Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

The data so far is pretty clear. If all you looked at was the ICU numbers (the dark blue at the bottom) you would not know anything remarkable is going on with regards to cases.

Hospitalizations are definitely up, but no where near where they were relative to the case count during the last wave.

I've been of the same mindset as Gonch on Omicron since the first hints that it wasn't offing people with very much veracity. Even if a new variant emerges (which it probably will), thanks to Omicron more and more of our population (and the world's) is less immunologically naïve.

The unknown and concern, which is looking less worrisome now, was infections would not cause a lot of hospitalization as a percentage, but the volume due to the high rate of transmission would crowd them anyway. I mean, given our track record, that was a reasonable concern.

The experts have said from the start that not distributing vaccines globally would have the effect of new variants coming up in those places. "America first" is a nice slogan but useless in the scientific reality. I mean, if there was oil involved, maybe the outcome would have been different.

But the truth of the matter is that virtually all humans have, for virtually all of recorded history, faced daily risks of disease or violent death that are far greater than those that the residents of developed countries currently face. And despite the genuine horrors of the past 24 months, that holds true even now.

This is my favorite quote from that Atlantic piece. It touches on RELATIVE risk. In my opinion, the biggest failure of the past 24 months is the failure to educate the masses about relative risk. The gross numbers were panic-inducing. The relative risk numbers were tolerable to a lot (most/many?)…particularly when presented by age group.

Once the vaccines demonstrated their success at reducing “severity”…the relative risk became “nothing” to ME…and apparently a lot of others. By “nothing” I mean I fear Covid today as much as I feared the flu circa 2018.

I know that tolerance to risk is subjective. But from my perspective, I’m simply not scared of Covid anymore.

I was well aware in 2018 that an unfortunate case of flu, in rare circumstances, could possibly take me out. I feel the same about Covid today. I’ll panic (or not) accordingly.

I don’t know how many times it needs to be said, but other people exist and you affect them whether by transmission (possibly compounded by their own choices) or by health care resource usage.

Even if this had the exact same transmission and virulence as a standard flu, it's not clear that our health care system could handle two flu seasons simultaneously.

By the same token, I guess it also bears repeating that some people still do have consideration for others, despite the inference that those of us who aren't as concerned about getting it are selfish bastards who care about only ourselves. I feel very much the same as Aamilj in that COVID no longer concerns me much, but when my daughter was exposed we took the necessary precautions to ensure no one else got it, to the point where it F'd up our Christmas plans. Two days after Christmas she tested negative, so we went back to licking handrails and spitting in other people's faces.

Perhaps this is where the thing Gonch and I exchanged a page ago comes into play: I don't doubt that what you and/or Gonch and/or even Aamilj actually do is unselfish and generally aligned with public health and generally good things which demonstrate care for other. I do not mean to imply that anyone who disagrees with me is selfish nor that anyone, anywhere is ignorant or misguided or anything like that.

But the way Aamilj phrased their argument was by focusing on the relative risk to the individual, particularly the individual who doesn't have comorbidities or other increased risks. Even if the conclusion and the actions are right, that line of thinking where the word ME is capitalized is incomplete. And as I mentioned in my manifesto, I am a stickler for checking that each step of the thought process logically follows from the previous and I think Aamilj's argument fails to address a very real concern. This does not make anyone selfish or unselfish, caring or uncaring, good or bad.

There's an eventual convergence here between the actual selfish freedumb people and the disease. Old folks and those who are immunocompromised are full of vaccines and understand precautions, which is good, while the newest variant is generally less dangerous. If it does burn itself out quickly, those folks from the Dakotas and parts of Michigan are going to feel pretty righteous. It doesn't change the fact that hundreds of thousands of people died this year that didn't need to. I don't say that to be smug, it's just frustrating.

Does the experience with Covid change views of say a typical flu season (10-52,000 deaths, 140-710k hospitalizations)? Could look at the flu numbers and think they are not too bad. Or look at how those numbers were reduced last year (at least in part based on measures taken to reduce impact of Covid) and say we could do better.

ApolloAndy said:

I don’t know how many times it needs to be said, but other people exist and you affect them whether by transmission (possibly compounded by their own choices) or by health care resource usage.

I feel like it also needs pointed out that not everyone is eligible for the vaccine. I mention that because the general tone of the last several pages has been "it's time to move on, those who haven't been vaccinated have made their choice and they can live with it." Yes, the risk is apparently quite low for the <5 age group, but I don't see why we should be at the "F those unvaccinated folks" stage quite yet when not everyone is eligible.

Besides those under 5, who have minimal risk, and some fringe medical cases, who isn't eligible?

I'd wager that 99% of those unvaxxed people chose not to be.

Also, one of those jerks caused my wife to get covid and now I have to cancel the cruise I was taking on Sunday. So now I care about them even less.

