Omicron Covid Variant Poses Very High Global Risk, Says WHO (theguardian.com) 480
The Omicron coronavirus variant is likely to spread internationally, posing a very high global risk of infection surges that could have severe consequences some areas, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. From a report: The UN agency urged its 194 member states to accelerate vaccination of high-priority groups and, in anticipation of increased case numbers, to "ensure mitigation plans are in place" to maintain essential health services. "Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic," the WHO said. "The overall global risk related to the new variant ... is assessed as very high." To date, no deaths linked to Omicron had been reported, though further research was needed to assess Omicron's potential to escape protection against immunity induced by vaccines and previous infections, it said.
It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:5, Informative)
Re: It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:5, Insightful)
Source for Extremely Mild symptoms: the doctor who discovered the variant: https://www.standard.co.uk/vid... [standard.co.uk]
That's possibly true (and consistent with the rule that diseases generally evolve to become more contagious but less virulent) but it's way too early to be sure.
She started seeing the variant on the 18th, so she's literally talking from the experience of about 10 days, not even time for an infection to fully run its course (and it wasn't clear of the vaccination/past infection status of the patients).
Certainly a lockdown isn't going to keep it in South Africa, but it will give the medical community some time to figure out what they're dealing with before it turns into a full wave so that wave will pass with fewer fatalities.
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Re: It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:5, Interesting)
From the UK: [samaritans.org]
Fortunately, provisional suicide rates for 2020 in England has found no evidence that national suicide rates increased. And evidence from the National Confidential Inquiry (NCISH) and the University of Manchester suggests suicide rates during the first national lockdown in England have not been impacted in the way that many of us were concerned about. Real-time data from other nations in the UK and Ireland is not available as surveillance systems are not currently widespread, though some are under development.
...
Rates of self-harm appear to have remained stable throughout the pandemic. The UCL Covid-19 Social Study, which has run weekly throughout the time since restrictions began, consistently found that around 2% of people report self-harming in the past week.
Lockdowns have costs. I haven't seen evidence that "skyrocketing" suicide rates are one of them.
Re: It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, because medieval ideas about medicine were so on-point right?
Don't be a sarcastic arse. History shows not just what was done, but what worked, and what did not.
The original Venetian Quarantine was a failure, while others were successful.
There are no Covid cases outside of quarantine in a thousand miles of here. It can work. We have no masks, no lockdown, just normal life. Nobody I know has had Covid.
4 out of 6 Australian states are still successfully keeping out Delta with quarantine, giving time to increase our vaccination levels (now over 95% for over-50 yos.) and improve treatment.
Maybe Omicron will change that, we always knew it was temporary, but just delaying the spread of Covid has had huge benefits.
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If you think about the evolution of the virus, mutants which are more contagious would have an advantage. Also, mutants which caused less severe disease would have an advantage (better to have people walking around and spreading the virus than isolated in bed or dead).
So hopefully this variant will follow this pattern and be less deadly. The important question which needs to be answered is whether or not this variant induces strong immunity. If it induces strong immunity, it might get the point where we hav
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Source for Extremely Mild symptoms: the doctor who discovered the variant: https://www.standard.co.uk/vid... [standard.co.uk]
Ban him from social media!!! We will not tolerate this misinformation!
/s
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Re: Maybe this will vaccinate trumpers (Score:4)
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The viral load of those who are vaccinated and suffer a breakthrough case of a delta-type infection (which is the only kind that matters any more)
- is approximately 10x lower for the first 2-3 months after 2nd dose or booster
- begins decreasing much sooner than those who aren't vaccinated (in very roughly 3 days vs 7)
- decreases faster (by on average a factor of 10 per day rather than 5)
- reaches complete clearance in most patients before day 10, whereas a substantia
Re: Maybe this will vaccinate trumpers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:4, Insightful)
However the problem is they are countries without the resources to vaccinate its population, the the countries that do have the resource has such an entitled population that think vaccination is an upfront to freedom. That these viruses spread, and mutate over time. Actually there is not enough data to explain how bad Omicron is yet in terms of symptoms. But as it spreads and longer it goes from host to host, the higher chance of an other mutation, where it could be more deadly, and/or be a worse spreader.
The reason that Vaccination is strongly encouraged, is not because anyone really cares that if you catch it and feel ill and perhaps get better or perhaps die, as a member of society we need to make sure that every one of us, is not causing harm to the society by making yourself a possible spreader, and a host for mutations.
