10 ms·

Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? I hate, __hate__ this constant fear of a lockdown. Hell, a good part of europe is in lockdown right now. I g

• Denvercoder9 5y ago
  > Leave me the hell alone! As long as that makes essential things such as grocery shopping more dangerous for others, such as myself, no.
  • ralph84 5y ago
    Do you have any evidence of a significant covid outbreak being traced to grocery shopping?
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      Yes just type covid breakout grocery store in google to see all the local breakouts in your area.
      • abledon 5y ago
        wow, i thought you were being sarcastic (I was laughing at your lmgtfy 'joke') , but they actually do list them. awesome! https://corpo.metro.ca/en/covid-19-cases-ontario.html https://corpo.metro.ca/en/covid-19-cases-ontario.html
      • ralph84 5y ago
        I said shopping, not working there.
  • bingohbangoh 5y ago
    Ok, then when does this end? I'm all ears!
    • doesnt_know 5y ago
      Maybe it doesn't? At least not until medical science catches up to allow the level of social/global interaction we had been taking for granted for decades. In the history of our species, we have never been this connected on a global level before, we were potentially sitting on a timebomb just waiting for the appropriate viral trigger to bring it down.
    • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      Violence. It gives people a lot of perspective very quickly. Sooner or later, it's where we're going to end up.
      • abledon 5y ago
        [flagged]
    • kaba0 5y ago
      As far as I know the current view is that it won’t end, but it will become a regular the same way the flu is. There may even be yearly shots combined with flu shots for all the new variants that may evolve. I truly hate that guy, but “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
      • Gigachad 5y ago
        I don’t think OP is concerned with yearly shots or covid hanging around. It’s the lockdowns and other restrictions that people care about.
        • spookthesunset 5y ago
          Bingo. It’s long since time to stop spending this much energy on this myopic fixation on Covid. There are billions of other things for each individual to worry about besides the spread of Covid. And that is a fact, which doesn’t care about the feelings of people pushing society to continue waging an impossible war on a respiratory virus.
  • scohesc 5y ago
    When you can prove in a court of law that person "x" infected person "y" at "Z" date/time - then you can say this with even a minimal level of confidence. Don't want to get sick? Order groceries online and have them delivered to your door.
    • mrinella 5y ago
      Are you saying that because it can’t be proven that you infected someone else, it is okay to put others at risk? And that since we can’t hold individuals responsible, everyone else needs to alter their behavior? That is, one infectious person wandering around a grocery store gets to force everyone else to shop online and is not doing anything wrong?
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      Those delivery people may be carriers. Better to grow and eat your own produce and avoid society at all costs.
• miohtama 5y ago
  > Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? We have managed to clear out measles, so we should be able to stop COVID as well with high enough vaccination rates. Although this is not apples-to-apples comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine
  • mellavora 5y ago
    We were close to clearing out measles in western countries until the anti-vax movement came along. These days, not so much.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      What is the fraction of the population who is anti-vax with regard to measles? I don't know anyone. I do know many people who are reluctant/refusing to get the COVID vax.
    • makomk 5y ago
      Peak anti-vax for measles was like two decades ago, at least over here in the UK - we were at pretty much an all-time record high for MMR vaccinations of kids before Covid came along and disrupted all the vaccination programs. (I know the BBC ran a very misleading article making it sound like Facebook was causing a vaccination crisis and putting us at risk of a measles outbreak, but in reality the actual danger is from all the people who weren't vaccinated years ago due in part to their own bad reporting.)
  • elzbardico 5y ago
    Did we clear the flu? No, it is endemic. The same is what will happen with COVID.
  • timr 5y ago
    > We have managed to clear out measles No, we have not. In fact, there has been a rather significant resurgence in measles over the course of the last two years. One of the many side-effects of our reaction to Covid that is not properly accounted. https://www.who.int/news/item/10-11-2021-global-progress-against-measles-threatened-amidst-covid-19-pandemic https://www.who.int/news/item/10-11-2021-global-progress-aga... https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1077482 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1077482 https://www.outbreakobservatory.org/outbreakthursday-1/3/11/2021/worldwide-measles-cases-climb https://www.outbreakobservatory.org/outbreakthursday-1/3/11/...
