My family is celebrating the holidays in one of the most vaccine reluctant states (Alabama). We have gone to the local movie theater and local Walmart and life is being lived mostly mask free in a state that is 47.3% fully vaccinated with very little social distancing being practiced in general. My family continues to mask and socially distance, so we definitely stand out here. But seeing so many people living an almost “pre-pandemic” experience weirdly gives me hope, although I am not sure that I will ever get all of the way back to pre-pandemic living.
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A friend, who is vaccinated and boosted, got “Omicroned”, likely at a venue which they attended while masked. However, his wife was not infected, and it was a pretty mild case, like a moderately bad cold, and it was mostly over in a couple of days.
There is increasing evidence that Omicron, while being far more contagious than Delta, is less severe, especially for people who are vaccinated. So the obsolete chance of a severe breakthrough case of Covid is lower from Omicron than from Delta, even though the chances of a breakthrough infection from Omicron is higher.
However, for the unvaccinated, Omicron is still severe enough to overload hospitals with severe cases.
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H and I talked with his sister on Saturday. She lives in a small town and is a pharmacist at the community hospital. The area vaccination rate is just over 50% and she is so frustrated. Hospital is almost full, ICU is packed - mostly Covid cases and almost all among the unvaxxed. The health care workers are putting in extra hours. I just don’t know what to say…
Thankfully H’s family (they all live there) are all fully vaccinated.
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Pretty much every day now we get an article in our newspaper saying the same thing. On Christmas medical lad and his GF said the same there too.
A lot of people are getting very angry at the unvaxxed at this point in time. Last year it was just sad (no vaxxes). This year it’s WTH - how _____ can you be?
But talking in person with unvaxxed BIL and SIL - they’re so convinced they are right and refuse to even consider anything else. At least now they’re not preaching it like they used to - or at least not among us. They’ve retreated to “everyone make their own choice.” I guess that’s a first step.
BIL might get dismissed from his military position. It wouldn’t bother me a bit. Military folks have to get a lot of other vaxxes and no one makes a big fuss at all. This time the fuss is there solely due to the politics involved (at least with BIL).
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So it’s good you are masking but based on your description, you still have a higher probability to get it. I hope you will test before getting onto a plane etc–to prevent the spread to others who may be vaccinated but still at risk of severe disease.
I fully agree.
And if their view is “everyone makes their own choice” then I wonder what their choice will be if they get sick with Covid? Will those folks then choose to follow science with the now-fewer treatments working with Omicron? Will they then choose to try the new Pfizer pill?
I just cannot get my head around the selfishness. I would understand (though not agree) if there was a real religious reason or whatever. But those making a political stand have a real possibility of harming others, whether they take those limited covid supplies, or prevent other emergencies at the hospital from being seen.
And if they feel that strongly, then I seriously hope insurance companies will hold them responsible for any medical needs. To me, it is different than a smoker requiring lung treatment–smoking is addictive, and has limited effect on others. Refusing a vaccine, just because, may well cause harm to others.
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Yeah I don’t understand why these people are dismissing vaccines in favor of even newer drug treatments. It’s illogical.
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This is me! We should not be where we are at nearly 2 years in.
DC had very bad reaction to booster (incl breathing issues and chest pain) and I took them to ER. Filled with COVID patients. And I wanted to scream, “put up your freaking mask” and “why do you have 4 people with you?!” And I wanted to triage - vaxxed people at the front of the line, unvaxxed at the back.
DC was able to get a test and then back to waiting room…another test and back to waiting room… etc. We finally talked to a nurse who said all the tests came back ok. So after being there 3-1/2 hours w/o seeing a doc or going back into the ER area, we bailed. Nurse didn’t say it but appeared to think it was a good idea. Hot showers when we got home!
I felt terrible for anyone who worked there. I was angry at the resources being taken away from cancer patients, children, genuine accidents, etc.
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My medical resident daughter is completely done with the anti vaxxers. She has patients threaten to sue her and complain to her attending because she won’t give them ivermectin. She shows them her badge so they get the spelling of her name right.
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So am I!
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We only had a 4 hour drive (We just got back home). My wife and I will self-quarantine for 10 days since I work from home and my wife won’t go back to work for another 3 weeks. The kids will both take rapid tests by tomorrow and take the PCR test right before flying back to school. If my wife or I show any symptoms, we would get tested as well. My wife has been doing in-class teaching at a high school with 3,000+ students throughout the pandemic so she is always “hyper-vigilant” about safety.
