Coronavirus thread

[krummholz]

The published statistics, which are easy to access, back up this up and while your figures are not necessarily 100% accurate, you are right in stating that it's the unvaxxed that make up the majority of hospital admissions - FOR COVID!. What is not taken into account is that people admitted to hospital here in Australia for reasons other than Covid, are lumped in with those who are if they test positive after admission. The ABS admitted this earlier this week.

Actually, what I (and, I think, T.D. also) was saying is that it's possible for the vaxxed (not the unvaxxed) to make up the majority of hospital admissions and still be much less likely to require hospitalisation if they contract COVID, when the vaccinated make up the vast majority of the population as a whole.

And indeed, if this article by PolitiFact is accurate, that is precisely the situation in NSW:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/14/blog-posting/australia-vaccination-status-hospitalized-covid-19/

Politifact states that (a) the figures only apply to NSW, and (b) it's true that the absolute numbers of vaccinated people in hospital for COVID surpass those of the unvaxxed, but that this fact is misleading because of the 93% vaccination rate (age 12 and up) in NSW. Given that, the unvaxxed are still overrepresented in COVID hospitalisations. And the situation is even clearer when ICU bed occupancy is considered -  the unvaxxed make up slightly over half of the people in ICU beds, testifying to the effectiveness of vaccines in keeping people from becoming really seriously ill from COVID.

[Florestan]

Very sorry for your loss... and I hope you recover quickly from whatever has you ailing.

Thank you very much.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Since last Tuesday until today past noon I had the following symptoms: sore throat, cough, fever about 38 (subsiding with treatnent), extremely running nose, extremely watery eyes. Iow, the very classical symptoms of the very classical flu. I tested negative twice on a quick saliva test. Nevertheless, I can't rule out omicron. The only reason I did not get an official PCR test (which, if positive, would have automatically entitled me to get the Covid Pass) was that exactly on last Wednesday my father-in-law passed away and we had to organize, and attend, his funerals which took place today --- so I really could not afford a quarantine.

I have been wearing (double) masks all throughout this time frame.

Right now I am much better on all counts.

My condolences and prayer for you and your family. Get well soon, Andrei.

[Florestan]

My condolences and prayer for you and your family. Get well soon, Andrei.

Thank you very much.

[Karl Henning]

US virus cases, hospitalizations continue steady decline

[greg]

Since last Tuesday until today past noon I had the following symptoms: sore throat, cough, fever about 38 (subsiding with treatnent), extremely running nose, extremely watery eyes. Iow, the very classical symptoms of the very classical flu. I tested negative twice on a quick saliva test. Nevertheless, I can't rule out omicron. The only reason I did not get an official PCR test (which, if positive, would have automatically entitled me to get the Covid Pass) was that exactly on last Wednesday my father-in-law passed away and we had to organize, and attend, his funerals which took place today --- so I really could not afford a quarantine.

I have been wearing (double) masks all throughout this time frame.

Right now I am much better on all counts.

Hope you get better soon and sorry to hear about that.

[Holden]

This from the NYT. While it is not peer reviewed to my knowledge, it does support what's known about how the body fights infections. Let's hope they are right.

New York: As people across the world grapple with the prospect of living with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future, one question looms large: how soon before they need yet another shot?

Not for many months, and perhaps not for years, according to a flurry of new studies.

Three doses of a COVID vaccine — or even just two — are enough to protect most people from serious illness and death for a long time, the studies suggest.

"We're starting to see now diminishing returns on the number of additional doses," said John Wherry, director of the Institute for immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. Although people who are over 65 or at high risk of illness may benefit from a fourth vaccine dose, it may be unnecessary for most people, he added.

American federal health officials including Dr Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration's top COVID adviser, have also said that they are unlikely to recommend a fourth dose before the northern autumn.

The Omicron variant can dodge antibodies — immune molecules that prevent the virus from infecting cells — produced after two doses of a COVID vaccine. But a third shot of the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or by Moderna prompts the body to make a much wider variety of antibodies, which would be difficult for any variant of the virus to evade, according to the most recent study.

The diverse repertoire of antibodies produced should be able to protect people from new variants, even those that differ significantly from the original version of the virus, the study suggests.