• lokl 5y ago
  According to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, as of now, Sweden has had 15,145 deaths; Norway has had 1,050 deaths; Denmark 2,863; Finland 1,309. With populations from Wikipedia (10,402,070 for Sweden; 5,402,171 for Norway; 5,850,189 for Denmark; 5,536,146 for Finland), this yields deaths per 1,000 people of: Sweden 1.456 Norway 0.194 Denmark 0.489 Finland 0.236 Saying Sweden has "just survived" doesn't capture these numbers well, I think. If this is "embarrassing" for anyone, it's Sweden, but I wouldn't use the word embarrassing. It's tragic.
  • oliv__ 5y ago
    So Sweden had proportionately 5 times more deaths for not locking down with a death / population ratio of 0.00145? I don't think it's ridiculous to consider not locking down with those stats. Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.
    • tgv 5y ago
      Are you going to tell those 12000 people: sorry, but you need to die for my exceptionally limited view of economy?
      • bmeski 5y ago
        Yes. How many people die in car accidents each year?
        • CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
          In Sweden? ~300 [1], so about 40 years worth of traffic accidents. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-deaths-in-sweden/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...
        • kaba0 5y ago
          Will it increase exponentially if not cared about?
• drusepth 5y ago
  Mutations happen during spread, so as long as we have huge swaths of unvaccinated people in every country around the world, the mutations will continue to happen. Luckily, variants of concern have slowed significantly as more and more people have gotten vaccinated (and practiced social distancing, masks, wash hands, etc), but there's still a long way to go before we can finally put this pandemic behind us.
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    Mutations are happening in vaccinated people. It's similiar to what happens when you spray a new poison on an insect group. Most die but the bugs with mutations live replicate and quickly spread making that poison useless.
    • XorNot 5y ago
      South Africa, where this strain originated, has a vaccination rate of 25%. Though I'm also curious why this only happens for this virus, and not any of the others we've destroyed with vaccination like smallpox, or reduced to nothingness like polio or measles. (short version: you don't know what you're talking about).
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        Mutations are happening in both populations. Specific mutation that make the vaccine ineffective are happening in vaccinated people. This vaccine doesn't prevent covid the way the smallpox vaccine does. This is a new type of vaccine trying to reduce deaths. Calling the same is a marketing trick.
• phonebucket 5y ago
  > If we couldn't overcome it after a year of lockdowns, why is this gonna be the time it changes? Lockdowns are not about overcoming it; they're about saving lives. I think it's fair to say that the lockdowns saved quite a lot of them. Looking at how the death charts correlate with lockdown impositions might support this viewpoint.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Lockdowns don’t make any progress. They put everything on pause. But as soon as you unpause, all of those saved lives are at the same risk they were at before. And you can’t pause forever. Each lockdown becomes less and less effective as people stop caring.
    • mojuba 5y ago
      Except there's hope of finding a more effective treatment against this virus while we are on pause. So lives can be saved potentially.
      • spookthesunset 5y ago
        We did. We have multiple vaccines and treatments. That was the end game. If those didn’t work, we have no choice but either live in some dystopian hellscape to save people from exactly one illness at the cost of literally all other issues… or we accept the risks and move on with our lives. 2 years of this is a non trivial amount of time.
        • tldrthelaw 5y ago
          We do have another choice, continuing to buy time to add to the arsenal of weapons we have against the virus. Things are only simple when you frame the issue simply; reality is complicated. You need only imagine yourself flickering out to see the value in doing what you can to keep someone from the same fate. We are all alive in our heads just like you are in yours.
• roywiggins 5y ago
  The world survived the 1918 flu without any vaccines and only sporadic and limited social distancing... but it killed 50 million people. That sucks, and we can do better. Societies survive these things, usually; it's people who die.
• deleted 5y ago
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• kaba0 5y ago
  “If we could not extinguish even the small fire, stop pouring buckets of water on it, let the whole thing burn down” It is still an exponential curve that will overflow all the hospitals the moment you stop paying attention, causing hundred thousands of additional deaths indirectly due to overworked med staff. Object permanence is a thing.
  • bavell 5y ago
    What I can't understand is the risk/benefit of firing thousands of unvaccinated medical staff across the US while we're in the middle of a pandemic and already experiencing hospital staff shortages. Isn't that just exacerbating the problem? Were those unvaccinated medical workers really killing more people than they saved? I honestly don't know but it doesn't feel like we really did the calculus and are instead just shooting from the hip.
    • GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Especially because it takes a minimum of 4 years to train new ones...
      • kaba0 5y ago
        If they are so stupid to not vaccinate themselves as a goddamn med worker, I doubt they were too useful in the first place, if not criminally dangerous.
        • bavell 5y ago
          Do you think the unvaccinated medical workers with natural immunity who were fired were criminally dangerous? I think denigrating nurses and doctors who have been working overtime to save lives for the last two years is pretty harsh and callous (vaccinated or otherwise). These are the people we all called heros just a year ago. Again, are they really killing more people than they saved?
• threatripper 5y ago
  > Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? No but they tend to become less severe for the surviving population. Either because susceptible individuals don't make it or the immune system is learning and the virus runs out of good mutations. So far it seems that higher transmissibility was the driving factor. We still have a large percentage of the population waiting for their first infection. Next we will see more immune escape variants and then probably come the variants that diversify but they will probably run out of useful mutations and our trained immune systems are better at preventing severe infection. It could take some more years and some more severe waves (and some calm years in between) until we arrive there. The new Joker we have are mRNA vaccines with which we might quickly sharpen our immune response before the main wave of a new variant arrives.
• jljljl 5y ago
  I don’t understand the recent celebrating of Florida’s COVID performance — in September, after vaccinations and treatment options were widely available, Florida was losing more than 300 people per day to COVID. They went from ~25th in the nation for COVID Deaths per capita to 8th worst since the pandemic started. That “just surviving” came at a huge cost of lives.
  • chmod600 5y ago
    After the vaccine was available it was mostly unvaccinated dying. It's called freedom.
    • jljljl 5y ago
      With any vaccine, there are people who 1. Can't access the vaccine, 2. Can't take it for medical reasons 3. Who are scared/skeptical of getting it due to misinformation (often spread by those in power). Florida could have pushed for higher vaccination rates, but mainstreamed misinformation and skepticism instead
  • nradov 5y ago
    Florida has a higher proportion of elderly residents at higher risk. When you adjust for demographics the death rate in Florida is about average for the USA.
    • sjg007 5y ago
      Citation?
• howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  > Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? RNA viruses have high mutation rates and variants will never end in the same way that flu & common-cold variation continues. The more interesting question is how will our immune systems adapt and will vaccines continue to provide protection against severity of illness at the same time as they apply selective pressure that enhances viral transmissibility? Of further interest is why Japanese and Taiwan infection and severity rates remain comparatively low and what - if any - role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success. Also of great interest is why aspiration isn't mandatory in the US to prevent the vaccine from entering the bloodstream (primarily the heart) rapidly and in large quantities. Many unanswered questions.
  • titzer 5y ago
    > why Japanese and Taiwan infection and severity rates remain comparatively low Just a stab in the dark, but generally high social conformity and particularly mask wearing.
  • planetsprite 5y ago
    >role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success. It's their willingness to wear masks, follow social distancing guidelines, not the secret magic of ivermectin.
  • BirdieNZ 5y ago
    > nd what - if any - role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success. There's a trial study currently in progress in Japan to investigate this, but all the evidence we have points to ivermectin being of no benefit to Covid patients unless they have parasitic worms. See, for example: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t... It's not an unanswered question, in other words. Ivermectin doesn't help against Covid.
  • jlmorton 5y ago
    It's obesity. We know that obesity is a large driver not just in severity, but transmission. When you compare a world map of obesity rates to Covid death rates, you'll find a better match than any other single variable, far better-matching than income, masking, density, or any other single variable.
• tmaly 5y ago
  We are all going to have to live in the metaverse at the rate things are going.
• biophysboy 5y ago
  Mutagenesis will continue as long as there are viruses making more viruses. If I had to guess our future, COVID will become endemic but with less potency. We will manage it with vaccines and anti-virals. Lockdowns and restrictions? Frankly, I don't think business will allow it, particularly given how hard it is to demonstrate their efficacy (we can't look at the parallel universe where restrictions weren't imposed by a nation).
• dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  >Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? Variants were always there, for every pathogen out there. It's a good old media keeping the masses engaged... >Particularly embarrassing is how Sweden and Florida have just survived without much restrictions. Not many will admit that, will they? Infact they will even interpret any figures from those places to be indicate that things have been terrible over there. The reality field for many people ( possibly including me) is distorted.