The @PHE_uk report today paints a grim picture - TL;DR:-delta variant has almost replaced the beta variant in much of England- 50-60% more transmissible- ~2.5x higher risk of hospitalisations- Schools appear to be a key area of spread with many large no.s of clusters 🧵— Deepti Gurdasani (@dgurdasani1) June 3, 2021
If 50 percent of the population is vaccinated and even the most mild amount of mask wearing for whatever reason it won’t shoot up in cases to badly even among the vaccine reluctant/mask reluctant. Also you wear a mask not to protect yourself, but protect others. Your risk of this is if your unvaccinated and loiter around other unvaccinated non mask wearing people but because of the relatively high rate of vaccination this will probably just appear as sporadic outbreaks.
Edit: The other thing is this is describing the world that already exists. This variant already has overtaken others, if you look at the current uptick in cases we see a small but ignorable bump compared to the gross incompetence that was normalized earlier. I don’t mean to be that person, but covid will kill people for the rest of our lives. I don’t mean this as a doomer, but we should expect some level of increased death forever. That increase will hopefully be minimal after the vaccine campaign giving everyone a baseline resistance, but it’s not going away. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be lockdowns forever either.
This. Everyone saying "well we're just going to have to return to normal and just live with it and it'll be mostly fine" haven't been paying any fucking attention to this nightmarish 15-month-long lesson about harmful viruses and the inability of neoliberal capitalism to stop situations spiralling into much worse situations than they ever needed to be.
When I was working on Covid software last year, the non-profit I was working with was adamant that a return to normal wasn’t on the cards for 2021 as the risks were simply too high. These were people with deep experience of epidemics and public health policy. The Biden admin is rolling the dice and hoping for the best for some headlines.
You’re just being a doomer, it’s probably all gonna be fine what with fully vaxxed dying from this variant and the reproduction rate escalating. Not to mention people are likely not getting as tested as much as they’re vaxxed and there’s no way they can possibly catch it….
Yeah but the kulaks had to die for the Soviet Union to survive. You think we can save every single life in a society of millions of people? There are always levels of “acceptable death” even if we don’t want to acknowledge it.
The question is: who makes those decisions, and how do we get to judge whether those decisions were acceptable or not?
Yeah, as socialists, we're going to have to think really hard about how many thousands of deaths are acceptable to enable the neoliberal empire to spin back up to full speed a few months sooner.
half-assedly vaccinating some of the population while relaxing every single incredibly mild measure in place to reduce transmission is going to guarantee that it continues to circulate and, as we’ve seen, likely continue to mutate into new variants, for which there will be a selective pressure for the spread of variants resistant to the immunity conferred by the current vaccine and/or prior infection
The “west” completely botched the whole response, but if you think the Middle East, Africa, or huge fuck ups like India are all going to hide in their homes at this point I don’t know what to tell you. Covid spreads too well. It’s staying with us in some capacity the moment it escaped wherever it came from. In my second home country everyone I know has either had covid or has family that did, but the average age is super young so most people have just shrugged it off and have to live with the long term consequences if any. On the world chart, the recorded cases is very low because the government doesn’t track at all because it’s bad optics.
Yes, there is no guarantee of further mutations which increase transmission, vaccine escape, etc., but seeing as we’re up to what, four or five major variants exhibiting those traits so far? It seems pretty reasonable to assume.
Ya we are probably going to get an escape variant. We are probably also going to get another shot for that in a year. Hopefully it’s lethality is decreased if you have partial immunity. They already are thinking about this and will probably treat it like they do with the flu by predicting escape variants and preemptively doing some work to get a new batch of vaccines ready.
I’ll tell my family to not catch covid. Thanks for that. Let me inform every shit government in the world that they should press the covid removal button in their country as well. I’m sure with many of them having internet penetration rates in the low double digits they will be able to do a bang up job. The west botched this but at least your countries don’t completely cook the books.
