General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors.
And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
We're walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that's not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn't gone away and there doesn't seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.
You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
> They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid.
This statement might be true for your location but is not true in general. Here in New York City hospitalizations due to covid are not very high and going down quickly. Elective surgeries and procedures go on as scheduled. ICUs are not overrun with covid specific cases. Majority of the patients with positive PCR test are hospitalized for medical reasons other than covid. Recorded deaths do not differentiate between "died from covid" and "died while covid positive" making death statistics hard to interpret. In general, compared to the situation on the ground in March-April 2020 this time the covid load on NYC hospital system is lighter.
The biggest challenge is staffing shortages in the hospitals due to general burn-out, people being on sick leave due to spreading omicron. Noticeable percentage of nurses were laid off because of the vaccine mandate (i am not judging the mandate, just stating the consequence).
SOURCE: several physician relatives and friends working in NYC hospitals (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn).
I'll tell you that here in Chicago, based off data, and anecdotes: really depends on the neighborhood. Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well.
Gosh, it's like vaccines work and that's the way out of this.
> Gosh, it's like vaccines work and that's the way out of this.
You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I'd just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way. Who is it directed towards? Do you think you are convincing anyone, or encouraging a productive discussion? I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated. I know I am.
In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn't assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.
I actually want to hear good reasons for avoiding vaccinations, because many people care a lot about that.
I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won't help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.
I don't agree with an argument from stand-my-ground, my-body-my-choice principles. I could agree with such a line of reasoning, if a personal choice did not present an immediate danger to anyone else.
This is a very infectious disease with severe health consequences. No one has control over the outcome, if they choose to infect another person. Maybe it's no big deal for them. Or maybe it wrecks their life, long after the vaccine objector has left the scene.
What are some other reasons for avoiding vaccination?
Just today Sweden's health agency advised against the vaccine for kids
> STOCKHOLM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks.
I'm not super well versed in the science but it seems like reasonable parties advise against vaccination in certain scenarios. Also knowing that government bodies are more likely to prioritize group outcomes over individual outcomes it seems reasonable for individuals to be skeptical.
Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.
A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection.
Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.
You've probably spent the last year being told these people are trying to murder your family though, so it also makes sense to me if you don't agree with this.
> Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.
It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else.
Getting boosted, even after having been infected, is a cheap and easy way to reliably keep your immune response high without unpredictable timing. It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
> It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else.
I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohorts. The recovered cohort didn't have any kind of stipulation that their infection was recent. The text does call out waning efficacy in the vaccines, but it does not mention the same for infection.
> It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
I did read, when it came out. I’m quoting Dr. Benjamin Silk, one of the authors:
"The evidence in this report does not change our vaccination recommendations. We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19.”
The reasoning is easy: many more people do not develop as strong a response from infection as they do from vaccination, and vaccination happens on a known schedule. This is especially of interest since the relationship here was reversed with Alpha, and is still unclear with Omicron - the figures I’ve seen have relatively recent infection somewhere between 2 doses and 3 in terms of efficacy, and infected plus vaccinated being the strongest.
Now, if you think from a public health perspective that makes the call very easy: vaccines are cheap and effective, and more reliably produce an immune response. Waiting for people to get infected means that the schedule is unpredictable (overloads happen), and the timing being variable means that you might have people thinking they’re protected but they were part of the group who never mounted a strong response, or who have waned over time. Rather than having people get infected randomly or hoping that they had a strong response, it’s much easier to spend a few seconds vaccinating them so you have a higher confidence that they’re protected.
Maybe you can help me understand this: if what you keep saying about reliability and timing are a thing, why doesn't this data support that?
The study shows a cohort of people who had infections sometime between the advent of testing and march of 2021, and that cohort had better outcomes than the vaccinated but uninfected cohort. How can that be? What does it mean for immunity solely from vaccination to be "stronger" and "more reliable" if the outcomes are worse? What am I missing here?
For the alpha vs delta point, what does it matter if the relationship flipped? They're basically equivalent either way. The important part is that they're both much better than seronaive.
I think you might have lost track of my original response to the question that started this thread (what is a reason to not get vaccinated) where I said:
> Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.
How are pox parties and "waiting for people to get infected" and "having people get infected randomly" relevant to the scenario that I mentioned, where people don't have the choice of getting vaccinated before they get infected, since its already happened? There's no waiting, there's no parties, there is just dealing with the cards you've been dealt. By now there should be far more of these people than straight up seronaive folks.
Similarly, "We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19", sounds like the same thing: if you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness. That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see empirically here) already been attained.
> [current medical consensus says] "If you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness." That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see empirically here) already been attained.
Apologies if my edit in quotating you is misrepresenting what you're saying, but it's how I read it.
Okay.
If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
I think so. I'm not a doctor, nurse, anything. But I expect anyone who hasn't seen COVID for a year, it would help. Probably the same benefit as a booster that follows vaccination for people who [think they] have never been infected.
Vaccination has its own risks. I believe there is very slight risk from the injection itself.
But -- I just got booster dose, my third shot, this week. I had to go to a pharmacy a couple of blocks from my house. I walked. I had to cross a street, with the traffic signal, but there were a couple of cars. They didn't hit me. This time. Then I had to go inside the pharmacy talk to some people, wait about ten minutes. Everyone was wearing masks, but honestly it was the most contact I've had with a random mix of people all week...
If I'd needed to drive miles out of my way to get the vaccination, that's also nonzero risk.
And then... well, it seemed to hit me pretty hard, the vaccine, this time. I felt awful for two days. Then I was fine. But it seemed like a bigger reaction than previous doses. I think that's supposed to happen, actually.
Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
> Apologies if my edit in quotating you is misrepresenting what you're saying, but it's how I read it.
I think thats a reasonable interpretation of what the original quote (which wasn't mine) was saying.
> If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
The linked data shows that it did seem to lead to a small improvement for folks during delta. Whether or not that small improvement is worth it is a judgment call.
> Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
Not that anybody needs this affirmation, but I'm 1000% in support of you making that call.
A lot of people caught the virus and recovered from it. Those people have immunity that is actually stronger than that offered by the vaccines. In those cases getting the vaccine is some (albeit small) risk and almost no reward.
My point is that if you insinuate that anyone who holds that position is stupid through sarcasm and snarky comments, you are never going to hear those reasons, because no one will want to engage with you.
I've heard tons of reasons why people aren't getting vaccinated. At least every one I've heard is based on false or poor quality information. I wouldn't go so far as to call those people stupid. But I would say most of their reasons for not getting vaccinated are stupid.
> I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won't help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.
This is exactly backwards from reality. The groups you mentioned are at much higher risk from covid and ergo it is much more important to vaccinate. The risk in absolute terms will remain much higher even with vaccination but this is a poor reason not to vaccinate. The reason you vaccinate is the degree of risk mitigated not the expectation of reducing that risk to zero.
I suggested immune-compromised people as a group who might need to avoid a vaccination because their immune response isn't working.
They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
There are certainly degrees of immune system pathology. If you are receiving medical care for such a situation, by all means please follow your doctors instructions and not mine!
I don't wish to be disrespectful but its undesirable to give life alteringly bad medical advice on a public forum. Saying hey don't listen to me listen to your doc after you gave advice that would literally lead to a portion of readers to actually die is in a word insufficient.
>They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
This is absolutely untrue. Most people who are immunocompromised have an immune system that works poorly not none. They are worse off than others as far as mortality and morbidity with the vaccine and without it compared to healthier individuals but they are absolutely able to develop antibodies and benefit from vaccination.
The CDC says they are 65-80% less likely to end up in the ER presenting with covid if vaccinated and boosted.
Immunocompromised people that took your advice would be 3-5x more likely to die if infected with covid and given prevalence will very likely to be infected in the year ahead of us. Please refrain from giving medical advise without first taking the time to understand the topic you are speaking on. It's more important not to spread health misinformation than chat on business and tech.
> Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid.
They don't stop it, but they do decrease your chances of acquiring it and they do reduce the viral load you shed.
> They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
So they prevent you from taking up a hospital bed, exposing the people who have to care for you to COVID and preventing other non-COVID emergencies from being tended to. That seems to impact others to me.
If avoiding obesity was as easy as a $20 needle prick with minimal side effects... absolutely. Without question, I would require that vaccine for everyone that didn't have a valid medical reason not to.
Yes it is more complicated. Here's two reasons. Glucose only gets converted to fat and harmful proteins at about 1:4 rate, whereas ethanol, fructose, and sucrose get converted to fat and harmful proteins at double or more that rate. So mere "counting calories" is meaningless.
Secondly, and this is the one that people find weird, once you've weighed X pounds, and lost some significant mass, you must eat less calories than simple "calories in is calories out" would suggest, because our physiology reacts as if food is scarce, and will store fat to the detriment of all other functions.
Not sure why I cant reply to the below comment but:
1. Sugar and its substitutes are bad for you, yes thats true (Thank you FDA for recommending 10 servings of grains, and backing the lipid hypothesis which caused low fat (aka High Sugar) products to appear everywhere.
2. Unless the obese somehow violate the law of thermodynamics if you reduce energy in while maintaining energy out mass will decrease.
There's also a difference between difficulty and complexity.
edit : Also, what's the protocol/norm about posting the same reply in multiple threads? I can see some pros and cons to it being within standard behavior, and don't see a clear answer as to which is larger
I don't know, is there a free two-shot regimen to help deal with obesity? Also, last time I checked, hospitals weren't running out of ICU beds thanks to obesity.
You clearly don't know much about obesity or simply don't care. Either way, if you're truly invested in the public health implications/strategies for obesity, you're welcome to look into it. :)
Because if you're unvaccinated you're much more likely to require hospitalization should you get Covid. The impact to others is the unvaccinated are consuming medical resources and causing burn-out amongst medical practitioners.
We dont make this distinction with the vast majority of personal choices. Obesity causes a ton of strain on our health system. Should we start a class system based on BMI?
Where are you getting the information for this claim? The vaccines certainly reduce your chance of catching it, and though vaccinated individuals may have similar viral loads to unvaccinated people at peak, the period of time that they're infectious is shorter. [0] One study even suggests less infectiousness. [1]
So you’re in favor of mandates along the lines of “Get the vaccine or you are fired” for marginal benefits? Would you be ok if this precedent was extended to other prevention areas? Eg. Maintain social distancing or you are fired (protests of any kind are typically not socially distanced)
Wasn't this subthread was about your claim that getting vaccinated doesn't influence one's chance of infecting others?
If you want to retreat to "ok, they probably do actually help a little bit with that, but I think the amount to which they help with that is small enough that [thing] isn't worth it.", then ok, but, like, I think you should probably make it explicit.
(earlier, the topic was about like, health insurance, not employment, and so I'm using [thing] to cover both of those things.)
If nurses and doctors were quitting and students dropping out of medical school for fear of dealing with the fallout surrounding people not wearing seatbelts... yeah, we'd probably be considering it.
> You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I'd just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way.
It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead?
> In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
You are comparing getting a couple of free shots at the pharmacy to much more complicated lifestyle circumstances.
> It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so why maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead?
and you think this is an experience unique to your viewpoint? do you think the people reading your words who have vaguely opposing views might not also be fatigued when your group flatly denies their concerns as irrelevant?
if you find yourself in an us-vs-them mindset and decide to ditch empathy, all you do is widen the divide.
> do you think the people reading your words who have vaguely opposing views might not also be fatigued when your group flatly denies their concerns as irrelevant?
In the sense that a conspiracy theorist or a crank gets tired of people not believing them, yes, I guess they are annoyed. I just little empathy for them: I want this pandemic to be over, and they are getting in the way of that. Barring that, I hope that they can take responsibility for their choices without forcing the consequences on everyone else.
> I have little empathy for them, however: I want this pandemic to be over, and they are getting in the way of that.
funny, because most everyone i know wants this too, and it’s always “the other side” which prevents the pandemic from “being over”. from a person standing in the middle, it appears that it’s the divide which blocks this, whereas from deep behind lines i guess it looks like everyone past that divide is blocking things.
well good luck winning a battle in the modern world through force of will. there’s a reason the world powers generally don’t conduct large wars openly these days, and that many conflicts are instead resolved via international agreements (especially of trade). if you do discover a way to resolve the social woes in life without leveraging pro-social behaviors (like cooperation/empathy), write me and share your findings so that i in turn can better the state of our society. and if you spot the inherent contradiction of the previous sentence, i’ll buy you a beer.
> funny, because most everyone i know wants this too, and it’s always “the other side” which prevents the pandemic from “being over”.
Yes, that's true. The anti-vaxxers think the vaccines will kill them or make them sterile, or something...it is really hard to keep track of what their current theory is. Again, it's a free shot you can get at the pharmacy, the only rational reason for avoiding it is if you thought it could do harm rather than just being thought ineffective.
But given that unvaccinated are dying 10X more in hospitals due to COVID than unvaccinated cases that come in, maybe this problem will just solve itself the good ole fashioned Darwin way. Mind you, as long as they don't increase unvaccinated deaths, aren't clogging the hospitals or causing my health care costs/premiums to rise (faster than they would otherwise), I believe they should have the liberty to make that decision.
