COVID - A light on the horizon?

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in the times this thread has fallen off my alerts , ı see there have been some attempts to steal the top position in responses to the coronavirus thing . Oh-kay people , you asked for this . Supposedly 6 point something billion liras was the amount of support provided in my country . This year's PPP cost of airports come to 8 point 8 billions , and has just been gifted to companies because of the crisis in business as caused by the Coronavirus ; instead of being not paid or delayed due to Act of God . (That's a billion Euros in terms that can be more familiar to people) .
 
This is sad.

We have always seen Canadians as practical unpretentious people with common sense.
Some of us are. Most of those who aren't, are politicians of all three levels of government. I had to find a loophole and get my case worker in the outreach program at the seniors' centre to agree to it, to get my banking done because the idiots at City Hall have decided that banking is nonessential for the disabled people who take that form of transit.

Ah, you haven't read Valka's posts on Stephen Harper then.
According to wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada

there are 38,008,005 Canadians

and 38,008,004 are not that Stephen Harper.
Stephen Harper is still very much in the picture, albeit in the backrooms of various subgroups of the Conservative Party of Canada (aka Reformacons) and he's been advising his good buddy Jason Kenney, the POS who is the current Premier of Alberta.

We might have Heaved Steve in 2015, but not far enough.

Thats not really a fair assessment of the situation. They’ve established a priority list in a way that is determined to statistically have the biggest impact. Due to limited vaccines, some people that are “high priority” aren’t going to be first up on that list. Weird, minor edge cases don’t notably affect that.
Easy for someone in the not-at-risk portion of the population to say. Very soon I will have been staying at home (except for critical medical appointments and banking) for an entire year. I've been outside - literally outside - maybe a dozen times during that time. Some of you will likely have noticed that there are times when I'm extremely short-fused here... part of that is mental health-related. I'm angry so much of the time now because the places where I can usually go to take a break and unwind have either been closed or they're places where I've not been allowed to go because the transit department deems them "nonessential."

In what universe is it fair to vaccinate murderers and rapists ahead of the staff who take care of Stage 4 cancer patients? :huh:

IN WHAT UNIVERSE IS IT FAIR THAT PAUL BERNARDO, ROBERT PICKTON, OR THE SHAFIYA FAMILY GET VACCINATED BEFORE PEOPLE LIKE ME, OR SYNSENSA, OR AIMEE? :huh: :huh: :huh:

Yeah, I know the blather that federal prisoners deserve priority because they're in a government-run facility and can't leave. So effing what? I do not give one portion of one tiniest particle of a damn if any of them get the virus and die. Vaccinate the staff? Fine, that makes sense. The prisoners? No. FFS, they get more time outside their cells each day than the people in the initial version of the quarantine hotel in Calgary did, and likely better food and access to medical care, as well.

There are some medical services I've been needing for TWO YEARS but haven't been able to access. I got lucky with the surgery scheduled for next month; it was only due to the danger of OD'ing on painkillers that I was able to get moved up the queue. In the meantime, nobody had better do something stupid with the spring breaks going on now so things get shut down again.

/justified tantrum
 
Very soon I will have been staying at home (except for critical medical appointments and banking) for an entire year.
You have just promted me to figure out that I have been locked down (voluntarily or legally) for 1 year and 13 days :(
what universe is it fair
Not this one.
 
From the test ground, North of Hadrian's Wall

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...lockdown-schools-vaccines-boris-johnson#img-1

Pfizer and AZ vaccines reduce hospital admissions by 85% and 94%, study suggests
The Covid vaccination programme has been linked to a substantial reduction in hospital admissions,
PA Media is reporting. The PA story goes on:

Researchers examined coronavirus hospital admissions in Scotland among people who have had
their first jab and compared them with those who had not yet received a dose of the vaccine.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strathclyde and Public Health Scotland
examined data on people who had received either the Pfizer/BioNTech jab or the one developed
by experts at the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca.

By the fourth week after receiving the initial dose, the Pfizer and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines were shown
to reduce the risk of hospital admission from Covid-19 by up to 85% and 94%, respectively, they found.

I doubt that there is much difference in efficacy between the two vaccines, and suspect that the Pfizer showed a
lower efficiency than the OAZ vaccine in Scotland because it was issued slightly earlier to an on average slightly
more vulnerable set of people who were. because of the extra vulnerability, slightly more likely to be hospitalised.
 
In what universe is it fair to vaccinate murderers and rapists ahead of the staff who take care of Stage 4 cancer patients? :huh:

In the universe where the national advisory committee on immunization hasn’t specifically de-prioritized high-risk people in congregate settings because of their past criminal convictions.

They’re not especially consequential in terms of delay to others anyway - if you do the math, they’re only going to delay your vaccination by a single-digit number of minutes.
 
