johnh wrote:
In other words, is someone who is 75 but in overall excellent health, significantly more vulnerable than someone who is 55 and healthy? Most people over 75 – certainly here in the US – are not in the greatest of general health – diabetes, obesity, cardiac issues, etc.
Exactly. If you’re older and in poorer health then you’re at a greater risk from any respiratory infection (or any infection of any sort) doing the rounds, not just Covid-19.
It’s a fact of life. Infectious diseases is a natural phenomenon – just not one the western world has had to pay much attention to for a while.
You can implement appropriately-scaled and targeted measures. You can vaccinate the population. What you can’t do is press the pause button on the whole world, because it won’t be long before the people who are paying for it all (the next generation) will rebel.
DavidS wrote:
The NHS have indeed started on the 65+s. I got a text this morning and was vaccinated within the hour :-)
Excellent news, good for you!
What you can’t do is press the pause button on the whole world
Governments seem to have gone into serious willy-waving mode about how much they are doing to protect their population from all those nasty foreigners. France has closed its borders even to French citizens. Scotland is insisting on hotel quarantine for EVERYONE arriving from abroad, while the UK in general is only doing it for so-called red-list countries. Quite how this this is supposed to work when most people arriving in Scotland from abroad will be flying into LHR – given how few international flights there are – is not very clear. Or do they put you in hotel quarantine when you drive up the M6?
Let’s face it, all of the variants are prob99 already in every country. Shooting foreigners on sight may have a very marginal effect on how quickly they propagate, but no more.
johnh wrote:
but let me just say that I have now got quite good at not only ignoring everything he posts, but also the resulting futile discussion. If someone wants to believe that doom is nigh, the end of the world is upon us, etc, sure, have at it. Just please don’t bother the rest of us with it.
While I agree with you that Mooney_driver has views that are a bit extreme, reading views like his and for example Silvaire’s at the other end of the spectrum, and also reading the occasional conspiracy theory, is precisely why I like this forum. While united by a love for aviation, we are a quite diverse bunch politically and in outlook on life – or if you are @Mooney_driver, what is left of it before he succumbs to the virus or despair 
[SCNR – hope you don’t mind. Need some humour here!]
Reading posts from and engaging with people holding a diverse set of opinions is interesting, has certainly influenced my view, and even when it hasn’t, it made and still makes me appreciate how other people think.
Valentin wrote:
I don’t understand why many focus on travelling as if it’s the primary source of all problems. There is nothing special about travelling that affects the spread of the virus
Oh yes, there is! And nobody says, it’s the primary source – but it is one source that significantly affects the spread of the virus. The virus can only travel by travel! If nobody moves in or out of your city, the virus can never reach your city. Obviously this is not perfectly possible in most cases as there are some delivery drivers that need to travel between cities to distribute perishable food. But that is something that can be managed.
On the second level, travel is more dangerous as it fuels the virus with “fresh meat”: If you have an outbreak in an elderly care home it is quite likely that the entire population of this home gets infected. They go through the disease and then the outbreak is pretty much contained.
If you have an outbreak in a hotel (or an apres ski bar) also pretty much everybody gets infected. But before they realize they travel back to their home locations where they are surrounded by many more uninfected and spread the disease further. The outbreak is unconfined.
Finally: Many people traveling demonstrate a behavior that they would not demonstrate at home. Even people who wear masks and keep distance at home (because they are afraid of social ostracism) not necessarily do this while traveling – a bit like many people think they can get uncontrolled drunk at vacation.
Malibuflyer wrote:
If you have an outbreak in a hotel (or an apres ski bar) also pretty much everybody gets infected. But before they realize they travel back to their home locations where they are surrounded by many more uninfected and spread the disease further. The outbreak is unconfined.
