, allow for further optimizations to be developed
| etc.
| j0057 wrote:
| The same is said in the Netherlands, but if you double the
| number of available IC beds, with associated staff (good luck
| with that), all you've bought yourself is two weeks before
| those are full as well - because of exponential growth.
| nzk wrote:
| Growth isn't exponential forever, cases appear to be going
| down again in Germany already. Delta waves seem to be only
| about 8 weeks long (check data from different countries, or
| here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/briefing/delta-peak-
| covid...), so two extra weeks would help a lot.
|
| I agree that vaccines are part of the solution. I disagree
| that stripping citizens of their rights and insulting them on
| TV is part of literally any solution for anything. If a
| government feels the urge to do that, it should look for
| alternatives instead. Maintaining ICU capacity from one year
| before (decreased by 4000 in 2021, see:
| https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-
| lage/zeitreihenht... - "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter
| Intensivbetten"), is the lowest-hanging fruit, I'm sure there
| are additional alternatives that I'm not qualified to comment
| on.
|
| Edit: It was pointed out to me that the DIVI numbers have
| some complexity that I did not account for. So grain of salt
| on the actual ICU number, but I've not yet seen anyone deny
| the trend. Here's a fact check that confirms that beds were
| lost: https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-
| praesident...
| lgreiv wrote:
| I'll not take a stance on the correct number of free ICU
| beds as I do not feel qualified to judge these numbers
| without more insight on the intricacies of what would
| qualify fully operational beds, but regarding the stalling
| case numbers I feel confident enough (after looking at some
| raw numbers from the municipalities themselves [1]) to
| dismiss the apparent trend as a statistic artifact.
|
| PCR test units and hospital bureaucracy are past their
| limits - e.g. regions like Bonn, Essen or Recklinghausen
| reporting zero cases on multiple consecutive days (Nov 29,
| Nov 30), which is _very_ unlikely w.r.t. the case numbers
| of the surrounding regions and those very regions reporting
| more than one hundred cases today.
|
| The published indicators do not count cases that are
| reported late [2], which leads to apparently stalling case
| numbers. Growths may not be exponential forever but given
| that roughly one quarter of the population is not
| vaccinated, I would not take bets that the virus runs out
| of hosts before the health care system collapses.
|
| I agree to the sentiment made that the balance between
| economic efficiency and damaging austerity for profit
| margin gains in the German health care system (especially
| for worker's loans) has been tipping way too far to the
| latter in the past decades.
|
| [1] https://www.lzg.nrw.de/covid19/download/laborbest_faell
| e_sar... (updated each day at 0:00 CET)
|
| [2] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Corona
| virus...
|
| edit: some formatting.
| odiroot wrote:
| > What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in
| the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a
| few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that
| were never addressed.
|
| Also one that collects high income taxes and high health care
| contributions (~14% of the income). So one can't really blame
| it on lack of funds.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| this!! It's unbelievable that these wealthy western countries
| find "cheaper" to stop their economy than to build few more
| hospitals, beds and employ / pay more these guys running this.
| It's hundreds, maybe thousands, of billions wasted in Germany
| alone, versus. no idea but definitely not hundreds of billions
| to increase the ICU capacity to keep the economy open no matter
| what.
| fsh wrote:
| This is such a bizarre take. If the ICUs are filling up, the
| solution should be to prevent people from getting sick, not to
| make the ICUs bigger. There are undoubtedly many problems in
| the German healthcare system, but the current surge is clearly
| due to the very large number of unvaccinated people.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| the two weeks were to build up health care capacity. We
| erected field hospitals to manage the sick and then closed
| them because they weren't being used.
|
| If this truly is an energy and hospitals truly are at risk,
| find a way to build more capacity even if it is temporary.
| Blaming the public for the failure to do this is wrong. And
| if you aren't building this capacity... maybe this really
| isn't an emergency?
| rytcio wrote:
| But if we do that then the media doesn't have a scare
| tactic
| fabian2k wrote:
| Something like 50% of the people in intensive care for COVID
| still die.
|
| Even if we were able to handle the load on the healthcare
| system, that still would be a very large amount of unnecessary
| suffering and death. And even though there are some fundamental
| issues with working conditions and pay in this area, fixing
| them would not be enough to be able to handle the load that an
| exponentially growing viral disease could cause if it remains
| unchecked. If you do not stop the exponential spread, even with
| twice the capacity you'd only gain another 1-2 weeks until
| you're at capacity anyway.
|
| The vaccines work well and are safe. The problem is that too
| many people didn't take them. There's plenty of problems with
| how this was organized in Germany, but in the we simply didn't
| manage to convince enough people to get vaccinated.
| gizmo wrote:
| The problem isn't simple and certainly not a matter of just
| vaccinating. A big part of the problem is that govt was
| confident that two jabs in the summer would be sufficient
| because of two faulty assumptions: that immunity would last
| and that fully vaccinated people would not spread covid.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Also, more broadly, that people would actually be willing
| to get vaccinated at a rate high enough to reduce the
| R-value below 1.
| int_19h wrote:
| What would be the rate in question for Delta? My
| understanding is that it was feasible for earlier
| variants, but Delta has R too high to begin with.
| tremon wrote:
| The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread,
| were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about
| reducing susceptibility, not infectivity. I don't think
| there were any numbers available on the vaccine's effect
| on virus transmissibility. It was implicitly assumed that
| fewer symptoms would translate to fewer transmissions,
| but was this ever proven?
|
| Point being, we didn't know what vaccination rate would
| reduce the R-value below 1, and FAFAIK we still don't
| know. Not even for the original Sars-cov-2 virus, and not
| for any of the variants.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread,
| were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about
| reducing susceptibility, not infectivity.
|
| Populations where people are less likely to get infected
| are less likely to spread. You have to be infected before
| you can spread.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Vaccination reduces transmission:
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2106757
|
| > Cases of Covid-19 were less common among household
| members of vaccinated health care workers during the
| period beginning 14 days after the first dose than during
| the unvaccinated period before the first dose (event rate
| per 100 person-years, 9.40 before the first dose and 5.93
| beginning 14 days after the first dose). After the health
| care worker's second dose, the rate in household members
| was lower still (2.98 cases per 100 person-years). These
| differences persisted after fitting extended Cox models
| that were adjusted for calendar time, geographic region,
| age, sex, occupational and socioeconomic factors, and
| underlying conditions. Relative to the period before each
| health care worker was vaccinated, the hazard ratio for a
| household member to become infected was 0.70 (95%
| confidence interval [CI], 0.63 to 0.78) for the period
| beginning 14 days after the first dose and 0.46 (95% CI,
| 0.30 to 0.70) for the period beginning 14 days after the
| second dose. ... Not all the cases of Covid-19 in the
| household members were transmitted from the health care
| worker; therefore, the effect of vaccination may be
| larger.1 For example, if half the cases in the household
| members were transmitted from the health care worker, a
| 60% decrease in cases transmitted from health care
| workers would need to occur to elicit the association we
| observed (see the Supplementary Appendix). Vaccination
| was associated with a reduction in both the number of
| cases and the number of Covid-19-related hospitalizations
| in health care workers between the unvaccinated period
| and the period beginning 14 days after the first dose.
| dragonelite wrote:
| I was under the same impression that vaccine would not
| reduce the spread or carrying of the virus. It would just
| greatly reduce the change you landing on the IC.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Also, the government knowingly ignored warnings by the RKI
| (german institute for public health) saying that numbers
| and hospital admissions will go up rapidly in autumn.
| krater23 wrote:
| You forget one, the people that are dying have taken the risk
| for ther own and didn't want to get vaccinated. It's ok when
| they die, it's their decision that's gone wrong. Other people
| didn't got vaccinated and will never get covid anywhere. This
| is a decision that not the government has to make for the
| people.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Those people don't refuse to go to hospital and they don't
| refuse the ICU bed.
| jpttsn wrote:
| Would you support a comprehensive healthcare opt-out,
| where an unvaccinated person would forego right to
| treatment, and also not have to pay taxes for public
| healthcare?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No, because at the end of the day, we're not going to
| literally let them die on the sidewalk outside the
| hospital just because they can't pay.
|
| That means that _somebody_ has to pay for them. Given
| that unavoidable but inconvenient fact, basic health care
| and life support might as well be organized under the
| auspices of the state and the costs shared among all
| residents.
| pelasaco wrote:
| those people still paid their taxes, health plan care and
| they should be treated. Stuff like this https://www.aerzteb
| latt.de/nachrichten/sw/Intensivmedizin?s=... should be
| better investigated. I thought as German, something that we
| learned from our past was not "oben buckeln und nach unten
| treten" or something like "to crawl to the bigwigs and
| bully the underlings". Winter 2021, and we still don't have
| a plan, the schools still offline and the numbers are much
| worse now than winter 2020 when the numbers of unvaccinated
| were almost 90% of the population.
| fileeditview wrote:
| The argument always is that there are not enough beds for
| non-corona patients. More beds would certainly help.
|
| It is nonsense to vaccinate young and very healthy people,
| especially kids. Their risk from COVID is minimal to non-
| existent.
|
| Also the spread is not stopped by vaccinating. Vaccinated
| still spread the virus. If it is reduced is still unclear.
| There was a study in GB that showed the incidence numbers in
| vaccinated was just as high or higher than in unvaccinated.
| The sample sizes of vaccinated and unvaccinated were equal as
| they should be. Reports in Germany about these numbers forget
| to mention that vaccinated people are basically not tested.
|
| > The vaccines work well and are safe.
|
| They do not work well enough. First of all people still
| transmit the virus after only about 2 months after the
| vaccination. Then the protection goes down extremely between
| 2-6 months after the vaccination (that is why we need
| boosters all the time). It is still unclear if we continue to
| need boosters after the third shot.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Vaccines do reduce spread.
|
| While vaccinated people who get infected still spread the
| virus, they're less likely to get infected in the first
| place, which is a necessary precursor to spreading.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Something like 50% of the people in intensive care for
| COVID still die.
|
| I don't think this is too far from the survival rate of those
| admitted to intensive care in general.
|
| But I think the point is that COVID really increases your
| chances of being admitted there in the first place.
| bduerst wrote:
| ICU survival rate is highly dependent on the cause,
| diagnosis, and/or disease that the patient is admitted for.
| It can range from 70-10%.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I don't know why you are voted down. This is very much true for
| The Netherlands as well. Ever since the year 2000, possibly
| before, ICU beds have been scaled down.
|
| Diederik Grommers, one member of the Dutch Outbreak Management
| Team (OMG) states: "it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or
| not; 60% of the beds are occupied by vaccinated people; the
| problems we will encounter in the coming weeks are caused by
| the fact that we totally hollowed out our health care" [0].
|
| The Netherlands has about 6 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens.
| Germany has almost 30 ICU beds per 100.000 citizens [1]. Now I
| know Germany did accept patients from The Netherlands on their
| ICUs and perhaps Germany is doing the same for other countries,
| so perhaps that is causing a capacity problem in Germany as
| well.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFg78PgDgu0
|
| [1]: https://cdn.nos.nl/image/2020/03/30/640384/3840x2160a.jpg
| wjnc wrote:
| Counter argument: Medical personel is hard to find and
| expensive, as is IC infrastructure. Why would we've needed to
| keep spare IC capacity for decades only to find out we need
| it in case of a pandemic? The German argument could be re-
| constructed into an argument that any country will run into
| IC shortages regardless of the level of IC availability. In
| an exponential curve it's only three or four cycles (8-12
| days?) away, regardless of capacity. Hence, keep your IC
| capacity at regular efficient rates and use vaccination to
| get out of the hot seat. IC's save some but lose many.
| Vaccinations save many.
|
| I can't say that I like the Dutch approach to covid in
| general, but in my first job I was deep into governement
| budgetting of hospitals (just before the introduction of the
| current Dutch reimbursement system) and it was a whole lot
| about 'keeping beds' and keeping patients in them to fulfill
| the budget. That was not what I'd call a generally efficient
| system. Even the health outcomes were worse since outpatient
| treatments usually have fewer side effects. What I've learned
| in that job is that doctors are like people. They respond to
| incentives. If that incentive is to have beds filled with
| people, you get just that. Beds with people.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| You can't throw a stone without hitting a nurse in the US,
| but I'm guessing they're paid far better here as well just
| as doctors are.
|
| I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me that
| socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes care.
| The increase in costs in the US is also unsustainable.
| There might be a happy medium in there but it might be too
| early to tell.
| scohesc wrote:
| > I know Germany has a mixed system but it seems to me
| that socialized medicine keeping costs down slowly erodes
| care.
|
| You can see this happening in Canada too. We have a
| hybrid system in healthcare where the majority of
| critical care is paid for via taxes/government subsidies
| however secondary/tertiary stuff is either out of pocket
| or through insurance agencies (prescriptions, out-patient
| care like physiotherapy, etc).
|
| Over the past 20-30 years, our system has seen the
| typical government thought process of throwing more money
| at problems but not actually having someone be
| accountable for the actions of the government over
| decades. You end up with a bunch of overpaid, under-
| worked management at the top while the actual front-line
| workers suffer with low staffing, not enough beds, budget
| cuts for the front line but raises for management etc.
| etc.
|
| Not to mention the number of students coming here for
| health education (doctor, nurse, specialist) - then
| immediately saying sayonara for another country like the
| US or in the case of foreign students, their home
| country.
|
| I don't understand why we keep cutting healthcare budgets
| - one possible reason could be because corporations have
| slowly been taking over every aspect of society as they
| move faster and make smarter decisions than government
| officials.
| int_19h wrote:
| How expensive is it as a percentage of overall healhcare
| spending?
| nzk wrote:
| Thanks, that was an interesting video. I had to rely on auto-
| translated subtitles but from the little Dutch I can
| understand, it seems like they got the gist across.
|
| Yeah, Germany has a ton of ICU beds in comparison, and yet,
| we're struggling exactly the same as any other country. I
| find it strange, too. In early 2020 I expected we'd see big
| differences between different countries based on ICU
| capacity, but we saw the same story everywhere (regional
| overload around the peak of a wave), with a few minor
| differences (whether some patients are transferred within the
| country or to other countries). Perhaps countries have
| different standards for when they put patients in ICU's,
| allowing hospitals (and governments) to always operate close
| to capacity? Would be one explanation, but I really don't
| know.
|
| High total number notwithstanding though, our ICU capacity
| actually decreased during the pandemic, see:
|
| https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
|
| The graph under "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten" shows
| total capacity (light blue) + emergency reserve (green), dark
| blue is occupied beds. There was a pretty sharp drop-off in
| the total capacity a year ago, and a slower decrease all
| throughout 2021. Apparently, that's mostly due to nurses
| quitting in droves since the pandemic made their already bad
| working conditions even worse.
|
| Our politicians didn't lift a finger to prevent or revert
| this, and now they're blaming a minority for this massive,
| massive failure. Just makes me really angry, I'll take
| downvotes for that if I have to :)
| wsc981 wrote:
| _> Perhaps countries have different standards for when they
| put patients in ICU 's, allowing hospitals (and
| governments) to always operate close to capacity? Would be
| one explanation, but I really don't know._
|
| There's different standards in different countries for
| sure. In The Netherlands there's a focus on quality of
| life. If a patient cannot have a decent quality of life
| after staying on ICU, there's a preference to provide the
| patient with palliative care instead. In (e.g.) Italy this
| approach would not be accepted.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> "[...] we totally hollowed out our health care"_
|
| Weird move for one of the richest countries in the world, no?
| emsy wrote:
| Privatization of infrastructure in Germany has always led
| to a, at least perceived, decline in quality. This has been
| true for postal service, railway, telcos and now health
| care.
| odiroot wrote:
| Health care in Germany is a not-for-profit endeavour and
| is strictly controlled by the law, with ministry of
| health oversight.
| mandmandam wrote:
| People are dying friendo, please wise up.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| It sounds like you read that off the government shill
| brochure.
|
| The decline in public healthcare quality has nothing to
| do with the lack of government oversight but it's due to
| the lack of funding and personel (which is also funding
| related). Ask any overworked healthcare worker in the
| public system.
| int_19h wrote:
| When was healthcare in Germany not private?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Except he was talking about the Netherlands.
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| Very insightful but doubtful more capacity would prevent the
| mandates, given that state medias around the West are all now
| calling for mandates, two tiers, and punishment for those who
| don't follow. Like the next round of "war on terror" measures
| where states get to shift their citizen management. Don't
| forget to call a spade a spade.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Germany was long criticised for its overcapacity of intensive
| care wards. Just up until the pandemic hit.
| mattlondon wrote:
| For what it is worth, in the UK there were similar concerns.
|
| They set up "Nightingale Hospitals" (reference to Florence
| Nightingale) - basically convention centres were converted into
| field hospitals with ventilators. One in London had 4000 beds,
| and there were others elsewhere in the country. It took 9 days
| to build the London one (I was impressed!)
|
| After all that, the 4000 bed one in London treated 20 patients
| during the first wave:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214 Most are now
| shutdown or being used as vaccination centres from what I know.
|
| If the UK can pull this off in 9 days, I am sure other more
| sophisticated countries can do the same if they need to.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's not really the problem though. See, no matter how many
| ICU beds you have, the people going to the ICU are about 40% or
| so likely to die from COVID and the remainder will recover but
| will take a very long time to do so and have a significant
| chance of having long term residual effects and/or
| complications.
|
| You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try
| to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming
| you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always
| the case).
|
| That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of
| countries that stripping your health care system is probably a
| bad idea.
| arrrg wrote:
| No country in the world has the capacity to take care of more
| than "a couple thousand" ICU patients (well, it's more like a
| couple of ten thousand ICU patients for the best equipped and
| richest large countries in the world, like Germany). Simply
| because "a couple thousand" is all that's needed during
| ordinary times.
|
| Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of
| the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and
| unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn't be much
| of a help.
|
| We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the
| literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if
| that (simply because it's not as though Germany's existing ICU
| capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it's quite large,
| actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand
| beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but
| wouldn't really solve the underlying problem.
|
| And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a
| solution. It's completely misguided. Not least of which because
| it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people
| for that ...
|
| Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially
| cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start
| implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as
| soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough
| vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.
|
| We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination.
| However, in the very short term even that won't be good enough,
| we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is
| necessary (and already happening).
|
| Think about time frames.
|
| Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks,
| vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster
| vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three
| months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show
| its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.
| nzk wrote:
| In three months, the booster efficiency might start waning
| again, we don't know that yet. These vaccines so far aren't
| looking like they are the solution to the pandemic either,
| better vaccines or better treatment might be. I'm not saying
| it doesn't make sense to get vaccinated if you want to help
| with the situation, but I do find the way our politicians
| deflect blame and openly insult a not so small segment of the
| population completely distasteful. They shouldn't be
| surprised if the people they're insulting are not willing to
| help anymore, now or in the future.
|
| A strategy that would make sense would include BOTH
| vaccination and ICU capacity, one of which could have been
| started in March 2020, and it would have put us in a much
| better position today. Letting capacity decrease while
| waiting for vaccines that may or may not end the pandemic is
| negligent. Not getting vaccinated may be seen by some as
| negligent also, but different standards apply for governments
| and citizens.
|
| The pandemic comes in waves, we do not need to plan for
| endless exponential growth. A few weeks of extra capacity
| would make the whole thing much easier to handle, given that
| we might be already at the peak and cases seem to be going
| down again[0]. The RKI weekly report[1] currently lists 1700
| ICU cases, a month ago it was 1100[2]. So the 4000 beds we
| lost throughout the year[3] could have made a big difference.
|
| [0]https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-infektionen-103.html
|
| [1]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavir
| us...
|
| [2]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavir
| us...
|
| [3]https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
| arrrg wrote:
| Please source the 4,000 number properly:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29422105
|
| As I point out in my other comment, you cannot interpret
| that number in any to imply as though we ever actually had
| those 4,000 beds.
| nzk wrote:
| Fair enough, thanks for the info, I'll check it out. But
| let it be 2594 then, that is still too many given that we
| should have increased it by any means possible before
| starting to publically insult 20% of the population. I'm
| not assuming a deliberate reduction, I am assuming
| negligence.
| arrrg wrote:
| 20% of the population is, however, behaving stupidly and
| irrationally and in a very antisocial way. Insulting them
| is perfectly fine.
|
| Just as with opposition to seatbelts it's important for
| politics to create facts and just decide this issue.
| Everyone should be vaccinated and that's just how it is.
| nzk wrote:
| ... yeah, okay, I disagree with everything. I don't think
| it's acceptable for a government to insult its citizens,
| and I do think boundaries should be respected.
|
| Nothing more to say, our worldviews are too far apart.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Simply because "a couple thousand" is all that's needed
| during ordinary times.
|
| Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would
| prepare for crises before they happen, because we always knew
| that it would hit us eventually, people have been warning
| about this for ages, this is not some black swan.
|
| More healthcare capacity would help, just like more supply
| chain capacity would help, or the ability to manufacture some
| masks, the entire problem is we've been running on the
| idiotic 80s managerial efficiency mindset for decades and now
| we're running on fumes on every front.
|
| If we had any appreciation for crisis management, robustness,
| redundancy and had some shock absorbers in our system many
| people would not have needed to die. And no it's not just the
| unvaccinated. Plenty of countries this year, including the
| US, will lose more people in total to covid in 2021 than in
| 2020. Vaccines help but they are not pandemic ending, and our
| systems are deeply screwed up.
| est31 wrote:
| This is also about appreciation. The main bottleneck for
| increasing capacity is not machines, rooms or beds, those
| are available. It's hospital staff that's lacking. ICU beds
| are the most staff intensive beds in a hospital. It's a job
| that requires years of training, so you can't just scale it
| up. Also, the willingness to be a nurse has _decreased_
| during the last couple months. A lot of hospital staff has
| burned out during the first few waves and either reduced
| their contracts to part time, or quit entirely. The
| remaining staff has to work hard, until exhaustion and
| beyond, in order to fight for the patient 's lives. Covid
| stations require proper hygiene which puts extra stress on
| the hospital staff. And they put in all of this work
| because some people couldn't be bothered to seek out
| vaccination, often even the patients themselves. This is
| the main difference to the first few waves where
| vaccination has _not_ been available to everyone.
| kazen44 wrote:
| > Also, the willingness to be a nurse has decreased
| during the last couple months
|
| this was entirely preventable by providing nurses and
| those keeping hospitals running with the support they
| need to do suchs jobs during a time of crisis.
|
| In the netherlands for instance, many nurses have been
| running 12h shifts during the peaks, and there has been
| very little practical support in helping those people.
|
| I am not even talking about monetary funds, but mainly
| practical stuff. (for instance, some volunteers decided
| to do grocery shopping for nurses during peaks).
|
| If people are busting their ass off to prevent the
| healthcare systems from collepsing, maybe the goverment
| should have done far more in its power to prevent those
| people from quitting.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Unvaccinated people are to blame for this
|
| This satirical article from Ireland is probably applicable in
| every Western country that has had its health system
| systematically hollowed out by cynical neoliberal fuckheads:
| https://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2021/11/19/unvaccinated-
| be...
|
| > Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It's
| completely misguided
|
| What you fail to understand is that the people who cut those
| bed numbers across Europe are responsible for far more death
| than a small percent of mRNA vaccine hesitant people. And
| they're fucking delighted that so many people are so
| misdirected.
| stefs wrote:
| the cynical neoliberal fuckheads didn't manage to cut ICU
| beds in time in austria (they tried but the epidemic beat
| them to it). we're still extremely close to running out
| though. currently, patients are transferred to hospitals
| across the country and surgeries are put off.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Is this the ventilator fallacy? You know, it's march 2020, and
| everyone is rushing to make more of those damn ventilators?
|
| _If you end up on a fucking ventilator in an ICU bed, the
| damage is long done_. The goal is not to maximize the number of
| people we can have on ventilators. That is an absurd idea on
| the same level of the "natural immunity is better than the
| vaccine!" insanity we got in 2021.
| nzk wrote:
| No, it's not the goal. The goal is also not to split society
| in two and create a group that'll hate everyone forever, just
| because our leaders can't own up to their mistakes. The goal
| is to get through the pandemic best we can, and keeping
| societal values and principals intact should be an important
| part of that.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >What we're seeing here is one of the wealthiest countries in
| the world with a population of > 80M people crumbling over a
| few thousand ICU patients because of long-standing issues that
| were never addressed.
|
| So I'm kind of surprised to see this. I was under the
| impression Germany was the opposite.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/hospital-beds
|
| Germany is #2 out of those reporting. Crushing Canada by like
| 300%.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/medical-doctors
|
| Germany #1 for doctors, beating Canada by 100%
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/nurses
|
| Germany #2 for nurses, beating Canada by ~75%
|
| I kind of step back, how terrible is Canada doing?
|
| >The staffing problems in hospitals (and nursing homes) have
| existed much longer than Covid. I heard a lot about them myself
| when I did my FSJ (volunteer work) back in 2004, and it's only
| gotten worse since then.
|
| Oh ya big time. I can't remember a time when
| nurses/psws/doctors weren't in huge demand here in Canada.
|
| Before covid: https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/07/toronto-
| hospital-fraud/
|
| During covid pre-vax: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-
| hospital-lays-off-97-regi...
|
| Antivaxxers fired:
| https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/11/28/were-on-the-brin...
|
| You can't be on one side in huge demand for nurses but also be
| firing them willy nilly.
|
| Firing them for not getting the vaccine isn't true at all.
