Long Covid patients haunted by smells of fish, sulphur and burnt toast
Parosmia has emerged as a symptom for some long Covid patients
www.independent.co.uk
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Yascha's argument is a load of BS. He is losing faith in experts but used their models as gospel to claim that the plan definitely would lead to more death? Guy is definitely out of his depth. Anything to cry more about wokeness.
First, given that we don't know how much (If any) that the vaccine will decrease transmission or the prevalence (and timeliness) of vaccinations, estimating the effect of vaccination on death is an estimate with enormous error bars. So the 0.5%- 6% should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Second, the 65+ crowd generally have less capable immune systems, so generally respond less effectively to vaccines. We just saw this with the sanofi trial that got pulled because the dose used was only effective at generating antibodies in the young. We don't know how well extrapolating the relatively small numbers of the trials to the general pop of elderly will be. Signs were pretty good, but is still a bit unknown. Plowing a scarce resource into people who might not respond as well is not automatically the optimal strategy. 65+ generally can social distance easier than essential workers who are more likely to propagate the infection, which brings us back to the earlier point. If the vaccine does limit transmission, one theory is that the infection will be stopped sooner by vaccinating the spreaders, which trend younger.
Third, we know that minorities are way over represented in the death tallies. If we want to limit death, why would we not look into vaccinating these groups earlier than other groups. I know Yascha wants to boil this down to wokeness run amok, but he is not remotely giving accurate representation to a very complex issue.
Who makes the models? Those are the same experts.He's not criticizing their models. He's criticizing the way they prioritize them. The CDC itself said it would lead to more deaths.
We can certainly estimate the number of deaths avoided if the elderly are vaccinated and protected. It's precisely because we don't know how much transmission will be affected that we should focus first on what we do know.
That may be true, but the CDC did not issue its initial recommendations based on this reasoning. Even if you could make an argument that vaccination of > 65 may have limited effect on protecting them, the CDC did not take this possibility into account. So the criticism of the CDC, as stated, was valid.
But the CDC' original proposal did not specifically indicate that minorities should be prioritized. They specified that groups that have an above average proportion of minorities should be prioritized. This leads to some counter-productive projections, such as more minorities actually dying, because minorities are under-represented in groups where they're much more likely to die.
Many scientists are predicting a decrease in transmission based on some of the Moderna data. If it does, it is a mistake to vaccinate the viral sink before the viral source in countries with outbreaks. In Australia or NZ, prioritizing the elderly is smart because of low community spread. That is not the case here.
You don't know the reasoning of the CDC because it is not monolithic entity with a single
I don't think what you saying is accurate. Nor does it reflect the totality of what the expert panels were deciding.
Learn to spell Government and then the rest of us will have a clue to your insight, aside from your apparent lack of regard for your own life and others. You get all super-heated over the prospect of protecting others from yourself....wait, that's not it. You'll have to check the feed from wherever the news in your head comes from.Grow up already. The Govenment has been crap since at least Lincoln.
can you name a time when the vast majority in DC were not corrupt? Neither can I.
Now sit down.
Only deafening if you don't read the responses. I wear a mask inside NO MATTER WHAT in public spaces (store, work), and don't have visitors in my house. Your argument all along is that masks don't work because people don't use them correctly, but at my work we are required to wear masks and everyone has complied. At the store masks are required and most people have complied. That greatly reduces the viral load that everyone breaths.
OZ and NZ have negligible cases of COVID
If you get it, the variations and intensity of symptoms varies from person to person. I am fit and strong and have a high tolerance for pain but this virus kicked the crap out of me like nothing I have ever experienced before. Muscle and joint pain on another level. Headaches that feel like a chisel going through your head scrapping little bits off each time, fever, muscles that just did not want to work like yesterday walking my dog Apollo my quads and hip flexors just did not want to work due to fatigue. Then my taste failed where beer tastes bad and wine the same. And finally at times struggling with memory of names and things.
Who would have thought?
In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.
The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of Covid-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Dr. Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information.
Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Dr. Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.
They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”
The orders were among thousands of secret government directives and other documents that were reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. They lay bare in extraordinary detail the systems that helped the Chinese authorities shape online opinion during the pandemic.
At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/technology/china-coronavirus-censorship.html
In my opinion, the virus didn’t win. The CCP won. But let’s blame anybody but where the blame truly goes. Every single government on the planet should literally turn their backs to China. Unwind all of it.
Learn to spell Government and then the rest of us will have a clue to your insight, aside from your apparent lack of regard for your own life and others. You get all super-heated over the prospect of protecting others from yourself....wait, that's not it. You'll have to check the feed from wherever the news in your head comes from.
I'm always sitting when responding; you can take solace from that.
