COVID-19 / Coronavirus Pandemic

[JDTAY]

According to the CDC, US daily cases hit over one million for the first time on the tenth, hitting 1.4 million. So much for cresting soon.

 

[netcat]

I respect both your optimism and your ass, but something collapsing is not enough to make sure that something stops hoovering up everybody's cash. They can still charge people, abuse workers and collapse service at the same time.

never stop moaning about being under resourced. and of course don't make the mistake of providing an adequate service.

 

[pyrat]

Please note I'm not claiming health care is incompetent or dishonest, not even management. I have my own prejudices regarding public and private heath care, but I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that if you keep people mixing and sharing highly contagious viruses, the health care system will be overloaded, the workers stressed and the funds insufficient both when health care is working properly and when not.

It's kind of blaming the goalkeeper for not stoping the ball when all their team mates were continously in the other teams field. The goalkeeper may be good or bad, but the goal is going to happen no matter what.

 

[FBnil]

Well, that left me with a churning stomach... very rigid methods....

Inhumane “Community of a Shared Future” in Xi’an: the CCP’s “Zero Tolerance” Policy May Backfire

While we were enjoying New Year’s holidays, things were getting harder and harder for the 13 million people in Xi’an City who suddenly became prisoners under the CCP’s inhumane lock-down policy. So to...

odysee.com

 

[JDTAY]

It’s been over 30 hours, and my COVID test results aren’t back yet.

In the meantime, my dad tested positive for COVID. He doesn’t seem to have many symptoms though.

 

[FBnil]

hey, did we know this?

 

[pyrat]

It’s been over 30 hours, and my COVID test results aren’t back yet.

Must be that it's negative, but they just don't know how to tell you...

 

[FBnil]

In the meantime, my dad tested positive for COVID. He doesn’t seem to have many symptoms though.

So he boosted naturally. The best kind of booster. Superdad.

Must be that it's negative, but they just don't know how to tell you...

Or it's positive, and they want him not to panic and to live his last hours peacefully.
That, or the lab assistant caught the strain and died before he could warn about the result.

 

[pyrat]

hey, did we know this?

Dunno. I for one had no idea that substances derived from cannabis could help with COVID-19.
I've had friends who had slow mental degradation from (I believe, I'm no doctor) smoking too much cannabis, and I got biased against it. But still hoping people more clever than I research this and it's used if found useful.

 

[FBnil]

AstraZeneca trials show its Vaxzevria vaccine causes high immune response against Omicron

Pharma giant AstraZeneca said on Thursday that preliminary data from a trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, Vaxzevria showed high antibody response against Omicron variant when given a third booster dose. The higher immune response was also seen against Beta, Delta, Alpha and Gamma variants of...

www.wionews.com

 

[TeDaDeS]

Preprint, so not published yet:

""Conclusions Vaccines are beneficial, but the high NNEs suggest that excluding unvaccinated people has negligible benefits for reducing transmissions in many jurisdictions across the globe. This is because unvaccinated people are likely not at significant risk – in absolute terms – of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others in most types of settings since current baseline transmission risks are negligible. Consideration of the harms of exclusion is urgently needed, including staffing shortages from losing unvaccinated healthcare workers, unemployment/unemployability, financial hardship for unvaccinated people, and the creation of a class of citizens who are not allowed to fully participate in many areas of society."
source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.08.21267162v1

 

[levi]

Hmm, that's the first time I've read of the transmission rate of omicron being described as negligible!

 

[pyrat]

Hmm, that's the first time I've read of the transmission rate of omicron being described as negligible!

This study looked at Delta in November 2021. They say the methodology would be usable, but the numbers (and eventually conclusions) need updating for other situations. I guess the baseline risk is higher in Omicron, but the vaccine effectivity is lower, so it might balance out or not. There was a study in Denmark in December 2021 comparing delta and omicron household transmission in unvaccinated, vaccinated or boosted.

 

[TeDaDeS]

Hmm, that's the first time I've read of the transmission rate of omicron being described as negligible!

How I understood the text was that it's focus is on how many unvaccinated people need to be removed to prevent vaccinated people from getting covid.
Say you would remove all unvaccinated people, lock them up somewhere safe where no vaccinated people come into contact with them. In that situation there would still be covid, but the idea is that is would spread less so some vaccinated people would not get sick.
How many vaccinated people are saved by doing this compared to having all unvaccinated mingle between the vaccinated people. This difference is probably negligible, no so much that covid spead itself if negligible (but it wouldn't be the first time I'm wrong).
Locking these people up would then be a higher costs then letting them mingle and risk a vaccinated person getting covid.