Literally just wishful thinking “the experts are on it, don’t worry, they’ll have a magic new vaccine” without considering “what if they don’t” or “are they going to have it ready for widespread distribution, for free” or whether an escape variant would fuck up its production,
This isn’t wishful thinking their are experts who study viruses on it and they have gobsmacking amounts of money on it. They don’t have a distribution plan even right now. COVAX is a mess, the US is going to have a hard time vaccinating 50 percent of its population because of its nonexistent system.
whether these “experts” can be trusted to “be on it” when they’re the same ones bringing you such great decisions as “open schools back up without even vaccinating teachers, let’s just redefine social distancing as 3ft, it’ll be okay” while still refusing to recognize that covid can aerosolize and become airborne
Your confusing “experts” with experts. The people who want to make money push for making the line go up, they will be content with a modest increase in deaths if you can make the line go up faster in your country. In isolation maybe you can stop that in your country like China has for the most part. The problem is not every country is that good and I don’t even mean your fancy first world places.
There are actually people out there who can put the fact there is a potential escape variant together and start working on yet another vaccine. We do that every single year for the flu. It’s s pretty common thing. I already saw a few people I follow talking about getting this started back almost half a year ago at least.
What the hell are you going on about and why are you moralizing this at me like some /r/politics poster.
to prevent this from being a necessity
You are not going to be able to control the movements of everyone in in the world. Some governments are ineffective even if they are not evil. You have this as a reality you have to accept which is why vaccination is important and even countries like China which had this under control still are focusing on vaccination and distributing vaccines to the rest of the world. A certain level of covid is expected as vaccinations get rolled out.
It’s Just a Flu
I didn’t say it’s just the flu, I am saying that we do this sort of action for the flu a bunch already. The basics of biology haven’t changed.
You probably will never fully eliminate it since it’s zoonotic. It’s going to take a few years to roll out vaccines to the whole world. Till then you are going to see some level of COVID and people who get vaccinated still can catch COVID. It’s not a 100 percent protection.
I’m cool as a cucumber. I never advocated not wearing a mask, I just pointed out even in complete failure at this point in countries like the UK we are seeing an uptick in deaths, but not full blown doom. The potential from full blown doom is an escape variant which I think is inevitable, but is already being well tracked. There is also potential for mild hopium with an escape variant having less lethality against vaccinated people based on deaths of vaccinated people in variant cases.
Who is this we getting the new shot? and what is this weird shit, you can’t predict where new virus will develop, but vaccine resistant virus have some very high pressure to develop in exactly mildly vaccinated countries. the goal should be to eradicate it, not to continue to half ass it, cause masks are hard.
Covid is zoonotic and probably has an animal host in addition to humans. Elimination is probably impossible because of this. Vaccination is our way out of it, but will require regular upkeep.
We already have an idea how the spike protein will mutate since about last November based on variations already discovered. You can’t predict where a virus will mutate, but you can predict how it will.
It being zoonotic doesn’t change human to human transmission, a lot of shit is zoonotic, doesn’t mean you have to help it. Like ffs, we’re leftists, wearing masks should be just common courtesy to fellow humans until it’s squashed one way or the other.
Have I advocated against masks at any point? I advocated against doom while acknowledging that ya we are going to see some increased amount of death. What I mean is we wont ever eliminate it because we could vaccinate everyone in the world and suddenly a bat sneezes on someone in the world 5 years from now in between boosters and we suddenly have COVID back again.
If bat contact is inevitable yeah, if it stays there for the next 10 years and gets recombined with other corona viruses, non-transmissible to humans, why would it :shrug-outta-hecks:
I mean, your initial point was virus is here to stay (?), but that’s something that can be influenced and having defeatist attitude to it is kinda meh, realistic/pessimistic maybe, but it’s changeable
The problem is there are 8 billion of us. Someone out there is going to get it again. Even in places that handled this almost perfectly like China still get outbreaks the have to squash from time to time which is why vaccination is our only way out to prevent those outbreaks from becoming epidemics.
My point is that for the rest of our lives we are going to have some level of covid death. That level depends on the rate of vaccination. The long term goal is going to be doing enough vaccination to lower the death rate to an “acceptable” place for society to function. I don’t think it’s defeatist, more just recognizing this is the world we live in and we can beat this back but it doesn’t ever go away.
My original point was that even now with this new variant and everyone misbehaving we can see that it hasn’t effected the trend line to much which is a good case for hope and anti-doomerism
See, what I get from this (if it’s true) - I will wear a mask for the rest of my life in the cities, cause I don’t want some old lady to keel over :shrug-outta-hecks:
Counterpoint: variants already exist that make vaccines less effective. South Africa had to send back it's shipment of AstraZennica/Oxford vaccines because they cannot provide effective protection against the South African variant of Covid 19. What if one of these variants ends up on your country? By removing mask restrictions before herd immunity is achieved (67-75% of the population being fully vaccinated), you are creating the conditions for such an event to occur. Masks don't only protect others, they also protect yourself to a certain small extent, even fabric masks. Also n95/ffp2 grade masks that seal do protect yourself very well. Please still wear a mask in public. I understand not wearing a mask when everyone around you is fully vaccinated, in that case yeah go for it and go maskless, but you can't have that knowledge in public.
