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Which horse film is your favorite? This poll is closed. |
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| Black Beauty |
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2 | 1.06% |
| A Talking Pony!?! |
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4 | 2.13% |
| Mr. Hands 2x Apple Flavor |
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117 | 62.23% |
| War Horse |
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11 | 5.85% |
| Mr. Hands |
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54 | 28.72% |
| Total: | 188 votes | ||
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Reinfections are still so rare that to pretend they are common you need to twist out a case where if you reduce infections by 30,000% and infect 90% of the population you can get 22 reinfections and pretend that is some staggering number by playing with percentages North Carolina has ~10000 reinfections out of ~1.3M cases. Most of the reinfections have been during Delta. ~0.75% in 3 months isn't "so rare" for a disease that will be with us forever.
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Oct 16, 2021 04:52
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poll plane variant posted:North Carolina has ~10000 reinfections out of ~1.3M cases. Most of the reinfections have been during Delta. 1% in 3 months isn't "so rare" for a disease that will be with us forever. Could you source this? This is why you were banned from the last iteration of the thread--repeated doomposting without sources. quote:After some discussion the mod staff decided that since you bring nothing to the covid thread other than unsourced alarmist poo poo stirring, you can have a permanent vacation from the DND Covid thread. Do not post in this thread again. From the IK of this thread, no less.
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Oct 16, 2021 04:53
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goethe.cx posted:Could you source this? This is why you were banned from the last iteration of the thread--repeated doomposting without sources. The state has started to release them recently. https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard/reports There's a one-off report, I'm not sure if there's any way to access them as we move forward but you can see the huge spike during the Delta wave. They're definitely collecting the data to make sure the cases get recorded multiple times instead of counting as one case the first time the person was ever tested positive. Oklahoma also tracks this and has seen similar numbers during Delta: https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/post/covid-reinfections-have-jumped-300-may#stream/0 poll plane variant fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Oct 16, 2021 |
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Oct 16, 2021 04:55
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poll plane variant posted:The state has started to release them recently. https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard/reports Ok, so it looks like you've got 200 post-vaccination reinfections, and 94 reinfection deaths, out of 10,812 total documented reinfection cases since March of 2020. It doesn't say what percentage of the 94 reinfection deaths were vaccinated. It also doesn't say what percentage of the reinfection cases required hospitalization. I would argue that this data suggests that severe outcomes from reinfection are rare. And it's the severe outcomes, not just the mere fact of reinfection, that we should be most concerned about.
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Oct 16, 2021 05:02
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goethe.cx posted:Ok, so it looks like you've got 200 post-vaccination reinfections, and 94 reinfection deaths, out of 10,812 total documented reinfection cases since March of 2020. It doesn't say what percentage of the 94 reinfection deaths were vaccinated. It also doesn't say what percentage of the reinfection cases required hospitalization. I would argue that this data suggests that severe outcomes from reinfection are rare. We'll see about the vaccine and hospitalizations, but just working with what we have a ~1% CFR is just a hair lower than the statewide 1.2% we've been seeing recently for CFR. If reinfection is not severe at 1% CFR, then wild-type covid was not severe.
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Oct 16, 2021 05:05
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poll plane variant posted:The state has started to release them recently. https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard/reports It's good that they're keeping track of reinfections  Of the 10,812 reinfections, only 200 are in vaccinated people. NC has a vaccination rate of around 50%. Seems like the vaccines are working pretty well. fake edit: beaten, kinda real edit: if my math is correct, if you're getting 0.75% reinfection over 3 months that works out to the expected time to reinfection being 400 months (33 years) I'm not sure what the original point was here Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Oct 16, 2021 |
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Oct 16, 2021 05:05
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Also regarding reinfections here's an interesting little exercise in excess-deaths number crunching suggesting mass reinfections in Iran, though obviously it's pretty far off in the weeds it's interesting to see foreign numbers getting crunched. Not sure I buy it given how much whatever they're seeing is showing up in excess deaths compared to what we're seeing in those numbers in US states with no NPIs and negligible vaccinations. https://twitter.com/Mahan_Ghafari/status/1446154506216017921
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Oct 16, 2021 05:16
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poll plane variant posted:Also regarding reinfections here's an interesting little exercise in excess-deaths number crunching suggesting mass reinfections in Iran, though obviously it's pretty far off in the weeds it's interesting to see foreign numbers getting crunched. Not sure I buy it given how much whatever they're seeing is showing up in excess deaths compared to what we're seeing in those numbers in US states with no NPIs and negligible vaccinations. It is worth pointing out that Mahan Ghafari is the lead author of the linked preprint. You're quoting a tweet thread of someone hyping their own non-peer-reviewed research.
