[Mezla PigDog]

UK stats are really interesting at the mo. Infection rates are high generally but dropping significantly in all cohorts except kids. Rates in under-18s are sky rocketing and it's blatantly caused by return to education settings after summer and the changes in covid policy in schools. But then you also have to ask what part vaccination plays because kids here aren't vaccinated so are rates dropping everywhere else because of vaccination? I think rates may have started to tick up in the 30-40 bracket but those people are more likely to be living with kids.

Although I also wonder that if vaccination means that if you do catch it but are more likely to have mild or asymptomatic infection then you aren't going to present for a test.

Hence the word 'interesting'.

[Macros]

 Tsundoku, on 26 September 2021 - 10:04 AM, said:

 Macros, on 26 September 2021 - 09:45 AM, said:

 Tsundoku, on 25 September 2021 - 08:40 PM, said:

Ummmm Norway, are you sure about this? I know Denmark did it first buuuuuuuuuut ...

https://www.news.com...2049ce938596b39

You seen the premier League games this season? UK has been full stadiuming for a month

Yes, and the infection rates are still high from what I understand. I think the hospitalisation rate fell but ah well.
It wasn't about that but getting the economy going again ie keeping rich people rich because it's only the proles, minorities and the old who are dying and that suits the Tories.

Oh I agree, I was in no way saying PL stadiums being full was a good thing

[Mezla PigDog]

Bugger. UK covid stats are now so interesting that 2 kids in my sons class are positive and another 2 are off sick without being tested yet. Let's see if we make it to the end of the week without having the plague in our house.

[Mezla PigDog]

Five positive kids in my sons class now. More off sick awaiting PCR test results. Mr PigDog got a positive lateral flow test result today so he had a PCR test this morning. He has had mild cold symptoms for a few days. We got the kid a PCR test tonight but he and I are both symptom free.

Assuming we stay healthy I kind of hope we all have it, burn through the 10 days isolation and then we *should* be free of covid risk for the winter. Also wondering if that is the UK governments plan...

[QuickTidal]

 Mezla PigDog, on 28 September 2021 - 07:23 PM, said:

Five positive kids in my sons class now. More off sick awaiting PCR test results. Mr PigDog got a positive lateral flow test result today so he had a PCR test this morning. He has had mild cold symptoms for a few days. We got the kid a PCR test tonight but he and I are both symptom free.

Assuming we stay healthy I kind of hope we all have it, burn through the 10 days isolation and then we *should* be free of covid risk for the winter. Also wondering if that is the UK governments plan...

Oof, I hope everyone feels better in your place soon!

[Mezla PigDog]

One positive PCR result in the house and still waiting on the result for the second. I am starting to imagine symptoms. Urgh. I think I have another few days before I will be able to safely say I am symptom free.

[Cyphon]

Oh dear Mez. Fingers crossed that it's okay in your house.

We're on hour 36 since PCR test and I am learning the hellish existence of working and a toddler+ that so many people had to go through in lockdown.

This post has been edited by Cyphon: 29 September 2021 - 03:55 PM

[Gorefest]

Visited my parents in the Netherlands for the first time in 21 months last weekend. The hoops you have to jump through to visit relatives is a bloody pain. The combination Covid/Brexit is very toxic.

[Mezla PigDog]

Glad you got to go home though Gorefest. I hope it was good despite the hoops you had to jump through.

We are 2 for 2 on covid PCR test results. Waiting for my own results now. I hope I have it since I'm free of symptoms - chalk off that pandemic milestone as cleanly as possible. Feeling rather guilty about the yoga class I went to on Monday night... otherwise I haven't been indoors anywhere since Friday.

[amphibian]

The toughest part for me of being exposed to someone who had COVID was the calls to make to the people I was around to let them know (that was the toughest because I didn't get COVID any of the times). My friends and family were so nice about getting those calls and gave lots of positive reinforcement.

In other countries, it's much easier where the contact tracers do the job for you, but we live where we live.

I hope this isn't a nightmare for you and yours, Mezla. Best of luck.

[Lady Bliss]

 Mezla PigDog, on 30 September 2021 - 12:55 AM, said:

Glad you got to go home though Gorefest. I hope it was good despite the hoops you had to jump through.

We are 2 for 2 on covid PCR test results. Waiting for my own results now. I hope I have it since I'm free of symptoms - chalk off that pandemic milestone as cleanly as possible. Feeling rather guilty about the yoga class I went to on Monday night... otherwise I haven't been indoors anywhere since Friday.

Take care of yourselves Mez.

[Tsundoku]

I love this. Right wingers now have a theory that the left deliberately put them in a bind between either dying or accepting the left were ... right? It seems many would just rather die.

https://www.theatlan...vaccine/620189/

The Conservatives Who’d Rather Die Than Not Own the Libs
Rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the life of its own supporters.

