BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

britain’s omicron wave is already waning. we already were ‘awash with cases’ and there was no measurable uptick in deaths. this winter’s ‘wave’ had a fraction of the last two winters’ hospitalisations and deaths. seems fine.

and they’re not “a few isolated” cases, are they? as soon as a few small clusters leap through those borders, you’re dealing with thousands of cases a day. korea kept it to ‘isolated’ clusters for 2 years … then, post-delta, it was in the thousands. omicron is just kicking off here, i’d say week 1/2, and we are racing for 10,000+ and record cases.

how does a vastly transmissible strain remain as ‘isolated cases’ ? lmfao. remember that little phrase: ‘exponential spread’ ? remind me what the r-factor is for those omicron-afflicted societies again!

and, yet again you keep denying the reality.

“australia had two years without covid because they closed their borders …”. dilbert, delta was several times more transmissible and many many times higher load than previous strains. delta was NOT CONTAINABLE AT BORDERS.

the situation changed. ‘everyone just close your borders, folks!’ wouldn’t cut it any more. covid was leaking through borders like a sieve.

omicron is SEVENTY times more transmissible than delta. 70x. 7-0. let that sink in.  australia’s water tight borders were failing with delta, i don’t care how many times you keep talking about WA and SA and ignoring 60% of your population in your major urban/international centres, who were suffering under highly unproductive lockdowns and emergency measures.

ALL OF THE ZERO COVID STALWARTS ABANDONED THE POLICY FOR A REASON. IT WAS CALLED DELTA.

‘it worked for two years …’ yes, against VASTLY inferior strains. jesus fucking christ. you know what else worked highly effectively ‘for one year …’ those VACCINES you keep disparaging as being out-of-date and no longer fit for purpose! you dumb schmuck!

honestly it’s like trying to educate a brick. or a tape machine, perhaps. round and round we go as your mind slowly unspools.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-24 22:06:53)

Isn't it worth holding out a bit longer until the better vaccines and anti-virals arrive, assuming they do.

Dilbert wrote:

Fast forward 23 years:

uziq wrote:

Don't worry, the Alpha-Kappa-Phi variant is bad but there's a vaccine around the corner which will fix it, carry on travelling and partying

you sure do change your tune a lot.

‘guys vaccines are useless, we have to shut all borders forever to wipe out this thing, even though that’s impossible’.

‘isn’t it worth shutting the borders until the new vaccines arrive …’

let me guess, you think the next-gen vaccines are going to ‘eradicate’ covid, just like you stupidly thought (and then tantrumed about it) that vaccines v1.0 were going to ‘return us to normalcy and disappear covid from society’.

i can see a pattern here. by q3/q4 of this year you’ll be wailing for full global lockdowns again and bemoaning that ‘vaccines are hopeless guys!’ despite the picture suggesting massively that the pandemic is only a threat to the unvaccinated and unboostered. 

you literally flip flop in the space of 2 pages. you’re hopeless. even you don’t know what your own covid policy is. like a lost little child wah-wah’ing and wanting to be noticed, that’s all you are.

new vaccines will reduce transmission for 6 months to a year. sure. like the last lot. and they were never 100% effective at this, anyway; no flu-type or corona-type vaccine has ever been thus. it's a 'bonus' from an epidemiological point of view, not the primary goal of vaccination, which is, you know, to stop serious illness and death. the next-gen vaccines won’t plug up covid forever. it’s here to stay in the long-term. you know what ‘endemic’ means, yes? you keep droning on about it.

and why do they even matter when 99.5% of the people dying of this thing are vaccine refuseniks? why should the 80-90% of the population who are willing to be vaccinated have to endure 3 or 6 months of lockdowns? people have already made great personal sacrifices to 'buy time' for years now. and we did buy time ... for vaccines (which you keep rubbishing), and now antivirals. 'buying time' is defunct.

the boosters aren’t ‘fairly useless’ for the vast majority of people. they enable them to go about their normal daily lives. to earn money. see loved ones. attend school. not all travelling and partying, dilbert. normalcy. you would recognise the vast gulf between that and the draconian measures you’re proposing if you had a life.