I addressed this point that I expect this, my point is that it’s a worldwide problem and we just have to assume that countries are going to botch their response enough we will get that variant which is why people are already looking at making vaccines that target those. My dumb hope is that if you had a vaccine and you catch an escape variant it might lower lethality at least, that would be a huge boon although one we can’t count on.
I wear a mask because my country has almost no one vaccinated at all. I stay inside and social distance as well. I am still very aware that you can’t trust everyone in the world to do this and with a animal reservoir species elimination is off the table so even if we vaccinated everyone it’s probably not going away away. China the country that has handled this best still gets regional flare ups they have to stamp out and not every country is as competent as China even if they are not overtly evil like the line god worshippers I’m the “western” countries.
Yeah it's just all messed up. Hopefully the vaccines work well and stomp everything out, but even then they're taking so long to be available in the global south. I've just pretty much accepted that a terrible 3rd wave is inevitable now.
Depends on where you are. The big risk in the developed world is a big wave of hospitalizations around the vaccine reluctant. The other longer tail problem is an escape variant, but generally the bad system we have set up is good at immediate problems with clear risk and every lab worldwide is currently tracking COVID variants.
This shouldn’t be a contrarian position, it’s the scientific consensus. I hate that doom porn is such an upvote magnet here.
Every doom porn post about variants on here for the past few months has been demonstrably proven wrong. Every variant has been handled fine by the vaccine. B117 didn’t cause an exponential surge (in the US). Vaccine hesitancy is serious but not destroying any hope of herd immunity.
Death rates are going to increase simply because of math. If you figure humans live to be 85-90 years old on average, and the population is not growing (i.e. births equal deaths), then about 1/90th of the population, 11-12 per 1000, has to die every year. Right now, only about 7-8 per 1000 die every year (even with covid it was less than 9/1000). That's a big change that we're going to have to make in our society, Covid variants or not.
I’ll take the contrarian position here.
If 50 percent of the population is vaccinated and even the most mild amount of mask wearing for whatever reason it won’t shoot up in cases to badly even among the vaccine reluctant/mask reluctant. Also you wear a mask not to protect yourself, but protect others. Your risk of this is if your unvaccinated and loiter around other unvaccinated non mask wearing people but because of the relatively high rate of vaccination this will probably just appear as sporadic outbreaks.
Edit: The other thing is this is describing the world that already exists. This variant already has overtaken others, if you look at the current uptick in cases we see a small but ignorable bump compared to the gross incompetence that was normalized earlier. I don’t mean to be that person, but covid will kill people for the rest of our lives. I don’t mean this as a doomer, but we should expect some level of increased death forever. That increase will hopefully be minimal after the vaccine campaign giving everyone a baseline resistance, but it’s not going away. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be lockdowns forever either.
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This. Everyone saying "well we're just going to have to return to normal and just live with it and it'll be mostly fine" haven't been paying any fucking attention to this nightmarish 15-month-long lesson about harmful viruses and the inability of neoliberal capitalism to stop situations spiralling into much worse situations than they ever needed to be.
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Getting rid of non-pharmaceutical interventions at this point in time is brazen, reckless and risking mass death through an escape variant. All for some asinine feel good shit around July 4th.
When I was working on Covid software last year, the non-profit I was working with was adamant that a return to normal wasn’t on the cards for 2021 as the risks were simply too high. These were people with deep experience of epidemics and public health policy. The Biden admin is rolling the dice and hoping for the best for some headlines.
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You’re just being a doomer, it’s probably all gonna be fine what with fully vaxxed dying from this variant and the reproduction rate escalating. Not to mention people are likely not getting as tested as much as they’re vaxxed and there’s no way they can possibly catch it….
:trump-anguish:
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The cult of the individual is so deeply ingrained in us, it’s horrific. Thatcher would be proud.
Yeah but the kulaks had to die for the Soviet Union to survive. You think we can save every single life in a society of millions of people? There are always levels of “acceptable death” even if we don’t want to acknowledge it.
