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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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Gio
Jun 20, 2005


small butter posted:

Just to be clear, I did not agree with the CDC guidelines back then and think that they should have kept it for 7 days, but I understand and respect the scientific and political reasoning behind it. I don't go out of my way to say that the CDC was simply "doing the bidding of Delta."
Why not? It’s a lot more accurate of a statement to say power makes policy than believing policy is derived through a rational cost-benefit calculus.

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Leon Sumbitches
Mar 27, 2010

Dr. Leon Adoso Sumbitches (prounounced soom-'beh-cheh) (born January 21, 1935) is heir to the legendary Adoso family oil fortune.





Gio posted:

Why not? It’s a lot more accurate of a statement to say power makes policy than believing policy is derived through a rational cost-benefit calculus.

Sometimes policy is allowed to be rational, but more often than not it's like you say. Time to rewatch hypernormalisation.

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Not directed at you but: I think if your model for understanding the CDC’s decision making process over the past three years is one of them adapting to the shifting landscape of scientific discovery, rather than one where they cynically use science to rationalize policies sought by those in power (e.g. covid doesnt spread in schools, 3 ft=6ft, vaccinated don’t need to mask, 99% of those in hospital are unvaccinated, shortened isolation periods etc. etc.), then you’re either hopelessly naive or a cynic yourself.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!

Gio posted:

Not directed at you but: I think if your model for understanding the CDC’s decision making process over the past three years is one of them adapting to the shifting landscape of scientific discovery, rather than one where they cynically use science to rationalize policies sought by those in power (e.g. covid doesnt spread in schools, 3 ft=6ft, vaccinated don’t need to mask, 99% of those in hospital are unvaccinated, shortened isolation periods etc. etc.), then you’re either hopelessly naive or a cynic yourself.
It's not just "those in power," though; a broad cross-section of Americans has opposed various covid measures at times. If the CDC makes recommendations that people won't follow, then they're just as useless as no recommendations at all. Every decision they've made has been a balance of science and the interests/desires of many stakeholders, which yes, includes the business community and other powerful people, but also includes all the regular people who were/are no longer willing to modify their behavior after vaccines were widely adopted and death rates fell drastically.

To say "the CDC made all their decisions because Number!" is just as silly as saying "they did it purely on science." It was a combination of factors.

killer_robot
Aug 26, 2006
Grimey Drawer
No amount of 'cdc says so and so' was going to keep me from having to field 'so how're you going to keep us safe?' questions from people who /had/ to spend hundreds of dollars a night to go to an indoor water park in fall of 2020. They had their child's birthday to celebrate! No they weren't going to wear a silly mask (not that they could in the water park.) No they weren't going to demonstrate .personal responsibility. by telling their spawn 'hahaha. no.' Life as normal! and they wanted to know how often we were going to wipe down the check out desk while they spent 10 minutes talking face to face with someone who's breathing in the personal space of hundreds of people a day.

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Mellow Seas posted:

It's not just "those in power," though; a broad cross-section of Americans has opposed various covid measures at times. If the CDC makes recommendations that people won't follow, then they're just as useless as no recommendations at all. Every decision they've made has been a balance of science and the interests/desires of many stakeholders, which yes, includes the business community and other powerful people, but also includes all the regular people who were/are no longer willing to modify their behavior after vaccines were widely adopted and death rates fell drastically.

To say "the CDC made all their decisions because Number!" is just as silly as saying "they did it purely on science." It was a combination of factors.
I’m kind of wondering how you balance science with “what people want.” I mean, the load of bullshit unloaded in early 2021 to open schools, going so far as to say schools are not a locus of spread, was just outright lying for the sake of political expediency, as was the reduction in isolation period from 10 to 5 days. Their use of scientific rationalizations have always been used ad hoc, it’s never been a guiding light.

Nevermind that, in all honestly, science isn’t going to tell you what an acceptable burden of death and disease on a society looks like. However, the CDC’s decisions made that burden of death and disease far greater than it needed to be, objectively speaking, and I refuse to be so cynical as to think “well they did the best they could with what they had.” Saying “the CDC has to issue guidance people will follow” with whatever policy they go with as “what people will follow” is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have no idea what could have been achieved with better decision making on their part.

