lil poopendorfer posted:

Unban Owl of Cream Cheese, the thread is too slow without him

lil poopendorfer posted:

Unban Owl of Cream Cheese, the thread is too slow without him

Mr. Mercury posted:

Stop posting about posters. Post covid info, something on topic to discuss, or get the gently caress out.

please just leave and save us all the frustration of reading back-and-forth bullshit constantly

Professor Beetus posted:

This please. I am 100% okay with this thread being slow moving since it actually facilitates better quality discussion. There are plenty of people who were capable of making the same points as oocc who weren't also addicted to constant shitposting and riling up their posting enemies. If you have further feedback about the moderation of this thread you can PM me, or if you think I'm a worthless idiot you can PM EHF or one of the other DND mods.

Thanks.

freebooter posted:

As Australia's PCR testing system buckles under the Omicron strain and the health authorities (understandably) strip back the definition of a close contact to someone who's been in a private residence with a positive case for four or six hours or whatever the gently caress it is now, and as rapid tests become as rare as hen's teeth and pharmacies start price gouging for them (I think $20-$30 is now the going rate for a single test?) the prime minister thought this was a good time to dig his ideological heels in:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/03/scott-morrison-resists-calls-to-provide-free-rapid-covid-tests-to-australians

I woke up to this on the radio this morning and actually said out loud "I'm already paying for it you fuckhead!" Just... even from a purely cynical political viewpoint, I cannot grasp why he took this line and how he thinks it's going to benefit him? I know my self-curated social circles and social media feeds trend left, but when even my conservative family are saying "wtf is he doing," that's when it feels like a bizarre misstep. Cracking out boilerplate conservative talking points to warn that people might have to pay for tests which they had never heard of three weeks ago but are now expected to use and are already paying for... just so so loving tin-eared and strange. Weird loving thing to do!

This is without even going into the fact that the federal government has abrogated responsibility for almost everything to the states all the way through the pandemic, and several of them are already saying that they'll procure rapid tests themselves and give them out for free. Absolute best case scenario is that this has a neutral effect on the federal government and even just politically speaking (never mind doing the right thing for your loving country!) I cannot understand why they think this is wise. What a totally cooked era we live in.

Vinny the Shark posted:

I started feeling a bit sick around the 24th Dec. I was down with a stuffy nose, sore throat, coughs and sneezes for 25th-28th. By the 30th I was feeling nearly all better. I got a test on the 28th and New Year's morning my PCR results were positive. I assumed it was a common cold as I didn't fall short of breath or lose my sense of taste and smell like a lot of people have reported. I got the Johnson&Johnson shot in April and the Moderna booster last month.

So my experience is that chances are pretty good you're going to catch it, even with vaccines and boosters. However, it will most likely feel like a moderately rough cold for 3-5 days. I am feeling nearly 100%, aside from needing to clear my throat every few minutes. Heck, I spent last night beating up my punching bag in my basement for 30 min. Still staying home until next week just in case, but I'm not at all worried about it.

Keep doing everything right- vaccinate, get boosted, wear masks, stay home if you feel sick and try to keep your distance from sick people. But if you do catch it, don't panic. You're probably going to be fine.

Edit: Based on my relatively mild symptoms and swift recovery I think I caught the omicron strain, but my test didn't specify.

A Terrible Person posted:

Welcome to abandoning any sort of sane safety measures simply because you're tired. Hope it's everything you wished for.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

pretty great username/post combo

A Terrible Person posted:

He was warned what every other country has to deal with, repeatedly, and simply bitched that lockdowns were just too tiresome and annoying. Now he's getting exactly what he wanted and is regretting it immediately.

The schadenfreude is amazing.

Mellow Seas posted:

I'm behind you a bit, but on a similar trajectory so far. Started to feel sick two days ago, no noticeable downward trend so far. Sneezing a lot and coughing, but not so much that I can’t like, smoke weed. My partner was able to do her daily workout today without much trouble. She’s fully boosted; I got my boost on Dec 23 so it probably wasn’t fully effective when I was infected (which was almost certainly 12/29).

I went on a long weekend trip with three other households, everybody had tested negative beforehand. If you don't want to get Covid right now, don't do things like that!

Still a little nervous that things could get worse but encouraged so far.

A Terrible Person posted:

He was warned what every other country has to deal with, repeatedly, and simply bitched that lockdowns were just too tiresome and annoying. Now he's getting exactly what he wanted and is regretting it immediately.

The schadenfreude is amazing.

SpartanIvy posted:

The US population seems to teeter between the opinion of "It's not bad enough to do anything yet" and "It's too out of control to do anything now"

SpartanIvy posted:

The US population seems to teeter between the opinion of "It's not bad enough to do anything yet" and "It's too out of control to do anything now"

Rust Martialis posted:

It's pretty clear that double vaccination at best partly reduces infection rates. Maybe boosters do but I've seen no clear data on that.

CmdrRiker posted:

VitalSigns posted:

Yeah I think this is what people from covid zero countries who complained about the restrictions never really got, "getting back to normal" doesn't mean the end of lockdowns and everything is fine now. That's what they had during the periods when there was no community spread!

