Yes, I don't know if that concern is valid but it is certainly understandable.

We have one those too, but I can't imagine any state or city conditioning public services based on vaccinations. Except public colleges, which I guess these orders preclude from requiring vaccines for attendance.

It sucks to be Tokyo. Postponed the Olympics last year and this year not limiting international fans. I'm assuming Japan will lose a lot of money being the unlucky host during the pandemic.

Somewhat interested in China winter in 2022. Not as interested in Paris summer in 2024. Definitely not interested in LA in 2028.

I don't think we have a population problem. The world can support a lot more people than it currently has, and projections before this hit were for population decline to begin by the end of the century.

I'm not as optimistic as JPhillips ... I think eventually we get by something several orders of magnitude worse than this virus. But developing tech is making it easier for us to fend them off, allowing this one at least and probably others to be less damaging than I expected a year ago.

So much of the opposition to masking and restrictions that I hear/read completely ignores the practicality that I believe is built into the restrictions. Yes, they are primarily built on science, but there's a real world implementation element that matters, too.

Two examples:

1. I recently listened to a Trumper ridicule having to wear a mask in a restaurant except when sitting at a table, saying it was crazy that he was somehow protected when sitting but not when standing. Well, no, that's not the theory. The idea is that if you are sitting, you are not moving and thus less able to spread or catch the virus than if you are moving around. This is why bars are such an issue as compared to restaurants and are usually more restricted. But the more practical thing is, the suggested guidance is that people should wear their masks at the table unless they are actively eating/drinking. But most people do not, and most mandates don't push that, because practically it's impossible to enforce. You want to tell me to wear my mask while sitting at a table, then I'm just going to hold a drink to my face every time you take one step toward me to warn me. It's just easier and more practical to leave people alone while they are sitting at the table, since it generally follows the science regarding being stationary versus moving around a room.

2. Requiring social distancing/masking for those who are vaccinated. Here's the problem - how do you know who's vaccinated and who's not? I would love to walk around without a mask now that I am fully vaccinated, but unless I'm wearing a neon sign that says "vaccinated - ask me for my passport," how do you effectively keep non-vaccinated people masked? This is basically a permission slip for 100% of the population to be unmasked. And that's an issue. So we all must be masked for practical reasons that science suggests are not necessary for a segment of the population. That will change when a significant portion of the population gets vaccinated, but of course the "if" that's going to happen is not a given.

I don't understand why this is so hard. And believe me, once it gets above 80 and humid, I am not going to enjoy wearing a mask at all. But it has to happen. The amazing thing to me is how many people who want to get rid of all of these restrictions are actively resisting the one thing that will make them go away. Mindboggling.

Remembering how people were talking about how all the lockdowns were going to increase suicide. It turns out that didn't end up being the case.

https://apnews.com/article/pandemics...5125c040b2ae81

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I haven't read through the 159 pages of this thread. What's the concise, intelligent reason to NOT get the vaccine? Not tested enough? I'm trying to wrap my head around smart people deciding NOT to get the vaccine and I'm kinda drawing a blank.

I daresay the most intelligent concern is about the potential long term side effects of the vaccines.

Understandable but we appear to be seeing long-term effects of COVID already and none from the vaccines. Seems like the logical route would be take the vaccine and cross your fingers rather than get COVID and cross your fingers.

Secondly, most of the people seem to be of the camp that they are never getting the vaccine. Not that they aren't ready to take it yet. Am I misunderstanding that?

EDIT: I guess we're looking at rare blood clots with J&J. Forgot about that.

The vaccine is like the mask - there's a political "if the other side says to get it, I'm not getting it" element to it. It follows from the idea that Covid isn't a big deal, or by now it's not a big deal (we've gone through the worst of it), so the vaccine is unnecessary and all restrictions should be lifted and people should be able to get back to normal life.

It's the same doubling down BS we've seen for the past several years - once you take a position on something, doing ANYTHING willingly that appears to be in conflict with that position means you are admitting you were wrong, and above all else, you have to save face.

And there's certainly an anti-vax element to a portion of the population.

Agreed. People either can’t understand things like this, or just don’t want to

I wonder if the people afraid of the blood clot risks have wives, girlfriends, or daughters on birth control.