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It must be remembered that by the standards of a virus, lethality and severe symptoms are a BAD mutation. What a virus wants (to the extent that virii "want" anything) is relatively mild symptoms - that way people that can make vaccines don't bother to try to drive the virus into extinction (think Smallpox - if all it did was give you a mild rash for a w
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by the standards of a virus, lethality and severe symptoms are a BAD mutation. What a virus wants ...
A virus does not want anything in regard to variations: they're just random evolutions which arise that either reproduce well and become dominant among infections and spread well or not. Selection pressure on a virus spread between humans is towards overcoming defenses and being as easily and frequently spread by its host as possible (That tends to favor higher infectiveness and greater severity), BUT for
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Noting that vaccine supply significantly outstrips uptake in South Africa.
The reason to get vaccinated is you are far less likely to need hospitalization if you are vaccinated and take up an ICU bed and/or divert nurses and doctors from caring for other patients.
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Re:It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsflash, it merely cements the front. They will dig in and it will be next to impossible to get them to reconsider...
Lots of talking heads say we should treat the vaccine hesitant with compassion. Fuck that, the fact there are still enough of them to burden the health care system for everyone is the only reason this pandemic is still a thing.
We should treat them like the pariahs they are, which is exactly what we are doing here where there are many public activities you cannot participate in without your proof of vaccination. The time for being nice and understanding is long since past.
We now know that 70% vaccination does not grant herd immunity because the vaccine does not provide sterilizing immunity.
Correct. There will be no herd immunity. I try and look on the bright side, the vast majority of the deaths are now in the unvaccinated. Unlike with other vaccines, they don't get any benefit from other people's effort. That does not make me sad.
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Wow... are you really saying that the potential deaths of 3 out of 10 people because of hesitancy doesn't make you sad? That's just sociopathic.
People make dumb choices that result in their deaths every day. I feel sorry for people who don't have a choice, but pretty much everyone (in the developed world at least) has a choice now. I feel sorry for the immunocompromised, or the small handful of people with legit medical reasons for not being immunized. I feel contempt towards the selfish people who willfully put those people at added risk.
You should try it sometime. This isn't a "the boat will sink if we don't throw them out" situation, it's a "let's try acting like a community for a change" situation.
I'm not convinced the community is really better off with people who believe the vaccines have 5G microchips
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The government should be "governing" and "leading"; what i mean by that is making the compelling cas
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They apparently have plenty of supply, but cannot get them all used right now due to both deployment processes and vaccine hesitancy there.
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Mandating vaccination for participation in social activities (store, restaurants, shopping, etc.) is entirely appropriate. It's not just about you. It's about you spreading the disease to others.
Do we consider laws against drunk driving an "affront to freedom"?
This is the same situation. You are a danger to yourself and others. You can't drive drunk. You shouldn't be able to spread disease.
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Vaccines reduce your chance of getting infected and spreading that infection (and mutations) to others. If you're not vaccinated, you are a public health menace and should be locked up at home.
Re: It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:5, Insightful)
Just wrong.
Vaccination reduces your chance of getting infected.
Vaccination reduces the severity of infection.
Vaccination reduces the chance of you spreading infection.
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Lower symptoms. So while it might be more transmissible, it will leave far fewer dead and far fewer needing hospitalization. The big question is if the natural immunity protects against the more deadly Delta variant. If it is contagious enough and has enough of a muted response, perhaps it will behave alike a pseudo vaccine, converting immunity on the vaccine hesitant by giving them a mild bout of Covid. Hopefully.
I'm not a medical doctor, but isn't it a little soon to say the new variant has lower symptoms? I probably missed something, but my understanding is that contaminated people in rich countries are travelers that got their vaccine shot and, thus, can be expected to have lower symptoms.
Do we have any credible data about the effect on unvaccinated people?
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I'm not a medical doctor, but isn't it a little soon to say the new variant has lower symptoms?
A medical doctor, the one with the most experience with the Omicron variant who discovered it, has said the symptoms are (to use her words): "Extremely mild".
It is my conjecture that if this is the case, and it is more contagious, it will confer some naturally acquired immunity on the unvaccinated, and perhaps enough to dampen the spread of the less contagious, but more virulent Delta variant. Hopefully.
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I'm not a medical doctor, but isn't it a little soon to say the new variant has lower symptoms?