Fruits of vaccine nationalism

Countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas have administered more than 175 million shots to protect people against COVID-19 since December 2020, with most countries giving priority to medical workers. But not a single country in sub-Saharan Africa has started immunizations—South Africa will be the first, this week—leaving health care workers dying in places where they are scarce to begin with.

On 6 January, gastroenterologist Leolin Katsidzira received a troubling message from his colleague James Gita Hakim, a heart specialist and noted HIV/AIDS researcher. Hakim, chair of the department of medicine at the University of Zimbabwe, had fallen sick and had tested positive for COVID-19. He was admitted to a hospital in Harare 10 days later and moved to an intensive care unit (ICU) after his condition deteriorated. He died on 26 January.
It is a crushing loss to Zimbabwean medicine, Katsidzira says. “Don’t forget: We have had a huge brain drain. So people like James are people who keep the system going,” he adds. Scientists around the world mourned Hakim as well. He was “a unique research leader, a brilliant clinical scientist and mentor, humble, welcoming and empowering,” wrote Melanie Abas, a collaborator at King’s College London.

Hakim was one of several prominent doctors to succumb in recent weeks in Africa, which has suffered a second pandemic wave. Just 1 day before him, U.S. physician David Katzenstein, who had moved to Harare after his retirement and directed the Biomedical Research and Training Institute there, died from COVID-19 at the same hospital.

Neighboring Mozambique lost an anesthesiologist, a gastroenterologist, and a urologist in recent weeks, says parasitologist Emilia Noormahomed of Eduardo Mondlane University, as well as two young general care physicians. Several more are seriously ill. Such losses hit hard in Mozambique, which only has about eight doctors per 100,000 people, compared with almost 300 in the United States. “It will literally take an entire generation to rebuild” from such losses, says Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

Beyond the moral argument, there are sound economic and public health reasons to close the gap. Vaccinating those most at risk around the world would drive down hospitalizations and deaths everywhere sooner, allowing societies to reopen and economies to recover. It could also help reduce circulation of the virus globally, lowering the risk of new virus variants emerging.​
 
And reduce the rate at which new variants are appearing. Yes anything that helps healing people faster or deduce the spread should be shared if the goal is to put an end to this.

If however the goal is to milk this for all it can be worth...
 
Argentina's new health minister denies having had any knowledge or responsibility in the ongoing (and snowballing) vaccine-gate scandal.
The only slight glitch here is that, as the former minister's secretary, she was formally in charge of vetting vaccines and then logging every single does received or applied by the Argentine state.

Please resign and surrender yourself to the appropriate authorities, madam.
 
In the universe where the national advisory committee on immunization hasn’t specifically de-prioritized high-risk people in congregate settings because of their past criminal convictions.

They’re not especially consequential in terms of delay to others anyway - if you do the math, they’re only going to delay your vaccination by a single-digit number of minutes.
Can you try to imagine why law-abiding, at-risk people would be upset about this? I'm not the only one.

We are living in a province where the Minister of Social Services thinks it's okay to remove ALL curtains from hotel rooms that will house homeless people, remove the normal amenities one expects of hotel rooms, even to the point of removing the pictures on the walls. Rajan Sawhney is completely tone-deaf to the AISH recipients who have tried to explain what her changing the date of the cheques has meant in terms of being able to buy bus passes in a timely way (for those cities with special transit allowances for AISH recipients; my own city doesn't give a crap about things like that). She doesn't care that certain bills can no longer be paid in a timely way if people are truly strapped by the end of the month. She really doesn't give a damn about those who were evicted because the AISH funds came AFTER the landlord tried to collect rent. She doesn't even think we've been negatively affected by the pandemic.

Shandro is equally tone-deaf. He thinks he knows more than my own doctor about what medications I should be on. No consultation, just the pharmacist giving me a heads-up so I won't call them in a panic when I see that my usual meds aren't there in the monthly pharmacy delivery.

When you combine Shandro, Sawhney, and Kenney, plus having a useless MLA like Adriana LaGrange, you get a huge mess that leaves the at-risk population having absolutely NO faith in this government's having the slightest bit of either common sense or compassion. It's all about THE MONEY to this pack of sociopaths.

Do not talk to me about "doing the math." I don't live my life by eating and breathing statistics. As I said... this is all just theoretical and abstract to people who aren't personally at risk or have someone close to them who is at risk.
 
Do not talk to me about "doing the math." I don't live my life by eating and breathing statistics. As I said... this is all just theoretical and abstract to people who aren't personally at risk or have someone close to them who is at risk.

Math is how public policy is determined. You can’t govern effectively based on feelings. The least effective policies on covid-19 has been where feelings have driven policy.
 