> The anti-vaxxers think the vaccines will kill them or make them sterile, or something...it is really hard to keep track of what their current theory is. Again, it's a free shot you can get at the pharmacy, the only rational reason for avoiding it is [..]
in one sentence, you admit that you don't understand what knowledge some person is operating with. in the next sentence, you claim to know what is rational for that person to do. if you're using "rational" in the literal sense, then you've leapt to premature conclusions.
and i get it. it's exasperating. there's a bunch of people who don't want to take a vaccine. and from the outside it seems that as more information becomes available to this group, their vocalized reason for avoiding the vaccine changes. they're being dishonest, and that's infuriating!
if this is what you're seeing, it doesn't necessarily mean every individual within that group is shifting their story. some certainly are, but many aren't and the group behavior can be explained by things similar to "evaporative cooling": some people leave the group as a result of new information (new people are still getting vaccinated, every day), and the people left behind are the ones for which the previously dominant argument wasn't their primary reason for not getting the vaccine -- and so the dominant argument of the group then changes.
group dynamics encapsulate way more complexity than just that one effect. and i think it's worth considering. you see that your own individual behavior is way more consistent than the other side's behavior -- and it is. but that's comparing an individual (yourself) to a group (anti-vaxxers). it's apples to oranges. the other individuals aren't seeing your individual behavior. they're seeing your group's behavior. they're seeing the exact same type of inconsistent and contradictory behavior that you're so fed up with.
what's the way out? well, we haven't found it, so it's hard to say for sure. but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.
> in one sentence, you admit that you don't understand what knowledge some person is operating with. in the next sentence, you claim to know what is rational for that person to do. if you're using "rational" in the literal sense, then you've leapt to premature conclusions.
You are right. I am just assuming that there is a rational explanation in their head for why they don't want to vax, and as you point out, it might not be. Nor are the explanations for vaccine hesitancy consistent.
> but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.
I'm not really compassionate enough to see this as an empathy issue: if their choices didn't affect me I wouldn't care one bit what they decided to do. Right now we have a huge society-wide problem that requires some sort of societal cohesion and consensus to defeat, but we lack that, and I don't think any of us have the energy to fight this battle at the individual level.
> Right now we have a huge society-wide problem that requires some sort of societal cohesion and consensus to defeat, but we lack that, and I don't think any of us have the energy to fight this battle at the individual level.
walk me through it: how do we achieve societal cohesion if not by empathy? a society is a network of individuals and entities, and cohesion implies that the individuals want to "stick together". why would i want to be cohesive with the parts of that network that don't acknowledge me? individuals are drawn together by common interests, shared feelings, mutual understanding, ... empathy. it's the basis of every relationship i've ever held onto. how do you build a cohesive society without that? i really don't mean to be obtuse... this is all that i know.
There are limits to empathy. I empathize with those who have been misled by a bunch of loony, grifting parasites who would have been laughed out of polite society 30 years ago. I empathize with those who suffer from mental illness exacerbated by political forces that seek to benefit from the confusion they foment. I empathize with those who are afraid of needles (I am one), and who are overwhelmed with too much information and misinformation.
But at the end of the day, after two years of watching this insanity in our society, where wearing a mask is considered "weak", where taking a vaccine, a vaccine that we're incredibly lucky to have, is considered a sign of Satan, or micro tracking chips, or sterilization or whatever is the latest loony thought of the day, I'm done.
> I empathize with those who have been misled by a bunch of loony, grifting parasites who would have been laughed out of polite society 30 years ago.
“laughed out of polite society”? think that one over a bit. sounds pretty impolite to me. (also a decent example of how a group [“polite society”] can inadvertently establish foregranted truths [its own politeness] and be thoroughly baffled when the outgroup challenges that fundamental belief. i’m not accusing anyone here of groupthink — just that it’s a prominent aspect of the present moment).
anyway, i get your point. we all have our limits and there’s no shame in that. IMO if you’re at the point where you truly can’t converse productively with some group — and don’t have the desire to grind it out and search for a way to actually relate to/reach them, then just exit the conversation. leave it to those rare overwhelmingly compassionate individuals who are able and willing to endure to bridge the gap. sometimes you’ll do more good by saying nothing than by fanning the flames. not always easy in an era where people can feel defined by the beliefs we advertise, but if you really believe that these opposing views of the vaccine are harmful to our society, then let go of your apparel and delegate to the best methods for resolving these opposing views. maybe that’s linking to data-based writings (sounds like you’ve tried that, to no success). maybe you’ve found that you can’t actually provide anything to resolve these oppositions. that’s okay. someone else will have it. yield the floor to them.
>and you think this is an experience unique to your viewpoint?
Can attest to that. As a flat earther, I am just so sick of the snarkiness of everyone who believes what mainstream science preaches.
We should all equally appreciate ALL differing views because no idea is more or less valid than any other idea. Evolution, creationism, alien seed planted by Xenu, they all deserve our time and attention.
> It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead?
It's far more nuanced than that. I have now had three doses of the vaccine, and I had Covid subsequent to the third dose. Israel is now moving on a fourth dose, and the vaccine manufacturers are making an Omicron-specific variant. If my city continues with prior behavior, and mandates a booster for a virus I've now had, am I an "anti-vaxxer" for not wanting the unnecessary dose?
That you're characterizing the situation in this binary way says a lot to how the entire issue has been treated as a cartoon political issue. But many millions of people are in exactly this situation, today (i.e. those who already had Covid, and are now being required to get a vaccine).
I don't understand why you would be against getting a free booster, or even a shot every 6 months. Is it more harmful in Israel?
Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics. Either they are had something else (like a flu or a cold, you wouldn't know without a test), or something about natural immunity isn't working. I won't speculate, I believe its the former (easier to confirm that you got the vaccine then if you really got COVID).
> Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics.
People who have had Covid are at least as well-protected against serious illness as anyone who is vaccinated, and probably more so given the latest variants:
> During October 3–16, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates were 19.8-fold lower (95% CI = 18.2–21.4) among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, 55.3-fold lower (95% CI = 27.3–83.3) among unvaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, and 57.5-fold lower (95% CI = 29.2–85.8) among vaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis.
Do you have a citation on previously infected unvaccinated people having 10x the mortality rate of vaccinated people?
Or are you saying a lot of people think they've gotten covid but actually got something else?
If it's the latter case, how do you feel about encouraging that the people who don't want to be vaccinated because they've had a prior infection get an antibody test, and get vaccinated if it comes back negative, and if they do indeed have antibodies we treat them the same way we'd treat someone vaccinated?
If you think that natural immunity is comparable to vaccine-generated immunity, but that proposal still sounds unappealing to you, I'd be curious why.
I imagine toward the people who behave as if vaccines aren't effective, which are nonzero.
> In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
I mean. The latter statement is a thing gay people actually DID say, long before the government told them to. Gay people noticed that it was spread through sex and that condoms work. Not even going to touch the former statement since I don't feel like wading into the criminalization of black people. Suffice to say, not convinced by either of these comparisons.
> I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn't assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.
I'd label your preceding statement to be snarky, fwiw.
It's a commonly accepted fact that vaccines work. We were all vaccinated against multiple viruses as babies for a reason.
The fact that he added the word "Gosh" to his comment doesn't make it insulting or target any specific group of people. You're taking great offense over nothing and distracting from a meaningful discussion.
I think repeating accurate facts is an important thing. Because the random complaints in incorrect and bizarre negative anti-vax claims pass by without someone addressing them often.
What is real and true matters. There's lots of things that are hard to decide, but we know that they're not millions of hidden deaths from getting vaccinated, and we know that there are millions of people protected from dying because they got vaccinated.
I don't think comments like that are meant to convince anyone.
There are vanishingly few circumstances other than legitimate medical conflicts that warrant being unvaccinated. Namely, crippling anxiety of planning/scheduling the appointment, or being misled by trusted advisors (Fox Entertainment or doctors who should have their medical license revoked).
Other than that, I have very little patience or sympathy.
I'm surprised more doctors have not had their license revoked for publicly preaching misinformation. You can have your license revoked for treating a patient when a more specialized expert is available. For example, a dentist can get in trouble for not referring more complex issues to a dental surgeon, periodontist, etc.
And yet we have cardiologists and eye doctors and chiropractors telling the public that the vaccine is dangerous and that we would be better off without it.
I saw someone mentioned that a doctor/professor from Johns Hopkins was raising concerns about college age kids getting vaccinated. I looked him up. He's a surgical oncologist. Guess what the epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists at Johns Hopkins are recommending?
Oh ya, and the surgical oncologist turned epidemiologist just so happens to have a book about the pandemic that he is pushing right now. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.
> I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated.
I am not so sure. HN is the most "covid is just a flu, masks and respirators dont matter, teachers should teach when sick with covid those lazy bastards" place I regularly visit. I would be surprised if vaccination rates did not followed the same general political alignement.
What are the demographics of each of your identified cohorts? For example, if the south side is under vaccinated (whatever that means) and doing poorly then it seems a little disingenuous to act like their medical care wasn’t subpar prior to Covid.
> Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well.
Not accurate AT ALL.
NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentage.
Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates.
For most ICUs running at 80 to 90 percent capacity is standard.
> Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates.
Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.
Icus in normal times stay at 70% capacity, so covid adding 20-30 percent capacity fills them up. Doing what CA does, flattening the curve and keeping covid induced capacity at 10-15% allows hospitals to continue functioning normally.
> Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia.
So I went ahead and checked this, and it's wrong.
Escambia's ICU capacity is 87% full, SC's is 90% full (and SC is a bad choice, as they have a total of 21 ICU beds in the county, they use bay area ICU beds for overflow, which are currently sitting at ~80% capacity), and Marin's is....40%. So I'm not sure what data you're looking at, but it seems to just be wrong.
Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half, hospitals were reducing non-critical care. That means you have tons of people who need hip replacements or brain surgery or tumor removal who haven't been able to get it. Many of them will need to recover in the ICU a bit, so you'd want a higher baseline ICU use post-elective surgery freeze, as that implies that the "clog" is being recovered from.
If the hospital is still full due to covid patients, those elective surgeries will never get done, leading people who never caught covid to suffer too. So low covid capacity, but higher overall use temporarily means that we're catching up to all the deferred non-covid care, something we really need to do!
The other possibility is that you mean that the 70-80% that ICUs normally run at is somehow problematic (because well like I just said, we did actually "flatten" it by deferring elective ICU recovery for more than a year in many places). The US already has more ICU beds per capita than most nations, even other developed nations, so I'm not sure what your idea here is other than perhaps, "The us population is too unhealthy or is providing too much healthcare", which are both interesting positions to take for sure.
>Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half...<a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.>
Bullshit.
Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions.
COVID is not causing the curve to be need flattening.
The medical system is.
Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
> Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions.
Yes, and actual data says this is a problem, because we don't have the capacity to handle a sustained 15% increase in ICU use. That is simply not a thing we have the capacity to handle.
> Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
The less than 1% of people who fall into this category are probably not the issue. 1% more nurses isn't going to address 15% more patients.
> <a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.>
You really should have, because none of it was "emotional" and most of it was quantitative, so this makes you look rather silly. Like c'mon, you've lied about how full hospitals are in California, when confronted on that you claim I'm "gish galloping" with emotional nonsense that's just true[0] factual content about how we handle and have handled hospital capacity and why your (completely conjectured!) conclusion was wrong.
> we don't have the capacity to handle a sustained 15% increase in ICU use.
100 - 15 is 85.
There's 85% left to handle it.
Where is this 85% going and why is it less of a concern in flattening the curve?
why is no one concerned about this 85% of non-covid ICU patients??
Seems to me covid is a small fraction of ICU cases.
Seems to me maybe the ICU should work on handling its caseload..
Seems to me maybe there's systemic problems like the AMA limiting the number of health professionals to keep the salaries up and firing the ones who have natural immunity.
Maybe that's why the curve can't get flattened.
but one thing that is crystal clear from the data is that covid is not the primary cause of hospital overflow.
> Where is this 85% going and why is it less of a concern in flattening the curve?
The short answer would be "aging" and "accidents". And we already do huge amounts of research to lessen the impact of those things, but if you have any ideas, do let me know.
It's less of a concern because it isn't really something we can change. We can't make people age less quickly, or have fewer accidents. And while we can (and did!) treat some of those things less, that has severe downsides in the long term.
> Seems to me covid is a small fraction of ICU cases.
No, it's a 20% bump in what the system is meant to handle. Systems don't generally do well when asked to sustain 20% more of what they were doing, forever.
> Seems to me maybe there's systemic problems like the AMA limiting the number of health professionals to keep the salaries up and firing the ones who have natural immunity.
Can you explain why you keep bringing up nurses when we discuss ICU capacity? Last I checked, we didn't need to vaccinate beds.
how long have aging and accidents been around? since the dawn of the human race?
and they still haven't figured out a way to handle the ICU load?
you would think with all kinds of random unplanned disasters happening all over at any time
..like terrorist attacks or earthquakes or tornadoes... they would be able to increase capacity by 20%
the problem is not covid patients, the problem is either a poorly planned system or news media sensationalism
> ..like terrorist attacks or earthquakes or tornadoes... they would be able to increase capacity by 20%
They can, for brief periods. You start by overflowing to nearby hospitals, you can't do that for covid though, because its global. So you try to drop non-urgent care, but they've already done that. You can't stop treating non-urgent care forever, it's only a temporary approach.