A medical doctor, the one with the most experience with the Omicron variant who discovered it, has said the symptoms are (to use her words): "Extremely mild".
It is my conjecture that if this is the case, and it is more contagious, it will confer some naturally acquired immunity on the unvaccinated, and perhaps enough to dampen the spread of the less contagious, but more virulent Delta variant. Hopefully.
Yes I did she her video. Of course, she's a doctor so her opinion is worth more than mine on the matter. However, I'm also a man of science. So I'll allow myself a little skepticism about her statement on two accounts.
* First, she's making an hypothesis on a very restricted sample in a very short period (less than 10 days).
* Second, there's no peer review.
There's hope, but I would leave it as that for now until more research is made.
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However, I'm also a man of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
* First, she's making an hypothesis on a very restricted sample in a very short period (less than 10 days).
Mild cases resolve in far less time, one to three days on average. She has observed this.
* Second, there's no peer review.
Doesn't mean it isn't worth listening to. Today she is the most experienced person WRT the Omicron variant, so, like I said (and you seconded), we remain hopeful that her data lies in the normal longer-term distribution of Omicron cases.
Again though, IF it remains, I hope exposure to Omicron conveys immunity to Delta. It will act as a pseudo-vaccine for the population that remains un
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That's good (Score:2)
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Maybe. Depends on if X or Y is larger (Score:2)
This variant is expected to have a lower fatality RATE and a higher transmission rate. That does NOT mean it will have a lower (or higher) *number* of fatalities.
Suppose the fatality RATE of omicron is half of the delta rate.
While the transmissibility means four times as many people get infected with it. That would mean the number of fatalities from omicron will be twice as many as delta.
So this simply isn't true:
> it will leave far fewer dead and far fewer needing hospitalization
No.
Fatalities = fatali
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This variant is expected to have a lower fatality RATE and a higher transmission rate. That does NOT mean it will have a lower (or higher) *number* of fatalities.
It's fatality rate is zero among those who have already had it, suggesting its far fewer numbers. That is why I said "IF this is true".
So this simply isn't true:
The data available today, according to the doctor who discovered it, suggests it actually is true.
Fatalities = fatality rate X number of people infected
0 people have died. So if the number of people infected is all 7 billion of us, and the rate is still 0, it will still have a lower number of fatalities than Delta. That is maths.
Further, omicron has more subvariants, more mutations.
Citation needed. You are fear mongering here.
Become more deadly than it is now
Citation Needed. Fear mongering, without any evidenc
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We can hope but it won't happen. Here's a few counterpoints. First the major issue is the immunological memory. People complaining about the vaccine seem to love to point this out. That the vaccine doesn't seem to provide the protect we should expect from a vaccine and that the need for booster shots prove this. Significant Immunological memory towards this pathogen could take a long fucking time (generations).
Likewise it's already clear the virus has high mutability and that re-infection is possible with c
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Lower symptoms. So while it might be more transmissible, it will leave far fewer dead and far fewer needing hospitalization.
Viruses that mutate frequently tend to mutate towards the most common varieties, especially when a particular variant is extreme to begin with, and more especially when it's extreme in mortality rates.
The most common variant of the coronavirus is, of course, the common cold, which is insanely contagious, and very, very mild.
So there's no surprises here. It continues to follow the historical pattern of most viral pandemics, and especially the 1918-19 flu pandemic (both medically and socially). Which means we
Re: It is showing higher contagiousness but (Score:2)
That could be true, but travel ban to slow its spread may be the right move until we can confirm how lethal it is and to what demographic. You cannot base a potentially dangerous policy on anecdotal evidence.
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Yes, that's hopeful news, but I wouldn't go too far in extrapolating early observation into different populations and circumstances, or even count on those observations holding up. In the real world data is either hard to come by, or so easy to come by it skews your picture of what's happening. It takes time to sort things out.
It's OK to feel hopeful, just as long as we keep hedging our bets. We may be getting a lucky break here, but we shouldn't rely on luck to get through this. The pandemic been partic
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What we know (Score:4, Informative)
What we know today? Not much.
What can the average person who sees news head lines do about it today? Not much.
Prepare to be prepared to listen to some recommendations coming soonishly.
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Prepare to be prepared to listen to some recommendations coming soonishly.