It all sounds to me like people grasping at straws to justify not doing what they're told they should do.

I worry that we'll have enough people refusing to get vaccinated that we never reach herd immunity and thus have to keep dealing with new variants.

Yep. Basically a one in a million shot of something going wrong due to the vaccine is not a valid reason to avoid getting it. You are in more danger driving to get the vaccine than you are getting the vaccine.

1 in a million chances should not be a big deal in a country that sells as many lottery tickets as we do.

Is the argument though, that it's already 1 in a million just a few short months after release? What's it going to be two, five, 20 years from now? < shurg>

The argument should be that you are much more likely to die/have bad side effects from NOT getting the vaccine than you are from getting it.

I'm willing to take the risk of unknown future completely speculative problems to do my part to help end the pandemic.

Vaccines are really the best and only way out. The bottom line is that we really don't have any choice - except on a personal level, whether one chooses to be a part that solution, or to sit it out because they've decided they're special and entitled (but will still benefit from everyone else getting vaccinated and the world solely getting back to normal).

But we know that the risk of blood clots from COVID at 100,000 in a million.

Risk isn't absolute. It is relative to the risk of doing nothing.

Less than the rate of death and serious medical complications from getting COVID.

I get you. I'm just trying to understand the argument to not get the vaccine.

There is a huge number of people looking for an excuse to not get it, this provides them one.

In fairness to these people (who I really disagree with), humans are bad at assessing risk. We vastly underrate the risk/cost of doing nothing.

We avoid yearly dental checkups and end up going in for emergency root canals.

We don't do preventative maintenance on our cars and end up paying for major repairs.

So focusing on the (small) risk of getting the vaccine and ignoring the (large) risk of not getting it does fit with human nature to some degree.

I'm not convinced that pregnant (or soon to be) women should get it. Teenagers < 16 also. I think it is understandable those demographics are cautious.

My mom isn't going to get it, and while she probably is motivated by conspiracies and/or misinformation & fear, she is also practically a shut-in and the entire process of getting the shot probably would probably put her health at more risk than her current lifestyle, so I'm not going to bother arguing about it.

Aside from all the red herrings stuff, the argument against the vaccine essentially boils down to:

** Not trusting the establishment. I.e., the vaccine was overly rushed, we need years of data to know whether it's safe; the less-soft version of this are those who don't take existing vaccines either, believing that they simply don't do any good and/or are dangerous. Distrust of the medical authorities in general is sometimes but not always part of this.

** 'Natural living' philosophy. Some people are opposed to putting medicine in their body that they don't absolutely need on principle. There's a part of this in me although only a small part, but I can sympathize with the mindset. The various scandals surrounding overprescribing of medications, the whole issue with resistance to antibiotics becoming more and more of a problem, opioid epidemic, etc. - all this sort of feeds into the more conspiratorially-inclined as well.

** Independent thinking. There's also a segment for whom being told they *must* do something is good enough reason on it's own to not do it. They're going to be their own boss, and nobody is going to tell them what to do, etc. Anything with this sort of up-front pressure is someone selling you a bill of goods, yadda yadda yadda.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/pfiz...12-months.html


Well boo. This seems like the first news that convinces me that this will be an annual flu shot sort of thing. I don't want this sore ass arm once a year.

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So much this.

I guess this is another example of how badly the Trump administration handled this. Although Boris’ vaccine rollout has been good, our general Covid response was average at best, but we’ve known this for months

Not to mention, I just assumed this would be like the flu shot, even without someone in the know telling me. I don't have an issue with this at all.

This.

I've followed all the rules. Basically lived as a shut-in for a year. On my rare ventures out, I've worn an N95 without exception. Got vaccinated. But if I still have to wear a mask in the fall because of these refuseniks, I'm going to snap & strangle one of them.

I actually have not minded wearing a mask outside during the fall and winter - not only has it kept me warmer, but it eliminated colds and flu. Now, I'm going to be pissed in about 45 days when 80 and humid is the norm.

It's hard enough to get people to get this vaccine in the US. Every year? It's going to be impossible.

