Covid-19 miscellany

[southernhybrid]

The optician I saw yesterday told me she had COVID about two years ago and was hospitalized for over 2 weeks. I asked her politely if she had been vaccinated at the time. She said that she hadn't been. I then told her about my nurse friend who refused the vaccine along with her then fiancé. He died of COVID and the nurse was hospitalized for a couple of weeks with COVID and told me recently she still has some long haul symptoms. They both had a lot of other risk factors too, and they were both Trump supporters. I told the optician that my husband and I have each had 7 COVID vaccines and so far, neither of us have had COVID. I did't ask her if she's had any vaccines since, but I was trying to gently motivate her to consider it, if she hasn't. Only something like 8% of people in Georgia have had the latest Vaccine. Cases are on the rise, including hospitalizations. Gee. I wonder why. My sister had COVID but she was vaccinated, which is probably why she had a mild case. Vaccines aren't 100% effective but they sure help prevent serious cases of COVID and flu in most people, most of the time. It's so weird to see so many people deny science, especially since I worked in public health during the 80s, when most people couldn't wait to get their children and themselves vaccinated against all kinds of diseases.

 

[marc]

Has that nurse friend gotten the vaccine since then?

 

[Worldtraveller]

I just had had my 6th or 7th booster a few months ago. Never had COVID.

Mom got COVID about a year after she moved to assisted living, but she had 3-4 booster by then and doesn't seem to have any long term effects. They quarantined her for about a week.
Anecdotal, I know, but there were a few cases where mom lives that were pretty serious. I think at some point, they required their residents to have the vaccine or they wouldn't be able to stay there.

 

[southernhybrid]

Has that nurse friend gotten the vaccine since then?

I honestly don't know. She and I aren't very close, but we text each other every couple of months just to see how each other is doing. We are both in our 70s, but she has a lot more health issues than I do. She spends most of her time in bed or resting at home.

I know that she had a big Trump sign in her yard in 2020, as I made a rare visit to Facebook where she proudly posted it. I know that she can barely get by on her SS, but we avoid discussing politics or religion to avoid conflict. I hope she's had the vaccine, but most of these vaccine deniers are pretty hopeless.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Nearly 17,000 people across six countries may have died because they took hydroxychloroquine (HQC) during the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020, according to a new analysis published by French researchers.

...

In February and March 2020, the use of this treatment was widely promoted based on preliminary reports suggesting a potential efficacy against COVID-19. However, subsequent studies showed that not only did the drug have no benefit, it also resulted in a significant increase in risk of death.

...

The analysis found an estimated 16,990 excess deaths across six countries — Turkey, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and the U.S. — were likely attributed to hydroxychloroquine use.

link

 

[Worldtraveller]

17k? wow..that's. just insane.

 

[TSwizzle]

17k? wow..that's. just insane.

Yes, it really is.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

17k? wow..that's. just insane.

Yes, it really is.

They should have asked their doctor if bleach was right for them.

 

[Derec]

Only something like 8% of people in Georgia have had the latest Vaccine. Cases are on the rise, including hospitalizations. Gee. I wonder why.

There is a marked increase in respiratory diseases nationwide, but Georgia is, along with most other other states in the Southeast, listed as having "very high" levels by CDC. I had had the latest COVID vaccine along with the flu vaccine last November.

My sister had COVID but she was vaccinated, which is probably why she had a mild case.

No kidding. A vaccine will not necessarily stop you getting it but it does prime the immune system to start fighting it sooner, which can make a big difference. I myself was sick as a dog last October, had fever for a week. Probably flu, but who knows. Did not get tested. Just isolated myself and took a bunch of fluids. Not even Tylenol. Unless it rises to dangerous levels, it's best not to reduce fever as it helps the body fight infections.
In fact, that's how they used to treat neurosyphilis before antibiotics. Treponema pallidum is good at evading the immune system so you don't get much of an immune response, including fever (also the reason why there isn't a vaccine). So they'd infect the patient malaria deliberately, the patient would spike a fever, curing the Syphilis, and then they'd get an antimalarial drug. Julius Wagner-Jauregg got a Nobel Prize for it and everything.

Vaccines aren't 100% effective but they sure help prevent serious cases of COVID and flu in most people, most of the time.