Gio fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Mar 14, 2023

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012
Crucial new evidence for zoonosis: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/covid-origins-research-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-lab-leak/673390/

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Mar 17, 2023

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Mellow Seas posted:

It's not just "those in power," though; a broad cross-section of Americans has opposed various covid measures at times. If the CDC makes recommendations that people won't follow, then they're just as useless as no recommendations at all. Every decision they've made has been a balance of science and the interests/desires of many stakeholders, which yes, includes the business community and other powerful people, but also includes all the regular people who were/are no longer willing to modify their behavior after vaccines were widely adopted and death rates fell drastically.

To say "the CDC made all their decisions because Number!" is just as silly as saying "they did it purely on science." It was a combination of factors.

This model of designing safety regulations around the lowest acceptable common denominator is patently stupid and should not be the role of the CDC. Imagine applying it to workplace safety, seatbelt use (which many people hated when it was first mandated but is now widely accepted), or basically any other comparable scenario.

It is also worth reiterating that the CDC actively discouraged the use of N95 masks until January 2022 (nearly a year after they became widely available again) and did not start discouraging cloth/surgical mask use then either. There was and still is no justification for such misleading and misinformed guidance.

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

Mellow Seas posted:

It's not just "those in power," though; a broad cross-section of Americans has opposed various covid measures at times. If the CDC makes recommendations that people won't follow, then they're just as useless as no recommendations at all. Every decision they've made has been a balance of science and the interests/desires of many stakeholders, which yes, includes the business community and other powerful people, but also includes all the regular people who were/are no longer willing to modify their behavior after vaccines were widely adopted and death rates fell drastically.

To say "the CDC made all their decisions because Number!" is just as silly as saying "they did it purely on science." It was a combination of factors.

Disagree. Hard disagree. The CDC should make best practice recommendations so that those who want to follow them know what they are. If someone doesn't wear a mask despite the recommendation of the CDC because they don't want to, that's on them. If someone doesn't wear a mask because the CDC did some dumb loving triangulation such that they don't recommend masking, then that is on the CDC. Just because some people won't follow advice is no reason to sabotage that advice for the people who would.

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


It’s also worth noting that the “meet them where they are” model of public health is one pushed in the media last year to rationalize the dismantling of any and all Covid restrictions. So while some are insinuating science had an equitable/fair stake in CDC decision making, they’re doing so while regurgitating lines disseminated by those in power.

Mercury_Storm
Jun 12, 2003

*chomp chomp chomp*
Any developments on booster shots now that covid is ""over""? Like new mutivarient ones, and can you still get them every six months and have it covered?

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Mercury_Storm posted:

Any developments on booster shots now that covid is ""over""? Like new mutivarient ones, and can you still get them every six months and have it covered?

That's a very good question and the answer appears to be uhh, we're not sure, this is completely new territory for medical science and regulation.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran
Near-complete abdication of responsibility, in short. We're firmly in "hope that the nasal / pan-coronavirus vaccine development goes well" territory.

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.
Did either of you read the linked article? It doesn't remotely match the nonsensical doomsaying. The FDA advisory panel met in January and voted to move forward with an FDA proposal for harmonized annual COVID boosters.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran

Discendo Vox posted:

Did either of you read the linked article? It doesn't remotely match the nonsensical doomsaying. The FDA advisory panel met in January and voted to move forward with an FDA proposal for harmonized annual COVID boosters.

If annual boosters were enough to solve the problem, we’d be out of this by now. It evidently isn’t enough, not least because uptake of the boosters is low.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Discendo Vox posted:

Did either of you read the linked article? It doesn't remotely match the nonsensical doomsaying. The FDA advisory panel met in January and voted to move forward with an FDA proposal for harmonized annual COVID boosters.

That would be more reassuring if there weren't evidence that monovalent mRNA vaccine effectiveness wanes after 6 months*, and if dominant variants weren't changing on much shorter timescales than a year.

