COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[DINGO Joe]

I think they matter. At least enough to keep track of them.

Of course.  And hopefully they scare some people into getting shots and boosters. 

[DINGO Joe]

How long has this thread had Star War references as it’s titles?

Since 1977

[DINGO Joe]

There are many aspects of COVID that are not well known:

1. That "mild" symptoms are anything short of SpO2 < 94%/hospitalization and are not what would be considered mild by the general population
2. That many people suffer long term effects from COVID even if they weren't hospitalized, and that the vaccine does not prevent this fully
3. That if you're hospitalized, even if you survive, there's a good chance you'll suffer long term effects
4. That there is no safe way to dine indoors
5. That there is no safe way to gather in large unmasked groups
6. That 6 feet was just a guideline and airborne transmission is actually more like how cigarette smoke would propagate

This was off the top of my head. Give the CDC/NIH a day and I'm sure they will come up with more. Give them what are effectively unlimited funds (for comparison, total spending on the 2020 campaign was $14.4 billion) to make every ad on every TV and radio station a PSA about COVID, maybe even buy out entire programs and turn them into long COVID documentaries, and I believe they can sway 20-30% of the population to take COVID seriously, on top of the say 30% that are already taking it seriously. There will be something like 40% that will not be swayed, like this forum, but at that point the market forces will have to favor the 60%.

This is nonsense.  It's been two years, the risks of COVID are well known by this point.  I am "fully vaccinated" for now, two jabs, and I tested positive this week.  The risks of hospitalization and death are very low if you are younger than 65, vaccinated, and not immunocompromised.  It is literally just a flu like illness.  If you are scared of getting sick, stay home, but you folks really need to stop trying to dictate how other people should live their lives.  It's getting tiresome.

These are all facts. You might not care about them, but if you weren't afraid of the truth, why are you so intent on suppressing knowledge of it? I'm not proposing to force anyone to do anything here, I'm proposing to let the full truth be known to everyone and then let market forces take care of it. You're just afraid that a solid majority will agree with me, alter their behavior to protect themselves, and then the free market will react and we'll resemble something like March 2020, without any government mandate or restriction.

Fine. Let's have it your way. Let's have a generation of socially and academically stunted kids with high rates of depression, drug abuse and suicide. Let's have millions of people sitting idle because they were laid off from their service or leisure sector jobs. Let's have anarchy in the streets because people aren't working or going to school and therefore have nothing better to do.

Do you listen to yourself?

I'd rather they'd learn how to drive a truck, but that's selfish of me.  Also, oddly enough the suicide rate did drop in 2020 for whatever reason.

[DINGO Joe]

Not fast enough.

[DINGO Joe]

Not fast enough.

The leisure and hospitality sector isn't going away. While I'm in the management part of it, which isn't that bad, I have had thoughts of leaving it myself.

But that part of the economy isn't going to go away.

Oh for God's sakes Jimmy, I live in New Orleans, why would I expect/want that to go away?  But right now, I need some damn truck drivers.

[DINGO Joe]

Chicago posted its first week of declining case rates (ending 1/8). This is positive news.

The death rate (lagging figure) is on the rise, up to about 80% of last winter's peak. Case rates peaked at about double last winter's peak, so more case will inevitably mean more hospitalizations/deaths, even with a milder variant.

Still, it seems the US has not been able to stave off the essentially lack of any rise in hospitalizations/deaths that South Africa saw with their Omicron wave. Probably as a result of lower vaccination rates and an older/less healthy population.

I would assume that deaths are still being driven by Delta, though I don't know that they can truly screen out one for the other  on a death by death basis.

Before the vaccines, the age group with the largest number of deaths was 85 and over.  I think the last time that age group led in deaths was March or Feb.  In fact they dropped to 4th even behind the 50-64 age group and that has continued through Dec, so it seems the vaccine has still held up thus far for the most vulnerable group to a new variant.

[DINGO Joe]

I found someone who everybody here can hate

Assembly candidate, vaccine skeptic Benjamin Yu talks about how COVID-19 sent him to ICU

Meet Benjamin YU a Republican assembly candidate in the OC, the same place that gave us now deceased former assembly candidate Death cultist, Kelly Ernby, who Yu calleda "great friend"

Assembly candidate Benjamin Yu wasn’t vaccinated when he spent New Year’s in Las Vegas. A week later, when he was back home, the Lake Forest resident was so sick with COVID-19 and his oxygen levels so dangerously low that a local hospital admitted him to intensive care.