| They've been reducing nurses and such for long before.
|
| >Our government is in full CYA mode, and doing everything they
| can to blame a scapegoat for problems they themselves have
| willingly created over decades. It's despicable, and nobody
| should support it.
|
| I propose that Canada and Germany probably have the same
| problem. That we are on the same page.
|
| I am curious what you think is that problem?
| dmix wrote:
| > Furthermore Bill 124, introduced in 2019, disincentivizes
| nurses by limiting wage increases. Many nurses have said
| repealing the bill would go a long way in retaining nurses.
| Others say removing barriers for internationally educated
| nurses would help fill in gaps.
|
| Wow, why is there the wage cap when nursing has long been an
| issue in Ontario? I wonder who thinks this stuff up and
| thinks they are somehow saving money by doing this. It just
| generates inefficiencies and unintended side effects.
|
| Whenever there's problems like this there's always seems to
| be a long trail of government interference that's
| counterproductive.
| throw8965 wrote:
| Additional problem is that when doctors that are against mass
| vaccinations (like inventor of the mRNA vaccine) want to debate
| no-one mainstream want to talk with them besides anti-
| vaxxers[0][1].
|
| [0]: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/my-team-of-vaccine-
| safety... [1]: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/wed-love-to-
| have-a-debate
| disneygibson wrote:
| Scary stuff. I think all of the authoritarian actions over the
| last two years can be traced to a single event: the fall of the
| Soviet Union. Without an enemy to compare itself against, the
| Western world has forgotten the value of freedom.
|
| If East Germany had implemented this forty years ago to fight X
| disease, it would have been painted as evil, something we don't
| do in the free West.
|
| Edit: flagged in 8 minutes. I guess this website isn't the place
| for intelligent debate and discussion anymore. That's
| disappointing.
| dang wrote:
| Your comments are correctly getting flagged because you're
| taking the thread further into generic ideological flamewar.
| That's off topic here and clearly against the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you'd
| please review them and stick to the rules when posting here,
| we'd appreciate it.
|
| Edit: actually, it looks like you've been using this account
| primarily for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that do
| that, regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've
| therefore banned this one. Please don't create accounts to
| break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account
| banned as well.
| beanjuice wrote:
| Thank you for continuing to do such an excellent job.
| throwaway224466 wrote:
| ...of blatant censorship sitting in his ivory tower? smdh
| throwaway224466 wrote:
| "Idealogical flamewar" a.k.a. any non-leftist talking points
| so downvoted into oblivion. You are a terrible human being
| and there will likely soon be consequences for people
| supporting this non-logical persecution.
| dang wrote:
| Everyone with strong passions on a topic feels like the
| mods are against them, the moment they see any sign of a
| post that they agree with getting moderated.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&so
| r...
|
| In reality, we ban accounts that do ideological flamewar
| from the other side in just the same way, and they feel
| like we're just as biased against them. They agree that
| we're terrible human beings though. The striking thing is
| how the passionate partisans and ideologues resemble each
| other more than they resemble the rest of us. They see each
| other as bitter enemies, yet they're close to isomorphic.
| anotherPerson67 wrote:
| Instead of believing the science, why not actually read and
| understand instead?
|
| For example:
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
| d1a2n wrote:
| Looks to me like as time goes on and the vaccines show themselves
| to be less and less effective, all we get is doubling down. There
| is no way the anti vaxxers could have been right, and I wrong.
| I'm a believer in science, I'm educated and sensible, and if it
| was a mistake to take the vaccine, then those disgusting, selfish
| anti vaxxers must make the same mistake!
| Animats wrote:
| Understand, we're in the second epidemic and headed for the
| third. Plans made on the basis of the original virus may not be
| valid. "The enemy get a vote", as the military says.
|
| The original virus had a R0 rate of about 3, that is, in normal
| conditions, each infected person infects three others. That's
| about what the first generation of vaccines could control well
| enough that eventually the virus would die out.
|
| The delta variant has an R0 of about 8. The current vaccines can
| slow down the spread, but not stop it. Which is why we've had a
| second epidemic. By last August, delta variant cases were 90% of
| the cases seen.
|
| We don't know enough about the omicron variant yet.
| krater23 wrote:
| Which means, vaccination doesn't works. Sounds like the
| antivaccers are right(?)
|
| When you want to see it like this, we will never know enough to
| do anything. The only thing we can do with things that we can't
| change is to accept it. It's time to do...
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| No, vaccinations prevent you from getting sick. It's the
| choice between a mild illness and potentially being admitted
| into the hospital.
|
| What we're starting to see is potential for further variants
| to evade antibodies, reproduce inside you and thus you spread
| it. Your immune system is still able to fight the virus
| easier because the vaccine has trained your immune system to
| look out for contagions _like_ this virus but for a while
| you're still actively spreading the virus before you've
| cleared it from your system.
|
| Someone correct me if I'm wrong though.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. Here's some tabular data on hospitalizations and
| deaths vs. vaccination status[1] Those are easy to monitor.
| How well vaccination prevents infection is harder to
| determine.
|
| Also remember, this is still the first generation of
| vaccines. There are some nasal spray vaccines in testing
| which look to be much more effective in preventing
| infection.
|
| [1]
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm#T1_down
| felistoria wrote:
| Fully vaccinated people still get hospitalized and some
| times die. If you are old or have comorbidity, even the
| vaccine won't save you. We need to get off this vaccine
| obsession and start working on early treatments.
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-
| 7...
| timdaub wrote:
| Delta's R0 isn't 8 [1]
|
| - 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/#:~:text=The%20De
| lt....
| josefresco wrote:
| From the link:
|
| "The Delta variant is now replacing all other SARS-CoV-2
| variants. We found a mean R0 of 5.08, which is much higher
| than the R0 of the ancestral strain of 2.79. Rapidly ramping
| up vaccine coverage rates while enhancing public health and
| social measures is now even more urgent and important."
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, that's encouraging. That's from October 2021. Early
| estimates were higher.
| elmerfud wrote:
| Germany classifying certain groups as undesirables and
| restricting their movements. This seems very reasonable.
| nazinazinazi wrote:
| It is almost like Germany did this at one point in time,
| sometime in the 1930s? What was that one guy's name? Schitzler?
| Blippar? Nitler?
| timdaub wrote:
| Tons of misinformation and bullshit numbers as top comments here.
| Scary to witness. HN, be aware, this is how fake news spreads.
| Please stay safe and double check numbers in case the sources are
| dubious or missing.
| aarobot wrote:
| If you don't wear a life jacket someone else will drown..
| periheli0n wrote:
| ... and this is where the analogy breaks down...
| dewert wrote:
| Yes, because you're all tied together for some reason?
|
| Really, this analogy is too much of a stretch to be meaningful.
| frockington1 wrote:
| The vaccine is so effective everyone should get it but stay
| away from the unvaccinated even if you're vaccinated because
| its not that effective.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This reminds me of the "no, not like that" meme.
| lixtra wrote:
| Remember the Titanic movie? Girl didn't take the seat in the
| live boat. Di Caprio gave her his place on the floating wood -
| and drowned.
| lispm wrote:
| as a German I agree, since I don't want to see another 100k
| people die too early and see many more people suffer after being
| rescued by long ICU treatments
| timdaub wrote:
| I find it ironic that there are plenty comments that paint the
| picture of how mandatory vaccinations divide the country.
|
| Hello? Have you been awake for the last month? How much more
| divided can a country already be when the absolute democratic
| majority has made their decision months ago to take the shot but
| 30% are holding everyone back. Anyone in my family or from my
| friends that has taken one for the team (and got vaccinated)
| could receive worse-than-usual ICU treatment because of some
| egoistic anti-vaxxers. Hell, even anti-vaxxers benefit from
| better ICU treatment if vaccination numbers are higher.
|
| Yes, this is a democracy and so it can also be deemed legitimate
| and representative to govern according to the majority decision.
| Besides, it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated.
| xafnuaetrf8764 wrote:
| You're just a piece of a fucking fascist, cunt.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... but 30% are holding everyone back.
|
| Not at all and I can turn that argument back: I know non-
| vaccinated people who stay at home and "evil" fully vaccinated
| people who go out. It is a fact that vaccinated people can
| still carry and transmit the virus.
|
| It is also a fact that in the EU 40 to 60% of all ICU beds are
| filled with fully vaccinated people (40% in Spain atm but the
| number is going up, 50% in Belgium, 60% in the Netherlands, for
| example).
|
| So evil, fully vaccinated (like me btw), people going out,
| spreading the virus, then falling ill and ending up on an ICU
| bed.
|
| Do you really want to shame people like that? Because if we
| play that game, then I'll shame the vaccinated people who still
| have a social life: they _do_ spread the virus.
|
| How did these evil fully vaccinated people who are on ICU bed
| get the virus? Who did they give it too? Why didn't they stay
| at home / live less of a social life? They're putting an
| unnecessary burden on the healthcare system...
|
| Countries like Gibraltar with 100% vaccination rate still just
| experienced a wave.
|
| Same in Israel, one of the most vaccinated country on earth.
|
| > Besides, it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated.
|
| That is not clear at all. Why not lock down hard, very hard,
| the old and those known at risk why letting the virus circulate
| among the healthy population: this, and that is a known fact,
| creates a much better immunity than the one conferred by the
| "vaccine". The studies published showed 12x less risk to catch
| the Delta variant if you had had Covid before compared to
| someone who just had the shots.
|
| If anything: maybe that that "vaccine" which still let people
| carry and spread the virus is part of the problem.
|
| The problem is the old and those at risk have been sold a lie
| by politicians and big pharma: that by getting the vaccine
| they'd be safe. So they let their guards down and now they're
| fully vaccinated... on ICU beds.
| glfharris wrote:
| There are more vaccinated people than not, and people with
| prior health conditions are more likely to be vaccinated so
| it's not surprising they would be represented in the ITU
| population.
| native_samples wrote:
| You'd think so but it's actually the other way around: the
| people most likely to die are _not_ given vaccines (because
| there 's no point). This can be seen in the UK data where
| increasing vaccinations causes an increase in deaths in
| unvaccinated people from _non-COVID_ causes. Clearly that
| 's not a biological link - rather, what's happening is that
| as the vaccinated population grows, the really sick and
| dying people get concentrated in the unvaccinated cohort,
| which then experiences higher death rates.
|
| Data is tricky, especially with something like this.
| walkhour wrote:
| That's irrelevant to the points being made. We all know
| this at this point, it's been said over a thousand times.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > 40 to 60% of all ICU beds are filled with fully vaccinated
| people
|
| Though correct, this is a dumb statistic used to peddle
| antivax propaganda. As vaccination rates rise, this number
| also rises.
|
| If 100% of people were vaccinated, 100% of all Covid ICU
| patients would be vaccinated.
|
| Spain has quite high vaccination rates, which is why this
| ratio is so high there.
| forgotmyoldname wrote:
| Last weekend I was at a Japanese history museum, and part of
| the exhibit was on 1600s-1800s medical technology.
|
| In the 1870s, Japan had vaccine passports and kept logs of
| unvaccinated people in order to track them down. It was deemed
| a huge step forward in developing the country.
|
| It's interesting how some people today think mandatory
| vaccination is some massive, unprecedented destruction of
| freedom, when it's historically nothing new and something that
| was essential to helping your country stay strong.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Given Japan was a nation where a certain class could execute
| summarily anyone below them, for something as germaine as
| insulting them, and given what Japan did to Chinese civilians
| during World War II, you'll forgive me if I don't look to
| their 1870s ideals as inspiration for living in 2021.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| Do you think the % of unvaccinated would stay the same next
| year? My gut feeling is that it will increase, every 6 months
| when the new booster is needed we will get more and more people
| not wanting it.
|
| How long until the unvaccinated are more than the vaccinated?
| 18 months?
|
| What happens when they are the majority and ban all vaccines?
| igorkraw wrote:
| In that fantasy world they'd still need to provide evidence
| that the ban us justified, otherwise people can challenge it
| in court. The vaccine people have the "benefit" of a
| collapsing medical system and am absence of a similar load
| and collapse in countries with high vaccination rate.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| Well if they are 30% now, they must have the 'evidence'
| that convinces them they are right, when they are 60% they
| would have even more 'evidence'. Why wouldn't they blame it
| on, the eastern europeans or something?
| native_samples wrote:
| Why? No evidence is needed that vaccine mandates are
| justified, as if evidence were required it'd fail
| immediately given the low and falling efficacy, that
| vaccines are individual protection so it doesn't matter
| what other people do, and given that hospital capacity is
| the problem of the hospital providers to solve and not
| their customers (this is fairly basic).
|
| But hey, if you disagree with that last bit and think
| hospital staffing is everyone's problem, be aware that this
| sword cuts in both directions. It actually makes it super
| easy to argue for banning vaccines. Here's the argument
| they'll use:
|
| 1. Vaccines aren't entirely safe. They can cause blood
| clots, strokes, heart attacks and many other kinds of
| injury.
|
| 2. The injured end up in hospital, consuming medical system
| capacity which takes it away from the people who opted out
| and didn't take the vaccines. Possibly for life, in some
| cases.
|
| 3. This is selfish because many of the people who took
| vaccines and got injured are young and weren't at any
| meaningful risk of COVID. They did it to themselves despite
| knowing there were risks, because they were incorrectly
| scared, or authoritarian, or whatever, but now society has
| to take care of them anyway.
|
| 4. And in addition the unvaccinated are now almost all
| recovered, and they have natural immunity for life. The
| vaccinated on the other hand, are now dependent on endless
| booster shots which not only injure new people on every
| round but are also are extremely expensive and taxing on
| the hospital system, meaning less healthcare resources
| available for everyone else.
|
| Thus, the vaccinated are a drain on the healthcare system
| and should have their freedom to choose endless boosters
| removed - or at the very least, they should be forced to
| pay for them themselves (and any subsequent healthcare
| issues they experience).
| helge9210 wrote:
| > Besides, it's in everyone's best interest to get vaccinated.
|
| No. Some are OK with the risk.
|
| > this is a democracy
|
| If all the possible choices for the vote are supported by all
| the parties. If there are unacceptable choices, this is just a
| dictatorship of the majority.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| What about compulsory seatbelts?
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I think it's worth to point out here that _since_ "it's in
| everyone's best interest to get vaccinated" you can't really
| call it taking "one for the team".
|
| People getting vaccinated are taking "one for the team" and at
| the same time "looking out for number one". That's the beauty
| of it, really: aligned incentives.
| zizee wrote:
| Perhaps this is true for covid19, as the vaccines do not seem
| to stop the vaccinated from getting infected and spreading
| the virus. But for vaccines that actually stop the majority
| of vaccinated from becoming infectious the risk reward
| calculation changes.
|
| All vaccinations have some level of risk. If you are
| surrounded by unvaccinated, your risk of not getting the
| vaccine outweighs the risk of catching the disease from the
| herd. In this instance you have aligned incentives.
|
| However, if you are in a entirely vaccinated population, your
| risk profile changes, and it is now possible for your
| incentives to become unaligned with "the team", or at least
| more blurry.
|
| Unfortunately the average antivaxer's mental model is
| probably not so well defined that they realise is what they
| have been doing. I would not be surprised if the majority of
| them don't realise/agree that they've been selfishly coasting
| on the coat-tails of the crowd with other vaccines/diseases,
| and therefore they have trouble realising their currently
| "successful" strategy is not going to work so well this time
| round.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Well yeah, but what you said is exactly the problem here...
| Vaccines were promised to be safe and effective against
| infections... then astrazeneca killed a few people, Jansenn
| killed a few people, moderna was stopped in finland,
| sweden, denmark etc., and of course people lose trust. In
| slovenia, for girls under 25, we currently have 1 death due
| to the vaccine (jansenn) and zero deaths due to covid (with
| a bit over 50% of the population getting covid - around
| 1mio). Also the changing the definition, from "preventing
| infection" to "preveting hospitalizations" doesn't help.
|
| I got vaccinated to protect myself. I am aware that even
| with 100% vaccination rates, sooner or later i will get in
| contact with covid (and/or i probably already have), and
| the vaccine is protecting only me. I am not afraid of the
| unvaccinated, and I don't care if they choose a greater
| risk, it's their life, and their choice.
| newacc9 wrote:
| How many footballers have to drop dead on the pitch before you
| remove the scales from your eyes?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > the absolute democratic majority has made their decision
| months ago to take the shot but 30% are holding everyone back
|
| Were people really asked to cast their vote by vaccinating
| themselves?
| timdaub wrote:
| no. That was a rethorical device I used in my comment.
| jpcfl wrote:
| > this is a democracy and so it can also be deemed legitimate
| and representative to govern according to the majority decision
|
| Not if the decision violates the constitution.
| belter wrote:
| You have a strange understanding of democracy...But if we are
| at it, would like to propose a public citizen petition:
| Requesting by democratic mandate that we remove the only
| immunity to come out of this process, the one from vaccine
| producers....
| worik wrote:
| I agree that everybody should get vaccinated. Let's make this
| virus extinct.
|
| But what you describe is majoritarianism. It is a form of
| democracy but a very weak form. For a lot of people, who are
| from minority groups, it is indistinguishable from
| totalitarianism.
|
| Why do 30% of people refuse to get vaccinated? (here in
| Aotearoa it is 5%). Something is happening, people are getting
| left behind, in vast numbers. Forcing them to comply is
| probably a cure worse than the disease - even a disease like
| COVID
| [deleted]
| dhosek wrote:
| In the US, it's because a bunch of demagogues have decided
| that they will make a lot of money (or retain political
| power) by saying that vaccines don't work and/or are harmful.
| Fox News regularly spews this kind of nonsense in its
| programming and a number of Republican politicians are happy
| to go along with it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| We should remember that the freedom of the press exists
| because a well informed population is necessary for a
| functioning democracy.
|
| The moment the press starts spreading disinformation, it
| starts to be detrimental to democracy and should be treated
| as that.
| gojomo wrote:
| Vaccinations are too leaky to "make this virus extinct".
| Within a few months of vaccination, half or more of people
| can get mild, but still transmissable, cases of Delta.
| (Omicron is likely worse; there are already multiple reports
| of mild cases among those with recent 3rd booster shots.)
|
| Honest epidemiologists have been warning about this risk
| since 2020, and more forcefully when confirmed by early vax
| results in 2021. But many people are still on the warpath
| against the unvaxed, as if that can make a difference.
|
| Well, it can for the unvaxed themselves - winning them a
| less-severe case.
|
| But every vaxed person is going to be exposed to, and have
| mild cases of, COVID - via waning immunity & multiplying
| variants. There is no net increase in protection from
| harassing the last ~15% (a more honest count of hardcore
| holdouts) into a vax they don't want. (Most of them have
| probably had COVID already, or soon will, giving them an
| immunity just as good as vaccination.)
| timdaub wrote:
| Biontech has proven to have 93% efficacy against
| hospitalization after 6 months [1].
|
| - 1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS
| 0140-6...
| jansan wrote:
| Which has nothing to do with making the virus extinct.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >Most of them have probably had COVID already, or soon
| will, giving them an immunity just as good as vaccination.
|
| Immunity from prior-infection was worse than vaccination at
| protecting people from Delta.
| switch007 wrote:
| By how much? It's really disingenuous to say "more" or
| "less" or "better" or "worse" without qualification.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Source? The papers I have seen show the exact opposite!
| EricE wrote:
| > Let's make this virus extinct.
|
| Here's the core problem - unrealistic expectations. Even the
| CDC has backed off from the whole "make the virus extinct"
| mantra; they haven't spouted it for over a year now. Which is
| a good thing - it was utterly ridiculous from day one.
|
| This virus isn't going away. It is carried by animals. You
| going to vaccinate every animal that we all come in contact
| with? Ha! You are not going to shelter in place or vaccinate
| away this virus. We had better figure out how to coexist with
| it in a rational and reasonable manner.
|
| The good news with the Omicron variant there are no reported
| hospitalizations in South Africa. So it's more virulent, but
| less bad. Here is the perfect path to herd immunity - a
| variant that people can get a mild infection from and have
| stronger natural immunity to than the vax would give, as well
| as broader protection to variants. Actually any protection to
| variants would be an improvement over the current vax - there
| has be zero confirmation from the CDC or vax makers that the
| vax provides any protection against Delta, let alone Omicron.
| All they make are vague promises about it reducing the
| reaction. Big deal! If the reporting by South African doctors
| is correct and Omicron is as mild as they have seen then what
| exactly is the vax doing? Nothing - except exposing you
| needlessly to potential side effects.
|
| BTW that Omicron is more virulent but less bad is totally
| unsurprising to anyone familiar with viruses and who wasn't
| politically motivated or shamed to pushing the ridiculous
| narratives around COVID right now; this is totally expected
| behavior as viruses mature in the wild and was predicted by
| many virologists last year. Virologists who were then quickly
| derided as quacks, truthers and worse since they dared to
| challenge the widely accepted groupthink. Same crap that
| happened with the lab leak, changing stances on masks,
| ignoring of massive spike in reports in the Vaccine Adverse
| Event Reporting System (VAERS) and more - hot takes that
| turned out to be VERY wrong later but amazingly the
| corrections never get the same amount of publicity as the
| initial propaganda.
| Pyramus wrote:
| > Why do 30% of people refuse to get vaccinated? (here in
| Aotearoa it is 5%). Something is happening, people are
| getting left behind, in vast numbers.
|
| It's an interesting question and there is lots of debate in
| Germany at the moment as to why. Some factors are:
|
| * Germany did very well during the pandemic so people didn't
| experience a Bergamo or Madrid moment
|
| * Germany has a strong esoteric / anthroposophical movement
| (Steiner, Waldorf et al.)
|
| * Federalism: Vaccination rates vary a lot by state
| native_samples wrote:
| None of those are the right answer. These are the answers
| people come up with having never talked to anyone who
| disagrees.
|
| The right answers are:
|
| 1. They don't trust the medical authorities to be honest
| about the risks.
|
| 2. They don't feel a need for it because they're at low
| risk of COVID and know it.
|
| 3. They don't believe it will change anything.
| jseban wrote:
| And
|
| 1. The recommendation to take the vaccine goes exactly
| against anything the doctors said pre-covid. Before
| covid, nobody would recommend you to take a vaccine
| against something you are not in a risk group for, and
| double doses and boosters were unheard of. This makes me
| suspicious, and I don't think that is unreasonable. 2.
| You get really sick from the second dose of the vaccine,
| which also is not normal, you are not supposed to get
| sick from vaccines, you are supposed to take them to
| avoid getting sick
|
| So the whole vaccination situation is something that's
| new and confusing, why do what my doctor always said to
| not do? Why get sick from vaccines, aren't they supposed
| to stop you from getting sick? Why double and triple
| vaccines?
| Pyramus wrote:
| > The right answers
|
| The right answers, but for the wrong question ;)
|
| Not disagreeing with you, but parent was asking why is
| Germany so bad relative to their European peers.
| prohobo wrote:
| You _cannot make this virus extinct_. These vaccines do not
| accomplish this goal, the end.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Yes the vaccine doesn't kill it, but what would kill it is
| a REAL lock down.
|
| Give everyone 2 months of salary, and 2 months of food.
| Nationalize food production for a month, give everyone
| shelf stable terrible food, the same crap that the majority
| of the anti-vaxxers have been hoarding for decades.
|
| Its like a pretend apocalypse. They should LOVE it.
| 14 wrote:
| I agree that is the only way but it better be my day off
| when the lockdown happens. How would nursing home staff
| stay locked down? Or other people critical to ensuring we
| have power or that our water treatment plants keep
| running. But I do agree a more aggressive lock down could
| work but we will never be able again to do something like
| that. Not unless it starts killing people like Ebola and
| everyone in those jobs says screw it I quit and walks
| away.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Unfortunately, that wouldn't really help long term,
| because the disease has spread through animal populations
| by now.
|
| The only way to reliably stop this from being an ongoing
| pandemic is measures that reduce the R-value below 1 in a
| long-term manner, like mass vaccinations.
| gojomo wrote:
| The high rates of breakthroughs mean even very-highly-
| vaxxed populations have had case surges. Rt is going to
| oscillate around 1, forever.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Even if it's around 1 forever, if the effects are mild as
| they are with vaccinated people, it'll be manageable as
| flu is.
| angelzen wrote:
| As I already replied elsewhere in this thread, as of
| 12/02/2021 German CDC estimates 7-day R-value as 0.92.
| That is below 1.
|
| https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavi
| rus...
| crooked-v wrote:
| The 7-day R-value _with current vaccination rates and
| local restrictions_ , yes.
| gojomo wrote:
| COVID fear creates that sort of warped fantasy. But few
| nations are totalitarian enough to carry that out.
|
| And large reservoirs of COVID would remain in wild
| animals, and other countries, and groups (like the elites
| & their children, or remote communities) that can't
| practically be forced to comply.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| One leak in the population of 7 billion and the whole
| plan is a waste.
| prohobo wrote:
| Utter insanity. Who told you a "real" lockdown would stop
| the virus? Where did you get this "fact" from?
| rbanffy wrote:
| In theory, if no household has any contact with any other
| household, the virus will be unable to propagate and will
| quickly die off.
|
| A perfect lockdown would stop a human-only pandemic
| immediately by stopping all transmission.
|
| Unfortunately, this virus infect other animals as well.
| Good luck locking them down.
| swader999 wrote:
| You ignore that this virus lives and will persist in
| animal reservoirs. It can creep right back in after any
| real lockdown you could imagine.
