COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[pbrower2a]

https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1442656553845334016

https://twitter.com/ianmSC/status/1444031277577891844

Ron LifeSantis

Where do these demented nutjobs get this stuff? There are literally no lockdowns in California and in fact through most of the state, authorities are refusing to enforce what few measures exist.

Then why was there a spike? Spikes ordinarily come down with no prompting.

[pbrower2a]

https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1442656553845334016

https://twitter.com/ianmSC/status/1444031277577891844

Ron LifeSantis

Where do these demented nutjobs get this stuff? There are literally no lockdowns in California and in fact through most of the state, authorities are refusing to enforce what few measures exist.

Then why was there a spike? Spikes ordinarily come down with no prompting.

Did you quote the wrong post? I was pointing out that the 'lockdown state doing worse than freedom state' garbage being vomited onto this forum makes no sense as there are not any lockdowns in the first place.

It could be. The death came as the result of a spike in COVID-19 infections and resulting deaths. It's the spike that did the great harm.

[pbrower2a]

The Governor of Michigan reacted properly and promptly to COVID-19, but some extremists plotted to kidnap her and do who-know-what. Michigan would prove a bare Biden win. 

[pbrower2a]

The Florida stuff is silly on both sides.

Was Desantis' general approach closer to the ideal initially, and more or less what pretty much everyone eventually settled close to?

Yes

No, he simply got away with it early as Governors of some other states could not. .

[

b]Is Desantis' political operation and instincts those of a control freak which means they have a tendency to lash out violently at the media and try and control information(ie. limit data releases, prohibit the release to counties themselves of death and hospital statistics out of fear they were being used by the media. Being so dependent on political loyalty that in the current climate being too loudly pro-vaccine or mask was seen as loyalty to Fauci/Biden?)
[/b]
Yes

Control freaks are disasters as leaders. There were Republican Governors who went along with Fauci and President Biden. They did right. Human life rightly comes before anything that might be lucrative (like tourism) that might lead to mass death. 

Did these things rise to level of altering data as opposed to erratically trying to control it?

Nope. We get the death numbers and if anything the gamesmanship with formats may have made them look worse with the rise sharper than it otherwise would have been. Maybe an argument can be made that when the county data was released again for deaths it shows that the second wave hit low vax counties REALLY hard, just like everywhere else but unclear what the agenda here was other than control. There is no evidence there is anything wrong with the numbers we are getting. We are just getting them far later and in a much more confusing format at the cost of far more work on the part of the State.

Honest results make public policy easier to form and more reliable.

Did more people die?

This is a trickier one. As is noted here, there are likely multiple facets

Schools Staying Open
Mask bans for kids

Both probably had no impact on deaths or very little

On the other hand some of the grandstanding regarding banning private employers from mandating masks or vaccines especially nursing homes, retirement communities etc almost certainly did.


Basically there is a lot to criticize about Desantis, much of which stems from his decision to pivot from adopting a light touch approach for ideological and scientific reasons in 2021, to then using his association with that approach and its success to "troll the libs" with it in 2021.

More than otherwise would have. If you take guard rails down on an active highway to scrap them for money then you can expect people to die should people veer off the road.
 

I suspect the above will also be the view of many middle of the road Florida voters in 2022. Do they wish DeSantis would tone it down a bit and pay less attention to online Republican twitter/out of state R primary voters? Yes. Do they find his staff and some of his methods abrasive? Yes. But all in all, would they trade that for the alternative, even say a Jeb Bush or Mike Dewine, much less a Charlie Crist. Probably not.

You can expect plenty of cat-calls from Democrats on COVID-19 in Florida in 2022. That's on DeSantis. For House Republicans, it would be something very different.

DeSantis almost certainly has annoyed people with this, and his militant online fans are not an asset. But those thinking he has turned into #deathsantis are as delusional as those who put together that idiotic ad.

"Idiotic" ads win at times.

[pbrower2a]

I think right now the U.S. is at 21 days in a row of declining cases. This hasn't happened since May.

Also, it does look like Alabama may be the first state to have full herd immunity.

If they are, they made it much harder than it needed to be.

3,000 ish deaths out of every millionth person (roughly a million Americans dead rather than 700,0000) was supposed to be the best way through the pandemic though? They couldn't accept there was a safer path of saving lives until jabs were in arms, and then putting the jabs in their own arms.

Of course that bungling happened when a President who thought that he knew more than the experts pushed chloroquinone and the injection of bleach, and created a climate in which cranks and quacks could wreak havoc upon preventive measures that were harder than inoculation, but before mass inoculation was possible.

More and more favors inoculations. The perverse examples of people dying because they refuse to get inoculated -- and worse, have declaimed masks and inoculations -- die of COVID-19. Social media sites now ban medical quackery involving COVID-19.

Winter is coming, and there will be mass gatherings such as sporting events.