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I wonder how many of these anti-Covid vaccine people who used to get the flu shot every year are now going to stop getting that one too. I tend to think it will be normalized once people see life get back to normal because of the vaccine, but we'll see. I could definitely see Trump making things worse as he tries to get back into the public eye in the next couple of years.

You are touching on a disconnect that's out there. Everyone talks about how we've been "shut down" for a year. But we haven't. For a lot of people, being "shut down for a year" means that this one time in March 2020 they had to get takeout from Applebees instead of dining in and have otherwise been living their lives as normal (but with less crowds and the occasional check from the government).

It makes sense that these people don't see the urgent need to end the pandemic that the rest of us do because it hasn't really had the impact on them that it has had on folks who have been staying home, wearing masks, etc.

Yep. This is what people were saying about Biden being out of touch with reality for talking about people taking vacations this summer if we do what's needed for the next 100 days, and they were like, "You mean like we did last summer?"

Think about wearing a mask in Denver right now...

I was quite happy wearing mine outside here today.

Woah. Some interesting stuff. So Viagra is like a therapeutic for the coronavirus.

Welcome to the forum.

I'm of two minds on this.

COVID is/was a fairly "mild" pandemic. It "only" has about an 0.5%ish CFR that jumped to about 3-5% when the health care system was overwhelmed. And we got better at fighting it fairly quickly (about a year). If we snuff it out before a much more virulent and deadly variant emerges, it will still have cost somewhere between 3-5M lives, potentially another order of magnitude greater of people living with long term effects, and huge economic damage. That's a "mild" pandemic. But it gave us a next generation platform to develop vaccines (mRNA), showed that there are still some very old ways (masks, social distancing) to help control spread before technology can catch up, and gave a couple of generations some social readiness about what a pandemic looks like.

However, it also showed how woefully unprepared we are in a number of ways from supply chain to technology. It also shined a spotlight on the huge social schisms and disparities that exist in our society and how viruses follow those weaknesses in our society. It showed a lack of societal understanding around raw science and our woeful reporting on science. And all of this led to a mistrust in the very institutions that could help get us out of this problem and, in some cases, active sabotage of those institutions.

SI

Some more interesting stats.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/14/healt...cdc/index.html

Couple discussion points in this article. First was Fauci's response to Jordan

What determines when Americans reclaim ‘liberty’? Jim Jordan demands of Dr. Fauci — here is his answer - MarketWatch

I don't know the # but Fauci's 10,000 per day passes my sniff test. I do wish Fauci would talk more about what vaccinated Americans can do vs cannot do.

Regarding J&J blood clot issue


Those stats are great but then the blood clot on long-haul flight being 3% to 12% makes the comparison fishy? I'm not sure what it is but the J&J and flight blood clot severity (?) factor are different.

Regardless, the odds are small enough where I would not hesitate to take it assuming there was medical care close by to help (e.g. in Mercedes Benz stadium and not local CVS or Publix).

There's a growing gap in vaccine hesitancy between red and blue states. Again, we know how to fix this, but Trump won't do it.

My guess was that crystal-clear evidence of the partisan vaccine-hesitancy gap wouldn’t show up in the real world data until May.

I was wrong.

The red-state vaccine gap is already here. https://t.co/s548rJu3Qs pic.twitter.com/tj8cpwKCL3

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) April 17, 2021

What's amazing is he's convinced them that he's the only reason we have a vaccine, while also convincing them that having the vaccine is a bad thing.

I made the mistake of asking my Dad if he and my step mom had plans to get their vaccines a few weeks back. I was met with a one word, "No", and then a few hours later, the fake story link in FB about Hank Aaron supposedly succumbing to the vaccine, with no other commentary associated with it from him. That was the last we talked about it. But it seems that his news sources are more and more narrow regarding all this.

6 months ago my wife's very conservative step dad was talking to her about how seriously they've taken covid, how he wears a mask at work even though it's uncomfortable for him, how they're not traveling or eating out, and overall just discussing the seriousness of it.

Today he was telling her how this isn't a "real pandemic" because we're not stacking and burning bodies, that the measures being taken are destroying families, and how they don't plan on getting vaccinated because they "don't trust these people" and the side effects are worse than getting COVID in some cases.

