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On May 02 2021 02:13 Starlightsun wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2021 01:33 Slydie wrote:On May 01 2021 23:07 Uldridge wrote:
Okay, so I'll go on a little rant here because I'm completely fed up with how governments handle the situation.
Perhaps other people can chip in on what they think could be better.
Reports of people dying with no prior health condition always makes my skin crawl. Not having a medical record != ubderlying issues like slight hypertension or some kind of weird physiological manifestation that only surfaces because of this kind of infection. Granted, it's near impossible to check up on this, but this is an issue. We have people catching COVID who have no problems and we have people catching COVID dying. It's the same problem we face when therapeutics are developed. Only broad strokes are possible because niche cases of 1/1000000 where people get an aneurysm from a medicine cost too much money to investigate.
And here we reach a bullshit paradigm: finding out actual physiological mechanisms for why our bodies fail in these situations is mostly a waste of time and money. It's why certain therapies literally cost millions.
And this is, in my opinion, one of the key points of why we're handling this so poorly.
Governments can spend millions on labs trying to figure out the 'exact' pathophysiology of the virus-host interaction. They can also find out how genetics translates to people being more or less at risk: these sets of genes give you a more likely chance of having a worse outcome when contracting COVID.
There are obvious ethical issues here, but we've had lockdowns and curfues that weren't entirely morally and legislatively sound either, so I think a case can be made here.
My second big grievance is that we only retro-actively act on situations. We slowly see numbers go up and then roll out soft/hard measures. If governments had started random population testing (which is literally every statistician's wet dream), you'd have, next to numbers from local outbursts, a nice overview of silent spreaders. You can then map at risk subpopulations and take measures accordingly.
If you couple the course data (statistics at population level) with detailed data (at individual level), I think we'd be able to handle this Sars-cov2 thing way better. We'd be able to provide nuance to a society which desperately needs it, instead of broad stroking it and making these random decisions like opening up contact jobs like hair salons only to almost immediately close them after 2 weeks because things are getting worse again! It makes no sense at all.
How is it that schools only became big spreaders after the UK strain became prevalent in Belgium? Is it because it's the case? Or is it because the original strain spread more silently among teens and it went unnoticed? Random trials would have found out about this! Anonymous genetic/physiological tests could build an actual robust/nuanced model on risk factors instead of the "obsese/hypertension/elderly/frail lung" risk factors we have now.
Bottom line: governments could've done way more to be competent with pro-active moves, developing actual models instead of watching which numbers go up where and acting in a kneejerk fashion, throwing parts of society under the bus that shouldn't.
Contact tracing is a nice system though. It goes both ways. The astronomic resources thrown at covid-19 are completely irrational if you compare it to any other area of healthcare. One example: One test which can save lives is to offer colonoscopy to males around 50 to catch early stage cancer, but it is generally considered not worth it. A close friend of mine, father of 3 young boys, recently died of... colon cancer, and it was discovered too late. He is one of the people who were "sacrificed" for that policy. Then, don't let us go into exercise, smoking, healthy eating etc... As many deaths Covid causes, most people still die from other causes, but we don't care unless we know them, as we always have. None of those examples are contagious diseases though, and they don't cause hospitals to overflow to the point where people are dying in the streets during surges. You may be right from a coldly rational point of view but emotion from seeing mass graves and medical workers in hasmat suits understandably affects people's response.
I know I am probably more coldly rational than average. It is also very difficult to calculate exactly the measures needed to keep the surges manageable, and countries over/undershoot all the time, which is slightly surprising given how long this has been around now.
Being contagious is one thing, but the healthcare system not being scaled for a pandemic is also important. If none smoked and then got a surge of smoking related illness like we are dealing with now, it would actually have been a lot worse (tobacco kills over 7 million a year, mostly but not only via cancer and cardiovascular diseases).