| Syonyk wrote:
| How do you keep things like "power plants" and "water
| systems" running in this proposal? Either you allow so
| many exceptions that it's worthless, or you _literally_
| shut down modern civilization. It 's far from clear that
| it can be blackstarted.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| The goal is to keep serious cases to a minimum so they
| don't clog the healthcare system thus making people die of
| all sorts of other things because they couldn't be treated.
|
| Vaccines do help with that, tremendously.
| prohobo wrote:
| Do they? Can you prove that, or are you just saying
| random shit everyone else says?
|
| This was not the narrative at the beginning of the
| vaccine rollout, by the way. The narrative changed every
| month towards what you're currently saying.
|
| From what I've heard, thousands of people have been
| losing out on proper healthcare because of _governments_
| blocking their access; I 'm talking people who should
| have had cancer screenings not getting them and dying
| because they were coerced into "lowering the strain on
| healthcare services".
|
| I also heard that thousands of healthcare workers have
| been getting fired, and ICU beds removed because of
| _governments_ deciding they weren 't heroic enough, and
| not fit for treating patients.
|
| Who are you trying to protect exactly?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| You can look up all the statistics on vaccine
| effectiveness against serious cases. They work really
| well for that. They don't work as well as first hoped
| against infection but data on third booster suggests
| better results on that front.
|
| Look it up instead of asking me for proof, while you
| yourself are restating hearsay originating from who knows
| where.
| prohobo wrote:
| I asked if you can prove that they stop hospitals from
| being overwhelmed, not whether they were effective. So
| far it's not looking very good, is that why you support
| the decision to mandate the shots?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I'm not sure I support a vaccine mandate. I'm just saying
| that the vaccines work and it's foolish to claim
| otherwise.
|
| I can understand hesitation to get vaccinated, but I'd
| like to ask those same people if they take any other
| medicine at all and if they have read the pamphlet that
| comes with those.
|
| Also I'd like to ask if they are fine with getting a
| completely alien and known harmful substance into their
| body, the substance we call Coronavirus.
| mattzito wrote:
| Sure, but we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms
| of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of
| people who suffer long term consequences, the number of
| deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder
| for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.
| runarberg wrote:
| I do think it is important to use the correct terminology
| here. This disease and the vaccines are already a huge
| spread of misinformation, so lets expand on the "sure"
| bit from this sentence a little. It is saying quite a
| lot:
|
| I don't think any expert nor any public health department
| is working with the goal of eradication in mind. So we
| should acknowledge the fact that these vaccines will
| probably not eradicate COVID. We will have people getting
| sick from COVID and we will have more COVID variants for
| the foreseeable future. Even after most people have been
| thoroughly vaccinated. And given the slow global spread
| of vaccines we will also probably see more lockdown
| measures to slow the spread of the virus beyond the
| current vaccine capabilities.
|
| Now that said, remember that with the vaccines:
|
| > we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of
| its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of
| people who suffer long term consequences, the number of
| deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder
| for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >I don't think any expert nor any public health
| department is working with the goal of eradication in
| mind
|
| I believe I speak for many when I say, "I have no idea
| what the experts' have in mind" (and that's not a good
| thing).
|
| So they're trying hard to get everyone vaccinated - a
| noble goal, perhaps, as our current roster of vaccines
| diminish symptoms and greatly reduce hospitalization and
| fatality rates. But..."Stop the spread, get
| vaccinated"...what? Like the parent said, all of the
| currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have
| proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate.
|
| Early on, experts probably made an educated guess or wish
| that these vaccines would be sterilizing and started
| information campaigns on this premise. When this turned
| out to be not true, their "Stop the spread, get
| vaccinated" became "You unvaccinated are the problem, you
| are holding us back, and you will be locked down
| immediately". Rather than address their mistake, rather
| than open up transparently, they doubled down on the lie.
| Not a good way to build trust.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| We could do that for smoking too, but since smoking is a
| choice, we let people smoke and die. Why not do the same
| with the vaccines? As with smoking, the unvaccinated are
| taking all the risks.
| caeril wrote:
| > We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term
| consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on
| hospitals.
|
| Huh. Curious, what kind of insane abrogations of bodily
| autonomy have you been advocating for the last 20 years
| of the obesity epidemic?
|
| I can't find anything in your post history advocating for
| mandatory calorie restriction for fat people, to "reduce
| the number of people who suffer long term consequences,
| the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals" for a
| condition that has not only killed FAR more people than
| COVID itself, but is the second significant comorbidity
| of it, and is likely responsible for more COVID deaths
| than vaccine hesitancy.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Obese people don't take up literally the entirety of ICU
| capacity in heavily-affected areas[1], nor does obesity
| spread exponentially in a matter of months.
|
| [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/indiana-covid-boy-cancer-
| treatment-...
| [deleted]
| throwoutway wrote:
| Thank you! It's this myth that keeps perpetuating that
| makes people think mandates are acceptable.
|
| And I say that as someone vaccinated.
| crooked-v wrote:
| However, they do accomplish the goal of stopping it from
| being a pandemic. With enough people vaccinated to reduce
| the R-value below 1, reinfections from animal reservoirs
| will become inherently self-limiting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Why not? We eradicated smallpox.
| whiddershins wrote:
| The smallpox vaccine is a sterilizing vaccine, meaning
| you cannot be infected and cannot transmit it once you
| are vaccinated.
|
| The MRNAs are non-sterilizing, as are many vaccines. They
| may reduce symptoms, reduce infections, and reduce
| transmission, but they are not considered a sterilizing
| vaccine.
|
| Secondly, coronaviruses mutate much faster than smallpox,
| and have other hard to deal with stuff like asymptomatic
| transmission.
|
| The only diseases we ever eradicated were polio and
| smallpox. I think we got rid of the guinea worm too. Out
| of all the many many diseases we have fought over the
| years.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Thanks to some Af-Pak mullahs, the world still has polio
| in the wild. [0]
|
| [0]https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-
| work/programs/global-dev...
| glogla wrote:
| > The MRNAs are non-sterilizing
|
| The vaccines we have are non-sterilizing - and my
| understanding is that the reason is mostly because we
| needed at least something very quickly and sterilizing
| vaccines for respiratory virus are harder to research. It
| is not inherent property of the technology as far as I
| know.
|
| Sterilizing vaccines for COVID seem to be theoretically
| possible. "Natural" infection generates stronger immune
| response on mucus membranes as well as deep inside the
| body and that provides higher protection against
| infection. There's no reason why that wouldn't be
| possible to replicate using a vaccine. But nobody
| succeeded at making one yet, so we'll have to see if it's
| practical.
| Pyramus wrote:
| Because unfortunately the current generation of vaccines
| doesn't completely stop the spread - they certainly slow
| the spread in the weeks after the second shot, but then
| antibodies start to wane over the next months (which is
| why booster shots are being administered). Vaccines still
| protect from hospitalisation and death, though.
|
| If you believe most virologists the only realistic
| scenario is that the virus becomes endemic, similar to
| most flu strains or other human corona viruses (which
| makes vaccination even more important!).
| standardUser wrote:
| It's generally considered impossible to eradicate a
| pathogen that can survive in "reservoirs" among wild
| animals, which this virus can.
| gjs278 wrote:
| because that vaccine actually works. this one has
| "breakthrough" cases
| prohobo wrote:
| Are you serious? Let me ask you why we haven't eradicated
| influenza?
|
| Not all viruses are the same, and neither are all
| vaccines.
| timdaub wrote:
| No, it's not totalitarian.
|
| In Germany we have a constitution that protects all human's
| right equally. If there's good reasons why you can't receive
| a vaccination, I'm pretty sure nobody can force you. Not even
| the state. Go to your doctor to get an attest that exempts
| you from the mandatory vaccination. Nothing easier than that
| in Germany.
|
| And again: You are just speculating. Nobody knows if a
| vaccine mandate leaves people behind it tropes. You cannot
| know it, because it hasn't happened.
|
| I'd rather make decisions based on facts than just
| speculating about hypotheticals.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Given Germany's track record on human rights, you'll
| forgive me I don't believe you... or your government.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > In Germany we have a constitution that protects all
| human's right equally.
|
| If Germany's constitution allows vaccine mandates, then
| your insistence that it protects all human's rights will be
| of little comfort to the people who are forced to take the
| vaccination without their consent and in violation of their
| conscience.
|
| At best you are saying "Having control over what medical
| treatments are done to you is not a human right", and at
| worst you are saying "Antivaxers aren't human". Either way,
| you are putting too much trust in a system that claims to
| protect human rights, and totalitarians generally manage to
| find a way to twist the law to justify what they are doing,
| whether the excuse is "military necessity", "medical
| necessity", or something else.
| timdaub wrote:
| It seems you're not understanding the German situation.
| But also: consider that your theoretical argument made
| out of anxiety for some imaginary totaliarism makes, in
| today's context, no sense:
|
| Triage is happening and people with better chances of
| survival (e.g. everyone vaccinated) are getting the beds.
| So already "antivaxers are treated less like humans".
| Xylakant wrote:
| In fact, germany had a vaccine mandate against smallpox
| until 1975 https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impfpflicht
| and we have one against measles, though the mandate only
| requires children and people in certain fields of work to
| be vaccinated (teachers,caregivers etc.) The German
| constitutional court ruled in 1959 that the vaccine
| mandate against smallpox is constitutional.
| Pyramus wrote:
| > the people who are forced to take the vaccination
| without their consent and in violation of their
| conscience.
|
| Your imagination got the better of you here - nobody will
| be forced to vaccinate, especially not without their
| consent. Similar to how nobody comes to your car and
| forces you to wear a seatbelt.
|
| Germany's constitution is quite clear about this, for
| apparent, historic reasons.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| So, how is paying a fine (as in eg. greece) not a form of
| "force"? In one way, if you're rich, you can pay for your
| right not to wear a seatbelt.. i mean, get the vaccine,
| but for normal people, the current measures are basically
| them being forced to do something that they don't want to
| do.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| You won't be physically forced to, but you also won't be
| allowed to do most of the things we normally consider
| that people have a right to do unless you comply. That's
| really a non physical way of forcing compliance (like
| saying I'll fire you from your job unless you agree).
| daylp wrote:
| So it will be "voluntary" by imposing successively higher
| fines until you cannot pay. Then your credit score will
| be ruined, you can't pay rent and join the homeless.
| Completely voluntary, just like compulsory state
| television fees.
|
| Incidentally, both state radio fees and mandatory
| vaccination were immensely popular in the Third Reich.
| fartattack wrote:
| The article says that Germany is planning to make the
| shot compulsory, literally this article that these
| comments are ostensibly discussing, in the second
| paragraph, so I'm not sure where you got the idea nobody
| is going to be forced to get vaccinated, but the
| gaslighting isn't appreciated
| Xylakant wrote:
| You won't be forcefully vaccinated. But you can be fined
| for not taking the vaccine and you can be restricted in
| what jobs you work in. That's how it works with the
| current limited vaccine mandate for measles.
| lsiebert wrote:
| I think I'd rather some people be vaccinated without
| their consent with a safe vaccine than have some people
| be infected without their consent with a deadly illness.
|
| We know mask mandates, vaccines, and other medical
| interventions save lives, reduce transmission, reduce
| hospitalizations, reduce long term symptoms and long
| covid rates, and reduce deaths, and they may even reduce
| mutation rates. So the choice to vaccinate, that you
| paint as one of conscience and consent don't just affect
| the individual making the choice, but all the people
| around them.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Why?
|
| I mean... we let people smoke and die due to that... why
| not due to covid too?
|
| The vaccines are too weak to actually achieve herd
| immunity, so pretty much everyone will get in contact
| with covid, sooner or later,... some will beat it by
| themselves and some will, sadly, die.
|
| If people want to take the risk of covid, why force them?
| I got vaccinated and I don't care if some people don't
| want to do it.
| helge9210 wrote:
| > I think I'd rather some people be vaccinated without
| their consent
|
| Read the book "Ordinary men" (by Christopher R.
| Browning). Normal people, like you and me, had "very
| good" reason to do what they did when they did it.
| [deleted]
| elvis10ten wrote:
| > Nobody knows if a vaccine mandate leaves people behind it
| tropes. You cannot know it, because it hasn't happened.
|
| An immigrant friend went homeless after Berlin required
| places like hotels & accommodation houses to be 2g (tested
| or recovered) only.
|
| He got his vaccine as he wasn't against them in the first
| place, he was just a wreck less dumb person. I would argue
| that other measures would have been less catastrophic while
| still "punishing" the individual.
|
| Isn't this an example of being left behind on a similar
| policy? If I misunderstood you, then my apologies.
| prohobo wrote:
| So I could go to a doctor and ask for exemption on the
| grounds that I'm a young male and I'm most susceptible to
| getting Myocarditis from the shots? Or that I've already
| had Covid and there's good evidence that I don't need a
| shot?
|
| I don't think so.
| timdaub wrote:
| I Germany you can go to a doctor and get an attest about
| practically anything. If you fail, just visit the next
| doctor.
| helge9210 wrote:
| > You cannot know it, because it hasn't happened.
|
| I know of another case, when subset of citizens was labeled
| as cause of all evil with following mandatory medical
| procedures. It did happen in Germany long time ago and I
| don't want to believe it can happen again.
| klyrs wrote:
| Then, the villain was Jews. Now, the villain is a virus.
| Incomparable.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| It's a tyranny of the majority:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
|
| I simply don't understand why one person needs to undergo a
| medical procedure to enable someone else to experience the
| safe conditions they want. These vaccines don't even grant
| immunity in the traditional sense (see CDC's revision of
| definitions here) - all the vaccines do is move things from
| one nonzero probability of risk to another nonzero
| probability of risk. If people are SO worried about their
| health, they need to behave honestly and either quarantine
| themselves or wear a full body protective hazmat suit
| everywhere. But requiring others to get a vaccine to attain
| some arbitrary risk ratio just doesn't make sense.
| jseban wrote:
| > I simply don't understand why one person needs to undergo
| a medical procedure to enable someone else to experience
| the safe conditions they want.
|
| Me neither, I think it's completely unreasonable.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> But requiring others to get a vaccine to attain some
| arbitrary risk ratio just doesn't make sense.
|
| Uhm, we do this all the time: licensing, seat belts, etc.
| Welcome to modern society.
| Pyramus wrote:
| Admittedly, it's not a great example, but maybe it can
| facilitate understanding a bit?
|
| Why do we take away the right to drive a car (free
| movement) from those who are intoxicated? All that banning
| of drunk driving does is it slightly decreases a nonzero
| probability of risk. The risk to be hurt by an intoxicated
| driver is very low, and the risk to die is even lower. If
| people are really concerned about street safety, and
| traffic is inherently dangerous as it is, they should just
| stay at home.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >30% are holding everyone back.
|
| What do you mean by this?
| chippy wrote:
| Its worth remembering that division is due to the other side
| _always_.
|
| This is an absolute statement as division is literally caused
| by dividing between "sides". You get a divided country when the
| people within it divides each other into sides. Its never been
| the case when people have said "our side has caused the
| division". never.
|
| That is the irony you should be finding! If you do finally see
| this irony you might find more nuance, but maybe more
| frustration and more uncertainty and confusion but less anger
| and possibly more empathy to the other. That's why its so easy
| for people to divide, as its less painful. Dividing and
| categorizing is how we make sense of the world, but it can be a
| curse too.
| timdaub wrote:
| And how exactly does this statement now help to address the
| situation?
| op00to wrote:
| No, vaccinations are how we get out and people who are
| medically able to get them and don't are hurting each and
| every human on this planet due to their own hubris.
| guscost wrote:
| Want a war? That's what you're going to get if you persist
| with this paranoid hypochondriac fascism.
| timdaub wrote:
| A war with sneezers?
| guscost wrote:
| A war with the enormous majority that either has refused
| this treatment, or just believes that others should have
| the right to refuse.
| fhany wrote:
| If 70% of people have a tattoo of a cross the remaining 30%
| have to get it because of the "democratic process"?
|
| In Florida the summer outbreak stopped by itself and the
| hospital capacity did not break down completely. The outbreak
| will stop by itself in Germany, too. But of course Germans need
| to dramatize everything ...
| timdaub wrote:
| Of course not. Why would that be? Nobody is clogging up ICU
| beds over getting tattoos. smh.
| whiddershins wrote:
| One of the most salient thing about rights is that the majority
| isn't permitted take them away whenever it suits them.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| One of the most salient thing about rights is that people
| constantly disagree about them and they often disagree with
| each other. For example
|
| * My right to speak freely and say cruel things vs the right
| of someone else to live a peaceful life free of terror.
|
| * The right of a privacy for a politician vs the right of the
| pubic to know about their character & personal life.
|
| * The right of a capitalist to buy out all the competition vs
| the right of the consumer to have choice.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Access to healthcare is considered a right in Germany.
|
| They're mandating vaccines so that they can continue to
| provide all their citizens with this human right.
|
| Sometimes rights clash, which is why you can't yell "fire" in
| a crowded theater despite having the right to freedom of
| speech.
|
| An individual's right to do X on principle can absolutely be
| overruled by the right for a larger group of people to
| continue living on this earth.
| floren wrote:
| > Sometimes rights clash, which is why you can't yell
| "fire" in a crowded theater despite having the right to
| freedom of speech.
|
| The decision about yelling fire in a crowded theater
| originates from Schenck v. United States, in which the
| Supreme Court decided it's OK for the US Government to
| suppress anti-draft protests; consider if you wish to build
| arguments on this foundation.
| ghoward wrote:
| > Access to healthcare is considered a right in Germany.
|
| > They're mandating vaccines so that they can continue to
| provide all their citizens with this human right.
|
| This is exactly why those people are wrong. True rights
| never clash.
| ericd wrote:
| Ironically, the ruling that spawned the "fire in a theater"
| limits on free speech was largely overturned:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-
| tim...
| mnd999 wrote:
| They are in the UK
| ericd wrote:
| Well, there's always civil war. That'd be a bit more divided.
| We should probably try going in the opposite direction, which
| usually involves less trying to impose our wills on each other.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| You should be stabbed in the throat repeatedly until you die.
| pohl wrote:
| _30% are holding everyone back_
|
| Are you still talking about Germany, because that's exactly the
| situation we have in the U.S., too. Same ratio, even.
| paul7986 wrote:
| I just became fully vaccinated and each day since I am dealing
| with dizziness / lightheaded-ness spells.
|
| Everyone should take one for the team you say but do you know
| what the future holds for the team? You just trust emphatically
| what the early science says vs. waiting over time to see all of
| it's effects on a huge population? That and time is the true
| bellweather but we are forced guinea pigs to join the
| experiment or lose our livelihoods.
|
| Can you tell me Why is the FDA want 55 years to process and
| release all the vaccine data they have.... shouldn't they be
| getting that out ASAP ... from Reuters (non-biased or sided
| media) https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-
| wants...
|
| You either believe everything your govt says and the very early
| science says (time is the bellweather and the large population
| data that comes with it) or you live life on the fence
| questioning things before making the best decision for yourself
| or you go completely agaisnt the ones who just buy, soak up and
| believe everything their side says.
| cbozeman wrote:
| LOL, "my body, my choice" right up until it's something that
| the political left want, then it's, "Fuck you, get in line or
| die."
|
| Either we have autonomy over our medical choices or we don't,
| period. This is the problem with having principles. You either
| live by them and have integrity or you abandon them and you
| don't.
| elvis10ten wrote:
| Not everybody who hasn't taken the vaccine is an antivaxxer.
|
| I think a distinction needs to be made between anti vaxxers and
| people who are just naive/"dumb".
|
| I have seen more of the later group. Which is why I'm surprised
| when someone here or in mainstream media says this has anything
| to do with a political side.
|
| This distinction is useful IMO in creating sound policies.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I think the biggest unsung problems in this saga, is actually one
| of marketing.
|
| The average person has experience with vaccines that have 3
| properties: (1) long lasting, (2) prevent contagion (3) and major
| symptoms. By calling the mRNA shot a vaccine , the WHO and CDC
| transferred such properties to the shot. That may have been great
| for encouraging adoption, but also comes with consequences
| particularly if two vaccine properties fail to hold, and a 3rd is
| not flawless.
|
| This was never made clear by anyone of relevance - instead the
| mantra was "take the shots and all will be well". We oversold the
| solution.
|
| People took the shots, then behaved as if nothing else mattered.
| Dropped masks. Started going nuts.
|
| Now we see the results.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The flu shot needs to be updated yearly, and it mostly prevents
| hospitalizations and deaths. Seems pretty similar.
|
| The flu vaccine is about 70% effective against getting flu[0],
| but it varies wildly by year. The two-dose mRNA vaccines are
| about 50% effective against COVID five months later[1] (for the
| delta variant, anyway), but the third dose seems to push that
| up substantially.
|
| [0] https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine
|
| [1]
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
| crooked-v wrote:
| Regarding 2 and 3, it feels like a major factor here is the
| huge number of people who have forgotten (or never knew) that
| vaccines as a category aren't automatically 100% effective,
| because all the hard work to wipe out diseases like measles
| from the general population has already been done.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| this has been a worldwide problem - the fact that it even
| happened in germany is concerning. Governments were looking for
| easy way outs left and right, but more importantly, did not
| take the time to create an international scientific task force
| to research treatments. The Manhattan project started 2 years
| after the start of WW2. Maybe the time is right to consider
| large-scale responses to this war as well.
| exabrial wrote:
| This is pretty danged sad.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| This is pure bullshit of the highest order.
|
| The science is crystal fucking clear: no one is dying from
| COVID![0]
|
| [0] -
| https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=over...
| lolsal wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean? The link you provided shows over
| 150k deaths in the UK alone.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| The daily death rate is at around 100 people per day and
| that's "100 people dying within 28 days of a positive COVID
| test" - a meaningless statistic that does not tell you a
| single thing.
|
| Plus, the stats only show deaths with covid on the
| certificate. That means they could have died from something
| else.
|
| This whole thing is a farce. A charade.
|
| Make no mistake: they're coming for your children.
|
| Also, there are approximately 450 deaths per day from cancer
| - where is the government push to fix that?[1]
|
| [1] - https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-
| professional/cancer-...
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| I am double vaccinated, pro vax, would get booster if I can, but
| if this happens in my country I will join the riots. I dont have
| solution, but if people dont want to get vaccinated they
| shouldn't be forced, period.
|
| I am afraid this pressure will create people that are against all
| vaccines, and when we get like 20% of new parents not vaccinating
| their new lockdown babies (which are a lot, everyone i know who
| can be pregnant is pregnant), the Pandora's box will open,
| measles and polio and shit will come crawling back.
|
| I feel we could do more to incentivize people to be less packed,
| like taxing working from the office and incentivize working from
| home, or subsidize working longer hours in retail and gyms. And
| possibly we could do better with masks and more tests, e.g. send
| families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread quicker.
| mike_d wrote:
| If you don't enforce vaccination, you have to ration medical
| care.
|
| Should someone come in to the hospital presenting with COVID
| symptoms they get tested. If you pop hot and are unvaccinated,
| you are sent home with your freedoms, liberties, self reliance,
| and a pain management pack. People who got vaccinated will have
| the now heavily unburdened healthcare system dedicated to
| making them better.
| zoe4883 wrote:
| I had covid, but have no certificate with PCR test. I had
| positive home self test. I did not want to ride bus and visit
| hospital, with 38 degree fever, to get official PCR test.
| Instead I just self isolated for 2 weeks like an idiot.
|
| They will now force me to take a shot. I have to risk severe
| alergic reaction.
|
| I am also vaccinated, but Jansen does not count anymore.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Sorry to hear that, but you may overestimate your own risk:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34463744/
|
| At this point, we're talking about the most-tested vaccine in
| all of the world. Even if your chance of dying is increased
| by 5x, that's equivalent to about 10 hours of driving a car
| at average Autobahn speeds.
|
| If you're prepared to take that kind of risk every year, I'd
| invite you to just go do it.
| zoe4883 wrote:
| Look, some of my relatives had severe side effects and are
| now chronically ill. When I got my shot, doctor had
| adrenaline injection ready. My GP now says I should pay the
| fines and not risk my life.
|
| This vaccine is not tested, nobody knows how it behaves
| with different medications, or even after 50 years.
|
| And there is consensus vaccine will trigger allergic
| reaction in people who recently passed hard form of covid.
|
| Honestly, next time I encounter troll like you, I will just
| socker punch him into face.
| zoe4883 wrote:
| Good you have better information than my GP!
|
| Edit: allergic reaction would be from high level of
| antibodies. I recently passed hard form of covid.
|
| Please stop giving medical advices! You are not doctor and
| you did not even read my post!
| nitrogen wrote:
| _send families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread
| quicker_
|
| This is a great idea, and I'm really curious why we don't have
| something like this, just mail a free mask and a free test to
| every address once a week, with a form to request more for
| larger households, or to request that they stop.
| DoktorDelta wrote:
| The US postal service isn't nearly robust enough to handle
| this. We saw that with physical unemployment checks last year
| when nearly everyone became eligible.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| The people not getting vaxed voluntarily are the same ones
| that would never sign up or take the test
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 5 tests are 14Eur here, me and my wife test weekly, and our
| daughter we test every 2-3 days, so we can isolate asap, but
| none of my neighbours do that. And multiple times people
| didnt even test with symptoms.
|
| It would cost ~50 euro per family per month, which is quite
| expensive, but possibly if they use some sort of model to
| give tests to people with higher probability of getting sick
| (e.g. if your child was in a school that got N positive tests
| recently) maybe it can be reduced to 5 euro per family per
| month.
|
| Somehow I feel this is a missed opportunity to get things a
| bit better, I dont think people will infect other people on
| purpose.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| I fully disagree; this matter is not a question of an opinion.
| There is absolutely not a single convincing reason why shots
| should not be mandatory.
|
| If people like you will join the riot against it, I will join
| the riots against the rioters. We finally need Ordnung in
| society and it cannot be that opinionated people "iT sHoUlD bE
| nOt MaNdAtOrY bUt I aM PrO VaX, iT iS bEcAuSe oF tHe
| GrUndGeSeTz" or uneducated should disturb it. Yes, I am a
| legalist on topics where the collective must work together and
| not have "opinions".
