Coronavirus

[DrGriz]

To put it succinctly, you can't fix stupid.

As long as hospital/health care capacity is not imminently threatened by Covid (military readiness, similarly), we won't see mandates for vaccination or lockdowns. It always was and remains the goal. Nobody thought we could save everyone, and they proved it.

 

[madodel]

Seriously? Why not ask if the sun will rise tomorrow?

People claiming he needs to be removed - they’re not worried about Tesla’s survival.

People claiming he’s distracted and not spending enough time at Tesla even though he hasn’t spent much time there for quite a while and previously only when there was an issue and out of his own mouth the company doesn’t need him there because of the job everyone else is doing - not worried about Tesla’s survival.

People claiming they and everyone on the planet they know will buy a Tesla the very second Elon is no longer with Tesla - they’re not worried about Tesla’s survival.

The company’s balance sheet and financial health definitely isn’t worried.

It’s as if your anger and upset with him blocks your ability to think in first principles and creates thoughts disconnected from reality. Strange, so many people suffering from the same affliction.

Are you living under a rock? Musk has completely alienated a huge number of potential EV purchasers with his insane anti-COVID lunacy and now right wing cult spewing. I'm not interested in cults of any sort but I expect nothing less from you with your endless attacks on anyone that isn't a true believer. I wish he were distracted and just played with his worthless new toy but Musk is a genuine liability at this point to Tesla and everything else he is attached to. That's the reality of his going over the deep end.

 

[eleison]

Viruses tend to mutate to become less deadly over time, though it's not guaranteed. The government did not coerce EVERYONE to get vaccines, obviously. Reasonable efforts were made to get people vaccinated, boosted, wear masks, etc., just as with previous pandemics. I don't know why this is so difficult for you to understand other than a willful desire to avoid the obvious.

During lockdowns, for a lot of places, you could not go to a restaurant unless you had a vaccine passport. It was to a point, the political leaders were saying you couldn't even go to crowded places unless you had the vaccine passport. A few politicians were thinking of even limiting access to grocery stores. Due to OSHA, a lot of employers were being coerced to make their employees take the vaccine and/or provide masks. If you wanted to have surgery or go to the hospital, for most hospitals, you had to have a passport. Doctors were not allowed to talk about the vaccine side effects in a negative light or the efficacy of mask or else they might lose their medical licenses. Everyone was being coerced.. not to mention the new regulations regarding traveling by plane... Have people forgotten what happened just a few years ago??? Or was it not really coercing everyone to get vaccines? It was just a slight nudge or else your life became very difficult? Oh, man, I forgot about the covid testing.. Everyday you had to take the test (or something like that) if you wanted to go to work

Well, I guess the virus in not longer deadly enough.. and the risk of it turning deadly is really, really low; mask don't really matter; boosters don't really matter; testing no longer matters... etc.. etc...

I wonder if we could have ended up at this same place without hurting so many people with lockdowns and shutting down of schools... After all, there's a lot of people who still haven't even taken the first vaccinate shot and yet nobody seems to care anymore unlike in the very beginning of the pandemic. If the virus was going to be less deadly over time regardless, it seems to me the lockdown, mask mandates, vaccines were only going to delay the virus into the state that it is now -- less deadly especially since the lockdowns continued AFTER the creation of the vaccine. And a lot of people are saying now, vaccines do not prevent transmission.

Oh well, whatever, fun times...

 

[Daniel in SD]

why did the government continue lockdowns EVEN AFTER vaccines were already in supply and people were already taking it?

There were no lockdowns in CA after the vaccine was widely available. The second lockdown ended January 25th, 2021. I’m surprised lockdowns continued in Illinois for long after that.
I would note that not many people obeyed lockdown orders and we had a huge winter wave. Personally I went on a nice camping trip because I felt it was perfectly safe (still haven’t gotten Covid! Knock on wood).

 

[EVNow]

Seriously? Why not ask if the sun will rise tomorrow?

I think it is possible for Tesla to get seriously injured because of Musk going "insane".

I'm not that worried about demand dropping in US/EU because of his tweets. But if he is not careful, it can create a big backlash in China.

Elon won't be the first (or last) billionaire to lose everything because of ill-advised adventures, either.

 

[madodel]

Asked my wife (a cardiologist for over 30 years) how things are at her hospital. She said about every other patient she is seeing has COVID or Flu. I asked if what she was seeing them for was related to COVID or Flu and she said a lot of the COVID patients have new onset arrhythmias related to COVID. She's given up asking patients to wear masks. She wears an N95 and stays as far away from them as possible.

