my take on covid 19 response

[Argus]

1 hour ago, OftenWrong said:

Not to worry. You can stay in the rabbit hole if that makes you feel safer.

Just get out of the way when us freemen go outside.

Sure. Just don't breathe anywhere around me.

[Aristides]

1 hour ago, OftenWrong said:

Not to worry. You can stay in the rabbit hole if that makes you feel safer.

Just get out of the way when us freemen go outside.

Na, I think it should be the other way around.

[OftenWrong]

1 hour ago, Aristides said:

Na, I think it should be the other way around.

I have been out there since day one, I never had a covid day off. I get no government cheese handouts. Never need a mask but I wear them if I see that other people are very afraid. I can tell who the chicken shits are real quick.

[OftenWrong]

1 hour ago, Argus said:

Sure. Just don't breathe anywhere around me.

It's like I tell my employees- Can't handle the stress? Maybe it's better you stay home then.

[Guest]

Just now, OftenWrong said:

I have been out there since day one, I never had a covid day off. I get no government cheese handouts. Never need a mask but I wear them if I see that other people are very afraid. I can tell who the chicken shits are real quick.

Are you a "Bud Man"?

I always wanted to be a "Bud Man', but I could never pretend to be tough enough.

[OftenWrong]

1 minute ago, bcsapper said:

Are you a "Bud Man"?

I always wanted to be a "Bud Man', but I could never pretend to be tough enough.

I don't know what a bud man is. I drink ales.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:

I don't know what a bud man is. I drink ales.

That's what I could never understand about Bud Men.  If they're so tough, how come they drink gnat's piss?

Edited March 3, 2021 by bcsapper

[OftenWrong]

4 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

That's what I could never understand about Bud Men.  If they're so tough, how come they drink gnat's piss?

It's a good question. Maybe you should ask them the next time.

Around here real men drink 50.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, OftenWrong said:

It's a good question. Maybe you should ask them the next time.

Around here real men drink 50.

I usually stick to one or two.  Three tops.

Edited March 3, 2021 by bcsapper

[OftenWrong]

3 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

I usually stick to one or two.  Three tops.

I'd say you're over the limit tonight.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, OftenWrong said:

I'd say you're over the limit tonight.

Nah, just the one.  This one.  It wasn't bad.

[OftenWrong]

 

My take on the covid-19 response:
<farting noises>

[Argus]

A pretty clear record of the incompetence and complacency of the federal government in addressing covid, from start to finish. A few interesting excerpts.

But after decades without so much as a typhoid outbreak, by the 21st century Health Canada had largely turned their attention towards more ethereal issues, like anti-bullying.

“We lost the ‘hard bastards’ who are the people who need to lead in times of pandemics,” said Amir Attaran, a public health researcher at the University of Ottawa. “We instead gained the world of gentle social scientists, and they are just constitutionally unfit for some of the decisions required in a crisis.”

Steven Hoffman had spent his entire career in the top echelons of public health: The UN, the WHO, Harvard University and the Canadian Institute for Health Research. He remains director of the Global Strategy Lab, a Toronto institute charged with investigating “transnational health threats.” And at a time when all but one of Canada’s 22,000 COVID-19 fatalities were still alive, Hoffman told TVO host Steve Paikin that “what we are seeing in many countries around the world is overreaction.”

After the United States restricted travel with China in early February, Health Minister Patty Hajdu chided opposition calls for Canada to do the same, saying in the House of Commons “one of the interesting elements of the coronavirus outbreak has been the spread of misinformation and fear across Canadian society” and accused the Conservatives of trying to “sensationalize the risk to Canadians.”

A month later, at a time when COVID-19 had already spread to 60 countries and killed 3,000 people worldwide, Tam issued a March 1 tweet celebrating Zero Discrimination Day and re-upping her report warning against the health consequences of stigma. On March 5, Trudeau resisted calls to close Canada’s borders or even require self-isolation for arriving travellers, saying “there is a lot of knee-jerk reaction that isn’t keeping people safe.”