So you're left with, well, reducing serious covid case rates. This can absolutely be done, by the way, with a combination of vaccination and varying masking policies as necessary. Because that's the only tool left after all of the others have been exhausted.
> and they still haven't figured out a way to handle the ICU load?
There is actually a really easy solution, it's just ethically terrible. You refuse (or triage last) unvaccinated covid patients. This solves most of the problems. It is however ethically unconscionable.
> the problem is not covid patients, the problem is either a poorly planned system or news media sensationalism
Yes, we all recognize that the global healthcare system is not able to handle a sustained 10-20% increase in demand. That doesn't make it "poorly planned" (are you willing to pay 20% extra in healthcare costs to cover the increased slack?)
The next line is "deaths with covid on the death certificate", which is different and is actually a higher number and the more important number, as it deals with people who died of covid induced pneumonia after a multi-week stay in the ICU, but not people who by chance had a heart attack after contracting a mild case.
Now there's where we get into interesting territory. The UK significantly relaxed regulations around March 2020, and basically made it very easy to put "Covid" on death certificates. The requirement for a coroner's report in the case of a novel disease (ie, Covid) was also dropped, as well as the requirement to do a Covid test (or even certify the death in person). [1]
As a result, it will never be possible to know how many died of specifically Covid, and how many died of a viral-induced pneumonia.
We know how many people die of non-covid viral induced pneumonia in a normal year (and in a bad year). Most of it is caused by the flu. We also know that covid policies have demonstrably reduced flu rates to some of the lowest ever over the past few years.
So what other cause of viral induced pneumonia do you suppose is the one killing everyone?
I already did. We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked.
I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?
> We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked.
What do you think causes viral pneumonia? If you get in a car crash and bleed out and die, they put both "massive hemorrhage" and "vehicle accident" on your death certificate. If you die of covid-induced viral pneumonia, they put both on your death certificate, because the covid is what caused the pneumonia. You're trying to draw a distinction where there isn't one. Deaths from covid-induced viral pneumonia are deaths from covid, in exactly the same way that deaths from car-crash induced massive bleeding are deaths from a car crash.
> I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?
See https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm#anchor_16336269..., notably the heading "Are there other metrics that can be used to compare the 2020-2021 flu season with past seasons?", which shows a table. That table compares the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Essentially they tested around the same number of specimens and the incidence of influenza was 1000x lower.
This is probably the most accurate datapoint, other things match up (such as reported hospitalizations also being ~100x lower than the year prior) but those are more prone to accidental misclassification of flu-as-covid. You can't really screw up a test in the same way. But generally speaking, they were low enough that the CDC couldn't actually calculate the likely impact, it was too low to make reasonable predictions about. This year it's higher, but still 10x less than a normal year.
(the reason for this is also straightforward: covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission)
Clue's in the name. A respiratory virus, of which there are many.
>covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission
Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.
I take your point with the data you provided (although there's no information on sampling methods and thus the statistical significance of those numbers. We also don't have a similar data point for the UK), but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures. I'm not in the US, but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter.
> Clue's in the name. A respiratory virus, of which there are many.
So again, if not covid, what other thing is causing the extreme spike in viral phenomena deaths? Is it some other novel virus that no one noticed or did we suddenly become more susceptible to the common cold?
> Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.
Anecdotes are not data, but if we're sharing them, your experience would be unusual in my neck of the woods.
> but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures
It really isn't.
> but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter
Compared to a year ago, social distancing and mask mandates are far weaker. December 2020, gyms were closed and I couldn't go to work and restaurants were at 25% capacity or outdoor/takeout only. Today gyms are open, I can work from my office, and restaurants can run at full capacity.
> You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
I'm one of these folks. I think it's wrong to blame this solely on COVID. I won't have kids because my position in the United States is nowhere near guaranteed. I have survived three economic recessions, one of which I lost everything in and the course of my life was permanently altered. I watched as society adopted "the internet" and used it in terrifying detail. I've watched as social problems turned into vitriol, anger, and at times violence. I've watched as climate change was viewed as either "conserve", "don't believe", or "innovate" with the latter being the latest focus - none of which have worked and each took myopic approaches to a very broad problem. I've watched as society became polarized on such arbitrary lines as politics, missing any nuance that may occur across the spectrum; almost turned into a caricature of Star Wars. Home prices are higher than they've ever been, inaccessible to even moderately wealthy citizens.
I may not be on the money with each of my perspectives, though I also don't think I'm really that far off. So riddle me this: Why in the hell would I want to add one more responsibility while dodging and dealing with the bullets of life as-we-know-it today?
If you don't feel like taking on that responsibility, don't do it.
But understand: the vast majority of human history is colored by a desire to grow a family in order to provide strength to their progeny knowing that they, in turn, will face an unkind future and can be protected, in some degree, by their kin.
Sounds like you're at the end of a multi-billion year winning streak. Your ancestors did well.
I think you are misunderestimating the value that bringing a new life into the world offers you as a parent, and your community. The world in general, and especially the United States, has never been more peaceful and prosperous as it is now. Human civilization needs more people, now more than ever.
> I think you are misunderestimating the value that bringing a new life into the world offers you as a parent, and your community.
To me judging whether or not to have a child solely based on the value that it would have for you and your community, without evaluating whether or not your child will have [the possibilities of] a good life, seems cruelly selfish.
If you're not sure that there's a stable future to bring a child into, then it only makes sense to wait.
> The world in general, and especially the United States, has never been more peaceful and prosperous as it is now.
Nevertheless, there's a good case to be made that the next few decades will be "interesting times".
> Human civilization needs more people, now more than ever.
Why? For what? I mean, I like humans but there are billions and billions of us. What purpose do you see for which our teeming numbers would not already suffice?
You're under no obligation to have children but historically it has been very rare for anyone to have a "guaranteed" position. The norm of human existence has been brief periods of stability punctuated by wars, famines, epidemics, depressions, and disasters. Yet through it all our ancestors kept reproducing. Our problems today are minor by comparison.
What's stopping a country, or hospital, from saying: "we'll prioritize cancer patients, scheduled surgeries, normal operation; you come in with Covid respiratory distress, and we're full? Go away." From the government data I've found, Covid patients are about 5-20% of emergency department patients in the US[0]; in Switzerland that leaves a healthy amount of free beds[1] (though I'm sure staffing is another issue). Why are they causing such disruption? And if they are, why are we not having a debate about whether all the additional cancer deaths, heart attack deaths (from deprogrammed surgeries and screenings) are worth it? In what way is this "healthcare catastrophe" not partly avoidable?
> You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
That's been happening long before Corona, and I doubt it has much do do with politics or "optimism about climate change" compared with wages, housing, etc.
I believe the EMTALA means a hospital can't deny you emergency treatment. Though what defines an emergency can be kind of murky. They could certainly evaluate most covid patients and send them home with Tylenol, or make them sit in their car while they let gunshot wounds in. I also think there is government money available for hospitals treating covid patients, so it is in the hospital's interest to not turn them away.
Some anecdotal evidence, I went through cancer treatment starting Feb 2020, ending Feb 2021, with a few scans since. Including one in a few days. I have never had any of my numerous appointments postponed for covid. But I think it is because I am lucky enough to afford to be treated by a hospital with a large cancer department.
I've asked my friends working in medicine the same thing. What if hospitals were to start turning away those who are willingly unvaccinated? I haven't been able to get a clear answer but the basic theme I hear is you can't, state law prohibits that. Of course the law can be changed, but what legislature is going to do that? This is where politics enters the fray. They'd rather kick the can down the road and bring in the National Guard to help run the hospitals than turn away patients and potentially face voter wrath.
For hospitals it's the federal EMTALA law which makes it illegal for hospitals to deny emergency care on the basis of vaccination status. If a patient shows up with unstable vital signs then the hospital is required to at least stabilize them. For COVID-19 patients that's usually based on respiratory distress or low blood oxygen saturation.
So, we essentially have mandates to "treat" with no corresponding agreement on defining any mandates to "prevent". Prevention mandates could be a tapestry of options and defined within specific contextual and cultural boundaries. But having nothing on the "prevent" tilts the scale entirely to obligatory treatment and clearly feels imbalanced.
I'm vaccinated and think everyone capable of receiving the vaccine should get it but turning people away is cruel. That's science-fiction dystopia cruelty in my opinion. Now if a hospital is full and at capacity maybe there are some calculations but just turning people away is wrong.
Note I wasn't suggesting turning people away if they're unvaccinated, I think that would be dehumanizing and would set a horrible precedent. I'm just wondering why pre-programmed surgeries and screenings are being deprogrammed when a Covid hospitalization spike is expected, as opposed to keeping all previously programmed appointments, and turning new Covid patients away when you hit full capacity (regardless of vaccination status, and obviously wouldn't include people who catch Covid at the hospital since they're already there) given the additional burden involved when dealing with Covid patients.
It's a really complicated issue. I've had a doctor friend explain it to me that one way to look at it is ignorance is a disease. The unvaccinated who have Covid now have two diseases they're fighting against. It's an interesting perspective.
Keeping with that perspective, those coming to the hospital with Covid that goes untreated are more likely to die in the next 30 days than those who come in with cancer that goes untreated. That's the calculus being played out. They're hoping to get through these waves and then get back to the patients who weren't facing as immediate a health threat.
What's really bothering my medical friends, and I suspect may be the source of so much burnout, is the prevalence of willful ignorance. They see it as a majority of the unvaccinated are people who should know better - that's what's making this so tough for them. They knew there would be cranks and crackpots who wouldn't get the vaccine because there always are. They weren't expecting it to be this prevalent and they certainly weren't expecting it to be politicized. The whole situation is demoralizing and causing people to reassess their life choices.
Most people don't die from covid, they die with covid and their multiple comorbidities. I think it would bring up multiple issues. I have many questions about the approach. Would you turn away someone who is asymptomatic but covid positive? What if they were turned away due to false positive covid test? What if they contracted covid from the hospital? What if they are vaccinated and still get covid?
I suspect it could easily lead to broader exemptions and eventually bring up the issue of other infectious diseases not being treated.
Pretty sure this is exactly what Switzerland has done a few times when the hospital situation was much worse for a short time last year.
My family also got several, none time critical yet time time intensive treatments over the past 2 years. There was no waiting because of COVID here.
Maybe also part of the reason it never turned out to be the healthcare catastrophe Americans some to live trough.
Edit:// not turning away, but giving less priority. Nobody gets or should be turned down. But when it comes to triangulation cancer may should win against a non vaccinated patient with low chance to survive.
At least in my area, I have heard of people being turned away from hospitals (where they are going due to covid symptoms) because of their vaccination status.
As with many things, nuance is a subject that many on HN fail to grasp.
They believe that masking is a binary decision and that once made, the die is cast.
Rather, if we tied masking mandates to thresholds of community spread and encouraged/provided high quality masks, the public would at least show medical professionals we're interested in keeping another body out of the morgue, aside from the obvious vaccination need.
But I digress - there are many slow moving disasters that were every so slightly accelerated by COVID that are only going to surface in the years to come.
> Rather, if we tied masking mandates to thresholds of community spread and encouraged/provided high quality masks, the public would at least show medical professionals we're interested in keeping another body out of the morgue, aside from the obvious vaccination need.
At this point, mandates have convinced everyone who will ever be convinced. There is no more convincing in our future. A subset of people will always reject masks and vaccines.
> At this point, mandates have convinced everyone who will ever be convinced. There is no more convincing in our future. A subset of people will always reject masks and vaccines.
This is defeatist and I don't think it's true. Most of those people have never had a mandate — as we've seen everywhere those have actually been implemented, there are a very few dedicated antivaxers and a whole ton of people who are comfortable repeating their shiboleths as long as there's no personal cost. Once they're forced to accept the consequences of their decision, a significant fraction cave. They'll never admit that they spent the last couple of years parroting lies but at least they're vaccinated and far less likely to be tying up a hospital bed.
Its only defeatist if you give up. And that's effectively what our leadership has done; keep screeching about masks and vaccinations, some listen, some don't, and nothing changes. The curve keeps oscillating.
Ok; recognize that. Pivot. If the best solution won't work, then it isn't the best solution; continuing to believe so is like standing on the Titanic as its going down and yelling "god damn it just don't hit the iceberg, its so simple, just turn left." Its not helpful toward driving positive outcomes, and that's what matters. Its what happens when you let scientists and doctors run the show; they present fantastic solutions which work in the lab, if everyone does them, perfectly. The population is not a programmable computer.
What's the problem right now? Medical care capacity. What's the best way to solve that? Keep people out of the hospital. That isn't working. Stop doubling down. We need to keep medical professionals in the system, and encourage new ones to join. Pass federal laws limiting the number of patients nurses are responsible for. Supplement medical professional income with tax dollars. Create incentives for retired professionals to come back into the fray, and younger people to stay in the pipeline to join the field. Deploy the military to hard-hit areas. Embrace more easily accessible, quicker trade-skill like training for COVID-care specialist to manpower-supplement existing hospital forces, working underneath more highly trained professionals. There are many things we could do, but we're not doing much of them.
> And that's effectively what our leadership has done; keep screeching about masks and vaccinations, some listen, some don't, and nothing changes.
This is wrong, and the reason resolves the seeming problem: “our leadership” never did that. Some people in some places did, many did not, and in many cases they actively worked against it. The experts’ plan works everywhere it’s actually been tried.
