_djo_

56 ms·

691.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Given the low vaccination rate in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time this variant emerged from there, it's unlikely that mass vaccination campaigns drove selection pressure in this case. Far more likely that it was a host jump or a long mu
692.
by _djo_ 5y ago
That’s not a lockdown by any reasonable definition of the term.
693.
by _djo_ 5y ago
‘Convenient’, or unsurprising because it’s just recording the current scientific consensus around vaccines and that’s the same thing driving current policy? Not everything is a conspiracy with malevolent intent. For all the damage that COVI
694.
by _djo_ 5y ago
That's false, Imperial College's modelling of Sweden actually matched real-world deaths fairly closely. For instance, it assessed Swedish deaths to 31 March 2020 as being 240 [140-440] with zero interventions, or 160 [110-240] wit
695.
by _djo_ 5y ago
70% would have been workable for the original or 'wild type' strain. Delta and Omicron are many times more transmissible.
696.
by _djo_ 5y ago
The CDC's definition has been out of date for years. It turns out that to a large degree sterilising immunity was a myth with only a tiny, tiny fractions of vaccines actually achieving it. [0] Most just achieve enough reduction in tran
697.
by _djo_ 5y ago
And yet the damaging travel ban against Southern Africa remains in place, even against recommendations by key US scientists...
698.
by _djo_ 5y ago
There is no Wikipedia editorial board. If you disagree with the article, you can engage in the discussion regarding it and make edits of your own.
699.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Google and Facebook are a direct cause of the decline in the quality of newspapers and journalism in general through their intentional strategy to capture as much of the value from news as possible, even though they created none of the actu
700.
Botswana Gets WHO Award for Mother-to-Child HIV Prevention Milestone(voanews.com)
1 points by _djo_ 5y ago|0 comments
701.
by _djo_ 5y ago
In our experience the weird lab origin controversy was broadly limited to the US and to a lesser extent the UK, and probably caused by your rather idiosyncratic politics at the moment. For most of the rest of the world it was never that big
702.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Why do people think the WHO is the world police, able to hold negligent countries to account? It isn't, and it can't. It's an international health agency that is entirely dependent on and beholden to UN member states, as it w
703.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Yes, that's the clear and obvious answer. We have regulations around things like being able to make 911 calls for a reason, because it's literally a life and death issue. Nobody should be making or selling a call-hijacking app if
704.
by _djo_ 5y ago
It's not unknown, all the groups publish their methodology in the open. I'm now convinced you just want to be a contrarian, rather than learning about a system you don't understand.
705.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Nope. You may think you are, but in reality you're ignorant of how these statistics are calculated and you that's why you think you're smart for finding what you think are mistakes. This has, actually, all been taken into a
706.
by _djo_ 5y ago
You know that's just an article providing an overview, right? It's not the official source of excess mortality statistics. For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records
707.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Now you're just shifting the goal posts. Excess death tracking is hardly a new thing, most countries have been doing it for decades to measure the effect of things like flu outbreaks. Therefore when those same statistics being done usi
708.
by _djo_ 5y ago
No, I'm providing what you asked for: A measurement of excess deaths. That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average. If those excess death calculati
709.
by _djo_ 5y ago
What? There has been significant excess mortality, as summarised here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual a
710.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Because all of these things work at population level, not necessarily at an individual level. Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in a
711.
by _djo_ 5y ago
No, they really didn't. Healthcare workers got COVID in large numbers, causing severe absenteeism, a number of deaths, and many with ongoing Long Covid conditions. It's part of the reason that bed capacity has been so difficult to
712.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Yet in that same article they admit they hadn’t seen any actual negative impact. If you’re going to name your airline after the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet you can’t exactly claim ownership over the name or insist that nobody else e
713.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Why be that specific? The WHO’s guidelines already made it clear why some names may be skipped. Referring to Xi Jinping directly would be counter-productive to their goal of depoliticising the name.
714.
by _djo_ 5y ago
From personal experience, KLM is quite lax about it.
715.
by _djo_ 5y ago
Was there really a strong likelihood that people were going to confuse Delta the variant with Delta the airline, to the point where it distracted from the global response? I don’t think so, and Delta seems to have suffered no specific harm
716.
by _djo_ 5y ago
That’s not what that means. It’s just the withdrawal of PCR assays that can only detect SARS-CoV-2 in favour of newer assays that can detect both it and Influenza A/B.
717.
by _djo_ 5y ago
No, it’s confirmed via sequencing. But the Omicron variant has a qPCR dropout like Alpha had, so you can identify likely cases from PCR tests and then use sequencing to verify.
718.
by _djo_ 5y ago
That’s confusingly worded and not enforced. I can confirm that fully vaccinated people flying from South Africa to the Netherlands did not need negative PCR tests until this week. You’re only required to fill in a declaration of vaccination
719.
by _djo_ 5y ago
No, it was just the next letter in the alphabet after Nu (not used because of its similarity with Mu and the ‘Nu/New’ thing) and Xi (not used to avoid making the discussion about a political controversy rather than the variant.
720.
by _djo_ 5y ago
They were Variants of Interest, which didn’t see substantial spread, rather then Variants of Concern. Both VOIs and VOCs get Greek letter names.

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