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Which horse film is your favorite?
This poll is closed.
Black Beauty 2 1.06%
A Talking Pony!?! 4 2.13%
Mr. Hands 2x Apple Flavor 117 62.23%
War Horse 11 5.85%
Mr. Hands 54 28.72%
Total: 188 votes
[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

 
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Carrier
May 12, 2009


420...69...9001...

Potato Salad posted:

Don't bother with freebooter yet, the notion that reinfections are not cumulatively risingly dangerous is DOA, give it a few months unless something is very very wrong across several high quality t cell / humoral response labs -- which is totally plausible, someone can suggest a method of action that upends the proposed understanding of t-cell-printer-broke levels of immune apoptosis and naive t cell depletion, sending the entire field back to the drawing board for another year

it is unreal in how* many dimensions cov2 is specifically perfect for harming humans

Maybe I'm having a stroke but I'm really struggling to parse what you are saying here lol

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dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

Carrier posted:

Maybe I'm having a stroke but I'm really struggling to parse what you are saying here lol
As I read it - The idea that reinfections get worse and worse isn't supported by anything we've observed in the general population, basically, and seems to be a single study vs. all other recent studies and our entire understanding of the human immune system.

But who knows? Maybe I have it backwards?

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

They're saying the opposite.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Carrier posted:

Maybe I'm having a stroke but I'm really struggling to parse what you are saying here lol

that's because I wrote poorly

Major t cell researchers and immunologists studying the hour-by-hour timeline of the humoral response via hospital blood samples happened to simultaneously bring pre-review prints of their CoV-2-And-You research to publications in ~November. Broad early takeaways are that (1) yes OAS is an issue with CoV-2 much like it's an issue with CHCs, this was broadly expected (2) several answers are proposed for last year's mystery of "guys where did everyone's T cells go in these convalescent and months-after-infection blood samples?" and perhaps some of the proposed methods of action will get weeded out in review

it's the synthesis of 1+2 that gets divisive quickly, so that needs many concurring opinions by well respected investigators before accepting anything because, well, immunity is loving intensely complex magical poo poo!

Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jan 25, 2022

Rust Martialis
May 8, 2007

At night, Bavovnyatko quietly comes to the occupiers’ bases, depots, airfields, oil refineries and other places full of flammable items and starts playing with fire there
Denmark - 25 January 2022

Welp, more of the same. Cases up, hospitalization predictably way up, yet ICU and vent use staying lower.

Age groups - I hadn't realized how many elderly never made it to ICU. :(

src: 21_noegletal_pr_region_pr_fnkt_alder.csv

pre:
Age	Cases		Hospital	ICU		Dead
00-02	26447		850		29		2
03-05	55823		183		9		*
06-09	165430		308		6		*
10-15	104482		237		15		1
16-19	114453		546		21		*
20-39	459754		5225		195		23
40-64	405809		8968		239		300*
65-79	51693		6330		160		1107*
80+	10493		2618		96		2154
All	1394384		25265		770		29
* age 0-9 deaths:1
* age 10-19 deaths: 1
* split the 60-69 group in two


