mattb65

If the myriad of health consequences of living an obese sedentary lifestyle aren't motivation enough to improve one's health by exercising and losing weight, then I highly doubt a relative risk reduction of covid illness is going to tip the scale... I think a really well written article on the variety of missteps in the public health response that led to some of the arguments and perspectives expressed in this thread was recently put up on the Atlantic. Worth the read https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/how-public-health-messaging-backfired/618147/ From the article on shaming which is one of many really insightful points made by the author. And the viral videos shaming people for failing to take sensible precautions, such as wearing masks indoors, do not necessarily help. For one thing, fretting over the occasional person throwing a tantrum while going unmasked in a supermarket distorts the reality: Most of the public has been complying with mask wearing. Worse, shaming is often an ineffective way of getting people to change their behavior, and it entrenches polarization and discourages disclosure, making it harder to fight the virus. Instead, we should be emphasizing safer behavior and stressing how many people are doing their part, while encouraging others to do the same.

I've previously posted that we will likely see hospitalizations and deaths continue to plummet even if the decline in cases slows down because of the vaccine effect. There's evidence that this is already happening. For the entire pandemic deaths in long term care facilities have made up 30-40% of the total deaths every week. In the last few weeks this number has been declining and is down to 18% see the article and tweet below. Note that New York and Missouri were excluded from the analysis because of large undated dumps of deaths recently. I'm not sure why Arizona was excluded. The number of lives that the vaccines will save is incredible.

In terms of vaccines and public health restrictions, my opinion is that after the supply catches up to meet the demand and everyone that chooses to be vaccinated gets vaccinated, at that point there should be little if any government imposed restrictions. At that point Darwin can take over for the anti-vaxers. At the same time I also think it's completely reasonable for companies and states to provide favorable treatment to vaccinated individuals. For example Hawaii is discussing getting rid of mandatory quarantines or required negative covid tests for travelers arriving more than 14 days after their second covid vaccine dose.

Good luck with that, not sure why you want more lockouts with numbers dropping so dramatically.

Why should people at relatively lower risk of severe covid infection i.e. age < 45 without comorbidities get vaccinated? 1. The benefits of preventing covid infection with vaccination far outweigh the risks associated with vaccination. There is no ambiguity if you review the clinical trials and safety data from now months of millions getting vaccinated. 2. The vaccines block chains of transmission, see the following analysis of powerful data from the Moderna vaccine trial.

I hope they are trolling. I've been a member of these forums and passionate about weather for a long time and have appreciated the different perspectives shared here. This is the last thread still open discussing the pandemic. For the most part it's remained focused on facts and reliable sources of information. It still has these weird weekly invasions from people spreading obvious misinformation. It's a symptom of a major problem in this country. Facts do not matter in these discussions, people don't care about facts it has become like a religion where it's a matter of faith and beliefs rather than scientific method. I could point to facts and data from both the clinical trials and the real world data from Isreal to demonstrate why it's important for people of all ages to be vaccinated. I could link to the facts on risks and benefits of the vaccine vs risks of the virus. It's just not worth the time because it's become this weird counter culture clash against "elites" and "mainstream media" where the random guy on Facebook is more reputable than the scientists who have devoted their life to become experts. It's just dumb.

What the f*ck happened here... If these lunatics were trolls then I wouldn't mind because they are just here to fill their sad emotional void by making other people angry but I think they fully believe what they are posting. Yikes.

8 years ago today from the Feb 2013 blizzard in Jamaica Plain,, definitely one of my favorites. Far cry from Hawaii life where anything under 70 is sweatshirt weather.

The rate of decline in hospitalizations has been dramatic, just one month ago we peaked at a little over 132k in the hospital and in just one month that number has plummeted by over 50k to 81k. With most nursing home residents now vaccinated and an increasing number of 65+ getting vaccinated every day, I have reason for optimism that we will continue to see a sharp decline in hospitalizations. I have every reason to believe that the sharp decline in deaths will begin this week as well. In prior surges of the epidemic the decline from the peak has leveled off at a new higher level and there is some reporting that we are "in the eye of the hurricane" with the UK variant set to slow the rate of decline. I wonder if we will see cases start to plateau in the next month but the most important measures - hospitalizations and deaths continue to decline because the most vulnerable are protected from severe illness and death. I am hopeful that we are vaccinating fast enough and the seasonality of the virus are both in our favor here.

Here's some encouraging real world vaccine data from Israel. Measuring efficacy from real world data is much more complicated than it is in a clinical trial due to confounding variables that are impossible to control for. Notably this is why so many observational studies on things like HCQ can lead to incorrect conclusions. Nevertheless there are some good Twitter threads from public health scientists breading down the data.

My mother in law estimates 20"+ in Oakland, NJ and still snowing. Obligatory deck picture. Meanwhile 70 and sunny here in Hawaii

Reasonable estimates say somewhere between 20-30% of people in the US have been infected by covid and probably the vast majority still have immunity to the virus. If we have an additional 50 million people vaccinated (~16%) that puts the total number of people immune to the virus at somewhere closer to 35-45% since there will be some overlap in infected/vaccinated. When you factor in the additional 16% being the most vulnerable to serious infection/death then you can see that 100 million doses may be enough for things too be pretty close to under control.

This point can't be emphasized enough and just to put the data out there, in the Pfizer vaccine trial 10 total cases of severe covid, 9 in the placebo arm and 1 in the vaccine arm, and in the Moderna vaccine trial 11 cases of severe covid all in the placebo group. Just to reiterate, once people in both vaccinations were fully inoculated, they prevented symptomatic covid by roughly 95% and there was additional protection against severe disease. For fever the rates of fever over 104 F in the Pfizer study was approximately 1 in 10,000 which was actually the same incidence in both the vaccine and placebo groups. Definitely a rare event.

