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Covid-19 miscellany

TSwizzle said:
And protests in New Zealand;

New Zealand beefed up security measures at its parliament on Tuesday as thousands of people gathered to protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and government lockdowns. All but two entrances to the parliament building, known as the Beehive, were closed off in the presence of unprecedented levels of police and security personnel, as mostly unmasked protesters marched through central Wellington and congregated outside parliament.
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Reuters

People have had enough.
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Yes!
People have had enough of plague rats insisting that they should be free to spread C19.

So the rest of us are making rules and passing laws that restrict their ability to impinge on the freedoms of us responsible people.

We have had enough! Get vaccinated or remove yourself from society.
Simple as that. We've had enough.
Tom
 
Insurrection by other means: Republicans are ready to die of COVID to spite Biden, Democrats | Salon.com by Amanda Marcotte
COVID-19 is increasingly a red-state phenomenon. Among the many statistical analyses that demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of the vaccines, perhaps the starkest are those that reveal a dramatic divergence in pandemic severity between red and blue states. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out on Monday, before we had vaccines, there "simply was not a strong partisan pattern" to the spread of disease. But after vaccines became widely available — and especially as Republican voters refused to vaccinate in large numbers — "a gap in Covid's death toll quickly emerged." Now that difference "between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month," Leonhardt wrote, to the point where counties where a large majority voted for Donald Trump have a death rate "more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties."
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noting
COVID-19 Vaccines Work | CDC
and
U.S. Covid Deaths Get Even Redder - The New York Times

Over 2020, there was not much of a partisan divide in the COVID-19 death toll. Pro-Biden and pro-Trump counties were similar. But then the vaccines came out, and the two sides began to diverge. "The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point."
The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent. (Look up your county.)

As a result, Covid deaths have been concentrated in counties outside of major metropolitan areas. Many of these are in red states, while others are in red parts of blue or purple states, like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Virginia and even California.
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The Polarization of Death - kieranhealy.org - How it first hit some Democrat-leaning areas the hardest, then became more Republican than Democratic by a sizable factor.

Back to Amanda Marcotte:
It's tempting, both on the left and in mainstream media circles, to write off these differences as a matter of ignorance versus information. ...

But the truth is much darker than that. As one person who replied to Leonhardt on Twitter noted, it's less about irrational fears of the shot and more that it "became a badge of honor to remain unvaccinated" and was even seen, among many Republicans, as "[t]raitorous to cave" and get the jab. ...

No, the darker and harder truth is that this isn't really about intelligence or ignorance. It's about ideology, and specifically, about how far a good chunk of the GOP base has become radicalized toward the politics of insurrection. ...

In light of this, the willingness to roll the dice with COVID-19 makes more sense. Vaccine refusal is being presented in right-wing media as a noble act of resistance against Democratic "tyranny." Any effort to prevent the disease — even among children — is increasingly viewed as an attack on red-state America. ...

Notably, Republican leaders aren't much interested in risking their own lives through vaccine refusal. Fox News even has a corporate vaccine mandate. But that's even more evidence that vaccine refusal is structured along the metaphor of wars and armies. The base voters are the foot soldiers, risking it all on the front lines, while the leaders give orders from the safety of their vaccinated bubble.

This whole thing may sound ridiculous, but, in truth, the strategy is a smashing success — at least so far. ...

This is what Republicans need to happen if Trump's next round of election-theft scheming is to be successful. ...

That said, the situation is not hopeless. For one thing, evidence shows that GOP vaccine refusal can mostly be overcome with vaccine mandates. The resistance fantasies of vaccine refusers tend to crumple pretty quickly once real consequences come into play, as the relentless drumbeat of deathbed-regret stories demonstrates.
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These right-wing anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers could say "It is better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees", but they don't do that. Instead, they do such things as talk about what a great wonder drug ivermectin is, even though there is no convincing evidence that it is as effective as vaccination.

But overall, I agree that there is a big element in culture warring in this.
 
In Romania, Hard-Hit by Covid, Doctors Fight Vaccine Refusal - The New York Times
As a new wave of the coronavirus pandemic crashed over Eastern Europe last month, devastating unvaccinated populations, an Orthodox Church bishop in southern Romania offered solace to his flock: “Don’t be fooled by what you see on TV — don’t be scared of Covid.”

Most important, Bishop Ambrose of Giurgiu told worshipers in this small Romanian town on Oct. 14, “don’t rush to get vaccinated.”

The bishop is now under criminal investigation by the police for spreading dangerous disinformation, but his anti-vaccine clarion call, echoed by prominent politicians, influential voices on the internet and many others, helps explain why Romania has in recent weeks reported the world’s highest per capita death rate from Covid-19.
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Its population-relative death rate is now 6 * US's and 17 * Germany's.
Vaccine hesitancy, stoked by powerful forces online and in the real world, has left Romania with Europe’s second-lowest vaccination rate; around 44 percent of adults have had at least one dose, ahead of only Bulgaria, at 29 percent. Overall, the European Union stands at 81 percent, with several countries above 90 percent. Complicating matters, Romania has been without a government since last month, when a centrist coalition unraveled.
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Bulgaria also, and ethnic Russians in Latvia. "Russia, where less than half of the adult population has been even partly inoculated, and Ukraine, where the rate is below one-third, have also reimposed sweeping restrictions amid surging cases."
Stubborn vaccine resistance across such a broad array of countries has left many looking for answers in the one thing that unites them: their shared communist past and widespread disenchantment with the disarray and corruption that followed.