By Conor Friedersdorf

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

At Breitbart News, the politics of vaccination have taken a strange turn. A longtime writer at the populist-right website who wants to save his Donald Trump–supporting readers from COVID-19 is speculating that the left has tricked them into rejecting safe and effective vaccines.

John Nolte is vaccinated himself and, in an article this week, correctly notes that the shots are “a lifesaver.” But every time he touts what he calls the “Trump vaccine,” his Twitter feed and comment threads on his articles get flooded with irrational arguments and unfounded assertions from anti-vaxxers, he writes. That’s no surprise. The populist-right milieu that Nolte inhabits includes lots of influential voices that spread misinformation about vaccines on Fox News, talk radio, and Facebook. For example, America’s most prominent populist commentator, the Fox host Tucker Carlson, has been amplifying Nicki Minaj’s thirdhand claim that a vaccine had swollen her cousin’s friend’s testicles.

In Nolte’s account, however, a conspiracy of evil leftist elites are to blame for vaccine skepticism on the right. “I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine,” Nolte writes. They are “putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position,” he insists, “where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.”

This conspiracy theory is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the left. Folks in blue America who fret about the surge of the Delta coronavirus variant want every American to get their shots as soon as possible, because they genuinely fear that unvaccinated adults will infect unvaccinated children, fuel new variants, overwhelm hospitals, burden doctors and nurses, degrade care for those who suffer any other medical emergency, raise the risk of breakthrough cases, and undermine political approval for President Joe Biden’s handling of the pandemic. Those are the reasons, right or wrong, that Biden and many of his supporters favor vaccine mandates. But the populist right has put disdain for the left and the establishment at the center of its identity. And rather than simply telling his readers that refusing a medical miracle in order to defy the left is irrational, Nolte accuses the left of exploiting their psychology.

Writing in a similar vein earlier this month, Nolte decried radio segments in which the shock jock Howard Stern mocked three right-wing talk-show hosts who died of COVID-19 after vocally refusing to get vaccinated.

Nolte theorized:

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead? If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing … I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated! …

Have you ever thought that maybe the left has us right where they want us? Just stand back for a moment and think about this … Right now, a countless number of Trump supporters believe they are owning the left by refusing to take a life-saving vaccine—a vaccine, by the way, everyone on the left has taken. Oh, and so has Trump.

To dispense with the obvious: No healthy person bases any major life decision on anything that Howard Stern says, and the left is not conspiring to thin the ranks of Trump supporters. If leftist elites are conspiring to do anything, it is self-interested stuff: padding their kids’ college applications, abusing historic preservation laws to prevent their neighborhoods from getting more dense. Biden himself wants credit for ending the pandemic, not to own Breitbart News readers.

Perhaps Nolte’s dark, paranoid claims simply show that he has lost touch with reality after looking at everything through a culture-war lens for too long. Or maybe, as some on Twitter have speculated, Nolte is engaging in his own attempt at reverse psychology, calculating that his best chance of persuading the still-unvaccinated among Breitbart’s audience of manipulable, leftist-hating, negatively polarized culture warriors is to tell them that the left doesn’t want them to get the jab and that staying alive is the real way to own the libs. (I requested comment from Nolte but have not yet heard back.)

Either way, a Breitbart polemicist deeply familiar with hard-core Trumpists thinks many of them will make life-and-death decisions not to protect their families but to avoid feeling humiliated by Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities. That’s an extraordinary conclusion.

It brings to mind bygone critiques of the populist right from outsiders attempting to warn about its dysfunction. “The secret shame of the conservative base,” the libertarian writer Julian Sanchez argued in 2009, “is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.” He was writing the year after Sarah Palin’s rise to vice-presidential nominee portended the GOP’s shift from Bushism to populism and the politics of ressentiment, a psychological state in which policy victories are less important than, as Sanchez defined it, “hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration.”

As Palin made gaffes and cost her party votes, the populist right rallied around her more enthusiastically, not less. Sanchez thought this faction was saying, in effect, “We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.” Later, when the GOP base elevated Trump, a boorish, flagrantly vulgar celebrity who gave Stern permission to call his daughter “a piece of ass” and was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, there could be no doubt that a faction of Trump’s base reveled in what others found deplorable.

Sanchez thought psychological grievances couldn’t be solved via politics, and, in another 2009 essay, offered conservatives a prescient warning about their base: “There’s a potential strategic benefit for any political movement in tapping these sorts of thicker grounds of solidarity,” he granted. “But the way it elevates and expands the scope of political identity—and therefore of politics—seems like it ought to be anathema to conservative principles.” The populist right, Sanchez argued, was fixating on matters that shouldn’t be swept up in national politics. He concluded, “It’s just another way of living in Washington’s shadow.”