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| > I fully disagree; this matter is not a question of an
| opinion. There is absolutely not a single convincing reason
| why shots should not be mandatory.
|
| Isn't the the reason of "someone doesn't want it" enough?
| glogla wrote:
| Is "I don't wanna" ever a good reason to threaten safety
| and health of others?
|
| What if I don't want smoking ban in public places? What if
| I don't want speed limit on public road or giving right of
| way? What if run a restaurant and don't want food safety
| laws?
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| What about [end to end] encryption? By using it we are
| threatening the safety and health of others. (e.g. the
| police is slower at solving crime because they don't have
| access to all private information)
| glogla wrote:
| I don't see million of lives lost due to end-to-end
| encryption, unlike with second-hand smoke, people driving
| cars like idiots or COVID. Also police mostly doesn't
| protect and help people and stop crimes, they arrest
| people after crimes happened. Police being helpful to
| anyone is mostly a myth.
|
| I mean I generally agree that we should be careful with
| sweeping "we need X to protect lives" but is global
| pandemic that killed millions really the case?
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| But police is total, they would love to prevent crimes
| before they happen if they could, and would do that at
| all cost. If only those pesky encryption people stop
| making this encryption things and we get access to all
| the data..we will know every crime from domestic abuse to
| terrorism, we would be even able to predict it, with like
| 97% accuracy with this 'totally not racist state of the
| art AI model'.
|
| All jokes aside, of course I agree with you. Including on
| the police point, but things like the oxy epidemic, or
| the war on drugs, or the promotion of alcohol, makes me
| question the "protective" incentives of the state.
| ospzfmbbzr wrote:
| > absolutely not a single convincing reason why shots should
| not be mandatory.
|
| what if you are wrong?
| endymi0n wrote:
| > e.g. send families 1 test per week so they can stop the
| spread quicker.
|
| I'm afraid you're missing reality, our kids are getting tested
| 3 times per week already and still we're in quarantine right
| now for the second week because an unvaccinated child care
| assistant has infected half the place and now it's going
| everywhere.
|
| There is no dialogue or discussion going on anymore. We have
| two factions in this country by now that don't talk to each
| other anymore, one of which is despising science, empathy,
| education and any common sense.
|
| And frankly I'm sick of it by now. Like you I wouldn't force
| anyone from this group to vaccinate against their will, but I'm
| completely fine with offering intensive care only for the
| vaccinated by this point.
|
| German army can build up oxygen tents to offer the others a
| decent chance to survival. I'm really not interested in saving
| any Nazi or lunatic against their will.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Oh, and because some people told me that would be "unethical"
| (and how to prioritize against smokers and motorbikers): It's
| really not, at least not any less unethical than not getting
| vaccinated.
|
| These people aren't just fully prepared to still take the
| risk of dying by Covid up to this day, they also
| statistically kill 0.01 other people by getting infected.
|
| We put people who kill other people in jail here, and
| increase their risk of dying by suicide about 10x that way.
| So far, everyone is fine with that.
| zoe4883 wrote:
| Even Fauci said vaccinated people spread covid at the same
| rate for first few days.
| tibu wrote:
| As far as I know vaccinated people (like myself) can also
| spread the virus, the vaccination helps only your immune
| system to combat the disease. So don't blame the unvaccinated
| for this. But I'm with you in the medical care part,
| vaccinated people should get priority. But they won't...
| endymi0n wrote:
| By your logic, we should get rid of goalkeepers as well,
| since all goals in football happen despite them being on
| the playground.
| glogla wrote:
| Sadly lot of people (I don't mean you specifically) are
| dumb and have black and white thinking.
|
| Yes, vaccinated people can still get sick. But they get
| sick order of magnitude less often and if they do get sick,
| they are order of magnitude less likely to need oxygen,
| hospital or ICU.
|
| Yes, vaccinated people can still spread the virus. But they
| are order of magnitude less likely to do so, and if they
| do, they spread smaller amount of the virus over smaller
| window of time.
|
| Yes, one type of the antibodies (the short-term ones that
| actively look for virus as opposed to the long-term ones
| stored in bone marrow that look for your own infected cells
| that take a while to activate) wanes as time passes but
| that is property of all vaccines and of "naturally" gained
| immunity as well - bodies don't want to waste energy
| actively looking for something it hasn't seen in a while.
|
| But in minds of black-and-white people, this means
| "vaccines don't work!!!11!!!" and that is just sad.
| pietjepuk88 wrote:
| > they shouldn't be forced
|
| I was under the impression that you'd just get fined if you
| don't get your shot. It's not like they are going to take you
| prisoner and stick a needle in you.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| Until when? when the next wave comes and the unvaccinated are
| 40% instead of 30%, do you think they wont start forcing the
| needle?
|
| How many people would get the booster? and the next booster
| after that?
|
| I think its reasonable to assume that every 6 months the
| unvaccinated group with grow with 5% or so, how long until
| they become more than the vaccinated?
|
| What will happen when they elect the new government in 2
| years
| pietjepuk88 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "until when?".
|
| > do you think they wont start forcing the needle?
|
| The article is about _fining_ people, i.e. negative
| monetary incentives. Your reply outlined a bunch of
| positive monetary incentives. There's probably enough
| research out there which of the two works better (negative
| or positive), so I won't get into that. I will say that I
| think it's quite a stretch to say that either is a step-up
| to "forcing a needle in you", and that I find it a bit
| disingenuous to imply that this slippery-slope argument
| only applies to negative monetary incentives.
| [deleted]
| soperj wrote:
| >send families 1 test per week so they can stop the spread
| quicker.
|
| these things are incredibly cheap in Europe. Brother in law
| tests his kids that are in elementary school twice a week. You
| pick them up at the pharmacy for like $1.50 a pop.
|
| No one is being forced. They're just being told to stay home if
| you're not going to be part of the greater good.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I would be fine with unvaxxed people remaining unvaxxed of
| their own free will if it were also a situation where the law
| said that anyone who does not get vaccinated during a pandemic
| when a vaccine is available (and obviously has no underlying
| medical condition that would put them at risk for a significant
| injury due to vaccination) while incurring significant medical
| bills for said pandemic would be liable for all medical bills.
| The rest of us shouldn't have to pay for premium increases
| because they're being stupid.
| shoto_io wrote:
| As a double vaccinated German, I am very disappointed and angry
| about this move.
|
| Our politicians have failed to prepare the country for the Winter
| (who could have known...). We lack a basic strategy how to cope
| with Covid.
|
| And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two. This
| will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will just
| continue to drive a divide that is already existing and will make
| anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big conspiracy.
| politician wrote:
| Blaming national problems on minority groups and enforcing
| involuntary ghettoization is quite German, no?
| ryandrake wrote:
| > And now they try to fix this by dividing the country in two.
| This will have no effect whatsoever on the infections, it will
| just continue to drive a divide that is already existing and
| will make anti-vaxxers even more convinced that this is a big
| conspiracy.
|
| You could say this about any law that enforces some
| uncomfortable behavior change. Anyone who remembers when seat
| belt laws became real, sees history repeating itself, down to
| the exact same arguments about effectiveness and rhetoric about
| choice and tyranny and government overreach.
|
| COVID has been a challenge for the same reason Climate Change
| is challenging: They both require collective cooperative action
| from people, and you can't rely on everyone having a natural
| desire to do the right thing. Laws can't make people want to do
| the right thing--they can only provide incentives or
| disincentives for specific actions or behaviors.
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| You can take the seat belt off when the car ride is over.
| Also if you are caught without one you get a small fine, but
| you don't lose your job and the ability to participate in
| society.
| wussboy wrote:
| Because your refusal to wear a seatbelt presents no risk to
| others. But vaccine refusal does present a risk. So the
| stakes of the game are not the same.
| ghoward wrote:
| Refusing to wear a seatbelt does, in fact, present a risk
| to others because in a crash, you can become a lethal
| projectile should you fly and hit someone else.
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| "X poses risk to others therefore you have no choice" is
| a statement that can be made for nearly any scenario. To
| wit:
|
| Uncontrolled flying bodies pose additional risks when
| there are multiple people in the vehicle. There's also
| the risk of driving to begin with, for people both in and
| outside the vehicle.
|
| The risks of harm to you _and_ others from crashing a car
| are probably higher at this point than that of a vaxxed
| person getting seriously ill from covid.
|
| But anyway the point I was making was to refute GP's
| statement that seat belt laws and the pushback around
| them are the same as for the vax mandates. They are not,
| because the vax is permanent, and the consequences for
| non-compliance much higher. The fact that you can't "take
| the vax off" is part of these stakes that are not the
| same.
| muttantt wrote:
| You are missing the point - the division IS their end goal.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Nah. Germans love to complain but not as much as they love
| having things decided for them decisively and following the
| rules begrudgingly. There will be no uprising. People are going
| to complain, as per usual, no matter what the change, and then
| fall in line without any upset that could begin to rival the
| downside of them not doing so.
| vletal wrote:
| You feel like Germany is lacking basic strategy?
|
| I'm Czech and we wish here we would be as prepared and forward
| thinking as your representatives are. If it was not for one of
| the highest rate of ICU beds per capita in the world and all
| the high quality nurses and doctors we export to Germany, our
| health care would have already crumbled.
| bijant wrote:
| Not only are they forcing the unvaccinated to get the shot,
| they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to get
| booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future. When
| the vaccines were first introduced their validity was fixed at
| 12 months and their was talk about extending it ("because they
| are so incredibly effective").
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future_
|
| This is the most stupid thing about vaccination plans. It's
| one thing to get vaccinated once, it's another thing entirely
| to need frequent boosters.
|
| I expect a lot of confusion and operational carnage when
| people who don't get a booster become "unvaccinated".
| standardUser wrote:
| You sound dismayed that vaccines don't work in a more
| simplistic manner. These CDC charts on vaccine schedules may
| provide a better picture of the general complexity of
| immunization.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/index.html
| tchalla wrote:
| > they are also forcing everyone who is fully vaccinated to
| get booster shots every 6 months for the indefinite future.
|
| There is no obligation (or force) to get a booster shot. It
| is available and recommended but not forced. Some groups like
| older age and immune-compromised people are highly
| recommended.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Yes, and if they had boostered the old in September/
| October we would not be in this situation.
|
| Now, everyone wants to get a booster and many old people I
| know need to wait until December or January to get a
| booster.
|
| It's the worst case that could have happened, because
| politicians didn't do their job
| serial_dev wrote:
| Not sure what to say without being labeled an anti vaxxer...
|
| I was very sick for a week after each shot. I'm 30, I work
| from home, I work out, I'm lean and only go out when running
| in the forest and buy food.
|
| I can't possibly know what would happen if I caught covid,
| but I wish the vaccination (I'm already vaxxed, but I mean
| the boosters) was my choice. With my reaction to the
| vaccines, it's two weeks a year guaranteed sickness vs a very
| low chance of getting covid with an even lower chance of
| getting very sick from it.
|
| The pros and cons just don't make vaccination every six
| months an obvious choice for me.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Yes I had a horrible reaction to the 2nd dose. So did
| everyone I know. Yes it's possible the real thing might be
| worse for me but I'm going to take my chances. I will not
| be taking a booster. I'm healthy, exercise regularly and
| I'm not in the age group that's high-risk.
|
| There are studies showing the vaccine isn't even effective
| at 3 months. There's no way I'm dealing with that shot
| every 3-6 months.
| artdigital wrote:
| This is the same argument my Germany friends made (and
| used to get fake vaccination certificates). The studies
| say it's not effective after 3 months!! People that are
| vaccinated get infected again!! I'm young and healthy!!
|
| Yes people get reinfected but how many die from it or run
| into serious conditions? Vaccines don't block the virus
| from entering your body, but they help with you not dying
| or using up ICU beds, even after those 3 months.
|
| Please do your part of the swarm and get vaccinated. If
| you know you'll have a odd reaction you can prepare in
| advance. Also Germany has sick-leave from work
| everywhere.
| vletal wrote:
| Just please cite the studies you mentioned. There is way
| too much nuance to be boiled down to such general claim.
| basisword wrote:
| Why do you assume you'll have the same reaction to the
| booster?
| scruple wrote:
| My story is very similar to yours. As a result, I am also
| reluctant to get the booster because I do not have a
| support system whereby I can have _another_ severe reaction
| that causes me to be incapable of helping the people who
| depend on me every single day.
|
| I am working on getting my mother in law to be on call to
| stay with us for a 10-14 day period, if need be, so that I
| can get the booster. It's quite ridiculous.
|
| All of that having been said, I know that I need it.
| basisword wrote:
| I was also very sick after my first dose. Completely fine
| with the booster. Don't assume you will react the same with
| the booster as you did the first dose.
| bllguo wrote:
| if this is your body's reaction to the vaccine, what makes
| you think your chance of getting very sick from actual
| covid is very low?
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| I think the key issue is hospitals being swamped. Once that
| happens, death rates will skyrocket even among people not
| at-risk. Until that point however young and healthy people
| don't really benefit themselves from the vaccination. It's
| essentially a tragedy of the commons situation.
| threevox wrote:
| Big whoop
| arrrg wrote:
| That's wrong information.
|
| Twice-vaccinated people will have to get a booster shot and
| there are discussions about a six month expiry date if you
| don't get the booster shot.
|
| What happens beyond that we do not know right now since can't
| look into the future. We do not know how effective the
| booster will be in terms of long-term protection.
|
| All of that is not surprising. A bit annoying but not
| surprising.
| moistrobot wrote:
| if it's the same shot as the originals, which is my
| understanding, then it's reasonable to assume a similar
| expiry
| arrrg wrote:
| No, not at all. That's not at all how it works.
|
| Other vaccinations are also given three times (second
| dose after a short interval, third dose after a longer
| interval), so it might well be that this vaccine turns
| out to be one of those, we just do not know. That's the
| point.
| [deleted]
| yladiz wrote:
| Genuine question: given the current situation, what's the
| alternative? A lockdown for everyone? Vaccine mandate? Doing
| nothing and removing restrictions? Something else?
| musicale wrote:
| Is it worse than last winter?
| Arnt wrote:
| Quite likely, yes. And no.
|
| In the part of Germany where I live, 7-day incidence among
| the unvaccinated is 1726, which is much worse than last
| winter, and it's 112 among the vaccinated. Hospitalisation
| tells a similar story: The unvaccinated are suffering.
|
| If that 1726 would rise as it did last winter, a lot of
| unvaccinated fools would die. A hundred thousand dead in
| three months, perhaps.
| disneygibson wrote:
| Increase hospital staff? Encourage social distancing? I don't
| know, _anything_ other than creating second class citizens in
| a country with a horrible history of it?
| yladiz wrote:
| Increasing staff won't add more beds to already full
| hospitals, though. And social distancing has been
| encouraged for a while, even for the vaccinated, and it
| hasn't seemed to help.
| disneygibson wrote:
| Then build new hospitals. Or learn to live with it.
|
| Authoritarianism isn't somehow justified because current
| actions "haven't seemed to help." That's the playbook of
| every oppressive regime since the beginning of time: this
| is an emergency so we don't need to follow laws or
| respect rights.
| yoghurt wrote:
| You can't simply increase hospital staff - these are highly
| trained people. That's an investment that takes years to
| pay off. Encouraging social distancing doesn't work, people
| are tired of it and many either didn't care in the first
| place or don't care now that they are fully vaccinated.
|
| Many western countries messed up big time by not investing
| enough into their health care systems or into properly
| educating their population. So now they're out of options.
| Arnt wrote:
| The hospitals have been hiring nonstop. Unfortunately
| medical staff is also leaving the hospitals that treat
| corona patients. As one said, speaking to a journalist, the
| current patients are a "potpourri of difficult
| personalities", so the nurses apply for jobs at things like
| eye clinic and the hospitals can't even operate the beds
| they have.
| [deleted]
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Imagine a world in which the vaccine does not exist. What
| would you do then?
|
| That is the alternative.
| yladiz wrote:
| We don't live in a world without the vaccine, so I don't
| see the argument.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| A possible answer to your question of what we could do if
| we do not want to force people to get vaccinated is the
| same as what we could do if people could not be
| vaccinated.
|
| You said it was your 'genuine question'. So I'm not sure
| why you need to see the argument. It's an answer to your
| question, not an argument.
| detaro wrote:
| So basically lockdown for all, because restricting the
| rights of everybody is better than restricting the rights
| of some. Good luck convincing the courts that that's the
| minimal necessary restriction.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| There are more options than 'lockdown for all', but yes,
| it would be one of the things you could do if
| vaccinations were not available.
| detaro wrote:
| But vaccinations are available, so you likely can't do it
| legally.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| That's for the courts to decide. Is a lockdown not
| allowed because forcing people to vaccinate is an option?
| Or is forcing people to vaccinate not allowed because
| lockdown is an option?
| detaro wrote:
| Forcing people to vaccinate is not really a tool to
| control infections _right now_ , and more of an
| independent (also currently hotly debated) longer-term
| question. (I'm fairly certain its going to come for some
| jobs at least)
|
| And if applied as here, I doubt many would argue that
| "forcing people to vaccinate" is a weaker measure than
| "impose some restrictions on unvaccinated" (although the
| former is of course going to be a strong form of the
| latter)
| [deleted]
| thedrbrian wrote:
| Use my immune system, like people did for millions of
| years. Unfortunately everyone can't but the vast majority
| will be fine after having covid and will have built up
| immunity.
| musicale wrote:
| Does managing indoor humidity help? It seems to with other
| respiratory viruses.
| yosito wrote:
| Yes! Indoor humidity helps in at least two ways: 1)
| Humidity prevents aerosol transmission 2) Humidity helps
| the cillia in your airways function better and remove
| foreign particles, including viruses faster before they
| have a chance to infect you.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Probably not much. All KPIs are heading down now anyways,
| just look into the RKI dashboard [1]. Doing a quick math
| exercise underscores this: 70% are vaccinated, 6 million had
| it (at least, the number is probably higher), so in total
| 80-85% of the population already had it or is vaccinated by
| now. Numbers should go down now from now, which they actually
| start to do, if you look in the dashboard.
|
| [1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavi
| rus...
| yladiz wrote:
| It's not great, and I do wish that the current coalition
| had prepared a bit more for this winter, rather than
| assuming 1. enough people would get vaccinated, and 2. that
| it wouldn't come back seasonally like last year. They
| really should have prepared months ago.
|
| I can't think of a better alternative given the current
| situation if the end goal is to get people to reduce
| contact and get vaccinated, short of a full lockdown for
| everyone (which I think is a lot less preferable). Whether
| this form of lockdown will have any effect remains to be
| seen.
| shoto_io wrote:
| It's absurd to believe that this will actually do
| anything additional to reduce infections on the short
| term. People don't get infected while shopping. This is
| just meant to pressure the unvaccinated to get vaccinated
| which might help next year.
|
| Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and
| get infected. It's just the wrong move at the worst
| possible time.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| > Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home
| and get infected.
|
| they are anyways
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| > People don't get infected while shopping.
|
| What's so special about shopping that it prevents
| transmission of a relatively communicable disease?
| rocketbop wrote:
| Mask wearing is well adhered too, and shop visitors stay
| only a short time, leaving less droplets in the air than
| maskless visitors to, say, a restaurant or bar.
| yosito wrote:
| While shopping, people wear masks, talk (and breathe and
| cough) less, and are generally not packed into small
| spaces breathing a lot of the same air, so the risk is
| lower than at a house party or bar or dance club.
| frockington1 wrote:
| The same force that prevents covid from spreading while
| you are sitting down at a restaurant but can get you as
| you walk in and when you use the restroom
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| but they have their scape goats now. the infections rise b/c of
| the unvaxinated.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Is it, to some extent, a problem of naming and terminology?
|
| When vaccines were first introduced in the UK, there was a great
| deal of discussion about ethics of forcing people to get them.
| One really cool view was, of course you can't force people to
| inject a chemical into their bodies. But if people choose not to
| get vaccinated, it's on them to reduce the risk to others - ie
| basically subject themselves to lockdown.
|
| I think this is harder to argue with than "forced vaccination".
| Sure, don't get the jab if you don't want to, but what are you
| doing instead to not endanger others?
| lbj wrote:
| In Denmark we have now reached 90% vaccination rate. We have more
| infected, the same number of admissions in hospital and a 15%
| higher death rate than all of 2020. I really fail to see why we
| are blaming the unvaccinated and not Pfizer/Moderna.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Is the death rate as high among the unvaccinated or is it just
| that the unvaccinated die 15% more frequently than before?
|
| > I really fail to see why we are blaming the unvaccinated and
| not Pfizer/Moderna.
|
| I'd blame both the unvaccinated and new variants that seem to
| be more lethal than before.
|
| If it is the case that vaccinated are still passing the virus
| but not dying from it, then isolation of the unvaccinated saves
| their lives.
| wiredearp wrote:
| That's because two out of three that get hospitalized are
| unvaccinated, or that's at least the case in Odense.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What people aren't typically "mathing" right is that even if
| you have 90% vaccinated, that's still potentially hundreds of
| thousands (millions in bigger countries) of un-vaccinated
| people who are prone to getting seriously sick.
|
| The numbers here in Ontario are clear. Case rates among the
| unvaccinated are far higher, and ICU admissions are far far far
| higher.
|
| I never fell for any line that said vaccination would just make
| the disease go away. Frankly that was never said by medical
| experts, only implied by certain politicians.
| timdaub wrote:
| Denmark has 76,4% vaccinated: check on
| https://www.zeit.de/index
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Thanks, something really didn't smell right there.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| One is the rate in the total population, the other is the
| vaccination rate for the 18+ part of the population.
|
| The numbers in the Netherlands are similar but both a bit
| lower.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Wow both those numbers are lower than here in Canada.
| angelzen wrote:
| The vaccines, while not as effective as classics like polio
| vaccine or measles vaccine, are definitely a net positive and
| help significantly in reducing the epidemic burden. Perhaps
| instead of internecine finger pointing we could blame covid
| itself?
| timdaub wrote:
| Denmark has 76,4% completely vaccinated.
|
| Source, the data on https://www.zeit.de
| fsh wrote:
| None of this is true. The vaccination rate in Denmark is 77%,
| not 90% [1]. The number of hospital admissions and the death
| rate are lower than during the first and second waves [2, 3]
| despite a significantly larger infection rate [4].
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-people-fully-
| vaccin...