Some more text:
"A method to evaluate the benefits of excluding unvaccinated people to reduce transmissions is described, called the number needed to exclude (NNE). The NNE is analogous to the number needed to treat (NNT=1/ARR), except the absolute risk reduction (ARR) is the baseline transmission risk in the population for a setting (e.g., healthcare). The rationale for the NNE is that exclusion removes all unvaccinated people from a setting, such that the ARR is the baseline transmission risk for that type of setting, which depends on the secondary attack rate (SAR) typically observed in that type of setting and the baseline infection risk in the population. The NNE is the number of unvaccinated people who need to be excluded from a setting to prevent one transmission event from unvaccinated people in that type of setting."

"Findings The NNEs suggest that at least 1,000 unvaccinated people likely need to be excluded to prevent one SARS-CoV-2 transmission event in most types of settings..."

The transmission risk data they provided:

Source: https://github.com/DrProsser/excluding_the_unvaxxed

 

[netcat]

I for one had no idea that substances derived from cannabis could help with COVID-19.

bong rips cure covid

 

[netcat]

I've had friends who had slow mental degradation from (I believe, I'm no doctor) smoking too much cannabis, and I got biased against it. But still hoping people more clever than I research this and it's used if found useful.

So, you're wrong. Weed makes it a bit harder to stay focused immediately, for better and worse. So don't smoke before your differential calculus homework but if you want to be creative or clear your mind go ahead. Smoking does positively affect certain video games, notably racing and fighting. Actually platformers too (mario). Pot does give you a hangover though. It takes me 2 days to be back 100% sharp.

Also i believe that smoking cannabis negatively affects your sleep. You fall asleep easily but it's not proper REM sleep or whatever so you're tired the next day. Not many people mention this and it could be the main contributer to dumbness.

But believe you me: alcohol is much more destructive in the short and long terms. Drinking two beers makes me much dumber the next day than the pure indica spliff I normally smoke. Alcohol has had a very detrimental affect on my father. Too much beer meant he didn't eat enough and became malnourished. Extremely dangerous.

@pyrat - Do your friends drink alcohol? Can you re-evaluate their mental acuity after they haven't smoked for 48 hours?

The two drugs that I tell myself I can control are cannabis and coffee. My alcoholism is so destructive and usually not fun at all, I just drink enough for the craving to go away (two beers) but not enough to be euphoric. And it definitely affects my sleep. And makes me depressed. Actually I'm so finely tuned (aka long time alcoholic) that I feel hungover as soon as I stop drinking, and the best remedy is weed...

I didn't drink yesterday just smoked and I feel pretty sharp and articulate. Not a mental ninja today just a stealth assassin.

 

[netcat]

Anyway.... Check this out:

Australia apparently stopped reporting excess deaths at the beginning of November. In my datasource https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv as well as https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker.

Previously there were ~3 figures released per month, so now having none for 3 months suggests an external factor not a blip.

I know that the Vatican stopped publishing it's death figures quite early on, I believe because they were the worst by far.

Australia stopping publishing it's excess deaths coincides with a clear negative trend. Ie: people aren't dying much anymore.

It could be coincidence. But Australia is very gung-ho about vaccines and lockdowns.

Why would they want to conceal negative excess deaths? Australia wants to keep it's citizens scared.

 

[JDTAY]

I finally got the results of my COVID-19 test, three days later. Negative.

Unfortunately though, I went to the hospital last night because of my foot, so there's no telling what I picked up there.

 

[rSl]

this cannabis-study looks really interesting too

Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants​

January 10, 2022
"As a complement to vaccines, small-molecule therapeutic agents are needed to treat or prevent infections by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants, which cause COVID-19. Affinity selection–mass spectrometry was used for the discovery of botanical ligands to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Cannabinoid acids from hemp (Cannabis sativa) were found to be allosteric as well as orthosteric ligands with micromolar affinity for the spike protein. In follow-up virus neutralization assays, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid prevented infection of human epithelial cells by a pseudovirus expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and prevented entry of live SARS-CoV-2 into cells. Importantly, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid were equally effective against the SARS-CoV-2 alpha variant B.1.1.7 and the beta variant B.1.351. Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2."
source: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00946

one more good reason to love my homemade weed-ginger-honey potion.

 

[levi]

How much you'd have to smoke let alone eat to make your cells be bathed in the acids from hemp, is left as an exercise for the reader to determine.