Table 1. Actual and Reported Denmark COVID Cases reported per day
pre:
	Actual	Reported	New	Total
Date	Cases	Cases	Reinf.	Hosp.	Hosp.	ICU		Vent		Dead
==============================================================================================
Jan 25	   ---	43,734	2,856	318	918	44 (+1)		28 (-1)		14
Jan 24	18,677	40,348	2,501	242	894	43 (+1)		29 (+2)		13
Jan 23	37,914	42,018	2,755	215	813	42 (-3)		27 (-1)		12
Jan 22	34,697	36,120	2,285	220	781	45 (+1)		28 (-1)		25
Jan 21	37,406	46,831	3,160	244	813	44 (-5)		29 (+1)		21
Jan 20	37,420	40,626	2,639	232	825	49 (-1)		28 (-2)		15
Jan 19	37,595	38,759	2,285	248	821	50 (+1)		30 (+1)		16
Jan 18	40,303	33,493	2,002	264	810	49 (-3)		29 (-8)		14
Jan 17	41,486	28,780	1,815	203	802	52 (-7)		37 (-4)		11
Jan 16	28,179	26,169	1,614	159	734	59 (+0)		41 (+1)		16 
Jan 15	25,188	25,034	1,644	202	711	59 (-1)		40 (+4)		16
Jan 14	25,883	23,614	1,519	215	757	60 (-4)		36 (-2)		15
Jan 13	23,776	25,751	1,822	194	755	64 (-9)		38 (-8)		20
Jan 12	22,575	24,343	1,614	215	751	73 (+0)		46 (+0)		25
Jan 11	22,656	22,936	1,459	181	754	73 (-1)		46 (-1)		14
Jan 10	23,244	14,414	  941	156	777	74 (-3)		47 (-3)		 9 
Jan 09	16,330	19,248	1,327	126	723	77 (-1) 	50 (-2) 	14 
Jan 08	13,573	12,588	  984	161	730	78 (+0) 	52 (-1) 	28 
Jan 07	14,434	18,261	1,482	186	755	78 (-4) 	53 (+4) 	10  
Jan 06	15,417	25,995	2,027	161	756	82 (+2) 	47 (-2) 	11  
Jan 05	17,577	28,283	2,083	204	784	80 (+3) 	49 (+2) 	15
Jan 04	23,698	23,372	1,701	229	792	77 (+4) 	47 (+1) 	15
Jan 03*	25,617	 8,801	  532	169	770	73 (-3) 	46 (-4) 	 5
Jan 02  19,906 	 7,550	  404	163	709	76 (+3) 	50 (+1) 	15
Jan 01   8,631	20,885	1,049	139	647	73 (+0) 	49 (+0) 	 5
Dec 31   9,728	17,605	1,090	177	641	73 (-2) 	49 (-1) 	11
Dec 30  19,927	21,403	1,123	178	665	75 (-2) 	50 (-2) 	 9
Dec 29  17,245	23,228	1,205	173	675	77 (+6) 	52 (+2) 	16
Dec 28  21,955	13,000	  670	177	666	71 (+1) 	50 (+4) 	14
Dec 27  22,616	16,164	  639	115	608	70 (-1) 	46 (-2) 	 7
Dec 26  10,965	14,844	  644	123	579	71 (-2) 	43 (+1) 	13
Dec 25   7,853	10,027	  463	 86	522	73 (-1) 	44 (+5) 	10
Dec 24   7,054	11,229	  527	134	509	74 (+2) 	39 (+1) 	14
Dec 23  12,605	12,487	  613	158	541	72 (+6) 	38 (+1)		15
Dec 22  11,591	13,386	  531	126	524	66 (-1) 	37 (+2)		14 
Dec 21  13,011	13,558	  501	121	526	67 (+1) 	35 (+2)		17
Dec 20  13,288	10,082	  ---	 85	581	66 (+3) 	33 (-2)		 8
Dec 19  10,231 	 8,212
Dec 18  10,049 	 8,594
Dec 17  10.614	11,194
Dec 16  10,171 	 9,999
Dec 15  10,775 	 8,773	  ---	 96	508	66 (+0)		43 (-3)		 9
Dec 13  10,294 	 7,799	  ---	 61	480	64 (-1)		42 (+0)		 9
Dec 12   6,986 	 5,989	  ---	 82	468	65 (+5)		42 (+6)	 	 9
Dec 08   6,560 	 6,629	  ---	 72	461	66 (-1)		38 (-1)		 7
Dec 01   4,464 	 5,120	  ---	 88	439	35 (+1)		35 (+1)		14
Table 2: ICU Bed Usage, Weekly (reported every 2 weeks)
pre:
Date      		Bed Availability
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
17 January  	328 ICU beds, 54 COVID, 66 available
10 January  	331 ICU beds, 72 COVID, 29 available
03 January  	331 ICU beds, 76 COVID, 32 available
27 December	316 ICU beds, 71 COVID, 62 available 
20 December 	317 ICU beds, 60 COVID, 59 available
13 December 	319 ICU beds, 64 COVID, 39 available
06 December 	310 ICU beds, 67 COVID, 10 available <-- squeaky bum time here
29 November	318 ICU beds, 61 COVID, 25 available
Sourcea:
https://www.rkkp.dk/kvalitetsdatabaser/databaser/dansk-intensiv-database/resultater/
https://covid19.ssi.dk/overvagningsdata/download-fil-med-overvaagningdata
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/242ec2acc014456295189631586f1d26
https://covid19.ssi.dk/virusvarianter/delta-pcr

Rust Martialis fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jan 25, 2022

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


dwarf74 posted:

our entire understanding of the human immune system

(musing to the room, not at you)

I think the biggest gripe I have with some of my friends and family through the pandemic is the notion that reinfection must be gentler, per the sum of medical knowledge.

Does it? Any person can think of their lived experience.

We each get infected by Common Human Coronaviruses (often responsible for common colds) regularly enough. We regularly get influenza reinfections. Over time, genetic drift provides younger strains immune escape capacity, and we get the flu again. Sometimes the infection is nothing, sometimes it sucks.

None of this is controversial, yes?

Even without getting into potentially-controversial topics like tissue scarring or accelerated immune ageing, to insist that subsequent variants of a disease must be gentler by rule of prior medical understanding is to misinterpret the pathology of some of our most familiar pests.

Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jan 25, 2022

Stickman
Feb 1, 2004

Not to mention the fact that it’s difficult to correctly identify and properly disentangle causality of accumulating health damage. Just look at how long the effects of leaded gas took to pinpoint. Or the fact that we’re only now discovering that the Epstein-Barr virus (which eventually infects about 90% of people) may be the primary direct cause of MS.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

Potato Salad posted:

I think the biggest gripe I have with some of my friends and family through the pandemic is the notion that reinfection must be gentler, per the sum of medical knowledge
I was trying to interpret a badly-written post, not make an argument :shrug:

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


dwarf74 posted:

I was trying to interpret a badly-written post, not make an argument :shrug:

wasn't directed at you, just prompted by the bit I quoted. I went and added a claudication :)

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal

Stickman posted:

Just look at how long the effects of leaded gas took to pinpoint.

That didn't actually take very long at all, doing something about it took decades because of all the business interests involved

Stickman
Feb 1, 2004

haveblue posted:

That didn't actually take very long at all, doing something about it took decades because of all the business interests involved

Scientists knew that lead was poisonous in high quantities and many initially suspected that leased gasoline would produce enough contamination to cause problems. But then the Public Health Service decided that the quantity of lead was small enough that it wasn’t a problem, and it took 40+ years to collect evidence about its specific effects and build enough scientific consensus to force action.

We all know infectious diseases are hazardous to our health but the specifics of their long-term effects are similarly murky. It’s especially difficult to tease apart effects when diseases are so prevalent that nearly everyone catches them frequently.

Stickman fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jan 25, 2022

virtualboyCOLOR
Dec 22, 2004

haveblue posted:

That didn't actually take very long at all, doing something about it took decades because of all the business interests involved

Speaking of business interests, it seems business is once again interested in making one of the only successful nations to handle covid look bad:

https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1485879735737630724?s=20

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1485941792100999174?s=20

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1484961965764235266?s=20

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1484858656650932226?s=20

It’s honestly one of the most pathetic things. This is on the level of something incels would write about women at this point.

NYT trash for yuppies posted:


For those who become infected, China’s health care system has limited outpatient medical facilities or home care. Many of those who fall ill will not be able to call a primary care physician, go to an urgent care center or get care at home. And if millions need care — even if they don’t need to be hospitalized — the hospitals will rapidly be overwhelmed. Hospitals might even become sites of super spreading events. As recent episodes in the city of Xi’an showed, Chinese hospitals fearful of the virus may deny care to those in need.


Wow I can’t imagine what this is like, living in the US, with rising hospitalization rates and death rates higher than the peak of delta.

virtualboyCOLOR fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jan 25, 2022

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus
I think my favorite thing is the idea that they are going to be less prepared for endemic Covid, real galaxy brain poo poo here.

LifeLynx
Feb 27, 2001

Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time
Grimey Drawer
Apparently there was some NY State lawsuit where some judge ruled classroom mask rules unconstitutional, so I woke up to an email (sent late last night) that said masks were now optional in my daughter's school district. The CHUD parents are celebrating and parroting the "it's your ~personal choice~ if you want to wear a mask, just like it's your ~personal choice~ if you want to keep your kids home and home school them" lines that are fully of selfish attitude. It's all using children as political pawns as usual, because there's already an appeal filed and I've heard as soon as a stay is granted, it's right back to mandatory masks. Which will confuse the hell out of kids - it's already happened once before, last year.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Real foggy brains

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-23/niall-ferguson-china-s-covid-victory-over-america-is-pyramids posted:

(Pyramids??)

China's Covid Victory Over America Turns Out to Be Pyrrhic
The pandemic has revealed Americans to be tacit Social Darwinists, while trapping the Chinese in a vast Panopticon.

Niall Ferguson January 23, 2022, 12:00 AM PST

Authoritarian regimes tend to boast about themselves and denigrate their rivals. President Xi Jinping’s China is no exception. “As the Covid-19 epidemic takes away hundreds of lives every day in the U.S.,” wrote Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, on Jan. 14, “that country’s propaganda machinery is engaging in vicious smears against China’s dynamic zero-case policy of epidemic prevention … Think about it. More than 800,000 Americans died from Covid-19 in the U.S. Behind these numbers, how many sad and desperate stories are there?”

“The experience and facts of the past two years,” wrote Guo Yan in the Economic Daily five days later, “have shown that China's general strategy of ‘foreign defense against imported [cases] and domestic defense against breakouts’ and the general policy of ‘dynamic clearing’ are the Covid prevention policies best suited to China's own national conditions on top of being beneficial to the world … It is the inaction and chaotic actions of some policy makers that have caused the American people to fall into the epidemic crisis time and time again.”

Might the Chinese be right? As we reach the second anniversary of the Covid pandemic, perhaps the most surprising thing is how many Americans have lost their lives compared to how few have perished in China. How are we to explain this astonishing divergence?

The simple answer is that, despite being the source of the virus that caused the pandemic, the Chinese managed containment very successfully, while the U.S. bungled everything from testing to mask-wearing to quarantining.

Some people go even further, arguing (as does Chinese Communist Party propaganda) that the difference in death tolls illustrates the superiority of China’s political system over America’s corrupt and self-indulgent democracy. However, I have never bought this second argument. And I am no longer satisfied with the first.