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Oct 16, 2021 05:30
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Professor Beetus posted:Look, I'm just going to say this loud and clear. The thing with all the threadbans coming off of this thread is that I really don't want people looking at names when deciding who is worthy of their time and effort to respond to. If you have a problem with a poster for whatever reason, leave it out of the discussion, period. I don't give a gently caress. I was a terrible person and poster when I joined this site in 2007, as my rap sheet can attest. If you think people aren't capable of learning and changing from their experiences here, I say you're wrong. Please just debate and discuss the issues and leave the "well so and so said it, so it MUST be bullshit" attitudes at the door. If your goal is to continue having high-quality discussions in this thread, I don't think your attitude of "giving leeway to folks to participate in the thread" is a sustainable policy, and I can tell you why. You should familiarize yourself with Brandolini's Law, also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: quote:"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." That is literally what we have been seeing in this thread since the start. Consider this post from just a few hours ago: Gio posted:https://twitter.com/peterhotez/status/1449052799946395657?s=21 How long do you think it took Gio to post this? I'd guess, probably 30 seconds or less. They grabbed the tweet URL, pasted it into their post and then followed up with a short and snarky one-liner. Now, contrast it with Fritz's response: Fritz the Horse posted:For more context, this is in Delhi during a period where "overall vaccination levels were only about 5% in Delhi, most healthcare workers had received one or two doses of ChAdOx1-nCov19 (Astra-Zeneca / Serum Institute, India) or BBV152 (Bharat Biotech, India)." So this is discussing Delta reinfection of people with mostly only natural immunity and no significant vaccination, which is what Hotez is mentioning in the tweet text. How long do you think it took Fritz to write the above? I would guess 15 minutes or so, which included reading or at least skimming the study, understanding what it was actually saying, then quoting the relevant parts and integrating them into a counter-argument. So there you have it: 30 seconds to post bullshit vs. 15 minutes to refute it. Bullshit asymmetry principle at work! Now multiply this discrepancy in time and effort with all the instances where one side has posted idiotic alarmist/doomer takes and the few remaining posters who seemed to actually have formal scientific training painstakingly refuted them. Do you see the issue? Do you understand why we had experts leave the thread literally a dozen pages in? Why do you insist on tolerating bad posts and the posters who continue to make them? What do the rest of us gain, exactly, from being repeatedly exposed to such posts and dealing with the burden of having to refute them? How much bullshit do you think we can tolerate before we, too, leave this thread? Why are you apologizing to posters after giving them the lightest of punishments? Why does your top priority as an IK revolve around finding a multitude of excuses to avoid moderating the thread you are the IK of? Thorn Wishes Talon fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Oct 16, 2021 |
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Oct 16, 2021 05:37
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HelloSailorSign posted:Even if you take some of the more pessimistic measures of nobody testing positive quarantining, that you're only catching 50% of cases Pessimistic? CDC’s estimate through May of this year was that one in four point two infections were reported, i.e. 23.8%.
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Oct 16, 2021 05:50
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Fritz the Horse posted:It is worth pointing out that Mahan Ghafari is the lead author of the linked preprint. You're quoting a tweet thread of someone hyping their own non-peer-reviewed research. The Confidence Intervals on their estimates of attack rate seem extremely broad for the more remote provinces. One provice starts out in Wave 1 with 15.5(0.000-93.6) to end up at wave 5 with 259(41.8-480) as the percentage of the population infected.