I doubt that there is much difference in efficacy between the two vaccines, and suspect that the Pfizer showed a lower efficiency than the OAZ vaccine in Scotland because it was issued slightly earlier to an on average slightly
more vulnerable set of people who were. because of the extra vulnerability, slightly more likely to be hospitalised.

Not to mention there is just a lot less covid now for Oxford to fight.

This is outstanding news. If it holds true these look like the kind of flu-like figures we can live with.
 
I am surprised by how stoic everyone is. Maybe it is an element of humanity: be hit by the boot enough times, and not being hit by a boot is a great success.
Works with anything, until breathing.
 
Math is how public policy is determined. You can’t govern effectively based on feelings. The least effective policies on covid-19 has been where feelings have driven policy.
You do need to take them into account, along with common sense. Kicking a woman out of the hospital for holding the hand of her terminally-ill husband who's dying anyway? If math told them to do that, math can go to hell.
 
Math is how public policy is determined. You can’t govern effectively based on feelings. The least effective policies on covid-19 has been where feelings have driven policy.

I think this is untrue. Public policy is not determined or driven primarily by math, but rather by ideology and group dynamics, both as in voters and politicians are driven primarily by ideology. Also, one can govern based on feelings, in fact governing without empathy is probably the single worst way to govern. Even the last sentence I don't think holds up. Many SEAsian countries had their pandemic response also driven by social stigmatization, and it actually worked out decent for them - In a pandemic situation it actually seems that strong societal taboos (that trump individualism and individualistic needs) are almost as key as a good government-driven pandemic response. I would say the countries that have been "less afraid" of the pandemic have been doing poorly.

If math told them to do that, math can go to hell.

As always, you put it much more elonquently than I ever could have. Rationality is only good when it considers human needs.
 
Perma-link to the article EnglishEdward shared: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/22/one-vaccine-protection-severe-covid-evidence The original link takes you to a "latest covid news" page, which alas is all too common when sharing links.

I think there's a happy medium. Basing decisions on data is important, and I agree that most of the worst covid-related decisions have not been based in data; I would argue they were based on denial of the facts. But as any politician should be able to tell you, you base decisions on numbers alone while ignoring people's feelings at your own peril. I'm reminded of the doctor that United Airlines dragged off an airplane a couple years ago. The math said he should be randomly removed from the plane, but anyone with sense would have realized the PR nightmare that was going to ensue.

For the prisoners' dilemma, I don't think they should be prioritized above health care workers, but I do think they should be prioritized higher than they are being prioritized. Several of the largest outbreaks have been in prisons, due to the close living quarters, and those outbreaks spill over into the community at large as prison workers go home to somewhere outside the prison. It shouldn't be as high of a priority as nursing homes, as the patients in nursing homes tend to have higher health risks, but the risk of an outbreak is similar. At least, prison workers should be prioritized to try to create a safe perimeter around the prisons where an outbreak could spread like wildfire.

Politically, I think this is one of the areas where you could include them somewhere higher than where they are now in most jurisdictions, but not quite where math alone would dictate. E.g. maybe after you do medical workers, nursing/congregate home residents, 80+, and 75+, you add in prisoners.

On an earlier thread topic, I like Macron's 5% suggestion. It's still too early in the roll out to sell politically what mathematics would dictate makes sense, but 5% is enough to get the ball rolling, without being so much that it is likely to cause an uproar among the electorate. And while he has tried to not focus on the diplomatic aspect of sending some doses abroad, I think that is an important consideration.

I've been considering doing some modeling of the spread of cases if you concentrate vaccinations in one area, versus spread them out equally. At current rates of transmission, it can be hard to reason about intuitively. E.g. it makes sense why vaccinating New Zealand isn't going to be very effective at stopping transmission, but it isn't so obvious why Britain sending doses to, say, Egypt, would make more sense than keeping them at home, when Britain still has a lot of cases.
 
Wait hang on are we mad that people in prisons, sites of repeated observable mass outbreaks, well known massive hotspots and sites of poor care and institutional negligence, are being vaccinated? That's part of what "high risk setting" means.

It's not just for the prisoners, although certainly no part of any civilised country's penal system is governed by rules which state "everyone in prisons should be exposed to deadly diseases". It's also for everyone who works there, as well, and all their contacts.

Not to mention, everyone in prisons is exposed if some are, so ranting about "murderers" etc elides all the other people imprisoned on far more debatably meritorious grounds. Prisoners are disproportionately from minority groups due to poverty and racist policing. The Aboriginal incarceration rate in Canada is several times higher than the general population, a third of the population of Canadian prisons are Aboriginal. Prisoners are often people with their own health vulnerabilities.

The desire to personify prisons as some specific bad famous individual because "but murderer" makes a person blind to everyone else caught up by the racist and classist carceral state, all of whom are at risk of outbreaks in what is a high risk environment.
 
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