Generic Virus Thread

[sidcow]

Just seen that Obama, Bush and Clinton are to be filmed having their jabs to encourage people to do it. 

In my opinion ANYONE who has a social media profile shod be filming themselves being vaccinated and posted up online.  A real campaign is needed to counter the anti vaxxers. 

[HanoiVillan]

I'm not seeing it with doom-saying about the distribution of the vaccine. We haven't spent all year racing to develop, test and approve a vaccine three times faster than ever before for a global pandemic, only to throw up our hands and say 'well, we haven't got room in the fridge for them'.

[Genie]

34 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Just seen that Obama, Bush and Clinton are to be filmed having their jabs to encourage people to do it. 

In my opinion ANYONE who has a social media profile shod be filming themselves being vaccinated and posted up online.  A real campaign is needed to counter the anti vaxxers. 

There is a growing surge of reports and media coming out telling people why the vaccines are safe. There’s also action on social media to remove fake news (which has to be handled carefully because of tHeY doNT wANt uS 2 nO tHE trOOf)

[Genie]

The US records almost 200,000 new daily cases 

[Xela]

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

Just seen that Obama, Bush and Clinton are to be filmed having their jabs to encourage people to do it. 

In my opinion ANYONE who has a social media profile shod be filming themselves being vaccinated and posted up online.  A real campaign is needed to counter the anti vaxxers. 

My first thought is let them deal with their own stupidity . 

[fightoffyour]

11 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

If you can work from anywhere, try going to another country to break up the monotony. If you come and work over here (get an AirBnb for 2 weeks or something), I'm sure both me and @fightoffyour will keep you company.

We sure would!

12 hours ago, Davkaus said:

I appreciate it, along with the other folks in the booze thread, I definitely want to have a pint or 5 with you when this is all over! It'd have been a  lot harder to get through this year without you lot.

I went to see a friend yesterday who's flying back to the US until after Christmas as his grandma died of Covid and I already hadn't seen him for a while. Made me realise how much I needed to get out the house and just talk to someone else for an hour, so I can empathise to some extent with what you're going through and yeah I'd suggest trying to do something different even for a small part of the day just to clear your mind a bit - if not take up Stefan's advice.

[StefanAVFC]

34 minutes ago, fightoffyour said:

We sure would!

I went to see a friend yesterday who's flying back to the US until after Christmas as his grandma died of Covid and I already hadn't seen him for a while. Made me realise how much I needed to get out the house and just talk to someone else for an hour, so I can empathise to some extent with what you're going through and yeah I'd suggest trying to do something different even for a small part of the day just to clear your mind a bit - if not take up Stefan's advice.

@Davkaus And if you can't fly, jump in the car!

[darrenm]

13 hours ago, Davkaus said:

Confirmed today at my company we're working from home until at least April, no matter what.

I love mostly  working from home. I get more sleep, no rush hour stress, more comfortable, better desk and tech. But I'm going **** mental. I basically wake up, talk about work, get pissed, play with the cats, and go to bed.

I miss the morning coffee run. I miss talking about what we watched on TV on the way to meetings. I miss pub lunches on quiet days. I'm realising how little I socialise outside of work. I feel like I'm approaching breaking point, I just don't know how much longer I can live like this. Today I made a coffee, then sat down on the stairs and just stared at the wall for a while, and realised my coffee was cold. I'm not ok and I can't live like this.

I changed to WFH in Feb and I won't go back (the company have closed most of the regional offices for good).

Do you go out at lunchtime? I plan either a running or cycling adventure every lunchtime. It's always somewhere or something new to keep me interested. I do have the family to keep me challenged/entertained on the evenings though.

You've got the shared office space you can go to as well. If you're not in tier 3 you can potentially go and sit with your laptop in a Starbucks etc? That should also get easier.

I reckon you've got to force yourself to go out at lunchtime. I'm struggling with motivation with getting work and non-work tasks started. My procrastination is getting pretty bad. I'm hoping it's not a sign of anything else but I think I'm OK because of other stuff I can think about and do. 

[Wainy316]

Isn't funny that the anti vaxxers also tend to be the same people that think BLM is a Marxist organisation hell bent on world domination, the American election was fraudulent and that Brexit is just fan bloody tastic.

[sharkyvilla]

34 minutes ago, Wainy316 said:

Isn't funny that the anti vaxxers also tend to be the same people that think BLM is a Marxist organisation hell bent on world domination, the American election was fraudulent and that Brexit is just fan bloody tastic.

We are in an age where you can pretty much extrapolate from somebody's opinion on one subject and know what they think about anything else, whether they're left or right.  

[sidcow]

1 hour ago, sharkyvilla said:

We are in an age where you can pretty much extrapolate from somebody's opinion on one subject and know what they think about anything else, whether they're left or right.  