[pbrower2a]

I got tested yesterday because I was at a rest area where free tests were offered, and I needed to take a safety break from driving. While I awaited the results I took a little map.

Negative. No trace, so far as I can tell.

[pbrower2a]

Also, it does look like Alabama may be the first state to have full herd immunity.

Talladega Superspeedway Superspreader NASCAR event has a lot going for it.

https://m.nascar.com/gallery/at-track-photos-talladega-playoff-weekend-2021/#photo-39

Not one mask did I see in any of those photos, although there were not a lot of crowd photos.

It would have been a good place for mass inoculations. This said, we just saw a potential supers-preader event.

[pbrower2a]

Video: Lindsey Graham gets booed by his own supporters.

Click here to watch ... https://us.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/10/06/lindsey-graham-booed-vaccine-mandate-orig-vf.cnn/video/playlists/top-news-videos/

We are almost two years into this global Pandemic, and Republicans/Conservatives are still acting like morons.
In the video, they boo when Graham recommends they get vaccinated, and they call him a liar for saying most of the South Carolina's people in ICU, are those who are unvaccinated.

They hate being told that they need to get inoculated and wear masks. The truth can hurt feelings, but falsehood can kill one. There will be life after COVID-19, and I certainly want to enjoy it. I don't want to die on a respirator.

Go ahead. Hate.

   

All vile, loathsome serial mass-murderers.

[pbrower2a]

If I am to expect anything, it will be following waves, each smaller than the previous one.  The most refractory resisters to inoculation will contract COVID-19 in smaller and smaller super-spreader events that most people will know enough to avoid or to attend only if they have masks. The Sturgis motorcycle rally of next year will likely be one of those. So will rallies for Republican pols.

More and more people will be inoculated, so at some point we will have herd immunity. Maybe around 2024...

People start getting warnings against doing really-stupid stuff, like walking backwards toward an unguarded cliff just to get the perfect selfie, getting hooked on heroin, or driving drunk. News media, even if they try to avoid what looks like yellow journalism, still report behaviors that go suddenly and catastrophically wrong when those result in death.

The people who know the victims get to see the stories or get evidence. One of those is the phone call that a medical professional tells a COVID-19 patient to make "because you are going on life support shortly".
 

[pbrower2a]

When it comes to COVID-19, the GOP is the "pro-death" party.

[pbrower2a]

A COVID-19 story from the sports world: the Washington State University football coach and several assistant coaches have been fired for not complying with the vaccine mandate for state employees.  

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/32426315/nick-rolovich-washington-state-football-coach-refusing-state-mandated-covid-19-vaccine-source-says

An employer's right.

[pbrower2a]

https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1450849899478765570
Complete insanity.

That's what makes your balls grove! Nicki Minaj was right!

What is truly sickening is that millions of people believe such stuff. That people can say that the pro-vaccine people are "the most evil cabal to have ever existed" is hysteria in the extreme. I can think of far worse:







If you can come up with symbols of the Khmer Rouge, Iraqi or Syrian Ba'athism or Hutu Power (behind the Rwanda genocide), then you are welcome to add them. The Japanese symbol is of the clique that murdered millions in China, starved peoples of Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines to feed the Japanese war machine of WWII. Mercifully the KKK never got the power with which to do any large-scale genocide, but in view of its lynchings I can only imagine how horrible a KKK-dominated America would have been.

I know what evil is. It does bad things to people or allows them to happen. I don't quite compare the Confederacy to the evil causes for which I showed symbols.

[pbrower2a]

Most charitable interpretation, he think only people really old or really sick are taking the vaccine voluntarily.

I look at the maps and see Puerto Rico as a heavily-inoculated place. That is as Hispanic a community as there is. Counties along the Rio Grande Valley of Texas are heavily inoculated. It is a good idea to learn Spanish if you want to get along in those counties. Likewise Bexar, which contains San Antonio.

I also notice some counties in Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota which have Reservations. What are the First Peoples of the USA doing so right about inoculation, and why?   

[pbrower2a]

Vaccinated people are obviously not the problem. COVID-19 would be dead in America if all people eligible for inoculation were inoculated. Of course we have plenty of stupid or deluded people who believe... whatever. I'd rather that they believed in something less harmful to believe, such as the chance of the Detroit Lions Football Team (now 0-7) having a reasonable chance of winning the 2022 Superbowl.     

[pbrower2a]

Perception and reality are two different things.

COVID-19 is still killing people that it infects. That has not changed. People inoculated against it can get it but are far less likely to get serious complications or to die from it.

Those who got inoculated early (like me) now include people with booster shots.

Reality is that nearly 750,000 people are dead. That cannot be random. It may have severe impacts upon some occupational categories. You can tell me what people are most likely to get COVID-19 and be no longer able to work in the jobs that they had before it. I'm guessing that the people most likely to get COVID-19 at its worst are people in the political category of "MAGA" types. We have the scale of losses that we can expect in conventional warfare in a shorter time between the Anglo-American (invasion? liberation?) of Sicily and V-J Day.   

