[Gorefest]

Too early to say. As already stated, most cases detected so far were in younger people who tend to have less symptoms anyway. The key info is hospitalisations and deaths attributed to the new variant and that is still too early to tell. So we have no clue if it really is milder or just the same, but more contagious. Not out of the woods by a long stretch.

[QuickTidal]

Fair enough. I'm just trying to be optimistic these days. LOL

[Gorefest]

Here's hoping along with you. Unfortunately if leading epidemiologists such as prof Ferguson (Imperial) are to be believed, the age old adage that pathogens tend to evolve/mutate towards 'higher infectivity, less pathogenicity' doesn't really seem to hold for respiratory viruses such as SARS-coV-2. Due to their rapid spread and high infectivity, they can hop hosts in record time so they don't really 'care' (from an evolutionary perspective) whether X days later the host collapses. Furthermore, for airborne viruses the most effective way of spreading is to get the host to cough and splutter lots, i.e. through causing lots of airway irritation and damage.

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 03 December 2021 - 02:29 PM

[Macros]

would there be a chance (wilfully optimistic here too) that it mutates into more "mild" symptoms that encourage spread, example a more spluttery coughing/sneezing situation, with the trade off being it just stops killing people>

[Gorefest]

Oh, absolutely. It can go any way, really. There is no conscious drive in viral evolution. If a specific mutation leads to an increase in survival and persistence, regardless of the driver for this survival, it will by default become more dominant. Until a next 'better fit' mutation occurs. So if a virus can initiate more 'ticklishness' in your throat without drastically inflaming the airway epithelium then that would be just as viable a route. The sad reality though is that to increase coughing, sneezing and spluttering, you normally need to do damage and the deeper that damage sinks down the bronchial path, the worse it is and the worse the effects of both pathogen but especially immune response damage are. Most of the lung damage actually results from the host's immune response, not the virus.

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 03 December 2021 - 03:23 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Gorefest, on 03 December 2021 - 02:27 PM, said:

Here's hoping along with you. Unfortunately if leading epidemiologists such as prof Ferguson (Imperial) are to be believed, the age old adage that pathogens tend to evolve/mutate towards 'higher infectivity, less pathogenicity' doesn't really seem to hold for respiratory viruses such as SARS-coV-2. Due to their rapid spread and high infectivity, they can hop hosts in record time so they don't really 'care' (from an evolutionary perspective) whether X days later the host collapses. Furthermore, for airborne viruses the most effective way of spreading is to get the host to cough and splutter lots, i.e. through causing lots of airway irritation and damage.

Wonder if this also applies to evolution inside a single host over a prolonged period of time. If as has been speculated the lack of detected branches relative to the number of omicron mutations implies that most of the mutations developed inside a single immunocompromised person, it obviously didn't kill them... too quickly. If it had been mild or asymptomatic the person may have been less likely to receive treatment, allowing the infection to continue longer. OTOH it's possible the mutations developed in a relatively isolated and untested population, or that testing just didn't pick them up before....

[Macros]

that was a bit of my logic on that front. something less life impacting (long covid or death) will not be as easy to track and trace, also people would be less worried about it, meaning laxity on a personal level = more spread?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Vaccinating Africa is critical to protecting the world against dangerous variants. In Zambia, hesitancy, apathy and unused doses are complicating the fight.

[...] her team might have found more takers if they packed the vials in Styrofoam coolers and headed out to markets and churches. “But we have no fuel for the vehicle to take the vaccines there,” [...]

[...] as supply has begun to sputter into something like a more reliable flow, other daunting obstacles are coming into focus [...]

Weak health care systems with limited infrastructure and technology, and no experience vaccinating adults, are trying to get shots into the arms of people who have far more pressing priorities. At the same time, the global flow of information, and deliberate misinformation, on social media is generating the same skepticism that has stymied vaccination efforts in the United States and other countries.

Some Zambians are hesitant, but others have an attitude that could better be described as vaccine indifference. This is a poor country where the economy has contracted sharply during the pandemic, and many unvaccinated people are more focused on putting food on the table.

“I’d like to get it but I work Monday to Saturday, and I don’t know if they vaccinate on Sunday,” [...] She has heard many rumors: that people who receive the vaccine will die in two years; that the vaccine is part of a plot by Europeans to kill Africans and take their land; that Bill Gates is on a campaign to reduce the world population.

