10 ms·

Many (I suspect most but I only follow a few) epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron. It's more contagious than measles - if you're in a room wi

by rfrey 5y ago

Many (I suspect most but I only follow a few) epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron. It's more contagious than measles - if you're in a room with somebody who has it, you're exposed barring a properly fitted N95 mask. All of us will be exposed by mid February. It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta, and it's a gift that nothing at present can outcompete it. I believe it's the version that will be endemic, if not than something very similar. So as someone who has spent too many months raging against people who refused to look at the facts of Delta - my mom missed essential surgery because the ICUs were crowded with antivax people, to add emotion to the mix - I'm onside that it's the time to start opening up, at least in jurisdictions where Omicron is 95%+ of cases and where hospitalizations have peaked. The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days. edit: In the above I say I believe all of us will be exposed - not necessarily infected though.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Many (I suspect most)epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron. Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time. I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at. Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.
- glogla 5y ago
  Some people just have black-white thinking. See also "vaccines are not working" and lots of other nonsense.
  - eloff 5y ago
    I feel like I really started to have more empathy and better understand the world the moment in my life where I realized that black and white don't actually exist, they're unattainable ideals. It's all just shades of gray. It's so rare to find things like math where the answer is either right or wrong.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      It really depends on the subject. 1+1=2 according to the rules of arithmetic.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Yes. But also, in current culture, it is politically useful to pretend you have only black and white thinking. I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront. It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.
    - rfrey 5y ago
      I kind of resent being lumped in with a politically motivated, black-and-white, feign ignorance kind of crowd. I try to assess the data as it arises, and the data about Omicron is markedly different than previous variants. I don't think I said anything in my comment that deserves this attack. If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.
      - watwut 5y ago
        I expanded on previous comments. Yours was 3 levels up. I wanted to make the exact point I did - a lot of black and white thinking is in fact manipulative. Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point. It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.
- rfrey 5y ago
  I don't mean to present a false dichotomy, thank you for alerting me that I may have. Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important. In Canada I'm still doing everything I can because it's not clear that we've peaked - the government is saying we have but they've also cut way down on testing so I'm not sure. In South Africa and increasingly in the UK it looks like a different story. Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.
  - jseban 5y ago
    > Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important. It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- wiredfool 5y ago
  Ireland is on the tail of their omicron peak ( based on cases, hospitalizations, and icu beds). Ireland has a very high vax percentage, well over 90+ in the covered groups, with high penetration of boosters as well. The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down. I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point. At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.
ricardobayes 5y ago
Your second and third sentences are factually incorrect. Check microcovid.org for an activity-based risk assessment.
- rfrey 5y ago
  Thanks for that site, it's very interesting and a very worthwhile project. I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.
Angostura 5y ago
I don't think it is particularly inevitable. My youngest got it - was picked up on a lateral flow test on Christmas Eve, we had spent the day mucking about and gaming together, wrapping presents etc. None of the rest of the family tested positive to my surprise. Yes, she did isolate in her room over Christmas, poor kid.
- aix1 5y ago
  I agree that "inevitable" is clearly too strong a statement. Furthermore, the odds of getting it depend on whether any of you are vaccinated and/or have previously had COVID (knowingly or otherwise).
ls15 5y ago
> The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Perhaps I can set you up on a call with my grandparents and aunts and uncles so you can find out what life with measles and smallpox and polio was like. A few still have scars. Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.
  - ls15 5y ago
    I just recovered from Omicron and I was vaccinated. I am not sure what your grandparents are going to tell me. That I should get another shot of the vaccine that did not prevent the disease?
    - acdha 5y ago
      That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case? Polio didn’t kill most people either.
      - ls15 5y ago
        > That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case? For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that. Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda? https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-against-covid-victims-say/a-60413978 https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...
disambiguation 5y ago
> Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days. Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.
- dtjb 5y ago
  Because many people they knew didn't wash safely back on the shores.
  - jseban 5y ago
    Is 1% "many"?
    - sweetheart 5y ago
      Is millions? And what about the millions of others who washed backed up but have become disabled and can’t work?
      - jseban 5y ago
        Millions out of what? Big scary number without context says nothing whatsoever.
        Cycl0ps 5y ago
        Millions out of us.
    - celticninja 5y ago
      1 percent of the world population is 78 million people, that is many, even if you try to make it seem small by using percent. Each of those people were a member of a family, a mother, brother, father, son or similar to someone. But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.
acdha 5y ago
> It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta. Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Why on earth would you vaccinate kids? It’s not going to do anything to the spread of the virus, as the grand parent post mentioned it is extremely infectious and neither masks or the vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections. They aren’t at risk of the virus either. The energy would be better spent convincing the few >60yo who haven’t been vaccinated to get the shot. But keeping restrictions until kids are vaccinated? What is the point?
  - jamps 5y ago
    That's correct. At some point we need to look at the real data of deaths. https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ In Europe, there has NEVER been A PANDEMIC for people <45yo. All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...). No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.
    - madeofpalk 5y ago
      You can be sick without dying. I don't want to get sick.
      - jseban 5y ago
        Everyone gets sick, you can't really stop that. Restricting your life from normal activities from fear of being infected with low risk cold viruses, is the very definition of hypochondria
spion 5y ago
The thing I find most baffling is that we have very good reason to believe [1] that HEPA air purifiers can keep the air clear of the virus, and yet they are barely talked about. In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes. HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in. There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open. So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”. Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7]. Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it. It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2 [2]: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-air-cleaners-reduce-covid-19-in-schools https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-ai... [3]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study.html https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study.... [4]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/6january2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... [5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2 [6]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v... [7]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v3 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v... [8]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Median%20of%20the%20total%20inward%20leakage%20over%20all%20subjects%20for%20different%20mask%2Dwearing%20cases https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Medi...
madeofpalk 5y ago
I think about just the common cold/flu - I also don't want to get that. If I knew that was ravaging through communities at higher than normal rates, i would take precautions because I just would prefer to not get sick!
- jseban 5y ago
  Be my guest, but don't force all of society to be your hypochondria buddies.
hutzlibu 5y ago
"The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along" Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once) In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that. That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system. But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.
guelo 5y ago
> All of us will be exposed by mid February This is misinformation.
JPKab 5y ago
I'm going to challenge you on a specific point: If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike. I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense. Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.