“Fake news has a huge influence on our population, and in Eastern Europe in general,” said Valeriu Ghorghita, an army colonel leading Romania’s vaccination effort. “Something we all have in common in this part of Europe is our political history of communism.”

Under leaders like Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s longtime dictator, who was overthrown and executed in 1989, “nobody trusted their neighbors, nobody trusted the authorities, nobody trusted anybody,” Colonel Ghorghita said.

This has made many people suspicious of what officials and doctors tell them to do, especially when the internet is full of vaccine-skeptical self-declared experts advising the opposite.

“Everyone is suddenly an expert and fake news is everywhere, 24 hours a day,” lamented Silvia Nica, the head emergency doctor at Bucharest University Hospital.
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Communism fell in Eastern Europe over 1989 - 1991, over 30 years ago. Which is plenty of time to get one's act together.
Romania began vaccinating its citizens last December and put the program under the military, the country’s most respected institution, according to opinion polls. The second most trusted institution, however, is the Orthodox church, which has sent mixed signals on vaccines, with Patriarch Daniel in Bucharest telling people to make up their own minds and listen to doctors, while many local clerics and some influential bishops denounced vaccines as the Devil’s work.
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Weird.
 
TSwizzle said:
southernhybrid said:
How many times do we have to post links that demonstrate the effectiveness of masks in lowering the spread of a virus!
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Just ONCE would suffice. But after nearly two years you still cannot provide one.
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The problem is you are demanding an impossible standard of evidence.

The sort of test that would truly prove it is horribly unethical. There's also the problem that the effectiveness of masks is highly related to how they're actually used.

TSwizzle said:
"strands of evidence" !! Laughable.

The real world indicates wearing a mask does nothing to stop the spread of the virus. It really is akin to wearing an amulet.
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Lets look at a very simple one: Note how the disease has become redder and redder as time goes on? There's a very high correlation between Covid rates and counties that voted for His Flatulence. The disease doesn't care, it has to be behavior. That's vaccination/distancing/masks. The trend emerged before the vaccine, so it has to be some combination of distancing and masks. Which is it??
 
TSwizzle said:
"strands of evidence" !! Laughable.

The real world indicates wearing a mask does nothing to stop the spread of the virus. It really is akin to wearing an amulet.
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Oh, yes, I remember when the entire world's community of doctors decided to start wearing amulets when performing surgery. Those amulets really helped reduce the infection rate in their patients!:rolleyes:

The virus is carried in tiny water droplets, the sort of water droplets that DO collect on the inside of my mask and DON'T collect on the inside of my glasses when I am wearing my kf94 mask correctly. This isn't hocus pocus. This is so elementary it's practically kindergarden level easy to understand.
 
Prager Claims Gay Men Were Never Treated as Pariahs Like the Unvaccinated

Conservative talk show host Dennis Prager on Monday made the wild claim that the unvaccinated today are treated worse than gay men during the height of the AIDS crisis. During an appearance on Newsmax, the PragerU founder said people who choose not to get vaccinated against the coronavirus are “the pariahs of America, as I have not seen in my lifetime... Can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users… had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable.”

Prager, who would have been in his thirties during the height of the AIDS crisis, apparently went the length of the decade without witnessing the endemic fear, ostracizing, and mistreatment of AIDS sufferers by wider society. During his Monday appearance, the conservative also shot his mouth off on the topic of climate change, saying that those concerned about it had an “idiotic, irrational, sick fear of extinction of the biosphere.” Disgusted, Prager continued, “I mean, do you understand the nonsense that we live with? If we survive this as a free country, historians will just ask, ‘How did this happen?’”
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Dennis Prager engaging in the Oppression Olympics and getting it totally wrong.

Why are conservative so terribly bad at history?
 
A North Dakota GOP lawmaker helped organize an anti-vaccine rally. Then he got covid and couldn’t attend.

A North Dakota GOP lawmaker helped organize an anti-vaccine rally. Then he got covid and couldn’t attend.
Andrea Salcedo8:37 a.m. EST

Days ahead of an anti-vaccine rally he helped organize, North Dakota lawmaker Jeff Hoverson, a Republican, urged his social media followers to gather on the steps of the state capitol on Monday to oppose coronavirus vaccine mandates.

“Noon Monday capital steps Bismarck. We The People rally,” Hoverson wrote on Facebook. “Extremely important for freedom from mandates legislation.”

But he did not make it to the event.

On Sunday, a day before the rally, Hoverson announced he would be skipping the event because he had contracted the coronavirus. He said that he did not need to check into a hospital because he was taking ivermectin — a deworming drug that some people are using to prevent or treat covid, despite several public health agencies advising against it.
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He may get very sick, he may even die... but he'll do it without worms!
 