Its worthwhile to hunker down to prevent people dying etc

i'm sorry but, CITATIONS NEEDED. this is just well-meaning sounding bullshit from you. 'worthwhile'? how? 'prevent people dying'? how?

you know what's most effective at preventing avoidable death? those boosters you keep calling useless.

'worthwhile'? why is it worthwhile? 99.5% of covid deaths are unvaccinated people, the majority of whom haven't taken the vaccine out of personal choice, not because they're immunocompromised or severely at-risk of complications.

'people dying'. are people dying en masse with omicron? again, citation needed. you make out like people advocating for 'living with covid' now are advocating for mass death. but omicron, which will in 1-2 months will be the globally dominant variant, is the least lethal form of covid we have seen. omicron's current ICU admissions rates are 0.1-0.25% of all cases in australia.

what will sealing the borders and grounding flights do to stymy the spread of omicron within your community? within national borders? the levels of internationally imported virus cases are trivial. there are hundreds of thousands of community transmissions - with possible mutations - every day INSIDE your communities, dipshit. so by 'hunker down', you must surely mean 'full lockdown', right?

if it was so self-evidently worthwhile, why has every country to formerly trumpet zero covid/closed borders/suppression now given up on it? you seem better informed on this matter than several independent national advisory bodies.

you don't care as long as you're free to do whatever you want to do.

erm, i've followed all the laws and restrictions? i effectively flew from one country that was just opening up and forgetting restrictions into another one that had much heightened restrictions and rules. south korea had a social group limit of 2 people for the entire summer. the UK had parties. remind me how i'm 'motivated by partying and doing just what i want to do' again? i moved to korea because i was burnt out of WFH and wanted a change, and because i was reaching the maximum elligible age for the 'ideal' freelancer visa, not because i wanted to hopscotch and evade covid regulations. i followed more stringent covid measures than 99.9% of people, idiot. i was sheltering a clinically vulnerable person. i didn't even see my then-girlfriend for almost a year because she was living in virus-hotspot london and the risks were too high.

sorry, try again you keep putting your coins into these machines - 'uzi is selfish!' 'we are the world's best at climate change!' - and leaving the casino with empty pockets like a rube.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-25 05:57:14)

pretty hard to argue against that, despite the obviously sensationalist rhetoric.

i have a big problem with that part of the right who have always urged 'let's back to normal' primarily on business/economic grounds rather than with any actual attention paid to public health rationale. that shit is gross.

i saw a darkly amusing tweet the other day which went sort of like:
"in the warhammer 40k universe the emperor demands 1,000 human sacrifices a day to the golden throne to sustain his immortality. this is considered a cartoonish and dystopian number to illustrate the inhumanity of their fascistic universe. here in america we are sacrificing 2,500 people a day for capitalism and nobody cares".

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-25 07:28:00)

that’s a rather academic difference, haha. i don’t think the classical antecedents and progenitors of market capitalism ever intended for their ideology to be used to justify the sort of rapacity we see in the american healthcare system or pandemic response.

adam smith as 40k emperor. there’s a fanfic for you.

Australia had 37,537 confirmed cases of H1N1 Influenza 2009 (Human Swine Influenza) and 191 deaths reported by Department of Health[1] but only 77 deaths reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.[9] The actual numbers are much larger, as only serious cases warranted being tested and treated at the time. Suspected cases have not been reported by the Department of Health and Ageing since 18 May 2009 because they were changing too quickly to report.[10] Sources say that as many as 1600 Australians may have actually died as a result of this virus.[11][12] On 23 May 2009 the federal government classified the outbreak as CONTAIN phase[13] except in Victoria where it was escalated to the SUSTAIN phase on 3 June 2009.[14] This gave government authorities permission to close schools in order to slow the spread of the disease.[13] On 17 June 2009 the Department of Health and Ageing introduced a new phase called PROTECT. This modified the response to focus on people with high risk of complications from the disease. Testing at airports was discontinued. The national stockpile of antiviral drugs were no longer made available to people with the flu unless there were more than mild symptoms or a high risk of dying.[15]

how verrrrry interesting. a disease-outbreak response that is proportional to the threat, and which evolves alongside an evolving and emergent situation!