by rfrey 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Many (I suspect most)epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron. Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time. I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at. Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.

glogla 5y ago
Some people just have black-white thinking. See also "vaccines are not working" and lots of other nonsense.
- eloff 5y ago
  I feel like I really started to have more empathy and better understand the world the moment in my life where I realized that black and white don't actually exist, they're unattainable ideals. It's all just shades of gray. It's so rare to find things like math where the answer is either right or wrong.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    It really depends on the subject. 1+1=2 according to the rules of arithmetic.
- watwut 5y ago
  Yes. But also, in current culture, it is politically useful to pretend you have only black and white thinking. I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront. It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.
  - rfrey 5y ago
    I kind of resent being lumped in with a politically motivated, black-and-white, feign ignorance kind of crowd. I try to assess the data as it arises, and the data about Omicron is markedly different than previous variants. I don't think I said anything in my comment that deserves this attack. If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.
    - watwut 5y ago
      I expanded on previous comments. Yours was 3 levels up. I wanted to make the exact point I did - a lot of black and white thinking is in fact manipulative. Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point. It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.
rfrey 5y ago
I don't mean to present a false dichotomy, thank you for alerting me that I may have. Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important. In Canada I'm still doing everything I can because it's not clear that we've peaked - the government is saying we have but they've also cut way down on testing so I'm not sure. In South Africa and increasingly in the UK it looks like a different story. Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.
- jseban 5y ago
  > Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important. It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
wiredfool 5y ago
Ireland is on the tail of their omicron peak ( based on cases, hospitalizations, and icu beds). Ireland has a very high vax percentage, well over 90+ in the covered groups, with high penetration of boosters as well. The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down. I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point. At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.

ricardobayes 5y ago

Your second and third sentences are factually incorrect. Check microcovid.org for an activity-based risk assessment.

rfrey 5y ago
Thanks for that site, it's very interesting and a very worthwhile project. I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.

