Poll of the Day > Things are a bit too quiet on the COVID front right now...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Feels like it's going to skyrocket again at any moment. Just laying in wait for the people who got it over Christmas to lose their immunity.

oh, you think its quiet now, huh?

turn around

MICHALECOLE posted...

oh, you think its quiet now, huh?

turn around

those jelly beans?

Its exploded in China and hasn't settled down in some parts of Australia (they're already mentioning a 5th shot)

Havent heard squat about it here in the US since the war started

Covid's not going away and it never will go away, at least not any time in the near future. Honestly, I think people are just so... spent... and exhausted... over it. I think a lot of people just don't care anymore and have adopted a 'if I get it I get it. Let me live my life again' attitude.

Lock it down

it's on break due to elections

I think its waiting to see whats happening between Russia and Ukraine just like the people are. Either that or Russia got lucky and bombed COVID in the process of leveling an entire country.

Covid isn't trendy anymore, war is the new covid.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/9/AAQ2WmAADEwp.jpg

Funny how when people finally got fed up with the resatrictions the pandemic went away. Just like I said from the begging.

Wanded posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/9/AAQ2WmAADEwp.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzytNyP1GBs

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

the pandemic went away.

By what metrics?

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

Things are a bit too quiet on the COVID front right now...

Things are too quite on the reporting on COVID front right now; governments have stopped wide spread public testing (with health units relying instead on wastewater testing, a reactive measure as opposed to the proactive measure of wide spread public testing) in the vain hope that if they pretend there is no problem, it will just go away, like climate change.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Funny how when people finally got fed up with the resatrictions the pandemic went away.

adjl posted...

By what metrics?

By the metric of putting their fingers in their ears, closing their eyes and screaming that the pandemic is over, all while a new deadlier strain is just around the corner, with no public health restrictions to stop it's inevitable spread.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Funny how when people finally got fed up with the resatrictions the pandemic went away. Just like I said from the begging.

Imagine thinking this way. Yikes.

Wanded posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/9/AAQ2WmAADEwp.jpg

I kind of feel like this meme is actually real for a lot of people

Wanded posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/9/AAQ2WmAADEwp.jpg

There is no shortage of things to be outraged about. And I'm not being sarcastic or facetious.

KodyKeir posted...

all while a new deadlier strain is just around the corner

this is incredibly unlikely. If the strain is deadlier, it is unlikely to be as contagious. If there is a new strain, it will likely be an evolved form of omicron that is less deadly, but more spreadable. At that point it's probably just going to be on the same level as a seasonal flu.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

If the strain is deadlier, it is unlikely to be as contagious.

This generally hasn't been true of Covid (see: the three major variants before Omicron that were both more transmissible and deadlier than the previous one). Given the high asymptomatic infection rate and long period of pre-symptomatic transmission, there's very little selective pressure acting on Covid's mortality rate. The only potential selective pressure is the one we artificially apply through public health restrictions, and that can only be true if we respond to deadly outbreaks with stronger restrictions and higher compliance rate (which isn't particularly likely when a sizable chunk of the world's population believes all Covid mortality data has been fabricated).

The whole "viruses tend to evolve to be more contagious and less deadly" thing is generally a considerable oversimplification of the process of viral evolution. Killing the host is usually going to be an undesirable outcome from a reproductive perspective, but there are many more factors involved that can mitigate that selective pressure by quite a bit, even going so far as to render it irrelevant in some cases.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

this is incredibly unlikely.

Omicron BA.2 is already circulating and growing in prevalence. Early data suggests that it's quite a bit more transmissible and causes at least the same severity of disease as BA.1, with some other data suggesting it may be more severe.

https://www.who.int/news/item/22-02-2022-statement-on-omicron-sublineage-ba.2

It's not only not unlikely. It's here.

adjl posted...

The whole "viruses tend to evolve to be more contagious and less deadly" thing is generally a considerable oversimplification of the process of viral evolution.

Yeah relying on genetic evolution roulette is not exactly the best strategy to deal with viruses.

adjl posted...