And having in mind virus’s simplicity, mutations are often. It’s not hard to conclude that the larger pool of infected people results in more mutations which eventually leads to new and more successful strains. Maybe I’m oversimplifying this but that’s the basic mechanism. So yes, travelling is the issue but at the same time I believe that need for travel makes the largest pressure for ending the pandemic.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Oh yes, there is! And nobody says, it’s the primary source – but it is one source that significantly affects the spread of the virus. The virus can only travel by travel! If nobody moves in or out of your city, the virus can never reach your city. Obviously this is not perfectly possible in most cases as there are some delivery drivers that need to travel between cities to distribute perishable food. But that is something that can be managed.
It makes sense only if there is no virus (or very few cases) in the city (region, country). It’s not the case for almost all locations at the moment.
Malibuflyer wrote:
On the second level, travel is more dangerous as it fuels the virus with “fresh meat”: If you have an outbreak in an elderly care home it is quite likely that the entire population of this home gets infected. They go through the disease and then the outbreak is pretty much contained.
If you have an outbreak in a hotel (or an apres ski bar) also pretty much everybody gets infected. But before they realize they travel back to their home locations where they are surrounded by many more uninfected and spread the disease further. The outbreak is unconfined.
The travel provides the virus with “fresh meat” in the same way as meeting any new people. If I go to a supermarket and get in contact with 10 people I have never seen before, it’s the same if I fly to another country and get in contact with 10 people.
If people from the hotel in your example, just go to a supermarket instead of travelling home, the same thing happens.
As for apres ski bars, there are no apres ski bars at the moment. Even the restaurants on slopes are permitted to serve food for takeaway only. The skiing itself is a quite safe activity in terms of spreading the virus (you are mostly in the open air and naturally distance from other skiers to avoid collisions).
Malibuflyer wrote:
Finally: Many people traveling demonstrate a behavior that they would not demonstrate at home. Even people who wear masks and keep distance at home (because they are afraid of social ostracism) not necessarily do this while traveling – a bit like many people think they can get uncontrolled drunk at vacation.
Do you have any evidence of this phenomen?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
1% risk of dying plus a much higher percent of being permanently disabled by long Covid.
It’s not as simple as that, overall the percentage of dying is much lower than 1% for anyone in good health and not ancient, especially if you’re under 75 and in good health. Around 75% of COVID deaths in the UK have been people 75 years old or older. This is why vaccinations started with old people first, because if we can stop old people from getting serious cases, we can stop the hospitals from filling up and the mortality numbers from going up, and in the inevitable time it takes to get to vaccinating younger people, we can at least free up hospital space and give them a decent chance of getting through it alive.
One thing I would like to see is the prevalence of ‘long COVID’ – I’ve seen ‘qualitative’ stuff saying younger, healthier people are at MUCH lower risk from it than older or unhealthy people, but nothing quantitative, not even a breakdown by age. The only concrete number I’ve seen about it was a few months ago, when the UK said it had slightly more long COVID cases than deaths. Everything else I’ve seen about it has been conjecture.
Graham wrote:
The restrictions on freedoms currently in place in most western jurisdictions have required fairly extensive legislation to implement.
Yes, if you think of government restrictions. In Norway the restrictions we see in the UK, France etc. curfew for instance cannot be done unless there is a martial law (we are at war). Interestingly, the legislator thought of that a couple of hundred years ago. The laws about this is for each local community (county) to use the means necessary to prevent/stop infectious diseases. The government has no saying in this. This has proved to work just fine. The problem being different regulations all over the country, which through government and the parliament has been “equalized” sort of.
alioth wrote:
One thing I would like to see is the prevalence of ‘long COVID’ – I’ve seen ‘qualitative’ stuff saying younger, healthier people are at MUCH lower risk from it than older or unhealthy people, but nothing quantitative, not even a breakdown by age. The only concrete number I’ve seen about it was a few months ago, when the UK said it had slightly more long COVID cases than deaths. Everything else I’ve seen about it has been conjecture.
I’ve also seen nothing that even attempts to properly define ‘long covid’ as an actual condition as opposed to stories about people taking a long time to feel 100% again, as is common after being seriously ill.