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-
| explor...
|
| [3] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-
| explor...
|
| [4] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-
| explor...
| koonsolo wrote:
| Probably the difference between vaccination rate in adults,
| and vaccination rate over the whole population?
| akira2501 wrote:
| On 1: The discrepancy in percentages is usually the
| difference between "Entire Population Vaccinated" and
| "Eligible Population Vaccinated." Which, until very recently,
| was only people 12 and older.
|
| Given the exceptionally low incidence of death in the 12 and
| under group, it's debatable which figure should be given
| prominence.
|
| On 2 and 3: The case rate is spiking significantly higher
| than it has ever before, and the death rate is on an upward
| trend. It is typically delayed behind the case rate, so we
| can't be certain that this will be as bad as it gets. It's
| still very possible for this wave to be more deadly than
| prior waves, even though the Case:Death rate is lower.
|
| Instead of showing 2 & 3 separately, perhaps the combined
| chart [1] is a better visualization.
|
| [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-
| explor...
| [deleted]
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Are hospital admissions and mortality rates similar among
| vaccinated and nonvaccinated individuals?
| berkes wrote:
| No. Not at all. .dk is similar to .nl in this, and in .nl its
| 55/45 unvaccinated/vaccinated (on a 12/88 ratio of
| vaccinations).
| liversage wrote:
| There is a dashboard (in Danish) with current numbers: https:
| //experience.arcgis.com/experience/aa41b29149f24e20a40...
|
| The number of hospitalized patients per 100K are as follows:
|
| Unvaccinated: 24.7 Started vaccination: 10.5 Fully
| vaccinated: 5.9
| throwntoday wrote:
| No you don't understand, the unvaccinated are the reason the
| vaccinated are getting the virus /s
| more_corn wrote:
| This is simply not true.
|
| Don't get me wrong. I fully support everyone getting
| vaccinated, and requiring it broadly. But your statement is
| just not true.
|
| Omicron is thought to have evolved in an immunocompromised
| person. Vaccinating that person would not have helped.
| COVID-19 is also known to cross easily between humans and
| other animals. An alternate theory is that the startling
| number of mutations in the Omicron variant evolved in an
| animal host.
|
| This variant appears to defeat previous immunity both from
| prior infection and vaccination. The willfully unvaccinated,
| while idiots and selfish assholes are not to blame in our
| current troubles and vaccinating every person on earth would
| not have prevented the Omicron outbreak.
|
| Furthermore we need to take a global view. Just because we
| have sufficient doses to fully vaccine everyone in Europe
| we're not protected unless everyone everywhere gets
| vaccinated. (And even then pockets of virus can mutate and
| overcome the vaccine) I'll worry more about idiot Texans (who
| are frankly mostly hurting themselves and their families)
| when we provide enough doses to Bangladesh to vaccinate their
| whole population. (And rinse and repeat for every developing
| nation)
| krater23 wrote:
| Why you think this? People that are unvaccinated will have
| harder covid symptoms that are earlier found and in best case
| quarantined. With a cold maybee without the knowledge about
| covid they just stay in the bed for some days. Vaccinated
| people are more the ones with no symptoms and run everyday
| through the city and infect other people without knowing that
| they do it.
|
| So I think that what you say is just not correct.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| The /s means they're being sarcastic.
| _moof wrote:
| I can't find any data to support your claim of a higher death
| rate in Denmark than all of 2020. The data I have show:
|
| - Denmark currently experiencing a massive new wave of
| infections
|
| - Previous large wave of infections was last winter, with rate
| peaking on Dec 18
|
| - Daily deaths peaked one month later at about 8 per 1000 daily
| infections
|
| - Current daily deaths, accounting for lag, is also about 8 per
| 1000 daily infections
|
| https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
| cheeze wrote:
| Yeah, but this is HackerNews. The antivax crowd is strong
| here. Brandolini's law in full effect in this comment.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Please actually post arguments and not just dismissals.
| Nobody in this conversation is anti-vaxx, but this fantasy
| of "If we vaccinate X more, covid will not be a problem"
| simply does not align with reality. The vaccines are
| effective, but they are not flawless, and we are dealing
| with a very high R0 disease that is changing.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Except that the problem is exactly the unvaxxed. When we
| have 100% coverage of all age groups, with boosters as
| necessary (let's hope for continuing good data from
| Israel), then we can suppress Covid.
|
| Vaccination is something that everyone has to do for the
| sake of everyone, which sadly is a somewhat alien concept
| in certain parts of our society.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| Unfortunately, this may have been true in 2020, but at
| this point the rate of SNPs (mutations) creating VoCs
| (variants of concern), plus the break-through infection
| rate, strongly suggest that no level of herd immunity
| (even 100%) will lead to suppression. At this point we'd
| all be better off focusing on ways to _slow_ the spread.
|
| https://cov-lineages.org/lineage_list.html
| vorpalhex wrote:
| When we have 100% coverage of all age groups.. we will
| still have covid hospitalizations. We will still have
| covid spread. We may still even sometimes need to wear
| masks and have lockdowns.
|
| You should still get vaccinated and get boosters, but no
| vaccination rate is going to make this go away anymore
| than the flu shot has eliminated the flu.
| belltaco wrote:
| The difference is that the load on hospitals will be far
| lower, which means better care for people that are
| hospitalized for covid, and people who need to be in the
| hospitals for other reasons.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| rather the opposite
| bocytron wrote:
| Sources please?
| timdaub wrote:
| the 90% vaccination claims of the op are false.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Probably vaccination rate for adults, not everybody.
| liversage wrote:
| The 90% figure has sometimes been quoted in Denmark but it
| doesn't include people not eligible for vaccination. Now
| that smaller kids are offered the vaccine this ratio has
| decreased and really shouldn't be used at all. The
| percentage of people in Denmark that have started
| vaccinations of the total population is 78% with 76% having
| completed their vaccinations.
| kareemm wrote:
| What is the breakdown of unvaxxed/vaxxed in hospital admissions
| and deaths?
|
| Serious question. I wonder about vaxx effectiveness when I see
| these numbers. But the breakdown matters.
|
| I live in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our breakdown from Mar 15-Nov 26
| is[1]:
|
| - Hospitalizations: 84.4% unvaxxed, 9.6% 1 shot, 6% 2 shots
|
| - Deaths: 69% unvaxxed, 7.1% 1 shot, 23.8% 2 shots
|
| Total admissions and death rate numbers don't tell the whole
| story - breaking them down by vaxxed/1shot/2shot will help
| unpack "who to blame".
|
| In fact, you can dig deeper. My province doesn't release the
| numbers but from what I can tell the 2-shot people who die are
| generally older and/or infirm. So I believe the 2shot numbers
| are being thrown off by an atypical population... which means
| the general population has less to fear from covid if they're
| double vaxxed. My co-founder informed this is an example of
| "Simpson's Paradox"[2].
|
| What kind of vaxxed/unvaxxed breakdown are you seeing in
| Denmark?
|
| 1 -
| https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/204d6ed723244dfbb76...
|
| 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
| ImaCake wrote:
| This is exactly simpsons paradox. It is a shame so few people
| have heard of it!
|
| This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the
| currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on
| hospitals. That is, if you have 80% vaxxed, a mere 10%
| increase could halve the number of hospital beds needed. No
| wonder governments are going so hard on vaccinating the
| hesitant and antivax.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >This same breakdown implies that vaccinating half of the
| currently unvaxxed would do a lot to reduce pressure on
| hospitals.
|
| This ignores the demographic differences between the vaxxed
| and the unvaxxed. The elderly and those with conditions
| that made them high risk have a much higher vaccination
| rate as one would expect.
|
| If you cut the number of vaccinated in half you won't cut
| hospitalizations in half because subgroups of the
| population being hospitalized are not present in the same
| ratios in the unvaxed.
| makomk wrote:
| No, this does not imply that going from 80% to 90%
| vaccinated could halve the number of hospital beds needed -
| that reasoning would only work if the vaccine completely
| prevented Covid-related hospitalizations, in which case
| zero vaccinated people would be hospitalized and Simpson's
| paradox wouldn't apply. What it actually implies is that at
| much less than 100% vaccination, you hit a point where
| vaccinating the remaining population does very little to
| reduce pressure on hospitals because most people who're
| hospitalized have been vaccinated, despite the fact that
| the vaccines do reduce the risk of hospitalization. That
| is, the benefits of vaccinating the last few percent of the
| population actually diminish rather than increasing like
| they would do with a more effective vaccine.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _most people who 're hospitalized have been vaccinated_
|
| Is this true? My understanding is that the opposite is
| true, most people who are hospitalized are not vaccinated
| by a large margin.
| yosito wrote:
| I haven't checked, but I think your understanding is
| correct. Even if it's not, here's a good explanation
| https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Your numbers are very similar to Ontario's, and in fact
| Canada in general as a whole.
|
| But what's strange is out the US doesn't seem to reflect
| this.
|
| There are states with fairly high vaccination rates where
| vaccinated people are ending up in the ICU at rates many
| times ours, and are only showing up as 2.5 or 3 times better
| protected than the unvaccinated for hospitalization.
|
| I don't know how to explain this other than length of time
| since injection. But we're heading into 6-7 months here now
| in Ontario and I'm still not seeing this trend. Boosters will
| certainly help, I'm sure, but I don't feel it can be the sole
| cause.
|
| It's so ridiculous just driving across the border... look at
| Vermont or New York compared to Ontario or Quebec in terms of
| daily case rates and hospitalization. (Or Maine compared to
| New Brunswick, etc.) The only way I can explain it is by
| _masking_ , which is still rigidly followed here in most of
| Canada, but not as much in the US.
|
| PS congrats on having perhaps the most competent governments
| in North America in terms of managing this disease. It's not
| the first time I've found myself browsing for real estate in
| Nova Scotia, but it certainly became more serious this past
| year...
| Tepix wrote:
| My guess is that obesity plays a bigger role than many
| people realize. Perhaps obese people who are vaccinated are
| still at a substantially elevated risk? This also explains
| why Africa is doing pretty well in terms of low casualties:
| Young people and fewer obese.
| novaRom wrote:
| Most developed countries have populations with high
| proportion of elderly people, just look at their
| population pyramids. Their population is generally older
| on average, as the country has long life expectancy, a
| low death rate, but also a low birth rate.
| noahtallen wrote:
| > We have more infected, the same number of admissions in
| hospital and a 15% higher death rate than all of 2020
|
| Another really, really important piece of context is how
| human behavior has changed. In 2020, many people were very
| cautious about covid. For example, in liberal US cities like
| Seattle and Portland, many indoor activities were restricted
| pretty hard until 2021. People didn't dine out in person, or
| didn't attend the movies. In 2021, people have more or less
| returned to normal, less-cautious behavior. While masks are
| still worn, people are comfortable dining out and going to
| the movies and all sorts of activities.
|
| My point is that this change in behavior is likely to "blame"
| for the increased cases. If people were behaving the same way
| a year ago as they are today, cases would have been
| significantly worse then.
|
| In other words, vaccinations have allowed us to return to a
| mostly normal life while stopping cases from rapidly
| increasing. At the very least, anecdotally, in places with
| lower vaccination rates, a return to normal life has been
| accompanied by more covid scares.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > People didn't dine out in person
|
| I wonder how did they dine out :-)
| pomian wrote:
| Order out, take home? Sort of eating out. At least you
| are not cooking. :)
| thomasahle wrote:
| > What is the breakdown of unvaxxed/vaxxed in hospital
| admissions and deaths?
|
| 85.6% of hospitalized in Denmark are either unvaccinated or
| "half vaccinated". See https://experience.arcgis.com/experien
| ce/aa41b29149f24e20a40... graph 2.
|
| This means that if the vaccination rate grew from 90% to 100%
| the hospitalized number would drop to very manageable levels.
|
| Even with a 90% fully vaccinated population, the remaining
| 10% are still enough to fill up the hospitals.
| thomasahle wrote:
| Edit: I think I misunderstood the graph. It is actually
| already normalized by the size of each population
| (Unvaccinated, Half-vaccinated, Fully vaccinated).
|
| If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the
| hospitalized are vaccinated.
|
| When taking the vaccination rate into account, the
| likelihood of hospitalization still seems to be a fifth
| after vaccination.
|
| But even if the remaining population got vaccinated it
| wouldn't be enough to drastically reduce the hospital load.
| yosito wrote:
| > If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of
| the hospitalized are vaccinated.
|
| This doesn't mean what you think it means. Imagine if
| 100% of the population were vaccinated, what percentage
| of the hospitalized would then be vaccinated?
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination
| chrishynes wrote:
| The other thing that doesn't show the whole story is using a
| data set starting in March when there was a quite low percent
| vaccinated but comparing totals of unvaxxed vs. vaxxed deaths
| over the whole period, when fully vaxxed in March was only a
| few percent.
|
| It'd be much more interesting to see a straight comparison
| over Oct-Nov, say, when the vaccination rate was stable and
| get the unvaxxed vs 1 shot vs 2 shot vs 2 weeks after 2nd
| shot vs booster numbers.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Incredible statistic, would love to see the source on this
| jltsiren wrote:
| The vaccination rate in Denmark is less than 80%. The virus
| does not care that vaccines have not been authorized for kids
| yet. An unvaccinated person is an unvaccinated person,
| regardless of whether the reason is bureaucracy or personal
| choice.
|
| Also, the effective vaccination rate is usually lower than the
| average rate. Unvaccinated people tend to spend time with other
| unvaccinated people, and this is particularly true for kids.
| The people an infected individual encounters are more likely to
| be unvaccinated than the general population.
| berkes wrote:
| 10% of 5,821,297 is still 58,212 people who potentially get ill
| (and can die and can get into hospital).
|
| I'm not sure where you get the 15% higher death rate: any
| sources?
|
| In .nl we are seeing the same numbers (but on a 3x population
| of denmarks). Hospitals are so full now, they are rejecting
| e.g. cancer-patients and other "plannable Intensive Care
| patients". Over half of the patients on those ICs are
| vaccinated; ergo, from a ratio of 10/90% the patients are
| 55/45%; ergo: they work. Certainly not fully and certainly less
| than (I) expected.
| thinkindie wrote:
| btw - 10% of 5,821,297 is 582k. Therefore even higher number
| of people that could potentially end up in hospital, ICU or
| dead.
| marcusverus wrote:
| I think he's confused about the data. Based on the Google
| data (from the graph that's visible when searching "COVID
| Denmark"), there are more Danish cases now than at the
| previous 2020 peak (3500/day then vs 4300 now), BUT
| hospitalizations (920/day then vs 430 now) and deaths (32/day
| then vs. 11 now) are _down_ significantly.
| nazinazinazi wrote:
| Downvote all you want you FUCKING NAZIS!
|
| I hope you all FUCKING DIE!
| [deleted]
| 0x_rs wrote:
| A recent submission[0] makes me think politicians, media and so-
| called TV experts should refrain from promising things that are
| misleading, deceiving and may have disastrous results in the
| short future. Vaccination shouldn't mean giving up on basic
| measures, but I believe it has been broadly advertised as such in
| this current year with, in a personal conclusion of mine,
| devastating results. In a few countries (such as Italy) in an
| ironic twist unvaccinated individuals were significantly more
| monitored due to mandatory testing every 48hrs for any work,
| while new spread and emerging variants seem to close the gap in
| transmission between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, as
| everyone minded their own business in overcrowded public
| transportation, gatherings et cetera. As others have mentioned in
| this discussion, hospitals and health services must still tend to
| a large pool of vaccinated people (significant majority of
| population in Western countries) that require medical attention
| and can overwhelm systems in place.
|
| Even if everyone in these countries that are rolling third doses
| did get wholly vaccinated in a short amount of time to attempt to
| halt transmission in its tracks, the majority of the world where
| some of the latest VoCs originated (Delta, Omicron) are largely
| unprotected.
|
| Everyone wants this to end but most people are also led to
| believe, willingly or not, something as basic as a vaccination
| will bring everything back to normal. It doesn't, it hasn't so
| far, has it?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29412681
| monksy wrote:
| Just a heads up about what is happening in Germany: (Just got
| back Monday from Hamburg)
|
| 1. Entry restriction: You must be vaccinated to enter from nonEU
| countries (Vaccation must be in the approved list)
|
| 2. Most restaraunt/bars/outdoor gatherings are either 2G/3G. The
| bahn is 3g (so testing as well). Nearly everything else is 2G.
| This includes the food hall in the airport. Enforcement is at
| entry. You must show your personal|lebenlingsausweiss and your
| coronapass. (identity license, and vacination evidence.. CDC
| vaccine card can work.. but get it converted and your life will
| be easy)
|
| 2g = genesen, geimpfung / recovered, vacced 3g = 2g+ gettestet
|
| 3. Many restaurants expect or require you to use Luca to
| participate in contact tracing. If that is not possible they do a
| manual collection of info.
|
| These rules are even enforced at outdoor gatherings such as
| weihnachtmarkts.
|
| Denmark/Coppenhagen: Only ate inside at one place. They only
| wanted to see my coronapass.
| detaro wrote:
| Just to clarify on the 2G / 3G labels, since I don't think it's
| 100% clear in your comment:
|
| 2G is recovered (PCR-validated infection in past 6 months) or
| vaccinated
|
| 3G is that _or_ (quick-)tested
|
| 2G+ is 2G _and_ tested (exception: I 've once earlier seen it
| used for 2G or PCR-tested)
|
| Quick-tests at test centers (which are all over the place) were
| free for residents for a long time, then that got removed (IMHO
| a mistake), then made free again.
|
| Actual proper checking of requirements was pretty terrible for
| a long time, from what I hear that's gotten a bit better.
| sarsway wrote:
| time to flee ...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I would be very happy if my government did the same. What a
| relief it would be!
|
| It's a public health measure, like public sanitation
| requirements, and driving a car that meets safety requirements.
| Unvaccinated people should be free to do whatever they want,
| short of risking infecting other people. Your freedom ends where
| your fist ends and my nose begins.
| tonfreed wrote:
| So your vaccination only works if others are vaccinated too?
|
| That sounds like you're getting scammed,bro
| hunterb123 wrote:
| You might have a point if the vaccine fully prevented
| transmission or infection, but it doesn't.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If your goal is exclusively to prevent transmission in itself
| vaccines aren't always they best way to do it. Isolation or
| biohazard suits are the way to go there.
|
| If you require society to still keep working _and_ for people
| to not die vaccines generally do a pretty good job of that.
|
| If your goal is to prevent mutation of dangerous new variants
| vaccines are wildly effective.
|
| I'd say just having the last 2 is pretty good.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Vaccines generally DO prevent transmission, just not this
| one, coronaviruses mutate too fast, and the vaccines only
| target the spike.
|
| This vaccine can spark new mutations since vaccinated
| people can get it and the virus would mutate to attempt to
| work around the vaccine immunity.
|
| GPs main point was people's freedoms should be restricted
| to stop the spread. My point was it doesn't stop the
| spread. So why restrict freedoms?
|
| Vaccinated people will continue to spread the virus,
| whether it's slower or faster doesn't matter in the end, it
| will spread until it's endemic. (I believe it already is)
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I like the personification of the virus as attempting to
| work around immunity.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Can you back that up? Reducing infection reduces spread,
| often to the point where the disease dies out.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > You might have a point if the vaccine fully prevented
| transmission or infection, but it doesn't.
|
| No health or safety measure is perfect. By that standard, we
| wouldn't have any at all - we can't prevent all contamination
| of the food supply, so we would prevent none?
| hospadar wrote:
| Passing a driver's test doesn't fully prevent all car
| accidents, and yet we still require potential drivers to pass
| a test. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it
| isn't worth doing.
| Fricken wrote:
| Across Canada, thousands of people have died as a
| consequence their elective surgeries have been delayed to
| make room for Covid ICU admissions.
|
| In Alberta ICU admissions are 60x higher for the
| unvaccinated than the vaccinated in their 50s.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-severe-
| outcom...
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Nothing to do with covid and everything to do with
| socialized medicine.
|
| Canada has always had very long surgery wait times:
|
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/health-care-wait-times-
| hit-20-...
|
| edit: not irrelevant, it's yet another problem being
| blamed on covid when it's really Canada's mismanagement
| of their healthcare system.
| Fricken wrote:
| That's irrelevant. I'm talking about what's changed since
| the pandemic began.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Forcing a standardized test is not the same as forcing an
| injection that people still have to sign a legal waiver
| for.
|
| If you're talking about taking away freedoms and forcing
| injections, it better solve something, not "meh it probably
| helps".
|
| -- edit --
|
| To below, the 14th amendment. Why do you think they keep
| losing court cases with the vaccine mandates?
|
| My body my choice. Ring a bell? If it's a good enough
| argument to kill life inside you, it's a good enough
| argument against forced injections.
|
| Don't be a useful idiot, don't advocate for your own
| oppression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| There is no "freedom from being injected" or "freedom
| from spreading a virus" or "freedom from denying a
| vaccine, getting sick and straining the healthcare
| system".
|
| People just love making up "freedoms".
| ghoward wrote:
| > There is no "freedom from being injected" or "freedom
| from spreading a virus" or "freedom from denying a
| vaccine, getting sick and straining the healthcare
| system".
|
| Actually, any authority not explicitly given to the
| government in the US Constitution is implicitly a right.
| See the Tenth Amendment. Also, wouldn't those fall under
| the right of privacy used to justify abortions or the
| right to due process protected by the Fourth and
| Fourteenth Amendments?
| hadem wrote:
| My understanding is it's not going to prevent transmission
| but it can help in reducing transmissions, thus reducing
| infections.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| > Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.
|
| I see this used every time, if you pay close attention to the
| phrase you will notice that it can literally be used every time
| by every party.
|
| There will be people thinking that you can't limit their
| "freedom" because a vaccine is out there at this point and
| those who fears for their lives can take it and forget about
| the virus (in most cases).
|
| There will be people thinking that unvaxxed people should loose
| their "freedom" because they apparently have an increasing
| probability to infect others (which in most cases are
| vaccinated and would get a mild infection in most cases?).
|
| I personally don't care about my unvaxxed friends, I hang out
| with them as I've always had and I do respect their choice. But
| I am biased towards individuals rights than "public health".
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| >Your freedom ends where your fist ends and my nose begins.
|
| The governments freedom ends where my epidermis begins.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Your government can imprison you, it can do body cavity
| searches, it can force medical procedures on you, all
| depending on the circumstances.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| You can lose rights after due process, nothing to do with
| this scenario.
|
| The due process is the important part, you must be
| convicted by a jury of your peers.
|
| Forced mandates are not due process.
|
| Your lack of understanding of how your rights work is
| troubling.
| johnteller wrote:
| I'd be more open to getting vaccinated when I see people actively
| making use of hand sanitizers in stores. When people learn to
| cover their whole faces with their masks. When they learn to keep
| distance. Vaccinated people who are old, sick or born with bad
| luck in the genetic lottery are still at risk. Vaccination
| doesn't mean people can go back to doing whatever they want. The
| vaccination itself can be a risk to certain individuals too. It's
| ludicrous to expect everyone to get the shot for the rest of
| their lives and call that situation a success because "at least
| everyone is vaccinated".
|
| If you want to force vaccination, start with the people that have
| a history of covid infection. Why piss the people off that have
| been actively avoiding to come into contact with the virus and
| carrying it around?
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| Hand sanitizer? We've know for over a year now that hand
| sanitizer does nothing against covid because that's not how it
| spreads.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Dude, it's nearly 2022. How do you _still_ not know that covid
| is an airborne virus and hand sanitizer doesn 't help anything?
| nazinazinazi wrote:
| Fauci funded gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab and
| repeatedly lied about it to Congress which is a federal felony.
| His own agency admits this.
|
| Fauci must face execution for his war crimes.
| rwaxm wrote:
| '"We have understood that the situation is very serious and that
| we want to take further measures in addition to those already
| taken," Merkel told reporters at Thursday's news conference. "The
| fourth wave must be broken and this has not yet been achieved,"
| she added.'
|
| You do not need special measures. Florida and Sweden didn't have
| any and have the best graphs right now. Outbreaks stop by
| themselves.
|
| Of course, if you lock down the unvaccinated right when the bell
| curve is at its natural top, you can take credit when the numbers
| go down. This is exactly what is happening right now.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| in the netherlands they just implemented measures to shut down
| non essential things at 5pm.. that lead to
| gyms/restaurants/swimming pools PACKED with people.. half the
| space, twice the density. in the very same day they implemented
| the measures the cases stopped growing..
|
| the fact that a scientist can recommend "lets shut down gyms at
| 5pm" instead of "lets make gyms 24/7" makes me distrust the
| whole corona committee
|
| when i look at the lockdown+cases graph, i dont think there is
| any causal link between them. e.g. https://www.uni-
| konstanz.de/polver/zuber/covid-19-student-wi...
| lambdaba wrote:
| It was myopic cargo-culting since day one. I used to think
| that over the years I'd gotten smarter and subtler from my
| initial libertarian leanings, but this has opened up my eyes
| on how bad authorities can mess up, and more worryingly
| convince their people they're doing the right thing.
| MadSudaca wrote:
| As libertarian leaning and someone who wants the state at a
| good distance, I believe that in many cases people are
| doing what they can, sadly, it fails to be enough. However,
| what's the alternative?
| [deleted]
| dempseye wrote:
| This is wrong, evil and authoritarian.
|
| One would think Germany would have learned some lessons about
| that kind of thing.
|
| Evidently not.
| jansan wrote:
| Note that "unvaccinated" will included all not fully vaccinated
| 14 years or older. This means that if you have an unvaccinated
| teenage child, you will not be allowed to meet other families
| anymore.
| musicale wrote:
| What are the major root causes for the surge in Germany? Low
| humidity/temperature? New variants? Something else?
|
| IIRC last winter in the US at least, health officials and the
| media were quick to blame irresponsible citizens and social
| gatherings - but the major root cause seemed to be a new, more
| transmissible (delta) variant.
| shmel wrote:
| Delta emerged in late spring 2021 though. You must be thinking
| about Alpha. However, it became dominant in the US only in late
| March 2021 according to Wikipedia[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-
| CoV-2_Alpha_variant#Sprea...