GoBucks89 said:

Does the experience with Covid change views of say a typical flu season...

Not for me, because Covid isn't the flu. I understand the invitation to compare the two, but more than 10x the deaths this year alone, preventable, it's not the same disease. Flu doesn't crush hospitals and require trucks to be used as morgues. I mean, I had to delay a routine colonoscopy (and who doesn't enjoy that?) because of this disease. Even the less harmful omicron variant, it's not the same disease when the airline industry partially collapses. If you're asking if I think people should get that shot, yes, why not? It's low cost and there's virtually no risk, and not being sick for a few days or getting others sick seems like a pretty good outcome.

My understanding is that everyone who is still participating in this discussion is vaccinated, so I'm not sure what we're arguing about. If you're vaxed, in my book you've done your part. You have significantly reduced the likelihood that you will contribute to the hospital crisis. Whatever else you decide regarding whether or not to mask, dine out, travel, etc. is based on personal risk assessment. So to admonish someone who says they are no longer worried about COVID, even though they're vaccinated...I don't know. What are we even talking about?

I'm talking about abstract thought processes, beacuse...I don't know, reality is annoying.

What are we even talking about?

Didn't we get there like 220 pages ago?

I think we're ultimately talking about how relative risk can be low for an individual (the "me"), but still be high for the community (the "we") when a large number of like-minded individuals make the same choices. I believe that's the crux of some of the abstract thought processes we've read from Andy and, from a logic perspective, it's valid to conclude that in a city with 1,000,000, if 50% of the vaxxed and boosted folks return to life as normal, the risk for the individual remains low, but the risk for the community (daily infections, hospitalizations, death, collapse of healthcare system [extreme case, obviously]) is something north of low risk. How far north probably depends on who you ask. If I play in traffic, my risk of death is low(ish). If I play in traffic with 100 friends, the risk to me doesn't change appreciably, but the risk to the community of 101 (not to mention the people driving who were just minding their own business before being thrown into a game of Carmageddon) is higher.For whatever it's worth, for myself, my vaccination and boost doesn't mean a return to normal life. It means more freedoms for sure, but as infections have ramped back up, I'm more comfortable shrinking my social circle and limiting my outdoor exposure because I think that helps the community. Whether it does or not? I don't know. Just feels like the least I can do, but that's not right (or even possible) for everyone.

kpjb said:

Also, one of those jerks caused my wife to get covid and now I have to cancel the cruise I was taking on Sunday. So now I care about them even less.

Which does beg the question (and I can't believe I'm saying this but the data supports it, so I don't really have a choice) "At what point do we just ignore positive Covid diagnoses?" If the hospitalizations are low and deaths are low but some ridiculous number of people are getting positive diagnoses, then at what point does a positive diagnosis not become a threat to the greater community?

I don't really have an answer, but that point exists and we're a whole lot closer to it with Omicron than we were with Delta.

Cruises are once again being cancelled

And the problem there is that cruises aren't being cancelled because of the risk of infection onboard. I don't know if my experience is typical (more diversely experienced cruisers say Disney is a higher level of clean and careful), but I would consider my cruise the week before Christmas to be the safest and low-risk way to vacation I've tried in the last two years short of renting a VRBO where the host texted me the door lock code. Yes, it's possible that one of 2,500 passengers and 1,200 crew could be carriers despite testing, but with masks, new food protocols and obsessive hand sanitizing, you can't tell me that a visit to Publix isn't higher risk.

ApolloAndy said:
If the hospitalizations are low and deaths are low but some ridiculous number of people are getting positive diagnoses, then at what point does a positive diagnosis no become a threat to the greater community?

This epidemiologist says a lot of it long-term depends on future variants, but said this about short-term:

Our models project that the United States is likely to document more Covid-19 cases in January than in any previous month of the pandemic, but a smaller fraction of those cases will require hospitalization. Whether hospitals experience more or less strain than they did in January 2021 will depend on case numbers and how severe they are. For example, if twice as many people become infected but these people are half as likely to be hospitalized, the demand for hospital beds would be the same. This calculus also applies to estimated deaths from the virus, as well as expected disruptions to the work force.

You know my mantra through this whole thing, right? That people suck at risk management. I even spent extra effort trying to manage my risk. Got my shots, monitored the actual prevalence of COVID-19 in my community, and in fact have had great success with a surprisingly normal lifestyle outside of work.
The thing is, risk management is still management. Would I have done anything different had I known that in spite of my risk profile I would still spend a week in the ICU? Here I thought I had removed myself from the risk pool; instead I am merely removed from society for a while…

Meanwhile the unvaccinated people I live with also got COVID-19 but *they* didn’t get sick like I did. Go figure.

(Still in the Krankenhaus but should be out in a matter of days)

—Dave Althoff, Jr. (I guess I suck at risk management, too!)

That sucks. Hope you feel and get better.