5 ms·

It’s not a US issue. The delta variant did not originate from the US. If we want to fix this we have to help other countries.

by baby 5y ago

epistasis 5y ago
That's why my comment explicitly said "and other places." I agree that this needed to be a global effort to succeed, and in the past the US would have helped the cause rather than hindered the fight against the diseases. I am still absolutely shocked at the poor testing response of the CDC, both in 1) the huge lag before allowing testing by anyone, leading to the Univeristy of Washington discovering it against the wishes of regulators, and 2) completely botching the initial test manufacturing due to newbie mistakes. It was a failure mode that nobody even anticipated in planning, because it's so ridiculous that the CDCs capabilities fell so low.
- shock-value 5y ago
  I agree with your criticism but also firmly believe that once COVID started spreading beyond a few handfuls of individuals, its fate as a human endemic disease was locked in. No difference in policy by any or all countries would have changed that eventuality, other than at most modify the timeline slightly.
  - gibba999 5y ago
    No... early social distancing would have dramatically reduced R0. It's exponential growth. Fewer infections => fewer mutations. Proper masks (electrostatic or nano layer) are widely available, and they all but stop the original COVID. They cost a buck. The nano ones can be reused several times. Providing those prior to vaccines would have been cheap and effective. Masks + vaccines + modest social distancing would have stopped it then. They would have been to rush to get vaccines to everyone, and to prioritize by exposures (e.g. service workers before WFH employees). Plus, look at China. If we all did what China did, we'd be done.
    - shock-value 5y ago
      > and they all but stop the original COVID Would love a citation on that. I think masks definitely help reduce transmission but they are hardly a magic bullet. Anyway we can reduce R0 to zero in the short term and it wouldn't matter to my thesis. COVID circulates in animals so as soon as we would take our foot off of the brakes it would again start spreading in an unbounded fashion. And the world can't undergo a complete global lockdown while we wait years for vaccine availability. It's just impossible from any point of view: political, economic, social, etc.
      - gibba999 5y ago
        The best source I've seen are the tracing studies in China. Police state meant China could follow exact paths -- from camera footage -- of who caught COVID from whom. If both sides wore surgical masks (imperfect fit, but electrostatic layer), there was almost never any spread. Singapore hospitals were good case studies too. Hundreds of COVID19 exposures early in the pandemic, with virtually no spread. You can do web searches for both. Million dollar question is how this impacts delta. Delta has higher viral loads, and it's perfectly possible filtering 95% of delta will still result in more virus than the original, unmasked. Things also get more complex with both sides filtering; naive math would place filtration at 99.75% effective, but I don't believe naive math in this case beyond saying "a lot more effective."
      - Exmoor 5y ago
        I wish I could find the study, but back in December there was a study indicating that frontline medical workers working directly with COVID patients every day and wearing N95 masks were more likely to have been infected by social contact outside of work then at work. I remember the day because it's when I went and bought KN95 masks.
      - cameldrv 5y ago
        The simple fact is that unmasked, the mean amount of time you can spend face to face with an infected person (with pre-Delta COVID) before you get infected yourself is maybe an hour or two. Many, many doctors and nurses were caring for COVID patients every day for 9 months before they were able to be vaccinated. Many spent hundreds-thousands of hours in contact with COVID patients and didn't get sick. This is extremely strong evidence that N95s work.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Agreed, all that a good cdc response does is t+n the endemic.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      No, a good CDC response reduces the number of deaths along the way to endemic
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Are you referring to people who died but wouldn’t have had the hospitals not been filled?
- handmodel 5y ago
  I am upset with the CDC too but even if we were perfect from Jan 2020 through Aug 2020 (or whatever) we'd still be getting hit with delta now. The US just ordered 200M booster shots. Making these is pretty much cutting into the capacity of other countries to get their first shots. I am for this - they are American companies and the US should happily pay for them for its citizens. But when there 7.5B other people in the world its not really up to us when the next variant hits.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    The primary fuel for evolution of new variants is the spread of infection. Every time the virus copies itself is a chance for a new mutation, another roll of the roulette wheel for the creation of a stronger sARS-CoV-2. So by letting infections spread as far as they did, we gave the raw evolutionary fuel to create new, more contagious, variants. If we had cut the number of global infections in half, we might be living in a timeline where a delta-like variant never evolved. We developed vaccines in record time, but if we had a way to distribute them more quickly, maybe it would have been prevented. It's a global fight, and every government that let it get out of control worsened our chances at containment.
officialjunk 5y ago
is the origin really known?
- pengaru 5y ago
  India [0], and with > 1B people there, that's a whole lot of opportunities to mutate, and a whole lot of jabs to manufacture, distribute, and perform. In the case of mRNA vaccines, they need to be kept quite cold until basically day of use. India is poor and hot, it's non-trivial to say the least. As others have said, this isn't primarily a US problem; 30.7% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 16% is fully vaccinated [1]. Even if 100% of the US population were vaccinated, it'd barely move those figures. [0] https://www.thequint.com/coronavirus/covid-variants-found-in-india-to-be-labelled-delta-and-kappa-who https://www.thequint.com/coronavirus/covid-variants-found-in... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Yes. India.
- paulmd 5y ago
  yes. genomic surveillance makes it possible to measure the presence of various strains in various areas and their ongoing mutations.
- stevespang 5y ago
  Peru
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sjg007 5y ago
I mean the delta variant took a plane trip here. The US could’ve stopped that.
- nradov 5y ago
  That would have only delayed arrival of the delta variant by a few weeks at most. The US has always had de facto open borders with no real effective security.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Delta and other variants are not unlikely events though: the expectation is that they would emerge independently anywhere that the virus is freely replicating. Delta is so named because using "origin of identification" kept convincing people the virus came from there, rather then was first isolated in a lab - and that relatively straight forward mutations couldn't emerge in multiple places with widespread infection simultaneously.
gridspy 5y ago
The US was (and to a lesser extent still is) exporting harmful Covid-19 mis-information. Your point about helping other countries to help all countries stands.
- baby 5y ago
  I think my country (France) and dr Raoult has its share of responsibility. Let’s not even talk about China’s responsibility in this mess.
antman 5y ago
Both US and EU countries kept vaccine production patents for profit effectively allowing the world to go unvaccinated and the mutations to go rampart. India a vaccine production behemoth but also others asked, begged but to deaf ears. Helping other countries looks like a US and EU issue.
- kilburn 5y ago
  Food for thought > BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-idUSKBN2FB15A https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-...