I do agree that we need to improve conditions for healthcare workers but that’s slow to train people up and it’d be much easier and faster if we had fewer Republicans driving them out. The politics around basic health measures is the most widely mentioned reason for burnout.
I find it kind of amazing that the justification for school mask mandates (which was once "keep kids from getting covid") has morphed into "we'll lower the load on hospitals if the kids keep their faces covered."
Can anyone imagine if we went back to 2020 and pitched this to parents? "Look, if your kid gets it, it will be similar in nature to a chest cold. It's somewhat more dangerous for the elderly. In order to keep doctors and nurses from getting burned out, the kids are all going to wear masks all day. Other than that, outside of school, we're all going to be pretty much getting back to normal."
I have lost track of what the goalposts are. I am starting to think that people just like the idea that children are suffering, it must mean that we're taking the whole thing seriously. As long as none of us are inconvenienced, right?
> In order to keep doctors and nurses from getting burned out
You say it as if that's the only consequence of a medical shortage... How about replacing that with "in order to have enough functioning doctors and nurses able to treat patients with cancer, respond to car accidents, and do organ transplants"?
Isn't the whole point of the article that school mask mandates probably don't reduce spread? If it doesn't reduce spread than it won't help your overwhelmed friends working in medicine. Sorry I guess I just don't understand what point you are trying to make.
His point is that the job satisfaction of adults is important and saving it requires our collective agreement that 1+1=3.
The point of masking in schools was maybe, once, based on the theory that it would keep the children and teachers safe. Now, the point is that we must exert every lever of control at our disposal. It just so happens that the only group of people who we can reliably control are children, as they cannot vote, do not have fully-formed civil rights, and (in the main) are legally required to attend government run schools each day.
So, while they'd love to make everyone else mask, they realize they practically cannot -- so they focus on children. It's grotesque.
The thesis of the article is that even though studies show masks work studies in schools had obvious flaws and are measuring multiple confounding factors ergo masks might not work so we have no justification for mask mandates. This is materially different from knowing they don't work.
I cannot countenance the idea that keeping most of your spit with you rather than floating around the room doesn't reduce spread of a respiratory virus. At best I would suggest instead that schools ought to have had a mandate to use and reuse sterilized n95 masks instead of a loosely fitting cloth mask oft worn with the nose exposed.
Yeah I don't think they are really saying that they absolutely don't work but that the evidence that they do is weak enough to justify removing the mandates. They address N95 mask in the article (did you read it) pointing out that they are more difficult to breath in and hinder communication more (I'll add my own point in that they are harder to keep a seal with which seems to be quite important according to the studies I have seen). Personally I have used N95 mask quite a bit for sanding projects and can to attest to the difficulty of wearing them for long period in a properly fitting way.
> N95 masks are not at all difficult to breathe in in my experience. Not at all.
My default assumption would be that if the mask doesn't make it more difficult to breathe then it is unlikely to be effective. The filtration mechanism should introduce friction which you then have to compensate for with additional pressure in your lungs.
This is a bad assumption that you can disprove for yourself in 10 seconds. You aren't pushing air up a slope you are creating a pressure differential. An impediment ought to at best result in a small decrease in the speed of filling and a tiny amount at that because your mask is very porous. Your mask is effective not in proportion to keeping air out but because larger items like globs of spit get stuck on it and because of electrostatic charge.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that effectiveness at preventing infection is linearly correlated with difficulty breathing or that to a degree that the additional friction induces difficulty must rise to the level of preventing breath in order to be effective. You aren't preventing 50% of particulates from getting in by preventing 50% of oxygen for example.
For example I imagine that you didn't believe that doctors wearing masks pre pandemic or construction workers weren't just going without breathing well for hours given paucity of air becomes an problem very very quickly
Thanks for the extra perspective. Without going into specifics like linearity it still seems like it could be the basis of reasonable public health advice. Forgive the tongue in cheekness but something along the lines of:
"Expect some discomfort - that lets you know the mask is working"
It’s a natural assumption!, and it’s important to address it. Basically the filter material is… almost indistinguishable from magic? It’s a beautifully balanced construction of materials science. From the perspective of gases, the mask is almost transparent. From the perspective of aerosolized particles, the mask is a wall of electrostatic forces and difficult luck rolls. It’s sort of like a wide reef that the tide may pass over but just isn’t traversible by boat; And all boats are steel and the reef is magnetized.
“Duckbill” type masks are great too, like Kimberly-Clark / Kimtech pouch respirators: https://www.kcprofessional.com/en-us/products/scientific-and... … These might be the most comfortable article of clothing I’ve ever worn? Like really seriously. Very easy to breathe through. No drag or inertia at all. The 3M Aura mask has the edge in breathability though – feels impossibly transparent. I believe it’s due to the material itself. The duckbill type gets its breathability through using more material and a bigger airspace. I’d love to try a duckbill made out of the material in the 3M Aura. (Secret tip: If the duckbill is creased just right it looks more like a Stormtrooper than a duck. The free bread is nice though.)
I’m reading the Wikipedia page on HEPA filters now. Trying to get a better feel for how the material works. Seems like part of how the close-fitting masks can be made so easy to breathe through is that the possible speed of air flowing through is limited. Anywhere in the range of airspeed that we can breathe aerosolized particles in or out, the filter material causes slight turbulence in the atmospheric gas, it flows and eddies around the filter material – the air flows around the material – but the aerosol particles have much more inertia and hit the filter. I actually hadn’t understood or appreciated this aspect before now.
This 'they don't 100% work so we shouldn't even bother' bullshit .. is just that. Bullshit.
What is the cost of masked students, it's the cost of the masks. Now granted our schools are, frankly, criminally underfunded. However that PPE could be supplied from outside the school's budget for those students that don't take care of the costs themselves.
The other problem that i've been hearing from my public school teacher friends is that there are so many staff absences due to covid that more and more students are stuffed into the classrooms of those teachers that are there. So if you, as a teacher, have a class that is down 50% of students due to an outbreak but somehow you managed to avoid it. Well your 50% empty class that allows for better distancing will not last, you will be at 100% or grater capacity simply because another teacher is out, there are no available substitutes and you can't leave kids unsupervised.
The cost of masked students is not just the purchase price of the masks. It’s that plus the reduction in learning (academic, linguistic, and social) from wearing the masks (and the masks being fussed over).
That total cost may (or may not) still support the decision to have a mask mandate for kids, but let’s not get confused and think the only cost is measured in dollars.
What is the cost of masked students, it's the cost of the masks.
It's much more than that.
The other problem that i've been hearing from my public school teacher friends is that there are so many staff absences due to covid
Sure, and that's happening in schools with and without mask mandates. Unless you go into full hermit mode, you are going to be exposed to Omicron. And if you're young or vaccinated, that's very unlikely to be a big deal.
ah, so you didn't read the article I guess, because it never says that they don't work 100% just says the evidence that they do isn't great, it also covers what the writer sees at downsides (cost) to masking children. Its fine to have differing views but you should probably focus your arguments on the substance of article. The author laid out several very compelling paragraphs to back up her point along with sources cited, so I'm sorry, but if the only counter argument you can come up with is "its bullshit" you should probably quit the debate club.
I mean that is generally referred to as "safetyism" and while I guess its a fine personal choice it is not something that should be applied in public policy.
Yes, we're not at the top of spending on education as a percentage of GDP. Similarly, we're spending less on food as a % of GDP than Mexico, and much, much less than Somalia. Does it mean that US is not spending enough on food? That we're underfed compared to Mexico or Somalia? No, it just means that using percentage of GDP as a measure of something being over/underfunded is ridiculously wrong.
> They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it!
This was a trend before the pandemic. The financials of becoming a doctor just don't make any damn sense any more. Sure you'll make more in the long run, but it's a grind to get there and you basically give up your 20's to get there. This has a lot of negative impacts on your social life and your ability to build any sort of financial stability until your 30's.
I'm really happy to see the change in attitude in medicine. Hospital leadership has been milking the Hypocratic Oath for all the can. Physicians (and other health care workers) are starting to realize this bullshit.
----
PS: I know it's not my place, but I'd really recommend having a conversation with your daughter about going into medicine. Take a peak at places like /r/medicalschool, /r/residency/, /r/medicine, and student doctor network.
> They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid.
This isn't true. Here in Washington State we're experiencing peak Covid, and only about 30% of hospital capacity is for Covid. And that's an all-time high. For most of the pandemic it's been between 10 and 20%.
> And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
You should be angry at corporate healthcare that has prioritized financial efficiency and monetary gain over doing its job and treating healthcare workers fairly, not strangers on hackernews.
> We're a population literally in decline.
No, no we're _literally_ not. Not as of right now at least; the US population grew over the last year. But- even if we were, wouldn't that directly address the unrelated issue of climate change that you brought up?
Not yet - if you look on pages 5 and 6 of that report, you see that births still exceed deaths in the US. Without immigration, though, population will stop growing in the next two decades (but it hasnt stopped yet).
ah, so everything is going according to plan then.
downvoters: is this outcome undesirable? if so, why, and what can we do to fix it? because I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to say that having more kids is a good thing, and using immigration/migration as a means of replacing those kids we're not having is a bad thing.
thus, is this outcome (declining citizen birth rates, increased immigration/migration compensating for it) not the intended, desired one?
(I think you may have been downvoted because your initial comment appeared to be referencing the "White Genocide" conspiracy theory - essentially the idea that the Jews are planning to slowly eliminate the white race in the West and replace them with blacks and Muslims.)
This is a bizarrely specific conspiracy theory (and seems to be designed for maximum divide & conquer of voting populations) which I've never heard of. What exactly led to its inception? I always enjoy engaging with conspiracy theories, as they are a great training regimen for keeping one's mind sharp and empirically grounded, but I don't even know where to start with this one!
From what I understand, people noticed the fact that whites were gradually becoming a smaller proportion of the population of Western nations, due to both lower fertility and increased immigration.
In addition to this, some migrant groups (notably Muslims from the middle-east) have higher-than-replacement fertility rates.
Extrapolating this out, the idea was that whites would eventually be "replaced" by Muslims and other "minority" groups over the course of many decades.
I don't quite know how the Jews got involved in the conspiracy, but I always found the accusation that they're trying to increase the population of Muslims to be a bit ridiculous.
notice that I did not say anything about races or religions or groups or anything, aside from, implicitly, "people who were already citizens of any given Western nation" and "people who are immigrating/migrating to said nation, en masse". my original post, untainted by your invocation of specific groups of people to brand my post as being an invocation of a specific—named even—"conspiracy theory" to be harmful to discourse, because once you have invoked that, not only is all further discussion is off the table, but now I'm now actively in a pickle here because I have to say something or else risk possibly being perceived as an anti-Semite when someone looks in my post history and sees your accusations not responded to by me. I don't know if that was your intent or not but I ask that you please be more sensitive to these things, especially when I'm posting here using my real name.
I am in healthcare and the leadership whoever that is makes me question continuing. Their decisions just don’t come with reason I am starting to question who is making such decisions. We are not supported and are left out to face the front lines with no sound decision making process behind what we do. If I come across a severely sick patient I am asked to wear a gown that covers 2/3s of my front from my neck to my knees along with my basic medical mask and face shield. That is all the protection I get. My head nurses do not show up and test the clients for covid they just get deemed droplet precautions until they get better. If they are confirmed covid then we can get an N95 mask but no one is testing them unless they test their selves and all my clients are elderly so not going to be tested. Now 2 months after firing those who choose not to get vaccinated we are told we have to work even with covid if our symptoms are not serious. The lunacy I am seeing is highly turning me off from doing this forever. What if it was Ebola? There is no way I can trust my leadership to make the correct decisions to keep me safe. And I don’t have any authority to use resources or make change myself. It is very tiring to do this job day after day and with the housing market I can not even afford to get into a house. I love my job but am considering a change to get into something higher paying and worth my time.
I understand you are making the argument that removing mandates for masks at schools will lead us to have a shortage of medical practitioners? That seems dubious to me.
From what I know, the limits on number of doctors licensed each year are tightly controlled. If students drop out, there are countless others who will be willing to take their place.
It's not just students being affected, but educators and those who supervise residents. There will be less and less spots available in residency programs, nursing programs, etc. due to this. That was already a problem pre-pandemic:
Based off what I read there, I don't think reducing burden on nurses to prevent burnout at any cost is the right response here.
The article makes clear there are two pipelines here:
Nursing student applicants -> Nursing students -> Nurses, and Nurses -> Nursing faculty
There are more qualified applicants than can be accepted as students due in part to shortages in the faculty, according to the article. So why is there a shortage of faculty? There are several items noted in the article, but I'll point out the one I think is relevant to our conversation.
> the pandemic has forced much of nursing education to an online, virtual format ... An overnight switch to virtual learning has not been seamless or easy on students or faculty ... The risk of burnout in these prolonged conditions is high—especially for faculty members who have young children or who are caretakers in the home.
So, this article is arguing nursing faculty is burning out because teaching virtually is too taxing. I don't think this article supports the idea that a nursing shortage will result due to overtaxed nurses in hospitals.
I agree, it's not the most significant factor. It would affect those close to retiring anyway. A bigger one is compensation. The reduction of funding of universities in the United States, and resulting loan cost, has made working towards a post-graduate degree very undesirable. Hospitals often cover the cost of working towards a degree, but if you are doing that you're more likely to become a nurse practitioner. Right now, working as a traveling nurse is extremely well-compensated. I had meant this article as just an introduction to the concept, you're right about the pipeline.