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I’m not excited about the anti-vaxxers because they’re near me and my kid and friends and thus dangerous to us. But as far as being done goes…there’s a certain unhappy inevitability here so long as we can’t get vaccine very fast into eight billion people. Even if they traveled like it was 1918, meaning hardly at all, all it takes is one bad mutation and one traveler.
As I see the preprints come through on omicron and other variants I think increasingly: this isn’t going to stabilize for a long time, we know a hell of a lot more than we did two years ago but there’s still a lot to learn about this virus. And as the years roll by I wonder about when the next one emerges and joins it. SARS, MERS, ebola, zika, H1N1, not that long ago, once you’re thinking in terms of years.
When I think about these things, I see that we’re still looking to “get back to normal,” but increasingly this looks to me like we’re seriously thick about the situation, and that this is like wondering when we can go back to driving cars that get 15 mpg and spraying Freon around. We live in a warming world of migrating insects and small animals, also of 8 billion people who travel a lot and eat and drink things that were on another continent three days ago. We already have climate migrants and tides of war refugees; we’re going to have more. But we obviously have not figured out how to live sheltered from new and violent pathogens. We don’t seem to have notice that this is an important thing to do. Judging by what happened in Missouri a couple of weeks ago, we haven’t even figured out how to listen to “the tornado will be in your part of town at 9:30 pm.” And you can see tornadoes coming with your eyes, they’re big.
Maybe this is a new sort of problem. People have lived in times of rapid disease transmission and multiple diseases they could do little or nothing about: the industrial revolution crowded people together and you can all name the regulars: typhus, TB, measles, malaria, various poxes, septicaemia especially after industrial accidents and childbirth, etc. Things that are usually diseases of poverty and ignorance now. But I can’t think of a time in which lots of people crowded together dealt simultaneously with rapid waves of new pathogens, new vectors, and various disruptions to food and habitation due to climate change.
Might be a good idea to think about it, rather than hoping that pandemic professionals will save the day by containing all the pandemics without most of the population’s cooperation.
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I always smile when I hear people talk about our current times as a new sort of problem of rapid/multiple diseases and the way we travel and how we are current responding to the pandemic. My soon to be college graduate took up an interest in viruses about 10 years ago when she downloaded a game on her 1st cell phone where the goal of the game was to “kill the world” by infecting the entire world with a killer pandemic virus. She spent a lot of time “designing” the type of virus that could wipe out the world and learned a lot of things that I see talked about as we go through this pandemic.
She struggled doing much true “long term damage” to the world with viruses like Covid-19 that occur more often than most think in world history (fast mutating viruses that infect a large number of people with lower death rates) as her simulated world saw travel restrictions and scientific innovation block spread, despite parts of the world struggling to manufacture vaccines and treatments to stop the spread (which is also happening today). She had the most success with a virus that would circulate in a population undetected with a long hibernation period that continuously mutates to avoid the human immune system and scientific innovation and had a much higher death rate once symptoms manifested along with a slow response from the virtual World Governments. If a 0.99 cents virtual game on virus spread played on a cell phone 10 years ago by a 12 year old could see a lot of the problems that are occurring during our current pandemic, this problem is not really a new one.
My own personal prediction talking to people much smarter than me who are fighting Covid-19 and reading articles from some of the world’s top scientists is that not only will this become an endemic virus, but one that will not be worried about much differently than other seasonal respiratory illnesses within 5 years. We could have lowered that timeline with a better response as a society, but the fact that their are still many 3rd world countries around the world with a less than a 5% vaccination rate means that we will have to do a better job, so that a true doomsday scenario never occurs when the next pandemic hits.
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There are a lot of pandemic games, and yes, they’ve been around for quite a while. Your daughter’s game, like all simulations, is a model: it limits variables sharply and simplifies in order to make a well-defined problem tractable. So it deals with a pathogen with one job in the game (kill), no humans, wildly oversimplified politics, economics, and sociology, and no other large, complex, cascading problems such as refugee waves and infrastructure damage driven by climate change. When you use the model, you will see the problems that the model is designed to expose. They’re real problems. They’re just not the only problems, and not even necessarily the important problems.
We don’t live in a model, and the problems that emerge when you have to deal with all the real (and varying) variables at once are what make medicine, governance, labor structures, etc. hard. And when you have many kinds of major disruptions at once, the models get less useful and ways forward harder to see, unfortunately. There’s a reason why the phrase “the fog of war” exists. People have to be able to think of the things that will matter and understand their interactions, in order to bake them usefully into a simulation that comes near verisimilitude, and knowing these things ahead of time turns out to be extremely difficult.
