Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[postman1782]

Nice goal post movements, you asked to prove that a lady was trampled and pretty sure I gave sufficient proof. The post you quoted never mentioned getting killed. And nice fucking victim blaming like holy shit some of you people are fucked in the head. The same shit when people are happy people at BLM protests getting injured and seemed to be happy about it. I should not be surprised though, people love to be giddy when people they disagree with are on the other end of the stick.

It also appears that SIU is investigating the incident.
https://ottawa.citynews.ca/police-be...rotest-5084656
They are a Special Investigation Unit in Ontario
https://www.siu.on.ca/en/index.php

Sure thing, I am not goalpost moving. I admitted that I didn't know someone was trampled, but every report that I had seen before was people lying about someone dying, and I was right that it didn't happen.

[Breccia]

"Okay, let's try this again," Australia says as it allows international visitors with fewer restrictions. Unvaccinated need to quarantine, but fully vaccinated visitors don't have to.

If you count every death since this started, Australia's total deaths/100k is quite low, 19, roughly Japan's 17. The US is 281. (More recently, their deaths/100k is about 0.18 compared to the US about 0.67) I'm not ready to say something like "the XXXth lowest" because I think some of the low reported numbers might be fake, but, the only European country doing better than Australia is Iceland. The UK is about 250, France is about 200, Germany about 150, all-time per 100k.

They also have an 81% fully vaccinated rate, slightly below Singapore and Canada.

Whatever Australia did, it worked. Much better than what the US did and is in fact still doing, such as declaring COVID is a hoax, that vaccination is a government plot, heading into a crowded area without a mask and immediately being trampled by a horse.

[Forogil]

An interesting study on long covid. TL;DR: get the vaccine.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....05.22268800v2
The main conclusions are that vaccinated are less likely to report those long term symptoms than unvaccinated when both are infected, and the number of symptoms among vaccinated infected is the same as among the non-infected.
(At least for some time, and for Pfizer/BioNTech; more studies needed...)

[PhaelixWW]

An interesting study on long covid. TL;DR: get the vaccine.

And definitely get at least the 2nd dose.

TL;DR in picture form:

[gondrin]

And definitely get at least the 2nd dose.

TL;DR in picture form:

Confirmed. Hair loss combined with the ability to control metal through magnetism. You become Magneto 2.0. Might be some other side effects like 5G coverage. Can only have 1 dose. If you get 2, you lose all of that.

[Flarelaine]

the only European country doing better than Australia is Iceland.

And if you ever played Plague Inc., you know what a tough bugger Iceland is to take down.

[Breccia]

And if you ever played Plague Inc., you know what a tough bugger Iceland is to take down.

Iceland ain't got shit on Madagascar.

But yes, it's easy to spot that islands -- Australia, Hawaii, Japan, Rapture -- have a bonus/penalty built in. It's harder to get there, sure, but once it's there it has its run of the place. That's why the other factors come in: masking, vaccines, social distancing, mandates. It's not just one factor, Australia's doing so well they must be successful on several factors. If, say, Japan had put no restrictions in place at all, they wouldn't have the amazing 17 total deaths/100k they do. Japanese cities are packed.

- - - Updated - - -

TL;DR in picture form:

Okay what the hell is up with this pixelated stuff?

[Afrospinach]

Okay what the hell is up with this pixelated stuff?

What pixelated stuff?

The lines on the bars are standard statistical things for margins of error so this data is probably extrapolated.

[Breccia]

What pixelated stuff?

Am I the only one seeing random color blocks all over all the words too?

[Poopymonster]

Am I the only one seeing random color blocks all over all the words too?

Sadly, yes you seem to be.

[Breccia]

Sadly, yes you seem to be.

Yeah, swapped browsers after reading this, and it went away. I have no idea what that was.

[Rasulis]

Got a COVID Booster? You Probably Won't Need Another for a Long Time

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 recognize 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 center, 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 recognize new variants.

“Those antibodies at six months are better binders and more potent neutralizers than the ones that are produced one month after immunization,” 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 recognize 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 neutralize 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.

Although most people, vaccinated or not, show only a small drop in their T cell response against omicron, about 1 in 5 had “significant reductions of their responses” of about 60%, Buggert said. The differences are most likely because of their underlying genetic makeup, he said.

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 recognize, 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.”

[gondrin]

Yeah, swapped browsers after reading this, and it went away. I have no idea what that was.

It is the rare side effect where you see everything as a minecraft world.

[PhaelixWW]

Eh, 9 days, since we're only just into the wee hours of the morning of the 15th here. But that also means it was only 7 days when you posted 10-20%. I doubt it'll jump from 3.6% to even the low end of that range when the update is made next week, but I'll allow that it could definitely happen. With cases slowing down right now, I think it'll take until the spring push in 2 months or so for BA.2 to really achieve its takeover of the original omicron in the US.

We'll see in time, I guess.

Yeah, it definitely was nowhere near the 10-20% range back on the 12th or 13th.