To react to a Biden mandate by eschewing a life-saving vaccine is to die in Washington’s shadow. And Nolte isn’t being paranoid when he posits that the Trumpist right is dying more such deaths. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “As of September 13, 2021, 52.8% of people in counties that voted for Biden were fully vaccinated compared to 39.9% of Trump counties.” An NBC News poll last month found that vaccination rates varied widely by political orientation:

Democrats: 88 percent
Independents: 60 percent
Republicans: 55 percent
Republicans who support Trump more than party: 46 percent
Republicans who support party more than Trump: 62 percent
Democratic Sanders-Warren voters: 88 percent
Democratic Biden voters: 87 percent
Biden voters in 2020 general election: 91 percent
Trump voters in 2020 general election: 50 percent
The populist right is not unique in its self-destructive political behavior. Indeed, its members are quick to point fingers at riots that destroy the rioters’ own neighborhoods or social-justice reckonings that sap progressive institutions’ ability to function.

But rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the life of its own supporters. The approach that Trump voters are taking all but guarantees that more of them will die, relative to other Republicans and to Democrats. If mass death among its members doesn’t inspire an inward reckoning, what will?

[Mezla PigDog]

I'm negative. How can you not catch it in your own house? Especially with a slobbery little kid around?

I gave myself a very thorough swabbing too.

This post has been edited by Mezla PigDog: 01 October 2021 - 08:07 PM

[Malankazooie]

Wow, Newsom (going back to cali cali gov.) first governor to enact mandate that all school kids will need to be vaccinated to attend in person learning. This is great thing for Cali, because more choads like J Rog will be fleeing the state for Tejas and Flaw-rida.

So California is the petri dish for these types of things. How long before other states follow?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Was thinking of getting Johnson and Johnson for my booster shot, since it's more different from Moderna (my first two) than Pfizer is and so might provide more robust immunity, but the (probably astronomically small) risk of blood clots (plus the possibility that a booster only three months after my second shot could worsen side effects---no evidence either way afaik, except to the extent not having seen anything about it implies it might not be happening) led me to choose Pfizer.

Wonder what effects the Merck drug will have on vaccination and economic activity in the US, if the results hold up with no major side effects and it gets FDA emergency use authorization. Cuts risk of hospitalization and death by half. Didn't see anything about mild cases or long Covid though.

By discouraging vaccination it could prolong the pandemic, but with fewer Trump voters dying. OTOH people might be less reluctant to go out and get infected, shortening the pandemic and speeding economic recovery... but cutting risk of death by 50% still leaves a huge risk most people can (hopefully) understand.

Trumplandia really doesn't need long Covid brain fog (though maybe it will help Trump seem to make more sense (at least when he gets really obviously incoherent))....

'The widespread availability of a pill that may prevent the worst outcomes of a COVID-19 infection could make some vaccine holdouts stick to their position of refusing the shot, [...]

"It certainly is likely that some people will take, if you will, refuge that should they become infected, a pill might be available that could help them avert serious disease," said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Infectious Diseases Division.

"We are seeing this happen already with monoclonal antibody treatments," he said. The treatments, administered intravenously and subcutaneously, in some instances, are meant for people with mild to moderate COVID-19 cases who are at high risk for severe disease. The fact that those treatments exist may have given some people who are vaccine hesitant the idea that they don't necessarily need the vaccine, he said.

[...] There "absolutely" will be people who opt for antiviral pills instead of the vaccine, according to Dr. Gregory Poland, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic.

"Americans, in general, will take about any magic pill, but not a vaccine" that's been studied to a much more intensive degree'

https://www.marketwa...ill-11633125181

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 02 October 2021 - 12:55 AM

[Tsundoku]

 Mezla PigDog, on 01 October 2021 - 08:07 PM, said:

I'm negative. How can you not catch it in your own house? Especially with a slobbery little kid around?

Because of the great old English tradition of never handling their kids?

Quote

I gave myself a very thorough swabbing too.

I'll bet you did, saucy minx.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Side effects from my Pfizer booster have been much more mild than my second dose of Moderna. Sore arm, bit of fatigue, both mostly gone by now.

Considered waiting for Delta-specific booster to be approved, though the 'vaccines going to waste' moral out might then not apply.

'Why you’re not getting a delta-specific booster yet

[...] mRNA technology [...] came with a huge selling point: It would enable scientists to reformulate the vaccines in response to new variants — and fast.

[...] Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have already produced customized, delta-targeted vaccines.

Pfizer[...] Clinical trial results are anticipated in the fourth quarter of the year.