"If people are exposed to another variant like Omicron, they now got some extra ammunition to fight it," said Dr Julie McElrath, an infectious disease physician and immunologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle.

What's more, other parts of the immune system can remember and destroy the virus over many months if not years, according to at least four studies published in top-tier journals over the past month.

Specialised immune cells called T-cells produced after immunisation by four brands of COVID vaccine — Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax — are about 80 per cent as powerful against Omicron as other variants, the research found. Given how different Omicron's mutations are from previous variants, it is very likely that T cells would mount a similarly robust attack on any future variant as well, researchers said.

This matches what scientists have found for the SARS coronavirus, which killed nearly 800 people in a 2003 epidemic in Asia. In people exposed to that virus, T cells have lasted more than 17 years. Evidence so far indicates that the immune cells for the new coronavirus — sometimes called memory cells — may also decline very slowly, experts said.

"Memory responses can last for ages," said Wendy Burgers, an immunologist at the University of Cape Town who led one of the studies, published in the journal Nature. "Potentially, the T-cell response is extremely long-lived."

Throughout the pandemic, a disproportionate amount of research attention has gone to antibodies, the body's first line of defence against a virus. That is partly because these molecules are relatively easy to study. They can be measured from a drop of blood.


Few labs have the wherewithal to study these cells, and their findings lag weeks behind those on antibodies. Perhaps as a result, scientists have frequently overlooked the importance of other parts of the immune system, experts said.

"Most people don't even know what they are — a lot of doctors and scientists are not completely clear what a T cell is," said Dr Dan Barouch, a virus expert at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston who led one of the T-cell studies.

"Fundamentally, I would argue that T cells are probably more important than what many people have given them credit for," Barouch said.

Antibodies spike after every shot of vaccine — or after each exposure to the virus — and inevitably decline within a few weeks to months.

Waning antibody levels after two vaccine doses prompted American officials to recommend boosters for everyone older than 12. The extra shots fortified antibody levels and helped to contain Omicron's spread, but they too appear to lose some of their ability to prevent infections within four months, according to recent data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Antibodies recognise two or three key parts of the spike protein, a protrusion on the outside of the coronavirus that allows it to latch on to human cells. But T-cells detect many more parts of the spike, and so are less likely to fail when the virus gains mutations in some of them.

Vaccines also encode a memory of the virus in B cells, which can churn out fresh batches of antibodies within four or five days after a new exposure to the virus.

This dual punch of T and B cells help explain why many people who received two or even three doses of vaccine could still be infected with the Omicron variant, but only a small percentage became seriously ill.

"You will see a decrease of the antibody levels over time, but if memory B cells are still there, and memory T cells are still there, they can kick back into action relatively quickly," said Alessandro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology who led a new study of T cells published in Cell.

Memory B cells become increasingly sophisticated over time, and they learn to recognise a diverse set of viral genetic sequences. The longer they have to practice, the broader the range of virus variants they can thwart.

Researchers showed last year that the elite school inside of lymph nodes where the B cells train, called the germinal centre, remains active for at least 15 weeks after the second dose of a COVID vaccine. In an updated study published in the journal Nature, the same team showed that six months after vaccination, memory B cells continue to mature, and the antibodies they produce keep gaining the ability to recognise new variants.

"Those antibodies at six months are better binders and more potent neutralizers than the ones that are produced one month after immunisation," said Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis who led the study.

In the newest study, another team showed that a third shot creates an even richer pool of B cells than the second shot did, and the antibodies they produce recognise a broader range of variants. In laboratory experiments, these antibodies were able to fend off the beta, Delta and Omicron variants. In fact, more than half of the antibodies seen one month after a third dose were able to neutralise Omicron, even though the vaccine was not designed for that variant, the study found.

"If you've had a third dose, you're going to have a rapid response that's going to have quite a bit of specificity for Omicron, which explains why people that have had a third dose do so much better," said Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University who led the study.

Memory cells produced after infection with the coronavirus, rather than by the vaccines, seem less potent against the Omicron variant, according to a study published last month in Nature Medicine. Immunity generated by infection "varies quite a lot, while the vaccine response is much more consistently good," said Marcus Buggert, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who led the study.

