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[Boris Sprinkler]

Denmark has got through it with one of the lowest death rates in Europe ... That seems more than just spectacle.

Im not denying that we got out of this well.
Im saying its easy to see where conspiracy theories come from.
There was alot of unecessary spectacle. Alot of nonsensicle rules (in the begining masks had to be worn standing up on the train, or in bodegas - but could be removed if for example, you were smoking or sitting), the entire mink industry was decimated because it was found that the animals could transmit the virus. These decisions were made by politicians in whatsapp conversations which were later deleted because "security".
They had new border controls put up with the police and army working together to offload trans and check peoples papers.
A border check that never previously existed. To look for what exactly?

 

[elbows]

The antidote to such confusion need only contain a few ingredients.

Effective vaccines can make a huge difference to hospitalisation and death rates but sometimes much less difference to the chances of catching it and only having mild symptoms.
Viruses evolve.
There was a strong correlation between age and risk of death.
Different people experience the same disease in very different ways.
There are limits to how many severe cases in a short space of time the health system can cope with.
Authorities make mistakes, and some of the the detail of rules and how they are policed can be stupid.

Even people who werent aware of the detail of most of those points before this pandemic should be capable of grasping most of them. And there is ample opportunity in this world, long before the pandemic, to become aware of that final point. The problem is that the conspiracy-minded only grasp it in one dimension: the corrupt, evil, carefully crafted conspiracy dimension, rather than the full spectrum of reasons that arbitrary authorities, their rules, the enforcers of those rules, and those subjected to those rules can all make absurd mistakes or make a mockery of things via self-interest.

 

[teuchter]

Every country threw a bunch of rules and measures at Covid, some of which were badly formulated, stupid without hindsight, stupid with hindsight, or ineffective only with hindsight.

Different countries had different results, and Denmark had some of the best results in Europe. So that would suggest to me that they managed to include quite a few sensible and effective measures along with the questionable ones. If people want to point at countries that introduced a lot of badly conceived measures that didn't work then Denmark seems a poor choice.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

Well I don’t live anywhere else so it’s difficult to say, but even at the time it didn’t make sense.
Having just been to the mall with the kid to get some food for dinner, you wouldn’t even know there had been a pandemic. It changed overnight. Caution threw it out with the bathwater, you would be extremely trusting to look back at the last 2 years and not think to yourself. Hold on, what was that about?

 

[elbows]

Every country threw a bunch of rules and measures at Covid, some of which were badly formulated, stupid without hindsight, stupid with hindsight, or ineffective only with hindsight.

Different countries had different results, and Denmark had some of the best results in Europe. So that would suggest to me that they managed to include quite a few sensible and effective measures along with the questionable ones. If people want to point at countries that introduced a lot of badly conceived measures that didn't work then Denmark seems a poor choice.

Yep.

There are other factors too beyond measures implemented and their timing. Including population density, age structure, obesity levels, levels of trust in authorities, poverty and inequality, sick pay, even height above sea-level. Attempts to analyse these things tend to result in them being able to find patterns that can predict pandemic mortality to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, there is still a big chunk of the picture they cant predict by looking at those underlying factors. Which doesnt surprise me really, underlying health and patterns of behaviour are not trivial to understand. Perhaps subtle and not so subtle detail in regards care homes and hospital infection control can make quite a difference, perhaps there was some more complexities on the partial prior immunity against severe disease front, eg if the timing of a wave of one of the other human coronaviruses made a temporary difference to severe disease risk in a particular wave.

 

[elbows]

Well I don’t live anywhere else so it’s difficult to say, but even at the time it didn’t make sense.
Having just been to the mall with the kid to get some food for dinner, you wouldn’t even know there had been a pandemic. It changed overnight. Caution threw it out with the bathwater, you would be extremely trusting to look back at the last 2 years and not think to yourself. Hold on, what was that about?

I dont know what you are talking about really.

We didnt have vaccinated populations or populations with some prior exposure to this virus in the past. Now we do. Thats a gamechanger. And Omicron appears to leave less people needing intensive oxygen support than the Delta strain did.

A pandemic is a pandemic because a new, novel virus arrives that none of our bodies have met before. That situation inevitably doesnt last forever.

Whats hard to understand about the idea that authorities only considered the toughest responses because without them there would be far too many hospitalisations to cope with in the past, but that numbers game has now changed, and so the official response has changed?

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

The overuse of nonsense legislation by framing data grabs as being necessary to fight a respiratory disease.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

The point is not all rules were put in place to fight the disease but we’re used to further different information gathering exercises.

 

[elbows]

That tells me more about levels of suspicion and mistrust in authorities and data gatehring than anything else. Although sure, such attitudes are yet another form of data of interest to authorities.