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Oct 16, 2021 06:13
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CeeJee posted:The Confidence Intervals on their estimates of attack rate seem extremely broad for the more remote provinces. Yeah it really needs someone with a good background in statistics and epidemiological modeling (specifically how excess mortality and attack rates are calculated) to review it. I mentioned way back that methodology is imo the hardest part of a research article to analyze because it often requires background knowledge. I saw they were using past mortality rates to estimate excess mortality and kinda shrugged. Not something I'm familiar with to do a good critique. Just because the lead author is tweeting about it doesn't mean it's bad research, but it very much needs outside experts to review and comment on it. late edit: fwiw the lead author Mahan Ghafari is a PhD student in the zoology department at Oxford who studies viral evolution and his advisor (last author and the other corresponding author) is a also a viral evolution / population genetics expert. Again that doesn't make this bad research, but as they're not epidemiologists I'd definitely want to double-triple check the methodology and quality of the input data and output statistics. Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Oct 16, 2021 |
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Oct 16, 2021 06:22
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CeeJee posted:The Confidence Intervals on their estimates of attack rate seem extremely broad for the more remote provinces.
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Oct 16, 2021 06:30
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Lmfao signal boosting a non peer reviewed paper by the author without looking or reading it. Exactly why there's a problem in this thread, posting literal bullshit with no understanding from non peer reviewed sources trying to push a point out and screaming that it's gospel.
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Oct 16, 2021 07:27
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I would personally be more interested in seeing posts in this thread about the daily COVID reality from people in countries other than the US or the UK, since they are both deeply aberrant, and more from places that will be comparable to my own experience once Australia opens up i.e. Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada. I would certainly be that more interested in this than just scrolling past ill-informed slanging matches about pre-print scientific studies, anyway.
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Oct 16, 2021 09:54
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:If your goal is to continue having high-quality discussions in this thread, I don't think your attitude of "giving leeway to folks to participate in the thread" is a sustainable policy, and I can tell you why. You should do a big performative post when you finally leave and make everyone realize you should have had the star you want so badly. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 16, 2021 10:48
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freebooter posted:I would personally be more interested in seeing posts in this thread about the daily COVID reality from people in countries other than the US or the UK, since they are both deeply aberrant, and more from places that will be comparable to my own experience once Australia opens up i.e. Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada. I would certainly be that more interested in this than just scrolling past ill-informed slanging matches about pre-print scientific studies, anyway. It's very much true that this thread is largely US-centric and also that the US has had a unique(ly stupid and harmful in many ways) response to the pandemic. Would it be helpful/interesting for you and other non-Amerigoons to discuss some research from the nations you mention (Aus, Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, maybe NZ, others)? I don't want to present myself as the thread arbiter for reading scientific literature, but I don't at all mind spending some time reading and trying to analyze some research specifically from those countries. I've honestly been very gladdened by posters taking a crack at reading academic publications ITT. Literature review and critical analysis of data are collaborative processes and skills sorely lacking in the general population. I hope I'm not being repetitive but I really encourage posters here to give it a try. I obviously can't offer anything wrt the politics of pandemic in any of those nations but I'd be happy to take a swing at discussion of research in nations similar to Aus and hopefully get others participating.
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Oct 16, 2021 10:53
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If you want to have a purely academic discussion about Covid focused solely on research papers wouldn’t SAL be a better forum for it?
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Oct 16, 2021 10:58
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Helith posted:If you want to have a purely academic discussion about Covid focused solely on research papers wouldn’t SAL be a better forum for it? I mean, that's a question for the thread IK and mods. My goal in pushing reading of literature is not to get a bunch of academics/experts to peer-review stuff on the Something Awful forums. It's to give your average poster some tools and practice reading scientific publications so they can appraise news and social media sources. Twitter is really bad in this regard, you get a ton of twitter hot takes from your curated feed of people you agree with. imo it's important to have a glance at the actual scientific literature to see if it supports the claims being made. It's a similar thing to what used to happen a lot in USNews/USPol. Posters would hot drop rage-inducing tweets that often misrepresented the article linked. idk I just care a lot about scientific literacy, especially in the COVID age. There's been some really good discussion of literature from a variety of posters and I think that's good! I'm not saying it should dominate discussion or be the sole focus of this thread, but when there's such a huge volume of COVID science being published or in pre-print it seems to me to be valuable to do somewhat deeper dives into it.
