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Anyway Jan 7th in Queensland. And they're saying it'll peak at the end of Jan/ start of Feb. I think the kids will be delayed going back to school for a few weeks as well. And it's urged we work from home.

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ice-is-forming said:
And what happens if people refuse?
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From Reuters

Prime Minister Mario Draghi's government had already made vaccination mandatory for teachers and health workers, and since October last year all employees have had to be vaccinated or show a negative test before entering the workplace.


Refusal results in suspension from work without pay, but not dismissal.

Wednesday's decree toughens this up for workers over the age of 50 by removing the option of taking a test rather than vaccination. It was not immediately clear what the sanction would be for those flouting the rule, effective from Feb 15.
 
krtek a houby said:
From Reuters

Prime Minister Mario Draghi's government had already made vaccination mandatory for teachers and health workers, and since October last year all employees have had to be vaccinated or show a negative test before entering the workplace.


Refusal results in suspension from work without pay, but not dismissal.

Wednesday's decree toughens this up for workers over the age of 50 by removing the option of taking a test rather than vaccination. It was not immediately clear what the sanction would be for those flouting the rule, effective from Feb 15.
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Thank you :) so it's just around employees? That's what we have here and it's brought out a lot of oppositional defiance disorder in usually sane people.

It seems to depend on if it's a government or private /nfp organisation around how long they'll keep you on the books before your contract is ended.

I have a few jobs & one you had to be double vaxxed by Dec 17th or be let go. I work that one with a very close friend who despite having chronic underlying conditions is refusing the vaccination. Her doctors have advised she should have it. We're only a team of 3 and we do very difficult crisis work in people's homes.

She's well down the rabbit hole & has been playing a game with HR by leading them on to believe she will get an exemption from the next specialist she sees ad infinitum... It's her way of protesting :rolleyes: we're finding it hard to be doing such traumatising work with only 2 of us now, it means me and my other colleage get no break, and until she goes we can't begin the process of advertising, onboarding and training up another person. And that'll take 6 weeks.

I eventually pulled her on it a few days ago and she just didn't seem to get it :facepalm:

When I asked her to "please do the right thing" I meant just fucking leave so we can find another team member, because we both know there's no exemption and she won't be vaxxed.

She's so one track that she assumed I was telling her the 'right thing' was to get vaccinated and sent me a yard long rant about conspiracies and government.... Again.

Obviously the right thing is to get vaccinated but I know her views and don't bother talking to her about it any more.

Sigh
 
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ice-is-forming said:
Thank you :) so it's just around employees? That's what we have here and it's brought out a lot of oppositional defiance disorder in usually sane people.

It seems to depend on if it's a government or private /nfp organisation around how long they'll keep you on the books before your contract is ended.


I have a few jobs & one you had to be double vaxxed by Dec 17th or let go. I work that one with a very close friend who despite having chronic underlying conditions is refusing the vaccination. We're only a team of 3 and we do very difficult crisis work in people's homes.

She's well down the rabbit hole & has been playing a game with HR by leading them on to believe she will get an exemption from the next specialist she sees ad infinitum... It's her way of protesting :rolleyes: we're finding it hard to be doing such traumatising work with only 2 of us now, it means me and my other college get no break, and until she goes we can't begin the process of advertising, onboarding and training up another person. And that'll take 6 weeks.

I eventually pulled her on it a few days ago and she just didn't seem to get it :facepalm:

When I asked her to "please do the right thing" I meant just fucking leave so we can find another team member, because we both know there's no exemption and she won't be vaxxed.

She's so one track that she assumed I was telling her the 'right thing' was to get vaccinated and sent me a yard long rant about conspiracies and government.... Again.

Obviously the right thing is to get vaccinated but I know her views and don't bother talking to her about it any more.

Sigh
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Afaik, it's workers based.

If people have genuine medical reasons for not getting their jabs, fair enough. But it will, undoubtedly, lead to more protests about the erosion of civil liberties and of course, fringe omicronauts heading into the darker spaces out there. Where are the latter when employers have always exploited the workers with zero hours/crap wages etc? Don't recall any solidarity from them for strikers or unions. They'd tend to be the ones to mock, rather than organize.

Sigh. Rant over.
 
krtek a houby said:
Afaik, it's workers based.