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Probably cold weather, Delta, and people getting lazy about
| their precautions, after 18 or so months of pandemic.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Would love to know the effect if any of being surrounded by
| countries with lower vaccination rates. Germany may have 70%
| vaccinated but how much does it help them when Poland has only
| 50%? Is there enough mobility between Poland and Germany to
| make it matter?
|
| Of concern to a Californian who is surrounded by other states
| with lower vaccination rates. Even internally in California
| there is a steep gradient between the coastal counties with
| 80-90% and the inland counties as low as 50%.
| FiberBundle wrote:
| Another factor is that the German government tried to keep
| infection rates low at all times, leading to very little
| natural immunity in the population compared to other countries.
| _Microft wrote:
| We have 57 million fully vaccinated [0] people and 6 million
| infected/recovered [1] out of 83 million inhabitants. The
| recovered even have to get a shot later to keep their status
| as recovered/vaccinated (which exempts from the restrictions
| that are imposed now), so they might even be considered as a
| subset of the vaccinated group. More infections therefore
| would not have increased the total number of immune people
| but only cost more lives.
|
| Beside that we can vaccinate a multiple of the number of
| newly infected people per day just fine. It's been about
| people being unwilling to get the shot, not availability of
| vaccines for quite a while now. Example: _one day of
| vaccinations_ like yesterday (~1 Mio) [0] equals _two weeks
| of new infections_ at levels like today ( >73000).
|
| [0] https://impfdashboard.de/
|
| [1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e
| 823...
| FiberBundle wrote:
| I disagree, over the summer they aimed for low infection
| rates, explicitly coupling openings to certain infection
| rate thresholds, knowing full well at that time that the
| virus was going to be endemic and without any good reason
| at all believing that sufficiently many people would be
| vaccinated in order to contain the pandemic in the winter.
| Other countries such as France or the Britain simply didn't
| care about high infection rates over the summer and face a
| smaller wave this winter.
| shoto_io wrote:
| This is not logical. More infections in the younger age
| groups would have boosted the defense systems of many while
| keeping lethalities low. This would have helped
| tremendously.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Yes, Delta combined with cooler weather and high percentage of
| antivaxxers.
| progfix wrote:
| Antivaxxers, but also unvaccinated children. In the current
| Covid wave in Austria children 5-14 years old have the
| highest 7-day incidence.
| nwellnhof wrote:
| School children in Austria are tested three times a week,
| so the numbers can't be compared to other age groups.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| God I wish we (Brits) could do that.
| guilhas wrote:
| Me too, also other government mandated medical procedures like
| abortions, to combat the climate emergency!
| atsaloli wrote:
| I was born in Soviet Russia, where the party line was: there is
| no God, there is no Soul, there is no Truth, and truth is what we
| tell the people. My family came to America to get away from that
| savage society and to live in a free country, based on voluntary
| cooperation (free market) not force and violence and coercion. In
| communism, the group is all and the individual is nothing.
|
| I do not believe it is okay to violate my individual liberties
| (such as forcing me to undergo a medical procedure) for the
| common good.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The legality of the government forcing a medical procedure for
| the common good been decided by the supreme Court nearly 100
| years ago. There is no specific "liberty" that is being
| violated here.
| standardUser wrote:
| Vaccine mandates are already ubiquitous across the Western
| world (and the non-Western world). In most cases, it is infants
| and children having a "medical procedure" forced on them. Your
| point still stands, but in reality an overwhelming consensus
| exists that vaccines are an acceptable exemption to bodily
| autonomy.
| vax1nat0r wrote:
| My neighbors are political refugees from Russia. They were not
| allowed to leave and had to escape - they have never been back
| because of that.
| e40 wrote:
| Where is the line (for the common good)? Prevent you from using
| indoor public spaces? Your right to not want the vaccine
| infringes my right to life and safety, does it not? I'm
| seriously curious where you draw the line.
| jfengel wrote:
| _based on voluntary cooperation (free market) not force and
| violence and coercion_
|
| Yeah, that's also an untruth. Western capitalist societies are
| no more pure capitalism than the Soviet Union was pure
| communism.
|
| Democracy is fundamentally coercive: the majority gets to rule,
| and everybody else lives with the result. Some of those rules
| force people to do things they don't want to do in the name of
| being able to live together: pay taxes, obey police, obtain
| permission to operate a motor vehicle. Those who don't obey are
| subject to force.
|
| It's the worst system except for all of the others. It works
| best when there's voluntary cooperation, and there's a lot of
| it. But there are limits to it, and anybody coming to it
| thinking that they're absolutely free and without obligations
| and restrictions is going to fare very poorly. Such people
| force them to pass even more rules to codify what is and isn't
| allowed, and make the system worse for everybody.
| purerandomness wrote:
| I was also born in Soviet Russia.
|
| It's hard to unlearn toxic ideas and relearn to trust in
| rational thinking, but it can be done. Don't let your
| upbringing fool you.
| xafnuaetrf8764 wrote:
| Drugimi slovami, kogda vse vokrug sosut khui radi obshchego
| blaga, ne zapadlo i samomu pososat', tak vykhodit?
| vax1nat0r wrote:
| Just keep in mind that these shots cause heart attacks[0] and
| nervous system damage[1] for a non-trivial amount of people.
|
| So if you are ok with casually murdering a few hundred thousand
| or million people - murder away.
|
| [0]
| https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.107...
|
| [1] https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/over-42000-adverse-
| reacti...
| rasengan wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. What about antibodies? What about the
| fact that vaccinated still catch and spread the virus?
|
| None of this adds up and it's likely it all goes back to
| Wikileaks.
| ipspam wrote:
| It's not meant to make sense. You are being told that your body
| is no longer yours. It's owned by the state.
| yladiz wrote:
| As of right now people are not forced to get vaccinated in
| Germany, so you still "own your body". This is mainly making
| those that choose not to get vaccinated to make a choice -
| don't get vaccinated and basically be restricted from doing
| most nonessential things, or get the vaccine.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I didn't force the teller to give me the money. I only head
| a gun to his head and told him to give me the money. He was
| free to refuse at all times.
| arrakis2021 wrote:
| What about antibodies? How will Pfizer get paid with your
| antibodies? You sound ridiculous.
| detaro wrote:
| just FYI, previously infected don't count as "unvaccinated"
| in this regulation.
| locallost wrote:
| As a foreigner living in Germany I could live with it if there
| were otherwise sound measures, but it's mostly been a bunch of
| wishful thinking. There was a rush last summer to open everything
| up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a
| lot of people really understood it as "corona is over". Even this
| I could understand, but this year they do the same thing again!
| Surprise, surprise that there is a record wave now. People have
| mostly given up and follow no rules other than the most basic
| ones (masks etc).
|
| I am also starting to think this country is not really built to
| work in a crisis like this. Regulations are maybe good in
| general, but this tendency to regulate every possible detail does
| not work when you have to change the rules every month because
| almost nobody really knows how to fix this.
| oezi wrote:
| Two major components for this winter wave:
|
| 1.) We just had our federal election so politicians were super
| cautious not to alienate anyone with though measures. Because
| we didn't have the transition of power to the new chancellor
| yet, this is still holding us back.
|
| 2.) If vaccination rates would just be another 5% higher
| (meaning 20% less unvaccinated people), the speed of the 4th
| wave would have been so much damper that we would have gotten
| through this winter without any hard restrictions (see France).
| I think there was a lot of wishful thinking involved that
| thought that those 5% would come around eventually.
| lbj wrote:
| "open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was
| way too early"
|
| It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the
| effects of covid-lockdown measures, they show a small increase
| in total mortality. So we should have done as the Swedes and
| kept everything open from beginning to end.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Sweden did worse than the other Scandinavian countries that
| enacted stricter Covid restrictions, including lockdowns.
| Sweden had roughly 5-7x as many deaths per capita as its
| immediate neighbors of Norway and Finland. Germany had less
| deaths per capita as well:
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
| tomohawk wrote:
| What is this obsession with limiting comparison of Sweden
| with "other scandanavian countries"? Is there some sort of
| special risk factor that only applies to scandanavia? Does
| COVID know what people look like? Why not compare stats of
| major metro areas with other similar metro areas in the
| world?
| jseban wrote:
| Yeah and avoiding looking at the statistics for mortality
| to see if it's actually higher than usual, which it
| isn't. I looked at the statistics of mortality for
| sweden, 2020 was high but well within standard deviation,
| and there were several more deadly years in recent
| history, 2008 and _much_ more deadly years in the 1990s,
| without this ever even making headlines.
|
| What stood out the most in the statistics, actually, was
| that 2019 had an unusually low death rates, if you add up
| 2020 and 2019 they basically even out to an average death
| rate.
|
| I bet mortality has been abnormally low during 2021 so
| now we have a bunch of dry tinder again which will cause
| another "crisis" and lockdown as soon as weather is cold
| and viruses making the rounds again. Never ending cycle
| of panicking when old people die.
| jseban wrote:
| It's always cherry picking to deliberately misinterpret
| statistics to make the most dramatic headline, it has
| been during the whole pandemic. Nobody is even trying to
| make accurate and relevant conclusions with the numbers,
| quite the opposite it's like a sport now who can lie the
| most with statistics.
| mijamo wrote:
| Because the density of the metro areas are similar.
| Stockholm is not comparable to Paris or London when it
| comes to density for instance.
|
| Culture is also very similar between Scandinavian
| countries and much different from western Europe, with
| people much more isolated (which is tough to adjust to
| for immigrants there actually).
| vcdimension wrote:
| Sweden has much higher ethnic & cultural diversity than
| Norway & Finland, and hence more people passing through
| it's borders potentially bringing in new infections from
| abroad. It also has fewer hospital beds per population,
| and higher population density. All these factors and more
| need to be taken into account when doing country
| comparisons. We won't really know how much effect the
| difference in policies had until someone has done a
| proper causal analysis using some regression model or
| other econometric technique.
|
| I got the stats from here: https://www.indexmundi.com/fac
| tbook/compare/norway.sweden/de...
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| People work in offices and go to shops in Scandinavia
| too. Maybe compare to the dozens of US states with lower
| population density than Sweden?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| For the same reason that their vaccination rates and
| wealth and gini coefficients and all types of other
| metrics closely resemble each other more than some random
| country like Ethiopia or Peru.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| We're talking about Germany and France. Right across the
| water. Sweden had lower deaths in earlier years than
| their neighboring countries and this was a reversion to
| the mean. Speaking as a Norwegian people in this country
| like to look smart but they're not getting the last laugh
| this time.
| notahacker wrote:
| Because they have similar risk factors, which are much,
| much lower than the other countries people are noting
| Sweden appeared to have fared better than. The UK, which
| imported a lot more cases, has more crowded commuter
| trains and bars and probably a less sensible population
| tried the Swedish strategy for a few weeks, but gave up
| because the deaths were mounting.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| A lot of that can be attributed to a relatively huge early
| spike in deaths at nursing homes.
|
| Rightly, Sweden decided it was a bad idea to do go about
| business as usual at nursing homes. After this, their
| relative difference to other Scandinavian countries is much
| smaller.
| jseban wrote:
| And are those spikes in deaths at nursing homes not
| normal? Is that not how things always and usually work?
| Do people at nursing homes not die mostly in the winter
| and flu season, since forever? What are the statistics of
| excess mortality, is it higher than usual or not. Old
| people die. I read headlines in the papers "10 people
| have died since moving into a nursing home" That's what
| nursing homes are for. Everyone who moves into a nursing
| home dies...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The average death rate for people in nursing homes for an
| entire year wasn't even as high as the death rate was for
| just a few week period:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-
| sweden...
|
| Almost ~3200 people died in nursing homes in a couple of
| months at the beginning of the pandemic. There's ~95k
| people in nursing homes. That's 3.3%...
|
| These deaths still account for ~1/5th of all Sweden's
| covid deaths.
|
| Hence, when people say 5x as many people died in Sweden -
| a full 1x of that is from the early nursing home no-
| strategy.
| jseban wrote:
| Doesn't say anything, death rates are not constant, it
| always varies a lot ever year by year. Did 2020 have
| excessive mortality per capita compared to other years or
| not? No it didn't. It doesn't matter if you find some
| anecdote.
|
| Everyone knows death rate was high in peak covid. As it
| always is in peak flu season, so what, the year was well
| within standard deviation
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| This is false, you have been misinformed. See here, and
| compare for instance Sweden with their neighbours Norway
| and Finland.
|
| https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/17/eu-excess-deaths-
| in-2020...
| jseban wrote:
| It doesn't make any sense to compare it to neighboring
| countries, you need to compare the same country to
| previous years. That's the real interesting statistic,
| and the one that nobody is showing you. Because it's not
| dramatic enough..
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| The graph is exactly that. Each country's excess
| mortality compared to that countries previous years.
|
| The comparison with neighbours is to gleam the effects of
| their differing mitigation strategies.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > Did 2020 have excessive mortality per capita compared
| to other years or not? No it didn't.
|
| Yes, it did. The statistics are pretty obvious: https://w
| ww.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
| jseban wrote:
| I'm saying compared to other years. That link does not
| compare to other years, it only compared 2020 to itself.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > Counts of deaths in the most recent weeks were compared
| with historical trends (from 2013 to present) to
| determine whether the number of deaths in recent weeks
| was significantly higher than expected, using Farrington
| surveillance algorithms (1).
| mythrwy wrote:
| I'll be curious to know what these numbers are in 5 years.
| [deleted]
| jseban wrote:
| And what is expected deaths per capita? That relative
| measure is irrelevant unless you compare it to some kind of
| normal death rate in the past. Are you expecting deaths per
| capita to drastically drop and be kept much lower from 2020
| and forward, compared to the past?
| howinteresting wrote:
| Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Indeed, and the lockdown and other impositions have
| introduced numerous ills that don't necessarily register,
| at least not immediately, as deaths.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| What about all the negative outcomes from continuing all
| the restrictions?
| xg15 wrote:
| Still less severe than long covid, sorry.
| adolph wrote:
| _Persistence of various symptoms in people who recovered
| from COVID-19 (collectively called Long COVID) is a major
| health issue worldwide. It could be due to various
| mechanisms such as post-intensive care syndrome, post-
| viral fatigue syndrome, permanent organ damage or others.
| Proper clinical evaluation will help identify the
| etiology, and to customize treatment. As the disease is
| new, it is too early to know the true long-term outlook._
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/
| xg15 wrote:
| Your point being?
| bduerst wrote:
| That's saying long covid is bad but we don't know just
| how bad until more time passes.
| howinteresting wrote:
| I think mask mandates and ratcheting up the pressure to
| get vaccinated is a far better use of the "restriction
| budget" than full lockdowns on the entire population,
| yes. Lockdowns on people who aren't yet vaccinated by
| choice seem pretty great to me.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Why should a vaccinated person wear a mask? Do vaccines
| not work? What is the point of getting one if I still
| have to wear a mask?
|
| Naw. Masks need to go away.
| Eelongate wrote:
| If the plan is to continue lockdowns until every last
| hypochondriac stops complaining about 'long covid', then
| lockdowns will never end. There needs to be a cutoff
| somewhere.
| airza wrote:
| As far as I know, the latest research says that more than
| half (!) of people experience fatigue and other symptoms
| after 6 months. I don't know if lockdowns are the right
| solution, but if the modal outcome is chronic fatigue
| than it seems a little flippant to call someone a
| hypochondriac.
| Eelongate wrote:
| When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested
| for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are
| revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And
| anecdotally, every last person I personally know that
| claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a
| hypochondriac.
|
| I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory
| problems, as is the case for _all_ viral respiratory
| illnesses. But I don 't think there is much more to it
| than that, and I think most of the complaints come from
| the sort of people who always think they have the latest
| trendy affliction.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _When people claiming to suffer from long covid are
| tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are
| revealed to have never had covid in the first place._
|
| Source?
| leesalminen wrote:
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/ful
| lar...
| xg15 wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I can find this meta-study:
|
| https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/themedreview/living-with-
| covid19...
|
| > _There is a widespread perception that people either
| die, get admitted to hospital or recover after two weeks.
| It is increasingly clear that for some people there is a
| distinct pathway of ongoing effects. There is an urgent
| need to better understand the symptom journey and the
| clinical risks that underlie that. People, their families
| and healthcare professionals need realistic expectations
| about what to expect._
| lambdaba wrote:
| There was a study recently published that showed that
| long covid was correlated with personal belief of having
| had covid and not having actually had it (antibodies), in
| other words, vast majority is psychosomatic which is
| frankly what you'd expect in the current climate of
| hysteria.
|
| Conversely another very real phenomenon is fear induced
| immunosupression, to which all of these overreactive
| measures and constant media bombardment are greatly
| contributing.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Parasmia, phantosmia, chronic fatigue, and narcolepsy
| (and I am an incredibly stubborn person when it comes go
| "keep on keeping on"). It's always an interesting new day
| when I'm sitting at my desk at the office and don't know
| whether I'm going to smell diesel fuel, dog shit, burnt
| toast, or one of another random smells. Also, tap water
| tastes like ditto paper used to smell, so that's fun.
| rytcio wrote:
| I would like to know who in the world ISN'T fatigued. I'd
| go into work and everyone is tired and fatigued...
| arsome wrote:
| A vague symptom like "fatigue" is also one of the most
| commonly reported symptoms of placebos.
| hogFeast wrote:
| And lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the
| waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a
| doctor has determined are required medically, some are
| elective but England doesn't do many electives because of
| cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total
| adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic
| turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil.
|
| There are no very good choices. But the high cost of
| lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the
| alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at
| least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last
| year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid
| period).
| Pyramus wrote:
| How many people is "extremely large" in your opinion? And
| who?
|
| Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while
| we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-
| parent?
| hogFeast wrote:
| I don't think you need to outline a number in advance (if
| you are familiar with the UK's response, one very big
| problem has been that forecasts of deaths has
| consistently undershot estimates even when England wasn't
| in lockdown and had no mask mandate). We had excess
| mortality around 10k/week in April, that probably did
| require a lockdown (to be clear though, if the govt had
| handled the care home situation better than maybe not
| necessary) but the bump in December last year was very
| minor. I am not sure what you mean by who...whoever gets
| Covid.
|
| Yes, no issues at all. I support lockdowns and have had
| relatives who became very ill because of lockdowns
| (delayed/ineffective hospital treatment, I am actually
| not well myself either for the same reason). I think
| trying to argue that someone should only support/oppose
| something because they have something to gain personally
| is the reason why politics in some countries is totally
| fucked (the UK is probably the worst for this, somewhere
| around 2017/18 most of the media became tabloids and
| every politics story contained some hyperbolic bullshit
| from some random person claiming their life would be
| destroyed by X minor policy change...it is just a waste
| of time and energy for all involved).
| jseban wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is
| for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none,
| and media has instead shifted to infection rate.
|
| If you were old and had little time left, and had a
| compromised immune system that made any slight infection
| possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down
| society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Replying to sibling: There's PLENTY of excess mortality:
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.
| htm
|
| Summer of this year was close to normal again, though it
| is of course easy to imagine it wouldn't have been in a
| zero-restrictions scenario.
| jseban wrote:
| That doesn't say anything, it only counts death during
| one single year: 2020. And concludes that the death rate
| is excessive during the flu season, compared to not in
| the flu season.
|
| It expects death rate to be constant over the year, which
| is wrong.
|
| You need to take the total number of deaths per capita,
| for 2020, and compare that to the same number for 2019,
| 2018, 2017 etc. And look at the standard deviation.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| What on earth are you looking at? The default view is US
| weekly excess deaths for 2018 through October 2021, and
| uses historical estimates from 2013 to present to
| estimate per-week thresholds: it's most certainly NOT
| using a single threshold per year. Go read the
| methodology section, please!
|
| You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous
| years, but because flu season happens every year since
| before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and
| don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also
| happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-
| Covid measures these last two years.
| howinteresting wrote:
| I agree that the NHS is fucked, but that's because of:
|
| * COVID itself
|
| * its funding and delivery model making it vulnerable to
| politicians acting in bad faith
|
| far more than restrictions on gatherings.
|
| By the way, an "elective" surgery is one that can be
| scheduled in advance. Most elective surgeries are not
| optional.
| https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-
| and-t...
| hogFeast wrote:
| Right, and how do you explain what has happened in
| Scotland then? The SNP gave ample rope to the NHS, and
| they promptly hung themselves with it. I agree there are
| structural issues but those aren't separable from the
| funding issues. A few months ago, the Tories said the NHS
| was getting PS20bn in extra funding, and journalists were
| being briefed by NHS lobbyists/BMA that weekend that it
| wasn't enough...at some point, the public has to
| recognise that the resources problem isn't separable from
| the structural problems.
|
| My comment about electives was for the US audience. The
| US does a huge amount of quality-of-life, elective
| surgeries that don't happen in the UK (i.e. giving an
| 85-year old a knee replacement). So when you write
| something like: the waiting list is long, people from the
| US might not understand that the mix of surgeries in the
| UK is very different from there, and it largely
| represents people who need prompt care (for example, I
| have a relative who is a high bowel cancer risk and needs
| a regular screen, in the US this would likely happen
| annually but hasn't happened for about three years now
| because they were overdue in early 2020 and then
| everything stopped).
| boringg wrote:
| You should add Mortality + mortality in the following year.
| Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid
| had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.
| latchkey wrote:
| https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-
| perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
| lbj wrote:
| Interesting, I did not know. Have a source?
| user764743 wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-
| covid-i...
| jseban wrote:
| Yeah because people who get severe covid are immune
| compromised, and that means they get are at high risk for
| severe illness/death from _any_ infection, not just
| covid. And remember that most people who "die from
| covid" are old and frail and more or less at end of life.
| Median age for covid deaths in germany is 85.
| boringg wrote:
| You are missing point to the study.
|
| Even if I use your position that people were to die
| without being infected due to their health already being
| somewhat compromised (which isn't the case here but I
| will suppose it for your trollish statements) - the point
| is that COVID-19 has serious and significant impacts on
| the cardiovascular system beyond your immediate infection
| and more so than we previously thought.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| > Studies coming out that people who survived severe
| covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next
| year.
|
| I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the
| effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID
| damages your health more so you're more likely to die in
| the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse
| general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be
| severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next
| year". Even if you try to control for factors like age,
| sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to
| miss something. But maybe they did something clever with
| their control group that serves as a good proxy for
| "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but
| didn't get infected".
|
| I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
| boringg wrote:
| Agree there are disentangling challenges.
|
| However if you think about it logically from a health
| perspective - if your respiratory system goes under
| severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory
| issues that were in your system beforehand. It is
| surprising that the risk is so great for the following
| year, but not shocking considering how taxing this
| disease is on peoples health.
|
| https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-
| perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Hm, I think that article references this paper[1]. It
| looks like their "control group" was patients who were
| tested for COVID-19 for any reason. They then checked
| whether the age distributions and distributions of
| Charleson Comorbidity Scores were the same for people who
| tested positive vs those who tested negative (of positive
| tests, 65.3% were under 65 vs 64.5% of negative tests,
| 53.5% had a comorbidity score of 0 or 1 among positives
| vs 49.4% among negatives). However, they then checked the
| age distributions between mild and severe cases, found
| very large differences (54.5% of severe cases were over
| age 65 vs 20.3% of mild cases, and 74.2% of severe cases
| had a comorbidity score of 2 or more vs 26.4% of mild
| cases)[2]. And then if I'm reading correctly, they just
| decided that was fine and they'd calculate the hazard
| ratios for mild vs severe COVID without adjusting for
| underlying confounders anyway?
|
| Their methodology doesn't look _super_ sketchy when it
| comes to COVID vs no COVID, but I am not sure what they
| 're trying to do by comparing mild with severe COVID
| without even controlling for counfounding factors.
|
| [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.202
| 1.77843...
|
| [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/778434/fme
| d-08-77...
| [deleted]
| standardUser wrote:
| If Swedish hospitals exceeded capacity as has happened in
| other nations (like the US) then there would have been more
| severe restrictions. The name of the game is and always has
| been "don't let this very contagious virus collapse our
| healthcare systems".
|
| The "we should have never shut anything down" contingent
| doesn't seem to understand this.
| zibzab wrote:
| Sweden did not keep _everything_ open.
|
| We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and
| "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and
| sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for
| younger kids.
| matsemann wrote:
| Sweet spot being 3-5x as many deaths as
| Norway/Denmark/Finland?
| SergeAx wrote:
| Please check out this data, section "z-score by country":
| https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
|
| Sweden indeed has a worse z-score compared to Norway or
| Denmark, but better compared to France, Netherlands or
| Belgium (or Germany, for that matter). And much better
| than Italy or Spain. I say they indeed found a sweet spot
| and escaped lockdowns.
| jseban wrote:
| People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental
| europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter.
| I think that has a big impact on how sick people get
| namdnay wrote:
| > People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in
| continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in
| the winter
|
| huh?
| SergeAx wrote:
| Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, north of France and
| Germany had a closer climate (and more accustomed to
| heating), that's why I looked up their z-score first.
| pmontra wrote:
| > [People] in continental europe people live in cold and
| damp houses in the winter.
|
| Really?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Every country had to find some balance between freedom
| and health. I don't think Sweden is to blame more than
| anyone else. They had less death than most European
| countries.
|
| Following you reasoning, how many more death did the US
| have compared to China? would you advocate to lock up
| people like China did?
| savingsPossible wrote:
| Did china get less freedom because of covid lockdowns?
| That is, surely people faced absurd restrictions, but
| given the _length_ of the restrictions, which is better
| for people?
|
| I know that I would prefer 1 month hard lockdown than 1
| year soft. But idk how it actually went there (curious to
| know!)
| jseban wrote:
| And not just freedom, but more important things such as a
| functioning society in general with regards to childrens
| education, babies being born, the economy doing well etc
| etc. It's not like lockdowns are only affecting some
| dude's ability to go and drink beer. And they are
| actively harmful to people's health too, so actually it's
| about finding a balance between everyone and everything,
| and the immune compromised people at risk from cold
| viruses.
| danans wrote:
| The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs
| 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population
| is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse
| than its Nordic neighbors, though.
|
| 1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
|
| EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-
| rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse
| for Sweden than its neighbors.
| op00to wrote:
| Why would the rate be higher in higher population
| countries?
| danans wrote:
| That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more
| like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population -
| but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The
| actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden.
|
| The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't
| meaningful without dividing by population.
|
| The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public
| policy around masking and gathering in groups has a
| significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions
| probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates
| and case fatality rates
| ajross wrote:
| That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected
| infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure
| how effectively a nation's health care system treated
| infections.
|
| Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed
| about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in
| Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the
| USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its
| neighbors:
|
| https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-
| visualization/?chart=countr...