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Oct 16, 2021 11:09
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Peer-reviewed paper finds that COVID infection epigenetically accelerates biological aging about 10 years compared to chronological age, most pronounced in those under 60: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8201243/ also: got an email from the novavax study administrator, should be getting a nvax booster through it very soon https://ir.novavax.com/2021-08-05-N...ary-Vaccination Petey fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Oct 16, 2021 |
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Oct 16, 2021 12:49
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freebooter posted:I would personally be more interested in seeing posts in this thread about the daily COVID reality from people in countries other than the US or the UK, since they are both deeply aberrant, and more from places that will be comparable to my own experience once Australia opens up i.e. Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada. I would certainly be that more interested in this than just scrolling past ill-informed slanging matches about pre-print scientific studies, anyway. The daily reality in Canada varies by which part of the country you’re in and when we/they introduced NPIs, as well as what sort of vaccination rate they have going. The good news is: it appears fairly minimal interventions like “wear any mask when indoors in public” is sufficient to prevent growth even at high case levels, with a sufficiently vaccinated population. We decided not to do that for a time here so our healthcare system is badly stretched, largely with people who are unvaccinated, who make up around 90% of COVID-related ICU patients despite being 30% of the population or so (source: https://twitter.com/cbcfletch/status/1449129666816589826?s=21 ). The main takeaways are: the vaccines are very good, even moderate NPIs are good and necessary, and we invite our own doom primarily when we refuse to do even the bare minimum.
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Oct 16, 2021 13:06
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PT6A posted:The daily reality in Canada varies by which part of the country you’re in and when we/they introduced NPIs, as well as what sort of vaccination rate they have going. The good news is: it appears fairly minimal interventions like “wear any mask when indoors in public” is sufficient to prevent growth even at high case levels, with a sufficiently vaccinated population. to expound upon this new brunswick cancelled all their interventions in like june or whatever and have also seen case counts rise problematically (well, for nb, it’s not an alberta sitch) despite having pretty great vaccination rates. their premiers support dropped from 80% in may to 36% last week as a result really goes to show how just doing really easy basic poo poo goes a very long way.
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Oct 16, 2021 13:16
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Weeks ago I mentioned a grad student friend who had been working on a vaccine that can stay stable at room temperature for at least a week, and can be dehydrated and rehydrated and still be effective, but they can't get anyone to manufacture it or publish about it because of the perception it's no longer important. It's now been published, at least: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/44/e2116147118
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Oct 16, 2021 13:26
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Fritz the Horse posted:It's very much true that this thread is largely US-centric and also that the US has had a unique(ly stupid and harmful in many ways) response to the pandemic. It's totally understandable that an English-speaking forum is going to heavily skew towards English-speaking countries, which is mostly the US and UK with a smattering of Canada/Australia/Europeans speaking English as a second language. It just kinda sucks because the US and UK are seriously loving Not Normal, both in terms of COVID and (politically) in general. I personally am just not interested in scientific studies. I don't know how to parse them. I think a lot of people posting here don't really know how to either, which is fine, but a lot of them pretend to. The GBS thread is full of people making dumb jokes (which is fine, that's what it's there for!) and this one is full of people playing armchair scientist. It kinda feels like there's no middle ground. Someone said in the last page or two said that they'll worry about dire warnings from scientific studies when they show up in the mainstream media, which I think is about the right attitude for a layperson. PT6A posted:Canada report Thank you! This is what I'm interested in. But what I'm interested even more is: how do you feel about this? What is your daily life like? Do you feel OK going out to bars and restaurants, or even family gatherings? Are you feeling pissed off when you see somebody with a mask around their neck at the supermarket? Have you already had COVID? Do you fear contracting COVID? Do you feel like anything is "back to normal"? Australia has been alternately a zero COVID paradise or a temporary dystopia with the predicated goal of returning to zero COVID. That was our reality for the 18 months of the pandemic. We are literally right now (NSW this week, Victoria next week) entering the brave new world where heaps of people are vaccinated and we just start accepting cases in the community, constrained by strict restrictions. I feel very anxious about it! Our newspaper pundits keep pointing to places like Denmark or Ireland, but I would actually like to hear first hand what it's like there (or in places like them).