We already lived in an information technology age of mass data gathering long before the pandemic. Most countries have responded in ways deemed compatible with the pre-pandemic attitudes towards policing etc in their countries. The pandemic has certainly built further on those things, but a lot of the justifications are credible and legitimate. Controlling the spread of disease means understanding behaviour and patterns of movement, behaviour and contacts between people, and levels of adherence to the rules.

Certainly it is easy to build on various fears and dystopian visions via various things that have been done in this pandemic. But I can acknowledge that and consider the future potential ramifications without needing to indulge in revisionist history or ignorance about the level of threat this virus posed.

 

[elbows]

One thing that the pandemic has somewhat changed in some countries in terms of data gathering is that some stuff that was previously largely covert or not much discussed has become more overt. In some countries where the previous establishment default was to prioritise keeping such things covert, even on occasions at the expense of securing criminal prosecutions, the authorities may have been rather nervous about showing their hand. Some of those may seek to return to the old approach as quickly as possible now that the direct threat from the virus has evolved. Similar stuff probably applies not just to data and surveillance, but also stuff like people showing their papers, passes etc. So its far from clear that the pandemic has enabled them to permanently shift the barriers of what the public deem acceptable.

A sense of legitimacy in regards many measures and changes during the pandemic was achieved because a rather broad spectrum of society were on the same page in terms of understanding the reasons and legitimacy of stuff that was done to combat this pandemic virus. Should the authorities seek to repeat the same sort of thing on another occasion where the threat is less easily demonstrated to be legitimate, I'm not sure they will find anywhere near as much success and compliance.

So I would question the idea that they have actually managed to 'sften us up' for more stuff on these fronts in future. Attitudes towards the borad sharing of medical data in England with private businesses dont seem to have changed beyond the core pandemic stuff. There was also the 'shock and enormity of the situation' with this pandemic which forced authorities and broader society to do stuff that was a departure from business as normal. There wont be the same numbing effects of immense, sudden shock if a similar situation happens again within living memory, and so I would expect more quibbling as well as a better understanding of what measures are actually essential to respond proportionately to the threat.

 

[Agent Sparrow]

wrong thread

 

[Badgers]

 

[platinumsage]

China really squeezing Hong Kong now:

"The BBC's Jeff Li in Hong Kong reports that one pro-Beijing Hong Kong lawmaker has said anyone advocating to live with Covid should be charged under the controversial national security law which has been used to persecute dozens of pro-democracy activists. The lawmaker argued such a policy was akin to starting "biological warfare".

Hong Kong's tough Covid laws threatened by virus surge

Hong Kong has recorded more than 1,000 Covid infections for the first time since the pandemic began

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[RileyOBlimey]

Fingers crossed: Prince Charles tests positive for Covid

 

[gentlegreen]

Fingers crossed: Prince Charles tests positive for Covid

Apparently he had it early in 2020 and got away with it ... so even if he's not vaccinated he'll be OK ...

 

[zahir]

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

yolo.

 

[prunus]

yolo.

bnfl

 

[Yossarian]

China really squeezing Hong Kong now:

"The BBC's Jeff Li in Hong Kong reports that one pro-Beijing Hong Kong lawmaker has said anyone advocating to live with Covid should be charged under the controversial national security law which has been used to persecute dozens of pro-democracy activists. The lawmaker argued such a policy was akin to starting "biological warfare".

Hong Kong's tough Covid laws threatened by virus surge

Hong Kong has recorded more than 1,000 Covid infections for the first time since the pandemic began

www.bbc.co.uk

The HK government said critics of COVID policy wouldn't be prosecuted under the NSL, though of course it's a fucking disgrace that they had to clarify that issue in the first place.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

bnfl

Bnfl?

British Nuclear Fuels Ltd?

 

[prunus]

Bnfl?

British Nuclear Fuels Ltd?

Well quite.

But Not For Long is what I was pithily adding.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

Yeah, it didnt make any sense to me at the time. How everything, all precautions, can just disappear overnight. When one month ago my friend was leaving shopping at my door and then running away and I spent 2 weeks isolated. Now everyone is mingling like nothing ever happened. So yolo is the only way to describe it really.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don't agree with him that 'with or of' doesn't matter. And there's also the possibility of 'instead of' to be factored in. One of the striking things about the omicron wave has been that, across many countries in which it is now the overwhelmingly dominant variant, the demise of delta and rise of omicron has been accompanied by a plunge in excess deaths. This is true in Denmark as well. I've put up seven countries here that are all reasonably vaccinated (US is a bit low), and have seen a move from delta to omicron between December and January during their winter months. The UK line stops at the end of December, unfortunately not updated recently, but its line for January would show four consecutive weeks of negative excess deaths.



