Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

You're 100% incorrect, and you continue to avoid critical thinking. Even if vaccines did nothing against omicron, it's only been with us for two months. You're going from willfully ignorant to willfully stupid and deceitful. For about a year, the unvaccinated were 8x more likely to be infected and 25x more likely to die. Those are the facts. Vaccines with boosters still work about 70% of the time, we just don't know how long.

You're spreading bull**** now, and the last person who did that was kicked off the site. You won't do that on my dime. You're next, this is the last warning you get.

"Willfully stupid and deceitful...since 2009" could be the motto for a major political party.

wahoo skipper said:

"Willfully stupid and deceitful...since 1865" could be the motto for all major political parties.

Fixed that for you.

Ok, that's probably fair.

Jeff said:

You're 100% incorrect, and you continue to avoid critical thinking. Even if vaccines did nothing against omicron, it's only been with us for two months. You're going from willfully ignorant to willfully stupid and deceitful. For about a year, the unvaccinated were 8x more likely to be infected and 25x more likely to die. Those are the facts. Vaccines with boosters still work about 70% of the time, we just don't know how long.

If I may, having read Aamilj’s post a couple of times, I think some of his statements are being taken out of context. I don’t think he’s saying the vaccines were always pointless, but rather that they don’t work that well against Omicron. With Delta and the previous variants, yeah, it seemed to really do the trick. Even with Omicron, they seem to prevent you from getting severe symptoms, but I think Aamilj is strictly focusing on the transmission of the virus, for which the vaccines don’t really seem to be achieving any noteworthy results against Omicron.

Also, I think Aamilj’s argument isn’t so much against vaccines as it is against the severe restrictions being applied in several parts of the country. As he noted, Hawaii, one of the more restricted states, has the highest hospitalization rate right now, and honestly, it’s always cycled back and forth between restrictive and non-restrictive states. I’m not saying that DeSantis has done everything right, and I think he needs to let certain businesses and organizations make their own rules, but it does seem curious that restrictions or no restrictions, every state ends up in the limelight at some point or another, but only when Florida or a select few other states are the ones in the hot seat, it’s due to governmental stupidity.

I think there is a happy middle ground, and I repeat that I won’t defend every decision coming out of Tallahassee right now, but I’d take Florida’s playing fast and loose over having to show my proof of vaccination just to eat inside a restaurant.

Also, Jeff and Aamilj, if I’ve misunderstood either of your arguments, please correct me.

Aamilj said:

And the best treatment to keep patients out of those overcrowded hospitals is monoclonal antibodies

Actually, that is highly inaccurate, but I wouldn’t expect anything different from you.

Prior to this past month, we were offering two potential experimental monoclonal antibodies, Bamlanivimab plus etesevimab and Casirivimab plus imdevimab. However, both of these were found to be ineffective against the Omicron strain, and are no longer being used.

The new kid on the block is Sotrovimab, which may be effective against Omicron. However, the availability of this mab is extremely limited. Our hospital, which is a major regional tertiary care facility, will get a total of 3-4 doses, then go a couple weeks before we get any more. We’ve had a total of 12 doses in the last month.

Use of Sotrovimab is being restricted to patients at highest risk of serious infection. This includes severely immunosuppressed patients, and get this, unvaccinated patients.

Our ID section rationalizes that if you can prevent an unvaccinated patient from tying up an ICU bed for weeks, that frees up resources for other patients. Thus the moral dilemma.

So if you believe that experimental monoclonal antibodies will lessen hospital overcrowding, you are grossly uninformed.

It's fun to have experts among us.

And I didn't take anything out of context. His whole pattern was half-truths and misdirection. It's like watching Tucker Carlson, who routinely questions the legitimacy of everything, countering reality not outright, but as if he's just innocently asking questions. It's basic gaslighting. It's fundamentally different than the spirited (if cyclical) discussions we typically have.

So to put it in words everyone can understand:

RRR > current experimental monoclonal antibodies preventing hospital overcrowding

I can’t say I have seen much in the way of infection with older variants and the vaccines, they probably worked very well against those, but the current wave is doing just fine spreading in vaccinated and non vaccinated people. Why can I say that, because I file Covid leave for people at work, and there are plenty of positive tests along with vaccination records, boosters as well. I can’t give an overall percentage for the population, but it is not a small number at work.

Yes, we are seeing many, many Omicron infections in people fully vaccinated and boosted. Most of these people are not seriously ill and do not require treatment. The vaccinated patients requiring hospitalization are the elderly and those that are immunosuppressed or have multiple co-morbidities.

Vaccination may not prevent infection, but it does seem to prevent serious infection.

However, confounding interpretation is that Omicron, in general, causes less serious infection.

People will interpret the data however it supports their pre-existing biases.

There isn’t much interpretation for me at least. It is playing out exactly how you said. I haven’t had a single case with anything beyond minor flu symptoms, but this wave does not give a hoot about vaccination status.

And now for a look on the bright side...

Cases, deaths, and hospitalizations are all plummeting in South Africa and the UK.

This trend is also happening in NYC. To put it in coaster language, if the Delta-wave was the final airtime hill on Maverick, Omicron has been Top Thrill Dragster's top-hat in terms of cases.

One uplifting quote from a health expert in the UK:

"We're almost there, it is now the beginning of the end, at least in the U.K.," Professor Julian Hiscox, head of infection and global health at the University of Liverpool, who sits on a government health advisory board, told CBS News' partner network BBC News. "I think life in 2022 will be almost back to before the pandemic."

"Should a new variant or old variant come along, for most of us, like any other common cold coronavirus, we'll get the sniffles and a bit of a headache and then we're okay," Hiscox said.

We're still in the tunnel, but there's a light at the end of it.

It seems the are a lot of people who don't understand where we would be today without vaccines. Pre-omicron, I don't think collapse of global healthcare would be understating it. During omicron, the hospitalization and death would absolutely be worse than it is. Vaccines were never a silver bullet to eliminate infection, but they were a likely way to reduce the severity of the disease regardless.

I hate that folks don't understand how remarkable all of this is.

Also, more about how poop predicts the pandemic future.

Jeff said:

I hate that folks don't understand how remarkable all of this is.

I think this point sheds light on how I differ from possibly all of you. I don’t get excited or all up in arms over how spectacular our achievements are, or do I feel that the human race is particularly amazing or important. I think we are really good at manipulating the environment around us, but that if for some reason we fail to do so we completely fall apart as a society. What you might label as an achievement, I simply view as a necessity for the continuation of our species. I think we are very weak at living based on the hand dealt by the world around us. What’s really interesting about Covid is that it is something we will probably never control despite all attempts made, and I am perfectly ok with that. Most of you are not, you get frustrated, possibly angry, because we can’t stop it, or we aren’t doing enough to stop it.

In the big picture we are just another species on this planet that has been born, will do some things, and will eventually die off, if somehow we make it to the very end the sun will eventually kill all of us anyways. We are a cog in the wheel, just like any other species.

That's pretty dark. I'm fairly aligned with our relative insignificance, but as an empathetic human, I'd like things to be better, not worse, even if it's just for my kid.

What's different is expectation. "Controlling" Covid was never the goal. Few things in our time, any time, can be credited with saving millions of lives worldwide. That's pretty exciting.

Millions? How about billions?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/the-50-most-important-life-s...in-history

That's a crazy list. I wouldn't have thought much of some of those innovations.

Jeff said:

Few things in our time, any time, can be credited with saving millions of lives worldwide. That's pretty exciting.

We are usually better at killing ourselves off, so yes, it is a rare innovation.