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Oct 16, 2021 13:31
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Petey posted:Weeks ago I mentioned a grad student friend who had been working on a vaccine that can stay stable at room temperature for at least a week, and can be dehydrated and rehydrated and still be effective, but they can't get anyone to manufacture it or publish about it because of the perception it's no longer important. It's now been published, at least: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/44/e2116147118 cool stuff. in epi circles i don’t buy that a lack of publishing has been down to a perceived lack of importance because epi people know that places like africa have huge swaths under 5% (sometimes you just get lovely reviewers though) it’s interesting research regardless since dehydrated vaccines are always going to be useful if the work can be extrapolated
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Oct 16, 2021 13:36
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freebooter posted:Thank you! This is what I'm interested in. Well, in terms of things I absolutely can't do, there's not very much. Large social gatherings (more than two households) are not to be allowed, but I don't really want to do that anyway. I'm fully vaccinated, so are all my family members, and there's no kids in the mix, so I feel quite safe at the moment and once we start vaccinating kids I think everything will be a lot more normal. Mask compliance where I live has been decent, and I'm really only bothered by idiots not doing it in contexts where our vaccine passport is not necessary. If you're dicknosing while fully vaccinated, in a room filled with other fully vaccinated people... it's not good, but I don't have the energy left to get seriously upset about it. I haven't been going to restaurants or bars recently because our case count is very high, but when it was much lower I had no problem going to restaurants and now that the vaccine is essentially required to do that, I'd have even less problem with it. The much more significant source of stress was the healthcare system being in relative crisis (and we're not out of the woods on that yet, we're still at about 175% of our baseline ICU capacity, because hospitalizations lag cases) so everything you do seems a little dangerous, because what if there's not a bed available for you if you get in a car crash or something? I suppose a nagging source of frustration would be that: we've basically mandated masks indoors, and vaccines for non-essential things, and it looks very much (at this point) that that was enough to stop the increase in cases and move to a decrease. It really was that easy and we still hosed it up due to bizarre political concerns.
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Oct 16, 2021 13:45
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Meanwhile, here in Red Statesville, wearing a mask indoors is seen as a political act, and asking an unmasked person to mask is seen as an insult. 
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Oct 16, 2021 14:03
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Texas has been one of the more embarrassing disasters in the US. Our govt and lots of the people around the state were never enthusiastic supporters of caring for your fellow man and as soon as the vaccine came out almost everyone went back to normal even though we're only at like a 50% vaccination rate. Mask use at the store is maybe 10%. Ive been lucky enough to wfh on a bit of land so we didnt have to go out much, and i took care of most of that. Recently we've started going to a small event or two but we're each triple vaccinated, the kids are vaccinated, and my mother in law across the street is vaccinated. Texas schools reopened, and i totally get where our failing society needs that child care function, but opened with a patchwork of different implementations and in my area the superintendent has gleefully reported how he will be ignoring county regulations. No option to do hybrid or online school for non vaccinated youth. Thankfully, there haven't been huge outbreaks around here and so we've weathered the actual storm fairly well, but most of the state lost its mind in the process.
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Oct 16, 2021 14:10
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Bel Shazar posted:Texas has been one of the more embarrassing disasters in the US. Our govt and lots of the people around the state were never enthusiastic supporters of caring for your fellow man and as soon as the vaccine came out almost everyone went back to normal even though we're only at like a 50% vaccination rate. Mask use at the store is maybe 10%. Texas also has one of the worst dumpster fires in the US of healthcare, with many many hospital systems that are for profit that have been actively on fire for the last year and a half.
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Oct 16, 2021 14:22
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UCS Hellmaker posted:Texas also has one of the worst dumpster fires in the US of healthcare, with many many hospital systems that are for profit that have been actively on fire for the last year and a half. Yes, even the dumpster fires are bigger in texas.
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Oct 16, 2021 14:27
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speaking of tx, i was in el paso from mid-august to mid-september. i felt safer there than i did in nyc or dc. nearly everyone in a public setting was wearing a mask. distancing was whatever, but it's whatever/non-existent everywhere. last i checked the vaccine rates there were a good deal above average too. i get it's a whole different beast than what most people assume when they hear tx, but it was great to see regardless.
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Oct 16, 2021 14:28
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abelwingnut posted:speaking of tx, i was in el paso from mid-august to mid-september. i felt safer there than i did in nyc or dc. nearly everyone in a public setting was wearing a mask. distancing was whatever, but it's whatever/non-existent everywhere. last i checked the vaccine rates there were a good deal above average too. That's a fair point. El Paso has been a stand-out success. Consequently our state government has pretended they don't exist and can teach us nothing.