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| Where do you think these deaths come from? Do you think
| the health services in Sweden were overwhelmed?
| danans wrote:
| You're absolutely right. I should have looked at the
| deaths per 100k population column.
| [deleted]
| kgwgk wrote:
| With "big gatherings" being defined as 50 people.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| A sweet spot, were the elderly first were not properly
| protected, and then euthanized instead of given at least a
| treatment effort? Not even C-Pap, just panic-relieve and
| pain-medication. Not even given a choice, just scratched
| out of the book by politics.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG
|
| It was a reckless betrayal of the elderly population of
| sweden.
|
| I'm all for the freedom of self-euthanization, if a person
| longs for that and no, this can not be compared with what
| went down.
|
| Which can be best described as a remnant from a horrific
| pre-worldwar 2 "survival of the fittest" mindset being
| dragged into the light.
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| And by 'Sweet Spot' we mean a materially higher death rate
| than immediate peers ...
|
| The lockdowns were imminently effective.
|
| In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the
| wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we
| cloistered again and the numbers came down.
|
| If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any
| number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which
| were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down
| drastically.
|
| Here you go [1]
|
| In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are
| serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Lockdowns in Canada were ridiculous, particularly in
| Ontario. People weren't even allowed to go to parks or
| hikes. My parents couldn't drive to their cabin up north
| in fear of being ticketed.
|
| My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband
| who resented her for going to work because he thought she
| was going to get him killed.
|
| Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it
| drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to
| disregard rules later on?
| throw10920 wrote:
| > People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes.
|
| If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science
| denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely
| low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're
| not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or
| next to 20k people in a stadium).
| xg15 wrote:
| It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just
| because those particular places have an increased risk of
| infection but also to stop people from traveling to and
| from those places.
|
| I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my
| country were for a large part to stop people from
| commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their
| actual workplace might not have had a high infection
| risk.
|
| I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20,
| there was a blanket order to close _everything_ in that
| street - cafes, malls, mom &pop shops, etc. The street
| consequently was deserted for a few months. Later,
| restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to
| keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may
| lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I
| can just observe that the street itself is as busy again
| as before the pandemic.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| So shut down the trains. If someone is driving to their
| cabin, there is no reason to stop them. It was always
| completely irrational to prohibit solitary or family-
| oriented outdoor activities. They did that around here
| for a while, in a largely rural state in the US Pacific
| Northwest region.
|
| Senseless "do something!" edicts like that give a lot of
| rhetorical ammunition to the denialists and antivaxxers,
| while doing nothing to address the spread of COVID.
| gebruikersnaam wrote:
| Another reason to keep people from traveling is to make
| sure they stay where there's available healthcare. If
| everyone traveled to their cabin and got sick, the local
| hospital wouldn't be able to handle all the cases.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Sorry, that's unconvincing at best.
| [deleted]
| bduerst wrote:
| People were allowed in parks. The hyperbole comes here in
| that the parks closed during certain seasonal events that
| tend to draw huge crowds.
| yonaguska wrote:
| So those videos I watched of teens being arrested for
| skateboarding or playing hockey weren't real?
| TravHatesMe wrote:
| Or the guy drinking coffee in a timmies parking lot
| dmix wrote:
| That's not true. I tried to go to provincial parks in
| Ontario and they were gated off and closed...
| annexrichmond wrote:
| https://globalnews.ca/news/7757913/cherry-blossoms-high-
| park...
|
| > During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday
| afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main
| concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be
| fenced off to "discourage" people from gathering.
|
| to be fair the park closures might not have been as
| general as I made it sound in my original comment but
| there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in
| addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to
| even go outside
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-
| ski-...
|
| > Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from
| Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year.
| Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to
| close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council.
| The province had said the closures were needed out of an
| abundance of caution and at a time when cases were
| soaring and vaccines were new.
| jollybean wrote:
| It's a tiny bit glib to lament 'science denialism' in a
| pandemic for which we do not have any living memory of
| dealing with, a new kind of disease for which there are
| many unknowns, serious concerns with equipment and
| personnel shortages, high mortality, time constraints, a
| state of emergency, and most evidently the very low
| social cost of 'not gathering in groups' outdoors.
|
| In hindsight, they probably didn't need to go that far,
| but that's hindsight.
|
| Along with the vaccine denialism, the other thing that
| has surprised me among the concerns of the plebes, is how
| they have difficulty grasping what an emergency implies.
|
| There is a term called 'Fog of War' that military people
| are aware of, hinted at in the term 'No Plan Survives
| Contact With The Enemy'.
|
| Running government is like running a company - it's
| operational. But governing in an Emergency is more like
| running a startup but where all your personnel are 9-to-5
| functionaries not used to such situations. It's managed
| chaos at best, nothing will be optimized.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety
| to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a
| very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually
| also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup
| could be much worse than in the US.
| FpUser wrote:
| >" People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes"
|
| This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen
| so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns.
| What was discouraged is big companies having party in the
| parks.
|
| I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking
| from experience.
| jollybean wrote:
| Nobody has ever dealt with these problems before in
| living memory there are far too many unknowns, and there
| are very serious consequences i.e. death, hospitals
| overflowing, staff shortages, it's a very real emergency.
|
| If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers
| come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers,
| it's visceral.
|
| It's managed chaos at best.
|
| Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they
| should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same
| time encouraged people to 'get out'.
|
| But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but
| if we can bring a national emergency down to something
| more bearable, so be it.
|
| If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be
| more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to
| get outdoors).
| jollybean wrote:
| "Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it
| drive unnecessary fear?"
|
| ???
|
| If you look at the data fro Our World in Data you see
| exponential spikes, implying any group facing them is on
| the precipice of disaster.
|
| The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented
| untold harm.
|
| That for a few weeks 'you couldn't go to the park' is
| relevant, but not hugely material, neither is that they
| caused a bit of fear.
|
| The 'no parks' bit is maybe an excessive feature taken in
| an emergency context but it's not a big deal.
|
| Whatever we want to call them and whatever the mechanism,
| they were mostly useful.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| I think it's material if people felt certain rules were
| invasive (which they were). And that was my point -- such
| people may be less inclined to follow certain guidelines
| in later phases of the pandemic.
|
| > The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and
| prevented untold harm.
|
| I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't
| been locked down _at all_ with zero mandates since last
| June and while it 's certainly not rainbows, it's not
| nearly "untold harm" either.
|
| Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?
| xg15 wrote:
| What exactly do those studies compare? How countries without
| lockdown coped in the same wave?
|
| Lockdowns were called because hospitals were at capacity and
| immediate risk of failing to keep up service - as is
| currently again the case e.g in Germany.
|
| Remember, the first lockdowns in Europe were mandated after
| hospitals in Italy were forced to conduct triage. (The "who
| do I have to let die" kind of triage)
|
| Why did that not happen in whatever control groups the
| studies were looking at?
| santoshalper wrote:
| The Swedes wore their masks and got vaccinated. What worked
| for them would not necessarily have worked for us.
| rory wrote:
| I'm not sure who "us" is for you, but Swedes are not
| vaccinated at an especially high rate.
|
| They're at about the EU average. 8-10% above the US
| average, 5-7% above California, but a few percent below New
| England, for example.
| ghaff wrote:
| And two of those New England states have among the
| highest case rates in the country right now (which isn't
| the same as death rates of course).
| jseban wrote:
| Why would you get vaccinated for something that you're
| not in a risk group for anyway, it doesn't make any
| sense. And even double vaccines and boosters. If you did
| this pre-covid the doctor would have diagnosed you a
| hypochondric
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Do you know that it's very normal for people not in a
| risk group for the flu to not only get double vaccines
| but to actually get a new one every single year? OMG,
| doctor's must be going crazy with all the hypochondriacs
| doing that.
| throw20211202 wrote:
| We certainly got vaccinated, but it could be better. But
| masks are few and far between. There was a recommendation
| to wear them on some public transport for a while (and
| might come back, due to Omicron), but my very unscientific
| anecdata I'd say less than 1% of people I see wear masks.
| Going through the central station in Stockholm in rush
| hour, seeing hundreds if not thousands of people, and you
| can probably count the number of mask wearers on your
| fingers.
|
| I would follow any mask mandate, but the experience here
| (from my point of view) is that they don't seem to help
| that much. Otherwise we should have an absolute explosion
| of cases right now, compared to other European countries.
| My personal theory is that people don't use them properly;
| look at people on tv, constantly adjusting them, or wearing
| them under the chin, reusing single-use masks, etc.
|
| There's been an uptick in cases during the last week or
| so[1], but compare it to eg. Germany[2] that have had a
| strong mask mandate for a long time. I don't understand it
| either.
|
| [1]
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
| (do note that when looking at the chart for deaths, we have
| always been lagging a couple of weeks)
|
| [2]
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
| jseban wrote:
| And everyone always forgets those politicians who had to
| resign after making millions on the mask deals, and
| pretend that this corruption has nothing to do with why
| Germany has the mask mandates...
| rightbyte wrote:
| > The Swedes wore their masks
|
| No such thing happened.
|
| Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about
| 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And
| far worse then the neighbouring countries.
|
| I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the
| policies were not worse than other bad policies.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-
| explor...
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Such a relief to live in Sweden. No one is pretending to
| wear masks and we're doing just fine. If i wasn't reading
| the news i wouldn't even know there was a pandemic.
|
| As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending
| to wear masks but only as chin diapers.
| 13415 wrote:
| You get used to wearing masks very fast and it's no big
| deal. They can be inconvenient. So what. Independently of
| the question whether masks are needed or not, it's
| bizarre and unreasonable that people still get heated
| about this topic. There are plenty of things worth
| discussing other than minor inconveniences like wearing
| masks or washing hands.
| fvdessen wrote:
| I personally don't think wearing masks are a minor
| inconvenience, and never got used to it. I like to see
| people's faces.
| 13415 wrote:
| Blessings to you, all that tells me is that you've never
| had a real inconvenience in your life.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Wearing masks are huge deal. They are depressing as fuck
| and make everybody look ugly. We aren't doing heart
| surgery... masks are silly rain dances.
|
| I really hate mask religion. Especially the branch of it
| that likes to gaslight and minimize the idea that masks
| suck.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Sweden had mortality rates nearly 10x those of their
| neighbours.
| [deleted]
| throw20211202 wrote:
| Not really, though:
|
| * Sweden: 1,485
|
| * Denmark: 500
|
| * Finland: 244
|
| * Norway: 199
|
| * Iceland (not really a neighbour, being a 1000 miles away,
| accross an ocean): 102
|
| Some more random cherrypicking:
|
| * USA: 2,414
|
| * Italy: 2,221
|
| * Belgium: 2,322
|
| * UK: 2,124
|
| * Russia: 1,901
|
| * Peru: 5,984
|
| Deaths per million capita, as of 2nd december 2021,
| from[1].
|
| [1] All numbers from
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| The numbers in Russia cannot be believed. My entire
| extended family (in Moscow) caught what was almost
| certainly COVID (Most of them twice, my grandfather was
| at death's door over it), and not a single one of them
| got a positive diagnosis.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Pretty sure 1485 is nearly 10x 199.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Sweden has the highest density pockets of all of them.
| Meanwhile Norway has more fjords than people.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The VAST majority of deaths there are people over 70, and
| Sweden like the US warehouses old people in cramped
| retirement homes where the virus can spread rapidly
| regardless of the public health approach outside. Their
| deaths fell off precipitously once vaccines got to the
| old.
|
| The lesson here seems to be that nursing homes probably
| cause some amount of excess mortality, and need special
| attention during epidemics/pandemics.
| user-the-name wrote:
| You think that is different in any other country?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yes, very different. Starting in the 90's Norway started
| transitioning from large crowded buildings with long
| corridors to more home based care and other approaches
| that seek to keep people out of settings that look like
| nursing homes. In southern Europe more people live with
| family when they're old. This is common in lots of Asia
| as well. In the US it varies a lot regionally and by
| income.
| jseban wrote:
| What difference does it make, they all get the virus
| eventually anyway
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The crowding can cause a lot of morbidity before anyone
| knows what's going on or how to treat the new infection.
| This is what happened in New York, the pandemic ripped
| through nursing facilities killing thousands of seniors
| well before any treatment was available.
|
| If things unfold more slowly, you have more time to
| develop treatments. A lot of the deaths in NYC occurred
| before we figured out that just laying people on their
| sides reduced the risk of dying significantly.
|
| Moreover, now that we have the ability to rapidly produce
| vaccines, it isn't a forgone conclusion that everyone
| will necessarily "get the virus eventually anyway."
| ajvs wrote:
| You said "neighbours", when in reality you mean "one
| neighbouring country".
| [deleted]
| oezi wrote:
| No, we should have strived to get everyone vaccinated (by
| making it mandatory) and _then_ this pandemic would be over
| in Europe.
|
| "Opening up" would have killed more people than it killed in
| the UK.
|
| The people driving this wave, who are getting seriously ill
| and dying are the unvaccinated.
| hogFeast wrote:
| It is worth remembering the "let people get on with it and they
| will work out" viewpoint within Europe was widely discredited
| by April 2020 (and ignoring the fact it worked in countries
| like Japan that have quite significant constraints on govt
| power).
|
| My conclusion from this is that, in this area, regulations are
| path dependent. In some countries, people will make the right
| choices themselves. In others, they won't. I am in the UK, in
| 2020 it was evident that the hands-off approach really wouldn't
| work. But it did work this year.
|
| Also, I don't think there is any question about fixing it. You
| have to test (most countries still don't test enough), you have
| to give people the information to make a choice, and you have
| to keep vaccinating. Imo, and I thought the opposite in 2020,
| lockdowns/heavy regulations aren't a long-term strategy
| (outside of China).
| creato wrote:
| I think in general, the gap between what regulations say and
| what people will do anyways will be small (as long as the
| regulations are more strict than "default" behavior).
|
| At the beginning of the pandemic, where I was, people mostly
| stopped going to restaurants before regulations said they
| couldn't. When restrictions have been relaxed, I couldn't
| really observe any changes in behavior.
| est31 wrote:
| Germany had elections at the end of September, and I feel that
| this is the main reason for the catastrophy that is unfolding
| now. It has prevented the ruling parties from imposing stricter
| vaccination requirements more early on. They could have easily
| required everyone to be vaccinated by November first, and this
| current situation would have been spared. Now the government
| still has to do it, but they need to rush it, and they impose
| unrealistic goals like 30 million vaccinations until christmas.
|
| After Macron's speech in July to put vaccination requirements
| for the medical industry, there was a major surge to the
| vaccination centers. Meanwhile Germany was in pre election
| mood.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-d...
|
| You can see the effect of Macon's speech clearly on this graph:
| it led to a major surge in per-day vaccinations in mid July
| 2021 while Germany stayed in steep decline, and the "corona is
| over" mentality spread. Germany has reduced its distance to
| France in the last few weeks, but France still has more
| vaccinations than us, and it's far away from european leaders
| like Portugal.
|
| At the start of covid, everyone in europe admired Germany for
| its good covid response. They flew ICU patients from Italy to
| Germany as the italian hospitals were way beyond their
| capacity. Now we might have to fly Germans the other way.
|
| Yes, you can say that there has barely been public support for
| vaccination requirements up until the start of the current
| wave. And indeed it's been quite unpopular in the autumn. But
| if politicians had been more courageously trying to sell
| vaccination requirements, maybe it'd have worked out.
| dham wrote:
| Everyone will get this virus. Countries that do good now will
| do bad later and countries that did bad now we do good later.
| It's all inevitable. All you can do is take it on the chin or
| delay it. Every country has predetermined number based on
| their population demographics and health, that they will hit
| and there's no thing we can do about it.
| novaRom wrote:
| This current wave moves from the east to the west. In fact,
| Germany has probably peaked, we have 4 days in a row of
| declining number of infections. France is at the beginning of
| the next wave, their number of today's infections is
| approaching German numbers.
|
| source:
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
| est31 wrote:
| Note that German infrastructure is at its limits in terms
| of how many tests can be done or whether the health office
| can track down the people a known covid case has been in
| contact with. Due to the sheer size of the wave, the
| percentage of unknown covid cases has increased.
|
| source (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-
| zahlen-corona-125.html
|
| But yes, there is a strong west/east and north/south
| gradient in terms of incidence.
| ascar wrote:
| I'm not so sure how valid the argument about test
| capacity limits and underreporting is. While laboratories
| for PCR tests might be above capacity the 2G+ requirement
| (recovered or vaccinated AND tested) must have increased
| quick antigen tests dramatically, which also get
| registered and positive tests reported. E.g. to enter a
| public pool I had to get tested and they had a test tent
| right next to the entrance. The week before I could just
| enter with my vaccination certificate. Many people have
| to get tested more extensively now for work or travel. So
| I would be very surprised if the test coverage hasn't
| actually increased and declining numbers with more tests
| certainly looks like a good sign.
| jll29 wrote:
| Ex-paramedic turned comp sci researcher here.
|
| > There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it
| being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people
| really understood it as "corona is over"
|
| I totally agree. Last week saw a dentist and this morning
| (10:02) two sales ladies at a baker's embedded in an EDEKA
| supermarket with no mask, one of them coughing. When pointing
| out politely that they should really put their masks on, my
| comment of mine was ignored. The unfair thing is that it won't
| be these people dying, but likely third parties that did
| nothing wrong (like the elderly couple behind me in the queue).
|
| There is a huge debate focusing on vaccination, about forcing
| people to do it etc., but schools are open, kindergardens are
| open (every parent knows that's where stuff spreads), people
| shop, socialise, eat together, work together almost if there
| was nothing going on.
|
| The government failed to point out that vaccinated people can
| still get CoViD because they were afraid it would stop people
| from getting the jab, so they assumed they were safe and went
| back to pre-CoViD behavior patterns. The government is reducing
| the testing regime, so future numbers will be less reliable.
|
| Public TV station ARD/Das Erste started to lose credibility
| with me when they claimed on Twitter that medical masks don't
| protect. That is false/"fake news": the truth is they are
| designed to protect the patient when worn by staff, so their
| protection is asymmetric and biased against the wearer and in
| favor of the person talking to the wearer. But they do provide
| a little protection even for the wearer, as the larger droplets
| get caught by them, and catching a virus also depends on the
| amount and concentration of viral material exposed to. (The
| reason the posted the tweet was because at the time, there was
| a shortage and they did not want that non-medical staff buy
| them up so there was enough of a supply for medical staff. It's
| okay to ask people to stop buying them for that reason but not
| feeding them with false information to make them stop.)
|
| The new government put a general in place to run a task force
| and instead of saying "fantastic, why didn't the previous
| government think of that?" the press questioned why leaders who
| all declined military service on the grounds of conscience
| appointed a military man (the candidate seems to be a supply
| chain expert, so not a bad choice - although I personally would
| pick a paramedic because pandemic training is part of one's
| education, at least it was back in the 1990s when I did mine).
|
| Despite all of this, in fairness the situation in Germany is
| much better than in other countries (I can only say that from
| personal knowledge about the UK, France and the US), and I
| would say that at the beginning, the government did a good job
| in absolute and relative terms.
| elorant wrote:
| No democratic country is built to handle something like a
| pandemic. That much became clear the last two years. You need
| to be able to mandate strict laws that take away a lot of
| liberties that we have learn to consider as standard.
| novaRom wrote:
| Many countries do currently mandate strict laws that take
| away a lot of liberties. Australia, Canada, Europe, parts of
| US. Are they still democracies?
| jseban wrote:
| No they are not. If you can declare a state emergency in
| the name of public health without quantifying it in any
| way, and bypassing any forms of debates or elections or
| votes (one expert said something), that's for sure not a
| democracy.
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| North Korea also claims to be a democracy.
| LilBytes wrote:
| Absolutely not, have you seen Fox News. Us over here in
| Australia are absolutely needing to be liberated by the US.
| I can't wait till the Marines roll in.
|
| Its terrifying, over here in Brisbane, Queensland. We've
| had one locally acquired case from Covid in the last few
| months.
|
| We're going to pubs, no masks, No Covid. But we're sorely
| missing our freedom. /s
| vinay427 wrote:
| While I don't believe this was true across Australia at
| certain points in the pandemic, your point is definitely
| taken and I would agree with the message.
|
| However, I don't understand the US-centric (satirical)
| perspective in a comment like this. The article is about
| Germany, the person you replied to made no specific
| mention of the US as far as I can tell, and their view is
| not unusual in many other regions of the world (such as
| the one I live in). Does the radicalism of Fox News
| really need more attention or notoriety?
| [deleted]
| Krasnol wrote:
| There was a paper recently circulating the media which shows
| the immense amount of "esoteric" people in German speaking
| countries. Those people are responsible for the staggering
| vaccination numbers and spreading of conspiracy myths around
| this crisis. It's so prevalent, I can't remember anyone who at
| least once spread some unscientific bullshit in the last 2
| years here.
|
| The handling of those people in the media and the way their
| opinions are presented equally with scientific facts result in
| this reluctance politicians displayed in this crisis. Now we
| all have to suffer because of it. I hope we finally mandatory
| vaccinations...it's overdue.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| By esoteric you mean pseudoscience believers, homeopaths and
| the like?
|
| Recently moved back from Germany after five years there,
| homeopathy depressingly common and accepted there, even by
| many medical professionals.
| dbkal wrote:
| Cases in super vaccinated Portugal are also rising. If one is
| looking for scapegoats, how about locking out Romanian migrant
| workers, who are everywhere in construction and cleaning inside
| family's homes? Look how the Romanian outbreaks precede the
| German ones multiple times:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
|
| Also look how fast the Romanian numbers dropped. The same will
| happen in Germany in some weeks and politicians will take the
| credit.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I sense a disturbance in the force..
| yosito wrote:
| At least they're not making the same move as Austria and locking
| down literally everyone, 24/7. What's the point of vaccines if we
| all have to sit at home anyway?
| president wrote:
| After 2 years of Covid, I find it extremely suspect that the
| covid vaccines are still touted so hard as the only way to manage
| or exit the pandemic despite it clearly not being the silver
| bullet it was originally promised to be. The fact that the media
| and government can't talk about anything other than vaccines
| tells me people are not really interested in solving for anything
| other than selling more vaccines.
| csee wrote:
| It's close to a silver bullet. Yes they don't completely stop
| transmission but who cares about that? All we should care about
| are severe cases and deaths.
|
| Add the new therapeutics on top and we actually do have the
| silver bullet. Vaccine + Paxlovid, if widely distributed
| enough, ends the pandemic, barring some new, more severe
| variant.
| blub wrote:
| Very thought-provoking this mistreatment of the unvaccinated.
|
| The process started with demonizing them to the point of being
| singled out and blamed for how the disease is impacting society.
| When the discrimination started, there were very few willing to
| speak for them. Particularly malicious was the expansion of the
| term anti-vaxxer typically used for a fringe minority which
| "rejects all vaccines for everyone" to all of those that "reject
| one single vaccine for themselves".
|
| Now a measure that will come too late and impact the entirety of
| society is sold as a means of finally forcing _them_ to conform.
|
| From the outside, this may look like a perfectly executed
| propaganda campaign. One can't exclude that the government (like
| the Canadian gov which actually got caught I believe) took
| advantage of the chaos and flexed its propaganda muscles a bit.
| But the more scary possibility is that a frightened and
| manipulated population + incompetent government in CYA mode is
| enough to try to override the constitutional principle of bodily
| integrity.
|
| And it's precisely this principle which seems to be the last
| thing preventing the state from forcing or punishing the
| unvaccinated too hard, limiting them to a fine.
| brummm wrote:
| I think this is a ridiculous opinion to have.
|
| I actually think unvaccinated people were treated way to well
| in Germany. They are a very loud minority in society and have
| managed to really hamper the progress against covid.
|
| Compare this to Canada where the government implemented much
| bigger restrictions on unvaccinated people (no restaurants, no
| train travel, no air travel) and the overall vaccination rate
| is ~10% higher. And the current rise in cases is nowhere near
| Germany.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Being willfully unvaccinated signals that you simply don't care
| about the people you come in contact with. I'm not sure how,
| exactly, I'm supposed to treat someone well if they won't care
| if I live or die from something they can prevent.
|
| Yes, I understand the vaccine isn't perfect, but none of them
| are. Yet here I am, not catching polio and other things because
| of them. (Polio was less lethal, btw, and some folks were fine
| - yet others lived out their lives in an iron lung).
| joeman1000 wrote:
| I'm not vaccinated, this is how I feel. I am not militant or
| political about it. My wife and whole family are vaccinated and
| I helped them to do it. As a young man, the risk of heart
| issues does indeed outweigh the risk of hospitalisation from
| the virus (as I've weighed it, anyhow). Victoria, Australia has
| hit 90% double vaccinated and case numbers have not changed
| here. To see this underwhelming effect in light of the anxiety
| the mandatory vaccination has caused, it is sad. I am lucky
| enough to be studying remotely, and so I just stay at home, I
| don't go out other than to exercise in a park. I am not able to
| go anywhere with my wife right now (shopping, restaurants
| etc.), which is difficult, but it was my choice. If I am
| further forced to undergo vaccination I'm really not sure what
| I would do. I would want to leave Australia and live somewhere
| that I can have my own decisions. I don't care if you think I'm
| selfish. Where did freedom of choice go? I'd like to move where
| it's gone.
| ceesharp wrote:
| "Das Recht, mit der Faust um sich zu schlagen, hort auf, wo
| die Nase des Mitmenschen anfangt."
| joeman1000 wrote:
| And what about my nose?
| Aldipower wrote:
| This counts for everybody. Being forced to be vaxxed with
| mRNA is probably also very "fisty" for some people.
| librish wrote:
| What makes you think the risk of heart issues is higher from
| the vaccine than the risk of heart issues from a non-
| hospitalized incidence of covid?