(see: the three major variants before Omicron that were both more transmissible and deadlier than the previous one)

idk if you're talking about like, subvariants, but I'm pretty sure Delta was the deadliest, but the variants after Alpha were a lot less lethal than it until Delta. Then Omicron just kind of threw everything out the window and is only really "deadly" because of the sheer amount of people who got it compared to other variants.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

idk if you're talking about like, subvariants, but I'm pretty sure Delta was the deadliest, but the variants after Alpha were a lot less lethal than it until Delta.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.775224/full
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/775224/fpubh-09-775224-HTML/image_m/fpubh-09-775224-t002.jpg

Alpha's (formerly the "UK Variant") mortality rate was 37% higher than the wild type, Beta's (formerly the "South Africa variant") was 50%, Delta's was 133%. I opted not to include Gamma in that comment because it never really became a major Variant of Concern, much like the 9-10 variants between Delta and Omicron (there were some concerns about Lambda, but those never really solidified). Those are the three major variants to which I was referring, and you can see that each was deadlier than the last.

I lack data for transmission rates, but I remember quite definitely that Alpha was more contagious than the wild type and Delta was more contagious than any previous one, so it's really just Beta that's in question there. I don't actually remember if it was more contagious than Alpha, so I may have spoken in error there.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

Then Omicron just kind of threw everything out the window and is only really "deadly" because of the sheer amount of people who got it compared to other variants.

Which would you consider to be the deadlier attack: Attacking a city with a revolver or attacking a city by carpet bombing it? Any given individual is more likely to be killed by being deliberately shot than by having a bomb dropped in their approximate vicinity, certainly, but I don't think it's particularly controversial to describe the carpet bombing as being deadlier due to its sheer scale despite the individual "case" fatality rate being lower. Anyone saying "Omicron isn't deadly" is actually saying "I probably won't die from it" and conflating that with "it's not a dangerous disease," which is very much a mistake (one which many people have been making with Covid since day 1).

On top of that, while definite data is still difficult to find because Omicron is relatively new and vaccination rates complicate the analysis quite a bit, some quick searching found this:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e4.htm?s_cid=mm7104e4_w
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/113628

That's finding 16 deaths per 1000 cases in the winter 2020/21 peak, 13/1000 in what they're calling the "Delta period" (though Delta was a major contributing factor to the winter spike, so I question those names), and 9/1000 for Omicron. 9/16=56.25% of Delta's peak mortality rate (blaming Delta for winter 2020/21), which we can multiply by Delta's 233% from above to get 131% of the mortality rate of the wild type, or slightly better than Alpha (137%) despite widespread vaccination that we didn't have when Alpha was dominant.

Now, on the flip side, I also found another article suggesting Omicron is 10% as deadly as Delta (or 23.3% of the wild type), and another still suggesting 25.7% as deadly, which would be 23.3% and 59.9% of the wild type, respectively. Again, conclusive data is still hard to find because we're only ~4 months in and it takes time to do these studies (especially with a three-week lag between infection and death, which most of them have to allow for), but the bottom line is that Omicron is still pretty comparably deadly to the wild type that shut down the world in March 2020, despite vaccines being everywhere now. It's a welcome relief from Delta in many ways, but people are far too quick to assume that "it causes a less severe illness" means that it doesn't have a significant mortality rate. It very much does.
Sources:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789408
https://globalnews.ca/news/8636502/covid-omicron-death-south-korea-data/

Pandemics are like terrorism, I guess. Makes you question your daily life and the sanctity thereof, causing you to compromise irrationally.

Unbridled9 posted...

Covid's not going away and it never will go away, at least not any time in the near future. Honestly, I think people are just so... spent... and exhausted... over it. I think a lot of people just don't care anymore and have adopted a 'if I get it I get it. Let me live my life again' attitude.

pretty much,i stopped giving a fuck, ik a lot others have as well., mask mandate is gone, yeh, people are just treating it as a flu now

I think people have turned their attention to the war. Then the last few days, the attention has been diverted by the Oscars.

Unbridled9 posted...

Covid's not going away and it never will go away, at least not any time in the near future. Honestly, I think people are just so... spent... and exhausted... over it. I think a lot of people just don't care anymore and have adopted a 'if I get it I get it. Let me live my life again' attitude.

That's right. COVID-19 will never go away. Bad things will always happen and never go away while good things will never happen. If they happen, then it's too good to be true, and will be gone right away and replaced with something much worse.

adjl posted...