You should suggest a trip to Brazil.

No problem with in-laws, they took it as soon as available.

5 RN's and 1 doctor in extended family, no issues in taking them. But there are younger nieces and nephews that won't until some time after approval for those age groups.

Article I read today that Biden is thinking about booster shots later this year. Highly recommend we place the order and pay the down deposit now, be first in line.

I don't know what this means for the excess shots we supposedly have already. I was hoping they would be donated to developing countries but maybe not if we need to plan for a booster shot in Q4.

They'd be different shots, right? Any booster shot would have some formulation to battle some of the common variants now, I would think. So you could still do vaccine diplomacy /and/ get the boosters, which seems like a slam dunk idea.

SI

I guess there goes my travel hopes this summer.

With the significant progress we have made in the US, easy for us to forget there are plenty in ROW that are still really, really suffering under this pandemic.

I know someone who got COVID early and has had long COVID ever since.

She just got her 2nd vaccine the other day, and she is noticing a lot of improvement.

It's an anecdote, but it seems to match up with what a lot of people are saying.

If the vaccines make a significant dent into long COVID, that's great great news.

Yeah, that would be great.

Not that I get great joy in this, but Karma does have a way of always making it's point.

Ted Nugent, who once dismissed COVID-19, sickened by virus

Now that every American adult is eligible for a vaccine, the anti-vaxxers getting COVID is a net win for society. If that's the way they prefer to get some defense and help us reach herd immunity faster, bring it on. Maybe we can get another Sturgis rally going.

We could have Covid parties like they do for Chickenpox.

Boris has announced the intention is to have tablets for us to take to treat Covid at home by this autumn.

Let me just get my kids vaccinated (both still under 16), and then I'm pretty much OK with this plan.

Those have reportedly happened in small numbers.

Definitely a smart move.

I don't know if other wealthy countries are placing a pre-order for 4Q but they should to hedge their bets. I know US is thinking about it, now Israel but how about EU, Japan, Australia etc.

Hockey coach dies after dispute over social distancing at St. Paul bar - StarTribune.com

A bar places Saran Wrap over a urinal to encourage social distancing in the bathroom. You believe that people are over-reacting to COVID.

Do you:

(A) Roll your eyes at how silly it is?

(B) Punch the Saran Wrapped urinal so you can pee in it and then murder a guy who saw you and told you it was a bad idea?

I'll let you guess what our hero in the article noted above chose. We'll see if it works out for him.

It is a sign of how callous and hardened I have become in the last year plus that my first instinct as I read the article was to make jokes about the relationship between the incident and victim's occupation. It was closely followed by sympathy for the victim's family and contempt for the accused. I am not proud of that first instinct though. I just recognize the change in myself and hope it is not permanent

(C) Think "damn right, correct urinal protocol calls for those to remain unused anyway."

The numbers out of India are staggering.

‘The system has collapsed’: India’s descent into Covid hell | India | The Guardian

Who was this video for? Why do I find that this is the most disturbing part of the whole article?

Horrific story.

As bad as it looks, our per capita peak still blows India out of the water.

The thing is, they haven't peaked. The recent growth curve is frightening. If it continues their daily rates could be astronomical. The big question is when is that curve going to stable out. The rate of change from what they had been experiencing is phenomenal. Just back in March they were just a couple hundred dead per day. Now they are hitting 2k and the curve is nearly straight up.

This is the correct answer

SI

Trial results for a new malaria vaccine show it to be 77% effective. This could be one of the greatest achievements in human history.

Wow!

Fuck you, Mosquitos!
Fuck you, Malaria!

who'd have thought that all it took to create vaccines is to actually work on making vaccines.

Hopefully this is the big silver lining from this pandemic

SI

We know outdoors < indoors but don't remember seeing stats before.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta says vaccinated people can generally go maskless outdoors, with some caveats

So it seems very likely that on May 15, Atlanta United is going to go to full capacity (40k). I mean I will be well past 2 weeks vaccinated by then, but it still feels strange. They haven't announced anything but are allowing the ~30k season ticket holders to buy extra tickets starting May 15. Seems obvious unless the Governor closes things down (lol).

