Covid-19 miscellany

[Loren Pechtel]

Europe descended into a third day of violent carnage on Sunday as tens of thousands of people in Belgium took to the streets to protest against the return of strict lockdown rules aimed at curbing a rise in Covid infections. Nearly 40,000 people descended on the capital Brussels to protest against new anti-Covid measures banning the unvaccinated from entering restaurants and bars.

DailyMail

All this talk of banning the unvaccinated from public life has a very familiar ring to it.

Yeah, it's the normal response of sensible governments to sufficiently deadly diseases.

I do not believe there is a border in the world you can cross without having to prove that you are vaccinated against certain diseases. The average first worlder rarely goes to places that will trigger the check but I've handed over my yellow card along with my passport many time because I knew I was crossing a border that would trigger the check. (Coming from a country where the disease in question exists in the wild.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The dumb sociopaths.

Sociopathic traits linked to not wearing a mask or social distancing during pandemic: study

Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 adults in Brazil about their personalities and how well they adhered to Covid-19 prevention measures. Their findings point to a few psychological reasons why some people don't wear face masks, maintain social distance and practice hand hygiene.

www.cnbc.com

I suspect this is a considerable undercount as such people will tend to self-select out of polls.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Interesting. So the intelligent anti-vaxxers are actually outliers. That confirms to me that their stance is more likely to be taken as a result of personal egoism and desire to make themselves important, as they are the ones pushing the conspiracy theories.

I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about that about the more intelligent sort of anti-vaxxers, even though I consider the anti-vaxx position difficult to support. Some of them may be doing as a way of owning the libs, for instance.

And that is an intelligent reason?

It's a bad reason, yes, but one might wish that they would be more willing to reassess their anti-vaxx position rather than thinking about how best they can own the libs.

Actually, it may be more related than you think. "Owning the libs" is basically an expression of personal ego. Just take a look at all those politicians who are pushing their "conservative agenda". They wouldn't do that unless they thought it would add to their public visibility and increase their importance in the eyes of their constituents. The same is true of those doctors and scientists who are pushing back against the vaccine; they have found a way to make themselves highly visible and make money too. I don't think it actually has a single thing to do with what they actually know or believe.

If you want to know what more intelligent people who reject vaccines believe, I would suggest reading their arguments. Some are just rattled because some of their freedoms are taken away in a way that interferes seriously with their lifestyle (which involves not using medicine for the most part, avoiding processed foods or other things when doable, etc.).

Technically they are my freedoms they are usurping. As they are refusing vaccination and the consequences that should come from non-vaccination. Which has fucked things up for everyone else.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

1) Flu is not a serious threat to a healthy person. They conduct medical studies in which (young, healthy) people are deliberately infected with flu. That is considered acceptable medical practice because it poses basically zero risk of serious consequences to the test subjects.

However, flu viruses kill a lot of people every year. For example, in the US here is some data frome the CDC:

Burden of Influenza

Learn about how CDC estimates the burden of seasonal influenza in the U.S.

www.cdc.gov

Vaccination would very probably cut transmission rates - so would, by the way, the proper use of good face masks. As a result, it would save lives. I'm not sure how many, but there would definitely be fewer fatalities. Whether that happens in healthy people or not is not my point. bilby's arguments do not seem to take into consideration the fatality rate, and seem applicable to other cases as well, like the flu.

2) We have already learned that getting infected doesn't produce immunity--you're immune to that version but it very well might not protect you from variants. The vaccine (other than the Chinese crap that's a killed-virus vaccine, provides about the same protection as prior infection--bad) provides better protection than prior infection.

No, we have not learned that. At least, I have not learned that, so I will ask you to provide good evidence of that. Here's a study supporting the opposite conclusion, comparing Pfizer's vaccine vs. prior infection.

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections

Background Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear. Methods We conducted a retrospective observational study comparing three groups...

www.medrxiv.org

Study: COVID recovery gave Israelis longer-lasting Delta defense than vaccines

The variant was 27 times more likely to break through Pfizer protection from January-February and cause symptoms than it was to penetrate natural immunity from the same period

www.timesofisrael.com

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1.full.pdf

Sure, you can find studies in the other direction. Jury seems to be still out on that one.