The previously healthy 39-year-old said he’s lost “weight, stamina and strength” over the past two weeks. Family and friends who helped take care of Yu also have become sick. At times, he said he’s wanted to bump his head against the wall to “relieve the pain and hopelessness.”

As of Thursday, Yu was still on oxygen at home and struggling to speak. But he used written messages to communicate that he believes he’s now on the path to recovery.

Yu says he's not an anti-vaxxer, just a skeptic who was still "gathering information"  so what does he think now?

In “hindsight,” Yu said he realizes that being vaccinated “may possibly reduce the severity or duration of the episode.” (Data shows unvaccinated adults are 13 times more likely to end up hospitalized and 20 times more likely to die from the virus.) Yu said he’s considering getting vaccinated when he’s well, “possibly after a few months.” And he’s encouraging others to wear N95 masks and practice good hygiene as the Omnicron variant surges.

“It’s not only for ourselves but for others,” Yu said.

That's right kids,  an anti-vaxxer pro-everybody masker.

[DINGO Joe]

January will be the 6th straight month with Covid deaths above 1000/day  The previous high streak was  Nov 2020-thru Feb 2021, which did have a much higher surge of deaths, but basically COVID seems to have gone from a boom-bust cycle to more of a steady drumbeat though the deaths do rotate some regionally, except Arizona where they just always die.

[DINGO Joe]

We need normalcy now!

Please tell everyone to stop filling the hospitals and dying, because the death rate is pretty far from normal.

[DINGO Joe]

What are the odds NY drops its indoor mask mandate on Feb. 1?

I'm more worried about which state will be the first to enact an outdoor mandate. I think a few states had one last winter.

Oregon already had one back in the fall, but if another state does it, my money would be on California

My guess is New Mexico.

Not too far-fetched. New Mexico has been particularly strict about mask mandates throughout the pandemic. It hasn't had a better outcome than Colorado, however, and Polis pointed to this state as an example when justifying his decision not to re-implement a statewide mask mandate.

New Mexico has had a much better outcome than Arizona which it's much more similar to demographically than Colorado.  Of course, Arizona has proven to be the kings of death in the pandemic.

The 3 most basic differences are Colorado only has 14.6% of the pop 65 and over while AZ and NM are at 18.0%.  Colorado has an adult obesity rate of 24% while NM and AZ are at 31%.  NM has a Native American pop of 9% with AZ at 4% and CO at 1%. 

While NA pop everywhere have had higher death rates from Covid is was really extreme in NM, especially in the first year of Covid.

[DINGO Joe]

I LOVE this

https://mobile.twitter.com/critica18495985/status/1483889174734417922

This just sums up the silliness of America's response to this pandemic

Here we have a kid who is basically saying that because she does not like mask adults should all bow down to her and let her take the risk of getting infected while also potentially infecting the other students around her

Now to be clear, I have no issue with anyone making an argument against covid restrictions, but I'm no fan of anybody who uses their kids as a prop in order to get their point across.

The fact is we know full well that this kid did not drive herself to this meeting in order to give that speech. If her parents felt so strongly about it, then they should be the ones speaking up instead of hiding behind their child

How about this , you let people decide what precautions they want to take .

For many people, that's not acceptable. We must have mandates, and mandates are a net positive for society. They are also, in their view, a necessity. Many students, interestingly enough, are now advocating for virtual learning and for mask mandates. They want the restrictions that have been imposed, to remain, and they don't want to discard them. In public schools and on college campuses alike, this seems to be true for a large segment of people.

     Because fear overwhelms reason. Children and young adults objectively have a negligible risk of serious injury from COVID. It is the situation wherein mandates make the least sense.

https://people.com/human-interest/florida-siblings-are-among-167000-children-orphaned-by-covid-we-have-to-stay-together/

[DINGO Joe]

I LOVE this

https://mobile.twitter.com/critica18495985/status/1483889174734417922

This just sums up the silliness of America's response to this pandemic

Here we have a kid who is basically saying that because she does not like mask adults should all bow down to her and let her take the risk of getting infected while also potentially infecting the other students around her

Now to be clear, I have no issue with anyone making an argument against covid restrictions, but I'm no fan of anybody who uses their kids as a prop in order to get their point across.