Ah, I bet you get some kind of posting alert whenever 'China' is mentioned? You sidestep most of what the story on Li's death was about, namely control about the narrative by the Chinese government. Furthermore, there is no question that China was pushing to keep international flights going, same as WHO. Capital mistakes. Not intentional, I'm sure, but nevertheless very wrong.
Your ranting against the MSM, whatever that actually is, is fairly ironic given that in China, only one type of media exists, fully under government supervision. Freelance journalists risk jailtime, as we've seen again today.
Wuhan Covid citizen journalist jailed for four years in China's Christmas crackdown
Prosecution of 10 Hong Kongers detained in mainland China after allegedly attempting to flee to Taiwan also began on Mondaywww.theguardian.com
anti-China sites that spew nothing but lies.
Ah, I bet you get some kind of posting alert whenever 'China' is mentioned? You sidestep most of what the story on Li's death was about, namely control about the narrative by the Chinese government. Furthermore, there is no question that China was pushing to keep international flights going, same as WHO. Capital mistakes. Not intentional, I'm sure, but nevertheless very wrong.
Your ranting against the MSM, whatever that actually is, is fairly ironic given that in China, only one type of media exists, fully under government supervision. Freelance journalists risk jailtime, as we've seen again today.
Wuhan Covid citizen journalist jailed for four years in China's Christmas crackdown
Prosecution of 10 Hong Kongers detained in mainland China after allegedly attempting to flee to Taiwan also began on Mondaywww.theguardian.com
I think that you are extrapolating your experience onto everyone else. Plus, I don't think that you actually read my response.The biggest source of infection is the home environment, followed by workplaces - The fact is COVID is spread more readily in indoor environments either by droplets on surfaces or in select cases by airborne transmission - People rarely use masks when visiting friends and families in indoor environments and in some indoor workplaces depending on circumstances - Masks are among a suite of measures to combat the virus BUT Government's have failed to sell the idea of using them in the right circumstances - The funniest thing over XMAS is the media highlight people gathering on a beach BUT fail to mention indoor XMAS gatherings with friends and family - I know which one is the more dangerous environment.
That is what Scott Atlas thought. The fixation on mortality is shortsighted in this discussion IMO and the hospitalization numbers are not nearly as skewed toward senior citizens.If the sink is protected, what difference does it make if the source isn't, right away? If we have a situation where there is a lot of spread, but relatively few deaths and hospitalizations, what's the big deal?
I think you may be over-thinking this a little. Yes, there is some uncertainty in weighing an effect at the source vs. an effect downstream, but the age dependence of mortality is so striking and universal that it greatly simplifies the options. We're talking about a factor on the order of 50-100 for 65-74 vs. those under 45, and well over 100-fold for those over 75.
About 1/6 of the U.S. population, 55 million, is 65 or older. If you vaccinate all these people, and there is 100% protection, you reduce the number of deaths by about 80%. Even if the protection is only 60%, you reduce the number of deaths by about 50%. If you apply the same 55 million vaccinations randomly to everyone over aged 14, and there is 100% inhibition of spread, you reduce the number of cases, and ultimately deaths, by about 20%. If spread is not entirely eliminated, if vaccinated people are still capable of transmitting the virus, the reduction in number of cases will be less. Prioritizing certain groups that have a higher than average proportion of people of color may increase this amount, but this situation is complex. While people of color tend to have much higher rates of hospitalization and death from C19, some of this is due to other health issues. Vaccinating these people will reduce deaths, but to the extent that these health issues are at play, it will not reduce the number of cases. There are other factors that suggest targeting these people would reduce cases, but it's difficult to estimate these effects.
Then why did the CDC change the recommended order? What was the reasoning behind that, if not a response to the charge that they weren't minimizing deaths? They began with 87 million "essential" workers, then reduced it to a few million medical workers, plus 30 million second tier "frontline" workers. The original essential worker pool may have included many people whose work wasn't essential, but they did arguably make a great contribution to spread. Why did they push them down the line?
18-29 years | Comparison Group | Comparison Group |
30-39 years | 2x higher | 4x higher |
40-49 years | 3x higher | 10x higher |
50-64 years | 4x higher | 30x higher |
65-74 years | 5x higher | 90x higher |
75-84 years | 8x higher | 220x higher |
85+ years | 13x higher | 630x higher |
No, I agree with you. I was mainly addressing the tier below health care and nursing homes which are almost universally accepted to be top priority. We don't really have quarantine center workers, but I would group them in the top tier too.I will take a different view to Baltimore in regards to vaccinations in Australia and New Zealand. Think they would be better served vaccinating workers involved in quarantine centres - I say this because OZ and NZ have negligible cases of COVID BUT have suffered cases of the virus escaping from quarantine and entering the community.