It’s not a US issue. The delta variant did not originate from the US. If we want to fix this we have to help other countries.

by baby 5y ago

It’s not a US issue. The delta variant did not originate from the US. If we want to fix this we have to help other countries.

epistasis 5y ago

That's why my comment explicitly said "and other places." I agree that this needed to be a global effort to succeed, and in the past the US would have helped the cause rather than hindered the fight against the diseases. I am still absolutely shocked at the poor testing response of the CDC, both in 1) the huge lag before allowing testing by anyone, leading to the Univeristy of Washington discovering it against the wishes of regulators, and 2) completely botching the initial test manufacturing due to newbie mistakes. It was a failure mode that nobody even anticipated in planning, because it's so ridiculous that the CDCs capabilities fell so low.

shock-value 5y ago
I agree with your criticism but also firmly believe that once COVID started spreading beyond a few handfuls of individuals, its fate as a human endemic disease was locked in. No difference in policy by any or all countries would have changed that eventuality, other than at most modify the timeline slightly.
- gibba999 5y ago
  No... early social distancing would have dramatically reduced R0. It's exponential growth. Fewer infections => fewer mutations. Proper masks (electrostatic or nano layer) are widely available, and they all but stop the original COVID. They cost a buck. The nano ones can be reused several times. Providing those prior to vaccines would have been cheap and effective. Masks + vaccines + modest social distancing would have stopped it then. They would have been to rush to get vaccines to everyone, and to prioritize by exposures (e.g. service workers before WFH employees). Plus, look at China. If we all did what China did, we'd be done.
  - shock-value 5y ago
    > and they all but stop the original COVID Would love a citation on that. I think masks definitely help reduce transmission but they are hardly a magic bullet. Anyway we can reduce R0 to zero in the short term and it wouldn't matter to my thesis. COVID circulates in animals so as soon as we would take our foot off of the brakes it would again start spreading in an unbounded fashion. And the world can't undergo a complete global lockdown while we wait years for vaccine availability. It's just impossible from any point of view: political, economic, social, etc.
    - gibba999 5y ago
      The best source I've seen are the tracing studies in China. Police state meant China could follow exact paths -- from camera footage -- of who caught COVID from whom. If both sides wore surgical masks (imperfect fit, but electrostatic layer), there was almost never any spread. Singapore hospitals were good case studies too. Hundreds of COVID19 exposures early in the pandemic, with virtually no spread. You can do web searches for both. Million dollar question is how this impacts delta. Delta has higher viral loads, and it's perfectly possible filtering 95% of delta will still result in more virus than the original, unmasked. Things also get more complex with both sides filtering; naive math would place filtration at 99.75% effective, but I don't believe naive math in this case beyond saying "a lot more effective."
    - Exmoor 5y ago
      I wish I could find the study, but back in December there was a study indicating that frontline medical workers working directly with COVID patients every day and wearing N95 masks were more likely to have been infected by social contact outside of work then at work. I remember the day because it's when I went and bought KN95 masks.
    - cameldrv 5y ago
      The simple fact is that unmasked, the mean amount of time you can spend face to face with an infected person (with pre-Delta COVID) before you get infected yourself is maybe an hour or two. Many, many doctors and nurses were caring for COVID patients every day for 9 months before they were able to be vaccinated. Many spent hundreds-thousands of hours in contact with COVID patients and didn't get sick. This is extremely strong evidence that N95s work.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Agreed, all that a good cdc response does is t+n the endemic.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    No, a good CDC response reduces the number of deaths along the way to endemic