Still, the recent studies suggest that in most people, the immunity gained from infection or vaccination will hold up for a long while. Even if mutations in new variants change some of the viral regions that T cells recognise, there would still be enough others to maintain a reasonably strong immune response, experts said.

One big unknown is how slowly the T cells may decline, and whether two doses of vaccine can create a long-lasting response, or if instead people would need three — as some experts have suggested — to cement immune memory.

"That's a question that we don't know the answer to yet," Burgers said. "Those are the kind of studies that we're going to need to do."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

[Florestan]

Hope you get better soon and sorry to hear about that.

Manyt hanks.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Thank you very much.

So sorry to hear of your loss Andrei.  My condolences to you, your wife, family, and relatives and friends of his.

Hope that you're starting to feel better too.

PD

[Florestan]

So sorry to hear of your loss Andrei.  My condolences to you, your wife, family, and relatives and friends of his.

Hope that you're starting to feel better too.

PD

Thank you very much, PD.

[greg]

Bill Gates: 'If every country does what Australia did,' the world could prevent the next pandemic

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bill-gates-if-every-country-does-what-australia-did-the-world-could-prevent-the-next-pandemic/ar-AAUgGdd?ocid=winp1taskbar

For months, Bill Gates has warned of a new pandemic looming on the horizon. And according to the Microsoft co-founder, one country has already laid out a blueprint for successfully mitigating it.

"If every country does what Australia did, then you wouldn't be calling [the next outbreak] a pandemic," Gates, a health philanthropist who has dedicated billions of dollars to vaccine research, said at the annual Munich Security Conference


Is it possible to prevent the next pandemic? If every country does what Australia did, says Bill Gates
Keeping a new outbreak from becoming a pandemic would almost certainly prevent many of the global consequences caused by Covid-19. But, Gates noted, it'll likely require much stricter policies in a future outbreak's early days than how most of the world enacted against Covid.

And countries will need to maintain those policies for a sustained period of time, even potentially against public pressure.

Gates cited Australia's Covid response as the gold standard to follow. The country reopened its international borders this week for the first time since March 2020. Over the course of the pandemic, returning citizens and approved international travelers have been required to quarantine in hotels guarded by police and military members. Australia's states even periodically locked down their respective borders.

Thousands of Australians protested those lockdowns, but the measures seem to have worked: Since the beginning of the pandemic, only 20 per 100,000 Australians have died from Covid, according to a New York Times analysis of John Hopkins University data. That's a significantly lower figure than the 283 per 100,000 Americans who have died from Covid, according to the same analysis.

Anyone feel anything... a bit negative when reading this?
So if you look at the reactions, disproportionally negative. 2477 angry reactions. 653 positive.

Great example of why the MSM is hated by many. This isn't the way forward.

[Karl Henning]

Great example of why the MSM is hated by many. This isn't the way forward.

If you hate the MSM for reporting that Celebrity N. has an opinion (setting aside the q. of the validity of said opinion) you may be a logic-challenged snowflake.

[Madiel]

Bill Gates: 'If every country does what Australia did,' the world could prevent the next pandemic

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bill-gates-if-every-country-does-what-australia-did-the-world-could-prevent-the-next-pandemic/ar-AAUgGdd?ocid=winp1taskbar




Anyone feel anything... a bit negative when reading this?
So if you look at the reactions, disproportionally negative. 2477 angry reactions. 653 positive.

Great example of why the MSM is hated by many. This isn't the way forward.

Oh dear, someone reported an opinion that other people didn't like and that leads you to comment on the mainstream media.

Half the fucking problem is that people have been taught by their social media bubbles that they should only hear things they LIKE. Your response to a report you don't LIKE is that it shouldn't have been reported. No discussion of whether it's true or not. No observation about how Australian death rates were massively lower than American ones. Just a declaration it's not the way forward.

Someone made you feel negative. Oh poor you.

How pathetic.

We also don't die from guns all the time here, and have a health system that generally works pretty well, but for some reason there's a part of American society that is completely terrified by all of these things.

Just because the MSM isn't brainwashing you doesn't mean you're not brainwashed. Just means you haven't identified the culprit.

[greg]

If you hate the MSM for reporting that Celebrity N. has an opinion (setting aside the q. of the validity of said opinion) you may be a logic-challenged snowflake.

