OSUmetstud

Just now, WhitinsvilleWX said:

My point was TOTAL asymptomatic spread, not presymtomatic. The idea that people were completely asymptomatic throughout the entire course of the disease is what predicated all this mess. We were told that again and again. When you get a med degree, a PhD, and have 30 years experience as a scientist, and know how to read literature, come talk to me. I'm not in the habit of getting my scientific information and analysis from a  meteorologist.  I'm not going to argue with you. Your're not worth my time and energy. You're good at name calling too. Not the first time you've done it. Now, GFY.

 

Dude, it has no bearing. No one knows whether their presymptomatic or asymptomatic at any given moment. Hence, asymptomatic people are spreading the freaking disease. 

20 hours ago, WhitinsvilleWX said:

That's the issue in my mind.

And..it was "follow the science" when it suited a particular agenda.

Most MDs and PhD's that I know new exactly what the CDC is saying now. But the corporate media get their news from blue check twitter doctors.

Whether people realize it or nor, we've had a huge experiment with nice controls. Florida and Texas were the control and the null hypothesis turned out to be true. p>0.05.

To me, the number one, overriding thing that cause the mass hysteria, masking, closures, lockdowns and the overall mayhem was the idea of total asymptomatic spread. Was BS then, is BS now. The idea that 40-50% of all cases were being spread by people running around the population totally healthy that didn't know they had it was ludicrous. And any scientist/medical doctor who went along with that notion was/is a dishonest fool. 

My biggest regret in all this, beyond keeping business shuttered, beyond the kids on Zoom for a year, was the nursing home carnage. That was a travesty of the highest order. That didn't need to happen on the scale that it did.

half the spread is in presymptomatic individuals you fool. Study after study show the serial interval be the same as the incubation period. There wouldn't be a pandemic if there was only spread in symptomatic individuals. It would be like SARS or ebola. This is the latest guidance on it from the CDC. 

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html

** The lower bound of this parameter is approximated from the lower 95% confidence interval bound from: He X, Lau EH, Wu P, et al. Temporal dynamics in viral shedding and transmissibility of COVID-19. Nature Med. 2020;26(5):672–675. The upper bound of this parameter is approximated from the higher estimates of individual studies included in: Casey M, Griffin J, McAloon CG, et al. (2020). Estimating presymptomatic transmission of COVID-19: A secondary analysis using published data. medRxiv. The best estimate is the geometric mean of the point estimates from these two studies and aligns with estimates from:

• Moghadas SM, Fitzpatrick MC, Sah P, et al. The implications of silent transmission for the control of COVID-19 outbreaks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2020;117(30):17513–17515.
• Johansson MA, Quandelacy TM, Kada S, et al. 2021. SARS-CoV-2 transmission from people without COVID-19 symptoms. JAMA Network Open 2021;4(1):e2035057-e2035057.

1 minute ago, tamarack said:

According to the Hopkins data, Maine's new cases are considerably higher than the national average, after a year of always being below that average, and seeing ICU cases at 80-90% of the post-holidays surge is cause for a bit of concern.  It is odd that a state near the top for vaccination percentage and with considerable restrictions still in place is having these numbers.  Are we merely testing at a far higher rate than elsewhere?   Also, in recent days nearly half of all new cases in Maine have been in folks age 30 or younger.

Yeah its interesting. Like I said, Maine has less natural immunity than nearly any other state. People are also interacting more the last month or two than they did before. 

That's the least vaccinated cohort. So it makes sense you would see most of it there and not in older folks. 

16 to 29 

38% first dose, 24% fully.

If you include kids its 

19% first dose, 12% fully. 

https://www.maine.gov/covid19/vaccines/dashboard

3 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

So that should fall soon as more get vaccinated. It's probably the brief spike some states saw before things started to go down. 

Yeah I think so. The behavior is relaxing at the same time the vaccines are happening and the coverage is lower in the prime spreading population. 

1 hour ago, Lava Rock said:

Just not seeing cases tanking here despite 44% full vax'd and 57% with one dose. And that's not taking into account those that already have some immunity from infection. Infection rate is actually up to 0.93 from 0.87 last week. ICU hospitalizations up too.

 

I guess we'll see there. Just spitballing

Less natural immunity than other areas. Maine has the 4th least cases and deaths per capita

Vaccine coverage is excellent in the 65+ population (85%) but 43% in the 16 to 49 population. With little natural immunity the disease can still spread in younger people but with an ever decreasing case fatality rate. 

19 minutes ago, radarman said:

I agree but note I didn't post this here and that statement was within the unseen context of other articles that I posted that did examine such

I haven't seen any studies yet that compared post vaccine infection with post infection infection. I'd imagine they're both pretty effective. The main advantage of the vaccine is obviously the lack of mortality and morbidity. 