More from

Bloomberg opinion

We now have a U.S. death toll of between (depending on your source) 860,000 and 883,000 deaths due to Covid, the 20th-highest mortality relative to population globally. Actual mortality is running at 19% above the expected figure (compared with 5% in Canada). We are heading for a million deaths by May. According to the Economist, we may already be there.

True, in relative terms — deaths per million — U.S. mortality is not the worst in the world (it ranks 19th). In terms of excess mortality, too, the U.S. has fared better than a number of Latin American and Eastern European countries. The puzzle remains that on paper — according to the Global Health Index published in 2019 — the U.S. was better prepared for a pandemic than any other country.

Even more remarkable is how few Chinese the new coronavirus has killed: Fewer than 5,000, meaning a death rate three orders of magnitude smaller than the U.S. rate. Considering that the pandemic originated in Wuhan, this is an astonishing achievement. Of course, skepticism is always warranted where Chinese statistics are concerned. But even the Economist’s estimates, which suggest that there may have been significantly higher excess mortality in China, point to a far lower relative death toll than in the U.S.

Two things explain the remarkably high mortality the U.S. has suffered in this pandemic. First, the American public health bureaucracy failed utterly. Initially, when we knew very little except that it was contagious and dangerous, the relevant agencies were staggeringly complacent when they should have been frantically testing, tracing and isolating.

Then, in March 2020, the official mind flipped from complacency to panic, partly on the basis of a paper by the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson (no relation), who argued that we had to lock people in their homes until vaccines were available or 2.2 million Americans would die.

As it became clear that this approach would wreck the global economy, the public health officials resorted to improvisation, alternately tightening and loosening restrictions on economic and social life in a reactive and mostly ineffective way. Masks were at first dismissed as unnecessary, then became mandatory even in some outdoor locations, where they served no purpose.

When some skeptical scientists challenged the wisdom of lockdowns, the public health establishment was dismissive. The Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020 by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, offered a persuasive critique of blanket pandemic lockdowns, arguing instead for “focused protection” of vulnerable groups such as the elderly or those with medical conditions.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, emailed Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises ... Is it underway?”

Now that we have vaccines with high efficacy and a variant that causes mild flu-like symptoms in most vaccinated people, the official mind remains wedded to its playbook — in the parts of the U.S. where most people are vaccinated, such as northern California, where I live. Educational institutions have reverted to remote learning (an oxymoron, as everyone knows); masks are ubiquitous, even outdoors; a host of petty regulations persist.

Meanwhile, in the states with significant numbers of unvaccinated and vulnerable people, almost no precautions are taken. Consequently, the intensive care units are filling up once again. I make this the fifth wave of Covid in the U.S., and already mortality relative to population is higher than in South Africa, Denmark and the U.K., where the omicron variant struck sooner.

Yet there is a second reason for the relatively high American mortality during the pandemic, which has to do with public attitudes and behavior. I have come to the conclusion, after observing my fellow Americans for two years that — whatever our public health officials may tell us, and whatever some of us may say — in practice and in aggregate we are a nation of Social Darwinists.

Social Darwinism is a contentious term, I know, but its history is illuminating. A century ago, the ideas that came to be summed up as Social Darwinism by historians such as Richard Hofstadter were not limited to a far-right lunatic fringe. They derived from the writings of some of the era’s pre-eminent proponents of social progress.

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was the English philosopher who did most to import ideas derived from Charles Darwin and other evolutionary theorists (notably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) into the study of contemporary human societies. In works such as “First Principles” (1862), “Principles of Biology” (1864) and “The Man Versus the State” (1884), Spencer sought to discern universal laws of evolution.

One of his key contentions was that most social interventions by government were harmful, no matter how well-intentioned, because they interfered with the natural laws of evolution, which were the main driver of progress.

Some Social Darwinists went even further, arguing that infectious disease had a role to play in promoting the survival of the fittest. Franz Ignaz Pruner, a German physician, anthropologist and racial theorist, wrote “The Global Cholera Pandemic and Nature’s Police” (1851), based partly on his observations in Egypt. Wherever Europeans and Americans established colonies in the tropics, officials would periodically muse that the terrifyingly high mortality rates arising from disease — and of course from poor sanitation and malnutrition — must, like famines in India, be part of some providential design.

It was a relatively short step from Social Darwinism to eugenics — the theory popularized by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and others that government should actively promote the reproduction of the “fit” and limit the reproduction of the “unfit.”

It is easy to forget today how influential such notions were a century ago, when they appealed almost as much to progressives as to proto-fascists. Chicago sociologist and reformer Charles Henderson opposed immigration of the “unfit,” proposed that the “feebleminded and degenerate” be banished to rural labor colonies and sterilized to “prevent their propagation of defects and thus the perpetuation of their misery in their offspring.”