The fact is we know full well that this kid did not drive herself to this meeting in order to give that speech. If her parents felt so strongly about it, then they should be the ones speaking up instead of hiding behind their child

How about this , you let people decide what precautions they want to take .

For many people, that's not acceptable. We must have mandates, and mandates are a net positive for society. They are also, in their view, a necessity. Many students, interestingly enough, are now advocating for virtual learning and for mask mandates. They want the restrictions that have been imposed, to remain, and they don't want to discard them. In public schools and on college campuses alike, this seems to be true for a large segment of people.

     Because fear overwhelms reason. Children and young adults objectively have a negligible risk of serious injury from COVID. It is the situation wherein mandates make the least sense.

https://people.com/human-interest/florida-siblings-are-among-167000-children-orphaned-by-covid-we-have-to-stay-together/

     I can also post links to stories of children tragically orphaned in other ways. For example this: https://www.blackenterprise.com/5-children-orphaned-after-father-dies-in-car-crash-months-after-mothers-untimely-death/. Does that mean we should make everyone work from home because automobile incidents kill 30-40k Americans every year and children like these are forced to confront the reality that they will never see their parents again? Not to diminish the human suffering here, but at some point we need to accept that we live in a world where death is a reality and bad things happen to people who don't deserve it. Now that Omicron, a strain that is substantially less deadly than those that preceded it, is the predominant mode of COVID infection, it seems like an ideal time for society as a whole to begin exiting the pandemic and getting back to normal.

You can't come up with anything that orphans like COVID, so go on trying to compare grapes to watermelons.  I agree that Omicron is less deadly than Delta though for whatever reason, deaths continue to be extremely elevated and for whatever reason, deaths were much younger last year than the first year of COVID--2020 81% of deaths were 65 and over. 2021 it was 69%.  It'll be a good time to ease when sick and dead people stop piling up.

[DINGO Joe]

https://twitter.com/ErinBanco/status/1484677169632755712

The CDC director called for broadscale investment in public health — including helping to hire more nurses locally, staffing emergency departments and recruiting statisticians and data crunchers. Walensky’s focus on strengthening public health offices underscores the extent to which she thinks the CDC must improve its federal response by revitalizing the local and state health systems it relies upon.

Walensky said the CDC has made some improvements to its data-collection methods, including setting up a more accurate and sustainable system to obtain hospital information. But she plans to put the agency’s data modernization effort front and center in the coming year.

“The pipes have to connect,” Walensky said. “We also have to get to a place where each state is collecting data that … can feed in in a way that can be crosstalk with all the other states.”

Those changes will likely take years to implement. In the meantime, Walensky said the CDC is trying to augment the information it has with other forms of data from international allies and academic institutions.

But accurate, real-time data will become increasingly important as the country tries to move from the pandemic.

As someone who's been critical of Walensky and the CDC, I'm glad to see that she seems to recognize some of the issues which the agency has and has proposals to address them.

Well, the CDC is dependent on state's providing the data including death certificates and cause of deaths and states are wildly inconsistent on how they chose to code the data, in many cases to make the state look "better" than they are. 

A good example is to compare Massachusetts and Arizona since they're very close in population and death rate and total deaths prepandemic.

2019  Massachusetts had 58630 deaths
2020 Massachusetts had  68864 deaths  with Covid being the cause for 10197 deaths
2021 Massachusetts had  63641 deaths (not final) with Covid the cause for 5495 deaths

2019 Arizona had  60236 deaths
2020 Arizona had  77089 deaths with Covid being the cause for 9321 deaths
2021 Arizona had  81972 deaths (not final) with Covid being the cause for 13854 deaths.

Well, isn't that weird?  What explains the surge in deaths in Arizona that aren't attributed to Covid?  A surge in non-Covid deaths that doesn't exist in Massachusetts.  It would be interesting to know the answer to that cause damn Arizona has killed a whole lotta people the last two years.  Maybe the CDC should find out, maybe Arizona and say Texas (which also has a massive increase in non Covid deaths) will be like "States rights! States rights! " and refuse to cooperate with the CDC.  I'm honestly surprised some states haven't stopped reporting deaths to the CDC, cause that's the way some of these states roll.