Such stories make her roll her eyes. But Covid is not at the top of her list of health care worries. “It’s cholera season, and people have malaria, and there is H.I.V. and TB,” she said. [...]

[...] pace of vaccination is far too slow to prevent unnecessary deaths in a fourth wave, which is already beginning in southern Africa, or to prevent the emergence of new variants [...] The vaccines now in stock — many of them donations close to their expiration dates when they arrive — may not be used before they must be destroyed.

[...]

Many people here recall the time when Zambians were dying of AIDS in huge numbers and Western pharmaceutical companies refused to produce affordable lifesaving medications. There is skepticism now that those same companies have come offering free solutions.

Vaccine misinformation spreads on TikTok and WhatsApp, and in evangelical churches where pastors warn that the shot “contains the mark of the beast.”

“No matter how educated people are, if their pastor says don’t trust the vaccine, they don’t trust,” [...] Chongwe District Hospital, where seven staff members sat idle in an empty vaccination tent.

[...] false rumors [...] the vaccine causes female infertility or erectile dysfunction. Zambians have heard AstraZeneca is not being used in many countries because of reports of blood clots in a very small number of people who received that shot. [...]

“To just walk up — and these health facilities are sometimes very far away, two, five, seven kilometers away and people don’t have cars, you have to be very motivated — sometimes people have gone to a health facility and then there is no vaccine,” he said. “All they are told is, ‘You can only vaccinate if there’s five or six people [so unused dosages in an opened multi-dose vial don't go to waste], so you can’t be vaccinated today’. How likely are you to come back?”'

[...] “I was scared because people say a lot of stories, that I will faint, that I will not be able to walk, that I will die,” she said. “I took the risk to come and protect myself and my baby.”

She is the only vaccinated person in her family. Her husband tried twice but the sites he went to never had vaccines in stock, and it was difficult for him to find the time to make the four-kilometer walk to try again [...]

[...] a veteran H.I.V. activist in Lusaka, said the government had yet to tap into the vast network of H.I.V. and TB treatment activists in the country. “We seem not to learn from our past,” he said, recalling how testing and treatment for H.I.V. only reached critical mass when care was delivered in bars, at schools and on doorsteps.

“If they don’t use the structures we already have, donors will keep sending the vaccines and they’ll pile up here and expire and then they won’t send us anymore,” [...]

[...] the key strategy for the planned rapid scale-up in vaccination was to do exactly that, taking vaccines to people in malls and at bus stops.'

https://www.nytimes....ine-africa.html

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'we've found in our research that for Covid-19, this risk analysis can get turned on its head: Vaccine uptake is so high among wealthy people because Covid is one of the gravest threats they face. [...]

For poorer and working-class people, though, the calculus is different: Covid-19 is only one of multiple grave threats. In the South Bronx, one man who works two jobs shared that he navigates around drug dealers, hostile police and shootings. "I don't want my kids to see what I've seen," he said. Another man said he lost his job during the pandemic and slipped back into addiction. "Most of my friends are dead or in jail," he said. Neither one plans to get vaccinated. Their hesitancy is not irrational: When viewed in the context of the other threats they face, Covid no longer seems uniquely scary.

Most of the people we interviewed in the Bronx say they are skeptical of the institutions that claim to serve the poor but in fact have abandoned them. "When you're in a high tax bracket, the government protects you," said one man who drives an Amazon truck for a living. "So why wouldn't you trust a government that protects you?" On the other hand, he and his friends find reason to view the government's sudden interest in their well-being with suspicion. "They are over here shoving money at us," a woman told us, referring to a New York City offer to pay a $500 bonus to municipal workers to get vaccinated. "And I'm asking, why are you so eager, when you don't give us money for anything else?" These views reinforce the work of social scientists who find a link between a lack of trust and inequality. And without trust, there is no mutual obligation, no sense of a common good.

[...] Hesitancy is a global phenomenon. While the reasons vary by country, the underlying causes are the same: a deep mistrust in local and international institutions, in a context in which governments worldwide have cut social services. [...]


Researchers find these sentiments echoed in poor and marginalized communities around the world.'

https://www.nytimes....ancy-covid.html

(Technically their vaccine hesitancy is still irrational, unless the 'costs' of getting the vaccine outweigh the likely benefits. But it's not as irrational.)

