fujiwara79

About 70% of people support vax mandates, including about 50% of republicans (to my surprise). that's probably why you saw republican politicians criticizing anti-vaxxers last week, and employers starting to mandate them recently. https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/565641-poll-68-percent-support-vaccine-mandate

I don't wear a mask these days. but that reminds me, i should get a set of KN95s for the winter!

I still find it hilarious how people thought masks were never coming back. It was always the easiest thing to bring back. i thought they'd come back in the fall, but this was even quicker than i expected. the cdc guidance from may 13th will go down in infamy as one of the worst messaging blunders in history. it'll be taught in schools decades from now as a case study in what you shouldn't do. most non-influenza pandemics last 3-5 years...it'll be best for everyone's collective psyche to accept that reality. maybe invest your Dogecoin in some innovative mask companies.

LOL....60% of this country is overweight and they've been asked to lose weight for as long as I can remember. Not gonna happen. Goobermint can't tell them what to do.

Those papers are already outdated though. I'm talking about recent data from Israel showing that people who were vaxxed in January only have 16% efficacy against symptomatic Covid. If they were vaxxed in February, it was 47%; if it was in March, it was 67%, etc. You get the picture - it clearly shows waning immunity after a certain period of time. The good news is that protection against serious disease doesn't wane as rapidly; it is still about 80% for those vaxxed in January, but even that is a drop from 98% or whatever it was. I do think waning immunity in the elderly (since they got the shots first) will be an issue going into the fall and winter. the CDC has been very sketchy lately. Apart from their ridiculous new mask guidance from back in May (which I can write a novel about as to why that made no sense), they stopped tracking breakthrough infections, so we have to rely on data from Israel, Singapore, Iceland, UK, etc to understand how variants and time affect efficacy. They also didn't declare delta a variant of concern until a full month after the rest of the world did. Very odd. That's why I think some chamber of commerce lobbying money was involved.

I never compared the two; I said natural immunity is clearly not lifelong. Not even close. But that is what some people seem to claim. Vaccine immunity is clearly not lifelong either. It appears to start waning after 6 months. I suggest interviewing the residents of Manuas, Brazil or New Delhi, India. Millions of them were re-infected by the gamma and delta variant, respectively. That "T-cell memory" thing didn't do squat for them. It certainly shocked the medical community.

Daytona is definitely redneck central. It's what happens if you moved West Virginia to the beach.

Honestly not sure why some are holding onto this idea that we can have lifelong 'natural immunity' to covid, like we get from chicken pox or measles. so many people have been re-infected that it's clear this isn't the case.

Many people have left the workforce due to chronic covid issues. It disproportionately affects women between the ages of 20 - 50, and in nearly all cases their acute covid illness was very mild, but chronic lingering symptoms afterward were much worse. The business elites are actually more terrified of this because it could impact the labor force for years. The medical community will probably gaslight these people, telling them it's "psychosomatic", just like they do for conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, or chronic lyme. meanwhile, many of them will go on disability, even though they count as a "recovered" case in our casedemic.

LOL @ the anti-maskers on this forum. Looking forward to mask field reports again. It was pretty obvious masks would come back; that's because the CDC new guidance from May made no sense. we should find out what drove the CDC to go from one extreme (recommending masks outdoors, even for vaccinated) to the other opposite extreme (no masks needed anywhere) - all within the span of two weeks. no doubt some chamber of commerce lobbying money was involved.

I predicted this more than a month ago and was weenie'd. But now people are coming around to the idea that mask ordinances might come back. LOL. Told ya.

Philosophically, that's true, but in reality many of voluntarily unvaxxed people that are currently hospitalized or in the ICU are getting their medical bills paid for by either the CARES act or the recent covid relief bill (especially if they are uninsured). Instead of offering lottery tickets and cash prizes to get vaxxed, the federal government should instead stop subsidizing hospitalizations for these people. Make the hospitals and insurance companies figure out how to pay for it. If this happened, you'll start seeing insurance companies compel employers to require vaccines for their workforce. Suddenly they'll realize that insurance companies are not as nice and coddling as the goobermint.

yeah, I mean not being able to dine-in at applebees for a couple weeks is just brutal. it's a human rights violation. worse than gitmo. worse than abu gharib. the only thing that would make it worse is being asked to wear a mask.

The resurrection of the 'Wuhan lab leak' story in the media was because of an intelligence report that was "leaked" (pun intended) to the media about a month ago. Now the intelligence agencies are supposed to conduct an investigation and come back with a report in 90 days (circa end of August). The lemmings will believe whatever these intelligence reports say if it affirms their pre-conceived narrative. Nothing is better for their funding apparatus than another cold war.

I think the 'natural immunity' probably exists for one particular variant, but the resurgence occurs when new variants arise. All the resurgences in areas with high seroprevalence were due to a new variant. That tells you two things: 1) natural immunity is very narrow and doesn't exist for the entire variant spectrum; 2) this isn't like measles or chicken pox, where you get it once and then you're immune for life.

tens of millions of people in brazil, south africa and india are evidence your "belief" in "conventional wisdom" is wrong. not to mention that people get re-infected with other coronavirus all the time, so why would this particular 'Rona be different. https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00183-5/fulltext

the vaccines aren't anywhere near 95% efficacious against these variants, but if they prevent serious illness then they're still doing their jobs. israel just reinstituted their mask mandate and a lot of vaccinated people got infected. the 'wild' form of the virus doesn't exist anymore.

he was likely to lose regardless. a general rule of thumb is that the incumbent needs to be at about 47% approval rating to have a reasonable chance of winning. he was in the low 40s for practically his entire presidency, even when the economy was great. he 'surged' to 45% in the closing weeks of the campaign, which made it closer, and the dems voluntarily handicapped themselves by not knocking on doors or doing in-person registration events because of covid (understandably so). the only way to win with such low approval ratings is to have some third party candidates in the mix to siphon votes, or to have an equally unlikeable opponent, ala 2016.

are you kidding me? i've seen tons of people that ride motorcycles without helmets. you live in jersey? that's probably why. i believe new jersey requires helmets by law. not all states are like that. the "muh freedumbz" crowd has always been adamantly against having states require motorcyclists wear helmets. they were against seat belt laws back in the day too.

yes, we have a consumerist culture. although I don't think it was always this way. we used to have more of a savings culture, but low interest rates, free trade and no anti-trust enforcement changed that. policy might have influenced culture or the other way around -- but the changes happened around the same time.

JIT is great for nominal conditions (no major wars, no pandemics, no massive natural disasters). it's terrible for off-nominal conditions, like a pandemic, where they have no reliable means of predicting demand. you may want to stick with dogecoin advice.

not really. over-reliance on "just in time" manufacturing is a much bigger reason.

Yeah, good luck with that. zombie reaganites will fight tooth and nail to never let this happen. after all, the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value (Friedman doctrine), and the sole objective of antitrust law is to minimize consumer prices (Robert Bork doctrine). this toxic value system has been indoctrinated in our business schools since the 1980s and it's going to take a while to undo that.

keep those mask fields reports coming! Maybe we should set up a CoCoRaHS network for mask reporting.

a biased website (summit news) reporting on a purportedly biased journal (lancet). that about sums up our news ecosystem today.