2019 deaths
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf

2020 and 2021 provisional data from CDC

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

I earlier reference racial breakdowns of deaths in NM and that data for all the states is here

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/health_disparities.htm#RaceHispanicOriginAge

Sex and Age data can be found here

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#PlaceDeath

Of course, the data isn't real time as Bill Gates has been foiled in microchipping everyone and in fact is dependent on the states processing their death certificate data and sending it to the CDC and the speed with which that happens varies by quite a bit from state to state. 

[DINGO Joe]

There is no way to prevent them. Full stop.

This is completely false.  The only reason there are hundreds of death a day is that so many people are not vaccinated.

So there are really two choices: (a) pass a vaccine mandate with real teeth to it (i.e. get vaccinated or get sent to a labor camp in the ANWR; or (b) just accept that the people who are now dying are doing so of their own choice and stop concerning ourselves with them.

There really is not two choices because even if Biden came out tomorrow a tried to pass a vaccine mandate with real teeth most Republican states will not comply with it and the supreme court will most likely strike it down.

Sadly, I think we will just have to accept the fact that there will always be a sizable amount of people in this country who will never get vaccinated and nothing you or I say is ever going to change that.

The best thing we can do now is hope that there is not an even worse virus that will hit us a few years from now because if covid has taught us anything in the era of Facebook America and the world are no longer capable of eradicating a virus like they did with Polio

A significantly worse virus would result in an America that was thoroughly vaccinated, though at an even higher death toll than the hundred of thousands of Americans who have died already.

Oh go ahead and call it a million, for all intents and purposes, it's there.

[DINGO Joe]

I dissent from the theory put up by the good General above that resistance to the vax is driven by macho impulses. I subscribe to the theory that the resistance is fueled by paranoia and kookery. The macho thesis is less depressing than mine. It is harder to induce change in the behavior of paranoids and kooks than it is of macho men.

Well, the deaths from Covid have definitely shifted to be younger, whiter and even more male than pre-vax, so macho men and kookery  aren't necessarily exclusive.

[DINGO Joe]

I dissent from the theory put up by the good General above that resistance to the vax is driven by macho impulses. I subscribe to the theory that the resistance is fueled by paranoia and kookery. The macho thesis is less depressing than mine. It is harder to induce change in the behavior of paranoids and kooks than it is of macho men.

Well, the deaths from Covid have definitely shifted to be younger, whiter and even more male than pre-vax, so macho men and kookery  aren't necessarily exclusive.

COVID has always been more lethal to men.

The gap widened further in 2021 vs 2020

[DINGO Joe]

Well, we've still got a death rate running 20% above pre-pandemic level and the deaths (and disabilities) have carved into the workforce so to treat it as endemic means adapting to a new normal and given the inability for a substantial portion of the population to comprehend reality , well, don't expect the "endemic" phase to be any easier than the pandemic phase until Covid is done running it's course.

[DINGO Joe]

So, what's causing the high body count at this point, do deaths really lag so much that it's Delta or is it Omicron offing everybody

[DINGO Joe]

So, what's causing the high body count at this point, do deaths really lag so much that it's Delta or is it Omicron offing everybody

It's a lag from Delta.

Well, that's a big damn ass lag.  Any link or just conjecture?

[DINGO Joe]

So, what's causing the high body count at this point, do deaths really lag so much that it's Delta or is it Omicron offing everybody

It's a lag from Delta.

Well, that's a big damn ass lag.  Any link or just conjecture?

It would have to be, because Omicron just isn't very deadly.

Lol, OK Mr. Science.

[DINGO Joe]

So, what's causing the high body count at this point, do deaths really lag so much that it's Delta or is it Omicron offing everybody

I mean a lot of people still got infected. Even if the mortality rate is lower, that doesn’t mean raw deaths will be.

That is a valid point, though there does seem to be a smaller pool of people that any form of Covid should be deadly too.

[DINGO Joe]

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1487247488780316672

Man lost his job, his life, widowed his wife and left 4 children fatherless, crazy.

 More police died of Covid-19 the past 2 years than anything else, this is the deadliest thing going for cops.

I can certainly sympathize with his family, given my own father's death back in November. But exactly how many law enforcement officers have died from the virus? I've never seen any figures.