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Oct 16, 2021 14:54
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yea, i managed to get out to some more rural parts of tx as well, and i got the impression most of tx wants nothing to do with el paso, and el paso wants nothing to do with the rest of tx. and for certain, i can't blame el paso one bit. so yea, wonder what the tx numbers look like without el paso.
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Oct 16, 2021 15:35
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Petey posted:Peer-reviewed paper finds that COVID infection epigenetically accelerates biological aging about 10 years compared to chronological age, most pronounced in those under 60: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8201243/]
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Oct 16, 2021 16:14
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poll plane variant posted:Seems pretty bad, like it's going to be difficult to "live with" repeat reinfections and "mild" breakthroughs You are living with it right this very second! “However, a DeltaAge acceleration has been observed in people infected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), cytomegalovirus, or bacteria such as Helicobacter pylori [32].“
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Oct 16, 2021 16:23
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You are living with it right this very second! I'm happy to report there's work being done on these again. We tolerate way too much disease burden from CMV and I'm hoping Moderna's phase 3 this year works out. HIV still existing is of course a travesty and a national shame and I don't want to live in a world where covid is so normalized. "Never again" vs "well that's just what happens now".
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Oct 16, 2021 16:57
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poll plane variant posted:Also regarding reinfections here's an interesting little exercise in excess-deaths number crunching suggesting mass reinfections in Iran, though obviously it's pretty far off in the weeds it's interesting to see foreign numbers getting crunched. Not sure I buy it given how much whatever they're seeing is showing up in excess deaths compared to what we're seeing in those numbers in US states with no NPIs and negligible vaccinations. The very first paragraph of the pre-print says that they don't have reliable data on COVID in Iran, "due to the scarcity of epidemiological analyses and lack of provincial data on the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths". As a result, they're attempting to estimate everything based solely on excess mortality counts. Not only are they trying to estimate death counts that way, but they're also trying to estimate case counts and infection rates that way. Other posters have already brought up the hilarious confidence intervals such an approach leads to, so needless to say, we shouldn't be drawing any larger conclusions from this paper. Also, can we just go ahead and ban preprints from this thread if so many of the people who keep posting them are incapable of applying even the most basic amount of scrutiny to them? Having to engage with papers like this is frankly a waste of time. Petey posted:Peer-reviewed paper finds that COVID infection epigenetically accelerates biological aging about 10 years compared to chronological age, most pronounced in those under 60: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8201243/ That's one interpretation - other studies have suggested that people with accelerated biological ages are more likely to get COVID in the first place. The idea of using epigenetic markers as a proxy for not only measuring biological age, but also contrasting it with chronological age, has only really come into vogue in the last few years, so it's still only poorly understood and there's a lot more research to be done. It's something to keep an eye on, but as far as I can tell, no one has yet released a study that'd capture a clear smoking-gun measure: testing blood samples from the same person pre and post COVID, to see whether COVID infection impacts these epigenetic markers or is impacted by those epigenetic markers.