As Spencer had made clear, it was a guiding principle of Social Darwinism that public-health legislation “defeats its own end” and “favours the multiplication of those worst fitted for existence, and, by consequence, hinders the multiplication of those best fitted for existence.”

In “Social Statics,” he used language echoed today by American libertarians:

If … it is the duty of the state to protect the health of its subjects, it is its duty to see that all the conditions of health are fulfilled by them. Shall this duty be consistently discharged? If so, the legislature must enact a national dietary: prescribe so many meals a day for each individual; fix the quantities and qualities of food, both for men and women; state the proportion of fluids, when to be taken, and of what kind; specify the amount of exercise, and define its character; describe the clothing to be employed … and to enforce these regulations it must employ a sufficiency of duly-qualified officials, empowered to direct every one’s domestic arrangements.

Like many of today’s critics of the public-health agencies, Spencer argued that the medical profession and bureaucrats were actuated by self-interest rather than altruism and had an “unmistakable wish to establish an organized, tax-supported class, charged with the health of men’s bodies, as the clergy are charged with the health of their souls.”

Reading “Social Statics” today, you see how completely Spencer lost the argument. As we enter the third year of the Covid pandemic, the public-health clergy have established themselves in precisely the kind of well-paid positions of power that Spencer foresaw, leaving a motley array of lockdown skeptics and anti-vaxxers to rehash his old arguments.

I have tended to steer clear of the lockdown skeptics and to heap opprobrium on the anti-vaxxers. But what we really see in both cases is a kind of revival of Social Darwinism that extends beyond the militant opponents of lockdowns and vaccines to include the many millions of Americans who over the past two years have simply flouted the pandemic rules. Ignoring the prescriptions of an intrusive nanny state, or complying with them so carelessly as to render them ineffective, they have tacitly given free rein to the principle of the survival of the fittest.

Compared with Western Europeans and especially with East Asians, Americans have a remarkably high tolerance of excess mortality, especially when it is heavily concentrated in politically underrepresented social groups. The same is true with respect to the relatively high death toll from firearms that Americans tolerate, not forgetting the staggering mortality caused by opioid overdoses in the past decade, which has no parallel in any developed country.

Now contrast the American experience of the pandemic with the Chinese. If Americans resemble modern-day Social Darwinists, the People’s Republic is a utilitarian Panopticon worthy of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s idealized penitentiary of the late-18th century, which relied on prisoners’ uncertainty about whether they were under observation to incentivize good behavior.

No country has more effectively used non-pharmaceutical restrictions on social and economic life to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 than China. True, these restrictions were widely imitated, as in New Zealand. But the reason they were more effective in China than elsewhere is precisely that the Communist Party’s system of surveillance creates what Bentham called “the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence.”

And yet there turns out to be a catch, in the form of a new and much more infectious variant of the virus. In omicron, Xi Jinping’s Panopticon faces a new and ghastly challenge. Not only does the Chinese population have essentially no natural immunity from previous infections, thanks to the Zero-Covid strategy; the inferior Chinese-made vaccines also offer little protection against omicron. As a consequence, China must impose tighter restrictions than ever before.

Currently, over 20 million people are under some form of lockdown in half a dozen cities, notably Xian and Tianjin, because small numbers of people tested positive. Traditional Lunar New Year celebrations are being restricted. The Beijing Winter Olympics will take place with almost no foreign spectators. The volume of international flights to China has been reduced by more than 90%.

In some ways, China’s reversion to being a closed society is of a piece with Xi’s attempt to revive other aspects of Maoism: his reassertion of the Communist Party’s dominance over the private sector, his call for more egalitarian social outcomes, his intolerance of domestic dissent and ethnic minorities, his readiness to threaten war. But it is not at all clear how any of this helps the Chinese economy grow sufficiently fast to overtake that of the U.S.

By contrast, the American propensity to ignore (or at least honor mainly in the breach) the bureaucracy’s rules and regulations — combined with the opening of the fiscal and monetary floodgates — has meant that paradoxically, the public health disaster of the pandemic has been accompanied by an economic recovery so red-hot that U.S. inflation has jumped to a rate not seen since 1982.

In the eyes of today’s Western public health experts, none of this makes sense. Neil Ferguson gave an interview last year in which he described how he and his fellow scientific advisors to the British government realized that they might be able to copy the Chinese strategy for containing Covid. “People’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March [2020],” he recalled. “They [i.e., the Chinese] claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. … But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”

The question was: Could the West copy China’s lockdown? “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said Ferguson. “And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

It continues to puzzle me that so many smart people were convinced that the People’s Republic of China should be the role model for a free society faced with a pandemic (as opposed to the East Asian democracies like South Korea and Taiwan that have contained the virus with minimal lockdowns). But that was the road we attempted to go down, inflicting immense economic disruption until we realized that it was unsustainable — that not even Ferguson (or, it turns out, the government he was advising) could adhere to a system of universal house arrest, much less don’t-tread-on-me Americans.