No such hesitancy was occurring in other Pacific Rim countries. Only three days after reports of a mysterious pneumonia emerged from Wuhan, South Korea began screening incoming travellers from the city. Taiwan was even faster: Enacting stringent measures on inbound Wuhan flights within hours of the first official reports of what would become COVID-19.

Last March, Canada was refusing to take similar measures, even in the face of clear evidence of what the virus could do.

 

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-complacent-country-how-canadian-public-health-allowed-itself-to-be-steamrolled-by-covid-19

[Argus]

Another recital of how badly we performed and how easily things could have been changed if we'd had better leadership.

Taiwan started screening flights from China within hours of the first reports of a pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan. South Korea followed suit three days later. New Zealand and Australia had both slapped restrictions on travellers from China by early February. None of these countries were spared from seeing community spread of COVID-19, but what these early closures did was to dramatically limit how hard they were hit.

Canada only got around to closing its border to non-essential travel on March 20. And even then, it was never a particularly hard border closure.

In the worst days of the first wave, you had direct flights coming in daily from New York City, Italy and some of the harder hit areas of China. The passengers aboard these flights – if they were met at all by a quarantine officer – were simply asked to go home and self-isolate for 14 days.

The result? Canada got seeded with a whole lot of coronavirus in early 2020, so by the time we first noticed we had it, we had a lot of it.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/canada/canada-didnt-need-to-lose-21000-to-covid-heres-what-could-have-saved-them/wcm/aba97d12-055e-447b-b15a-1742af73d322

[CITIZEN_2015]

The so called experts are at it again. Take whatever vaccine that we tell you!!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-shopping-johnson-pfizer-1.5938725

They want to take away vaccine choice from Canadians pushing us to take low efficacy vaccines but they don't bloody have the ones with high efficacy. 

These are the same experts who advised too  damn late on border closures only after the virus was established in Canada (unlike New Zealand).

These are the same experts who advised against wearing masks for several months after pandemic till virus was well spread in Canada.

These are the same experts who took weeks and months to approve already approved and used vaccines causing virus to seriously harm citizens.

As far as I am concerned I choose what vaccine enters my body. I don't trust their expert opinion and they can keep what they are preaching.

Edited March 10, 2021 by CITIZEN_2015

[Argus]

Nearly every flight from India has covid positive passengers. 

Gee, maybe if we'd been testing all along we could have kept some of them from spreading it in Canada!

Of course they're required to have a negative test before getting on the plane, but this is a part of the world notorious for forged documents and fake negative Covid19 tests are freely available.

And data provided by Health Canada reveals nearly all of the twice-daily flights between Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport and Toronto Pearson Airport carried passengers infected with COVID-19.

Health Canada doesn’t indicate how many passengers tested positive on each flight, instead providing three-row ‘ranges’ of where an infected person sat on the plane.

While seven of the 21 Toronto-bound Delhi flights list the affected rows as ‘unknown,’ the rest show a minimum of six rows impacted by infected passengers, suggesting each flight carried more than one case.

Nearly every India-Toronto flight this month carried COVID+ passengers | Toronto Sun

Edited March 20, 2021 by Argus

[myata]

I hope it's no surprise for our experts" that the immunity for this disease may not be lifetime long but likely limited to several months (and for vaccines, still unknown though likely similar). Now, "up to" eight months means that after six some part of the vaccinated population will begin loosing the protection. And six months after December 2020 means end of May. With obvious conclusions for some provinces that aren't even planning to begin general vaccinations at that point.

I do hope it's not a secret, but then after Wuhan, 18 years after the failure of SARS who can be sure? And just in case, we should be prepared to a multiple year pandemics not in the least thanks to the efforts of the bureaucracy that has stubbornly and adamantly refused to try and implement anything but the least common denominator of mediocre and ineffective management elsewhere (and often belatedly). This is only the numbers, facts. And the facts do not lie.