It's so weird to see so many people deny science, especially since I worked in public health during the 80s, when most people couldn't wait to get their children and themselves vaccinated against all kinds of diseases.

In the 70s people were still dying of smallpox. Many people were still around in the 1980s who remembered the world before widespread antibiotic use, or who remember polio outbreaks and even live in iron lungs themselves. People these days don't remember how things used to be.
At the risk of making it political, that's also why all these Millennials and Zoomers are susceptible to socialism. They are too young to really remember the Soviet Union and the rest the Warsaw Pact.

 

[Derec]

They should have asked their doctor if bleach was right for them.

link

 

[Derec]

In February and March 2020, the use of this treatment was widely promoted based on preliminary reports suggesting a potential efficacy against COVID-19. However, subsequent studies showed that not only did the drug have no benefit, it also resulted in a significant increase in risk of death.

You know, it was right to try different things in research. We did not have a vaccine, nor any effective antivirals at the time.
But preliminary results are just that. Often they do not pan out. But you can read all sorts of not yet published studies on preprint servers and there was much interest to access anything Covid related at the time.
COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 preprints from medRxiv and bioRxiv
Hydroxyquinone developed this irrational cult following that was pretty insane to witness.

 

[Derec]

But now watching YouTube recently, the advertisements are full of health scams promoting products and services based on claims like:
- Losing eyesight and hearing have nothing to do with the eyes or ears but only the brain

Technically, many parts of the eye are really brain tissue. They bud out from diencephalon during embryonic development.
In reality eyesight and hearing loss may be due to issues with the sensory organ, nerve connection or brain regions responsible for processing the information. There is such a thing as "blindsight". If there is a defect in the occipital lobe a person might not be able to consciously see, but since the visual information still reaches areas of the brain such as the thalamus, visual stimuli may be perceived subconsciously.

Of course, it would be stupid to generalize. If your cochlea is damaged, it really has nothing to do with the brain. A lesion in the cochlear nucleus does.

- Germanium bracelets helps with weight loss

Makes sense, as long as they are big enough to act as weights. Get a set of anklets too for extra weight loss!

No one is going to die from wearing a germanium bracelet. Lots of people died from covid misinformation.

The issue with these "harmless" remedies that don't work is that they are often used instead of real medicine. That is especially true for serious conditions like cancer. Sure, chugging cranberry juice is not going to harm you (watch that sugar though!), but if you delay chemo or radiation therapy because you want to try the cranberry juice regimen for a month, your cancer might progress and your prognosis may worsen, even to the point of metastasis.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In February and March 2020, the use of this treatment was widely promoted based on preliminary reports suggesting a potential efficacy against COVID-19. However, subsequent studies showed that not only did the drug have no benefit, it also resulted in a significant increase in risk of death.

You know, it was right to try different things in research. We did not have a vaccine, nor any effective antivirals at the time.
But preliminary results are just that. Often they do not pan out. But you can read all sorts of not yet published studies on preprint servers and there was much interest to access anything Covid related at the time.
COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 preprints from medRxiv and bioRxiv
Hydroxyquinone developed this irrational cult following that was pretty insane to witness.

There never was any reasonable reason to think it would work. It's like that handgun--kills the virus, but at way above lethal level. It's a drug aimed at parasites, why would you expect useful anti-viral activity?

And it went nuts because some researchers faked their results. The irrationality was from the very start.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

https://wapo.st/49Gxfj9

Measles in Florida schools and the anti-vax movement grows, as the government coddles the madness.

 

[repoman]

https://wapo.st/49Gxfj9

Measles in Florida schools and the anti-vax movement grows, as the government coddles the madness.

The measles vaccine works because measles itself is very amenable to vaccination producing very long term and nearly full immunity. Unfortunately, covid is not amenable to the same kind of vaccination success, no disrespect to the scientists trying.

By trying to oversell the efficacy of the covid vaccines with no discernment between vaccines for different infections, this is leading the reactive masses to think other vaccines are similarly oversold. For the most part the other vaccines are not oversold.

This is like reefer madness backlash but for vaccines. And yes, high strength cannabis is not all roses, but it is not fentanyl.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

https://wapo.st/49Gxfj9

Measles in Florida schools and the anti-vax movement grows, as the government coddles the madness.

