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Pandemic Panic Must Stop

Delvo said:
This kind of attitude is exactly why the current situation has gotten as bad as it is. We would have hammered it down long ago if we were contending with just the virus alone, instead of the virus plus this kind of moronic drivel to deliberately help the virus out as much as humanly possible.
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Wow, vehement! Or just another strawman?

Please explain how panic is aiding the response to the pandemic.

TIA
 
Delvo said:
This kind of attitude is exactly why the current situation has gotten as bad as it is. We would have hammered it down long ago if we were contending with just the virus alone, instead of the virus plus this kind of moronic drivel to deliberately help the virus out as much as humanly possible.
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This.
 
d4m10n said:
Fear is an adaptation, it helps you get through life for a longer time than utter fearlessness.

Fear is why I look both ways before crossing the street to get back to my car, buckle up once I get there, and check my blind spots along the way. Fear is why I got my family vaccinated and refuse to hang about with my anti-vax inlaws. Fear is why we buy mushrooms at the greengrocer instead of eating the ones which happen to crop up in the yard.

Of course it's possible to a weight fears too heavily when doing cost/benefit calcs, but if we're going to talk about those, we have to be quite specific.
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Fear can be good; it's a basic survival mechanism.
 
Panic doesn't aid the response to the pandemic. And the stress created under these conditions can itself be a detriment to health. But panic will be an unavoidable consequence of any mass crisis.

I worry about panic, but right now I worry more about the sheer lack of empathy and convoluted denial among people in the worst-hit regions. I would respect them a bit more if they justified their relatively lax response to the crisis by saying they just don't want to contribute to mass panic, but that's often not the only reason.
 
The Atheist said:
Sure I do, but it seems you don't, so I've taken a screenshot for you:

[qimg]http://charman.co.nz/icuoz.PNG[/qimg]
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That was to the end of July. The numbers are different now. I am not permitted to reveal them though. Just to show how different, your numbers show 5600-odd cases 1-Jan to 1-Aug. NSW alone has been reporting 600+ new cases per day for a couple of weeks now - it's been in the news, remember? That's over 6000 cases since the start of August. Want to guess how many are kids? And how many of those in ICU now?


Best you go have a talk to the Australian Government Department of Health, then. They're the one saying it.
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FEDERAL Health Department, not state Health Departments. They are a bunch of bureaucratic bean-counters. They don't run hospitals.

And how many kids are in ICU right now from car crashes, falls, and other issues?
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You forgot kids with life-threatening diseases and cancer-sufferers, among others. Some of all of those have COVID. They are not mutually exclusive conditions. And paediatric ICU is not unlimited. Under this government, we are scraping to fund hospital facilities generally and paediatric facilities in particular. Gladys used to be our state health minister and she knows this. COVID patients add to the burden on an already stretched ICU capability. So when they are full, we do...what? Which kids do we deny access to ICU first? Toss a coin?

You really are sounding more and more like Bolsanaro. It's just a "little flu", no need to panic. Don't be that guy.
 
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crescent said:
An old friend of mine is in that boat. Trying to recover from some significant cancer treatments, and needs a stem cell transplant to do that.

The treatment has been postponed indefinitely due to a lack of hospital beds. They are all filled up with people who refused the vaccine.

Maybe he'll die from some disease that doesn't impact people with functioning immune systems, or maybe the cancer will come back without enough immune response to stop it. Maybe he'll get Covid and die real fast because his immune system is trashed and can't gain any benefit from vaccines until after he gets that indefinitely-postponed treatment.

I guess The Atheist thinks that's nothing to worry about though. :(
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I can think of a quick way to clear out those beds, but it wouldn't be legal or ethical.
 
Herd immunity by vaccination and, to a lesser degree, previous infection, has been the strategy of policy makers. Alpha, and to a greater degree, Delta has made that increasingly impossible leading to Covid-19 becoming endemic. Several countries like Singapore and the UK are now planning to transition to an endemic model. The main significance is that NPIs can only delay, but not stop, the entire population from being exposed.

NPIs are still useful in the first phase. They can smooth out the numbers infected at any one time to reduce the burden on hospitals. And they can buy time to get people vaccinated. And this gets into the age skew of Covid-19.

100,000 vaccinated people of age 12 will save as many as 1,000 vaccinated people of age 52 and 100 vaccinated people of age 72.

Much of the media has, for quite a while now, focused on relatively younger people that got Covid-19 and died. This may be good messaging when trying to get as many people as possible vaccinated in search of herd immunity but it has the side effect of muting the highly asymmetric risk older people face. This messaging needs to change because they are clogging up hospitals and morgues and that is showing up in the numbers. Get as many vaccinated as possible but change the messaging please.