We are still 1,000+ a day dying, 7-day average (and new cases appear to be increasing now), and these buffoons are just yucking it up right-wing populism style.
 
TSwizzle said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
I have to wear a mask at Playhouse Square not because of state or municipal regs, but because tens of millions of idiots didn't get vaccinated which has prolonged this pandemic. That you are upset at municipalities for the ridiculous stupidity of Americans that refuse to help solve the problem is just a sign of how bitter you are politically.
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That you go along with the charade is just a sign of how willfully ignorant you really are. These mandates are not about concern for people's health or science. It's about power drunk autocrats exerting their neuroses over ordinary people and virtue signaling wankers wagging their fingers in disapproval at the out group.
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What proof have you to offer for the assertions in your last 2 sentences, which appear willfully ignorant to me.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
We are still 1,000+ a day dying, 7-day average (and new cases appear to be increasing now), and these buffoons are just yucking it up right-wing populism style.
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It seems interesting the convergence of anti-science leftists, hyper-partisan right-wingers and alt-right-wingers, and minorities, as we appear to be seeing cases rise into potentially another fucking wave, as the north heads indoors.
 
Emails reveal new details of Trump White House interference in CDC Covid planning
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New emails and documents released by a congressional committee investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic show the extent to which top White House officials interfered in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s efforts to warn Americans about Covid-19.The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has conducted interviews over the last several months about how former President Donald Trump and his closest confidantes, including former White House adviser Scott Atlas and son-in-law Jared Kushner, tried to steer the course of the federal response, sidestepping the interagency process.
Several top former Trump officials, including Deborah Birx, the former White House Covid-19 task force coordinator, have answered committee questions. Former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Nancy Messonnier and former CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat also appeared for questioning. Both stepped down from their posts at the CDC in the spring.
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The documents released by the committee — and the corresponding interviews with witnesses — lay out a timeline for how the Trump White House began to downplay the dangers posed by Covid-19. Several former high-level Trump officials who worked on the administration’s response have said publicly after the fact that they did not want to panic the American public.
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But scientists at the CDC, well aware that the virus was transmitting at a high rate and could infect easily, stepped in early to speak to the American people directly in an attempt to warn the public about what was coming.
Following Messonnier’s comments in the Feb. 25 briefing, the leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services called yet another press conference.

“The impression that I was given was that the reaction to the morning briefing was quite volatile and having another briefing — you know, later I think I got the impression that having another briefing might get — you know, there was nothing new to report, but get additional voices out there talking about that situation,” Schuchat told the committee in her testimony.
From that point, the White House took the lead on the federal response and controlling all communications and messaging about the virus, denying CDC requests to hold its own briefings.

“We would submit a request to the others to do a briefing and it was declined, and then — or we didn’t get approval to be able to do one,” Schuchat said, referring to specific requests she received from the media for an interview. Schuchat said the White House also denied several agency telebriefings in the spring of 2020 that would have allowed CDC scientists to explain emerging evidence about how the virus moved and infected different populations.
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Austria plans to approve lockdown for the unvaccinated on Sunday
Roughly 65% of Austria’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, one of the lowest rates in Western Europe. Many Austrians are sceptical about vaccines, a view encouraged by the far-right Freedom Party, the third-biggest in parliament.

“The aim is very clear: that we give the green light this Sunday for a nationwide lockdown for the unvaccinated,” Schallenberg, a conservative, told a news conference, adding that intensive-care units are increasingly strained.

“The development is such that I do not think it is sensible to wait … We will take this step now and my wish is that we take this step on Sunday and nationally for all nine provinces.”
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Unvaccinated people will have the restrictions that all people had in that nation's three lockdowns last year. Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg wants to avoid locking down vaccinated people to give people more incentive to get vaccinated.

Germany plans to classify Austria as high-risk, meaning that anyone returning from there must be quarantined.
 
Thousands March in protest in Australia.


Thousands of demonstrators descended on to Melbourne’s central business district on Saturday, protesting against the Victorian government’s new pandemic powers and vaccine mandates. The protest, which included signs advocating violence against politicians and a man carrying a prop gallows with three nooses hanging from it, came as the state recorded 1,221 Covid-19 cases and four deaths.
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Teh Gruaniad

The control freaks and authoritarians will not give up their powers easily.
 
TSwizzle said:
Thousands March in protest in Australia.


Thousands of demonstrators descended on to Melbourne’s central business district on Saturday, protesting against the Victorian government’s new pandemic powers and vaccine mandates. The protest, which included signs advocating violence against politicians and a man carrying a prop gallows with three nooses hanging from it, came as the state recorded 1,221 Covid-19 cases and four deaths.
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Teh Gruaniad

The control freaks and authoritarians will not give up their powers easily.
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Quite true.
Apparently, nobody has managed to convince Trump or his supporters that he lost the election in 2020.
We the People also voted against him in 2016.

Trump has never been elected by any free and fair election. Never. He got appointed once by a rigged system, but that's not the same.

Still, you are correct. The control freaks and authoritarians will not give up their powers easily. Which is why "Stop the Steal" is still a thing.
Tom
 
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