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Train left the station as soon as orders were placed for
| massive amounts of vaccine well before it was ever developed.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Bodily autonomy and health privacy are fundamental human rights.
| No just society should be able to violate a person's body in this
| manner or coerce them through methods like lockdowns. It is
| simply not compatible with a free and just society. And I say
| that as a pro vaccine person with my booster.
| MrDresden wrote:
| My partner was diagnosed with cervical cancer a couple of months
| ago and is now on the brink of starting radio- & chemotherapy.
|
| Due to the covid situation here in the Netherlands the treatment
| may not go ahead as planned, and treatment might get delayed, due
| to the new measures.
|
| I then know of people who's heart surgaries have been delayed 5x
| times due to the stress covid is putting on the health care
| system in another country.
|
| Please, get vacinated/boosted and if possible convince a close
| one to do too.
| danieldevries wrote:
| Overrun healthcare system and lack of ICU beds is serious cause
| for concern. No, the vaccine is not sterilizing but it will
| improve your chances of not getting seriously ill / dying. simple
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Realistically:
|
| 1) Mandatory vaccination, all age groups, boosters etc.
|
| AND
|
| 2) permanently reconfiguring our society to reduce social
| contacts such that with the vaccines, COVID is suppressed. If the
| vaccines work well, then small (maybe no) changes will be needed.
| If they don't, then large changes. WFH, no indoor hospitality
| etc.
|
| We can cycle through lockdowns, we can wring our hands about
| vaccinating children, we can even pretend it isn't happening, but
| the formula is the same:
|
| vaccines+restrictions=suppression
|
| We don't know what the LHS needs to add up to, and we don't know
| how much vaccines can give us, but this equation must hold, as
| the alternative to suppression is complete failure of our
| healthcare system.
|
| To put another way, suppression is the only steady state. If you
| allow the virus to run unchecked, then eventually restrictions
| have to be reimposed. If you release restrictions, then the virus
| ramps up again. Either you tailor restrictions to suppress, or
| you bounce up and down around that point. Vaccines move that
| restriction point down.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Despite the wide variety of US state responses, no one is
| experiencing "complete failure of our healthcare" so I think
| we'll be all right.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| Because half the population can't afford to see a doctor and
| would rather die than leave a pile of debt to their families?
| drewg123 wrote:
| I spent over 2 weeks in a US hospital in 3 separate stays
| this fall, and while its not "complete failure", it is pretty
| close. ER overflowing, nurses with 2x the patient loads of
| 2019, etc.
|
| It is not 100% clear to me if this was because of an excess
| of COVID patients draining nursing staff, or it was because
| of staff leaving because they did not want to deal with COVID
| paitents, vaccine/testing requirements, etc, and taking other
| jobs elsewhere (or just quitting). I suspect that it was a
| combination, and some of the problems could simply be solved
| by the hospital paying staff better.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| German hospitals are currently transferring patients with
| severe cases from high incidence regions to lower ones (and
| the military has to help with nursing roles) because they
| simply can't stem the number of severe cases in some regions.
| The situation is as close to "complete failure of our
| healthcare" as it could be. If you take that as evidence of
| "we'll be alright", you're playing the white hat guy in
| https://xkcd.com/2278/.
| prohobo wrote:
| Do you think, maybe, that has something to do with Germany
| losing 4000 ICU beds? https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-icu-
| medics-expect-covid-surge...
| ascar wrote:
| That actually has a lot to do with the pandemic itself,
| as intensive care personnel quit their jobs due to the
| extended stress.
|
| https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-
| praesident...
| prohobo wrote:
| Is that excuse something you'd use as a defense in court?
| Because that looks like mismanagement to me, and changes
| nothing. After two years, there should be _more_ ICU
| beds, not thousands less.
| ascar wrote:
| You posted a tangentially related source to your claim
| and I posted the correct context of this claim.
|
| It clearly shows that ICU beds decreased involuntarily
| and actually as part of the healthcare system starting to
| fail due to exhaustion. It actually underlines the point
| of GP you responded to.
|
| But yes, German public funded organizations are
| notoriously inflexible when it comes to attracting
| employees due to tons of bureaucratic red tape.
|
| I don't see the relevance of a defense in court here. How
| about we stay on topic?
| boston_clone wrote:
| In TFA from the parent comment, it states that the
| reduction is directly correlated to not having
| appropriate staffing; not necessarily a count of physical
| beds.
|
| I'm not sure what you're referring to about a "defense in
| court", but I also don't know what the appropriate
| solution is for that situation. Teaching / training
| people takes time, and compulsory service at the
| direction of the government seems like overreach.
| nawgz wrote:
| I think it would be pretty inaccurate to argue that because
| it's not "complete failure" that it's not a failure. People
| are dying of medically preventable situations on the basis of
| triage, and it is fairly widespread in places where COVID is
| unchecked. I think that's really not ok; especially not when
| it's unvaccinated COVID patiences.
| pokepim wrote:
| Nah, what you saying is not realistical. This is more like
| wishful thinking and would only work in suppressive utopia (if
| that's a thing).
|
| We as a society had only one shot at doing a lockdown that
| could work and it was at the beginning of march 2020. Some
| countries actually managed to have almost no cases but they had
| to do harsh lockdowns and everyone needed to comply. After that
| with 2nd and 3rd waves we have seen less and less countries do
| lockdowns and people already worn out stopped to comply. Now
| everything is half assed and on top of that vaccinated people
| are extremely unwilling to participate in lockdowns as it was
| promised that vaccines will help us avoid the disaster of
| lockdowns we have seen earlier (i got vaccinated based on that
| as many of my friends).
|
| So no. This is not realistical, nope.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 1) Mandatory vaccination, all age groups, boosters etc.
|
| 50% to 60% of all the people in ICU with covid related symptoms
| in the EU atm are fully vaccinated.
|
| It's been lies from day one: "masks do not protect" then "masks
| are mandatory because they protect" (I don't know which one is
| correct but at least one is a lie), "you're a conspiracy
| theorist if you think there's any link between a virus research
| lab in Wuhan and the fact that the outbreak started there" then
| now "a lab escape is a possibility", then Fauci commited a
| crime by lying in front of congress (he then retracted himself
| after having been called out by senator Rand paul) "I had no
| idea there was gain of function research done in the Wuhan
| lab", then "we will never discriminate between vaccinated and
| non vaccinated people", etc. ad nauseam.
|
| Then the mRNA vaccine (which I got) was sold us as major
| scientific discovery and as a panacea. Turns out that "vaccine"
| doesn't confer a long lasting immunity at all (otherwise there
| wouldn't be 50 to 60% of ICU beds in Europe filled with fully
| vaccinated people).
|
| I don't think suppression is possible with a non-sterilizing
| vaccine. I think it's even less possible that it's even less
| possible with something that is called a "vaccine" but that
| isn't really one (Merriam-Webster recently changed, by sheer
| chance, the very definition of what a vaccine is, but I need
| time to adapt to the new definition).
|
| The virus is here to stay and we won't get rid of it with snake
| oil (I'm not saying the mRNA Pfizer shots don't work _at all_ ,
| I'm saying their effectiveness is _extermely_ limited seen that
| ICU beds are filled with vaccinated people).
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > 50% to 60% of all the people in ICU with covid related
| symptoms in the EU atm are fully vaccinated.
|
| I'm trying to find a reliable/official source for this
| statistic (not your numbers in particular but numbers at
| all), but am coming up empty-handed. Can you tell me where
| you found this?
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's a statistical effect: far more people are vaccinated
| than not, so they are more likely to show up in the ECU _even
| if_ the vaccine reduces their infection rate.
| prohobo wrote:
| Let me be clear: no place that has _not_ put these measures in
| place has, or will, experience "complete failure" of their
| healthcare system. What you stated is a false dichotomy.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| So uh, maybe we decide that life doesn't need to be permanently
| centered around Covid and just move on?
|
| And realistically that is what society will do. Move on. There
| are infinitely more problems in the world than just Covid.
| Solving for exactly Covid to the exclusion of literally
| everything else is complete madness. Any rational person will
| tell you that. Life is to short to maintain a Covid centric
| lifestyle... life is meant to be lived.
|
| Oh yeah, and we've been wringing our hands about hospital
| capacity for 2 years now. Perhaps we should ask why there isn't
| any effort at all into increasing it? Forcing society to do all
| these restrictions to "protect hospitals" while doing fuck all
| to increase capacity is also madness... perhaps hospitals are
| actually just fine? If they were actually "full" why has
| nothing been done to address the problem? This is an emergency,
| right?
| datameta wrote:
| Spoken like an able-bodied individual of young(er) age and/or
| someone with zero co-morbidities. Fuck the rest, eh?
| prohobo wrote:
| He said what most poor people have been saying the entire
| time. They're willing to take the risk, because the risk is
| lower than all the other problems they have now.
|
| Now, the question is: should you care what poor people say?
| datameta wrote:
| People from lower socio-economic backgrounds are
| statistically more predisposed to develop co-morbidities.
| prohobo wrote:
| They also have bigger problems than this virus, get it?
| ascar wrote:
| This and your other comments in this thread are really
| not the kind of attitude one likes to read at HN. You
| shouldn't be surprised if you get downvoted for it.
|
| This community strives from intellectual discussion and
| not aggressiveness.
| labster wrote:
| > Oh yeah, and we've been wringing our hands about hospital
| capacity for 2 years now. Perhaps we should ask why there
| isn't any effort at all into increasing it?
|
| Yeah seriously, it's been two years, why haven't we doubled
| the number of doctors and nurses by now? Just add more
| conveyor belts to our factorio.
| twofornone wrote:
| You could start by not laying off workers who refuse to get
| vaccinated.
|
| You know, the same workers who have been on the front lines
| exposed to the virus for two years and have unquestionably
| developed immunity. Forcing mandates onto them is insanity.
| They are not spreading covid.
| chki wrote:
| Increasing hospital capacities is almost pointless because
| new cases will be exponential. So doubling your ICU-
| capacities (which is extremely difficult to do, mainly
| because you don't have the staff) will buy you two-three
| weeks until the hospital is full again.
| whiddershins wrote:
| It peaks though, and comes back down. Every. Single. Time.
| Regardless of interventions.
|
| The real world can't sustain exponential growth for too
| long, other limiting factors come in to play.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| So what do you do with the infected people that turn up at
| the overcrowded hospital? Let them die on the street?
|
| Overall COVID19 mortality is still around 2%. In Germany, for
| example, we currently have 100k deaths. That would increase
| _fivefold_ if you let every currently unvaccinated person get
| infected, and that 's assuming we can provide the same level
| of care for all of them (i.e. hospitals are _not_ over
| capacity).
|
| > Perhaps we should ask why there isn't any effort at all
| into increasing it? - Building hospitals
| generally takes more than 1.5 years. - Training
| nurses does too, although at least there is some elasticity
| in supply. - Mortality among patients hospitalized
| with COVID 19 is around 10%. Keeping them out of the hospital
| in the first place is much more effective than increasing
| hospital capacity.
| fhany wrote:
| The winter outbreaks in the northern hemisphere seem to
| disprove these conjectures:
|
| https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/christmas-cancelled-gi...
| guilhas wrote:
| The future looks grim with governments mandating health
| procedures on the population against their will
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I'd rather be vaccinated than someone force Covid on me. To me,
| if you choose to be unvaccinated, you are showing how little
| you care about those around you and how little you care if they
| die.
| guilhas wrote:
| Those around me, or are vaccinated so it does not matter, or
| chose not to be vaccinated in which case also does not matter
|
| I would rather no one forces anything on anyone
| pezzana wrote:
| > Many hospitals are struggling to cope with the increasing
| number of intensive care patients. There could be around 6,000
| Covid-19 patients in intensive care by Christmas -- regardless of
| any measures implemented by Germany's leaders -- the country's
| Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency
| (Divi) warned Wednesday.
|
| The article doesn't really talk about the rate of change to date.
| An article from The Guardian puts this into perspective:
|
| > Daily new infections in Germany have broken records in recent
| weeks, with many hospitals operating at or over capacity.
| Authorities said 73,209 new cases were recorded in the past 24
| hours. Deaths have surged from a rolling seven-day average of
| just over 10 a day in August to nearly 300 this week.
|
| To enforce something like this policy requires:
|
| - laws and penalties
|
| - a method for identifying those who get special treatment
|
| - verification procedures
|
| You'd think a country like Germany would be especially sensitive
| to the idea of segregating 1/3 of the population for special
| treatment. I'm going to assume this isn't lost on anybody there.
|
| The question then becomes: what if this doesn't work? What if
| biology overtakes the law (i.e., a new variant begins sending the
| vaccinated into hospitals as well)? What if biology has already
| overtaken the law?
|
| If it does work, when does it end? If it ends, under what
| circumstances is it Ok to re-impose? What precedent does this set
| and what unintended consequences might result (e.g., a new strain
| of a virus with a vaccine emerges)?
| nazinazinazi wrote:
| Total fucking NAZIS!
|
| In Austria they are arresting and throwing into prison people who
| refuse to get the vax.
|
| In Australia they have concentration camps for people who are
| testing positive.
|
| Anyone cheering this on is on the WRONG FUCKING SIDE OF HISTORY.
| You all will perish and if it is war you want - WAR IS COMING!
|
| NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
|
| NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
|
| NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
|
| NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS! NAZIS!
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Good. Here's hoping the US follows suit. Thankfully the Supreme
| Court has already settled the constitutionality issue:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
|
| This is "A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an
| epidemic of a lethal disease".
|
| Now, I'm vaccinated and support vaccination (though, I'm on the
| fence about forced vaccination - though I do think it can be a
| fire-able offense, if you can't telecommute). However, does
| 1.6% reach the bar of a "sufficiently lethal" disease,
| especially now that our medical system has regained its footing
| and is more capable of handling the number of patients now that
| vaccination rates have reached 70%?
|
| Bodily autonomy is an important right. Forced sterilization, as
| referred to in the article, was a nightmare. Forced mental care
| facility commitment, was/is fraught with abuse, especially when
| we consider lobotomies. Granted, this is nowhere near that, I
| will agree. But, as you say, precedents will be set about what
| is or is not legal to circumvent for body autonomy due to an
| epidemic of a lethal disease.
|
| Is social unrest use a lethal disease, caused by social media?
| Should steps be taken to "inoculate" us from ourselves?
| fabian2k wrote:
| 71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for COVID,
| this is from a poll published today.
|
| Our governments failed pretty hard in this wave, which is why we
| now need to take more drastic measures again when the entirely
| predictable course events would take this winter became apparent
| even to our politicians. But at a point were planned operations
| for other diseases like cancer get cancelled all over the place,
| when people requiring acute care get long delays until they find
| a free intensive care bed somewhere, you can't ignore this any
| longer.
|
| Requiring vaccinations for non-essential activities with many
| people is something we should have done much earlier, it's long
| overdue. It's the least restrictive measure that has a good
| chance of doing both, reducing the spread and encouraging more
| people to get vaccinated.
|
| The failure to organize the vaccine boosters is another big
| issue. It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be
| effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive care
| and were to some degree avoidable.
| krater23 wrote:
| >It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be
| effective
|
| Looks like you are really a optimist. I would say, 'It's clear
| now that the vaccines require one dose every 5-6 months to be
| effective against hard covid symptoms'.
|
| Additionally I would not say 'Our governments failed pretty
| hard in this wave', instead I would say 'Our governments failed
| hard during the complete pandemic'.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 4 months or could be even less. I don't know if we need to
| debate that vaccines are not the way out and we need heavy
| stress on therapies
| fabian2k wrote:
| We simply don't know. There are other vaccines that require a
| delayed third dose, so I don't think it is that unlikely that
| the boosters could cause a much longer-lived immunity. But it
| could also be that we'll need yearly boosters, or maybe only
| for the elderly.
|
| I'll accept "Our governments failed especially hard this
| wave", the problems were more predictable this time and the
| responses were worse.
| notjes wrote:
| Our governments should have done nothing. People, doctors and
| clinics would have taken care of this easily. Also, it would
| be a good community building exercise. But no. Once the
| Governments stepped in, it was all lockdowns, prohibition and
| ban of repurpose drugs, soldiers marching through streets, 80
| years of ethics preaching tossed out the window in a heart
| beat.
| arsome wrote:
| While I do feel the restrictions have been widely
| overzealous, to say "People, doctors and clinics would have
| taken care of this easily." is an absolute falsehood. The
| failure of the healthcare system to keep up in many places
| is what caused many restrictions to become a necessity in
| the first place.
| martneumann wrote:
| It's not the government who cried for help because of
| overflowing ICUs, it was the hospitals.
| [deleted]
| zibzab wrote:
| In the very beginning Germany was doing _extremely_ well,
| until the protesters showed up.
|
| Which is crazy, because Germany managed to do well by good
| organisation and mass testing, not by lockdowns.
| retromario wrote:
| Uh, Germany locked down pretty hard, several times. "Good"
| organisation and mass testing came later.
|
| Source: my last two years with three kids at home
| notjes wrote:
| Via polling, you can conjure a majority for most stupidest
| shit. That is why founding fathers invented the constitution
| and the bill of rights.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| > 71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for
| COVID, this is from a poll published today.
|
| how does that match up with only 68.7% being fully vaccinated?
|
| me f.x. I am fully vaccinated and do not at all support
| mandatory vaccinations. I doubt I'm the only one.
|
| (https://impfdashboard.de/)
| rory wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy that the 71% number is representative
| either but-- presumably they don't poll children, who have
| lower vaccination rates.
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| Your own link puts it at 79,3% of eligible adults with at
| least 2 shots, from this I would strongly presume that the
| poll was mostly asking adults and excluded (pre)-teens.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >71% percent of Germans support mandatory vaccinations for
| COVID, this is from a poll published today.
|
| From the article:
|
| >Germany, much like Austria, has one of the lowest vaccination
| rates in western Europe, with 68.4% and 65.6% of eligible
| adults vaccinated respectively, according to the ECDC.
|
| More Germans support mandatory vaccinations than are actually
| vaccinated? Seems like it should be the opposite. There are
| many vaccinated people (like myself) who oppose mandatory
| vaccinations, but are there unvaccinated people who support
| vaccine mandates? If so, I haven't met one.
|
| >It is clear now that the vaccines require 3 doses to be
| effective, the delays here cause increased load in intensive
| care and were to some degree avoidable.
|
| That's not clear at all. In fact, all the data shows that
| incidence of mortality and severe illness among those with 2
| vaccine doses and 3 is virtually nil. Reducing your chance at
| mortality while fully vaxxed from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000
| is hardly significant, even though its technically correct that
| your chances of dying are "double" without the "booster". Nor
| is there any data that multiple shots reduce transmission
| rates.
| arrrg wrote:
| These political polls are typically only include people 18+
| (people who can vote), and among those the vaccination rate
| is around 80 percent.
| [deleted]
| nwellnhof wrote:
| The 68.4% number is wrong or outdated or maybe relative to
| the whole population including minors. Currently, 79.3% of
| German adults are vaccinated. This is according to official
| numbers with actual numbers estimated to be up to 5
| percentage points higher.
| caeril wrote:
| I bet on the order of 71% of Germans supported mandatory
| discrimination against undesirables in 1940 too, but here we
| are yet again, claiming that what a majority of the population
| supports is indicative of moral correctness.
|
| If these measures don't work, like literally every
| authoritarian measure undertaken by governments so far, maybe
| Germany can put all the un-vaccinated into camps, too. We need
| to keep the unpure away from us.
|
| Sure, the R0 value of the contagion amongst a 100% vaccinated
| population is still >1.0, and there are early indications that
| Omicron has a sufficiently mutated spike protein as to render
| the vaccine immune response ineffective, but why let
| epidemiological facts stand in the way of exercising power over
| one's inferiors?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It's really hard to sympathize with people fighting for the
| "right" to infect me with a disease.
| bavent wrote:
| And really hard to listen to people compare vaccine
| mandates to the holocaust.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| If you're vaccinated, how can anybody infect you with it?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| How did you and a whole bunch of other people apparently
| hear "95% efficacy against severe disease" and somehow
| decide that meant "100% efficacy against infection"?
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| They did loudly proclaim 100% efficacy against infection
| when vaccines were firstly introduced. Like many other
| such proclamations that turned out to be wildly
| incorrect. No surprise people learned to discredit all
| such claims and their sources.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, they really didn't.
|
| November, 2020: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-
| release/press-release-deta...
|
| > Primary efficacy analysis demonstrates BNT162b2 to be
| 95% effective against COVID-19 beginning 28 days after
| the first dose;170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were
| evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus
| 8 in the vaccine group
|
| November, 2020: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-
| releases/news-release-d...
|
| > This first interim analysis was based on 95 cases, of
| which 90 cases of COVID-19 were observed in the placebo
| group versus 5 cases observed in the mRNA-1273 group,
| resulting in a point estimate of vaccine efficacy of
| 94.5% (p <0.0001).
|
| April, 2021: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-
| release/press-release-deta...
|
| > Thirty-two cases of severe disease, as defined by the
| CDC, were observed in the placebo group versus none in
| the BNT162b2 vaccinated group, indicating that the
| vaccine was 100% efficacious in this analysis against
| severe disease by the CDC definition (95% CI,
| [88.0,100.0]). Twenty-one severe cases, as defined by the
| FDA, were observed in the placebo group versus one case
| in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group, indicating 95.3%
| efficacy by the FDA definition (95% CI, [71.0, 99.9]).
|
| They've been clear since the very beginning that
| vaccinated people could still get infected, and that
| efficacy was regarding severe disease.
| detaro wrote:
| Then you surely can link such an announcement?
| [deleted]
| mythrwy wrote:
| It's hard to sympathize with people who still believe this
| series of vaccines prevents others from spreading
| infections and thus all measures to require compliance are
| fine.
| krastanov wrote:
| See sibling comments for the citations. Vaccines
| significantly lower the chance for transmission.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Maybe. One non peer reviewed study. Reduces transmission
| some. For a brief period.
|
| How does this translate into force everyone to take an
| experimental shot (with some number of side effects and
| deaths) every X months?
|
| We see, right now, outside of "studies", I've seen in my
| own family and I'm not the only one, these vaccines do
| not stop transmission. They do not stop infection. Maybe
| they "reduce". They do not stop.
|
| So parent posters histrionics about "right to infect me
| with disease" is just.. histrionics. The vaccinated can
| also infect him with a disease.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| That's what they said back then, too.
| blub wrote:
| They're really not, they don't know you nor do they care
| about you.
|
| That was just a reframing you did to make them seem
| malicious, when they're mostly indifferent, afraid or
| misinformed.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| How are they infecting you if you're vaccinated?
|
| It's really hard to sympathize with people that think it's
| their right to force something on other people's bodies.
| This isn't polio.
|
| I'm vaccinated. I stay healthy. I have no fear of un-
| vaccinated people and neither should you. If you are
| fearful you've fallen victim to your own anti-science
| mental health anxiety with a load of media brainwashing on
| top.
| mandmandam wrote:
| People saying this are being flagged, but the fact remains
| that COVID vaccines don't stop transmission.
|
| The CDC themselves state that viral load is similar in
| fully vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
|
| And yes, people have the right to refuse medical treament;
| that's a human right. It's there for very good reasons, and
| there is broad agreement among civil liberties experts on
| that point.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The CDC themselves state that viral load is similar in
| fully vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
|
| You missed a pretty important bit of that statement.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-
| var...
|
| > However, like prior variants, the amount of viral
| genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated
| people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means
| fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for
| less time than unvaccinated people.
|
| As for transmission, the CDC _actually_ says the vaccines
| do help here. (Not stop, but reduce.) https://www.cdc.gov
| /coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...
|
| > And yes, people have the right to refuse medical
| treament; that's a human right.
|
| Most states in the US require a variety of vaccinations
| to enter public school. New York requires it even for
| private/religious schooling (https://www.health.ny.gov/pr
| evention/immunization/schools/sc...). Measles, DTaP,
| polio, etc. have widespread existing requirements
| predating COVID.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I didn't miss any part of that statement.
|
| Everything I stated is factual, and I insinuated nothing
| else.
|
| The person I was replying to clearly inferred that
| vaccinated individuals don't infect others, and that's
| dangerously wrong.
|
| As for schools requiring vaccines, there is a lot to take
| issue with there - mRNA vaccines are different, with no
| long term data, for a different virus. The mandated
| vaccines don't require biannual top ups, and are for
| viruses that actually threaten children themselves -
| school agechildren have a near-zero mortality risk form
| COVID.
|
| But the fact remains, regardless of all the weeds we
| could get into there, and NY state law notwithstanding,
| ** _human beings have a fundamental right to not be
| forced into medical treatment**_.
|
| As I said, civil liberties groups have written on this at
| length, and been largely ignored. I think ignoring them
| requires a level of stupidity bordering on evil.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Everything I stated is factual, and I insinuated
| nothing else.
|
| You left a pretty important bit out. Lying by omission is
| still lying.
|
| > human beings have a fundamental right to not be forced
| into medical treatment
|
| Thought experiment: If SARS-CoV-2 were as transmissible
| as it is currently, but 50% fatal, would you still hold
| that position?
|
| Do human beings perhaps _also_ have a right to life and a
| certain level of protection from others who might do them
| harm?
| krastanov wrote:
| This study (respectable institution, large sample, not
| yet peer reviewed) seems to claim vaccines significantly
| lower the chance of transmisson. https://www.medrxiv.org/
| content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
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