"Getting back to normal" by abandoning covid zero means covid running rampant through your country ripping through the population and every trip to the grocery store is a roll of the dice, and yeah you can go to the bar if you want but only if you're willing to catch covid.

I had to lock down for 14 months straight here in Texas, didn't see anybody, double-masked it when I was forced back into work and prayed, because the alternative was getting covid and maybe dying (I have asthma). Doing a lockdown for a month at a time to crush 14 cases sounds like heaven.

How are u posted:

Two of my old buddies have caught it over the last week, but they're fully vaccinated and doing just fine.

Somehow, so far at least, I managed to avoid it over 2 weeks of holiday with family in a blood red death-cult state + going to visit a tourist town in another blood red death-cult state. So far so good! Home now in my wonderful, more sane blue state where it feels so good to sit in a county with 90%+ vaccinations.

Sharks Eat Bear posted:

I haven’t read the preprint yet so take it with a grain of salt, but I saw this on Eric Topol’s Twitter and I think he generally seems to be a decent source of info. I imagine a limitation could be short follow up so limited info on durability of booster efficacy, but still suggestive of boosters having a meaningful impact on reducing transmission.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1476212140956553222?s=20

Sharks Eat Bear posted:

I haven’t read the preprint yet so take it with a grain of salt, but I saw this on Eric Topol’s Twitter and I think he generally seems to be a decent source of info. I imagine a limitation could be short follow up so limited info on durability of booster efficacy, but still suggestive of boosters having a meaningful impact on reducing transmission.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1476212140956553222?s=20

Gio posted:

Devil’s advocate: To what extent, if at all, would personal decisions to social distance confound these findings? I imagine someone boosted is more cautious than someone with only two jabs is more cautious than someone who has none.

Gio posted:

Devil’s advocate: To what extent, if at all, would personal decisions to social distance confound these findings? I imagine someone boosted is more cautious than someone with only two jabs is more cautious than someone who has none.

Gio posted:

Devil’s advocate: To what extent, if at all, would personal decisions to social distance confound these findings? I imagine someone boosted is more cautious than someone with only two jabs is more cautious than someone who has none.

quote:

Similarly, there are likely underlying behavioural drivers for an individual being unvaccinated, which are likely to confound with other risky behaviours that might be expected to increase both transmission and susceptibility to infection (e.g. poor use of face masks, reduced attention to hygiene). The use of registry data limits our inference to associations between transmission/susceptibility and vaccination status of individuals, where part of the association is due to general characteristics of the individuals themselves rather than their vaccination status. However, a key point of our study is that these biases are non-differential with respect to variant, i.e. they would be expected to affect transmission of both the Delta and Omicron VOC identically because risky behaviours and/or underlying health concerns should affect both variants equally. Consequently, although the associations between vaccination status and transmission for each variant are likely to each be susceptible to bias, we believe that any such bias is non-differential with respect to variant. Therefore, our results concerning the relatively higher transmissibility of the Omicron vs. Delta VOC for vaccinated individuals should be robust to these potential biases.

VitalSigns posted:

Doing a lockdown for a month at a time to crush 14 cases sounds like heaven.

droll posted:

Yeah it was pretty amazing reading Australians whine about their "harshest 3 month lockdowns in the world!" while posting from the COVID free pub afterwards. Some even had the gall to suggest us Americans, that have been in the same "harsh" lockdown for nearly 2 years but with more risk of death from the grocery store, were having it easier because we could theoretically choose death. I hope freebooters government took their 18 months of gifted prep time to build hospitals and train hcws because jfc their numbers are looking grim.

freebooter posted:

It wasn't a month and it didn't crush them. I don't know how many times I have to explain this, but I was very pro-lockdown and pro-zero-COVID right up until the point where it stopped loving working because the outside world cooked up a far more contagious variant as a nice little present for us.

I don't know about anyone else but I've never said or even implied this. Even in Melbourne which probably racked up more cumulative time in lockdown than anywhere in the world, I still wouldn't trade the last two years of my life with somebody living in Europe or the US, because the COVID-free periods were great!

The federal government closed the borders at the start of 2020 and then did sweet gently caress all, but the states had (and continue to have) probably the best COVID responses in the Western world with the exception of the New Zealand government. Case in point, while the PM bangs on about personal responsibility and not wanting to undercut RAT suppliers, the state governments just ignore the prick and give them out anyway:

https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/94212

Judakel posted:

If China can lick omicron, it will be clear that your lockdowns were inefficient due to the way they were policed, not because lockdowns don't work.

Wang Commander posted:

I suspect it's more due to inadequate tracing and quarantining within lockdown vs cops beating people down or whatever. If you're not testing the lockdown region daily, what are you even doing, you're just smearing out family member infections over time and space.

Wang Commander posted:

I suspect it's more due to inadequate tracing and quarantining within lockdown vs cops beating people down or whatever. If you're not testing the lockdown region daily, what are you even doing, you're just smearing out family member infections over time and space.

Judakel posted:

If China can lick omicron, it will be clear that your lockdowns were inefficient due to the way they were policed, not because lockdowns don't work.

Judakel posted:

Yeah, China really is the only one doing massive testing on that scale. Every wealthy country should have a public health corps in response to covid to handle testing on that scale.