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On May 01 2021 19:26 Slydie wrote:I just went on my Worldometers tour, and saw over 400k detected cases in India. It turned ot large religious celebrations with people traveling and gathering was a bad idea. It really isn't that hard to explain the outbreaks. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countriesIn the meantime, Israel had a disastrous stampede at their own 100k religious event. You can't pack crowds any closer together than that... It will be interesting to see if that had any impact on their numbers, or if the vaccines are now enough to keep them safe from even the highest risk activities. I hope so, but it is a reminder that there are other dangers than the virus when going back to normal life. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/middleeast/live-news/israel-mount-meron-stampede-intl/index.html
To be honest, India at this point can no longer measure how far covid has spread. Estimates are that the undercount for both cases and deaths are more than an order of magnitude now. I know before Canada banned flights from India, EVERY single one of the flights from India in the last couple weeks have had one or more(usually multiple) covid positive travellers on the flight, and fake covid test reports were commonplace.
The punitive measures for Australia on travellers from India make sense in that context. I disagree with the severity, but you can put everybody on the multiple flights/boats you'd need to take at risk, even if it is technically possible to still return with a roundabout route.
A year and a half into the pandemic, if you leave your home country for whatever reason to go to a country with one of the worst outbreaks in the world, the expectation that you should be able to return at any time is really should no longer be a given.
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I don't quite get why people are particularly surprised about the Australia policy. you wanted (Trump like) populism, you got it. wasn't Morrison a good buddy of his for the most part?
calling it communist is especially funny as the policy is coming from the "right". like the last 3 PMs were "conservatives", or rather what goes as conservative in AU.
does that sound familiar in any way?
Trump says he'd rather keep people on cruise ship to keep numbers down
but it does not matter anyway who was stupid enough to come up with it and act on it, this policy needs to die and the Australians need to be allowed home... and to be consistent fire the people even considering such an abomination of a policy.
and what is happening in India is absolutely heart breaking... they do not have enough crematories for all the bodies, I even read that chimneys made of steel at crematories MELTED as they are running 24/7... this is an insane human catastrophe and they need all the help they can get.
here's a heartwrenching account of the failures that led to today from someone with Indian roots.
Modi’s pandemic choice: Protect his image or protect India. He chose himself.@WaPo
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Well i can tell You, that recently Poland also run in problems with funeral buissness/practices. Although less spectacular than in India the problems were/are:
-lack of space for bodies in morgues
-double funerals (two people from same family dying in short span of time of themselves buried during one ceremony
-very long wait times for funerals
-lack of supplies (for example for those special kind of flower bouquet we poles like to put on coffins)
Judging by official numbers Poland has it a lot worse, however i have seen claims that unofficial numbers in India are 10-20 times higher).
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There was an very "interesting twist" in problems with funerals in the eastern parts of Germany!
"In the before times" many people there had their dead cremated in Poland/Czech Republic, because it was much cheaper!
So, with Covid all the dead "stayed" in Germany and crematories there didn't have the capacity to deal with that! The numbers of dead people weren't exactly that much higher, but it was still enough to get them into problems too!
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On May 02 2021 17:27 Silvanel wrote:
Well i can tell You, that recently Poland also run in problems with funeral buissness/practices. Although less spectacular than in India the problems were/are:
-lack of space for bodies in morgues
-double funerals (two people from same family dying in short span of time of themselves buried during one ceremony
-very long wait times for funerals
-lack of supplies (for example for those special kind of flower bouquet we poles like to put on coffins)
Judging by official numbers Poland has it a lot worse, however i have seen claims that unofficial numbers in India are 10-20 times higher).
I even read up to 30x higher in India, but it is all guesswork, and we will never really know. What we DO know, however, is that they have a very high % of posetives (~40%) and few tests per capita.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/wap.business-standard.com/article-amp/current-affairs/data-story-delhi-s-covid-19-test-positivity-rate-goes-past-40-rajasthan-s-35-121042700674_1.html
Speaking of tests, I just did my 3rd one. The previous ones were taken by a drop of blood and in the throat, but this one was up the nose and by far the most uncomfortable. It was a random call, and I feel good about having done my part to keep the positivity persentage here low.
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I've only done one test which was the nose swab. It's incredibly uncomfortable, feels like when you go swimming and get chlorinated water up your nose. It's eyewatering but probably the most effective way to test.
I'm pretty happy though, my parents just got vaccinated today with Moderna. I think that's everyone in my parents/grandparents bubble vaccinated. They said some people in line wanted to leave because they found out they were getting Moderna instead of Pfizer. Fucking ludicrous that there's boomers that are that level of entitlement.