If I had to guess, vaccines are better at preventing infection due to the strong antibody response but the natural virus might be better for longevity against variants due to more epitopes from the whole virus. 

7 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

AWT

Eric ( Radarman) posted this elsewhere 

Super informative paper... King's College of London lead... Sample size 627,383 vaccinated patients

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00224-3/fulltext

A few highlights:

1) As many have suspected, the reaction to the vaccine is far worse if you've had Covid already.

"Systemic side-effects were more common (1·6 times after the first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (aka Oxford/AstraZeneca) and 2·9 times after the first dose of BNT162b2 (aka Pfizer)) among individuals with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection than among those without known past infection. Local effects were similarly higher in individuals previously infected than in those without known past infection (1·4 times after the first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and 1·2 times after the first dose of BNT162b2). "

2) There is no difference in side affects if you had covid recently, or quite awhile ago

" No consistent difference in occurrence of systemic or local adverse effects was observed between individuals who reported a positive test result within the past 6 months and those who reported they received a positive test result at least 6 months ago "

3) Infection risk reduction peaked at 60% for AstraZeneca at day 12, 69% Pfizer (shot1) at day 21-44, 72% at day 44-59 (shot 2)

"Significant reductions in infection risk were seen starting at 12 days after the first dose, reaching 60% (95% CI 49–68) for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and 69% (66–72) for BNT162b2 at 21–44 days and 72% (63–79) for BNT162b2 after 45–59 days."

4) In a separate sample group over an observation period of 14mos (starting Jan 2020) 10.8% of unvaxxed participants tested positive, and 3% of vaxxed participants tested positive.  (Note- vaccine wasn't ready in Jan 2020, so it's a shorter observation window implying less chance of exposure... but also to note some of those 3% likely contracted it shortly after getting the vaccine, before it takes affect)

"3106 of 103 622 vaccinated individuals and 50 340 of 464 356 unvaccinated controls tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection."

My conclusions... 

a) the vaccines generally work and reduce risk substantially, but perhaps not as well as was reported in phase 3 trials

b) the vaccines are nowhere near as effective as natural immunity

c) if you've previously had covid, you are very likely to have substantial side effects no matter how long it's been since you've had it, with almost nothing to gain

 

This is infection risk not symptomatic covid risk. Phase 3 trials looked at the latter. 

Both natural and vaccine immunity should have greater effectiveness at reducing symptomatic covid, hospitalizations, and deaths, but a smaller effectiveness at reducing infection. 

There is no comparison here between natural immunity and vaccine immunity in this study. 

2 hours ago, mattb65 said:

As others noted,  there are a number of problems here.

1. You can't add these two groups because there's a lot of overlap. 

2. Vaccines give ~80-90% protection on average and infection probably also gives ~80% protection.  So even if we somehow miraculously have no overlap, we're still at best around 75% population immunity which would definitely be sufficient. 

3. Local level of immunity will be important,  if the entire northeast is sitting at 70% of the population vaccinated + 10% with immunity through infection but not vaccinated then 80% total x 80% efficacy = 64% immune to virus introduced in that area, the virus will have a hard time finding new targets to sustain an outbreak. 

If you have the large sector of the southeast where only 50% get vaccinated + 15% immune through infection but not vaccinated then you get 65% total x 80% efficacy = 52% immune to virus introduction.  Outbreaks still significantly mitigated but 12% would be a substantial difference. Fortunately it does seem like the elderly and high risk are getting the vaccine more so it may not matter in terms of the important metrics like death and disability.

 

I'm still optimistic that things are overall going to be fine,  everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated will deal with the consequences ultimately. We're at the point where it is about choice and not access.

I think that the CDC has estimated in those studies is that the infected percentage of the oldest cohort is lower...which is advantageous. 65+ is 23% positive. That cohort has high vaccine uptake. The 18 to 49 cohort is 41% positive with lower vaccine uptake....so combined you might get closer to 70 to 80% immunity. 

Just now, WhitinsvilleWX said:

That was my point about more population inside 128. No comparison. And 60 plus % of deaths in Mass were in LTC facilities, just like most states in the US. 

I dont actually believe it's a population issue for this purpose. We're geographically isolated and implemented travel restrictions. Newfoundland literally had no community spread for months. Massachusetts has always had an endemic level of disease since like Feb 2020. 

Just now, TauntonBlizzard2013 said:

I just think it’s kind of unfair to compare the two places. There is a ton of people packed into a very small area in mass, especially eastern ma. I’m not defending mass and their approach, just saying it’s difficult to compare to very different places 

Read the conversation, this whole thing started because people started dunking on Nova Scotia and Canada in general. It's amazing that people who lived in Massachusetts would have the gall to do that. 

Just now, TauntonBlizzard2013 said:

There would be no tolerance for the way Canada has handled this here.

hasn’t there vaccine rollout been abysmal?

Wasn't their state travel restrictions early on? 