The measles vaccine works because measles itself is very amenable to vaccination producing very long term and nearly full immunity. Unfortunately, covid is not amenable to the same kind of vaccination success, no disrespect to the scientists trying.

By trying to oversell the efficacy of the covid vaccines with no discernment between vaccines for different infections, this is leading the reactive masses to think other vaccines are similarly oversold. For the most part the other vaccines are not oversold.

No, not really. Seeing that the measles vaccine was available to the teens contracting measles now, a decade before the Covid-19 pandemic happened. The Jenna McCarthy movement helped create a bunch of noise regarding vaccines, making untrue allegations and people had started to slow down or even not bother with vaccinations. We saw a number of outbreaks at colleges well before the Covid-19 Pandemic, which was indicating there were gaps in the herd immunity.

The difference now is that the Covid Pandemic increased the viability of vaccine deflection being a viable political position, so instead of being merely about left-wing/right-wing crackpots, it is now becoming part of the Republican Party platform.

And just to again clear up any misconception, the Covid-19 vaccines saved lives. Those that were vaccinated were usually a magnitude less likely to get hospitalized or die. Like the flu vaccine, it needs to be taken more often because science.

 

[TV and credit cards]

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.

arstechnica.com

So it looks like Return to Office is just about so much dickery; wanting people to push around and something to blame for overall poor performance. But how far up the ladder does this RTO attitude extend? Is anyone considering the benefit of happy employees and the cost of office space?

 

[bilby]

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.

arstechnica.com

So it looks like Return to Office is just about so much dickery; wanting people to push around and something to blame for overall poor performance. But how far up the ladder does this RTO attitude extend? Is anyone considering the benefit of happy employees and the cost of office space?

A big driver is the cost of office space - or rather, a desire to keep the price of office space up.

Lots of top managers and corporate shareholders (and of course, there's a big overlap between the two) have large investments in commercial real estate. If workers don't use that space, they stand to lose a LOT of money - money that was invested in what (in 2019) looked like a really safe asset class.

RTO is essential to support the retirement funds of the folks sitting in the boardroom; They need it to happen on a personal level, so they don't give two shits whether or not it makes good business sense. And they never much cared for happiness amongst their employees - employees get paychecks; If they want to be happy, they can do it on their own time.

A brief glance at the office towers in any major city gives you an appreciation of the problem here. These are very expensive structures, which are typically useless for any purpose other than office space - they cannot easily be repurposed as domestic or industrial spaces. Workers must RTO, if these buildings are to continue to return dividends for their investors (who just so happen to also be the owners and/or managers of the big white-collar firms that are calling for RTO).

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I found working at home and working at the office to be about the same, with a slight advantage for collaboration when in person.

I live close to work, so I don't have this 1.5 hrs of daily driving to weigh in on the math.

 

[crazyfingers]

I believe I posted this perhaps over a year ago but I recall when my then employer started making back to the office announcements in a company meeting they used this chart. I saw it and knew that it was nonsense. I told the HR manager as much. The CDC looked at all the research but the CDC did not forecast Covid deaths and knowing that winter and the holiday season was on the way I thought that the chart was preposterous.

Even though I had been 100% WFH since around 2009 and wouldn't be impacted by a back to office rule, this just pissed me off.

Slide presented at the October 2021 company meeting



We had a pretty new CEO and I never much liked him. I completely disliked how on MS Teams meetings he wanted everyone to keep their video feeds on all the time which research was already showing was counter-productive, distracting and stressful.

Anyway, here is a PEW Research chart of what really happened with Covid deaths over that time-frame denoted by the space between the red lines that I've drawn on the chart. There was the Omicron spike recall.



The back to office order was purely driven by the new CEO's personality and preferences. The kicker was that about half the company was already remote before the pandemic because people were hired in as remote due to their expertise and existing locations. So at best he could only get the other 50% back.

So this was the October 2021 company meeting. My wife had been stuck in Canada for 8 months as some people might recall. She got home on November 6, 2021 and on Nov 8 I gave my ~3 month notice that I was retiring. I was going to retire anyway and had already been hinting that I wouldn't be around much longer but the attitude of the new CEO sped up the timing. I was gone on Feb 1 2022 having never stepped into the office again. The IT guy came out to get my notebook in the parking lot.

I don't like being lied to.