[OftenWrong]

1 hour ago, myata said:

I hope it's no surprise for our experts" that the immunity for this disease may not be lifetime long but likely limited to several months (and for vaccines, still unknown though likely similar). Now, "up to" eight months means that after six some part of the vaccinated population will begin loosing the protection. And six months after December 2020 means end of May. With obvious conclusions for some provinces that aren't even planning to begin general vaccinations at that point.

I do hope it's not a secret, but then after Wuhan, 18 years after the failure of SARS who can be sure? And just in case, we should be prepared to a multiple year pandemics not in the least thanks to the efforts of the bureaucracy that has stubbornly and adamantly refused to try and implement anything but the least common denominator of mediocre and ineffective management elsewhere (and often belatedly). This is only the numbers, facts. And the facts do not lie.

I read that the vaccines do not in fact impart immunity, they only reduce the severity of symptoms for the Convid. Which is why Fauci et al are now making noises like, we must not stop wearing masks and social distancing after the vaccine.

A person who was infected and recovered does have actual immunity, and for at least 6 months. At least. So hopefully your concerns about now being 8 months in are unfounded. Also keep in mind that people did not get infected at the very onset, but a gradual infection rate over course of a year. People were infected last month and got over it, etc.

If all that is true then it seems the only lasting and positive way out of this mess is to allow a carefully controlled spread of the infection through the healthy populace, ALLOWING people to get the virus and get over it. As waves of recovers persons rise from their beds and go back into the world, herd immunity (real immunity) gets established. The virus is defeated. So in other words the exact opposite of what most countries have done.

My take on the covid-19 response-  Peecaca,

 

[dialamah]

12 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:

person who was infected and recovered does have actual immunity, and for at least 6 months. At least. 

 

13 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:

persons rise from their beds and go back into the world, herd immunity (real immunity) gets established. The virus is defeated.

Each wave is "defeated" for six months - "maybe" longer, is that your idea?  Because that just sounds like a perpetual pandemic, to me.  

17 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:

If all that is true then it seems the only lasting and positive way out of this mess is to allow a carefully controlled spread of the infection through the healthy populace,

A "carefully controlled spread"?  For the past year, governments have been trying to limit the spread but people have gotten sick and died anyway. 

Unless you think people with co-morbidities and the elderly should be permanently separated from everyone else, locked in their homes perhaps?  

In this "targetting for herd immunity" plan, you need to ask yourself what percentage of the workforce  is not "healthy enough" to be exposed to the virus.  You need to include fat people, people who smoke, people who have asthma or any other COPD, people who've recovered from cancer, people with kidney disease or heart disease, people with diabetes, people who've had a transplant, people who are immuno-compromised from other conditions you've never heard of.  Just because someone looks healthy and shows up to work every day doesn't mean they're among "the healthy" and unlikely to get very sick or die from Covid. 

Even if someone is "healthy enough" to get Covid, what about the people they live with - their spouse, kids, siblings or parents - are not?  How do you "target" all but one for getting Covid, when everyone lives together under one roof?

The idea that you can keep a virus contained to a certain group, and leave other groups unaffected, is as sensible as thinking you can pee in a pool and keep it all within some defined boundary.  

Mass immunization for Covid is the best scenario, even if it has to be regularly repeated, and even if it "only" reduces the severity of illness and the likelihood of hospitalization and death.  If that is the case, researchers will develop more effective vaccines over time.  Which they'll no doubt be doing anyway.

[myata]

1 hour ago, dialamah said:

Mass immunization for Covid is the best scenario, even if it has to be regularly repeated, and even if it "only" reduces the severity of illness and the likelihood of hospitalization and death.  If that is the case, researchers will develop more effective vaccines over time.  Which they'll no doubt be doing anyway.

It all in the numbers, as said. If "mass immunization" takes a year and the immunity from vaccine lasts 6 months then mass immunization benefits mostly PS pension plans and budget deficits and can well go on forever. Only secondary school math and basic common sense, no need to be an expert.