We don't have domestic vaccine manufacturing so we had a slower start, but just over 30% have a first dose now. It's much better than many other countries, but not as good as the US, the UK, or Israel. The daily rates lately are similar to the US. 

I never suggested that what Atlantic Canada did could work there. 

Just now, WhitinsvilleWX said:

I’m glad you like it there. 

I do, I just can't imagine gloating about how Mass has done. You haven't been particularly open and you've had a hell of a lot of death and disease. 

2 minutes ago, WhitinsvilleWX said:

Glad we don’t live there 

Mass has like 25 times the deaths per capita, congrats. And, we've had schools mostly open up here which is a big advantage of downstream costs to the American experience. 

Just now, HIPPYVALLEY said:

Well, I guess the Atlantic provinces are isolated enough with low enough populations that that type of policy could work.

You’ll never have it down to zero cases anywhere in the US, that’s for sure.

Yeah I agree. It's worked here. We've only had 6 deaths in NL, for example. Were up to about 30% vaccinated with the first dose, so there's a solid opportunity cost advantage in preventing infections and deaths this spring as we vaccinate. 

Just now, HIPPYVALLEY said:

Just talked to my SIL in Nova Scotia.  She said as of yesterday  the entire province is in a two week lockdown.  Apparently they have about 400 cases province wide.  

They've been running a mostly zerocovid policy, like here. We've had success due to the travel restrictions in Atlantic Canada.

Just now, PhineasC said:

Where's the "relevant case law" that provides for vaccinated people remaining under restrictions? Or is that some of the new case law being developed as we speak?

I thought we were talking in general. Idk, I think the suggested guidance on vaccinated people trends too safe. 

The Court held that "in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand" and that "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others."

Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)

Just now, PhineasC said:

People have always been allowed to be extra careful and wear masks. That has always been an option and will continue to be an option forever.

People with compromised immune systems have lived the "COVID life" for a long time now. No Federal mandates needed.

There's plenty of relevant case law for public health restrictions in pandemics going back over 100 years. I understand it sucks. 

4 minutes ago, WhitinsvilleWX said:

You kinda missed my point, but ok 

I understand your personal risk assessment, I think that's perfectly reasonable. At the same time, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for someone who has been vaccinated and at high risk to be careful until the community prevalence drops to a much lower level. 

36 minutes ago, WhitinsvilleWX said:

And I might get hit by a bus on the mass pike  tomorrow morning and die a horrible fiery death. 
Do you worry about sitting next to someone who might be pre symptomatic for measles, mumps? Mumps vaccine is only 78% effective. At some point you have to rust the vaccine and move on. Otherwise hide under the bed until Christ comes back.

Again, trust the vaccine. If you don’t, what’s the point? 
Yiu can decrease the risk of dying in a car wreck by lowering the speed limit to 30 mph. 
It’s all about risk tolerance. Personally one of the reasons I got vaccinated was to help end this non sense. But I fear this will persist awhile longer.

We don't have measles are mumps running through the population currently at fairly high prevalence. The risk calculation is very different, there. I do trust the vaccine and I hope to vaccinated in about early June or so from the looks of things and get back to normal. 

4 minutes ago, schoeppeya said:

I'm going to make one of those that says "when you get shot in chicago" and the picture collage will be mugshots and see if you guys still think its funny.

This is a hell of stretch. Political avatars having nothing to do with gun violence. Probably be better to find a liberal tell on people who far too scared of covid or something. 

Assuming these numbers are reasonably correct, India has about 20 times fewer ICU beds per capita than the US. So obviously you don't even need similar infection/hospitalization rates to the US or Europe to have a huge problem.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-most-critical-care-beds-per-capita.html

1 hour ago, Bostonseminole said:

I heard Israel is doing well


.

It's not a socialism problem. It's nationalized vaccine contracts combined with a government that's outsourced its manufacturing ability overseas years ago. The UK is doing fine with vaccines and they have socialized medicine. 

1 minute ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Mm hm ... it says that 10 minutes after filming this ... internet pornography arrived -

The 10-year super outbreak anniversary is tomorrow. 

1 minute ago, Lava Rock said:

There may not be a causal link (yet?), but the % of cases are much higher than AZ's clotting issue. From the report above:" The condition developed in one out of 100,000 people who received the shot, while the incidence rate for men of 18 to 30 years was one in 20,000. Two people died and the rest recovered. ".

while no link found between clots and myocarditis, what is it about the vaccine that is potentially responsible for these issues, as they are the same as actual covid infection. Does the spike protein cause so much inflammation either due to vax dose and/or carrier molecule? This won't help more people want to get vaccinated.

The media is in full fear mode on variants and vaccines. I'd like to see how things shake out over the next few weeks to see if there's anything there. 

I stopped using hand sanitizer regularly very early on. It seemed like late spring/early summer it was rather obvious fomite transmission was super low.