If people have genuine medical reasons for not getting their jabs, fair enough. But it will, undoubtedly, lead to more protests about the erosion of civil liberties and of course, fringe omicronauts heading into the darker spaces out there. Where are the latter when employers have always exploited the workers with zero hours/crap wages etc? Don't recall any solidarity from them for strikers or unions. They'd tend to be the ones to mock, rather than organize.

Sigh. Rant over.
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Absolutely! It makes me rant too.
 
Interesting thread on long COVID from the doomier end of the spectrum - the neurological issues in particular sound like very bad news.

Even a “mild” case in a vaccinated individual can lead to long-term issues which cause a measurable uptick in all-cause mortality in the first 6 months, and get progressively worse with time.

 
NB: I'm not an anti-vaxx/conspiracy/'it's just a cold' loon... but out of curiosity, if we had lateral flow tests for the flu, do you think the numbers of positive tests, and general numbers around positive tests/hospitalisations/deaths would be in anyway similar? Just idly wondering and hadn't seen any discussion around it.
 
I think the flu is still reckoned to be a lot less infectious than covid - and it was wiped out last winter even while covid cases were skyrocketing - presumably due to the measures people were taking ...
It is said that pretty well everyone has rhinovirus up their noses - presumably doing a bit of replication ...
 
pbsmooth said:
NB: I'm not an anti-vaxx/conspiracy/'it's just a cold' loon... but out of curiosity, if we had lateral flow tests for the flu, do you think the numbers of positive tests, and general numbers around positive tests/hospitalisations/deaths would be in anyway similar? Just idly wondering and hadn't seen any discussion around it.
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I can do this one, its just a quetion of how brief and concise I can manage to make it:

The headline answer would be no, but there would be a few yes's in the longer answer too.....

In an influenza pandemic or a bad influenza epidemic year, which would feature a large wave, you could perhaps get some similarities in sheer case numbers if we actually did routine mass diagnostics testing for that strain of flu at the time. But those giant epidemics and pandemics dont come along all that often.

And health services are used to being placed under significant pressure during such waves. But they happen far less frequently than with the Covid virus so far. And there are a lot of existing treatments for flu, and we have used vaccines over many years to reduce the burden. There are some similarities in terms of the age profiles of those most severely affected, some of which end up reducing pressure on intensive care and ventilation because we dont do that sort of care for the oldest and frailest people as much as we attempt it for younger people.

But there are still differences in scale which make the nature of the covid waves so far quite a lot worse than typical flu epidemics and we havent had a really really bad flu pandemic for a long time. On paper, fears about brand new types of flu, such as ones that could adapt from birds to humans far more than has been the case so far, do envisage challenges that could be on a comparable scale to this covid pandemic - hopefully it will be a long time before this is demonstrated to everyone in a dramatic fashion. A lot of the planning for such pandemics tends to assume that we wont be starting from scratch in terms of treatments for those though, that for example some of the existing influenza antiviral treatments would help, even if suitable vaccines were not available for a while.

In terms of deaths, lack of mass testing has left this subject as one where there is significant divergence in attitudes between different professionals. Some people in healthcare woefully undercount the number of deaths that flu is implicated in, and arguments about this aspect have emerged on this forum from time to time during the current pandemic. It doesnt get on death certificates as much as it should either. Ultimately we can work round these issues by looking at overall total deaths and excess deaths during periods where a flu epidemic is happening. I have graphs of deaths per day going back to 1970 which demonstrate that on a few occasions there have been pandemics and epidemics of flu which can result in peaks of all cause death that are not dissimilar in size to the death peaks from all causes seen in the first two waves of this covid pandemic. However we need to keep in mind that the similar scale of death is a distorted comparison in that the flu epidemics and pandemics were not met with anything like the same scale of non-pharmaceutical interventions as the first few covid waves were met with. For example there are some studies which estimate that if the UK had taken a Sweden-like approach to the first wave, we would have had twice as many deaths as we actually had, and if accurate that would have pushed the covid death peak much further beyond the death levels seen in the very worst flu epidemics and pandemics of the last 50 years.
 
Here is one example in graph form. Though note the differences between the first graph and the second graph, which demonstrate the limitations in simply comparing crude numbers over a very long period of time - big changes to total size of population, health care, age and general health of the population. Its still useful to see the raw spikes though, just need to keep in mind the broader population context too.