Omicron BA.2 is already circulating and growing in prevalence. Early data suggests that it's quite a bit more transmissible and causes at least the same severity of disease as BA.1, with some other data suggesting it may be more severe.

https://www.who.int/news/item/22-02-2022-statement-on-omicron-sublineage-ba.2

It's not only not unlikely. It's here.

Let me know when it's up to Omicron Persei 8. Then I'll start sounding the alarms.

fishy071 posted...

I think people have turned their attention to the war. Then the last few days, the attention has been diverted by the Oscars.

How dare you!!!

I watch CNN religiously, and I think I can proudly speak for the American people in saying, COVID-19 is the most serious thing to ev . . .

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/7/3/AAMabeAADFpl.jpg

Covid is useless now, so they're lifting the mandates to avoid angering people to the point of protesting.

Of course they'll bring it back just in time before the midterms.

Need to impose those draconian lockdown measures to produce mass mail-in ballots and ensure they steal the elections.

We all know it.

SantaKhala posted...

Need to impose those draconian lockdown measures to produce mass mail-in ballots and ensure they steal the elections.

Last I checked the Left aren't the ones making it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in polling places.

Zareth posted...

Last I checked the Left aren't the ones making it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in polling places.

That only applied to politically affiliated groups, and it's based on existing laws. It's considered voter influence, and it's akin to bribery.

SantaKhala posted...

Need to impose those draconian lockdown measures to produce mass mail-in ballots and ensure they steal the elections.

What is your basis for believing the election was stolen?

The government is ...

SantaKhala posted...

useless now, so they're lifting the mandates to avoid angering people to the point of protesting.

Hooray! Abdication of responsibility hoping that individual responsibility will be enough to sto..

...and we're in a new outbreak that threatens to break our healthcare system, good jorb everyone.

SantaKhala posted...

draconian lockdown measures

lol, as if.

Wear a mask, wash your hands.

KodyKeir posted...

lol, as if.

Wear a mask, wash your hands.

I'm rather enjoying the mental imagery of interpreting the term "draconian" literally enough that that's an actual reflection of what dragons are like. Like Bilbo sneaks into Erebor and finds a bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on the Arkenstone.

KodyKeir posted...

lol, as if.

Wear a mask, wash your hands.

. . . and don't donate to people that disagree with us or we'll freeze your bank account and put you on a watch list. Nothing draconian about that, right?

Ozmose posted...

. . . and don't donate to people that disagree with us or we'll freeze your bank account and put you on a watch list. Nothing draconian about that, right?

Considering the kid gloves used to get there versus the entire history of the suppression of the left, those measures were downright judicial in their application.

Ozmose posted...

. . . and don't donate to people that disagree with us or we'll freeze your bank account and put you on a watch list. Nothing draconian about that, right?

Did you ever stop to wonder what the differences might be between the convoy and the hundreds - if not thousands - of other anti-mask, anti-vaccine, or otherwise anti-doinganythingabouttheworstpublichealthcrisisinacentury protests that have been taking place across the country without incident or government involvement for as long as the government has been doing anything about the worst public health crisis in a century? Differences that perhaps might have something to do with the fact that the government took extraordinary measures (after pissing away a month doing virtually nothing about it) in this case but not the others?

I'll give you a hint: If you don't want to be treated like a terrorist, committing terrorism is generally a bad idea. It's nothing to do with "disagreeing." People have been disagreeing continuously for two years with no issues except every sensible person in the country thinking they're idiots (for obvious reasons). Then a handful of them got tired of how ineffective peacefully protesting was and decided to try terrorism instead to get faster results.

Hold the hell on, do viruses make sounds

In the sense of "do they cause whatever medium they're existing in to vibrate"? I'd say yes. Despite their small size, moving through that medium and colliding with other things is still going to cause waves to form and propagate through that medium, albeit very small ones that will dissipate almost immediately because of how little energy is involved in creating them. In the sense of "can humans hear them"? Almost absolutely not. I'm sure it's not impossible to create equipment that could detect and amplify those waves to such an extent that humans could hear them, but that's going to be an extremely involved process with little to no actual value to justify the immense cost.

Blorfenburger posted...

Hold the hell on, do viruses make sounds

Is this a Bligh alt? Because you've been killing it lately.

adjl posted...

it's not impossible to create equipment that could detect and amplify those waves to such an extent that humans could hear them, but that's going to be an extremely involved process with little to no actual value to justify the immense cost.

Oh, that 's been done.