CDC is now estimating 2% for BA.2 through 2/12 and still only 3.8% through 2/19.




At this point, it won't overtake BA.1 until the almost-inevitable spring surge around spring break late March to early April.

In other news, BA.1 immunity apparently doesn't overlap quite as well with BA.2 as we had hoped.

One of the key unknown characteristics of BA.2 is whether it is different enough from BA.1 to be able to cause illness in people who have already had the latter—raising the possibility that people could catch Omicron twice in the few months the COVID variant has existed.

Research from the U.K. earlier this month had found no evidence of any such cases. But a new study from Denmark's government-affiliated research lab the Statens Serum Institut (SSI) suggests it is indeed possible and has happened dozens of times in Denmark.

It should be noted that the study is a pre-print and has not yet gone through the validation process of peer review.

The researchers studied data from over 1.8 million Danish COVID cases from November 22, 2021, until February 11, 2022, and selected people who had tested positive for COVID twice in that time, based on two positive samples returned more than 20 and less than 60 days apart.

This resulted in a total of 1,739 possible reinfection cases. [Note: The paper only studied 187 actual reinfections; this 1739 is misleading in the context of this article.] Upon further analysis using genetic sequencing, the researchers found that there were 47 instances of people becoming infected with the BA.2 Omicron variant shortly after they had caught BA.1.

The cases were "mostly in young unvaccinated individuals with mild disease not resulting in hospitalization or death," the authors noted. The median age was 15 years.

Of those 47, the vast majority, 42, were unvaccinated. None of the people who had caught BA.2 after BA.1 had been hospitalized or died during the follow-up study period. Most reported mainly mild symptoms.

The study authors concluded that the BA.1 to BA.2 reinfection rate "appears to be low" but still highlights the need for continued assessment of how long COVID immunity lasts.

They added that since the majority of people reinfected were not vaccinated, the study further emphasizes "the enhanced immunity obtained by the combination of vaccination and infection compared to infection-induced immunity only."

[DarkAmbient]

No more news from Buckingham Palace after they announced the Queen cancelled her virtual engagements. Apparently she was already much more frail than she was a year ago. Covid's gotta be rough at 95 even if you're still healthy.

[PhaelixWW]

Covid's gotta be rough at 95 even if you're still healthy.

"Healthy" is a relative term at age 95.

Also, she reported had her weekly phone briefing with BoJo today, per Buckingham Palace.

[Rasulis]

A new study in Nature magazine found a three-dose efficacy of the Moderna vaccine against hospitalization with Delta OR Omicron was more than 99 percent effective across the entire study population, with no significant waning over time. You can read the study here, or a summary here.

The unvaccinated made up 6% of San Francisco population (11% - 5% children between 0 - 4) and over 80% of San Francisco Omicron's deaths.

[Forogil]

A new study in Nature magazine found a three-dose efficacy of the Moderna vaccine against hospitalization with Delta OR Omicron was more than 99 percent effective across the entire study population, with no significant waning over time. You can read the study here, or a summary here.

Excellent news, although we will need to look more to see if it actually wanes over time, and the result for Omicron was 99.2% but the confidence interval was 76% to 100%.

For 2-dose they begin to see the decline after 3 months, and then a more rapid decline at 6 and 9 months.
For 3-dose they don't see a decline after 2 months, but for obvious reasons they don't have data much beyond that; but this time it seems we can wait until summer to see if it declines and a 4th dose is actually needed.

[PhaelixWW]

Excellent news, although we will need to look more to see if it actually wanes over time, and the result for Omicron was 99.2% but the confidence interval was 76% to 100%.

For 2-dose they begin to see the decline after 3 months, and then a more rapid decline at 6 and 9 months.
For 3-dose they don't see a decline after 2 months, but for obvious reasons they don't have data much beyond that; but this time it seems we can wait until summer to see if it declines and a 4th dose is actually needed.

I'm pretty sure you're misreading this. The decline was referenced for infection only, not hospitalizations. Sometimes it's called "VE for infection and hospitalization", inclusive, but that basically means infection, which naturally includes the smaller subset of hospitalizations. I don't see any note of waning protection against hospitalizations, just different values for different doses against different variants.

This is in line with previous study findings, which don't find a decline in hospitalization protection (or at least not a quick one).

Also:

Notably, all four individuals hospitalized with Omicron despite receipt of three mRNA-1273 doses were more than 60 years of age with chronic diseases, and one was also immunocompromised.

[Forogil]

I'm pretty sure you're misreading this. The decline was referenced for infection only, not hospitalizations. Sometimes it's called "VE for infection and hospitalization", inclusive, but that basically means infection, which naturally includes the smaller subset of hospitalizations. I don't see any note of waning protection against hospitalizations, just different values for different doses against different variants.

Ah, yes, I switched from hospitalization to infections between the two paragraphs.

And for waning hospitalization they simply don't know (not sufficient number of cases and time).