You have to take into account a lot of variables to have the numbers fall so rapidly with the most important being the priority vaccination of nursing home residents. This program alone can prevent up to 40% of covid related deaths and except for the most frail individuals, I don't see there being much vaccine resistance in this group. Similarly in the 65+ cohort, by May the majority of these individuals who elect to receive the vaccine should be vaccinated. Again when polls have been done that study vaccine acceptance, it is extremely high in this group for obvious reasons. Then there's the rest of the population over 18 with comorbidities for whom the vaccine should be available by May. Having these cohorts vaccinated with the best efficacy vaccines from Pfizer/Moderna will dramatically bring down the death rate. If there's wide enough distribution by May, vaccination alone could cut the death rate by 75% or more. I'm addition to vaccination, by May seasonal factors should also be favorable for reducing the natural reproductive rate of the virus. Combining these interventions could cut the death rate from where it is now at roughly 3500 daily deaths down by 90% in a realistic scenario 350 or by 95% in a best case scenario 175.

Was a link to this thread posted on some dark cesspool of the internet filled with morons today? Angry summons got moderated yesterday, maybe he recruited his cabal of misinformed idiots

It seems a little idiosyncratic, the second dose for me was just like the first - sore arm for about one day but a couple other people in my group felt a bit more under the weather for a day and needed to take some tylenol/motrin.

Among the many problems with your posts is that you express certainty and present questionable and at times factually false information as if it is factual. You also never provide links to sources which is particularly important when you're putting forward more questionable information. This was particularly true when you were posting nonsense about the vaccines. It was always "I know a guy". And never more than that. You might be right that we are at the peak, you can see my post from yesterday expressing similar sentiments. But you need to look no further than the UK to see that they had a false peak before cases went out of control with the more contagious viral strain.

I'll put forward a contrarian argument regarding national trends, it appears that we may be approaching a plateau in hospitalizations right around 130,000 which has held roughly for the past week. Test positivity also peaked about a week ago and appears to be leveling off or starting to drop. This could definitely still be a blip in the data but these are both signs that we may be at the peak. There is the risk that it is a false peak and the more contagious strain of virus could send the infection back to the stratosphere. There's also a race going on between virus and vaccine. I think even if the virus continues to run wild and I hope it doesn't, with the majority of the nursing home residents getting vaccinated by the end of this month we should hopefully see the daily deaths and infection fatality rate both dropping potentially dropping dramatically in February or March ( some of the timing is a matter of data reporting delays).

They are all still someone's parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, friend, brother, sister, husband, or wife. It is the leading cause of death right now definitely in the elderly and probably in all age groups except for those under 18. The callousness of how some talk about the scale of death and suffering caused by this virus is very sad.

It may happen on the local level in some areas but not on a widespread basis imo. There are however many that would argue with the 1 in 7.2 number. Other data modelers like yyg at covid19-projections.com provides a dynamic estimate of this ratio and currently estimates it being closer to 1 in 3 which pegs the total infected at 72 million as of Dec 23rd which puts the number at 21% with a range of 15-32%. There are also additional uncertainty regarding the amount needed to obtain here immunity with Dr. Fauci recently edging the estimate closer to 70-80% especially in light of the more transmissible variant that is likely to become dominant going forward.

Sorry for your loss, my condolences to you and your family.

The death numbers look like they are still rising. Today in particular is terrible. The most reliable figure on tracking continues to be hospitalization data. Until it starts meaningfully dropping we can't confidently say cases are going down imo.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.21.20217174v1 What's the leading cause of death for those aged 25 to 44 in hard hit areas during the pandemic? - Most likely Covid. And this is before the winter surge occurred. 23% relative increase in death in this age range during the pandemic compared with the same period last year. These are the facts. IFR may be low for this virus in this age range but so is the IFR for almost everything for this age range. This age range mostly dies from things like accidents, drug overdoses, etc. Enough with your nonsense about this is only an old person's disease, the oldest suffer the worst of it and they are rightly being prioritized for the first vaccinations but make no mistake this disease is not one to be gambling with even if you're young and healthy. We have the means to safely vaccinate enough people to squash this virus to oblivion and we will.

There's so sugar coating how bad the current wave of infections is. A 7 day average of over 2,500 deaths per day is hard to conceptualize. But as others have noted, all signs point to us beginning on what should be a long and sustained reduction in new infections and soon a reduction in daily deaths until the pandemic is finally contained. Evidence is clear that new cases are reaching a plateau, hospitalizations also appear to be nearing a plateau, deaths are still rising but in 2-3 weeks they should start to decline. With vaccinations starting to reach nursing home residents followed by those over 75, the rate of decline in deaths should accelerate as we move into late January/February. Hopefully by that point the vaccination will become more widely available so that the rate with more people vaccinated combined with seasonal changes hopefully we see the numbers declining enough to start removing a lot of the mitigation restrictions. I see a lot of reason for optimism despite the current terrible state of the situation.

More facts coming out about the rate of anaphylaxis to the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine as well as the next steps to address it. So far 6 cases of anaphylaxis in 556,000 doses, just under 1 in 92,667 doses or a rate of 0.001 %. I'm sure all the people who have been on here falsely claiming that "99.997%" of people survive from Covid will say the same about the vaccine /sarcasm. The NIH plans to perform a study in high risk individuals to get more information and mitigate the risk. It's important to keep this adverse effect in perspective, 1 in 92,667 is very rare. Anaphylaxis is very treatable. Covid infection is far more deadly to all age groups than a serious but treatable vaccine reaction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-vaccine-allergic-reactions-study/2020/12/21/e01001d2-431a-11eb-b0e4-0f182923a025_story.html