As for the "Chinese crap" , Sinopharm's vaccine is the most widely used vaccine over here, closely followed by AZ and then Sputnik. Combined they probably make up well over 90% of the vaccinations over here. And despite the government's serious negligence that resulted in many more fatalities than otherwise would have occurred, eventually things have improved a lot, the ICUs have plenty of room available, the number of daily covid fatalities has fallen sharply now is gradually falling still, with 234 fatalities in the past 14 days (out of a population of about 46 million). This is despite the fact that nearly all restrictions have been lifted - even mask wearing outdoors, though it's still mandatory indoors - and the fact that most people do not respect the remaining ones anyway. In short, the Chinese crap seems to work okay in the long run, even if it's less effective than AZ or Sputnik. But infection should work better than the dead virus vaccines, as it is with the current variant of the virus.

Incidentally, vaccination with Chinese crap is accepted by European governments and by the US government, even though the US government does not seem to count prior infection at all and demands vaccination. That does not make sense to me: Why consider people vaccinated with dead-virus vaccines immunized, but reject the same for people who recovered from the virus? I can't make sense of that one.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The dumb sociopaths.

Sociopathic traits linked to not wearing a mask or social distancing during pandemic: study

Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 adults in Brazil about their personalities and how well they adhered to Covid-19 prevention measures. Their findings point to a few psychological reasons why some people don't wear face masks, maintain social distance and practice hand hygiene.

www.cnbc.com

Or as Kevin Sorbo once replied to “Is your freedom more important than my safety?!”

I don’t know you, my lunch is more important to me than you are.

So, where does SYG laws stand on the unvaccinated?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Interesting. So the intelligent anti-vaxxers are actually outliers. That confirms to me that their stance is more likely to be taken as a result of personal egoism and desire to make themselves important, as they are the ones pushing the conspiracy theories.

I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about that about the more intelligent sort of anti-vaxxers, even though I consider the anti-vaxx position difficult to support. Some of them may be doing as a way of owning the libs, for instance.

And that is an intelligent reason?

It's a bad reason, yes, but one might wish that they would be more willing to reassess their anti-vaxx position rather than thinking about how best they can own the libs.

Actually, it may be more related than you think. "Owning the libs" is basically an expression of personal ego. Just take a look at all those politicians who are pushing their "conservative agenda". They wouldn't do that unless they thought it would add to their public visibility and increase their importance in the eyes of their constituents. The same is true of those doctors and scientists who are pushing back against the vaccine; they have found a way to make themselves highly visible and make money too. I don't think it actually has a single thing to do with what they actually know or believe.

If you want to know what more intelligent people who reject vaccines believe, I would suggest reading their arguments. Some are just rattled because some of their freedoms are taken away in a way that interferes seriously with their lifestyle (which involves not using medicine for the most part, avoiding processed foods or other things when doable, etc.).

Technically they are my freedoms they are usurping. As they are refusing vaccination and the consequences that should come from non-vaccination. Which has fucked things up for everyone else.

My point was about their motivation. They're not caricature villains, even though what they're doing is wrong (though if they accept infection, the matter is more difficult because it's a question of whether they can be properly confined).

By the way, do you think your argument works also for face masks? How about for the flu?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Interesting. So the intelligent anti-vaxxers are actually outliers. That confirms to me that their stance is more likely to be taken as a result of personal egoism and desire to make themselves important, as they are the ones pushing the conspiracy theories.

I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about that about the more intelligent sort of anti-vaxxers, even though I consider the anti-vaxx position difficult to support. Some of them may be doing as a way of owning the libs, for instance.

And that is an intelligent reason?

It's a bad reason, yes, but one might wish that they would be more willing to reassess their anti-vaxx position rather than thinking about how best they can own the libs.

Actually, it may be more related than you think. "Owning the libs" is basically an expression of personal ego. Just take a look at all those politicians who are pushing their "conservative agenda". They wouldn't do that unless they thought it would add to their public visibility and increase their importance in the eyes of their constituents. The same is true of those doctors and scientists who are pushing back against the vaccine; they have found a way to make themselves highly visible and make money too. I don't think it actually has a single thing to do with what they actually know or believe.

If you want to know what more intelligent people who reject vaccines believe, I would suggest reading their arguments. Some are just rattled because some of their freedoms are taken away in a way that interferes seriously with their lifestyle (which involves not using medicine for the most part, avoiding processed foods or other things when doable, etc.).

Technically they are my freedoms they are usurping. As they are refusing vaccination and the consequences that should come from non-vaccination. Which has fucked things up for everyone else.

My point was about their motivation. They're not caricature villains, even though what they're doing is wrong (though if they accept infection, the matter is more difficult because it's a question of whether they can be properly confined).

By the way, do you think your argument works also for face masks? How about for the flu?