EDIT: Another thing is that nurses often go through 'preceptorships,' which is like a residency but much more focused and shorter in duration. It is how you accumulate a great deal of the clinical hours required by a Board of Nursing. It was difficult during my preceptorship to find people trained to be preceptors, as experienced nurses are dropping out. The difference between a green instructor and an expreienced one can be massive.
People stopped having kids once they could(easily available birth control). Trying to connect it to COVID or Climate change is not supported by any data whatsoever.
Call it a vibe. I only see a steady decline in living standards in our future and it makes me pause when I think about whether to subject another human being (i.e. my kids) to that.
We are living in the most safe, prosperous, easy, carefree time in the history of human species. Can we fuck it up? yes we probably can, it won't be easy and would need to involve nukes probably.
Realize that doom and fear porn that you are reading addresses certain type of need we have. If you overdo it well you get depression. Then again some people I know use this crap to give themselves excuse to behave like teenagers in their 30s, stuck in childhood(because they can).
There is no stigma these days for not starting a family kids and men can privately retreat into video games and pornography. When confronted about their selfish* lifestyle the above comment is convenient cover but it is not backed by solid data. I'd take birth in this past decade over birth in my decade any day.
*I'd argue that not having at least one child and possibly adopting others is selfish assuming one has financial means. For example, while I thought I wanted kids, upon reflection what I really wanted are mini-me's. If I could buy a clone I'd do it immediately, but child roulette?, no thanks. My selfish lifestyle had made me very happy so far and that feels like a character flaw.
From where I am, a "selfish" lifestyle of video games and porn replacing responsibility does not seem to be healthy long-term.
I'm in my late 20s now, and the guys I know who are not working towards getting married and starting a family are pretty much all starting to experience some sort of constant existential anxiety.
I'd rather not say my age because I rather not influence any young men to follow my path. The general data is there, a life without a family is not healthy long term. Follow my path at your peril since a lot of other things have to go right to make up for the void usually filled by family. For the record I don't play video games or view much porn and if that is how I were filling the void I would have severe existential anxiety. I volunteer/mentor, play sports, run a business, and am successful professionally.
Perhaps the existential anxiety was already there and has kept them from working towards a family? Look at a history of births and you see a major drop-off in WW2, a period where it really felt like the world could end, literally people anxious over their continued existence. Take away the War, and you get a baby boom.
Part of me thinks its the "working towards" part, independent of the family/marriage bit. I can't prove it though.
I think if you drop off the rails of a traditional lifestyle, you need to be ready to stand on your own two feet a little more when it comes to intrinsic motivation.
Birth control is not the only factor that has affected birth rates, even if it's the biggest. There are many factors. Any connection to COVID or climate change may not supported by any data you've seen, but does that entitle you to categorically rule it out as a factor? Where's this data that shows no relationship? I've seen a number of indications young people are increasingly hopeless about the future. It stands to reason that this could effect birth rates so I feel there's at least a small burden on you to show why the idea is wrong.
I mean it is possible somewhere in the rounding error or the rounding error of the effect contraceptives had there is climate change and covid effect. Massaging that out of the data will will be tricky to say the least, but given enough grant money I am sure people will rise to the occasion.
Yes, having plunged dramatically in the 60s with the widespread adoption of the pill, birth rate in the US has been falling in a fairly steady rate since about 1970
What does this have to do with masking young children, many who are vaccinated, in schools? Are you implying that they are a source of the spread and causing medical professionals to be burnt out? and that therefore we should ignore that both the teacher and student wearing a mask might be detrimental for ESL & Language development ?
Given the extremely contagious nature of Omicron, what plausible way do we have to prevent these individuals from getting COVID and using hospital space? And don't say masking up kids—because if they haven't gotten vaccinated, then why do you think they themselves would wear masks and social distance to prevent themselves from getting COVID?
I have seen no plausible modeling that shows even high level of masking would significantly blunt the spread of this.
So why make the kids put on hair shirts I mean masks?
Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it.
The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.
Are you sure this is true? The data you linked to shows that hospitalization rate for 65+ unvaccinated is 7x 65+ vaccinated. But WA has a great vaccination rate, over 99% for 65+ with one or more shot. So even with 7x the rate, unvaccinated elderly probably aren't massively dominating hospitalizations because it is such a small pool of ppl.
The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses.
Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.
I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate.
edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated combined. We can definitively say that the hospital case load is not overwhelmingly dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.
60% is the number for 60+, unvaccinated and 60+ vaccinated. The claim was the 65+ unvaccinated alone were dominating. Can't be true given the numbers. Specifically the claim was "overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated".
I think the relevant table is on page 13 "COVID-19 hospitalizations in unvaccinated and fully vaccinated individuals in
Washington state by age group, February - December, 2021"
It shows that 79% of hospitalizations in the state are unvaccinated people and that of those, 3,000 are under 34, 11,000 are between 34-65, 7,000 are over 65.
So it is indeed largely elderly unvaccinated in the hospital.
So, help me here. If 7000 hospitalized are over 65 and 11,000 are under 65, does that not show that there are 4000 less elderly hospitalized than middle-aged?
If I look at those numbers, the elderly are not "dominating" the hospitals. In fact, that would show that if you looked in a hospital at any given time, there would be more middle-aged than elderly. I get that "per-capita" the rate is higher, but that does not matter to the hospital census.
I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.
> If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning
In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, but without some top-down moonshot level effort to make it better fast, continuing it would have been an actual catastrophe. I doubt anyone else with school-side insight into how it went would claim otherwise. It was bad.
It was so bad in my school district. I think it was worse than no school for a year because of the chaos of teachers doing different things and no good monitoring or follow-up.
Classes ranged from some teachers sending out a single email a week with assignments and tests and grades to teachers taking attendance the minute class started and then disconnecting. For 10 year olds.
This means I would get silence for a long time, no posts in the classroom site or Teams and then an email saying “major test is tomorrow, make sure your kids study X,Y,Z” with X being chapters in a pdf, Y being a broken link, and Z being some slapdash PowerPoint posted minutes before the email. And there’s multiple subjects.
It was such a surreal experience with countless “we’re doing our best” emails from school leadership.
It was even more performative and useless than normal school.
I know my mileage may vary and it may be problems with my school district. But in the same district they didn’t suffer like this and my kids performed better.
And this is with me spending 1h+ every day helping, running around between telework. I can’t help but think how it fared for kids who didn’t have parents who could flex their work schedule to support digital school.
My wife is a teacher in Chicago Public Schools and there are classes in her school that have spent less than half of the school year in the classroom because of quarantine every time a kid gets COVID. Because the kids all eat lunch together, unmasked, and indoors, well they're all considered close contacts. So back to remote lessons they go again and again.
How exactly is this better than a consistent schedule from home?
No. It wasn't that bad. School still continued. Your children are at most slightly inconvenienced during a global pandemic that has killed MILLIONS of people.
All you have to do is keep your kid looking at a screen. They may need to repeat a year of school. At some point in their future your kids boss may say "oh right, you were a pandemic kid, here let me show you."
It's like someone in WW2 UK complaining that the Germans dropping bombs on their neighbors houses knocked some of the good dishes off the shelf.
“Slightly inconvenienced” is a term I can assure you would be only used by someone who doesn’t have kids.
Sure, the first six months, or even a year can be discounted as an aberration in the child development process and can be compensated for. This is year 3 with no end in sight. Do you even realize how much children develop in 3 years? A 6 year old and a 9 year old have a significant difference in cognitive capabilities and if you stop the learning process, the lifetime effect can be devastating. It doesn’t matter when you’re 30 and have to sit at home, but it absolutely does when you’re a child and your brain is developing.
And based on my long career on the corporate ladder, absolutely no one cares about whether you were a pandemic baby, a child growing up in poverty or pretty much any other non visible handicap in your life. You either know stuff or you don’t.
And since you mentioned World War 2, schools didn’t stop even in WW2, At a time when people didn’t even necessarily need to go to schools to eventually lead a comfortable life.
Louisiana schools closed in March of 2020 toward the end of the month. In August/September they were virtual learning only for a while, and it was not good, or so I was told.
Essentially, they got a "pass" for 2020 regardless of what their grades were, without ever stepping back into class or remote learning.
We also had a massive hurricane and two smaller ones that year, and that had more people at home in October than the SARS-CoV-2 virus did.
Either way, assuming other states allowed or encouraged remote learning and continue to this day, as of, say April of this year we enter year 3 of remote learning. I'm on mobile so I could be wrong, but I believe the original post said "going on/into 3 years at this point" - or at least that was how I interpreted it.
I cannot find evidence of a single US school district that did not have an in-person option this academic year. As another commenter mentioned, it now makes national headlines when a school district needs to take a 1 week pause.
Also the original commenter was talking about early childhood development, not beuracracy. Everything kids learned from 9/2019 through 2/2020 shouldn't disappear because of what happened that spring. If it does our school systems are even worse than I thought.
You wouldn't say you are going into 30 years 2 months before your 29th birthday. And "no end in sight" makes 0 sense in the context of in person schooling, because the end of remote school is already in the rear view mirror.
I get your overall point, but you're greatly exaggerating the length of time here. The entire pandemic has been going on for less than 2 years. I also don't know any district that wasn't in person this entire school year. Every family I know in my area (a pretty liberal area of the US) had a packed summer involving camps, friends, and road trips. Kids truly sat at home for about 1 year.
Now envision:
You are a parent who HAS to work to make ends meet. Your work has to be in person (nurse, meat packing plant etc). You have two kids 3 years apart, say 7 and 10. One you just were able to adjust to school after years of sensory and social issues. The school is closed. The kids cant go in but bars are open.
Certainly my circle is wealthier, but it is a major city and any mandates would apply city-wide. Rural areas have even fewer COVID restrictions. Please point me to a school district in the United States that has had no in-person option this school year.
I live in a large U.S. city. For this discussion I'll include the metropolitan area which has a total population of roughly 2.5 million. The schools closed in the Spring of 2020 - just as the disease was first spreading. In the Fall of 2020 they were partially open - kids would go to school 2-3 days per week. By Spring of 2021 they were completely back at school though there was a mask requirement. That's the state we've been in since. So in total we had 3-4 months of no in-person school. Certainly not the 3 years the commenter you're replying to has claimed - as you pointed out this pandemic hasn't even hit the two year mark yet!
It's been the norm for some time to have in-person classes. School districts make the headlines when they cancel in-person classes and even then that situation only lasts a couple of weeks. Look at the most recent case in Chicago - it lasted one week. Since I live across the street from a large park I can tell you the kids are in school, they're playing outside, they're doing after school activities, and they're playing sports. I don't know what these people are getting on about acting like kids have been locked in their homes for two years.
The argument is that we make this trade off in order to minimize the maximum terribleness, not just because it's convenient.
Fwiw, we name this trade-off all the time. If you think your kid is getting the best possible experience for their development at school then you are pretty naive. School is largely about improving worst case educational outcomes, not fostering maximum growth.
Kids have had long holidays as long as the school system has existed, and they never regressed enough for the general public to raise the alarm.
My own children just repurposed the tools used for remote learning, and now interact more with their peers than they did before the pandemic (and its not just video games either: there's a fair amount of creative activity that happens). Kids are incredibly resilient.
Poor education practices like chaining them to Zoon for hours at a time to attend class, on the other hand, would damage anyone, and show there's a long way to go in the remote learning space. You'd have expected some high profile projects to shine, but I haven't heard a lot from them.
You are wrong. Deeply wrong. I respect HN's rules, so I won't reply as I really want to.
There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse.
And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything. If you look at places and regions that kept kids in school and compare them to places that shut schools down, there's no discernable difference in outcomes. Because people intermingled anyway. So we could've at least had kids socializing and developing normally for that cost.
Here's the thing - my wife works for the school system, I have 3 kids, and I'm involved in kids activities. The "shutdown" happened in the Spring of 2020. In the Fall of 2020 all the sports leagues resumed as normal and all the kid activities resumed as normal. The schools were partially open and they went to fully open in the Spring of 2021. In total there were 3-4 months where the kids were "locked up" in their homes. I don't know where this narrative is coming from that kids have been "locked up" for the past two years, but they have not. At least not for the overwhelming majority of kids in the U.S.
There have been cases where a school system makes headline news by cancelling in-person classes as the infection peaks in their area. These shutdowns have only been for 1-2 weeks. The kids are in school. The kids are doing activities. The kids are alright.
My son had a total of 6 days of in-person school for the '20-'21 school year. All after, in-person school activities were canceled the entire year. Almost all sports were canceled as well. The summer of 2020 all summer camps were canceled except for a handful of virtual camps. This past summer, there were a handful of camps available, fortunately.
School is in person this school year, although there have been about 10 virtual days so far for his school, all have been in 2022 because of Omicron making staffing really tough. There are a handful of after school activities, but many are canceled. Sports are largely back to normal.
That's awful - especially at the start of 2021 when we fully understood the vectors and how to manage the transmission of the virus. Summer Camps in 2020 really struggled with sick staff. Even camps that did open had to close due to high rates of infection. Summer 2021 was a completely different story thanks to the vaccine. It's been really frustrating to see the people clamoring for a return to normalcy are taking action to prolong that return to normalcy.