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On May 03 2021 02:11 Slydie wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2021 17:27 Silvanel wrote:
Well i can tell You, that recently Poland also run in problems with funeral buissness/practices. Although less spectacular than in India the problems were/are:
-lack of space for bodies in morgues
-double funerals (two people from same family dying in short span of time of themselves buried during one ceremony
-very long wait times for funerals
-lack of supplies (for example for those special kind of flower bouquet we poles like to put on coffins)
Judging by official numbers Poland has it a lot worse, however i have seen claims that unofficial numbers in India are 10-20 times higher).
I even read up to 30x higher in India, but it is all guesswork, and we will never really know. What we DO know, however, is that they have a very high % of posetives (~40%) and few tests per capita. https://www.google.com/amp/s/wap.business-standard.com/article-amp/current-affairs/data-story-delhi-s-covid-19-test-positivity-rate-goes-past-40-rajasthan-s-35-121042700674_1.htmlSpeaking of tests, I just did my 3rd one. The previous ones were taken by a drop of blood and in the throat, but this one was up the nose and by far the most uncomfortable. It was a random call, and I feel good about having done my part to keep the positivity persentage here low.
It's bad here. From start of December, cases reduced by a lot and everyone thought covid was over till start of feb. Marriages and other functions were running in full force in Jan, which most probably gave birth to all sorts of covid variants which are wreaking havoc here.
The current government is fully responsible for the crisis India is going through today. Like the day there were more than 300K cases in India, Prime minster of country was seen addressing a political rally of more than 1000 people. They were all sleeping till the matter got out of their hands and now everyone has no clue how to stop this derailed train and they are still trying to save their face than saving the country.
People are gasping for oxygen outside hospitals.Almost all the ICU beds, oxygen beds in big cities are full. Like 2 days ago. 12 people died in a single hospital in New Delhi , because the oxygen stock got over for the hospital. Deaths are not even close to what is being shown in numbers
People are resorting to buy 1200 INR remdesivir at upto 80000 INR (In lot of cases, people need more than 3 vials per patient). Now after almost one year of covid, they are waking up from sleep and are setting up new covid care centres in empty buildings no one is using due to lockdowns.
Vaccination programme is another covid wave in the making. Government ordered less vaccines in the first place and now, there is big rush at vaccine centres with almost no social distance
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On May 02 2021 17:16 Doublemint wrote:I don't quite get why people are particularly surprised about the Australia policy. you wanted (Trump like) populism, you got it. wasn't Morrison a good buddy of his for the most part? calling it communist is especially funny as the policy is coming from the "right". like the last 3 PMs were "conservatives", or rather what goes as conservative in AU. does that sound familiar in any way? Trump says he'd rather keep people on cruise ship to keep numbers downbut it does not matter anyway who was stupid enough to come up with it and act on it, this policy needs to die and the Australians need to be allowed home... and to be consistent fire the people even considering such an abomination of a policy. and what is happening in India is absolutely heart breaking... they do not have enough crematories for all the bodies, I even read that chimneys made of steel at crematories MELTED as they are running 24/7... this is an insane human catastrophe and they need all the help they can get. here's a heartwrenching account of the failures that led to today from someone with Indian roots. Modi’s pandemic choice: Protect his image or protect India. He chose himself.@WaPo
A citizen returning home with Covid is just as contagious as a tourist visiting with Covid. The punishments are draconian but seriously, why are people traveling to a Covid hot spot in the first place? Even if Australia decides to repatriate their citizens, there is a case to be made to quarantine them offshore first.
It is interesting to note that the western world's two biggest fuck ups last year (US and UK) are leading in vaccinations. A lot of the richer countries that did well at the start of the pandemic (Taiwan/Japan/SK/Aus/NZ) are pretty behind on vaccinations. They are quite vulnerable to surges if Covid takes root in their countries. Pretty sure Japan is having issues right now.
