BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

Larssen wrote:

There's several countries in the world now that have 80%+ vaccination rate. Quite a few in the EU. Despite the effort, it's not enough to keep covid at bay. Several are now reimposing restrictions or considering doing so as winter approaches.

It really makes you wonder what the point of it all is in the long term. 80% vaccination is only achievable for very highly developed countries. There will be many countries around the globe that will top out at 30-50%, even if they have unlimited supply. It may also take several years to get to that point globally. Because of issues with infrastructure, dispersed rural populations, low literacy rates, the fact that the jab isn't effective forever and will need to be reapplied etc. Considering that a nearly fully vaccinated population doesn't seem to be enough to deal with covid, it's a foregone conclusion that this pandemic will not end. More mutations may also pop up. We can only hope there won't be one that's more contageous and/or dangerous than delta.

These conditions couldn't be more ideal to breed vaccine resistant variants.

So what will that mean for the next 1, 2 or even 5 to 10 years? I'll assume there's no sudden miracle cure and covid won't inexplicably disappear.

Vaccine resistant variants.

Yes, pre-flight testing and quarantine measures are likely to remain for the foreseeable future. It's likely there will be countries that are permanently semi-blacklisted from travel. It's likely most of the world will remain denoted as 'do not travel' because their healthcare infrastructure/population monitoring/vaccination isn't developed enough for high quality economies to trust them.

Covid: All countries to be removed from UK's travel red list
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59063818

Another genius move.

Workplace restrictions might become either permanent or reconsidered every fall/winter season. Face coverings could be made compulsory on and off. Kids going to school or uni will always have covid dangling over their heads as an argument to restrict them from following in-class education or socialising with friends. Social venues, events, festival & nightlife might just be closed again every few months.

The world is going to have to change.

I'll be frank, it's fucking madness. I'm not a healthcare professional or virologist so don't have answers, but at this point it doesn't look like they have any answers either. The zero covid strategies around the globe have failed, and the controlled covid strategies are entering the realm of stupidity. After seeing that 80% vaccination isn't doing it the next 'way out' that's being propagated is for people to not only be vaccinated & QR-checked, but also tested regularly, wearing masks everywhere, social distancing forever, perhaps taking anti-viral medication in the future on top of that. On/off lockdownesque restrictions. And then we'll beat it for sure! All for the sake of mostly keeping geriatrics and retirees from flooding intensive care capacity.

This is the problem with doing everything half-arsed. Sort of nearly do lockdown, kind of impose travel restrictions etc.

It's folly to believe that the majority of the population will abide by all that shit or think that it is in ANY WAY possible for that sort of convoluted and costly system to be implemented anywhere but the very richest & developed countries. I'll carefully conclude: there is no real way out, and it'll take another year or so, maybe two, for that realisation to set in.

Probably right.

At this point developed countries could and should get to 90% vaccination and could go into a 2-3 month ultra-hard lockdown after preparation.
But there's little point as the 2nd and 3rd world will just reinfect us unless we close them off forever.

Various places, Aus and NZ, could ride this out if we could just be serious about shutting down international travel, morons aren't going to go for that though.

Now would be a good time for China, Daszak and Fauci to come clean and admit what they've done, it might help us get out.

Dilbert_X wrote:

*snip*

wow you sure cannot read a graph. the death rate has literally been halved in those examples with high rates of vaccination. the first and second waves have a very direct proportion between new cases:deaths. the third wave ...? are you even looking at the same charts?

the USA does not have widespread vaccination.

it was unclear if israel's mass vaccination would make a difference until this autumn. that's because they were on the very cusp of needing widespread booster shots. a large campaign of covid boosters has precisely established that, yes, they are highly effective at curbing the rates of serious illness and death. what we were seeing in the picture of israel's recent third wave was, at first, a large population encountering a new variant when their early vaccines were starting to wear off. that has been rectified. IT WORKS.



i've posted this three times now. read the recent fucking harvard meta-study and learn something.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-01 04:30:33)

yes, great, kill off the virus ... then, as you say, keep 2/3rds of the world, particularly the global south, permanently locked out of your hermetic jar.

that worked for new zealand and china didn't it?

you are unflappable in your stupidity.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Larssen wrote:

All for the sake of mostly keeping geriatrics and retirees from flooding intensive care capacity.