Why is Bill Gates' opinion important in the first place? Why not balance out that opinion with something else? Why not mention the negative aspects of this approach?

Big corporations giving one of the richest people in the world a voice, with no counter balance. And it so happens that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer during the pandemic. It seems almost as if they want this to happen again, it is profitable, after all, if you're rich. And who cares what the people say.

That really doesn't strike you negatively, at all?

Oh dear, someone reported an opinion that other people didn't like and that leads you to comment on the mainstream media.

Half the fucking problem is that people have been taught by their social media bubbles that they should only hear things they LIKE. Your response to a report you don't LIKE is that it shouldn't have been reported. No discussion of whether it's true or not. No observation about how Australian death rates were massively lower than American ones. Just a declaration it's not the way forward.

Someone made you feel negative. Oh poor you.

How pathetic.

We also don't die from guns all the time here, and have a health system that generally works pretty well, but for some reason there's a part of American society that is completely terrified by all of these things.

Just because the MSM isn't brainwashing you doesn't mean you're not brainwashed. Just means you haven't identified the culprit.

I don't know why my comment gives others an excuse to be personally mocked.
See the above comment. Remember, they know what's best for us, your opinion doesn't matter.
Also don't know why you would bring up health care and guns when I never mentioned them.
And brainwashing? I think you are thinking of Poju, I can't think of a time I used that word, but I remember that he has.

[Madiel]

Greg, you frequently try to present yourself as a neutral undecided person looking for balance.

This is a false narrative.

An article reporting on Bill Gates is not required to go find someone who disagrees with Bill Gates. There will be OTHER articles with other views.

As to why Bill Gates' opinion might be of interest: you wouldn't have to ask that question if you had the slightest awareness of what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done about world health over the last couple of decades.

[Holden]

returning citizens and approved international travelers have been required to quarantine in hotels guarded by police and military members. Australia's states even periodically locked down their respective borders.

Inaccurate - apart from the odd exception, the guarding (strange word) was done by private security

Since the beginning of the pandemic, only 20 per 100,000 Australians have died FROM Covid,

Wrong word. It should have read WITH Covid. A huge difference and the Australian Bureau of Statistics admitted last week that any one who died/was hospitalised who tested positive for Covid was classed as having died/was hospitalised because of the virus. A couple of weeks ago I went to a wake. The deceased had developed a very serious infection necessitating the amputation of both legs at the knees. This was not enough and the infection killed him. While in palliative care he tested positive (and asymptomatic) for Covid. His son was horrified to see the cause of death listed as Covid19.

Next Friday, the QLD government will remove virtually all Covid19 restrictions in the state including the mandatory wearing of masks - airports and public transport excepted.

[Madiel]

Holden, you do realise that if any Covid deaths were misclassified, that just means our results were even BETTER?

In other words it would make our numbers even more impressive. You're saying "no, not only 20, it was even less".

[greg]

An article reporting on Bill Gates is not required to go find someone who disagrees with Bill Gates. There will be OTHER articles with other views.

From CNBC, anything very different than that recently? Where the tone is similarly neutral about reporting a completely different vision/perspective about things?

[Madiel]

I don't watch CNBC. Nor is it my job to monitor your confirmation bias whereby I suspect opinions you don't disagree with won't get your attention anyway.

[Holden]

Holden, you do realise that if any Covid deaths were misclassified, that just means our results were even BETTER?

In other words it would make our numbers even more impressive. You're saying "no, not only 20, it was even less".

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying and implicit in this is that the virus has never been anywhere as severe as our media and our govt's have made out. Why this approach has been taken should be looked at in the future.

People's way of life, their financial security, their ability to make informed decisions, to feed their families has definitely been impacted. I live on the Gold Coast which is heavily reliant on the hospitality industry and I know many people involved. Right from the start, the political aspect, as opposed to the people aspect, deeply concerned me. Both McGowan and Palaszczuk shamelessly used the pandemic to get themselves re-elected with little concern about their constituents. Palaszczuk effectively trashed Qld's tourism industry in the process.

In a couple of years time it might eventuate that we look back at our initial handling of the 'pandemic' and wonder how we got it so badly wrong.