It varies from person to person. Like the people who supported mask mandates bans in the south and helped see to 100.00 more dead Americans.

 

[TSwizzle]

Authoritarians get called out on their tyranny;

Democracy is deteriorating across the world, with countries including the United States taking undemocratic and 'unnecessary' actions to contain the coronavirus pandemic, an intergovernmental body said in a new report today. 'Many democratic governments are backsliding,' the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, said. The 34-nation organization added that as of August 2021, 64 per cent of countries have taken an action to curb the pandemic that it considers 'disproportionate, unnecessary or illegal.' The report said the US was among countries which has imposed 'measures that amount to democratic violations', adding that the Covid-19 pandemic has 'accelerated and magnified' some of the negative trends.

DailyMail

The emergency powers granted during this pandemic need to be rescinded but the fascists will not relinquish control voluntarily.

 

[ZiprHead]

Authoritarians get called out on their tyranny;

Democracy is deteriorating across the world, with countries including the United States taking undemocratic and 'unnecessary' actions to contain the coronavirus pandemic, an intergovernmental body said in a new report today. 'Many democratic governments are backsliding,' the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, said. The 34-nation organization added that as of August 2021, 64 per cent of countries have taken an action to curb the pandemic that it considers 'disproportionate, unnecessary or illegal.' The report said the US was among countries which has imposed 'measures that amount to democratic violations', adding that the Covid-19 pandemic has 'accelerated and magnified' some of the negative trends.

DailyMail

The emergency powers granted during this pandemic need to be rescinded but the fascists will not relinquish control voluntarily.

As I understand it, the majority of people in affected areas support mask and vaccine mandates. How can it then be anti-democratic?

 

[TSwizzle]

In Austria, you can now get a two for;

A brothel in Vienna is providing COVID-19 vaccinations and giving those who take up the offer vouchers for a free visit. In exchange for a jab, visitors get a free 30-minute session in a "sauna club" with the "lady of their choice".

Sky News

This is the kind of society we should be aiming for, right?

Sick fucks.

 

[TomC]

In Austria, you can now get a two for;

A brothel in Vienna is providing COVID-19 vaccinations and giving those who take up the offer vouchers for a free visit. In exchange for a jab, visitors get a free 30-minute session in a "sauna club" with the "lady of their choice".

Sky News

This is the kind of society we should be aiming for, right?

Sick fucks.

You must not know much about guys if you think this is the weirdest thing they do to get laid.
Tom

 

[ZiprHead]

Holy crap! One of the two Walmart stores in town is closed because of covid.

Thanks to people like Tswizzle.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Interesting. So the intelligent anti-vaxxers are actually outliers. That confirms to me that their stance is more likely to be taken as a result of personal egoism and desire to make themselves important, as they are the ones pushing the conspiracy theories.

I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about that about the more intelligent sort of anti-vaxxers, even though I consider the anti-vaxx position difficult to support. Some of them may be doing as a way of owning the libs, for instance.

And that is an intelligent reason?

It's a bad reason, yes, but one might wish that they would be more willing to reassess their anti-vaxx position rather than thinking about how best they can own the libs.

Actually, it may be more related than you think. "Owning the libs" is basically an expression of personal ego. Just take a look at all those politicians who are pushing their "conservative agenda". They wouldn't do that unless they thought it would add to their public visibility and increase their importance in the eyes of their constituents. The same is true of those doctors and scientists who are pushing back against the vaccine; they have found a way to make themselves highly visible and make money too. I don't think it actually has a single thing to do with what they actually know or believe.

If you want to know what more intelligent people who reject vaccines believe, I would suggest reading their arguments. Some are just rattled because some of their freedoms are taken away in a way that interferes seriously with their lifestyle (which involves not using medicine for the most part, avoiding processed foods or other things when doable, etc.).

Technically they are my freedoms they are usurping. As they are refusing vaccination and the consequences that should come from non-vaccination. Which has fucked things up for everyone else.

My point was about their motivation. They're not caricature villains, even though what they're doing is wrong (though if they accept infection, the matter is more difficult because it's a question of whether they can be properly confined).

By the way, do you think your argument works also for face masks? How about for the flu?

It varies from person to person. Like the people who supported mask mandates bans in the south and helped see to 100.00 more dead Americans.