* no, obviously there isn't comparable data for the bivalent booster since it has only been widely available for 7 months. So far the CDC has reported:

quote:

Early Estimates of Bivalent mRNA Booster Dose Vaccine Effectiveness in Preventing Symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection Attributable to Omicron BA.5– and XBB/XBB.1.5–Related Sublineages Among Immunocompetent Adults

Using spike (S)-gene target presence as a proxy for BA.2 sublineages, including XBB and XBB.1.5, during December 2022–January 2023, the results showed that a bivalent mRNA booster dose provided additional protection against symptomatic XBB/XBB.1.5 infection for at least the first 3 months after vaccination in persons who had previously received 2–4 monovalent vaccine doses.

Fine** for now, but nothing conclusive for the next 5-6 months assuming that's when the next mRNA updates will be (uptake of which does not seem likely to be improved from the current pathetic rates). Also:

quote:

Early Estimates of Bivalent mRNA Vaccine Effectiveness in Preventing COVID-19–Associated Emergency Department or Urgent Care Encounters and Hospitalizations Among Immunocompetent Adults

Long-term durability of bivalent booster vaccination protection also could not be assessed because of the short period of observation since bivalent dose receipt. In a recent analysis from VISION, during BA.4/BA.5–predominant circulation, 3-dose monovalent VE against COVID-19–associated hospitalization was observed to wane from 68% at 7–119 days after vaccination to 36% at ≥120 days (5). This might explain why, among patients who had received 2, 3, or 4 monovalent vaccine doses only, a longer interval since the most recent dose was associated with more relative protection after receipt of the bivalent booster dose.

**Fine in the sense of not significantly worse than a year ago, for those who bothered to get boosted and didn't get lingering symptoms from a breakthrough infection, if any. Population-wide in the US, not so much.

Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Apr 1, 2023

Alctel
Jan 16, 2004

I love snails


Kestral posted:

If annual boosters were enough to solve the problem, we’d be out of this by now. It evidently isn’t enough, not least because uptake of the boosters is low.

I mean, whats your standard for 'out of it'

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

eXXon posted:

That would be more reassuring if there weren't evidence that monovalent mRNA vaccine effectiveness wanes after 6 months*, and if dominant variants weren't changing on much shorter timescales than a year.

* no, obviously there isn't comparable data for the bivalent booster since it has only been widely available for 7 months. So far the CDC has reported:

Fine** for now, but nothing conclusive for the next 5-6 months assuming that's when the next mRNA updates will be (uptake of which does not seem likely to be improved from the current pathetic rates). Also:

**Fine in the sense of not significantly worse than a year ago, for those who bothered to get boosted and didn't get lingering symptoms from a breakthrough infection, if any. Population-wide in the US, not so much.

That article talked about that exact point:

quote:

Should we move to a once-a-year booster strategy?

On Thursday, FDA advisers will discuss whether COVID-19 vaccination should shift to a new strategy akin to that for influenza, which consists of an annual vaccine dose tailored to flu strains expected to circulate the next winter. In a briefing document released on Monday, FDA said it anticipates assessing coronavirus strains “at least annually” and conferring with advisers “in early June of each year regarding strain selection for the fall season.” A new vaccine for all would be rolled out every September at the latest.

Many researchers agree that a once-a-year shot would be less cumbersome and confusing than more frequent boosters, and it’s logical to “vaccinate with the circulating variants,” just like we do for flu, says immunologist Rafi Ahmed, director of the Emory Vaccine Center. But there’s a crucial difference between flu and COVID-19: Flu is seasonal, whereas the coronavirus runs year-round. People who contract COVID-19 in August—which is vanishingly rare for flu—would have to decide whether to also take a shot in the fall, when immunity from their illness may still be robust.

It’s also unclear whether an annual booster offers everyone enough protection for a whole year; that may vary by age. The durability question “is a big one,” says Jennifer Gommerman at the University of Toronto, who is the immunology co-lead of CoVaRR-Net, a Canadian effort to track and respond to SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Many studies have looked at COVID-19 antibodies in people’s blood, but we don’t know how high a level is needed to protect. A strategy used to assess influenza shots might help gauge the durability and effectiveness of COVID-19 boosters as well, Slifka says. Called a test-negative design, it entails testing all patients coming to a hospital with flulike symptoms for the virus; researchers then compare how many of the people who test positive were and weren’t vaccinated.