Yikes, my friend. One could easily take that for a Jay line.

Anyway, the anti-vax camp has done devastating damage, and it's going to be a slog undo. I don't think it's going to be possible to reverse in a generation or even two. In countries lagging behind, there may have to be mandates, and of course civil disorder may be a consequence. Ideally, we can get the global south to a point where they're no longer such a cauldron.

Fact Check-The Delta variant of coronavirus can affect all age groups
https://www.reuters.com/article/factche … SL2N2OJ0HW

One image shared on Facebook reads: “So they’re saying that the ‘delta variant’ is a covid variant that affects young people aged 12-20. How convenient is that? They want to jab the 12-20 year olds [sic] in September and here comes along a ‘new variant’ out of nowhere that affects that age group lol.” (here).

Going to have to aggressively battle these completely retarded takes wherever they pop up, for the foreseeable future.

However, this does not mean the Delta variant has “conveniently” targeted younger populations as some of the social media posts suggest. Such a suggestion misses vital context including the result of vaccination campaigns in older age groups, as well as the level of social contact among young people.

Yes, it affects all age groups, but around or over 70% of IC capacity is occupied by over 65s. The other 30% is almost entirely 50-65, with again most on the older end of the scale. In population terms young people are not pressuring the health services to the extent where it would necessitate these sorts of containment measures.

As for 'fear mongering', time will tell. I'm a little more pessimistic as you can read. In virology land it seems to be up in the air. Whatever the case, this is probably as good as it gets and I'd advise people to live a little again. If you're not going out or travelling anymore while fully vaccinated you may as well stay indoors for the next 5-10 years or permanently.

just went and got fully authenticated at the local korean health centre today. set-up on their native vaccine passport app.

beginning yesterday, everything is slowly going to return to normal over the next 3 months. vaccine passports, masks and hand wash in public, and testing for high-volume or high-risk events will be the new norm.

i've been living in a country with an effective business curfew of 10:00pm for the last 9 months. admittedly, they've never had a full lockdown and have never had to shutter businesses or institutions during the entirety of the pandemic; but that arbitrary night-time curfew was starting to grate (on the small business owners and restaurant/nightlife sector employers, in particular).

looking forward to experiencing seoul for its unique east asian megacity vibes, at last. surely one of the best things about cities like seoul, tokyo, hong kong, etc, is that they are truly 24-hour spectacles. soon i'll be drinking soju at midnight and slurping on a fortifying bowl of steaming ramen at an all-night joint in the early winter hours.

thank god the vaccines are highly effective.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-02 01:15:16)

no, it didn't work. china and new zealand have both, whether implicitly or explicitly, acknowledged the failure of their zero covid approach. i don't know how many more times i have to labour this point: the entire ground has shifted, on account of major developments in two directions: (i) the delta variant is highly, highly transmissible and nigh on impossible to contain (new zealand failed to contain an outbreak originating with ONE case); (ii) widespread vaccination obviates the need for such drastic city- or state- or nation-wide measures.

i really don't know how to make it any more clear than this. the world leaders whose policies you point to are directly contradicting your own views, and rejecting the views you impute to them. way to go!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/new- … -zknrntfnq
New Zealand abandons ‘absurd’ zero-Covid strategy after failure to stop Delta strain

https://www.irishpost.com/news/new-zeal … rus-221287
NEW ZEALAND Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has admitted the country's 'zero-covid' approach has failed following a stubborn outbreak of the Delta variant.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/worl … virus.html
New Zealand abandons its goal of eliminating the coronavirus.

Ms. Ardern’s announcement — which came seven weeks into a lockdown that has failed to halt an outbreak of the Delta variant — signaled an end to the “Covid zero” strategy New Zealand has pursued for a year and a half, closing its borders and quickly enforcing lockdowns to keep the coronavirus in check.