My question was about whether it's your freedom that they were usurping. And yes, good masks properly used of course work - clearly, since they block nearly all viral particles -, so without them you'll get more dead people. But it's unclear how effective a mandate is when people are just going to were bad masks and/or wear them improperly (this happens here all the time). At any rate, my question about the flu is that it also kills many people, even if covid kills many more, and your argument does not seem to distinguish on the basis of numbers.

 

[lpetrich]

Austria Imposes Lockdown Amid Europe’s Covid Surge - The New York Times

Tens of thousands of people protested official crackdowns and vaccine requirements in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and Croatia, with scattered violence and police use of tear gas and water cannons. Some protesters were organized by far-right parties, but many were simply fed up with almost two years of intermittent state controls over their lives in the name of public health.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Interesting. So the intelligent anti-vaxxers are actually outliers. That confirms to me that their stance is more likely to be taken as a result of personal egoism and desire to make themselves important, as they are the ones pushing the conspiracy theories.

I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about that about the more intelligent sort of anti-vaxxers, even though I consider the anti-vaxx position difficult to support. Some of them may be doing as a way of owning the libs, for instance.

And that is an intelligent reason?

It's a bad reason, yes, but one might wish that they would be more willing to reassess their anti-vaxx position rather than thinking about how best they can own the libs.

Actually, it may be more related than you think. "Owning the libs" is basically an expression of personal ego. Just take a look at all those politicians who are pushing their "conservative agenda". They wouldn't do that unless they thought it would add to their public visibility and increase their importance in the eyes of their constituents. The same is true of those doctors and scientists who are pushing back against the vaccine; they have found a way to make themselves highly visible and make money too. I don't think it actually has a single thing to do with what they actually know or believe.

If you want to know what more intelligent people who reject vaccines believe, I would suggest reading their arguments. Some are just rattled because some of their freedoms are taken away in a way that interferes seriously with their lifestyle (which involves not using medicine for the most part, avoiding processed foods or other things when doable, etc.).

Technically they are my freedoms they are usurping. As they are refusing vaccination and the consequences that should come from non-vaccination. Which has fucked things up for everyone else.

My point was about their motivation. They're not caricature villains, even though what they're doing is wrong (though if they accept infection, the matter is more difficult because it's a question of whether they can be properly confined).

By the way, do you think your argument works also for face masks? How about for the flu?

It varies from person to person. Like the people who supported mask mandates bans in the south and helped see to 100.00 more dead Americans.

My question was about whether it's your freedom that they were usurping. And yes, good masks properly used of course work - clearly, since they block nearly all viral particles -, so without them you'll get more dead people. But it's unclear how effective a mandate is when people are just going to were bad masks and/or wear them improperly (this happens here all the time). At any rate, my question about the flu is that it also kills many people, even if covid kills many more, and your argument does not seem to distinguish on the basis of numbers.

It is my freedom. Much like people pooping in the pool usurping my ability to go into the pool.

 

[crazyfingers]

If people would only get vaccinated and mask up it could be over. But they won't so it isn't.

 

[TomC]

If people would only get vaccinated and mask up it could be over. But they won't so it isn't.

So much this!
It's the people refusing to take reasonable precautions that are keeping this crap going.
Tom

 

[Angra Mainyu]

It is my freedom. Much like people pooping in the pool usurping my ability to go into the pool.

Alright, so would the same apply to people not wearing masks/not getting vaccines against the flu?
If so, do you think the government should impose a lockdown on them as well?
If not, why would it not be your freedom?

 

[Jarhyn]

I find it interesting that in fact many of us now do see and realize that wearing masks when potentially sick is just a no-brainer, and when in close contact.

We can handle an ecosystem without COVID, it is not to be seen that we can handle an ecosystem with large waves of COVID alone let alone that and flu. But I guess our species will see a filtration event if we can't get it together on this one.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

I find it interesting that in fact many of us now do see and realize that wearing masks when potentially sick is just a no-brainer, and when in close contact.

It isn't a no-brainer for many people - nearly all in the past where I live, and I suspect in most of the world - because of the social cost. Wearing masks in the past (pre-covid) would have had a huge social cost - being mocked, insulted, bullied, probably losing one's job for most people, etc.
Now it's different, so one can pick a good mask and wear it properly to protect oneself and others - and not just when "potentially sick" (unless you count that as 'all the time'), but all the time.

It is of course a cultural matter. There are places (mostly in Asia) where masks were socially accepted long before COVID.

We can handle an ecosystem without COVID, it is not to be seen that we can handle an ecosystem with large waves of COVID alone let alone that and flu. But I guess our species will see a filtration event if we can't get it together on this one.

What do you mean by that?