[Zeitgeist]

The point of the vaccines isn't to prevent you from getting the virus but to keep you from getting hospitalized or dying from it.  Probably a year after the vaccine some kind of booster will be necessary.  That's manageable.  Beginning to lose immunity after 6 months doesn't mean you lose all immunity; it means you become less immune over time, but you likely retain enough immunity to prevent death over the longer term.  We don't know the long term immunity yet, but annual boosters are already being tested.  After everyone who wants a vaccine gets one, all restrictions must be lifted.  At that point if you're afraid of your own shadow, stay home.  

[OftenWrong]

Sweden is achieving herd immunity without vaccines. They are ahead of all other European countries in controlling the outbreak, and ahead financially. Hospitalizations and deaths have virtually stopped.
 

Quote

Sweden’s strategy has shown human society can still function in the presence of the coronavirus, despite the apocalyptic warnings from modelers and media.

While modelers predicted 96,000 Swedes would die by July as a result of its policy, as of mid-August the figure stands at less than 5,800, a higher per capita total than neighbors such as Finland, Norway, and Denmark but superior to Belgium, Italy, and others. COVID-19 case numbers continue to fall. Deaths and hospitalizations have flatlined, and reports indicate Stockholm is on the verge of herd immunity.

BBC: Sweden’s Economy Is Doing Way Better Than the Rest of the EU During the COVID-19 Pandemic

 

My take on Covid-19: We are doing things bass-ackwards.

Edited March 22, 2021 by OftenWrong

[myata]

The smart way would be of course to focus on protecting the vulnerable population (for example over 60, conditions and workers) from the start including the need for continuous administration based on scientific data on how long the acquired immunity lasts.

That would involve: 1) knowing the target population 2) effective and fast channels of delivery 3) close and effective coordination between health authorities on all levels 4) specific and exact targets, like all vulnerable population in 3/4 months.

Yes it is possible because our neighbors south are doing the entire Canada in less than a month, UK has done it in three and vulnerable population is likely a fraction of the total.

Then building on the created process and with improvement in supply gradually extend it to the whole population maintaining the rate and target time. That could have worked - if someone thought about it last summer instead of, or at least in addition to writing mind-boggling policies.

But the experience showed that "smart and effective" is not the name of the game here. That officials at all levels do with any effectiveness mostly obscure policy / order writing, and little else. Oh yeah maybe showing advance training on TV under fanfare while the system six months (and countless millions) in the making won't work on the day of opening. And so we get what we get: "don't have to answer that now" instead of must do and will be done in ... months and I can almost bet that comes September we'll hear "this is oh so new and we now have this new challenge of delivering boosters alongside general vaccination and who could have known yada".

If I'm proven wrong comes September will gladly acknowledge it here.

[myata]

8 hours ago, OftenWrong said:

My take on Covid-19: We are doing things bass-ackwards.

It would be too good because at least shows some originality. But we're just doing what everybody else has tried only less efficiently, slower, and at a higher cost. US had emergency funding program and got Phizer-BioNTech in 6 months. UK got Astra-Zeneca in eight. Canada spent 1.5 billion on "rapid Covid response research" and a year on got... well, it's out there, somewhere.

[myata]

News of a new variant today in India. So, in approximately a year of full pandemics there are 4 new variants with significant difference. The duration of immunity maybe 8 months. And that means that with very good luck, at least one booster would be needed annually. And if variants develop strong resistance, more.

So we have a choice, to keep marching cheerfully to the last year's fanfare or stop and think now, and rethink.

Protect the vulnerable, effectively continuously and non-stop.

Find any efficiencies in the existing system and create new ones.

Focus on immediately available and best treatment.

Create and implement new technologies to provide protection to general public.

Find a way to provide clear and consistent information in the place of incomprehensible mesh of orders and policies.

If this turns out to be a decade-long story, as happened before, a very different world may emerge. And nothing here gives us any assurances that it will be five years from now exactly as it was 150 ago.