Many scientists worry policy decisions will outpace the research. “There is a great need to simplify our boosting recommendations,” Ho says. “However, such policies should be guided by data, which are still lacking. Rushing to set policy is likely to result in revisions later, which would lead to confusion for the public.”

That last line is an important one, and goes back to Vincent's point: we're still very much in unknown territory here, and policymakers have had to do a lot of educated guessing throughout the COVID pandemic.

And the "great need to simplify our boosting recommendations" is also crucial. Currently, given the dismally poor uptake of the bivalent booster, how to encourage voluntary compliance is also an important question. Even if the booster's effectiveness does decline somewhat over time, as the original vaccine did, it's still unlikely to be worse than not getting the vaccine at all. If creating a simple, consistent vaccination schedule makes it more likely for people to actually get the booster in the first place, then it's a net plus, even if the schedule interval is too long to guarantee maximum immunity benefits.

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

Main Paineframe posted:

That article talked about that exact point:

And the "great need to simplify our boosting recommendations" is also crucial. Currently, given the dismally poor uptake of the bivalent booster, how to encourage voluntary compliance is also an important question. Even if the booster's effectiveness does decline somewhat over time, as the original vaccine did, it's still unlikely to be worse than not getting the vaccine at all. If creating a simple, consistent vaccination schedule makes it more likely for people to actually get the booster in the first place, then it's a net plus, even if the schedule interval is too long to guarantee maximum immunity benefits.
spoiler: it won’t, because people have very black and white views and something either works or doesn’t. If the booster doesn’t prevent infection and it knocks me on my rear end for a few days AND I might get heart inflammation AND it’s a pain in the rear end to find and pharmacies are randomly gatekeeping why bother?

They need to just do rolling updates, stop trying to limit it by population when it first comes out like they’re Beyoncé tickets for Make-A-Wish kids instead of a shot maybe 20% of the population cares about and just make it come in, has it been at least three months since your last shot/infection? Ok here. End of story. At least until they find a sterilizing vaccine.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



I'm entirely unclear on how the guidance for mRNA boosters can be any more simple than it is now. It's been bivalent-only since September 2 (later for under 12, fine) and the CDC guidance is:

quote:

CDC recommends 1 updated booster dose:

For everyone aged 5 years and older who completed their primary series.

Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Apr 1, 2023

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

eXXon posted:

I'm entirely unclear on how the guidance for mRNA boosters can be any more simple than it is now. It's been bivalent-only since September 2 (later for under 12, fine) and the CDC guidance is:

That’s what it is now. When the bivalent first rolled out it was only over 65 or certain comorbidities and you had to be at least three (four? Six?) months out from your last shot or infection, then they kept going down in age and I want to say kept altering what a comorbidity was. And of course no kids under 12, then under five, then some series of shots could get the bivalent and others weren’t eligible for kids (Pfizer vs Moderna) it was confusing as all hell.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Oracle posted:

That’s what it is now. When the bivalent first rolled out it was only over 65 or certain comorbidities and you had to be at least three (four? Six?) months out from your last shot or infection, then they kept going down in age and I want to say kept altering what a comorbidity was.

That's what it was before September 2. After that it was recommended for anyone 12+ (the communication of the guidelines was bad, yes, but I'm not expecting it to improve). The caveats about waiting x months before your last booster/infection seem unlikely to change. So I'm asking what's going to be significantly different on September 2, 2023, if a new mRNA booster gets rolled out? It will have been a full year of widespread availability of the current bivalent boosters. What's going to change holdouts minds?

- A hypothetical formulation change to target subvariant XBB1.? seems unlikely to be any more compelling than the bivalent booster targeting Omicron.
- A combined flu/covid vaccine may make it (seem) more convenient. I have nothing against this idea, although I wonder if it might increase skepticism of the flu vaccine.
- A fresh new marketing campaign... based on what, though? Potentially misleading advice that you only have to get it once a year now (with the obvious retort being that you don't have to get it at all)? Chances are they won't recommend a second bivalent booster for the general population before then anyway.

The above is why some of us are concluding that:

Kestral posted:

We're firmly in "hope that the nasal / pan-coronavirus vaccine development goes well" territory.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
I can only speak for itself, but I would like for life expectancy to cease its decline and return to levels previously seen in this century.