The question is: who makes those decisions, and how do we get to judge whether those decisions were acceptable or not?
Yeah, as socialists, we're going to have to think really hard about how many thousands of deaths are acceptable to enable the neoliberal empire to spin back up to full speed a few months sooner.
As socialists we don’t have power so yeah we are all just circle jerking here.
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Eco-fascism is when people decide to grow food in a famine instead of working on a cure for a rare disease that one person has.
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If it’s happening in terf island I’m all for it. Nature is healing.
The “west” completely botched the whole response, but if you think the Middle East, Africa, or huge fuck ups like India are all going to hide in their homes at this point I don’t know what to tell you. Covid spreads too well. It’s staying with us in some capacity the moment it escaped wherever it came from. In my second home country everyone I know has either had covid or has family that did, but the average age is super young so most people have just shrugged it off and have to live with the long term consequences if any. On the world chart, the recorded cases is very low because the government doesn’t track at all because it’s bad optics.
Ya we are probably going to get an escape variant. We are probably also going to get another shot for that in a year. Hopefully it’s lethality is decreased if you have partial immunity. They already are thinking about this and will probably treat it like they do with the flu by predicting escape variants and preemptively doing some work to get a new batch of vaccines ready.
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I’ll tell my family to not catch covid. Thanks for that. Let me inform every shit government in the world that they should press the covid removal button in their country as well. I’m sure with many of them having internet penetration rates in the low double digits they will be able to do a bang up job. The west botched this but at least your countries don’t completely cook the books.
This isn’t wishful thinking their are experts who study viruses on it and they have gobsmacking amounts of money on it. They don’t have a distribution plan even right now. COVAX is a mess, the US is going to have a hard time vaccinating 50 percent of its population because of its nonexistent system.
Your confusing “experts” with experts. The people who want to make money push for making the line go up, they will be content with a modest increase in deaths if you can make the line go up faster in your country. In isolation maybe you can stop that in your country like China has for the most part. The problem is not every country is that good and I don’t even mean your fancy first world places.
There are actually people out there who can put the fact there is a potential escape variant together and start working on yet another vaccine. We do that every single year for the flu. It’s s pretty common thing. I already saw a few people I follow talking about getting this started back almost half a year ago at least.
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What the hell are you going on about and why are you moralizing this at me like some /r/politics poster.
You are not going to be able to control the movements of everyone in in the world. Some governments are ineffective even if they are not evil. You have this as a reality you have to accept which is why vaccination is important and even countries like China which had this under control still are focusing on vaccination and distributing vaccines to the rest of the world. A certain level of covid is expected as vaccinations get rolled out.
I didn’t say it’s just the flu, I am saying that we do this sort of action for the flu a bunch already. The basics of biology haven’t changed.
You probably will never fully eliminate it since it’s zoonotic. It’s going to take a few years to roll out vaccines to the whole world. Till then you are going to see some level of COVID and people who get vaccinated still can catch COVID. It’s not a 100 percent protection.
Which is why mask wearing is important then lol and normalizing it is also net good. also both of you need to chill out.
I’m cool as a cucumber. I never advocated not wearing a mask, I just pointed out even in complete failure at this point in countries like the UK we are seeing an uptick in deaths, but not full blown doom. The potential from full blown doom is an escape variant which I think is inevitable, but is already being well tracked. There is also potential for mild hopium with an escape variant having less lethality against vaccinated people based on deaths of vaccinated people in variant cases.
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Time to log off for a bit, comrade.
PooperKrobuttkin will never log off :sadness-abysmal:
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You’re right about that!
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Adding you to the list.
What list did I get added to?
People who actually know what they’re talking about lmao
Damn I was hoping it was someone’s internet debate minecraft friend list.
Who is this we getting the new shot? and what is this weird shit, you can’t predict where new virus will develop, but vaccine resistant virus have some very high pressure to develop in exactly mildly vaccinated countries. the goal should be to eradicate it, not to continue to half ass it, cause masks are hard.
Covid is zoonotic and probably has an animal host in addition to humans. Elimination is probably impossible because of this. Vaccination is our way out of it, but will require regular upkeep.
We already have an idea how the spike protein will mutate since about last November based on variations already discovered. You can’t predict where a virus will mutate, but you can predict how it will.