I'm preparing heavily to listen. Refreshing my Facebook feed every minute. Latest updates: Omicron is little more than a Greek vowel and the vaccines make you talk like Christopher Walken. /s
I don’t know about you guys (Score:2)
But all my Covid information comes from podcasts and social media. Free thinkers unite!
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Tarot cards tell you about people, not events. You might as well said you read Covid's palm.
Now oracle bones would be a different story.
So the humor of your post is you show a lack of education through comparing the uneducated to mystical practices which you, yourself are not educated on.
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There is another group that get their information from institutions who's funding and clout are based on the prospects that the virus is bad and they are sorely needed to guide the rest of us. The problem is the incentives. Personally I think Fauci is the worst off
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Your comments not all that bad except for the false dichotomy.
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There is one group that is getting information from amateurs who are learning to digest the data and draw their own conclusions and risk assessment, who's incentive is to best navigate this virus for themselves and their loved ones and community.
Yeah I trust amateurs who haven't even taken a class on statistics to read medical studies and give advice. Like hiring a guy off the street to build a deck, what can possibly go wrong?
There is another group that get their information from institutions who's funding and clout are based on the prospects that the virus is bad and they are sorely needed to guide the rest of us. The problem is the incentives. Personally I think Fauci is the worst offender. His cloud and celebrity has been exponentially raised by the pandemic, and the worse it is, the more people will believe we should be listening to him. For a guy who hung a life-sized portrait in his office, I think at this point he is fear mongering to continue elevating his importance and clout.
Ah yes the financial conspiracy angle, they're all in on it. Every single one. Fauci is a world class immunologist and even worked for the Reagan administration. If you can recommend someone better I'd love to hear it.
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I dunno....his reaction and recommendations about AIDS isn't terribly reassuring.
He's not ever really been on the ball for much of his career.
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Yep. *Every* question in science can be reduced to this: is the answer endorsed by good people like me whom I identify with, or bad people whose motivations I can't trust. Every... single... one.
Once you realize this, you need never be in doubt again. You may, however, be wrong a lot of the time.
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Well, that would be some good news for a change. Let's all hope that he's right, we could use a little breather. Literally.
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It seems that the whole social economy is operating on terror now, though. The media wants you scared, the government wants you scared, even fucking ads want you scared.
The new normal is that of constant anxiety.
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The only thing that's scary is the amount of bullshit on social media and even more so the amount of people believing it. Other than that, I'm not scared.
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The answer is we just don't know. Yet. That is absolutely the usual state of things when something new has been discovered.
With every week that goes by we'll get a clearer picture of the significance of this variant, but for now it's perfectly reasonable to say we just don't know.
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Denying Covid patients access to hospital resources would open very dangerous president.
1. Covid patients while in the Hospital are protecting the general public, as they are outside the community, if they are dying in their own homes, they will have a care giver who will most likely catch Covid, while those in the hospitals have Negative Pressure rooms, and PPE and policies and procedures to keep their staff rather save, as well as not spread to other units.
2. We can't apply a condition to determine if you
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Fuck 'em. Society has rules if you want to participate.
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Sure. When do we deny healthcare services to smokers and overweight people?
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Being fat and smoking is contagious now?
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Fuck 'em. Society has rules if you want to participate.
Um, okay. Does that go for all high risk behavior? Even that indulged in by reliable Democrat margin voting "communities"?
This right here is part of the problem, making it political.
Be against what layabout and ArchieBunker are proposing, sure, but they never mentioned political parties.
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Fuck 'em. Society has rules if you want to participate.
Um, okay. Does that go for all high risk behavior? Even that indulged in by reliable Democrat margin voting "communities"?
This right here is part of the problem, making it political. Be against what layabout and ArchieBunker are proposing, sure, but they never mentioned political parties.
Yeah, I made it political, lol
My point was, they have no desire at all to make all high risk behavior be a disqualifier for medical care. Just high risk behavior that they disapprove of, due to their politics.
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That is pretty sick and disgusting a attitude to have.
Why?
Re:Wash your hands. Take your vitamins. (Score:5, Insightful)
While it is horrifying to think about, there is a point where resources are limited, and the decision has to be made about who gets care and who doesn't.
The only argument is what metric should be used.
To use an analogy, there's a firefighter and two people in a burning building. One of the people is an arsonist who set the fire, the other is an innocent bystander. The firefighter can only rescue one before the building collapses. Who should be saved?