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On May 04 2021 03:09 andrewlt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2021 17:16 Doublemint wrote:I don't quite get why people are particularly surprised about the Australia policy. you wanted (Trump like) populism, you got it. wasn't Morrison a good buddy of his for the most part? calling it communist is especially funny as the policy is coming from the "right". like the last 3 PMs were "conservatives", or rather what goes as conservative in AU. does that sound familiar in any way? Trump says he'd rather keep people on cruise ship to keep numbers downbut it does not matter anyway who was stupid enough to come up with it and act on it, this policy needs to die and the Australians need to be allowed home... and to be consistent fire the people even considering such an abomination of a policy. and what is happening in India is absolutely heart breaking... they do not have enough crematories for all the bodies, I even read that chimneys made of steel at crematories MELTED as they are running 24/7... this is an insane human catastrophe and they need all the help they can get. here's a heartwrenching account of the failures that led to today from someone with Indian roots. Modi’s pandemic choice: Protect his image or protect India. He chose himself.@WaPo A citizen returning home with Covid is just as contagious as a tourist visiting with Covid. The punishments are draconian but seriously, why are people traveling to a Covid hot spot in the first place? Even if Australia decides to repatriate their citizens, there is a case to be made to quarantine them offshore first. It is interesting to note that the western world's two biggest fuck ups last year (US and UK) are leading in vaccinations. A lot of the richer countries that did well at the start of the pandemic (Taiwan/Japan/SK/Aus/NZ) are pretty behind on vaccinations. They are quite vulnerable to surges if Covid takes root in their countries. Pretty sure Japan is having issues right now.
A returning tourist is likely worse, as they have many more connections with the local community than visitors.
There are a lot of very good reasons to travel to a large country like India. No reason to judge them, and they could have gone there a long time ago.
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On May 04 2021 03:09 andrewlt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2021 17:16 Doublemint wrote:I don't quite get why people are particularly surprised about the Australia policy. you wanted (Trump like) populism, you got it. wasn't Morrison a good buddy of his for the most part? calling it communist is especially funny as the policy is coming from the "right". like the last 3 PMs were "conservatives", or rather what goes as conservative in AU. does that sound familiar in any way? Trump says he'd rather keep people on cruise ship to keep numbers downbut it does not matter anyway who was stupid enough to come up with it and act on it, this policy needs to die and the Australians need to be allowed home... and to be consistent fire the people even considering such an abomination of a policy. and what is happening in India is absolutely heart breaking... they do not have enough crematories for all the bodies, I even read that chimneys made of steel at crematories MELTED as they are running 24/7... this is an insane human catastrophe and they need all the help they can get. here's a heartwrenching account of the failures that led to today from someone with Indian roots. Modi’s pandemic choice: Protect his image or protect India. He chose himself.@WaPo A citizen returning home with Covid is just as contagious as a tourist visiting with Covid. The punishments are draconian but seriously, why are people traveling to a Covid hot spot in the first place? Even if Australia decides to repatriate their citizens, there is a case to be made to quarantine them offshore first. It is interesting to note that the western world's two biggest fuck ups last year (US and UK) are leading in vaccinations. A lot of the richer countries that did well at the start of the pandemic (Taiwan/Japan/SK/Aus/NZ) are pretty behind on vaccinations. They are quite vulnerable to surges if Covid takes root in their countries. Pretty sure Japan is having issues right now.
its not really that interesting when you consider that the vaccines are being produced in the us and uk/eu
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Nice! I find it strange that countries like Norway saved up vaccines to make sure they had 2nd dosis available in case of supply problems. Someone must have read the manual too carefully without thinking...
Oh, and I am reading that it is standard to give previously infected people only one shot now. Not sure if this is a new strategy or if it has been standard for a while.
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On May 06 2021 22:06 Slydie wrote:Nice! I find it strange that countries like Norway saved up vaccines to make sure they had 2nd dosis available in case of supply problems. Someone must have read the manual too carefully without thinking... Oh, and I am reading that it is standard to give previously infected people only one shot now. Not sure if this is a new strategy or if it has been standard for a while.
it's just a nice precaution to "stash" a bit of vaccine.
and the one shot policy is done because of general low supply I'd guess, at least partly. but it makes sense in case of people who already had the virus and lived to tell the tale, and showed antibodies.
it's gonna be interesting how this waivering of - some - patents will affect supply in the mid to longterm.
EU 'ready to discuss' COVID vaccine patent waiver, says von der Leyen
The European Union is willing to discuss a proposal, now backed by the United States, to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday.
The head of the EU executive said the bloc's vaccination effort was accelerating, with 30 Europeans being inoculated per second, while exporting more than 200 million vaccine doses to the rest of the world - contrasting with limited sharing of vaccines by the United States and Britain.