As stated above, I am a big proponent of any legit strategy that would speed up putting vaccines into arms. But without a clinical trial, I would put this one on the back burner. It is definitely worth a debate, but I alluded to immunological issues with the single dosing strategy the other day. This is one of the issues that I was talking about.(google translated from 'De Standaard')
Postponement of a second vaccine dose is also on the table in other countries
Consensus is growing among Canadian experts that all available vaccine doses should be used as the first dose. "Is it justified to watch people die when vaccine doses are waiting in the fridge?"
Maxie Eckert Monday, December 28, 2020 at 3.25 am
With the corona vaccines, Canada may again take a unique path. Again, because Canada, and in particular the province of Québec, is known in the art as a pioneer in deviating and improving pre-established vaccination schedules. For example, Quebec was the first region in the world to switch from a three-dose regimen of the hpv vaccine to a two-dose regimen for girls. Many countries have since followed. Now in Canada a similar discussion is emerging, namely about the postponement of the second dose of the corona vaccine, with a view to the widest possible roll-out of the first dose. Consensus is growing among Canadian experts that all available vaccine doses should be used as the first dose.
One of the experts in that line and who advise the Canadian authorities is the Belgian Philippe De Wals. He is a professor of epidemiology at Université Laval (Quebec) and a member of the Quebec Immunization Committee and the Canadian National Advisory Committee on Immunization. As a renowned researcher, De Wals would hold the international Francqui chair at the University of Antwerp last academic year, but the corona crisis threw a spanner in the works. Via a video call, De Wals tells De Standaard that there is more to the debate in Canada than purely scientific arguments. "Besides the scientific insights - the second dose after three weeks gives a minimal increase in efficacy - there are also ethical issues. We have to ask ourselves whether it is justified to see people get sick and die when we have vaccine doses in the fridge reserved for people who already have good protection with a first dose. "
Much depends on the courage that politicians show, says De Wals. "I suspect that decisions on the matter will be made in Canada within the next week. The question is whether politicians dare to deviate from a vaccination schedule that has been researched in clinical studies and on the basis of which the vaccines have been approved by drug agencies. Governments will fear that they will be taken to court if someone who has not received a second dose still falls ill. " "The question is whether politicians dare to deviate from a vaccination schedule on the basis of which the vaccines are approved"
"You can also turn that liability issue around", says professor of vaccinology Pierre Van Damme (UAntwerpen). "If we take longer to build group immunity while giving the virus free rein to make variants, who will be responsible for that? This is worth a debate. " De Wals and Van Damme argue that the detailed data from the clinical studies with the corona vaccines show that the postponement of the second dose is justifiable: a high degree of protection against covid-19 is already achieved after the first dose. The Havard epidemiologist Michael Mina also cited the data in an opinion piece in The New York Times.
Researchers from the Simid group, which health economist Philippe Beutels (UAntwerpen) leads together with biostasticist Niel Hens (UAntwerpen / UHasselt), want to model the impact of a broad rollout of the first dose (and a delayed second dose) for our country: what is the effect on the reproduction rate, the pressure on the hospitals and the possibilities to resolve the corona measures? It is expected that the effects of the vaccination will be felt earlier if the first dose is administered to a large group at an accelerated rate. But what are the long-term consequences of delaying the second dose? The second dose may not so much increase the level of protection in the short term, but it can make the protection more durable. According to vaccinologist Van Damme, other vaccines have previously shown that the result of a vaccination sometimes even gets better as more months pass between the first dose (the "primer") and the second dose (the "booster"). "You give the immune cells more time to mature after the first dose. The response of the immune system to the booster is then better: antibodies of a higher quality are formed. It remains to be investigated whether this also applies to the corona vaccines. I would like to set up clinical studies to investigate that in detail. In times of scarcity, we must dare to look for alternatives. "
I think that you are extrapolating your experience onto everyone else. Plus, I don't think that you actually read my response.
EDIT: I had to 'meet' with my team...
-You should not have non household members in your home.
-If more people wear masks in public, that reduces the odds of C19 entering the home.
-How can home be a greater source of infection? There are 100+ people at my work site, and only my wife at home.
--Yes, if my wife or I get it at work or the store, we can transmit it to one another, but the odds are much greater that we get it at the store.
--People who participate in high risk activities (ie: bars) are the ones who should be most concerned about home transmission, but probably aren't.
-Surfaces are a NOT a significant source of transmission.
-IDEALLY, I could go back to the way I had it for 5ish months when my only exposure to others was the twice a month I went to the grocery store, but I am required to work from work now.
-Short of isolation, masks are our best defense (reduced viral load).