Angostura 5y ago

I don't think it is particularly inevitable. My youngest got it - was picked up on a lateral flow test on Christmas Eve, we had spent the day mucking about and gaming together, wrapping presents etc. None of the rest of the family tested positive to my surprise. Yes, she did isolate in her room over Christmas, poor kid.

aix1 5y ago
I agree that "inevitable" is clearly too strong a statement. Furthermore, the odds of getting it depend on whether any of you are vaccinated and/or have previously had COVID (knowingly or otherwise).

ls15 5y ago

> The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Perhaps I can set you up on a call with my grandparents and aunts and uncles so you can find out what life with measles and smallpox and polio was like. A few still have scars. Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.
- ls15 5y ago
  I just recovered from Omicron and I was vaccinated. I am not sure what your grandparents are going to tell me. That I should get another shot of the vaccine that did not prevent the disease?
  - acdha 5y ago
    That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case? Polio didn’t kill most people either.
    - ls15 5y ago
      > That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case? For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that. Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda? https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-against-covid-victims-say/a-60413978 https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...

disambiguation 5y ago

> Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days. Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.

dtjb 5y ago
Because many people they knew didn't wash safely back on the shores.
- jseban 5y ago
  Is 1% "many"?
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    Is millions? And what about the millions of others who washed backed up but have become disabled and can’t work?
    - jseban 5y ago
      Millions out of what? Big scary number without context says nothing whatsoever.
      - Cycl0ps 5y ago
        Millions out of us.
  - celticninja 5y ago
    1 percent of the world population is 78 million people, that is many, even if you try to make it seem small by using percent. Each of those people were a member of a family, a mother, brother, father, son or similar to someone. But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.

acdha 5y ago

> It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta. Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.

cm2187 5y ago
Why on earth would you vaccinate kids? It’s not going to do anything to the spread of the virus, as the grand parent post mentioned it is extremely infectious and neither masks or the vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections. They aren’t at risk of the virus either. The energy would be better spent convincing the few >60yo who haven’t been vaccinated to get the shot. But keeping restrictions until kids are vaccinated? What is the point?
- jamps 5y ago
  That's correct. At some point we need to look at the real data of deaths. https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ In Europe, there has NEVER been A PANDEMIC for people <45yo. All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...). No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    You can be sick without dying. I don't want to get sick.
    - jseban 5y ago
      Everyone gets sick, you can't really stop that. Restricting your life from normal activities from fear of being infected with low risk cold viruses, is the very definition of hypochondria

spion 5y ago

The thing I find most baffling is that we have very good reason to believe [1] that HEPA air purifiers can keep the air clear of the virus, and yet they are barely talked about. In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes. HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in. There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open. So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”. Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7]. Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it. It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2 [2]: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-air-cleaners-reduce-covid-19-in-schools https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-ai... [3]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study.html https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study.... [4]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/6january2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... [5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2 [6]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v... [7]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v3 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v... [8]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Median%20of%20the%20total%20inward%20leakage%20over%20all%20subjects%20for%20different%20mask%2Dwearing%20cases https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Medi...

madeofpalk 5y ago

I think about just the common cold/flu - I also don't want to get that. If I knew that was ravaging through communities at higher than normal rates, i would take precautions because I just would prefer to not get sick!

jseban 5y ago
Be my guest, but don't force all of society to be your hypochondria buddies.

hutzlibu 5y ago

"The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along" Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once) In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that. That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system. But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.

guelo 5y ago

> All of us will be exposed by mid February This is misinformation.

JPKab 5y ago

I'm going to challenge you on a specific point: If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike. I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense. Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.