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Are you referring to people who died but wouldn’t have had the hospitals not been filled?
handmodel 5y ago
I am upset with the CDC too but even if we were perfect from Jan 2020 through Aug 2020 (or whatever) we'd still be getting hit with delta now. The US just ordered 200M booster shots. Making these is pretty much cutting into the capacity of other countries to get their first shots. I am for this - they are American companies and the US should happily pay for them for its citizens. But when there 7.5B other people in the world its not really up to us when the next variant hits.
- epistasis 5y ago
  The primary fuel for evolution of new variants is the spread of infection. Every time the virus copies itself is a chance for a new mutation, another roll of the roulette wheel for the creation of a stronger sARS-CoV-2. So by letting infections spread as far as they did, we gave the raw evolutionary fuel to create new, more contagious, variants. If we had cut the number of global infections in half, we might be living in a timeline where a delta-like variant never evolved. We developed vaccines in record time, but if we had a way to distribute them more quickly, maybe it would have been prevented. It's a global fight, and every government that let it get out of control worsened our chances at containment.

officialjunk 5y ago

is the origin really known?

pengaru 5y ago
India [0], and with > 1B people there, that's a whole lot of opportunities to mutate, and a whole lot of jabs to manufacture, distribute, and perform. In the case of mRNA vaccines, they need to be kept quite cold until basically day of use. India is poor and hot, it's non-trivial to say the least. As others have said, this isn't primarily a US problem; 30.7% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 16% is fully vaccinated [1]. Even if 100% of the US population were vaccinated, it'd barely move those figures. [0] https://www.thequint.com/coronavirus/covid-variants-found-in-india-to-be-labelled-delta-and-kappa-who https://www.thequint.com/coronavirus/covid-variants-found-in... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
throwawayboise 5y ago
Yes. India.
paulmd 5y ago
yes. genomic surveillance makes it possible to measure the presence of various strains in various areas and their ongoing mutations.
stevespang 5y ago
Peru

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sjg007 5y ago

I mean the delta variant took a plane trip here. The US could’ve stopped that.

nradov 5y ago
That would have only delayed arrival of the delta variant by a few weeks at most. The US has always had de facto open borders with no real effective security.
XorNot 5y ago
Delta and other variants are not unlikely events though: the expectation is that they would emerge independently anywhere that the virus is freely replicating. Delta is so named because using "origin of identification" kept convincing people the virus came from there, rather then was first isolated in a lab - and that relatively straight forward mutations couldn't emerge in multiple places with widespread infection simultaneously.

gridspy 5y ago

The US was (and to a lesser extent still is) exporting harmful Covid-19 mis-information. Your point about helping other countries to help all countries stands.

baby 5y ago
I think my country (France) and dr Raoult has its share of responsibility. Let’s not even talk about China’s responsibility in this mess.

antman 5y ago

Both US and EU countries kept vaccine production patents for profit effectively allowing the world to go unvaccinated and the mutations to go rampart. India a vaccine production behemoth but also others asked, begged but to deaf ears. Helping other countries looks like a US and EU issue.

kilburn 5y ago
Food for thought > BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-idUSKBN2FB15A https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-...