Screenshot 2022-01-02 at 22.09.jpg
Thats from Deaths registered in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

The flu epidemics and pandemics of the last 50ish years that I mentioned dont really show up well in those yearly figures, because of things evening out over the course of a year, but do show up well in daily, weekly or monthly deaths. Note that this was not the case for the covid first wave, which certainly did not balance out in the death figures over the course of 2020. I dont have my charts to hand right now, but I will dig them out at some point, not sure it will be today though, maybe.

People may be curious about the gradual rise in deaths seen well before this pandemic - we might attribute that to demographic changes, to austerity etc, but also to reduced vaccine effectiveness against one of the nastiest versions of flu, H3N2.
 
pbsmooth said:
interesting. thanks for detailed response. just interested in the idea that we might all have flu much more often than we think but are unaware.
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We do. When we dont have mass testing, people are left to think about different illnesses in terms of symptom severity, and its actually a really poor guide, hence things like popular ideas about 'man flu' are often far wide of the mark. We end up only really being confident that we've had 'proper flu' when we experience an especially bad bout of it, with symptoms we find easy to associate with flu specifically.

And this is an even bigger distortion when it comes to flu because a very large proportion of flu cases are believed to be completely asymptomatic.
 
pbsmooth said:
interesting. thanks for detailed response. just interested in the idea that we might all have flu much more often than we think but are unaware.
Click to expand...
I've recently come to the conclusion that I probably had flu most years while I was working in a university - I was consistently laid-out for 4 days every year for nearly 40 years - but only a few times did it get to the not being able to climb the stairs stage - I don't recall ever having "a cold" - it was mostly fever / headache / fatigue - and I always bounced back - until 2018 and 2019 by which time borderline diabetes had caught up with me - in 2011 it was followed by shingles.
 
Cuba’s vaccine success story sails past mark set by rich world’s Covid efforts
5 Jan 2022
More than 90% of the population has been vaccinated with at least one dose of Cuba’s homegrown vaccines, while 83% have been fully inoculated. Of countries with populations of over a million, only the United Arab Emirates has a stronger vaccination record.
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“Cuba is a victim of magical realism,” said John Kirk, professor emeritus of Latin American studies at Dalhousie University, Canada. “The idea that Cuba, with only 11 million people, and limited income, could be a biotech power, might be incomprehensible for someone working at Pfizer, but for Cuba it is possible.”
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...

The vaccine success is all the more striking when set against the parlous state of the healthcare service in other areas. With hard currency inflows cut in half over the last two years, antibiotics are now so scarce that 20 pills of amoxicillin trade on the black market for the equivalent of a month’s minimum state salary. Out of plaster cast, doctors in some provinces now resort to wrapping broken bones in used cardboard.
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“Ever since the 1959 revolution, Cubans have embarked on these grand crusades which are quixotic yet often successful,” said Gregory Biniowsky, a Havana-based lawyer.
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A prime example, Biniowsky said, was Fidel Castro’s pipe dream of investing one billion dollars in biotech after the Soviet Union disintegrated. “Any rational adviser would have said this was not the time to invest resources in something that might bear fruit in 25 years. And yet here we are now … where these fruits of the biotech investment are saving lives.”
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Yes and as I've mentioned before, they added new restrictions in December too:

The latest restrictions - the second stage of the government's plans - includes a limit of 50 people at private gatherings and the need for a vaccination pass for public events where there are more than 500 people.

Bars and restaurants will only be able to serve seated guests while the public will also have to be seated at larger events - like football matches. Shops will have to limit the number of customers to prevent crowding.
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www.reuters.com

Sweden hardens COVID curbs amid worries over Omicron

Sweden will urge all employees to work from home if possible and impose tighter rules for social distancing, the government said on Tuesday, as it ratchets up restrictions to fight a surge in new infections and the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
 
Swedens response, like their war effort has been deliberately ineffective. There is no restrictions to speak to of. They try and use police to stop it at the border. People have no awareness. No masks on transport or in shops. No social distancing.
 
Saw a video on Chinese social media earlier of how a zero-COVID is implemented with Omicron. There were people in a shopping mall in what I think was a shoe shop, and suddenly security guards locked the shop doors trapping everyone inside. One of the shopper’s phones had pinged red indicating they might have a close contact who was infected, so all the shoppers were detained inside to await transportation to a quarantine facility.
 
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