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 11 December 2021 - 07:17 PM

[Macros]

Well we've booked our flights for a summer holiday in Spain (Not Benidorm or Malaga)
Have a wedding there mid July so we're making a two week holiday of it and seeing friends in Gibraltar too. What will be the name of the variant that fucks that trip up?
The book is open

[Tiste Simeon]

Macros, on 13 December 2021 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well we've booked our flights for a summer holiday in Spain (Not Benidorm or Malaga)
Have a wedding there mid July so we're making a two week holiday of it and seeing friends in Gibraltar too. What will be the name of the variant that fucks that trip up?
The book is open

By that time surely we'll be at Omega and then it's game over anyway so you might as well go and enjoy the last few days of humanity in a warm place!

[Maark Abbott]

Tiste Simeon, on 13 December 2021 - 10:09 AM, said:

Macros, on 13 December 2021 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well we've booked our flights for a summer holiday in Spain (Not Benidorm or Malaga)
Have a wedding there mid July so we're making a two week holiday of it and seeing friends in Gibraltar too. What will be the name of the variant that fucks that trip up?
The book is open

By that time surely we'll be at Omega and then it's game over anyway so you might as well go and enjoy the last few days of humanity in a warm place!

Get up to the Tyrant variant and party like it's 1998!

[Mezla PigDog]

I've got pandemic fatigue. Anyone else in the UK also just thinking "fuck it"? Fortunately my version of "fuck it" is probably still pretty covid safe because I have forgotten how to lead a sociable life and not going to the shops is more than fine by me. But, meh. I'm done with doing anything Boris tells me.

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Mezla PigDog, on 13 December 2021 - 02:39 PM, said:

I've got pandemic fatigue. Anyone else in the UK also just thinking "fuck it"? Fortunately my version of "fuck it" is probably still pretty covid safe because I have forgotten how to lead a sociable life and not going to the shops is more than fine by me. But, meh. I'm done with doing anything Boris tells me.

Mr Not a Blacksmith and I are much the same in both senses - feeling utterly done with Boris but also not really that sociable and unlikely even pre-COVID to do most of the more problematic stuff (nightclubs etc).

[Abyss]

Macros, on 13 December 2021 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well we've booked our flights for a summer holiday in Spain (Not Benidorm or Malaga)
Have a wedding there mid July so we're making a two week holiday of it and seeing friends in Gibraltar too. What will be the name of the variant that fucks that trip up?
The book is open

[Macros]

Mezla PigDog, on 13 December 2021 - 02:39 PM, said:

I've got pandemic fatigue. Anyone else in the UK also just thinking "fuck it"? Fortunately my version of "fuck it" is probably still pretty covid safe because I have forgotten how to lead a sociable life and not going to the shops is more than fine by me. But, meh. I'm done with doing anything Boris tells me.

the constantly changing narrative from bojo and co is the most exhausting part of it.

as I've (selfishly) said anyone in the UK who wants a vaccine can get one and has had ample opportunity to get it, if you don't want the vac, that's fine. They've made their choice, lets just roll on now.

yes yes I'm a horrible specimen of a person

but I'm sick of trying to mitigate this pandemic when people are willfully going against all efforts to curtail it, and these will be the people who don't want the vaccine as well, so fuck them, they think its not an illness then lets get on with it

blegh, having a grumpy day or two, not sleeping

[Macros]

Ugh

I think my Uncle in Philly has been emailing my dad crap again
He just sent me a link to a Martin Armstrong trash piece that says the Pfizer vaccine is actually the same stuff they dose wild horses with to control population

[Macros]

I mean, literally two second of reading the article anyone could see it was garbage. Hell it's literally tagged in the 'conspiracy' section.
A further two seconds shows how much of a nutter the author is. Ugh I preach to my family all the time, a cursory search debunks nearly everything you get sent on Facebook

[Maark Abbott]

Definitely fatigue here. The amount of people not bothering with a simple mask despite it being 'mandatory' is pretty damn high, but shop staff are apparently not allowed to challenge on it. So any mandate for masking up again is rendered pointless because so many are going to just fuck it off that it doesn't do anything.

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Maark Abbott, on 14 December 2021 - 08:54 AM, said:

Definitely fatigue here. The amount of people not bothering with a simple mask despite it being 'mandatory' is pretty damn high, but shop staff are apparently not allowed to challenge on it. So any mandate for masking up again is rendered pointless because so many are going to just fuck it off that it doesn't do anything.

I wouldn't want to be challenging people about it if I was a member of shop or transport staff. Too high a likelihood of just dealing with abuse all day.