I'm mostly a utilitarian in this regards - try to save the most people regardless. If that means that the innocent bystander is most likely to be able to rescue themselves, but the arsonist is badly injured and unable to get out, save the arsonist, since that will lead to the most lives being saved, on average.
But some will argue that the arsonist has contributed to their situation, while the innocent bystander did not, thus the responsibility should be to save the bystander first.
Re:Wash your hands. Take your vitamins. (Score:4, Insightful)
To use an analogy, there's a firefighter and two people in a burning building. One of the people is an arsonist who set the fire, the other is an innocent bystander. The firefighter can only rescue one before the building collapses. Who should be saved?
Whoever is me.
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Paradoxically it's a great argument against nationalized healthcare.
I didn't trust the government in that capacity before, mind you, but here's Archie coming along giving me a great material example to show others who are on the fence.
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Yes, private healthcare is so much better - "I advocate for denying poor people access to hospital resources if there are rich people needing Hospital services".
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I didn't say that, but if you look there's a lot of overhead because of the government. What if a majority of the problem with private healthcare is because of government meddling?
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Why is it so disgusting? They make a choice not to get vaccinated, which is their right, but they should have to live with the consequences of their choice. Why should vaccinated or other sick people suffer because of it? My grandmother refused to get vaccinated, she was 94 (died of cancer, unrelated, refused to go to hospital) said she thought the vaccine would kill her, and said if she dies that's gods will. I respect that you make a choice and live with the consequence. I you truly believe that a vaccine
Honestly I understand GP's frustration (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand rationally that these people are being tricked for political and financial gain, but it's still frustrating. It's hard not to want to lash out. Mind you, we should be lashing out at the 12 anti vaxxers spreading the lies, Twitter for not banning them, and guys like Tucker Carlson for spreading vaccine misinformation on national TV while being fully vaccinated and at a workplace with vaccine mandates... but those are all powerful people that are hard to do anything about. Going after the individual anti-vaxxers while ineffective seems obtainable.
I mean, it's not like Twitter is going to care enough to ban those (highly profitable) influencers, or that Fox is going to take Carlson off the air or even reign him in. So you call for what seems obtainable... even if it's not the right thing. It's a symptom of our dysfunctional body politic and media.
You need better sources (Score:3, Insightful)
There is such a thing as being flat out wrong, and I'm tired of snowflakes telling me there isn't.
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The issue is there is a finite number of hospital beds and unvaccinated people catching COVID are as they have acute symptoms taking hospital services from those with chronic symptoms and people in the later group are dying as a result.
Is it sick and disgusting to prioritize treatment for those who didn't choose to roll the dice with their lives because they are stupid and ignorant enough to spend a few minutes of there lives getting a vaccine?
I could just as easily argue that the unvaccinanted are morally
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Actually, parent offers a perfectly reasonable prioritization. It's triage, not a denial of medial services.
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Yes, if there's an easily accessible vaccine for any of the above.
Yes, if any of the above is highly contagious.
Yes, if any of the above can kill within a couple weeks if passed over to an elder person.
Oh, wait...
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No, because a lifetime of abstinence is hard, it takes a lifetime of will power to maintain. Taking out 30 minutes of your life to get a vaccination is not on that hard.
I have never smoked, taken drugs, drunk alcohol. I have eaten unhealthy food, who hasn't, but not that much. I don't abstain from these things, I just don't want to do them in the first place, but I understand that its not that simple to overcome these addictions, but getting a vaccine does not require you to overcome an addiction.
Herman Cain Award (Score:4, Informative)
So says the spokesperson for dementia.
In your spokesperson role, are you also representing Herman Cain and all the recipients of the Herman Cain Award [reddit.com]?
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Anyone else reading this for entertainment purposes?
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Sucks to be an extrovert these days, eh?
Welcome to the life of an introvert prior to 2020.
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They said, it will likely spread internationally and that it will do it faster than other variants. This likely will be true.
Likewise many people complain flu kills more people. Well how does it do this? Simple, it spreads a lot and doesn't kill most, leaving many carriers. So we are likely to finally see "Covid is Flu" come true and higher infection with *potentially* a larger number of deaths.
Maybe we can finally nip in the butt this whole idea that a most viruses evolve to be very virulent but low mortal
Re:I understand their caution, but it doesn't look (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the WHO "panicking wildly"?