I saw a similar problem turn up in a recent county meeting here: we have a small group of autistic people who advocate for accommodations and ND-friendly…everything, really, and one of them was beside himself about the way a rezoning procedure was happening. As often happens in rezoning, the neighbors are looking like losers, it’s more or less a done deal before they know what’s happening, their personal problems count for little against the municipality’s or state’s, and the maddening thing is that they couldn’t have seen it coming because the long-range plan said something else. So this guy was not only outraged but couldn’t figure out why the board was so stupid: it’s very obvious to him, have a plan and stick to it, and then you don’t screw over hardworking people who’re now seeing their futures unravel. Debate the bejesus out of the plan and then make it and stick to it. Which works beautifully in Sims. The problem is that people are not Sims, and don’t necessarily behave in ways one might find reasonable or rational. If you make a ten-year plan to live by irl, you wind up with even more furious people attacking the board (or HOA or ag agency or what have you) for being unfair and holding everyone back and losing opportunities and being rules fascists for no reason. And they may be right. Even worse, you are not in control of many of the things that will present opportunities or make people want things different from what they said they wanted two years ago, or were indifferent to. You have no idea at all what might fall out of the sky. Which is why government is hard.
So: good training toy for your daughter. (Axis & Allies did something similar for me.) I’m sure she’s aware at this point, though, that there’s more to it, including other kinds of problems. As for problem novelty, some problems are new in kind, some in degree. At some point there’s not enough distinction to bother teasing them apart.
tl;dr: don’t rely too heavily on a game to guide you through anything but a game.
The Brooklyn Nets decided to bring back Kyrie Irving for road games only. Irving is one of the 3% of NBA players who is not vaccinated, refusing for non-medical reasons. The NYC vaccine mandate disallows him from playing home games.
However, he went into the NBA’s health and safety protocols immediately, presumably having tested positive for COVID-19. The protocols require sitting out 10 days or two negative tests 24 hours apart (a recent change shortens to 6 days for vaccinated players).
https://www.si.com/nba/2021/12/18/kyrie-irving-enters-health-safety-protocols-nets
According to the following page, “NBA players are testing positive and heading into quarantine at an unprecedented rate. As of Monday afternoon, 214 players have entered the league’s health and safety protocols this season, with 201 coming in December and 170 in the past two weeks.” Note that there are about 500 NBA players, so it looks like COVID-19 is infecting far more than the 3% who are unvaccinated. However, there is no mention of anything more than asymptomatic or very mild cases.
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It is a lot more than a game that guides my family and I agree with your statement that a pandemic game is an over simplistic model (yet it still hits a lot of the issues we see today). What you may not know about me is that inside of my “village” are some who are “In the Room where it happens” (to take a Hamilton musical quote), especially when it comes to public policy and vaccine development. The epidemiology models for a possible pandemic before 2020 where not off at all (not even on the amount of people who would get full vaccinated, because the models used at the highest levels are pretty complex as well). What was slightly off was the interpretation of those models once politics and public policy intersect. I will continue to trust my sources, but please continue to share what I find to be an unique perspective around the Pandemic.
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Seeing as how many vaccinated people are having break through cases and many more might have Covid but be asymptomatic, does your risk of getting sick rise based on whether the person who gave it to you is vaccinated or not? To me the greatest benefit to the vaccine is that it gives me some modest control on how the disease affects me. It doesn’t seem to do much to control the spread or eliminate variants.
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There is quite a bit of data (just fire up google) that vaccinated people who get infected have lower viral loads, so they are infectious for a shorter period of time and don’t shed as much virus. The point of the vaccines was not to stop all infections/transmission, it was to reduce severe cases and death.
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That was the expectation promoted in 2020 to early 2021. Then vaccination was found to stop nearly all infection and transmission of earlier variants, so there was a brief period of optimism. Then Delta and later Omicron came and set things back to the earlier expectation (at least while vaccines are still aimed at the ancestral variant), but that now looks disappointing compared to what seemed to be the case in May and June.
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We are now at 8 days since D2 tested positive for Covid on our ski trip. D1, H and myself have continued to have no symptoms. We rode in a car for 12 hours with D2 two days before she had symptoms and tested positive. All of us are fully vaccinated and had our boosters. The 3 of us may be healthy because D2 may have a lower viral load. This is just one example.
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