In the U.S. today, Covid has become as much a bureaucratic as a medical condition. Having had omicron in December, I and my family remain subject to a plethora of rules that make absolutely no sense, as we can neither catch nor transmit the virus again so soon after having been infected. I pointlessly wear a mask at meetings and on planes. I pointlessly submit to regular Covid tests. I pointlessly fill out online forms attesting to my children’s health.

Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.
Perhaps at some point this year a new variant — Pi, Rho, Sigma, take your pick — will emerge that I can catch and that will give me and others something more than a mild cold. But until that time comes, I shall feel a sense of individualist resentment — that I now realize is very American — about the whole dysfunctional edifice of rules and regulations. When (if?) they are finally swept away, I shall rejoice.

And, if the Chinese Panopticon finally loses control of Chinese virus in this, the third plague year, I’ll recall that, in the history of struggles between rival empires, the fitness that determines survival is seldom correlated with a state’s power over the individual — or its propensity to boast

e: wrong thread, but you’re welcome.

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

mawarannahr posted:

Real foggy brains

e: wrong thread, but you’re welcome.

I think that one got posted up above by VBC but I appreciate not having to click a Bloomberg link to read it in full. :tipshat:

mdemone
Mar 14, 2001

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

This I agree with. Despite China being pro zero covid the Olympics are a huge misstep on their part. We’ll see how they handle it.

Every athlete crossing that border will be quarantined, isolated, and PCR tested repeatedly over a span of at least two weeks before going straight into the Olympic Village bubble.

Spectators will be following the standard quarantine + test that everyone entering the country undergoes. Around four million people visit China every year during normal times, I'm sure that number is a hell of a lot lower right now, but it's large enough to be a perfectly good example of how to bring thousands of people in without causing significant outbreaks.

StratGoatCom
Aug 6, 2019

Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice


haveblue posted:

That didn't actually take very long at all, doing something about it took decades because of all the business interests involved

Consider the crossover factor between this and Open Biden.

Durr Kommissar
Jan 25, 2010

LifeLynx posted:

Apparently there was some NY State lawsuit where some judge ruled classroom mask rules unconstitutional, so I woke up to an email (sent late last night) that said masks were now optional in my daughter's school district. The CHUD parents are celebrating and parroting the "it's your ~personal choice~ if you want to wear a mask, just like it's your ~personal choice~ if you want to keep your kids home and home school them" lines that are fully of selfish attitude. It's all using children as political pawns as usual, because there's already an appeal filed and I've heard as soon as a stay is granted, it's right back to mandatory masks. Which will confuse the hell out of kids - it's already happened once before, last year.

Yep. My wife is an 8th grade teacher in a more rural district in NY and the kids who were already showing up in Blue Lives Matter gaiters were just showing up without any masks at all today. One kid got written up through six straight periods for refusing to wear a mask and loudly proclaiming his Constitutional Rights and the Nassau ruling when confronted. Admin there is a loving joke and I know they won’t stick up for their teachers, based on everything I’ve seen thus far.

You’d figure they’d toss that kid into ISS by about the third write-up in a day, but nope, he’ll be right there in her last period class, when the kids are already at their rowdiest as is. Between seeing my brother’s working conditions in the COVID units as a nurse and the unending nightmare of the American education system my wife is dealing with (wasn’t peachy at her district pre-COVID, this year has been as bad as or worse than early 2020), I really don’t see how much longer these systems can hold up before we start seeing some ~really fun~ responses.

NoDamage
Dec 2, 2000

Potato Salad posted:

Major t cell researchers and immunologists studying the hour-by-hour timeline of the humoral response via hospital blood samples happened to simultaneously bring pre-review prints of their CoV-2-And-You research to publications in ~November.
Do you mind sharing the actual studies you are referencing here?

Rust Martialis
May 8, 2007

At night, Bavovnyatko quietly comes to the occupiers’ bases, depots, airfields, oil refineries and other places full of flammable items and starts playing with fire there
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.17.21267350v1

Study of COVID in the young in Scotland.

Turns out infants under 1 year have had much higher hospitalization rates for a long time.

Jaxyon
Mar 7, 2016
I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.
I remember seeing that that Amazon was a bad source of N95s because it mixes legit and counterfeit sources.

Is there any further reading on that?

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
Lol, "China's covid victory over America."

It's literally impossible for a country not named America to do anything without America being involved, in America.

Couldn't be the government just didn't want disease running rampant.

Riptor
Apr 13, 2003

here's to feelin' good all the time

Durr Kommissar posted:

You’d figure they’d toss that kid into ISS by about the third write-up in a day,

I mean punishment is one thing but launching him into space seems excessive

virtualboyCOLOR
Dec 22, 2004

mdemone posted:

Every athlete crossing that border will be quarantined, isolated, and PCR tested repeatedly over a span of at least two weeks before going straight into the Olympic Village bubble.