There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year.
My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.
My son would totally be in to that, and I figured he'd have an ok time in the pandemic because of that. Unfortunately, his friends (were 6th grade, now 7th grade) turn out to be complete cyberbullies online. They just get hyper aggressive with each other and every other week during the pandemic my son would be in tears because his friends were so toxic. Once back in person at school, they are totally fine (well, within standards for middle schoolers!) and have a great time, but even now there are several he can't be around online because they just want to find a target and gang up on them. Sometimes it is my son, sometimes some other kid.
Plus a lot of parents are paranoid about online interaction to a crazy degree and will hardly let kids interact online - it makes no sense, but they consider it to be the great bogey man of the 21st century and think that pedophiles are ready to instantly jump on their kids, even if they are in a private discord room just chatting.
It’s hard to measure this systematically and I’m glad that your experiences were positive. My kids had marked drop in grades and really suffered. It wasn’t so much the social aspect as teachers and schools not being to adapt to new methods.
I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
I've got decent insight into several local school districts. From less-close information I've picked up from around the country, our city doesn't seem to be an outlier.
For both fully-remote and alternating-day in-person, if schools still failed kids, they'd have had to fail over half of most classes. Percentages of engaged-enough-to-be-OK kids in online schools tended to sit in the 10-20% range. It wasn't unusual for half or more of kids to effectively be absent for an entire semester. [EDIT] The alternating-day half-in-half-out in-person schedule kids, in the one district that I have insight into that did that for fall 2020/spring 2021, seemed to fare even worse than the online cohort, incidentally.
> I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
Any places that did them, they'll be awful, guaranteed. IIRC at least some states skipped them in Spring 2020 since it'd have been nearly impossible to proctor them and everyone knew they'd be "tainted" anyway. The main point of them is to compare year-over-year progress to see what needs to be adjusted and whether progress is being made, for which a during-remote-learning standardized test would be worthless, since you already know it'll be bad and why it's bad and won't be able to get any actionable info out of comparing it to prior or future years. It'll probably be another couple years before we have something like a new baseline and the tests start to be useful for their intended purpose again.
You're wrong. Deeply wrong. There is no deep psychological damage. Children are not fragile snowflakes - they're adaptable, resilient little humans. That's why as a species we continue to thrive.
Stop inventing new problems that don't exist - there's already enough to go around.
My wife used to teach reading to elementary aged children with reading comprehension issues. And she found that you cannot teach children how to make letter sounds via Zoom. They cannot see, hear, and experience the inflections and mouth/tongue movements required.
The result is these children don't learn how to read. And studies have shown for ages that if a child is not a proficient reader by grade 3, they will likely never be proficient, ever.
That's just one of many costs. We're leaving these children behind.
They are resilient, my son will (probably) be fine - but that doesn't mean there wasn't damage done. I ask all his teachers what the effect has on the kids in comparison, and without an exception, they all point out that nearly all kids aren't as far along as they normally would be: emotionally, socially and academically. Most of them will mostly catch up. Some won't, and all will have an imprint of the pandemic on them in many ways.
Minimizing this does nothing for them. And remember, a depressed kid doesn't always look sad, but can seem happy go lucky as they are trying to be what their parents want them to be.
Seeing as I have 2 kids and plenty of kids live in my neighborhood, none of them are walking around like damaged zombies - it's hard to take you seriously.
I have family that teach in poorer districts here in California. Distance learning (for middle school in these areas that I have heard about) was and is an unmitigated disaster. A lot of the families served don't have reliable internet. Many have nowhere in their homes where a child can be in class without massive distractions of siblings/people/noise/etc making it essentially impossible for the students to pay attention. Often the laptops/chromebooks sent home with them don't last long due to external actions from others in the household.
The teachers are trying their best, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome the nature of these problems, and the effects are absolutely compounding over the past couple of years. It's really, really bad.
Actually, it didn’t go well. Nowadays we’ve got a bunch of 6th graders still at a 4th grade education level. Remote learning for children is substantially less effective for many of them.
Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.
The people getting hit hardest by remote learning are the poor kids, who have few enough opportunities as it is. (I can tell you from experience, these remote learning systems are horrible on a low-end device, yet almost tolerable on a high-end one. Parents with both the time and knowledge to assist with school-work aren't distributed evenly. etc, etc.)
Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.
If you think it wasn't that bad, you must be from a privileged household, and haven't paid attention to the data. Children, especially low-income children, have been devastated by remote learning.
Remote learning was a disaster for my family, and we have great internet with many computers, and a father who could troubleshoot all the problems, and tutor them some of the time. I cannot imagine what it was like for low income families.
Closing schools was never necessary or even helpful. Some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open for in-person learning throughout the pandemic. They did fine.
That's what I don't understand. Massive world wide problem.. but we have to keep cranking the kids through the meatgrinder (public school->college->first entry job) on time. God forbid, they stop, think about how things run, try to adjust accordingly.
This is yet another problem that's ignored, swept under the run and "averaged out" as a solution.
1. If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem.
2. The idea that anyone who wants in person learning is a "screaming Karen" is fucking stupid. There is lots of evidence that remote learning has all kinds of negative outcomes for kids, and your (frankly sexist) dismissiveness is the reason this conversation never goes anywhere.
Isn't the point way up that nurses are quitting. This creates a burden at the hospital. Why are they quitting? Because they are treated like cattle instead of employed human beings. See the court case on the hospital suing the nurses in an at will employment state for quitting and going to another hospital for higher pay. There are even some who are fired for not getting a vaccine regardless of any special circumstance the individual may have.
True, but thats a % of a % of a % (ie Masks could prevent some % of COVID transmission at school, of some % of which would have be transmitted to other individuals in the home, of which some % of which would have required hospitalization), which makes it seem likely to be a high cost for not much reward.
Should insurance companies also drop low income Americans with diets that trivially lead to heart disease? Shouldn't we, as a society, take care of those who don't know better?
Just record license plates at all fast food restaurants, probably most restaurants, really, average meal runs over 3/4ths of what an average adult male needs to maintain weight.
Liquor stores and bars, too. Ethanol is at least as bad for your body as straight sucrose/fructose.
Log time spent on Facebook, steam, Reddit, etc. Statistically inactivities.
Hell, we could probably reject 75% of Americans in the first three months without any sort of death panels being necessary, just let Google, Target, and walmart machine learn AI the rejection criteria and alert the insurers.
> If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem.
Sure thing. Can we get the Grandpa's to sign documents saying they're going unvaccinated by choice and would like to opt-out from any hospital care related to COVID if their resources are needed for any other patient?
Sure and while we’re at it, let’s not treat aids patients because they engaged in high risk activity and not treat heart attacks of the overweight either.
Are the hospitals collapsing because of aids patients or so many people getting heart attacks? If so then maybe we should start using carrots/sticks to limit peoples risky behavior or make them absorb more of the cost.
If they’re not collapsing the hospitals then why bring them up?
The US medical system is financially untenable due to the massive percentage of adults drinking sugary sodas with every meal, getting fat, and developing Type II diabetes. Guess we should let them die too, right?
You are making an argument with no limiting principle, because it's poorly thought out and shallow, and it shows.
Was it untenable before covid? There were twos of needing more nurses before every boomer was in a nursing home, but I don’t remember reading reports of elective surgeries being cancelled or hospitals going to extremely understaffed.
> You are making an argument with no limiting principle, because it's poorly thought out and shallow, and it shows.
It wasn’t poorly thought out. Our system sucked but was sustainable before the unvaxxed group decided to eschew medical prevention for this disease. Now it sucks _and_ is unsustainable.
Any argument you bring out that doesn’t recognize that the situation has changed due to covid, that also points out other health problems as a reason to not react to the change caused by covid, is poorly thought out.
If any self inflicted problem causes our healthcare system to tip over we should react to it.
People refusing the covid vaccination have tipped over the system. People getting type II diabetes have not
The way you talk about the unvaccinated is telling.
I'd like to propose a solution that I think you would really prefer:
Let's make it really obvious who the unvaccinated are. I'm thinking we could maybe have some kind of article of clothing that could be worn over top of normal clothes. Perhaps an armband would suffice? Would that make you feel comfortable? It would also make it easier for you to mistreat them and shame them at will. Perhaps we could have a different armband for people that are unvaccinated but have a record of a positive test and recovery. They could be subject to shaming as well for not going along with your sacrament.
59% of Democratic party voters surveyed support a policy of confining unvaccinated people to their homes. We should go ahead and do that right? I'm taking this to its logical end because you don't dare do so.
I voted Democrat my entire life. People have no idea what it was like campaigning for Barack Obama in southwestern Virginia. I literally had a man brandish a shotgun at me in his driveway. It's coal country. I was a die-hard supporter and they betrayed me and other people like me.
This coercion was the last straw and I'm never voting for the party again. Congratulations you and your ilk have created a monster.
> Let's make it really obvious who the unvaccinated are. I'm thinking we could maybe have some kind of article of clothing that could be worn over top of normal clothes. Perhaps an armband would suffice? Would that make you feel comfortable? It would also make it easier for you to mistreat them and shame them at will. Perhaps we could have a different armband for people that are unvaccinated but have a record of a positive test and recovery. They could be subject to shaming as well for not going along with your sacrament.
I’m not going to accept you trying to make comparisons between the unvaxxed and Jews. Being unvaccinated is a _choice_. If you make choices you deal with the consequence. I’m never going to be behind treating people different for aspects of their life they had no choice in, but I am 100% behind treating people differently based on their choices.
> 59% of Democratic party voters surveyed support a policy of confining unvaccinated people to their homes. We should go ahead and do that right? I'm taking this to its logical end because you don't dare do so.
You didn’t ask. I’m completely fine taking this to the logical end. Not a democrat but I’d be in the 59%. If you want to be unvaxxed and not enter society, that’s fine. You’ve kept your externalities to yourself. If you want to have access to public areas and not take steps to stop breaking down public systems, then you’re pushing your problems on us and that’s where I have a problem with it
> I literally had a man brandish a shotgun at me in his driveway
And? It’s America, who grew up here and hasn’t had someone threaten to kill them for coming on their land?
> This coercion was the last straw and I'm never voting for the party again. Congratulations you and your ilk have created a monster.
I didn’t talk about being democrat at all, but if I was in the Democratic Party and you were threatening to leave over not being getting vaccinated then I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop you. It’s not a threat when I already don’t want the unvaccinated associated with me. Go ahead, take your ball, and go home.
I fully admit I've been harsh in this thread, and frankly I'm unhappy with myself for letting my emotions get the best of me.
I appreciate your honesty and candor on your feelings on this subject.
What I will state bluntly is this:
You have stated, implicitly, that you support the policy of confining the unvaccinated to their homes.
Unfortunately, I don't see a path forward for me to ever forgive, or be willing to be decent to, people who hold that opinion, because I view it as absolutely and unequivocally tyrannical, to a degree that I view is a betrayal to the constitution. My ancestors settled in southern Appalachia in the early 1700s, and I would have a far larger number of relatives if not for so many of them dying in the Revolutionary War for the right to never again have their fundamental rights violated by inevitably corrupt, morally certain and powerful rulers in distant cities. They too, fled Ulster, where oppressive policies could have been avoided if they had made the CHOICE to convert to the Anglican church. Just a CHOICE. They CHOSE to not join the Anglican church, so they deserved the oppression that was visited on them in the eyes of the British monarchy. "Those stupid Scots-Irish Presbyterians. If they'd just convert, they'd be fine! Let's take their shit." The English KNEW that THEY were RIGHT. It was all justified.
I strongly suspect that, had you been born in 1914, you would have been fully supportive of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Most Americans were, because violating the sovereign rights of fellow citizens made them feel safer. It reduced the risk imposed by some of them being spies. You have applied the same logic here. I know you view that as an unfair characterization. I don't fault you for that. Most people think that, if push came to shove, they would not have been one of the majoritarian oppressors they read about in history books. They think they are one of the small percentage of people who would have taken a stand, and sacrificed to do so. I see no evidence to support that belief in this conversation.
All I will say is that the machinery required to enforce such policies, as put on display in Australia, once put in place, can be used for any end, by any ruler who seizes power.
Regarding the political party aspects, it wasn't intended as a threat, but more of as a single data point that should make you question what the long-term fallout will be when this already endemic virus is eventually recognized as such by the vast majority of the American public. I'm not the only one who has hit a point of no return. I know I am in a minority, but it's an intransigent one, and the effect will be generational. I used to support gun control as well. Knowing that people out there are happy to violate my rights, I no longer do. 2 years ago, I viewed the NRA as a bunch of psychopaths allied with gun and ammunition manufacturers. My opinions, likely correct, was that a lot of the "Obama will take your guns" was designed to boost ammunition sales and profits for the gun/ammo companies. Now I view them as a useful counterbalance. I've been radicalized. Was it worth it?
There’s a lot in here to respond to but I think the most important part is this
> I've been radicalized. Was it worth it?
Why do I always hear this from people who think the unvaxxed should be completely unrestrained in their behavior? And why do I always hear it from people who haven’t realized they’ve radicalized the rest of us.
