BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

An antivax German nurse allegedly administered saline instead of the covid vaccine to over 8,000 people. There have been protests from hospital workers over getting vaccinated. There are fuck around and find out meme stories about antivax nurses losing their jobs over it, and responses from provax nurses more or less to the tune of "good riddance, get out of my industry."

Go figure.

Maybe overrepresented:

Claims of anti-vax nurses fueling hospital staff shortages ignore the limited support and lack of mental healthcare for COVID's frontline workers
Business Insider
https://news.yahoo.com/claims-anti-vax- … 52125.html

Some health systems have blamed unvaccinated healthcare workers for staffing shortages, but the problem with unvaccinated healthcare workers may be overstated: the American Nurses Association found 9 in 10 nurses have received a COVID-19 vaccine or are planning to.

"My neighbor's aunt's cousin's sister's second ex's brother's nephew occupies a vaguely non-specific position at a hospital that could be anything from janitorial to medical billing. Follow him for sage wisdom on 'common sense' epidemiology."

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

"My neighbor's aunt's cousin's sister's second ex's brother's nephew occupies a vaguely non-specific position at a hospital that could be anything from janitorial to medical billing. Follow him for sage wisdom on 'common sense' epidemiology."

let's face it, dilbert was going to go ahead and do things his way, anyway. he's just looking for a license to justify his aberrant and weird views.

Once again though, the zero covid stuff hasn't really panned out. Discussed here to an exhaustive degree.

"Just so people can go on safari," blah blah blah lol.

Imagine if you did manage to cut yourselves off completely for years. You'd still have to rejoin the world at some point.

here we go again. a sparsely populated state with 1.7 million people. you want to extrapolate that example to THE WORLD.

'seems like the rest of the world is turning into a mad max hellscape'. erm maybe stop expecting the globe to conform to an 'example' set by a population group which makes up not even an infinitesimal fraction of 8 BILLION people?

can you not see how FUCKING inane that is?!? 'well the state of south australia has done okay even though we have the same population as a tiny regional city spread out over an area the size of a european state, so i don't know what melbourne or new york's problem is'.

ANY trade or population hub that NECESSARILY has frequent cross-border or international interactions will find it hard to keep the delta variant out. china and new zealand have both failed at this, whether by SINGLE human cases or SURFACE SPREAD. melbourne has failed to eradicate it. you keep making out all these things are due to 'hopeless administration' and 'corruption', but that's hardly the case. the level of TOTAL CONTROL required to maintain such perfect isolation is TOTALLY out of proportion with pragmatic reality and the needs of people to CONTINUE their lives, their lives of WORK and FAMILY, that is, not 'safaris and beach parties'.

i really just don't know how many more times you need this to be put to you.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-16 20:43:02)

he makes out like australia's system has been an undoubted success, as well, and as if there were no other ways.

south korea and taiwan had better numbers for the duration of the pandemic and DIDN'T close their borders or totally lockdown entire cities. they didn't immiserate their own citizens by forcing many of them to stay out of the country for 15 months; they didn't lock down major population centres for 245 days. literally other systems other than australia's posted measurably better results. and yet here we are ... talking over and over about 'zero covid' and 'the winning australian model'.

i imagine many australian citizens who actually have lives and were actually affected by the restrictions in a severe way are not as blithe in their applause. but, as always, dilbert's basic ethical posiiton on any question is 'i'm alright, jack'.

this discussion with dilbert now is seriously reaching the same point as what i imagine americans have with their swivel-eyed, qanon'd relatives. at some point there's just no longer any dialogue or reasoning and you just have to leave someone to get on with their own obsessions. the world is going to return to normal, gradually, carefully, using all available precautions, and dilbert is going to continue leading, well, whatever sort of life it is he leads holed up in his parents' compound.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-16 20:57:30)

but it's not about tourism, is it? people aren't re-opening to entice tourist trade.

visa-free tourist travel is not a sine qua non of re-opening. many countries have open borders but which allow people to visit relatives, do business, move for work, etc. you know, regular day-to-day transit in a global economy.

i can think of few countries which are seriously advocating re-opening for the sake of tourism. nations like spain with heavy investment in their tourism industry, maybe. tourism is actually way down in the UK this year, even following re-opening, so clearly it's not been the driving engine of relaxing travel measures.

why is it always about safaris and beach parties with you?