Spectators will be following the standard quarantine + test that everyone entering the country undergoes. Around four million people visit China every year during normal times, I'm sure that number is a hell of a lot lower right now, but it's large enough to be a perfectly good example of how to bring thousands of people in without causing significant outbreaks.

It will be a test what China is able to accomplish with their zero covid policy. It they succeed, it will be to the embarrassment of every western nation. I assume this is why western media is pulling bullshit about not attending due to ”Concerns about covid” when in reality it’s more that they don’t want to demonstrate there is a method to solving the covid crisis when one lives in a functioning government.

I’m sure the second a single athlete has covid there will be a giant echo chamber about how China has failed from the country that reported 1 million covid cases today.

Rust Martialis
May 8, 2007

At night, Bavovnyatko quietly comes to the occupiers’ bases, depots, airfields, oil refineries and other places full of flammable items and starts playing with fire there

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

It will be a test what China is able to accomplish with their zero covid policy. It they succeed, it will be to the embarrassment of every western nation.

I hope you continue to be correct, because the failure of zero-covid with a fast-spreading strain like Omicron will probably be far worse than other countries had with earlier strains. Countries that followed a managed-burn policy decently like DK avoided overwhelming their critical care facilities and by the time Omicron showed up, it has caused ICU and ventilator use to drop.

We know vaccination doesn't stop omicron, but it does limit ICU use.

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

Speaking of business interests, it seems business is once again interested in making one of the only successful nations to handle covid look bad:

https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1485879735737630724?s=20

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1485941792100999174?s=20

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1484961965764235266?s=20

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1484858656650932226?s=20

It’s honestly one of the most pathetic things. This is on the level of something incels would write about women at this point.

Wow I can’t imagine what this is like, living in the US, with rising hospitalization rates and death rates higher than the peak of delta.

Tbh, opinion pieces are like the trash magizines in check worthless garbage drivel. Or as an old saying an rear end in a top hat spewing poo poo because they think people care.

My point being gently caress opinion sections.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Your third and fourth tweet links are referring to the same article (except the fourth is just going to the AP general covid feed).

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

quote:

Not only does the Chinese population have essentially no natural immunity from previous infections, thanks to the Zero-Covid strategy; the inferior Chinese-made vaccines also offer little protection against omicron.

I always find it weird when America/British commentators crow about how their countries have developed more "natural immunity" - yeah, by racking up hundreds of thousands of corpses and tens of millions of sick people. The absolute worst-case scenario for China at this point means they just... will also go through that and develop that same natural immunity? Except not even, because they are vaccinated even if their vaccine isn't as good? It's like sitting in the ashes of your house and expressing faux concern for your neighbour because if their house ever burns down, it will be really devastating for them - an emotional turmoil which you, fortunately, have already weathered.

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

It will be a test what China is able to accomplish with their zero covid policy. It they succeed, it will be to the embarrassment of every western nation. I assume this is why western media is pulling bullshit about not attending due to ”Concerns about covid” when in reality it’s more that they don’t want to demonstrate there is a method to solving the covid crisis when one lives in a functioning government.

Well also because China has been harassing/arresting/ejecting Western journalists for a few years now

MadJackal
Apr 30, 2004

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1486100085532512267?s=20

Americans would rather rebel for meaningless freedom from protection than do anything for a greater good.

NoDamage
Dec 2, 2000
Looking for data on whether boosters reduce transmission of Omicron and came across this Danish study on household secondary attack rates: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v1



Am I interpreting this chart correctly? Having a booster reduces your odds of becoming infected by Omicron by about half (column 1)? And having a booster also reduces the odds of infecting someone else with Omicron by about a third (column 3)?

Noting that these odds are given relative to fully-vaccinated individuals, can we use the same numbers to calculate the reduction in odds of an infected (but boosted) person transmitting Omicron to another boosted person, relative to the odds if both people were unvaccinated?

Petey
Nov 26, 2005

For who knows what is good for a person in life, during the few and meaningless days they pass through like a shadow? Who can tell them what will happen under the sun after they are gone?

freebooter posted:

An incident involving five unvaccinated elderly people in late 2020? Come on man

I mean, you're the one who asked for CDC data. There's also this study from the Kaiser system: https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(21)00422-5/fulltext, which found "Hospitalization was more common at suspected reinfection than initial infection."

Fritz the Horse
Dec 26, 2019

... of course!

Petey posted:

I mean, you're the one who asked for CDC data. There's also this study from the Kaiser system: https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(21)00422-5/fulltext, which found "Hospitalization was more common at suspected reinfection than initial infection."
On my phone but this study has been brought a couple times. Iirc some drawbacks are there are a small number of total suspected reinfections (315), the change in rates was small other than for immunocompromised people, and the study didn't control for other underlying conditions.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't more recent similar studies? This is Aug 2021

Edit: there were 36 hospitalized after suspected reinfections and 4094 hospitalized after first infection so the former group is pretty small to do statistics with and the CIs are large

Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Jan 26, 2022

virtualboyCOLOR
Dec 22, 2004

UCS Hellmaker posted:

Tbh, opinion pieces are like the trash magizines in check worthless garbage drivel. Or as an old saying an rear end in a top hat spewing poo poo because they think people care.