"The EU is also ready to discuss any proposals that address the crisis in an effective and pragmatic manner," von der Leyen said in a speech to the European University Institute in Florence.
"That's why we are ready to discuss how the U.S. proposal for a waiver on intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines could help achieve that objective."
Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said Italy supported suspending patents, commenting on his Facebook page that Europe should not miss the opportunity and be courageous.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he was "very much in favour" of opening up intellectual property. However, a French government official said lack of production capacity and upstream components was the problem, not patents.
"I would remind you that it is the United States which has not exported a single dose to other countries and which is now talking about lifting the patents," the official said.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn said he shared the U.S. president's goal of providing the whole world with vaccines.
the bolded part is why the vaccination progress is faster in some richer countries compared to others. solidarity, even though limited, seems to be something (central) european. not anglosaxon. though opening up patents was first announced by the US so kudos for that grandpa Biden.
hopefully this will help improve supplies for everyone around the world.
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I don't think the EU really intended to share this much. It was just a result of a flawed procurement process. The EU was being penny wise, pound foolish with their purchase. US paid $4 per dose for the AZ vaccine and $20 for the Pfizer one. EU haggled theirs down to $2 for the AZ vaccine and $15 for the Pfizer one. The EU were also very resistant to waiving liability even though AZ wasn't planning to make any money from the vaccine.
EU spent too much time haggling that other countries were able to swoop in and buy their vaccines first. Meanwhile, Israel paid something around $40-50 per dose for their Pfizer vaccine. The amount of money the EU saved was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of shutdowns.
Biden wanting to open up patents should help considering that US companies have the bulk of them. That said, it doesn't seem like these things are easy to manufacture, considering all the troubles that we've been hearing about. I wouldn't expect many of the poorer, developing countries outside of India to be able to manufacture their own. And India is in no position to export much of any vaccine they manufacture right now.
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sure it was too much haggling, and compared to shutdown costs it indeed was an effort in futility.
however, we could have also stopped exports. which no one gave the US any shit for forthe longest time. now that people are wising up and shit - in india for example - is hitting the fan people are calling the highly selfish nations out. and the result?
AZ stockpiles from the US, which no one wants or wanted there anyway, are finally getting passed around.
Israel even gave away patient data on top. that is worth quite a bit more than what they paid for the doses.
did not know BioNtech is a US company 
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Funnily, Biden happily adopted Trump's "America First" policy when it comes to vaccines, and has gained praise for it.
We mainly care about ourselves when it comes down to it.
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The cost of vaccines is pretty much a non-factor for most wealthy nations compared to the cost of the shutdowns/disruption that covid is causing.
The USA strategy of vaccinating Americans first is starting to end though, they're hitting the point where they need to incentivize people to get vaccines.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations
Delivered
321,549,335
Administered
249,566,820
It was +45m for a while, and now, even with the plants exporting to both Canada and Mexico, they're at +70m vaccines. There's more than 1m extra vaccines per state. At the USA's current vaccination rate, it's enough supply for more than 3 weeks. If they tossed 5m of that stockpile at Canada, 15m at Mexico, it would go a long way towards ending the pandemic in North America. Should be fairly quick to die down at this rate though, pretty much half the states are refusing vaccine allocation because they've hit a demand wall.
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On May 07 2021 01:28 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2021 22:06 Slydie wrote:Nice! I find it strange that countries like Norway saved up vaccines to make sure they had 2nd dosis available in case of supply problems. Someone must have read the manual too carefully without thinking... Oh, and I am reading that it is standard to give previously infected people only one shot now. Not sure if this is a new strategy or if it has been standard for a while. I have not heard that yet, here at least it had not been announced and I'm expected to get my second dose in 3-4 months. What I was told was I'm somewhere between 1 and 2 doses of protection. Would be nice if I didn't and was as protected, the side effects kicked my butt for 24 hours.
The singlen dosis does indeed seem like a very recent development, but with vaccine shortage in Europe, it is an obvious way to cut corners when studies point in that direction:
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/single-covid-19-vaccine-dose-boosts-protection-in-previously-infected-study/article34472304.ece
I do not like that "reinfected" and "being sick twice" are not separated more clearly. I haven't heard any examples of double serious illness, even from various mutations, but there might be some unicorn somewhere.
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EPT
