Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

Excellent post. I'm afraid you're going to be very right.

One thing that constantly astounds me is how scientifically unsophisticated so many people are. Some of these concepts are pretty straightforward. Unvaccinated people are at severe risk, and we have a huge unvaccinated population - nearly 100 million people. The entire populations of many of the comparitor countries - Israel, South Africa, even the UK - are smaller than our vaccine resistant population, much less the anti-maskers. Florida has as many new cases this week as the entire US has averaged each day.

"An average of more than 550,000 Americans are testing positive for COVID every day. About 10% of them are in Florida, where the average number of new cases is higher than it has been since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Hospitalizations in Florida remain well below their highs during the Delta variant surge. But hospitalizations are rising fast: 340% higher in the last two weeks, according to the Florida Hospital Association." (CBS, today)

Well, first off, the administration did reverse itself from vax plus to vax only. I know it’s memory holed by most upper classes butBiden ran on bringing the pnandemic under control with vaccines, NPI’s and robust testing/tracing. I’m trying to think of anything he hasn’t gone back on since being elected that he ran on. A good roundup of the evolution of The Biden admin:

“ How did we get in a situation where a Democratic president — who ran, in part, against Trump’s horrid pandemic response — is letting the virus rip? How did we get to a point where a key organizer of the Great Barrington Declaration, a right-wing libertarian campaign opposed to public health measures, has stated that Republican and Democratic states alike have adopted policies in line with their philosophy? As hospitals fill up around the country, why are political leaders doing nothing to at least try to ‘flatten the curve’?”

https://jmfeldman.medium.com/a-year-in-how-has-biden-done-on-pandemic-response-88452c696f2

As far as there being no profit connection between pharma, government and regulatory agencies-GTFOH!

40 years of opiates unleashed on the American public has trashed any thinking on the integrity or morals of institutions that helped facilitate that addiction epidemic. But it was good times for the investor classes in much the same way as it was good times for the east India Co. shareholders during the subjugation and addiction transformation of the Chinese in the late 1800’s.

Hows the stock doing for companies doing the vaccines?

Here’s one answer:

“ While the process of science and the products it yields are noble, science for outrageous profit that costs people their lives is not noble. That is why I can no longer in good conscience be part of Moderna’s trials, and I urge other Moderna trial participants to resign as well. We allowed Moderna to test its experimental vaccine and booster on us in order to help end this pandemic, not to make more pharma billionaires.”


Confessions of a ‘human guine...?m resigning from Moderna vaccine trials


Breaking it down in simple terms for you:
Production of ruling classes produces ruling class ideas which, in turn, produce ruling class policies.
We’re a rightwing capitalist society. All policies are in support of that. The two iron answers from neoliberalism are:

1. Cuz markets!
2. Go die!

Soooo. Fluid mechanics are the primary function of where a pathogens point of entry is determined? The virus has no agency in the process and the upper and lower respiratory tracks are the same base line with regard to immune defense? There’s no fit for purpose with the virus’ infection pathology?
By that questionable reasoning any plane that hits a mountain has a flight path determined by its impact elevation. If it hits high, it’s flight path duration was always high. If it hits lie, it’s flight path was always low. Ok. It’s a rational I suppose. Still…Omicron seems to be taking up residence in the bronchial airways. If I apply your fluid mechanics, infection site rational, why is it locating there and not moving into the deeper lung tissues?

You also can’t square the circle with well documented super spreading events with droplet theory.
The same way you can’t argue the current policies of the administration have done anything to control the virus spread with their vax only policies.


Frankly, the intransigence of the PMC class in its inability to understand reality was well described in this Bourdieusian analysis in their failure to form a coherent strategy towards mitigation. Very similar in the PMC classes politics, it’s about being in charge and having good intentions not about getting results or understanding anything beyond their realm of influence:

“.. with medical scientific orthodoxy which promoted the droplet theory of transmission and considered aerosol transmission unproven or of doubtful relevance. This dominant scientific sub-field centred around the clinical discipline of infectious disease control, in which leading actors were hospital clinicians aligned with the evidence-based medicine movement. Aerosol scientists—typically, chemists, and engineers—representing the heterodoxy were systematically excluded from key decision-making networks and committees. Dominant discourses defined these scientists’ ideas and methodologies as weak, their empirical findings as untrustworthy or insignificant, and their contributions to debate as unhelpful.”

Bourdieusian analysis of infection control science in the COVID-19 pandemic

Not like we ever see these types at the rant…

This you?

‘ “As for "super transmission ability" claims for Omicron (and every earlier variant), I doubt them.”

I haven't been paying much attention to this stuff for a bit. Its all very odd. The facts seem to be that approximately 30% of the population are clueless, believe absolutely nothing that gov says, including any and all genuine medical folks. This being the case then NOTHING being actually suggested means a damn thing. 30% won't wear masks, get vaccinated, etc. That is, I suspect, a fact. Hell, I have seen people dying, on TV saying, right out loud, "I would rather die than be vaccinated!" Another simple fact is that all these plans, suggesting, orders, etc are not going anyplace. Anybody that thinks any of it will make any kind of difference is, I suspect, a little confused.

I read someplace that the fact is that everybody will, eventually, get infected with covid. The good thing is that there seems to be better and better medicines that can help when that happens. I think it seems to be a fact that if you keep up with your vaccination stuff, including boosts 1 and, probably 2 you will be fine. The longer you put it off the better will be medicines to deal with it. The trick is to put of getting it as long as possible. All this seems true. If I remember correctly there was some talk that the omicron variant was also a bit slow on developing after infection. My main bad thought is that I wonder, if that was true. If true, then I wonder if anybody that is infected may get a bit of surprise sometime in the future.