My point being gently caress opinion sections.

Sure but it’s not like opinion pieces just form out of the gutter and invade the news media. These opinion pieces, posted in less than a week, were all green lit by western media. It’s just sad and pathetic.

freebooter posted:


Well also because China has been harassing/arresting/ejecting Western journalists for a few years now

Glass Houses etc etc:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2005/11/22/memo-bush-wanted-aljazeera-bombed

https://cpj.org/2020/12/in-2020-u-s-journalists-faced-unprecedented-attacks/

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/media/australia-journalists-protests-washington/index.html

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

Fritz the Horse posted:

On my phone but this study has been brought a couple times. Iirc some drawbacks are there are a small number of total suspected reinfections (315), the change in rates was small other than for immunocompromised people, and the study didn't control for other underlying conditions.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't more recent similar studies? This is Aug 2021

Edit: there were 36 hospitalized after suspected reinfections and 4094 hospitalized after first infection so the former group is pretty small to do statistics with and the CIs are large
The other one I've seen is the Qatar study which claims a large odds reduction in bad outcomes, but there's some sample size issues there as well I reckon:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2108120

With Omicron there's probably enough real world reinfection data now to make more robust assessments.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Petey posted:

I mean, you're the one who asked for CDC data.

I said "health authorities" and the CDC is not particularly foremost in my mind when I use that phrase, but in a 2-year pandemic I'd rather see something more recent than mid-2020. If reinfections being of increased severity were particularly likely (or even not unlikely) I feel like more of an alert would've been raised by now. Instead I've seen health authorities saying that if someone has previously been infected by COVID their body is more likely to mount a better immune response than if they're immunologically naive.

Incidentally, what is the highest number of infections someone's gone through? I remember it wasn't until late 2020 there was the first incident of someone in China or Hong Kong testing positive again, but there must be people out there who've had it three or four time by now.


Overzealous American cops failing to discriminate against journos during mass street protests is not remotely the same ballpark as ongoing, top-down intimidation by the actual government. Get back to me when the DHS threatens the 14-year-old daughter of a foreign bureau chief or sends half a dozen plainclothes police to a journalist's apartment late at night.

Stickman
Feb 1, 2004

NoDamage posted:

Looking for data on whether boosters reduce transmission of Omicron and came across this Danish study on household secondary attack rates: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v1



Am I interpreting this chart correctly? Having a booster reduces your odds of becoming infected by Omicron by about half (column 1)? And having a booster also reduces the odds of infecting someone else with Omicron by about a third (column 3)?

Noting that these odds are given relative to fully-vaccinated individuals, can we use the same numbers to calculate the reduction in odds of an infected (but boosted) person transmitting Omicron to another boosted person, relative to the odds if both people were unvaccinated?

Yes, with some caveats about model assumptions. To get the estimated OR for a boosted vs unvaccinated susceptible household member, we can just divide the two respective ORs:

We can do the same for the OR for the index case.

Because the model assumes that the effects of vax status of the index case and status of the susceptible household member are independent (and that transmissibility is identical for Omicron and Delta households), we would just multiply to get the OR considering both susceptible and index case status:


Unfortunately, there's no way to compute confidence intervals without additional information about the covariances of ORs (technically covariances of log ORs).

There's a couple of big caveats, but the biggest is the assumption that transmissibility is the same between variants. They apparently included some degree of model selection because the stratification of susceptibility was only included after the interaction was found to be statistically significant, but it's usually a good idea to include theoretically plausible interactions regardless of the statistical significance in a particular model fit. It also seems plausible that the source and susceptible vax status may not be independent, though they likely didn't have a sufficient sample to estimate all pairs separately. There are also potential unadjusted confounders like behavior, distancing, mask wearing, etc.

E: Also keep in mind that is is the reduction in transmission odds within a household over 7 days. In other settings and over different time periods the reduction might be different.

Stickman fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jan 26, 2022

LifeLynx
Feb 27, 2001

Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time
Grimey Drawer
Masks are back on in the school district. A whole 24 hours of no masks. Elementary school kids were fine, but upper grades descended into bullying kids who still wore masks. And the parents aren't any better.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
It would be much better if children bullied those who did not wear masks.

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Petey
Nov 26, 2005

For who knows what is good for a person in life, during the few and meaningless days they pass through like a shadow? Who can tell them what will happen under the sun after they are gone?

freebooter posted:

but there must be people out there who've had it three or four time by now.

UKHSA has tracked/announced multiple confirmed 3xers.

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