Demographics of death are grossly uneven, and in a country so polarized politically as America is, demographics decide political races even more than political competence. We will not see the full effect until at least 2022.

I expect a fourth wave relating to super-spreader events such as Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations.   

[pbrower2a]

Newsmax reporter's tweets blocked for claiming Covid vaccine contains satanic marker.

Twitter suspended Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson for posting blatant misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine, including claims the shots contain tracking devices linked to the devil.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/04/media/twitter-suspends-newsmax-emerald-robinson/index.html

So now the Devil wants to track-us?
WTF.

Incredibly stupid. I can't speak for the Infernal Entity, but I would figure that it would endorse resistance to the vaccine.

The substance is "Luciferase". Get it?

[pbrower2a]

Newsmax reporter's tweets blocked for claiming Covid vaccine contains satanic marker.

Twitter suspended Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson for posting blatant misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine, including claims the shots contain tracking devices linked to the devil.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/04/media/twitter-suspends-newsmax-emerald-robinson/index.html

So now the Devil wants to track-us?
WTF.

Incredibly stupid. I can't speak for the Infernal Entity, but I would figure that it would endorse resistance to the vaccine.

The substance is "Luciferase". Get it?

Luciferase is a real substance that has been used in real covid treatments.  But it's not in the covid vaccines and it has nothing to do with Satanism.  My understanding is that it's basically the substance than enables fireflies to light up.  If Satanist were secretly trying to sneak a tracking device into vaccines, they'd probably try to be a little more subtle about it.

Thank you for the tip=off. The substance is real, and it has nothing to do with any demonic entity. It's an enzyme, with the -ase suffix so indicating.

Journalists need be wary of stories too good to be true. The schmuck could have checked it out here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferase. I have yet to see any indication that an enzyme associated with bioluminescence  is particularly dangerous.   

[pbrower2a]

We're starting to see very few reliable reports of death by COVID-19 in some states now being ravaged. 

[pbrower2a]

US total deaths: 780,775

I thought earlier this year it would go to a million, but the mortality rate has signicantly decreased compared to the start of the pandemic.

At the start, it was closer to 2%. Now it appears to be 1.4-1.6% and falling.

Hopefully those Pfizer booster shots decrease that number further.

People can get infected if inoculated, but they generally don't get as sick or have such lasting consequences.

Again, five good reasons to not risk COVID-19:

1. diabetes
2. organ damage
3. cognitive loss
4. sexual dysfunction
5. dying on a ventilator

[pbrower2a]

It’s not quite a lockdown, but most of the fast food restaurants in my area still have never reopened for in-person dining.

Some of them are open around here, but a lot of them are still closed.

Is there any government policy, federal, state, or local, which is forcing these restaurants to stay closed? I'm not aware of any such policy in the NY/NJ area for at least the past 6 months. Or is it the choice of the restaurants themselves? If it's the latter, why are you blaming the government, or Joe Biden, or the Democrats?

In Georgia, no restaurants are required to have their dining rooms closed.  Most are open, but there are a few fast food places that are still doing drive-through only.  This may be more due to difficulty finding enough staff than out of concern for COVID.

I also encountered a hybrid model at a Steak N Shake up in Fort Oglethorpe (NW corner of Georgia) a couple months ago.  Their dining room was open, but they no longer had table service.  Instead, you placed your order at the counter and they called you when it was ready to pick up, packed in to-go bags like a drive-through order.  Every second table was closed off to create social distancing.  There were bins of silverware, napkins, condiments, etc. from which you served yourself.

I've seen this in Michigan.

I prefer to go inside because waiting in a drive-through line eats gasoline. Twenty minutes of idling is one gallon of gasoline, and I look at that as a cost of the meal.

[pbrower2a]

My father is now among the 700,000+ victims of this pernicious and evil disease in this country....

My sympathy.

[pbrower2a]

Loss of a sense of smell? That could be personally dangerous.

[pbrower2a]

I got my flu shot yesterday. I do not want to go to the hospital for the flu with COVID-19 patients putting me at risk.

(That's not as exciting as getting the booster, but I got my booster about two weeks ago, anyway.

Death to COVID-19! 

[pbrower2a]

[pbrower2a]

For sure it's concerning, though not the time for panic. WHO held an emergency meeting today to assess the situation.

I know the CDC's response is just going to be "more masks", because that's their response to everything.

Masks, masks, masks. That's their only answer.

That is the answer. Well, so is getting out those cleaning wipes. So is social distancing. People who acted recklessly and lucked out the first couple times are the ones who will die.

We have learned something since the first outbreak of COVID-19. Trust science more than politics.