Messaging should also point out that if you haven't been vaccinated or previously been exposed you are going to get covid-19. Get vaccinated or take your chances.

As for kids too young to get vaccinated, there's not much to be done. Closing schools and other NPIs just delays things but doesn't change the ultimate result absent Vaccine 2.0 or some yet to be discovered treatment. Rather the focus should be on testing vaccines on lower age groups and doing risk/benefit on them. This is not simple because it takes a really huge number to know as the risk level is so low anyway. But to some degree it can be assessed by collecting and reviewing the extensive data on kids 12-13 then dropping the age in increments given a good benefit/risk profile.
 
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I've noticed some panic in US friends over the level of anti-vaxxers, with some claiming at least 40%, and worried that the 70-80% safe level of vaccination will never be reached.

One thing that might help is actual stats.

How many Americans identify as antivaxxers?

https://www.futurity.org/how-many-americans-identify-as-anti-vaxxers-2578842/

"A study of more than 1,000 demographically representative participants found that about 22% of Americans self-identify as anti-vaxxers, and tend to embrace the label as a form of social identity.

"According to the study by researchers including Texas A&M University School of Public Health assistant professor Timothy Callaghan, 8% of this group “always” self-identify this way, with 14% “sometimes” identifying as part of the anti-vaccine movement."
 
Orphia Nay said:
I've noticed some panic in US friends over the level of anti-vaxxers, with some claiming at least 40%, and worried that the 70-80% safe level of vaccination will never be reached.

One thing that might help is actual stats.

How many Americans identify as antivaxxers?

https://www.futurity.org/how-many-americans-identify-as-anti-vaxxers-2578842/

"A study of more than 1,000 demographically representative participants found that about 22% of Americans self-identify as anti-vaxxers, and tend to embrace the label as a form of social identity.

"According to the study by researchers including Texas A&M University School of Public Health assistant professor Timothy Callaghan, 8% of this group “always” self-identify this way, with 14% “sometimes” identifying as part of the anti-vaccine movement."
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I think that in the US, there is almost no chance that 70-80% will get vaccinated, and it may be that 70-80% is not even herd immunity levels.

Even if some of the more vaccine-friendly states get 70-80% of the population vaccinated, and it would need to involve children as well, there will be states where such numbers will not be reached.
 
angrysoba said:
I think that in the US, there is almost no chance that 70-80% will get vaccinated, and it may be that 70-80% is not even herd immunity levels.

Even if some of the more vaccine-friendly states get 70-80% of the population vaccinated, and it would need to involve children as well, there will be states where such numbers will not be reached.
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Yes there are hotspots of covidiocy.

But overall, the 70-80% figure will be reached in the US.

The question is, do we panic about the hotspots of covidiocy?
 
The Atheist said:
That's a common argument, and I believe a completely nonsense one.

We accept risk as a feature of life. We don't enforce cars to drive at 10 mph so nobody gets killed, we don't stop selling fatty foods that cause immense numbers of early deaths, and we don't cut down all the trees in case a kid falls out of it.
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None of those measures are cost effective. There are better approaches.


If you're saying the only number of acceptable deaths from Covid is zero, then please explain why other deaths don't matter as much.
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This is from your imagination.


I did say it, but I'll repeat it for you:

...panicking about the disease instead of being rational.
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No one I see is panicking. What evidence do you base this baseless conclusion on?


And I'll unpack that a little so there's no confusion:

Taking precautions is good and vaccines are excellent, but working up states of panic is bad.
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For anyone who is curious I believe my sentence in the other thread, "So you want to try that again, 1900 is a drop in the bucket? ," or something like that struck a nerve.



Where vaccine resistance is high. I have zero sympathy for people who choose not to be vaccinated and I'd leave them in the carpark if it were down to me.

How many kids are in ICUs? If there are 1900 kids in USA with Covid, I'm picking the number is going to be very, very small.
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There were 1900 kids hospitalized and 358 died, pay attention. This is the number of infections in kids (link in the other thread):
In the last week alone, according to the report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association, nearly 72,000 cases were reported in children,
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snipped more of the same
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Unlike making up a strawman to create faux outrage?
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What straw man would this be? And BTW, the biggest straw man in this thread is you claiming other people are panicked. I can't for the life of me understand what you think we are doing that indicates panic.



As for lionking and SGM, please let me know what level of death and harm you'd accept and save yourself a whole lot of asterisks.
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Death and harm in whom?

As few kids as possible, and that means I am in favor of vaccinating children as soon as we can. And BTW, the direct damage to kids was only one aspect of the reason to vaccinate kids. I listed others in my reply to you.
 
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