3,200 australians have died of covid-19. since 'reopening', and with the current omicron threat, ~1000 (largely unvaccinated, unboostered, etc) people have died as a mixture of delta/omicron (no specific numbers are available for omicron-reported deaths at present). that's with ~450,000 cases per week at current steam.

in the 2019 seasonal flu outbreak, 1,900 australians died out of reported 310,000 cases. funny, i don't remember dilbert proposing state-wide border closures and society-wide lockdowns then.

by all present statistics, the omicron strain of sars-cov-2 is an order of magnitude less dangerous and lethal than H1N1 swine flu, and even less dangerous than the 2019 seasonal flu.

i wonder if his parents/he got their flu shots in 2019 and got on with their lives as normal?

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-25 08:35:07)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

It is clear that society is never going back to what they imagine it was 'back in the day'. So they want to just collectively punish everyone else.

That "back in the day" nostalgia people have is insanely rose-tinted. Maybe you had more buying power, but unless you were "in" with the wealthy you were still a thing to be used up and discarded.

Americans watch too much television. A lot of people think "Leave it to Beaver" was how it was back then. Strange that people in the 50's never made any media about struggling World War 2 veterans putting their 1911's in their mouth on Thanksgiving.

smh

I guess the dad thinks he's being supportive of him, but he's being supportive of a self-destructive, collective psychosis that has gripped this nation. "Sticking to your guns" on something as routine as a vaccine to the point where you're leaving your family fatherless. What can you do for these people at this point? The heels are dug in. I'm sure the hospital has made weary arguments, but it's all bounced off of that fight or flight opinion-defense psychologists talk about.

It's probably not even that he's worried that the COVID vaccine is going to kill him. He's already dying. Admitting that they're wrong, much scarier!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ … acceptance

new zealand move towards covid acceptance.

another sterling example of ‘measurable results’ from dilbert’s advocacy.

Boosters increase protection against death from Omicron in over-50s to 95% – UKHSA

Covid boosters increase protection against death from the Omicron variant to 95% in people aged 50 or over, the UK Health Security Agency said on Thursday.

The UKHSA said that about six months after a second dose of any of the Covid vaccines, protection against death with Omicron was about 60% in those aged 50 and over. However, this increased to around 95% two weeks after receiving a booster vaccine dose.

UKHSA added that data continued to show high levels of protection against hospitalisation from the booster. Effectiveness against hospitalisation was 90% for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot , dropping to 75% 10-14 weeks after the booster.

For Moderna, effectiveness against hospitalisation was 90-95% up to 9 weeks after the booster.

“The evidence is clear – the vaccine helps to protect us all against the effects of Covid-19 and the booster is offering high levels of protection from hospitalisation and death in the most vulnerable members of our society,” said Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at UKHSA.

The UKHSA also issued an initial analysis of vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron sub-lineage called BA.2, which is growing in the UK and Denmark, finding a similar level of protection against symptomatic disease.

“After two doses effectiveness was 9% and 13% respectively for BA.1 and BA.2, after 25+ weeks,” the UKHSA said. “This increased to 63% for BA.1 and 70% for BA.2 from two weeks following a booster vaccine.”

dilbert: oh my god the boosters are useless!

lmao well done at misreading elementary results.

they mean the effectiveness of the original 2 doses against omicron is very low (i.e. for people who had their original vaccination 25+ weeks ago, without a booster update, means they are now very exposed to new strains).

after a recent booster, their protection is back up to 70%.

jesus you are dense.

new variants will ALWAYS occur. may as well try and stop flu from evolving. the only thing that does it is natural selection itself. no amount of lockdowns or ultra-new vaccines are going to do anything about sars-cov-2's future mutability. moron.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-27 15:43:22)