I told my wife I'd likely go. But ain't gonna lie, be a bit strange on Marta and in the Stadium.

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I'm going tonight with some friends, we are season ticket holders but were not selected for the limited capacity game. We are going with close friends who are vaccinated, and we are too. But our kids are not and so we will probably sell a bunch of our tickets during the season. I imagine the limited capacity people will follow the mask rules and other rules much more than full capacity.

Went to dinner at a local mexican place outside city limits, so no mask mandate. We're vaxxed up, but still wear masks because of breakthrough cases.

After we sat down, I had a perfect view of the door. I probably saw at least 80 people come in while we were seated, I counted 9 masks.what bugs me is, you know the vast majority who aren't wearing masks are the same people who won't get the vaccine because "freedom." So we're just going to have to worry about this shit the rest of our lives.

Once I'm fully vaxxed, about 10 more days now that I had shot 2 this week, i don't think I'm going to restrict my activities. Except wearing a mask when required - which is everywhere indoors here still. But I'm excited for bars, movies, indoor restaurants, and arena football on the short term, plane travel in May, and the Red Sox in June

Going to my first game at Truist Park tomorrow. And it's now going to be a double header.

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Braver than me. Will do outside but won't be going to eat inside a restaurant for a while.

Bark at the Park!

There were puppies. Unfortunately, there was no Braves offense.

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This is Covid in India. These are bodies of victims being cremated.

wow

I was pleasantly surprised how uneventful my travels to the DMV were a couple of weeks ago. Most of the people were mask compliant even in outside in open spaces. The only non compliance were people who had it pulled under their nose but they remedied that when asked. Most of the places I ate had outdoor spaces available and social distancing inside. I would say about 40% of the people I interacted with said that they have been fully vaccinated with closer to 70% having received their first dose. The only discomfort I felt were people just being unnecessary close but I would not say that had anything to do with social distancing. I just don't understand standing within 6 inches of a stranger when we are in a wide open space that does not require such intimacy:p

Last year there was an article (supposedly pretty credible) that said travel in a plane was pretty safe because of the ventilation etc. and the key risk is in the airport itself.

May still be true but this article is somewhat worrisome.

Fifty-two passengers on one flight from Delhi to Hong Kong test positive for Covid-19 after landing | Daily Mail Online

I listened to Joe Kernan on CNBC talk about India "Opening too early, not wearing masks, not enough vaccinations etc" and I about screamed through the radio at him, "You F'n wanted that here!!!"

A couple of positive milestones over the weekend.

We passed 1 billion total vaccine shots given worldwide.

And the U.S. reported only 273 deaths yesterday. Obviously the rolling 7-day average tells us more than any single day due to the inconsistent ways the states report things, but, still, that's the lowest number we've seen in a day since March 24, 2020.

Certainly sounds like we're about to be told we can go maskless outside, even unvaccinated people under certain circumstances.

Sounds like we are releasing a lot of our AZ stockpile to the world. Makes sense. It's just taking up refrigerator space here and can save lives out there.

dola:

Now that our vaccine campaign is moving into people who are either reluctant to get a shot or have logistical difficulty in getting one, I wonder if it is time for J&J to become our main weapon.

The eager beavers were always going to show up for two shots. But if we have to put a lot of effort into getting people there in the first place, then maybe we need to not make it twice as hard on ourselves.

J and J will also be effective for the people who have side effects and decide not to get their second dose. I heard today something like 5 million people didn't go back for dose 2.

(not directed at you, Edward64 - I see this all over the news, my FB feed, Twitter, etc - you just provided an easy example)

I'm sorry, but once again, this is from the medical journal "Duh".

Of course putting people into an enclosed area with recirculated air was gong to lead to superspreader events, no matter how many times a trade group tries to show that their particular thing is safe. Bonus points when the "proof" is half-hearted contact tracing in an environment where you can't prove specifically where you caught an illness because it's endemic. It's heads in the sand mentality, every time.