 

[eleison]

Asked my wife (a cardiologist for over 30 years) how things are at her hospital. She said about every other patient she is seeing has COVID or Flu. I asked if what she was seeing them for was related to COVID or Flu and she said a lot of the COVID patients have new onset arrhythmias related to COVID. She's given up asking patients to wear masks. She wears an N95 and stays as far away from them as possible.

I was under the impression most of the new COVID patients have been vaccinated and boosted. I think the majority of people who have COVID now have been vaccinated. I also heard the vaccinate can cause heart issues. I wonder if the arrhythmias is related to what she is seeing. Another question: I wonder what percent of those who got the vaccine also wore a mask but got COVID anyways. Oh well... one of these days, some ones going to have to do research on this without all the politics.... and no BS of "the science keeps changing"; no censorship.. Just plain old facts..

Since COVID is endemic now, if your wife keeps wearing the N95 mask and stays away from people -- what are her chances of still catching COVID over her lifetime? From what I hear, COVID is starting to become like the common cold. You can try to prevent it, but sooner or later, you will get it. It's just a question of time and since COVID is deadliest to older folks, I would assume getting when younger is the best. I could be wrong though.

 

[Dave EV]

As long as hospital/health care capacity is not imminently threatened by Covid (military readiness, similarly), we won't see mandates for vaccination or lockdowns. It always was and remains the goal. Nobody thought we could save everyone, and they proved it.

Unfortunately, there have been plenty of cases where COVID (combined with other airborne diseases like RSV / Flu) have recently, or currently threaten hospital capacity and service, yet there have not been any significant calls to even bring masking back. Los Angeles County, being one recent exception where they are talking about bringing a masking mandate back, but that's all that I can recall.

There were no lockdowns in CA after the vaccine was widely available. The second lockdown ended January 25th, 2021. I’m surprised lockdowns continued in Illinois for long after that.
I would note that not many people obeyed lockdown orders and we had a huge winter wave. Personally I went on a nice camping trip because I felt it was perfectly safe (still haven’t gotten Covid! Knock on wood).

And that really depends on your definition of lockdown - there was no real lockdowns in the sense that you couldn't leave your house. Plenty of people went about their daily business. Restaurants were probably the only business that were truly locked down and prevented from operating.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

I was under the impression most of the new COVID patients have been vaccinated and boosted

Yes, the goal, and a measure of complete success is for 100% of patients to be vaccinated and boosted. This is straightforward.

From what I hear, COVID is starting to become like the common cold. You can try to prevent it, but sooner or later, you will get it.

The idea is to know as much about the virus as you can before you get it. That includes getting your immune system to know as much about it as possible.

The data show (looking at matched cohorts) that vaccination and boosting reduce mortality and other severe outcomes significantly.

It is becoming like the flu (similar burden, excluding PASC), because it is no longer novel to immune systems, through vaccination and prior infection. (Unfortunately immunocompromised are still at substantial risk.)

Hopefully with a bivalent booster it is lower impact than influenza but we have no data. Which is incredibly annoying.

 

[Daniel in SD]

And that really depends on your definition of lockdown - there was no real lockdowns in the sense that you couldn't leave your house. Plenty of people went about their daily business. Restaurants were probably the only business that were truly locked down and prevented from operating.

I think that a stay-at-home order is the lowest possible bar to call something a lockdown. Of course there were a huge number of exceptions to California’s two stay-at-home orders. Also there was no punishment for disobeying them. Restaurants were still open for takeout during both lockdowns. The claim that there were lockdowns in the US after widespread vaccine availability is bizarre to me. I assumed that California was close to the most restrictive state.

 

[Dave EV]

It is becoming like the flu (similar burden, excluding PASC), because it is no longer novel to immune systems, through vaccination and prior infection. (Unfortunately immunocompromised are still at substantial risk.)

I think it's starting to show that COVID infection leads to significant other potential health issues that show up some time after the initial infection.

There's plenty of long COVID going around, and some are hypothesizing that COVID has weakened immune systems causing the bigger than typical RSV and flu seasons this year.

Not to mention the increase in cardiovascular events.

Not sure if the near-baseline results recently are to be trusted or not, or if it's suppressed because the data hasn't been fully submitted yet:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1602337780125908995

 

[DrGriz]

Unfortunately, there have been plenty of cases where COVID (combined with other airborne diseases like RSV / Flu) have recently, or currently threaten hospital capacity and service, yet there have not been any significant calls to even bring masking back. Los Angeles County, being one recent exception where they are talking about bringing a masking mandate back, but that's all that I can recall.