It being zoonotic doesn’t change human to human transmission, a lot of shit is zoonotic, doesn’t mean you have to help it. Like ffs, we’re leftists, wearing masks should be just common courtesy to fellow humans until it’s squashed one way or the other.
Have I advocated against masks at any point? I advocated against doom while acknowledging that ya we are going to see some increased amount of death. What I mean is we wont ever eliminate it because we could vaccinate everyone in the world and suddenly a bat sneezes on someone in the world 5 years from now in between boosters and we suddenly have COVID back again.
That is actually unlikely though, as bat pools will have different mutation pressures, away from human transmissibility
Yes, but if it already crossed the big barrier. Crossing back and staying away is the rare type of mutation right now.
If bat contact is inevitable yeah, if it stays there for the next 10 years and gets recombined with other corona viruses, non-transmissible to humans, why would it :shrug-outta-hecks:
I mean, your initial point was virus is here to stay (?), but that’s something that can be influenced and having defeatist attitude to it is kinda meh, realistic/pessimistic maybe, but it’s changeable
The problem is there are 8 billion of us. Someone out there is going to get it again. Even in places that handled this almost perfectly like China still get outbreaks the have to squash from time to time which is why vaccination is our only way out to prevent those outbreaks from becoming epidemics.
My point is that for the rest of our lives we are going to have some level of covid death. That level depends on the rate of vaccination. The long term goal is going to be doing enough vaccination to lower the death rate to an “acceptable” place for society to function. I don’t think it’s defeatist, more just recognizing this is the world we live in and we can beat this back but it doesn’t ever go away.
My original point was that even now with this new variant and everyone misbehaving we can see that it hasn’t effected the trend line to much which is a good case for hope and anti-doomerism
See, what I get from this (if it’s true) - I will wear a mask for the rest of my life in the cities, cause I don’t want some old lady to keel over :shrug-outta-hecks:
Counterpoint: variants already exist that make vaccines less effective. South Africa had to send back it's shipment of AstraZennica/Oxford vaccines because they cannot provide effective protection against the South African variant of Covid 19. What if one of these variants ends up on your country? By removing mask restrictions before herd immunity is achieved (67-75% of the population being fully vaccinated), you are creating the conditions for such an event to occur. Masks don't only protect others, they also protect yourself to a certain small extent, even fabric masks. Also n95/ffp2 grade masks that seal do protect yourself very well. Please still wear a mask in public. I understand not wearing a mask when everyone around you is fully vaccinated, in that case yeah go for it and go maskless, but you can't have that knowledge in public.
I addressed this point that I expect this, my point is that it’s a worldwide problem and we just have to assume that countries are going to botch their response enough we will get that variant which is why people are already looking at making vaccines that target those. My dumb hope is that if you had a vaccine and you catch an escape variant it might lower lethality at least, that would be a huge boon although one we can’t count on.
I wear a mask because my country has almost no one vaccinated at all. I stay inside and social distance as well. I am still very aware that you can’t trust everyone in the world to do this and with a animal reservoir species elimination is off the table so even if we vaccinated everyone it’s probably not going away away. China the country that has handled this best still gets regional flare ups they have to stamp out and not every country is as competent as China even if they are not overtly evil like the line god worshippers I’m the “western” countries.
Yeah it's just all messed up. Hopefully the vaccines work well and stomp everything out, but even then they're taking so long to be available in the global south. I've just pretty much accepted that a terrible 3rd wave is inevitable now.
:doomjak:
Depends on where you are. The big risk in the developed world is a big wave of hospitalizations around the vaccine reluctant. The other longer tail problem is an escape variant, but generally the bad system we have set up is good at immediate problems with clear risk and every lab worldwide is currently tracking COVID variants.
This shouldn’t be a contrarian position, it’s the scientific consensus. I hate that doom porn is such an upvote magnet here.
Every doom porn post about variants on here for the past few months has been demonstrably proven wrong. Every variant has been handled fine by the vaccine. B117 didn’t cause an exponential surge (in the US). Vaccine hesitancy is serious but not destroying any hope of herd immunity.
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Death rates are going to increase simply because of math. If you figure humans live to be 85-90 years old on average, and the population is not growing (i.e. births equal deaths), then about 1/90th of the population, 11-12 per 1000, has to die every year. Right now, only about 7-8 per 1000 die every year (even with covid it was less than 9/1000). That's a big change that we're going to have to make in our society, Covid variants or not.