Or is it reasonable to label this a high risk situation currently? We don't know much about Omicron, other than it has been successful at spreading, and that it's mutations may make existing vaccines less effective.
Mild symptoms in South Africa are encouraging, but the median age of South Africans is a decade younger than American, and a decade and a half younger than Europeans. We know infections in younger folks tend to be more mild.
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You take a microorganism you want to evolve in certain direction, you put it in a nutrient rich petri dish, and then you add small antigen zones within it of the thing you want microorganism to evolve around.
That's how bacteria/yeast/fungi can be engineered. It's not how you do it with a virus. Those other organisms have complex mechanisms to drive their evolution that a virus lacks, which makes them fundamentally different in terms of how they evolve.
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"Alpha" is the UK variant. The original Wuhan version does not have a letter as it is not a variant. There wasn't any retroactive naming.
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The argument about vaccines providing evolutionary pressure could apply to natural immunity or any vaccine.
In fact, it's not necessarily a bad thing if the virus mutates away from the targeted spike protein, if that mutation also reduces the severity of the illness. The logic behind targeting the spike protein is that is the specifically bad thing about the virus. The spike protein mutating is likely to render the virus less severe. A more vague immunity may actually be more susceptible to mutations that l
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Who would've thunk. It required a really big brain. Insert another stupid meme here, because no matter how stupid the meme, it's a lot smarter than the stupid shit we did to tackle this epidemic so far.
And what would you have done, were you dictator - not vaccinate?
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We put a virus under massive evolutionary pressure by vaccinating during the pandemic using a single antigen, that being the spike protein in the virus. Virologists and evolutionary biologists were getting cancelled in 2020 left right and centre for noting that this is how we create mutations in specific direction in lab conditions.
So starting with some antivax by blaming vaccines for variants despite a complete lack of evidence that vaccines are responsible for any of the variants.
In fact, all of the variants are arising in countries with low vaccinations rates which is pretty inconsistent with your theory.
You take a microorganism you want to evolve in certain direction, you put it in a nutrient rich petri dish, and then you add small antigen zones within it of the thing you want microorganism to evolve around.
Because things that work in a petri dish always work the same in typical populations.
The vaccine gives the body a head start in identifying the infection, but if it actually gets a COVID infection the body is still going to build a
There isn't another choice. (Score:2)
AFAICT, there's only one cell surface antigen on the COVID: the spike protein. So mRNA vaccines, traditional vaccines, and natural immune response all target the same antigen.
That having been said, the two mRNA vaccines (should) elicit slightly different antibody profiles. mRNA gets translated into amino acid sequences (proteins) in groups of three sequential nucleotides (these groups are called 'codons'). Since there are four nucleotides, there are 64 possible codons. But these code for only 22 amino a
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Please do. The more idiots get infected and die. Not only does it increase the average IQ (not by much, sadly, it's not quite lethal enough for that), it also means that my home office will keep going on longer if infection rates stay up and they don't dare to call us back in.
If I had anything but contempt for these dimwits, it would actually be gratitude that they risk and often even lose their life just for my comfort.
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Re: Omicron is very scary. (Score:2)
Is %40 of the US population under 45 years old, under 25 BMI and free from co-morbidity ?
If so, then, I take that as good news.
Re: Omicron is very scary. (Score:3)
You are appealing to a fallacy of single cause. In your particular example, the connection from you to me is obviously negligible, especially because we are in different countries. You being vaccinated is not going to protect me or stop a pandemic just as no
Re: Omicron is very scary. (Score:3)
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How far do you take this?
Do you get the flu vaccine every year? If you missed it, and got hospitalized from the flu, should you be denied insurance or medical treatment?
What about if you smoke and your life expectancy is lowered by 10 years (Covid is by 1 year). Should you be denied cancer treatment, transplants, ...?
What about if you drink...?
Or if your eating habits are leading you to be obese? Limited medical treatments, right?
Or if you skydive or rock-climb, We should limit coverage for broken bones a
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If you want people to vote Republican, run good candidates that are better than those run by the Democrats. For me, Trump or any of his immediate swamp buddies or relatives or the Mega/Maga/Gaga horde of politicians who suck up to him cause about a 95% drop in the chance they'll receive my vote. If the Democratic party candidate isn't better, I'll find a third party candidate. And by the way, I've been a lifelong Republican. I just tend to vote for who I feel is best, regardless of party in the general elec