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

I’d like to see less than a hundred people a day dying of it before I relax. Also it’d be awesome if it could stop mutating to evade immunity every six weeks.

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

Oracle posted:

Also it’d be awesome if it could stop mutating to evade immunity every six weeks.
Good news!

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
It looks like we are near an all-time low right now; that's nice. Credit to the bivalent boosters? Uptake is low overall but pretty decent among the most vulnerable (people in nursing homes and such). We stalled out in the mid-triple digits daily for all of '22 so if we could go down from there, that'd be great.

Random numbers I pulled together,

Since 2020 covid has been responsible for

- 1.3% of deaths 0-17
- 3.4% of deaths 18-29
- 6.5% of deaths 30-39
- 10.2% of deaths 40-49
- 11.2% of deaths 50-64
- 11.4% of deaths 65-74
- 11.0% of deaths 75-84
- 9.7% of deaths 85+

Just a lil over a thousand deaths per day average over the last three years. They've ranged from ~3200 a day (Jan '21) to ~230 a day (this week).

Over that time period about 8-10 times as many people under 18 have died from overdoses as Covid. People in their 40s were about equally likely to die from either. 25-30 times as many people over 55 died from Covid as overdoses.

Just some numbers I dunno I was bored. Saturday night baby.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
I am reminded of this story from June. Even now, at an ahistoric low, without adjustment for unrecorded deaths, things are worse than what the Biden administration considered might be acceptable losses.



How many Covid deaths are acceptable? Some Biden officials tried to guess.

By RACHAEL LEVY
06/06/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Biden officials in recent months privately discussed how many daily Covid-19 deaths it would take to declare the virus tamed, three people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO.

The discussions, which took place across the administration, and have not been previously disclosed, involved a scenario in which 200 or fewer Americans die per day, a target kicked around before officials ultimately decided not to incorporate it into pandemic planning, according to the people. The discussions were described as exploratory, said the people, who were granted anonymity so they could speak freely about internal deliberations.

One U.S. health official told POLITICO the number was “aspirational ... a general metric people have bounced around a lot” that would signal that “the pandemic would be under control.” But, this person added, the figure “never passed the hurdles to be a formal metric.”

The sensitive nature of the conversations and the decision not to bring any hard number to the most senior members of the coronavirus task force or top Biden officials demonstrates the longstanding struggle to articulate when the country has controlled a pandemic that has already killed more than 1 million Americans and is still claiming nearly 300 lives every day.

Fewer than 200 people dead a day would translate to about 73,000 deaths per year, slightly more than what the U.S. experiences during a bad flu season.

Because the virus continues to evolve, officials have largely shied away from promoting any metric, especially after the administration appeared to herald Covid’s end last summer, just ahead of the Delta and Omicron waves, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“They don’t want to say that it’s tolerable for 200 Americans a day to die,” added one of the three people familiar with the matter, who personally discussed the number with administration officials.



Still, the discussions represented at least a nascent effort to create a framework for a post-Covid world.

One of the three people involved in the conversations last year said it was an effort to gauge what the American public would “tolerate.”

“Five hundred a day is a lot. You still have 9/11 numbers in a week,” the person said. “People generally felt like 100 [a day] or less, or maybe 200, would be OK.”

With fewer than 200 people dead per day, the person added, hospitals wouldn’t be overrun and infection rates would be comparatively low, allowing Americans to live closer to pre-pandemic times with less threat of infection.

“When you spread 100 to 200 [deaths] around the country, then it’s minimal around your [geographic] area,” the person said.

But the idea never became official.

Cyrus Shahpar, the White House’s pandemic data director, told POLITICO that pinpointing a number “doesn’t make sense from a public health perspective because it’s also about how long you’re able to maintain low numbers or low severity of illness,” and the virus can evolve quickly.

“Because these things are all changing, I think most experts would tell you it’s hard to have any kind of durable number … because the overarching goal for us is to drive down deaths,” he said. “There’s no point at which you give up trying to drive down deaths.”

“We’re not satisfied with the number of deaths we have now,” he added. “I don’t really know why 200 would be a number that would be magically OK.”