Again, we kindof know how this thing works. High viral loads in enclosed areas, especially spread virus. Masks lower that risk but certainly do not eliminate it. Older people are significantly more at risk for death. Long haul symptoms are hitting a decent segment of the population, much like SARS did. It's really a blood disease masking itself as a respiratory one. I mean, we've mostly known how it works since May or June of last year. *

Yet there are sometimes studies that go against these these ideas and they get so much play. And they always follow the same formula, seemingly: "trade group x claims activity x is safer than thought during covid, they enlist group to study mostly using contact tracing study, six months later after everyone is back to doing x we find out that, yeah, it's really not that safe but people are ok with doing it because they've been doing it for a while". We're continually surprised (or feign surprise) every time that something consistent with what we know about the disease comes out and we're clearly all getting played just to open back up x. But, hey, I want to fly/send kids to school/go out to eat/go see a movie/do extra curricular school activities/whatever.

As I've also maintained, we're going to also find out in a year or two that schools caused spread even though "at the time, kids were shown to not be spreaders". Like, seriously, is there a single parent in the world who actually believes this as fact? I don't mean like "wants to weigh the damage of not being in school vs the danger of a pandemic" (never mind that everyone wants to zero out what they want to in that equation to make it fit what they want). But does any single goddamn parent honestly believe that kids, who are giant germ reproduction and spreading factories in the best of times, aren't spreading COVID like crazy at school? Going back to "what we know" - it seems kids are more asymptomatic. But there certainly are numerous cases of young people having serious issues and even death from COVID. And the number of teachers who were catching it during the peak were absolutely indicative of schools being a great place to catch it. Sure, we can play the "oh, I'm sure Billy's teacher caught COVID going out to eat for an hour and not at school for 8 hours a day".

But, damn, that desire to get back to normalcy is so strong and we are so happy to lie to ourselves so much this past year.

SI


*There's some new stuff around vaccines that we don't quite have a handle on. Some are obvious, like "less likely to have severe illness and spread the virus if you have had vaccine". But there are some lesser ones that are raising eyebrows: 1) first shot seems to be worse if you've already had it - maybe asymptomatically - versus 2nd for most people and 2) vaccine seems to help alleviate some of the long haul symptoms (indicative of virus still being present in body long term vs all damage being done by initial infections and/or cytokine storm). And it's definitely a more complicated virus than I can write about in one paragraph. But the broad strokes haven't changed much in almost a year.

We get two or three calls a week from my daughter's HS that one or more people have tested positive, and they're only in-person four days a week.

The great majority of this is probably attributable to people not following through, but some of it I'd assume is people getting their second dose at a different site. Like my youngest -- got the first shot at school, but the 28-day period is up after the semester ends so the second dose will be here at home at a CVS.

I wonder if others got their first shot a half hour away, but now that the shots are more readily available just decided to get the second at a local pharmacy instead.

Kentucky just dropped the mask mandate for people outdoors at events of less than 1000 people (starting tomorrow). Sounds like a preview of what we'll hear from Biden.

Miami Private School, Centner Academy, Won’t Employ COVID-19 Vaccinated Employees – CBS Miami

Impressive. In 6 months the GOP will have made storming the Capitol as part of a white nationalist coup attempt seem like one of their more sane ideas.

Not sure if this is the right thread for it, but it appears one of my personal heroes is going to be the first casualty of Covid that I know personally. Mom and brother both got it, brother eventually fractured a rib from the coughing and had himself a generally terrible time for almost a month, but recovered. Mom was fairly high-risk but recovered.

One of the men who helped encourage and shape me, longtime invovement in the community, music in various local churches and cultural heritage relating to the large amount of Danish influence where I live etc. has reached the point where his children only are going to be able to do a final visit with him soon and then end of life care begins. To my knowledge he wasn't particularly high-risk, early 60s and in good health previously. He's on the short list of people outside my immediate family that I would be the most affected by not having around anymore, unquestionably a person who will leave the world a better place for him having been part of it in my opinion. I definitely consider him to have lived a far superior life to my own.

Compared to what's happening in India and elsewhere one life is not of great significance, but it's definitely been an increasingly sobering few weeks during his time in the ICU and now the most recent sad news. This one won't slide out of mind easily.

Sorry to hear, Brian. Take care.

Very sorry Brian. I've been very fortunate so far in that no one in my immediate circle has contracted COVID. Sadly that's not going to be true for everybody here. You are in my thoughts