alioth wrote:
In the UK’s case what I found so odd was recently all the “case number handwringers” insisting all sorts of measures like mandatory work from home but no mention of schools. Closing workplaces again but leaving schools open isn’t really going to do a lot when most of the circulation is in people in schools!
Because they want to work from home but they don’t want their children at home with them all day?
alioth wrote:
No, it’s been vaccinated to be a bad cold.It is still a very nasty illness for those with naive immune systems. Out of the people I know who have had symptomatic COVID: the two unvaccinated ones, one died (that person had co-morbidities) and the other ended up in the hospital (that person was healthy and not overweight) and just 10 minutes of minor activity leaves him completely exhausted for 3 hours. The partially vaccinated were over the worst symptoms within a week, but are still not quite up to their previous fitness levels over 12 weeks later, and for the fully vaccinated, it was merely a 3 day heavy cold with complete recovery within a week.
But of course remembering that ~ 50% of infections are totally asymptomatic, and plenty of people who get symptomatic infection (perhaps the majority?) report very mild symptoms rather than a bad cold.
So what we mean is that it can be a nasty illness, especially if unvaccinated, but it still probably won’t be.
We’re all going to get infected, yes, but we won’t all get ill. Most of us will get either nothing at all or nothing we’d even consider bothering the doctor about.
alioth wrote:
We really need to get more on top of vaxxing the teenagers, not locking down the economy again.
Not to mention kids too.
Schools are not the main problem here, people returning from high risk countries (including vaccinated people) are a huge problem. It may not be a bad idea to shut down travel from these places for a while or re-introduce testing and /or quarantine.
Locking down here really is not appropriate right now, the measures and certificate use work quite well.
Graham wrote:
We’re all going to get infected, yes, but we won’t all get ill. Most of us will get either nothing at all or nothing we’d even consider bothering the doctor about.
IF we are vaccinated.
alioth wrote:
IF we are vaccinated.
No. I believe that still holds (~50% asymptomatic, most of the rest very mild) even if you’re not vaccinated.
Vaccination just shifts it even further in that direction.
Yes, but dramatically so. Looks at the pre-vaccine UK hospital occupancy versus today’s. And on top of that we have a much more infectious strain dominating, plus we have almost no precautions. It seems obvious that the vaccine has improved things by some factor of 10x and probably more.
I totally agree with Graham. I know lots of people who got Covid before the vax was available. All were fine
Person 1 – caught it right at the start of this Pandemic on a skiing trip – a bit overweight – was on his running machine all through his illness
Person 2 – his wife ditto above (without the running machine)
Person 3 – wife of one of my employees – works in a care home – like a 3 day cold much less worse than flue – back to work in 5 days!
Person 4, 5 and 6 – all Pilots – all fine – a cold – less bad than flu
All at the start when the BBC and Sky news were reporting it like Ebola
This is now with us, we will all get it sooner or later. You might as well get it out of the way as your natural immunity (after vax) is 30 times that of just being double vaxxed
Peter wrote:
Yes, but dramatically so. Looks at the pre-vaccine UK hospital occupancy versus today’s. And on top of that we have a much more infectious strain dominating, plus we have almost no precautions. It seems obvious that the vaccine has improved things by some factor of 10x and probably more.
For sure. All I’m getting at is that your odds were pretty damn good even before the vaccines.
People don’t understand the incredibly uneven distribution of risk within a population. They think that a 1.5% case fatality rate (UK cumulative 8.94m positive tests, 140k deaths) means that anyone who gets Covid has a 1.5% chance of dying.
People and the media cannot grasp that almost all the risk lies with a very small subset of the population in question.
Jersey_Flyer wrote:
I know lots of people who got Covid before the vax was available. All were fine
They were lucky to say the least. I knew plenty who died and I know many who lived through hell and some who are still very bad after months. I know very few who have actually had it and would call it harmless.
Jersey_Flyer wrote:
All at the start when the BBC and Sky news were reporting it like Ebola
If it had been treated as thus in the very beginning, when we had 10s of cases instead of played down by head-in-the-sand politicians, this pandemic would have been over for more than a year by now.
Jersey_Flyer wrote:
You might as well get it out of the way as your natural immunity (after vax) is 30 times that of just being double vaxxed
That is not what I am reading. People who have recovered are protected by the antibodies for between 3 and 6 months, those who are vaccinated for about a year. Apart, the risk of going through this unvaccinated is tremendous.
Right now, people in places which are close to me die in large numbers. To claim that passing through the illness rather than avoiding the effects by vaccination sounds either extemely cynical or whistling in the dark. There was a time when people did Covid parties to get infected and to get it over with, quite a few deeply regretted that idea.
Graham wrote:
People don’t understand the incredibly uneven distribution of risk within a population. They think that a 1.5% case fatality rate (UK cumulative 8.94m positive tests, 140k deaths) means that anyone who gets Covid has a 1.5% chance of dying.
No. they understand very well that this means 15 out of a thousand will die. In many places it is way more. If you have a community with maybe 2000 people, that is 30, if you have one with 10’000 it is 150 and so on. These are not numbers to be taken lightly, particularly if by vaccinating everyone, those numbers can go down to 0.0x %
Graham wrote:
People and the media cannot grasp that almost all the risk lies with a very small subset of the population in question.
140k deaths and millions of people handicapped is a “small subset”? Again, I find that cynical. Accepting these kind of death and loss of health numbers reminds me of very dark times indeed. So why are we upset if a 747 crashes with 500 dead? Their own fault to climb on the airplane? They knew the risk? Here we are talking of a number which is well over a medium size city, all in all so far more than whole countries worth of people have been killed by this bug.