If you asked about limiting someone to their home because they won’t take a vaccine for a plague, you would have only gotten odd looks because no one would have expected people to be that crazy en masse. But hey, they are, they’re inflicting their problems on the rest of us, and like to get threatening anytime it’s questions.
We’ve been radicalized by the insistence of personal freedom over not harming the rest of us. Was it worth it?
I tested positive for COVID in February of 2021. I have natural immunity but I'm being treated like I'm a risk to fully vaccinated people around me. I think that might explain why I feel like I'm having my rights violated.
Please explain to me why the scientists in the EU consider prior infection equivalent to being vaccinated but the United States doesn't?
Like any kid who grew up in Appalachia, I own firearms and a sweet compound bow, learned how to hunt when I was 9, caught my first fish when I was 4, and therefore have no need to "stock up on food." I grow cannabis and vegetables in a hydroponic system in my basement. Fresh tomatoes in the middle of winter makes a hell of an impression at dinner parties, and I highly recommend an indoor hydro garden to anyone. The wonders of LED grow lights and deep water recirculating hydroponics! I don't brew my own beer, so I guess I'll be hosed on that front. Obviously, I know I'll never be welded into my house, but I appreciate the dry wit of your statement.
I'm angry and disappointed, but I'm not afraid of you and the other innumerate immunity deniers. I pity you. The willful imposition of tyranny on others is dehumanizing for those who push it, and for those who go along with it. You're better than that, and I hope you realize it one day. I sincerely wish you a good evening, and I appreciate the opportunity to learn your perspective. I also want you to know that I apologize for being so harsh at times in my comments. I don't fault you, because I understand that people aren't themselves when they are afraid.
There is no free market. Due to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), medical insurers aren't legally allowed to set premiums based on vaccination status.
Medical services do not have price-elastic demand just because they are offered in a free market. It's the other way actually; I'd imagine medical services are some of the most price-inelastic things you can buy.
Yeah, but masks aren't doing much to prevent that. My kids go to an Oregon elementary school that requires full time masking and I can't think of a single kid who hasn't had it. COVID has run rampant through Oregon schools. I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools. The elderly and vulnerable need to get vaccinated, or be handled in a tent in the hospital parking lot. Stop punishing kids. This coming from a very large, male, angry "Karen."
Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing.
It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who???
It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.
The strange part to me is that usually on policy issues there’s this band of reasonable behavior and people disagree on which end of that band we should fall, but if you’re honest you can understand the other side’s perspective. On COVID in Oregon, it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m looking at a completely different world than others. I’m just flabbergasted by the policy calls driven by COVID hysteria. I’m not some rabid right winger. (My wife and I are both triple vaccinated, AND we still recently got it!) I just feel totally, totally confused. We vacationed in Idaho over Christmas and it was like reorienting myself to reality. I have no idea what’s going on in Oregon, but I am confident that we have revealed a fundamental split in human psyches that some bad actor will exploit to terrible ends.
So what I'm about to write here is I want to emphasize just groaning and complaining from my brother. He recently moved just over the line to one of those suburbs of Portland in Washington State. He told me he was fed up with Oregon and although he doesn't like the Pacific Northwest in general, he is divorced and needs to be near his ex-wife since she has custody of the kids.
His view of Oregon is that it's filled with people who are really not that bright. Obviously this is a stereotype but I will say that being out there what I kind of sensed was a bunch of people who were descended from pioneers who were very religious and are wired for religion but don't have it. I think COVID helped foster a new form of religion in the population, but perhaps it was always a sort of case where people on the coast were kind of doing that with progressive politics in general.
Human beings really are herd animals, and the vast majority of the population would rather do what is popular than what is right. I think that you have a toxic mix of this ideology combined with the rather unique Pacific Northwest cultural trait of never speaking your mind and primarily using passive aggressive behavior at all times. My brother worked at Nike for a while and was always told by colleagues that he was "too intense". He and I both worked in military intelligence in the past in the DC area and he's a driven worker like I am. He's only intense to people that really want to take it slow all the time. He always told me that the cultural traits in the region were really obnoxious and obstructed. Getting good work done. Nike is after all a shitshow of a company. Highly unproductive, very unefficient, with the dramatically larger workforce then it needs at its campus in Beaverton. We are talking about a state that has made the decision that people can't pump their own gas because it would hurt the economy by robbing people of the job of pumping their gas for them. That's a special kind of stupidity at the government level.
On top of this rather insane groupthink that you are referring to west of the Cascades, you have this other weird situation which is the rather extreme government measures at the state level have completely radicalized people on the right side of the political spectrum. When going to a grocery store in Sherwood outside of Portland, I encountered a bunch of boogaloo boys. Half the time I was driving around there I would occasionally see a truck with radical right wing stickers all over it, signifying membership in some group. (3 percenters or something like that?) I almost never see that anywhere in Colorado outside of Denver.
But perhaps the most memorable part of that trip was the interior of the state and the fact that the state government of Oregon clearly has zero authority anywhere east of the Cascades. It's really something to behold. You have this massive land area that is essentially ungovernable by the state government. The local population absolutely hates everything from the capital. They aren't at all subtle about it. It is basically a state of open, proud disobedience. It is the only place I've ever been since the pandemic started where there is a state law requiring wearing a mask indoors, but if I walked into a convenience store wearing one, they would get angry at me including the employees. It's a very good lesson to me about the fact that urban areas should understand that large swaths of this country will become completely ungovernable if they continue to use the government as a cudgel to force their values on a population that doesn't want it.
Another item that was shocking was the fact that we had visited Portland a few times before in previous summers, and the horrific degradation of Portland's downtown was tragic to see. It's really insane. Granted I was there right as the federal courthouse was being besieged, and it was pretty crazy having young men dressed in black threaten me and my brother when we were walking. We are both over 6 ft and over 200 lb and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we didn't get our asses beat. Complete lawlessness in that city. I just don't know how people who live there aren't completely embarrassed by it.
> I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools.
According to the article, studies have said very little in a way that controls for variables. There haven't been great studies showing their effectiveness. The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective." Not that it matters. Omicron is so contagious masks are well past their usefulness.
> The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective."
And then the raw data came out and there was a difference of maybe 20 cases.
The gold standard is an RCT, and it failed to show any benefit to masks in general.
Masks work great on mannequins or hamsters but they are essentially useless as a public health measure. We learned this in 1912. I am astonished that so many people still cling to them and claim "masks work" when we have overwhelming data that as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, they really don't. unless 100% of the people wear an N95 24/7.
The masks were well past their usefulness in 2019.
I'd be more than happy to test and vaccinate in schools. In particular vaccinate. But having kids wear masks…which they don't do well, because they're kids…not like adults do it well either…is a fig leaf. It's not going to work. And you can see that from the massive infection rates in schools that have masks.
Of course all of our problems go away when you convince the remaining 40% of the population to get vaccinated.
I'm actually in favor of doing away with masks and social distancing. Just create a nationwide policy that the unvaccinated will not be admitted or treated for COVID and we can all return to our daily lives.
Please refer to countries like Australia/Israel who are still experiencing massive case loads with a ~95% vaccination rate. It doesn't make it go away. For example please see
> Please refer to countries like Australia/Israel who are still experiencing massive case loads with a ~95% vaccination rate. It doesn't make it go away. For example please see
I think people underestimate how big a number 5% of a population of most countries -- even small ones -- actually is, especially when compared against available health care resources.
About 1/3 of the covid cases in the ICU where I live [1]. No idea how that stacks up compared to total ICU capacity (I think <10% but am not sure on this).
None of those things have forced us to all drastically alter our lives in the forms of economic and social lockdowns like covid has. It is a pretty silly thing to compare.
Covid is old and busted. Now all you have is OMG Omicron that’s just basically an annoying flu, you go ahead and lose your mind over it - it’s a free country. I’m still freaking out about dioxin so I don’t have time for this shit.
Convincing that 40% to get vaccinated while members of our elected government preach to that particular choir about how things that are partially or mostly effective (masking, vaccines, etc) are NOT effective simply because they are not 100% effective is a losing battle.
Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration.
We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.
The denial is so palpable. I know a couple in their early sixties who refused to get vaccinated because "COVID is way overblown". They were both regular weight and normal health. The wife contracted COVID and died in the hospital. Later, when asked if he was going to get vaccinated, he said no, because "COVID is no worse than a cold."
He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID, she actually died from pneumonia, and not COVID. I guess no doctor explained to him that pneumonia is simply an infection that has spread to the lungs.
I'd argue it in a more adult way than just punishing those who are different from you. Just do away with the masking and social distancing regardless. As soon as we were throwing out the first doses of expired vaccine, the choice by every american to get vaccinated or not had been made. If the hospitals are overrun, it will be the unvaccinated, so they'll be punished anyway - no need to legally do it.
Also you need to update your Sam Harris stats, its not 40% unvaccinated anymore like some outlets continue to harp on, check CDC numbers, its closer to only 20% of the population remaining.
hospitals being overrun doesn't just affect the unvaccinated, it affects anybody who needs medical attention. just allowing the hospitals to get overrun is not a reasonable option
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...
I guess it depends on what you mean by vaccinated:
75.1% of total us population has had at least on dose (79.8% of eligible (>= 5 yr)
Fully vaccinated drops to 63.6/67.6%
And Boosted is at only 41% of the fully vaccinated, 86.5M.
Another thing I wonder about is what are the affects of wearing masks at young age and not getting usual amount of exposure to viruses and other germs.
I remember reading here and elsewhere that early childhood exposure to germs builds a robust immune system.
While my kid doesn’t wear mask in his class but his school is following very strict cleaning procedures. So he hasn’t gotten sick as much before pandemic. Maybe that is good, definitely easier on us. Maybe we will always have higher level of hygiene now. Or maybe in future there will be a lot of young adults with underdeveloped immune system.
Having young kids myself, I can say pretty confidently that kids are going to expose themselves to quite a lot of germs no matter what precautions we take, short of putting them in solitary confinement in clean rooms.
So I think it's possible that precautions reduce viral and bacterial exposure, but since they don't completely stop it, immune systems may still get enough exposure to build immunity to things while still not getting enough exposure to actually make them sick.
This seems to run counter to the current hygiene hypothesis, which is the current mainstream scientific opinion on one aspect of allergy development. Children in developed countries are decreasingly exposed to various microorganisms, and this is thought to result in increased rates of allergic disorders.
I believe that it's common for kids to wear masks during flu season in some countries. They probably have some relevant data.
I think there's a belief that strict adherence to vaccination and masks would get us to a place where we won't need masks all the time, and kids can resume their usual immune-system adventures. That might be less realistic than we might want. I don't know.
Is there a massive infection rate? My kid’s elementary school sends an email with the count of positive test results in the school each week. It seems like it’s consistently under 1% per week. (Typically 1-4 people testing positive in a city K-5 school, students and staff being tested.)
Our school has seemed to do OK keeping it from spreading between kids.
But they also do weekly testing. And did surveillance testing at the end of winter break, which kept about 15% of the school's students at home for the first week back because they had covid.
This statistic was also consistent with LA Unified surveillance testing after winter break - about 15%.
Before winter break, some parents of 2nd graders had an indoor, maskless, holiday party. Apparently all the kids got covid. Then gave it to the teachers - all 4 2nd grade teachers were out of school with covid the week before winter break. But from what our school's testing showed, it didn't spread beyond that.
I do know of a couple families who did seem to get covid from their school though.
Our elementary school in Oregon has required masks. And I can't think of a kid who hasn't got it, including our own. It's run rampant through Oregon schools. By my assessment, masks do very, very little to stop the spread.
You somehow manage to be condescending against all parties here.
Calling mothers who want their children to receive an in-person education "screaming Karens" is terribly out of touch.
I have young children, and my position is simple: the hospital load, the vaccination status of the elderly, the burn out of the teachers -- it's not my child's burden. It's the adults' burden.
You are free to wear a mask for the rest of your life for all I care. I find it pathetic, but I really don't care. But you and people like you do not deserve power over my children, and if you don't see the reckoning coming you are not paying close enough attention.
So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is.
The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.
> The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period.
That's just deaths, though. What about other long-term effects? Long COVID and MIS-C come to mind.
> TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR.
And you'll notice that schools tend to take measures to prevent drowning - namely, barring unsupervised access to bodies of water deep enough for kids to drown.
> The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks
Everyone will inevitably be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that exposure occurs in school or somewhere else hardly matters. We can't wrap our children in protective bubbles. At some point they have to exist in the real world with all of it's risks.
Care to back up any numbers with long COVID? Or am I again going to have to suffer with hand waving and zero quantitative analysis?
Throughout this pandemic, measures were taken with a public health benefit in mind that was purely limited to the virus, and any and all mentions of weighing the cost of these measures or even trying to quantify it was met with "You're killing people!!! You shouldn't have a platform. You should be silenced!" Shaming tactics are the last resort of people with bad policies and bad ideas.
I wasn't aware that any schools had completely closed their doors to prevent kids from drowning or were preventing kids from learning to speak by forcing them to cover half of their faces to prevent drowning. The point is that you don't know a kid that's drowned most likely and most of us don't.
Additionally, masks don't stop the spread. So we're sitting here arguing about an intervention that hasn't done anything to prevent omicron from spreading all over classrooms anyway. If you had school age children you would know this, but I'm going to take a wild guess you don't do you?