[... "] Trials of mRNA vaccines against the beta variant are being done in people who got the regular mRNA vaccine first. Some of these studies also have arms in which the same vaccine was given a third time, and it looks like that gives you as much protection or as-good antibody levels [...] against delta, as the switched vaccine. So right now, it’s not clear whether there is even a benefit in changing the vaccine strain.["]

[...] delta-specific vaccines probably won’t be that much better than the original vaccines because delta’s spike protein is pretty similar to the ancestral coronavirus’s in terms of its look and shape. That means the antibodies created by the original formulation of the vaccine, if we’re given third shots of it, should work well to attack the virus.

[...] “It would take a while to get through regulatory approval and manufacture and vaccines are needed now.”


[But wait: other sources claim the issue not is not actually insufficient supply, but distributing the existing supply to the world... Delta-specific shots would be in addition to what's already sufficient? However there's apparently a lack of transparency about the actual numbers.]

“You’re going to have, one, the delay of manufacturing and having to allocate specific manufacturing plants for that purpose, and two, the FDA review that would go into it, so that creates a delay. I don’t think that trade-off makes sense for the delta variant.”

[...] “But in the urgent situation we face now with Covid, the regulatory process still takes time that right now we don’t have.”

[mRNA technology] can only be used to its full potential in a scenario where regulatory pathways allow tweaked vaccines to be evaluated efficiently.

[...] There are lots of unused doses of the original vaccines, which public health officials and drugmakers may have feared would go to waste if people decide they only want the “new and improved” version.'

https://www.vox.com/...r-vaccine-covid

Guess in the extremely unlikely event of unforeseen side effects from the Delta-specific shot, the anti-vaxxers could get a terrible boost....

It's not at all clear that boosters would result in not having enough shots for the rest of the world:

'A consortium of pharmaceutical industry trade groups [...] said in a statement that global vaccine production is sufficient to provide boosters in rich countries and donations to the developing world in 2021.'

https://www.reuters....ght-2021-09-22/


'“we’ve got the supply, we’ve got the technical skills, what we really need is leadership and political will” to vaccinate the rest of the world, Udayakumar says.'

[...] “What’s actually most important right now is the urgency with which we can get doses around the world,”

https://www.webmd.co...n-needs-urgency

But money spent on distributing booster shots could presumably be effectively spent on distributing vaccines more quickly to poorer nations... however, '“There’s a big economic case to be made for boosters,” [...] giving out boosters to people 65 and older makes sense if the sole goal is to keep people from becoming critically ill. But if the aim is something more along the lines of returning to normal, that’s a differently positioned goal post.

[...] estimates that the U.S. could be losing 15 million working hours each week because people are sick or quarantining at home, he said. The European Central Bank’s Christine Lagarde said earlier this month that boosters would be an “add-on” to resolving the pandemic. And Federal Reserve Gov. Lael Brainard, citing government survey data, said Monday that the number of people who are “not working due to either being sick with COVID or caring for someone sick with COVID more than doubled between late July and early September.”'

https://www.marketwa...ers-11632860963

So the anticipated near-future boost to the economy from boosters could help justify providing more funding now (and in the future) for faster vaccine deployment in developing nations. And for more vaccine production, assuming supply chain bottlenecks are no longer a significant issue?...

[Malankazooie]

That Thor's hammer pill (molnupiravir) possibly getting emergency FDA approval has got to be a game changer, right? The anti-vaxx set love themselves some pills (hillbilly heroin chic /opioid epidemic), so they'll be more than accepting to add another to the pill cocktail and gulp down with their natty light each morning (do you take it only once, or is it a monthly prescription you have to fill?). It's not as good as getting the vaccine jab, but it would be a step in a right direction.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 Malankazooie, on 12 October 2021 - 02:49 AM, said:

That Thor's hammer pill (molnupiravir) possibly getting emergency FDA approval has got to be a game changer, right? The anti-vaxx set love themselves some pills (hillbilly heroin chic /opioid epidemic), so they'll be more than accepting to add another to the pill cocktail and gulp down with their natty light each morning (do you take it only once, or is it a monthly prescription you have to fill?). It's not as good as getting the vaccine jab, but it would be a step in a right direction.

'People will need to get a prescription, which they’ll fill at a pharmacy. Patients will take four capsules twice a day for five days — in other words, 40 pills over the course of the treatment.'

https://www.nytimes....lnupiravir.html

I don't think they'll let people get a prescription before being diagnosed with symptoms though? So not a morning after pill for COVID-19 exposure?


And not intended as a prophylactic... taking it every day for a prolonged period might not be safe.

[Tiste Simeon]

Oh heck I took a lateral flow tonight and it came up positive. I know there have been false positives (my mum got one for example) but this was a very quick and clear result. I've got so much on at work this is not what I wanted. I will have to get a PCR tomorrow and see what they say but this had to happen on the week my brother and his wife have come over to visit and we are all having a lovely meal tomorrow evening but of course I won't be able to now.