 

[snowychap]

 

[bickster]

18 minutes ago, snowychap said:

 

Not remotely shocked at all, just by looking at the daily rates over time gave the impression it had little to no effect. (see other posts on the subject)

[HanoiVillan]

I remember back at the start of this crisis, I became quite interested in mass-testing solutions (back when Paul Romer was suggesting testing 25 million Americans per day) but it has been clear for a while that various problems, technical (a high false-positive rate), societal (a high degree of skepticism and resistance) and governmental (still no adequate support for people isolating) meant that it was not going to be useful solution.

Now we have these vaccines, the 'mass testing' solution can be consigned to dustbin to be honest.

[darrenm]

Only purely anecdotal and take it as pure hearsay but my wife (backline NHS) reckons from talking to the frontline staff that they've seen plenty more people with it in the hospitals this spike but it hasn't been as bad. People aren't getting as ill with it. The deaths vs cases support that but it's generally been put down to wider testing picking up the cases that were likely to be there last time but missed.

I think there's perhaps more pre-start attained herd immunity out there than thought. When you look at how easy it is for people to catch COVID in enclosed spaces and how long it's been discovered to linger in the air, it's surprising it wasn't more prevalent. And there's the discovery that viral load (how much of the virus people are exposed to) has a big effect I have to wonder if a large number of people have been exposed to a tiny viral load that gives the immune system a small head start by the time of the second spike. There was a finding in the Oxford vaccine that a smaller first dose then larger second dose improved efficacy.

Because of this, I think the vaccine might bring the deaths down very rapidly while cases will linger for a while

I'd love to see the data in that chart comparing December 2019 to June 2020 then June 2020 to now. I think it would show the excess deaths being clustered more towards the higher ages this time.

[bickster]

3 hours ago, darrenm said:

Only purely anecdotal and take it as pure hearsay but my wife (backline NHS) reckons from talking to the frontline staff that they've seen plenty more people with it in the hospitals this spike but it hasn't been as bad. People aren't getting as ill with it. The deaths vs cases support that but it's generally been put down to wider testing picking up the cases that were likely to be there last time but missed.

I think there's perhaps more pre-start attained herd immunity out there than thought. When you look at how easy it is for people to catch COVID in enclosed spaces and how long it's been discovered to linger in the air, it's surprising it wasn't more prevalent. And there's the discovery that viral load (how much of the virus people are exposed to) has a big effect I have to wonder if a large number of people have been exposed to a tiny viral load that gives the immune system a small head start by the time of the second spike. There was a finding in the Oxford vaccine that a smaller first dose then larger second dose improved efficacy.

Because of this, I think the vaccine might bring the deaths down very rapidly while cases will linger for a while

I'd love to see the data in that chart comparing December 2019 to June 2020 then June 2020 to now. I think it would show the excess deaths being clustered more towards the higher ages this time.

I think there's some truth in this but there are also other factors at play too. They have learned quite a bit now in terms of treatment that they didn't know at the start. I believe there are certain combinations of symptoms that can lead to determination of the most effective treatment for the patient, this was a complete unknown at the start when they literally were winging it.

Also, I believe this ”wave” has affected a much younger overall demographic, the persons age and fitness will also be a factor in less deaths

The lower death to hospitalisation ratio is a combination of a few different factors

[ender4]

I am still wondering how accurate the overall death figure is? 

I don't like that they count any death within 30 days of having Covid.  What about those people who were fine from having Covid but had other health problems which they died from?  Can't they use actual cause of death on death certificate to count it?

Also, in the first wave they were counting any death after having had confirmed Covid.  I think the estimate was 3k extra deaths counted by not cutting off after 30 days. Did they ever revise the figures to take out these 3k extra non-Covid deaths?   I didn't see the death figure go down at any point. 

[Seat68]

Huzzah covid cured in the rich. 
 

 

[darrenm]

28 minutes ago, ender4 said:

I am still wondering how accurate the overall death figure is? 

I don't like that they count any death within 30 days of having Covid.  What about those people who were fine from having Covid but had other health problems which they died from?  Can't they use actual cause of death on death certificate to count it?

Also, in the first wave they were counting any death after having had confirmed Covid.  I think the estimate was 3k extra deaths counted by not cutting off after 30 days. Did they ever revise the figures to take out these 3k extra non-Covid deaths?   I didn't see the death figure go down at any point. 

What other health problems would people have that would kill them within 30 days but wasn't made any worse by having COVID?

The original death figures were well under the actual deaths because they weren't counting care homes. Only hospital deaths were counted. Also plenty of people will have died from COVID without having a test.

So the FT and the eventually the ONS did their excess deaths analysis which have become the best source of information. It's shown in the chart I've posted above. If there's normally 100k deaths in a month and it was 120k in the same month this year, it doesn't matter how they were recorded, those 20k extra were COVID related.

[jimmygreaves]

5 hours ago, sharkyvilla said:

We are in an age where you can pretty much extrapolate from somebody's opinion on one subject and know what they think about anything else, whether they're left or right.  

That assumption is fundamentally massively incorrect and almost certainly the reason the world is going up shit creek.... People are not red or blue. The world and the  people who live in it are complicated.... very complicated. Unfortunately it now seems totally fine to operate as if everything is binary.