At no point since the pandemic’s first weeks have fewer than 200 Americans died per day at a sustained rate. During the country’s best stretch, last summer, an average of 230 Americans died daily. A few months later, Omicron killed more than 2,600 Americans per day, many of whom were vaccinated.

The White House for months has focused more on hospitalizations and deaths than infections, telling Americans that Covid-19 is more manageable because of vaccines and therapeutics.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance so that mask recommendations were tied to hospitalizations instead of infections and let mask mandates on public transportation lapse. Inside the White House, there has been debate over how vigilant the public should be considering roughly 2,000 Americans are dying every week and the CDC expects deaths to rise in the weeks ahead as cases are forecast to surge nationwide.

While vaccines greatly reduce the risk of death, only 67 percent of Americans meet the CDC’s definition of fully vaccinated, a figure that doesn’t include boosters, placing the U.S. 68th globally, behind countries like Bangladesh and Rwanda, according to Our World In Data. Less than one-third of Americans have received a booster shot.

Using daily deaths as a metric of success is not a new idea. The administration’s external advisers proposed a similar figure in recent months and public health experts have debated what death toll policymakers should target throughout the pandemic.

Communication around the pandemic and its eventual end, however, have long presented a challenge for the White House, which has nudged vaccinated Americans toward pre-pandemic life while also extending a public health emergency declaration that grants state and federal government a host of special powers.

Meanwhile, the administration is asking Congress for billions of dollars to purchase additional vaccines and therapeutics ahead of an expected fall surge in cases.

“So if you’re wondering what is it that really worries me — I think we have the tools for the summer,” Covid coordinator Ashish Jha told a largely maskless crowd of journalists inside the White House on Thursday. “We will not have the tools for the fall and winter, unless Congress steps up and funds us.”

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Apr 3, 2023

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
Well, just because we (quite nearly) got down to 200 once before and it didn't stay that way doesn't mean that getting it down to 200 again isn't worth celebrating. I can easily imagine things falling even further during the warm months.

It's extremely unlikely that we will see a death spike like winter '22 again; that was the result of an unstoppably contagious variant tearing through a population that was somewhat less vaccinated than they are now and had vastly less acquired immunity than they do now (because the Omicron wave infected like, literally over half the country.)

Very bad variants may well come down the pike at some point, but that's something that we have to deal with when it happens (but prepare for now, obviously) - we can't eradicate the disease, so all we can try to do is minimize its spread to give it less chance to mutate. But it'll still mutate.

And, on the slightly morbid side, there's a huge amount of variation in how people react to an infection, and a large amount of people with a genetic disposition to developing life-threatening Covid rather than a mild case have, you know, already died. So that'll "help."

Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Apr 3, 2023

Saladman
Jan 12, 2010
COVID deaths right now are at an all time low, as Mellow mentioned, but the data specifically are here if anyone else wants a link: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html - under category "Deaths". Weekly deaths at 1596. Of course maybe people dying of pneumonia aren't getting tested etc.

I didn't notice that Google stopped showing COVID stats when you search [covid deaths + country]. I wonder when that stopped, I don't think I've looked in about 6 months.

Mellow Seas where'd you get those stats of deaths by age? That's interesting / horrifying to see, but it'd be interesting to break it down by year. At least for my anecdotal experience, I haven't heard about anyone getting especially sick or dying of COVID in more than a year since omicron+third booster, even from friends-of-friends, and this includes COVID tearing through my parents' and all my friends' parents' social networks between May 2022-present. I stopped really bothering to follow up on COVID news after it went through everyone I know above 70, and I guess so did everyone else since this thread gets like 20 posts/month.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Mellow Seas posted:

It's extremely unlikely that we will see a death spike like winter '22 again; that was the result of an unstoppably contagious variant tearing through a population that was somewhat less vaccinated than they are now and had vastly less acquired immunity than they do now (because the Omicron wave infected like, literally over half the country.)

[citation needed], but also, consider extrapolating these trendlines to October:


Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!

Saladman posted:

I didn't notice that Google stopped showing COVID stats when you search [covid deaths + country]. I wonder when that stopped, I don't think I've looked in about 6 months.