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Oct 16, 2021 17:19
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freebooter posted:I would personally be more interested in seeing posts in this thread about the daily COVID reality from people in countries other than the US or the UK, since they are both deeply aberrant, and more from places that will be comparable to my own experience once Australia opens up i.e. Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada. I would certainly be that more interested in this than just scrolling past ill-informed slanging matches about pre-print scientific studies, anyway. Thanks for this. This thread can be great but I do feel like it's become so American-centric other experiences are getting drowned out, which is definitely frustrating. Earlier this year you saw a lot more goons posting from Europe, Asia, and South America and they just haven't as of late. To pitch in like P6TA I'm in Canada but a difference province (Ontario instead of Alberta). To the surprise of most people living here, we're doing much, much better than the predictions. The seven day average is sitting at 441 (for reference our population is around 14.5 million) and steadily dropping, with the vast majority of cases being in the unvaccinated/partially vaccinated. Hospitalizations and ICU numbers are also stable, with again the vast majority being unvaccinated. A key difference is unlike Alberta we have a higher vax rate (around 8% higher IIRC) and we kept minimal NPIs. It also looks like the gamble to stretch out the shot interval, and to mix doses, seems to have paid off (although they did it for supply reasons not that they were confident it would), as we seem to be seeing somewhat higher effectiveness than places that stuck to matching shots and the 3-4 week interval (average up here seems to have been around 2-3 months between shots give or take). Like really minimal NPIs compared to what they were when cases were bad (Toronto was basically in lockdown for seven months in winter/spring). Masking is required indoors unless you're eating or drinking, and some places have capacity limits still (and private indoor events are limited to 25 people), but that's pretty much it. Events are open, restaurants and bars are open, gyms are open, hell schools have been open for six weeks and cases are still dropping. There has been an increase in cases in the school aged population that can't get vaxxed but it didn't translate to an increase in cases in the rest of the population. Mask compliance is reasonably good, with the vast majority being medical-style masks at least where I am. N95s/KN94s are pretty rare but some people do use them, and I've maybe seen two full respirators in public across the entire pandemic. We have a number of vaccine mandates that have definitely helped get a few more percentage points. Our vaccine passport system is a pretty bad implementation, but it is there and required for any sort of indoor event now (also eating in a restaurant, indoor weddings, etc...). The Feds also mandated all federal employees and federally regulated industries (transportation, banks, telecoms, broadcasting, plus a few others) get vaccinated. Restrictions are also coming in for federally regulated travel. Soon you won't be able to take any flights (domestic or international) without proof of vaccination, same for non-commuter rail. Life seems, honestly closer to normal than it's been for almost 20 months. People visit family, friends, go out to eat. Masking when you leave the house has sort of become second nature, you don't really notice it as much anymore. You'll unmask with people you trust who are vaccinated indoors and outdoors. Most people I know won't hang out with anyone unvaccinated, and I know of at least one wedding that basically had to purge a decent number of one of the families from the guest list because they won't get the vaccine (and they have an excuse at least in that the hall won't let anyone unvaxxed in). However they're becoming increasingly rare (less than 13% of the eligible population is completely unvaxxed while making up something like 70-75% of the cases). For most people I know the anxiety is slowly starting to wane. It definitely took a while to start and pretty much everyone I know is being sensible with precautions, but there really isn't same sense of mortal fear anymore. Oh sure you have the occasional scare with symptoms, but you just stay at home for a day, book a test, get your results the morning after the test, and it always seems to come back negative because hey, sometimes you need a reminder that COVID didn't eliminate rhinoviruses. Maybe we'll have a spike in the winter who knows, but by then 5-11s will be mostly vaccinated so that'll help drive down the case numbers further. In general I'd say people are feeling cautiously optimistic here. So basically yeah it seems to be that with a sufficiently high vaccination rate you still need some precautions, but nothing really extreme, and nothing really burdensome on day to day life, in order to drive case numbers down. Mr Luxury Yacht fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Oct 16, 2021 |
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Oct 16, 2021 17:42
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 IK Hat post:Look, pushing buttons isn't the sole job of a moderator and I wanted to try something different because I truly believed that there would be enough common ground in here to appeal to better angels. Hopelessly naive, I know, but COVID has been such a dramatic and crushing blow for so many people, that I wanted to make everyone feel welcome to express their concerns and fears, and give others the opportunity to help them navigate it. It's clear my approach is only working for some folks, and that a harder stance needs to be taken wrt to some posts, and going forward there's going to be less tolerance of misleading poo poo getting posted, whether intentionally misleading or not. But this isn't "the credentialed expert forums" it's the something awful forums, and if you don't want to expend the time or energy to help lay people work through their misunderstandings of news blips, then don't. No one is obligated to post here if they find it exhausting. freebooter posted:I would personally be more interested in seeing posts in this thread about the daily COVID reality from people in countries other than the US or the UK, since they are both deeply aberrant, and more from places that will be comparable to my own experience once Australia opens up i.e. Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada. I would certainly be that more interested in this than just scrolling past ill-informed slanging matches about pre-print scientific studies, anyway. I agree, and I really enjoyed seeing the responses you got from this post. If more folks want to chip in with international perspectives, they are especially welcome to.
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Oct 16, 2021 18:08
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Assuming I get time today or tomorrow I can do a brief recap for British Columbia. It's been interesting as a former American to follow along and see the differences in healthcare applications
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Oct 16, 2021 18:21
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