Yes, while I was addressing @eleison's rants about Covid, you are correct that the triple threat of RSV/Flu/Covid has locally challenged capacity. And while the CDC has quite definitely called for masking, there have been few local mandates (which are bound to fail politically at this point anyway). However, the situation is not quite the same as when Covid was novel, and we didn't know how bad it would get.

I definitely wish rationality pervaded and people would mask. At least our state's health care systems still insist on it in hospitals and clinics.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Not to mention the increase in cardiovascular events.

Not sure if the near-baseline results recently are to be trusted or not, or if it's suppressed because the data hasn't been fully submitted yet:

To me it just looks like this graph shows that COVID causes cardiac and respiratory events in this age group, which we know. Fortunately the scalar eyeballs as being somewhat lower after vaccine availability, in your plots (also have to account for ascertainment). Anyway, seems separate from PASC (potentially), and if PASC is an issue that causes the same result I’d expect a long elevated tail.

Too early to tell on the data though several months is usually close to good enough. I’d wait longer.

PASC is something to avoid which is why I avoid COVID as much as possible within reason while returning to regular life. That’s why I specifically excluded its contribution in my post above.

Personally I like the face diaper as they like to call it.

 

[madodel]

I think it's starting to show that COVID infection leads to significant other potential health issues that show up some time after the initial infection.

There's plenty of long COVID going around, and some are hypothesizing that COVID has weakened immune systems causing the bigger than typical RSV and flu seasons this year.

Not to mention the increase in cardiovascular events.

Not sure if the near-baseline results recently are to be trusted or not, or if it's suppressed because the data hasn't been fully submitted yet:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1602337780125908995

Regarding RSV, my wife said she had never seen an adult patient hospitalized with RSV before this past month. She's sure it has happened but she's never seen adults that sick from RSV to need hospitalization. It was always a childhood threat. She has no idea why this is happening now but I suppose it could be related to the triple pandemic or just COVID wearing down immune systems or just bad timing for RSV mutating to being more virulent in adults.

 

[Dave EV]

I definitely wish rationality pervaded and people would mask. At least our state's health care systems still insist on it in hospitals and clinics.

I can understand the aversion to masking - they can be a pain!

I would love to see a big push towards indoor air quality and regulations that get us towards upgraded HVAC filtration and/or portable filters, upper-room UV sterilizers (ones that are proven to be effective, unlike a lot of UV snake oil out there) and similar measures.

Not only would this be effective against COVID, but also many other airborne diseases that are prevalent now, and in the future.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

she had never seen an adult patient hospitalized with RSV before this past month.

Historically how has ascertainment been for RSV and have the diagnostics been just as widely available and definitive? And was testing as common? (Strong incentive to test now with COVID around.)

My baseline assumption (a hypothesis I suppose) is that we are better at assigning blame (ascertainment), but I really have no idea, and it could be the things you suggest as well.

 

[eleison]

Regarding RSV, my wife said she had never seen an adult patient hospitalized with RSV before this past month. She's sure it has happened but she's never seen adults that sick from RSV to need hospitalization. It was always a childhood threat. She has no idea why this is happening now but I suppose it could be related to the triple pandemic or just COVID wearing down immune systems or just bad timing for RSV mutating to being more virulent in adults.

Has she seen adult patients hospitalized with RSV who has never gotten the vaccination? If so, what is the percentage? According to those crazy right wing conspiracy theorist, they say the COVID vaccine is hurting the body's own immune system therefore the body cannot fight other virus as well.

 

[DrGriz]

Historically how has ascertainment been for RSV and have the diagnostics been just as widely available and definitive? And was testing as common? (Strong incentive to test now with COVID around.)

My baseline assumption (a hypothesis I suppose) is that we are better at assigning blame (ascertainment), but I really have no idea, and it could be the things you suggest as well.

If you don't go fishing, you don't catch fish.

 

[DrGriz]

Has she seen adult patients hospitalized with RSV who has never gotten the vaccination? If so, what is the percentage? According to those crazy right wing conspiracy theorist, they say the vaccine is hurting the body's own immune system therefore the body cannot fight other virus as well.

You are barking up the wrong tree. No vaccine for RSV.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

No vaccine for RSV.

The gentleman (?) is talking about the “coagulating” and immune-damaging (yes I am kidding; this is nonsense; there is a reason J&J was taken off the market!) COVID vaccine.