Mellow Seas where'd you get those stats of deaths by age? That's interesting / horrifying to see, but it'd be interesting to break it down by year.
I also noticed that Google stopped bringing up stats automatically. It was within the last few months sometime.

Got the % numbers from here, which includes total deaths, covid deaths, influenza deaths and pneumonia deaths since the start of the pandemic, broken down by age. I just did some division to get the percentages.

I'd also be interested in a breakdown by year because obviously the numbers would be much lower if you looked at '22, and would be on track to be even lower in '23. I'm sure yearly breakdowns of those stats are available somewhere (possibly even on the CDC website but I didn't look extensively).

eXXon posted:

[citation needed]
In Dec '21 the population was 72/61/16% partially/fully/boosted. Right now it's 81/69 partial/full, with boosted at least 34% (my source stopped booster info after Oct '22 for whatever reason.) And we now have bivalent boosters, which about half of the most vulnerable people have gotten.

I said "somewhat more vaccinated," not "dramatically," and I think the data (which I had looked up prior to making the assertion, because I don't talk out of my rear end, thanks) supports that. There was actually significant vaccine uptake over this winter. Figures.

Graph showing slight acceleration of vaccinations in late '22:


And acquired immunity is leagues ahead of where it was 18 months ago.

I would note again that bivalent uptake is highest among the people who are most vulnerable to Covid. And people who received a bivalent booster this fall would be very likely to do so in the years to come, especially because older people tend to listen to their doctors. And the uptake rates we got this winter happened without any omicron-style tidal wave or huge spikes in death; if either of those things started to happen a lot more people would be running to CVS.

I got one myself, because I'm the kind of person who is still analyzing Covid stats in 2023, but at this point I honestly can't really blame anyone under 50 for not bothering with a bivalent because at this point they are at, essentially, zero risk of death from Covid. (Yes, a handful of people die, but despite the disease being so widespread, dying from it for young people is kind of a freak thing like dying of meningitis or a staph infection.)

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

Mellow Seas posted:

It's extremely unlikely that we will see a death spike like winter '22 again; that was the result of an unstoppably contagious variant tearing through a population that was somewhat less vaccinated than they are now and had vastly less acquired immunity than they do now (because the Omicron wave infected like, literally over half the country.)

I wouldn’t say that, and not just because of the potential for the emergence of a distant lineage from some reservoir.

The reason I wouldn’t say it is that this last winter was a worse one in Europe than the winter of the BA.1/BA.2 wave.



All‐cause weekly mortality

Image from latest EuroMOMO bulletin, twelfth week of 2023.

Note both axes of the chart. The severe flu season of 2017–2018 is present, as is the more typical 2018–2019 season.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Apr 4, 2023

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
Isn't all causes mortality in Europe just elevated in 22-23 because of the war? The regular old covid stats show the same pattern as the US - a much lower number of covid deaths over the last six months than the previous two winters.

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

It's not to do with the war, in the UK at least hospital services were hammered to the point where people were waiting an hour for ambulances and such.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
Okay, why isn't that in the death stats? Assuming the answer is a lower CFR, if an outbreak that bad led to 1/4 of the deaths of the previous winter shouldn't that be encouraging, not discouraging, regarding future death totals?

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

I meant that those deaths weren't necessarily from COVID infections, they were things like flu and heart attacks that just swamped everything. The biggest issue is that if these things aren't fixed properly the same thing could happen next winter as well. I agree with you that COVID waves in the future won't cause as much death, but they will continue to exacerbate existing problems.

Thorn Wishes Talon
Oct 18, 2014

by Fluffdaddy
https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1643994000473608198

The future is looking bright!

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.
RFK Jr. has announced he's running as a spoiler in the Dem primary. I may have to dust off the antivaxx bookshelf and review some of his "output". He's also, zero surprise, getting boosted on Sputnik.

Wee
Dec 16, 2022

by Fluffdaddy
https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1650211417801256961

https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1650579844512776192

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Entorwellian
Jun 30, 2006

Northern Flicker
Anna's Hummingbird

Sorry, but the people have spoken.




Man I feel sorry for that dude with his replies. First he has to fight a blue check idiot, then a whole batch of people asking him "what does this mean?" while he has to repost the same explanation over and over. He has the patience of a saint.

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