I am also amazed that everybody seems to spend a lot of time arguing, talking about, etc. what everybody should be doing. Complete waste of time! Due, basically, to our 30% who lack the brain power to understand that hundreds of thousands on non-vaccinated have died and they are continuing on that path. The really bad thing is that so many of them are actually surviving to tell their story about how right they were and how stupid everybody who got vaccinated were and how they are going to die in 2 or 3 years. My own thought is that, perhaps, all of us who are keeping up with their vaccinations might stop wearing masks so that they may help the stupid 30% die off at a more rapid rate thereby giving the rest a better chance of survival.

Sorry, just a mean spirited thought ...............

I doubted those claims when I wrote that, and I still doubt it. All those claims are based on Rt being higher for Omicron (and Delta before that). But Epidemiologists are calculating Rt from the spread rate, so the argument is circular. The popular idea is that it's an inherent property of this variant to spread faster, completely ignoring that human behavior is a huge part of Rt. When people ignore safe behavior "because the pandemic is over" or "it's just our extended family getting together" or "it's just our New Years Eve party", spread shoots up. And when 15% of your population has active infections, the exponential growth curve starts getting real steep.

The popular idea is that Covid symptoms are starting sooner after exposure, not later. And that it's a milder variant, with faster recovery. But I doubt those are because of any inherent property of Omicron. They are exactly what you would expect in a highly immune population: Faster onset of symptoms that tell you people's immune systems know all about SARS-COV2 viruses. Milder cases and faster recoveries for the same reason. Like I've been hypothesizing for a long time: The virus is not changing how it affects us. We are changing as collectively we gain immunity.

Jeeze, I had no idea Human behavior was so consistent around the world. Wether it’s in sub Saharan Africa in late November, Isreal or Denmark the behaviors must be pretty similar, regardless of climate or social customs and holidays for achieving similar rates of Omicron spread. Got it.

Note that I did not say Omicron isn't spreading faster than other variants. I said I doubt it has anything to do with the inherent characteristics of the variant, because I have not seen any evidence to that effect. Transmissibility studies are very difficult to perform on lab animals, where researchers can control all the variables. They are impossible to perform on people. Comparisons to other variants have differences like weather, population immunity, people's behavior changes over time, the fact that the most susceptible people died from infection by earlier variants, etc.

Omicron less virulent? It turns out 50% of the population in South Africa has some immunity because of previous infection with SARS-COV2. 40% of them are vaccinated. How do those sets overlap? Don't know, so the percentage with some immunity could be anywhere from 50% to 90%. That's going to make infection with a new variant, that has some antibody evasion, seem mild. But antibodies are not the only arm of the immune system. Don't forget, most of those people who recovered or had asymptomatic cases, before the vaccines, did so before they started to make ANY antibodies!

So, was that a long way of saying ‘I don’t know’?

Omicron has spread around the globe in one month.
By your logic, that’s a lot of hacking, spitting and surface licking going on that is somehow new from the usual hacking, spitting and surface licking in previous waves.

Looking like lots of kids going to ER with omicron. That’s may be an unfortunate ‘drag on the economy’. Eff em. They shoulda tried harder in school and made the correct life choices!

No public health mitigation, lazy reliance on a vaccines of waning effectiveness over time. A constant ‘but the other side!’ scapegoating to cover their feckless unwillingness to rise to the occasion.

Omicron may alter the trajectory of the pandemic with its suppressive effects of temporary herd immunity. Maybe not. We got a taste of hyper transmissibility. We got lucky it was moderate in its effects and doesn’t appear to like moving into the lower lung regions.

We ought to pray that another, more dangerous, mutation doesn’t emerge cuz we’ll be in a world of hurt with the current ‘everybody’s on their own’ strategy.

No, it's a full explanation of why nobody knows. I'm sorry if this idea is just too complex for you to understand. Repeating the wishful thinking of the mainstream media can do harm: Like convincing unvaccinated and never-infected people to go out and catch Omicron on purpose "because it's the low virulence variant". A lot of people wish that was true, but that doesn't make it true. Like I said, they need to look at a group of people who have never been vaccinated or infected to see how catching Omicron affects them. And they can't be selected just by antibody levels, because antibody levels naturally contract. They have to be selected by the absence of activated T-cells, which is much more expensive and difficult. Nobody has done that study yet.

The fact that some unvaccinated people are dying says that Omicron is not innocuous. One frontline doc wrote he knows more about a new patient just by asking if they were vaccinated, than from everything else in their chart. This is a personal issue for me, because my mother died from covid, and my wife's twin sister refuses to get vaccinated. She works as a dental hygienist and is convinced her N95 mask is going to protect her. Though today she was telling us how her dental office is being affected by quarantines of staff members.

Since the pandemic began in March 2020, the corp office has daily round-ups of how many peeps are not at work because they became exposed for COVID.

The message doesn't name the person (HIPPA), but their building number, floor number, and wing

One Monday 01/03, 32 people were on the list - the most ever. Tuesday 01/04, 47 on the list - the most ever. My manager, my divisional assistant General Manager, my divisional General Manager all out last week due to "COVID protocols." That means they were exposed and are staying away from work for 5-days, but working from home. My manager turned poz yesterday, FR 01/07. He's been double vaxxed + boost. He said he's pretty bad off and would have been ICU if he were not vaxxed.