Your last question indicates that you think making mask wearing in school by children a permanent feature should be explored. I would welcome you to submit your own children if you ever have them to this experiment, but good luck finding researchers that think it would be ethical to conduct this experiment. They certainly wouldn't endorse it for more than a short period of time, but we did it to all of our kids in an uncontrolled experiment born out of panic.
Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks.
Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. We face the "risk" on two fronts. Unlike many of her colleagues, she was unhappy with the obvious impeded ability to teach resulting from the school closures. A large percentage of her colleagues were clearly enjoying working from home. That's a dark side of this that people on your side are unwilling to admit.
I deeply resent it when people call it an issue of convenience. Proper emotional and social development of children is not an issue of convenience despite the constant claim from people like you that "You're just mad because you lost your free babysitting. Get over it."
The teachers were first in line to get vaccinated. Every other kind of employee in public places faces equivalent risks. As usual nobody is talking about numbers because your side has no numbers to back you up. It's just waving your hand and talking about people's comfort levels. Unquantifiable emotional nonsense, with people who are impervious to any form of facts or statistics or actual numbers.
Why? Masks dont help much. Vaccines dont stop contagion or transmission. They do lower risk of severe covid but kids are very low risk even if unvaccinated.
It depends what kind of mask. Proper respirator masks like N95 and FFP2 work very well. There are now very clear results that show that the main mode of transmission is respiratory aerosol.
I can’t find fault with the data or the investigation or the conclusion – I act according to this: We’re dealing with an airborne pathogen. Aerosolized.
Closed masks – respirator masks – N95/FFP2. These do work. Almost unreasonably well.
“Surgical masks” that gape at the sides do not protect well against aerosolized particles.
At what cost? If there were crazy people jaywalking onto the freeway, do you want to reduce speed limit nationally to accommodate that, or would you rather let it play out and people can realize certain things are just fatally stupid?
Until when? What’s the endpoint? Children are little bundles of disease; it has always been and will always be strictly better for public health to prevent children from interacting with each other. But what kind of world is that?
So basically harming Billy possibly violating his rights and not respecting Grandpa’s autonomy to make his own decisions regarding risk/return tradeoffs is the solution? Hasn’t worked well to date.
>Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it.
Instead of blaming unvaxxed people, you should blame the government for not having more capacity and not planning on how to handle surge in demand for hospitals. We're lucky covid is so tame, this could have been a crazy disaster.
This rhetoric where we try to divide the population is insanely toxic when the fault should be placed on the ruling class for mishandling both the planning, the communication and the handling of the pandemic.
There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals. Only vaxxed patients and medically-ineligible unvaxxed patients get treatment. If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.
Firstly, there no way to check someone’s vaccination status. There are fake cards, there are people who got vaccinated before government databases, there are people who got vaccinated without documentation, there are people who got documentation from medical people who didn’t actually perform the vaccination.
Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. Medicine knows where that goes and is strongly incentivized to never go there again.
> Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement.
I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage
I don’t have an answer but I always get stuck on the slippery slope intersection about what differentiates willingly unvaxxed vs people that don’t exercise and eat healthy enough.
The unvaxxed tipped the system. It’s like when your company finally adds npm audit checks to your ci pipeline and you are the first team to push a patch after that. Sucks that you got the luck of the draw and are dealing with the failures of multiple groups, but the failures are real now and there is no more forward progress without handling the situation
Sure, the electorate has thus far been unwilling to increase the capacity. At the same time the private medical facilities have been underpaying, overworking, and under-resourcing our hospitals. They close rural hospitals because they're not profitable /enough/. We could have more beds, and happier staff, but then the profits would be lower.
I agree that the hospitals as private businesses have not handled the situation well because they are seeking profit, but the electorate has no punished them for it.
There are no single issue voters for increasing the medical systems capacity. There are multiple political groups who care about the medical system but none who are willing to sacrifice every other possible gain if they get an improved medical system. That is what I mean about the electorate signaling that they do not care
> There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals.
Have you considered Nth order effects of this simple approach (the law of unintended consequences)?
> If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.
Have you considered that there might be some of this within the infinitely complex (and typically invisible, due to the nature of consciousness) causality behind why some people aren't getting vaccinated? Perhaps we are enjoying the bitter taste of unintended consequences as we speak.
> So why make the kids put on hair shirts I mean masks?
Because wearing masks is a good thing. A large part of the resistance to mask wearing in the US stems from seeing it as an abnormal thing and an oppression, but, in fact, wearing a mask when you're sick—even if it's just a minor sickness, not in the context of a global pandemic—is a good and respectful thing to do, practiced as a matter of course in many countries. Kids who grow up wearing masks will not have the horror of them that their vaccine-avoiding forebears did, and hopefully will be better equipped to meet the next pandemic sanely.
> My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies
This may not be a bad thing in the long run. There’s a shortage of medical professionals because the medical industry wants it that way. If the crisis becomes acute enough, the government will be forced to loosen regulations, and that would allow for more people to enter the field faster and more easily.
It's good to remember that the AMA and other medical groups lobbied for capping the residency slots back in 1997 (when an "oversupply" of doctors was forecast).
From [1]:
> "The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians," the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. "The current rate of physician supply -- the number of physicians entering the work force each year -- is clearly excessive."
> The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year.
> The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate.
They've changed their tune (which I, cynically, think is because the members in the late 90s have all "gotten theirs" by now).
So we didn’t have physicians before government started funding residencies? I think not, I think we used to have physicians just fine 100 years ago. So what changed?
Medical education with residencies only really started in about 1930. Before that there was no real consistency, and the results were terrible in terms of iatrogenic harm.
_thats_ your takeaway? that if the damn government stopped bothering to try to oversee outcomes in an area with extreme information asymmetry, a desire to get treated regardless of the cost, a bunch of agents between the doctor and the patient taking their cut, and a massive problem with cost control....everything would just be fine and we'd have plenty of doctors.
General observation from reading YOUR comment - you must not have young kids at a key developmental age in primary school for if you did you'd realize how detrimental arbitrary, poorly-fitting, non-medical masks are to small children's ability to learn to speak, read other's emotions, and other crucial milestones.
It's an uncontrolled experiment that was launched, without any regard for potential negative consequences. Your kids are older, you don't know anything about what they are facing.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. It's a huge topic of constant discussion amongst the entire faculty at her school and others about how insanely developmentally delayed and poorly socialized the current crop of kindergartners are. They've been stuck in isolation, left alone on ipads and other screens since they were 3. This isn't just anecdotal, there are studies showing small children are TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS behind where they should be. Your sitting here whining about young adults in an extremely high-paying profession being worn out saving a population that will mostly be dead of old age in less than 20 years, and ignoring the damage that has already been done (needlessly) and the continuing damage being done for bio-security theater. Utterly infuriating. These kids are OUR future.
Your comment showed zero empathy or thought towards that. YOUR kids didn't miss kindergarten. YOUR kids didn't get isolated. YOUR kids had a normal childhood. Mine aren't. Many others aren't. But really glad you care so much about "Global Climate Change" (why capitalize it, is it your religion?). The selfishness of your statement is appalling.
Less than 20 years—what is 20 to you? That's a generation's worth of time to live, love, have grandchildren; enjoy retirement. People of that age with Covid-19 are often nowhere near the point where hospice is recommended. Would you expect the treatment you prescribe?
In any case, we're seeing a surge in cases where the young are facing hospitalizations https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/health/covid-children-hos.... When I trained at a country hospital, it was overwhelmingly people under 50 being hospitalized for COVID-19. Children are at risk and we shouldn't think like it's spring of 2020 anymore.
Adults have offloaded as much of the burden of the pandemic on young people as possible.
- Suicide rates are through the roof
- Developmentally delays
- Societal debt
And it goes on. Medical professional have it rough… oh well! Open up more medical schools, theres far more people willing to go to med school than get in.
Id rather not go to the Dr. and not need prescriptions to buy most drugs. Lets loosen those regulations and 80% of the reasons Ive been to the Dr. in the last six years will be covered with the same formula: 10 days of augmentin.
You can't open up more medical schools because the American Medical Association has lobbied for decades and use their accreditation authority to put a cap on the number of seats in med schools in the US. There's been virtually no change since the 1980s despite a 30% increase in the population.
They are perhaps one of the most significant drags on economic growth in the history of the United States. Because of the artificially induced scarcity, we pay mediocre physicians the wages that CEOs earn in other industries.
Everyone in the US thinks insurance companies are to blame, while they are certainly not efficient, there have been numerous studies that show that the majority of growth in price increases in medicine are due to physician wages and their organized bargaining power with insurance companies driving up prices.
What other service have you encountered where you routinely have the person you are paying reschedule your appointments at the last minute? Thanks to the American Medical Association, they have the ability to do this with impunity. What's insane is we actually have to import medical workers from overseas where they are trained in countries that don't have an evil organization limiting supply.
Knowing about this has made it even more unbearable to get scolded by these people for 2 years. I'm terribly sorry that they have to endure such horrible conditions while earning over $400,000 a year. It really is primarily a profession of non-creative, rule following mid-wits, kissing the ass of their licensing boards and taking defacto bribes from pharma reps to push the latest overprescribed Big Pharma product.
“ You can't open up more medical schools because the American Medical Association has lobbied for decades and use their accreditation authority to put a cap on the number of seats in med schools in the US. ”
Thats what I was implying, but I wasn’t sure if this was also the case in the US as in other countries. Like you say, its their doing so they can go and cry me a river for all I care.
That's not correct. The actual bottleneck in training more physicians is lack of federal funding for residency slots. Every year about 5% of the students who graduate from accredited medical schools fail to get matched to a residency program and are thus unable to practice medicine. Contrary to your claim, the American Medical Association has actually been lobbying for increased residency funding for years, and even contributed their own money.
Why does the federal government need to fund the training of doctors? They don't fund the training of software engineers considering that universities do a pretty poor job of preparing somebody for a position at a software company. The vast majority of computer science graduates I've hired require extensive on the job training before I can trust them with anything. I've actually had to fire several.
If you're talking about clinics catering to poor populations. Why can't they use their Medicare money?
I'm sorry, I don't trust anything from the AMA because they are a lobbying organization. Why don't I just start sending links to the American Petroleum Institute while we're at it?
The federal government doesn't necessarily need to fund the residency training of doctors, but if we want more doctors then that's the fastest way to get them. Most teaching hospitals are non-profits so if they had to self fund residency programs then they would have to raise prices to patients. Hospitals barely break even (or less) on many Medicare service fees so those don't provide much margin to fund residency programs. That is the reality of our situation regardless of whether you trust the AMA.
Yes the American Petroleum Institute is a good source of information on some topics. They're certainly biased and I disagree with some of their conclusions, but they publish some accurate data and it's worth understanding their perspective.
> This isn't just anecdotal, there are studies showing small children are TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS behind where they should be.
Do you have a link? I would not be surprised if there were significant developmental issues, but two standard deviations is such an enormously large effect size that I'm doubtful.
>They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid.
Do you have a source for that? The percentage of Covid patients in ICU wards in the UK peaked at somewhere near 30% for a short period in January 2021.
>the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out.
Now I do know this to be true, but it's not due to the absolute numbers of Covid patients. In my experience (as I know several people in frontline healthcare), its the side-effects of Covid restrictions making healthcare impossible to provide.
This is a perfect example of catastrophizing our situation and seems riddled with anxiety and fear.
The CDC has already admitted half of the people in the hospital with Covid aren’t there because of Covid and this lines up with other countries experiences.
The world has been through far worse than what we are going through now and we made it just fine.
You personally may die from Covid or you could get run over by a car walking your doggy.
Rather than worrying about it, try and turn off the internet, spend time with people you love and enjoy your life. There will always be time to worry and stress.
I just graduated from nursing school and am preparing for my board exam. Everyone I talked and worked with during school said this was the worst period in their careers. Now, with Omicron, we're back to peak load on hospitals. The postponements started in the middle of December, it's terrible.
I program as a hobby, so I do frequent here. It is unusual how many people talk here about medicine, especially when deciding to debate medical ethics. A lot of it feels like they are working it out a priori.
I'll throw into this that my friend at a big hospital in Topeka, Kansas says all overnight surgeries are canceled so to staff shortage. Including heart surgery. Crazy.
At your dentist or plastic surgery clinic, sure. Hospitals everywhere are short on nurses and anything that can be delayed still is. A friend was recently transfered to another hospital to give birth because the maternity ward was unstaffed.
It took me two months in Chicago to see a general practitioner and I'm still waiting (4 months later) for an in-network physical therapist to start taking non-critical, new patients for a back issue. Everything is completely understaffed and overwhelmed, even the services that aren't even associated with emergency care are swamped. Heck, getting just a dentist appointment now is a multi-month out scheduling nightmare with a side of random cancellations because the staff got COVID followed by being rescheduled several more months out and hoping to be bumped again.
> My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it!
And who can blame them at this point? If anything we need more doctors/nurses/healthcare workers, but now we're going to be moving in the wrong direction for many years.
If the concern is hospitals being overwhelmed for long periods of time, then there's really no reason not to just let them get overwhelmed all the way. They can return to normal working conditions earlier, and people can get important surgeries again.
>they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out
The ones dancing on tiktok a year and a half ago? Or the ones who are left in an understaffed environment after their unvaccinated colleagues were canned?
And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
We're walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that's not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn't gone away and there doesn't seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.
You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.