Covid-19 was the leading cause of death among U.S. police officers in 2021, a report says.

A total of 458 officers died in the line of duty in the country last year, making it the deadliest year in more than 90 years and a 55 percent increase from 2020, according to preliminary data compiled by the organization. Of those, it found that 301 federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement officers had died because of Covid-19.

 

Of course, Mr Lemay wasn't a police officer when he died of Covid

[DINGO Joe]

Johns Hopkins Study: Covid Lockdowns saved 0.2% of Lives at Enormous Economic and Social Costs in US/Europe.

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10466995/New-study-says-lockdowns-reduced-COVID-mortality-2-percent.html

'While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,' researchers wrote. 'In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.'

I said it in May 2020, when it wasn't socially acceptable, but now I'll say it again: worst public policy decision in decades.

I am curious to know how the situation would have turned out if our leadership had taken the same approach to the pandemic that the Scandinavian countries did, with fewer restrictions and more encouragement of social interaction.

I think your talking about Sweden which took a laissez faire approach and ended up with a death rate 5 or 6 times higher than Finland and Norway who were much stricter.  The Swedish equivalent of Fauci actually got sh**tcanned over it.

[DINGO Joe]

Johns Hopkins Study: Covid Lockdowns saved 0.2% of Lives at Enormous Economic and Social Costs in US/Europe.

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10466995/New-study-says-lockdowns-reduced-COVID-mortality-2-percent.html

'While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,' researchers wrote. 'In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.'

I said it in May 2020, when it wasn't socially acceptable, but now I'll say it again: worst public policy decision in decades.

I am curious to know how the situation would have turned out if our leadership had taken the same approach to the pandemic that the Scandinavian countries did, with fewer restrictions and more encouragement of social interaction.

I think your talking about Sweden which took a laissez faire approach and ended up with a death rate 5 or 6 times higher than Finland and Norway who were much stricter.  The Swedish equivalent of Fauci actually got sh**tcanned over it.

This much is true, but I don't believe that even the strictest responses to this would have been worth the costs-namely, the economic dislocations and the erosion of civil liberties.

Dead people seem to cause quite a bit of economic dislocation and in the US at least the death rates the first couple months of the pandemic seem almost quaint to what has followed.

[DINGO Joe]

Johns Hopkins Study: Covid Lockdowns saved 0.2% of Lives at Enormous Economic and Social Costs in US/Europe.

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10466995/New-study-says-lockdowns-reduced-COVID-mortality-2-percent.html

'While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,' researchers wrote. 'In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.'

I said it in May 2020, when it wasn't socially acceptable, but now I'll say it again: worst public policy decision in decades.

I am curious to know how the situation would have turned out if our leadership had taken the same approach to the pandemic that the Scandinavian countries did, with fewer restrictions and more encouragement of social interaction.

I think your talking about Sweden which took a laissez faire approach and ended up with a death rate 5 or 6 times higher than Finland and Norway who were much stricter.  The Swedish equivalent of Fauci actually got sh**tcanned over it.

This much is true, but I don't believe that even the strictest responses to this would have been worth the costs-namely, the economic dislocations and the erosion of civil liberties.

Dead people seem to cause quite a bit of economic dislocation and in the US at least the death rates the first couple months of the pandemic seem almost quaint to what has followed.

You are saying, then, that you disagree with the article's conclusions? And that the lockdown policies which were pursued were worth it?

Well, I'm not terribly familiar with the timing of the  lockdowns in Europe and the distribution of deaths across the countries.  All I can do is look at the death graphs (those roller coaster rides of surges and declines of deaths in each county.  In the US, the lockdowns clearly limited the impact of the first wave of the pandemic to several urban areas in the US and overall made it the weakest of the waves in the US.  Subsequent waves in the US have been worse and wider spread.  In fact, the most annoying thing about the current wave is that the previous Delta wave never subsided before the Omicron wave   We're on the 6th straight month over over 1000/day.  The original (lock down) wave lasted two months, last winter was 4 months (with the highest peak).  The original lockdowns were disruptive but very impactful in US.  All you have to do is look at a death graph to figure that out.  Europe had a lousy winter 20-21 like the US, but Western Europe at least doesn't look as pathetic as the US graph does over the last six months.