The nation maintained that goal even as other Asia-Pacific countries transitioned to coexisting with the viral threat. On Monday, Ms. Ardern said the country would switch to “a new way of doing things.”

“With Delta, the return to zero is incredibly difficult, and our restrictions alone are not enough to achieve that quickly,” Ms. Ardern told reporters. “In fact, for this outbreak, it’s clear that long periods of heavy restrictions has not got us to zero cases."

as for 'nobody needs to go visit africa or see giraffes poop' ... we are right back again, at the point that's been belaboured beyond a toothache, that the world system is connected via more than just tourism and safaris. rich western nations, such as your own, can't suddenly cut themselves off from all international links, trade, movement of labour, etc. the highly transmissible delta variant is going to find a way in. it has done so with china and new zealand on several occasions now.

how do you seriously think western nations would effect this policy of 'zero covid'? how would they control their borders and shipping so totally? it's an unrealistic pipe dream. even the world's most notorious totalitarian states and the world's most remote island communities can't do it.

China as the scapegoat is a rather tiring deflection from worldwide shortcomings in pandemic management.

If only most of the billions of people on the planet could have been cryogenically sealed for a year blah blah blah.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Hey just think, if we'd done quarantine properly we wouldn't have needed lockdowns to crimp the delta variant and they wouldn't have then failed.

If China had just been honest on day one - which seems like sometime in September 2019 - as they were obligated to do under WHO rules we wouldn't be here at all.

but HOW do you ‘do quarantine properly’?! that’s the whole fucking point of this new strategy. the delta variant is much, much more transmissible than the original covid. we don’t have a perfect grasp on how and where a virus is mutating; serology and sequencing happens ex post facto, playing continual catch-up.

evidently all it takes is for one person to slip through a net, either legally or illegally, either with in-person contact or through surface contact (china suspects delta spread via its cold-chain supply networks). even ONE can, given a tiny headstart without immediate detection, quickly spiral into several clusters that city-wide lockdowns can’t curb.

you have this totally false illusion of control. no world government on earth has the wherewithal or technical means to totally seal its borders and repel every single pathogen on earth. we live in a globalised system. do you really think covid spread around the globe because of gawping tourists? really? the ultra-popular safari season? sick italians flying to machu pichu? LMAO. covid’s vectors of spread reflect an interconnected world, one which you think we can disengage from in 3 months. it’s laughable.

dilbert: enjoys all the benefits of international supply chains, moans when things aren’t delivered quickly enough from the other side of the world.

also dilbert: we need to totally seal our borders and disengage from the world system. i don’t need to look at giraffes!

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-02 15:46:33)

That's not "perfect quarantine" though. Like zeek says, people slip through the cracks, and essential jobs keep ticking on. All it takes is one, right?

Uzique wrote:

Dilbert wants one more Christmas with his parents while wear tissue boxes on his feet.

Wow, okay, Jay.

uziq wrote:

PCR tests aren't infallible. they require human lab technicians, human interpretation, impeccable standards to prevent contamination or false positive/negative results. covid is a constantly changing beast. some strains seem to incubate longer than others; some are more transmissible than others. you could keep someone in quarantine for 30 days and there would still be an exception, or a surface contamination event. the viruses' potential infection window is not like the use by date on a carton of milk.

again, you live with this totally false illusion of control. it's like you don't exist in the real world of human beings and complex systems. 'just lock it down for 3 months after reaching 90% vaccination, problem licked'. LMAO.

a perfect quarantine system would require the perfect cooperation of thousands of people across multiple organizations/agencies. what could possibly go wrong? there is always going to be a small margin of error/viral escape. and with the delta variant, we have already seen that full-scale lockdowns are an incredibly blunt and ineffective instrument. want to know what does provably work well against the delta variant? VACCINES.

OK just shut the borders then.

Covid came from China you dunce.

Does that mean it came from there?