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-16 21:50:47)

DDG search on the rittenhouse trial took me to a conservative rabbit-hole. Here's a good one about how Fauci finally admitted the truth (ha!) about vaccines.

The meat of the article: waning immunity.

Like doctors haven't been saying this since the beginning. We'll need boosters and new vaccines from time to time as the virus changes. Almost as if we haven't had years and years of precedent with annual flu shots.

https://en-volve.com/2021/11/15/dr-fauc … accinated/
got 'em!

Distorting context of expert opinion is particularly insidious tactic of fake news. Mixing truth and lies, even using a truth to spin a lie. Very exhausting to keep up with.

i think it was always foreseeable that there would be circuit breaker or emergency lockdowns in the peak of winter. vaccination levels still aren't high enough yet and many countries which started their vaccination drives in the spring are now having to navigate booster shot roll-outs.

it looks like the lockdowns and measures will be more targeted this time, possibly involving a distinction between those who have been recently vaccinated and those who have not. whilst this raises about umpteem questions about personal liberty, privacy, the right-to-refuse, etc, personally i'm all for it.

next winter i don't think there will be lockdowns. by then we will have 2-3 major antiviral treatments, probably over the counter and widely available, as well as hopefully more mature vaccine tech.

coronaviruses mutate. it's how it is.

as i've said umpteen times, there have so far been no mutations which have confounded the vaccine tech. SARS-CoV-2 is a pretty simple thing on a microbiological level and doesn't have many 'components' that can alter and change. most mutations concern the spike protein and that's precisely the thing which our vaccines operate upon. so long as covid-19 spreads using this spike mechanism, we've got it covered with greater and lesser degrees of effectivity.

new mutations may arise which make it more transmissible and 'successful' at hopping from person to person, but it's not like it's suddenly going to mutate to become 5x as deadly and totally invulnerable to our vaccines. we haven't seen that picture yet and we have sequenced hundreds of variants.

Here Victoria is removing most restrictions, including masks in most places, even though they're on ~1200 cases and 5-10 deaths/day, they'll be back in lockdown soon enough.

the only stats which matter at this point is serious illness/ICU capacity and deaths. obsessing over keeping case numbers low is a pointless and impossible task. covid-19 is as general and predicted to be as seasonal as the flu from here on out, forever. we can't put it back in its bottle. koreans have recently had to get over this huge psychological obsession and fear about case numbers, too. you'd be surprised how quickly people stop caring. 6 months ago the idea of there being 1,000 cases a day spelt national doom and disaster. now it's hovering around 2.5k-3k cases a day and people are going about their lives as normal; in fact, they're being a little blithe about the whole thing (pensioners need to get their boosters). 

the UK has had 40-50k cases a day for months and the death rate has stayed flat. it's still at a pretty unhappy average, if 'every death is an avoidable tragedy' and so on, but we are closing in on covid-19 with every passing month. new treatments, new antivirals, better vaccines, deployment of boosters, etc, all have a measurable and positive effect. look at israel's stats, again, to see just how effective booster shots really are. there is cause for some measured, patient optimism.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-19 05:24:05)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ … -scientist

Covid-19 is no longer a disease of the vaccinated, the head of the Oxford jab programme has said.

The “ongoing horror” of patients gasping for breath in hospital is now “largely restricted” to people who are unvaccinated, according to Prof Sir Andrew Pollard.

Even though the more transmissible Delta variant continues to infect thousands, most of those who are fully vaccinated will experience only “mild infections” that are “little more than an unpleasant inconvenience”.

but tHe vAccIneS dnT woRk aNd wE arE aLl dOomEd

Yawn, no, having a vaccine doesn't mean we can drop all other controls.

"My car has ABS brakes, now I don't need seatbelts or airbags, I'll rip them out."