So while the headline covid deaths figure is higher than it was during the delta wave in these places, something is going on such that January was not a bad month. Digging a bit deeper into the UK figures (well, England, but it's the same story for Scotland and Wales), deaths from respiratory infections are lower than average currently, even factoring in Covid. Whether acquired omicron immunity provides some cross-protection against other nasties, I don't know, but whatever the cause, the patterns are becoming rather robust. Delta deaths were 'on top of' other deaths. Omicron deaths appear more like 'instead of'.



Microsoft Power BI

 

[kabbes]

I would interpret that^^ on the face of it as meaning that the precautions taken to protect against COVID have also helped to protect against other causes of death. Τhat has caused a reduction in other deaths that has partially compensated for COVID deaths. Remove those precautions, however, and your benefit against other causes will also disappear.

 

[8ball]

I would interpret that^^ on the face of it as meaning that the precautions taken to protect against COVID have also helped to protect against other causes of death. Τhat has caused a reduction in other deaths that has partially compensated for COVID deaths. Remove those precautions, however, and your benefit against other causes will also disappear.

Fewer things to die from when you’re not really living life..

 

[kabbes]

Fewer things to die from when you’re not really living life..

Exactly

No, wait

 

[bluescreen]

Also, I'd say that those people who died prematurely from Covid can't die again, so their deaths have already been counted.

 

[elbows]

I would interpret that^^ on the face of it as meaning that the precautions taken to protect against COVID have also helped to protect against other causes of death. Τhat has caused a reduction in other deaths that has partially compensated for COVID deaths. Remove those precautions, however, and your benefit against other causes will also disappear.

Yes. There has been a little bit of flu around this season but nothing like the levels seen normally, which has a big impact on excess death calculations at this time of year.

Also whilst there was quite a large spike in RSV, its timing was rather different to whats normally seen, eg in the UK there was a wave of it in summer. I cant really say how much impact this has had on winter deaths, since RSV tends to be associated with strain on paediatric hospital capacity, and that was certain seen in the UK last summer.

We did see the same thing with lack of flu deaths in the previous winter too, and thats where the nature of Omicron, the booster campaign and other population immunity effects have made a difference to this picture too. ie if covid deaths had been at anything like the previous winters numbers in the UK, then the huge reduction in flu deaths would have been replaced by covid deaths and we'd still have seen plenty of excess mortality.

The future of when influenza waves will return is uncertain. The standard assumption will be that it returns to patterns seen before the pandemic at some point, but I tend to prefer to wait and see what actually happens just in case there are any surprises. I believe one of the B strains of influenza has 'gone missing' and only time will tell whether that particular lineage has been wiped out or whether it will mount a resurgence eventually. I suppose its also possible that the return of flu might initially happen with non-typical seasonal timing, due to all the disruption that happend to its traditional timing, different population immunity picture etc in the last two years.

 

[elbows]

Note for example that the baseline R0 of influenza is thought to be quite a lot lower than recent Covid variants, so mitigation against Covid quite probably had a larger impact on preventing influenza transmission than it was able to have against the likes of Delta and Omicron. The number of influenza deaths that we've 'lived with' routinely are not inevitable, and I'd expect masks and infection control procedures in care homes and hospitals to have had quite the impact on influenza during this pandemic. Shame there is a lack of mainstream pressure to consider how the lessons learnt from the pandemic could be applied to saving many lives every winter from influenza and other respiratory infections. Within health etc institutions perhaps some lessons will endure, unclear at this stage. If the will was there we could probably gradually save more lives than were lost in this pandemic.

For example as I've pointed out before, since the start of 2020 Austrailia has had over 15,000 less deaths than expected based on previous years averages and excess death calculations. Obviously we arent going to ban travel and have heavy lockdowns in order to make that a permanent thing. And without control measures even a steady trickle of covid deaths will mount up over time. Also, reduced economic activity initially results in less deaths, another fact that wont be dwelt upon by mainstream capitalism. At the start of the pandemic and lockdowns we heard quite a bit about pollution and its health impacts too, and thats gone well off the radar these days. All the same, other measures that arent so drastic could still be expected to save lives/extend lives.

 

[weltweit]

The vaccination levels of people in poor and developing countries is still so low to be a scandal and one that will come back to bite the richer countries as unvaccinated spread is mainly where variants are produced and we have seen clearly with Delta and Omicron that variants can be around the world in no time.

There is no reason why the next variant might be "mild like Omicron", it could instead spread like Omicron but be deadlier than Delta. Or it could escape our vaccines, who can tell?

It is surely the UN or the WHO's role to organise worldwide vaccination, and it should be countries like the UK's role to pay our fair share of the costs. When will it happen?