Coronavirus

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

1800 people die from Omicron. The vast majority being unvaccinated. The vast majority likely having 1 foot in the grave, 1 foot on a banana peel, as well.

The vaccine is ubiquitous. Those people had a choice. Why are we letting Omicron influence ANYTHING in the day-to-day life for the average person?

I think you partly answered your own question with the deaths.

Then, there's also the hospitals.

Then, there's also the standard of not going out when sick which is just common sense, or used to be at least.

[Jocephus]

The vast majority likely having 1 foot in the grave, 1 foot on a banana peel, as well.

if anti's are gonna call out people who say "the vaccine saved my life" sentiment can i call this out? what a terrible mindset, again, just americans saying FU to their neighbor. amazing. i never want to hear a politician say this is a christian nation. [expletive] greedy country, in so many ways. i love the idea of telling someone you care about "eh, you're almost dead anyways"

[heyzeus]

1800 people die from Omicron. The vast majority being unvaccinated. The vast majority likely having 1 foot in the grave, 1 foot on a banana peel, as well.

The vaccine is ubiquitous. Those people had a choice. Why are we letting Omicron influence ANYTHING in the day-to-day life for the average person?

The pandemic has made me dabble in social darwinism too. It's hard not to. Ultimately there are moral reasons I reject this as a personal belief, and both selfish and societal reasons that I care about the net effect on our health care system of just saying "[expletive] it, we all do what we want now, and like Ivan Drago said, if they die, they die."

As a country, we're about 20% lower on vaccination rate than any other developed country. That's unacceptable, from a public health standpoint. I'm just a dummy lawyer though and not a public health person, and I don't know how we reach the people who are either resistant, skeptical, or poisoned by misinformation. But we're gonna keep having a lot of dead americans every day til we do.

[Popeye_Card]

Maybe free market hospitals should increase their capacity to perform procedures and deal with other demands “from the market.” Given how woefully incompetent they are, maybe a different way of doing things really is in order. It’s not like it had years to deal with this…

I would agree with you on some aspects of this. Again, it's not a matter of adding another building and another 100 beds or whatever. It's staffing those beds, and current ones, that is the real issue. 2 years is a long time. But, so is med school, nursing school, etc. And, there is a current bidding war to attract the limited supply of medical staff required to treat covid patients.

That still doesn't mean it's okay for people to go out when infected.

It is also perhaps a reasonable model for more urban areas, but what about the countless hospitals scattered across more rural small towns? How do you staff up and down for COVID waves? Do we start having a healthcare reserve system like the military, where you are called up to active duty at different times during the year? Perhaps plausible, but certainly a departure from where we have been.

[TGantz]

Why are we letting Omicron influence ANYTHING in the day-to-day life for the average person?

The same reason everyone is referencing an elderly Eastern European folk singer dying after getting Covid on purpose as proof that it's super deadly: fear. We couldn't even find an American Trump supporter as the laughing stock for that agenda.

When you wake up every morning and see death tickers on the news, you drive to work and the radio talks about deaths and mandates, you get to work and there are new Covid protocols, you get your temp checked at the door with an incorrect thermometer that reads mostly the room temp and says 95.6 (which means you are dead), you get to your desk and your coworker talks about their Aunt's neighbor that died of Covid, then you go out to lunch and you stand in line six feet apart with masks right before you sit 4 feet away from the same person to eat without a mask, you go back to work, get temp checked and its 98.8 which is probably a fever but the $15 thermometer from China said you're good, you go in and finish your day, you go to the grocery store on the way home and there's a lot of empty shelves and 1984-esque broadcast being played on the loud speaker encouraging social distancing, then you drive home and catch more Covid talk on the radio, arrive home and your family talks about their new Covid protocols at school/work, you turn on the TV and there are tickers counting deaths underneath our 80+ year old President giving a sweeping government mandate taking effect soon, you eat dinner and talk about Covid, you sit down and watch late night hosts joke about Covid while you fall alseep reading Facebook posts and news about Covid. Rinse and repeat.

With compliance, you are promised safety. If you are non-compliant, you are unsafe. The people wanting compliance can double down by saying the only reason it doesn't work is because of non-compliance. We continue the endless cycle.

We need to learn to live with it. If you could snap your fingers and liquidate every unvaccinated person, there would still be Covid, there would still be people dying. If there are no vaccine goal posts to aim towards, what's next? Better early treatment? We should be doing that now. More lockdowns? Hasn't worked for 2 years.

We can't continue this as a species.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Maybe free market hospitals should increase their capacity to perform procedures and deal with other demands “from the market.” Given how woefully incompetent they are, maybe a different way of doing things really is in order. It’s not like it had years to deal with this…

I would agree with you on some aspects of this. Again, it's not a matter of adding another building and another 100 beds or whatever. It's staffing those beds, and current ones, that is the real issue. 2 years is a long time. But, so is med school, nursing school, etc. And, there is a current bidding war to attract the limited supply of medical staff required to treat covid patients.

That still doesn't mean it's okay for people to go out when infected.

It is also perhaps a reasonable model for more urban areas, but what about the countless hospitals scattered across more rural small towns? How do you staff up and down for COVID waves? Do we start having a healthcare reserve system like the military, where you are called up to active duty at different times during the year? Perhaps plausible, but certainly a departure from where we have been.

To be honest, I don't know why the military isn't more involved; no idea how many medically trained personnel they have on active duty, but it seems like there would be a decent amount, and there would be others that could be trained to perform some more of the mundane tasks (like testing).

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Why are we letting Omicron influence ANYTHING in the day-to-day life for the average person?

The same reason everyone is referencing an elderly Eastern European folk singer dying after getting Covid on purpose as proof that it's super deadly: fear. We couldn't even find an American Trump supporter as the laughing stock for that agenda.

When you wake up every morning and see death tickers on the news, you drive to work and the radio talks about deaths and mandates, you get to work and there are new Covid protocols, you get your temp checked at the door with an incorrect thermometer that reads mostly the room temp and says 95.6 (which means you are dead), you get to your desk and your coworker talks about their Aunt's neighbor that died of Covid, then you go out to lunch and you stand in line six feet apart with masks right before you sit 4 feet away from the same person to eat without a mask, you go back to work, get temp checked and its 98.8 which is probably a fever but the $15 thermometer from China said you're good, you go in and finish your day, you go to the grocery store on the way home and there's a lot of empty shelves and 1984-esque broadcast being played on the loud speaker encouraging social distancing, then you drive home and catch more Covid talk on the radio, arrive home and your family talks about their new Covid protocols at school/work, you turn on the TV and there are tickers counting deaths underneath our 80+ year old President giving a sweeping government mandate taking effect soon, you eat dinner and talk about Covid, you sit down and watch late night hosts joke about Covid while you fall alseep reading Facebook posts and news about Covid. Rinse and repeat.

With compliance, you are promised safety. If you are non-compliant, you are unsafe. The people wanting compliance can double down by saying the only reason it doesn't work is because of non-compliance. We continue the endless cycle.

We need to learn to live with it. If you could snap your fingers and liquidate every unvaccinated person, there would still be Covid, there would still be people dying. If there are no vaccine goal posts to aim towards, what's next? Better early treatment? We should be doing that now. More lockdowns? Hasn't worked for 2 years.

We can't continue this as a species.

Nice rant, and I'd concede there are certain pockets of society too focused on covid. That can be true while recognizing that there are reasons sick people don't go get other people sick. A concept so simple it was pretty well unanimously agreed upon as a society in December of 2019. Again, go back to that time and replace covid with flu and try to make the same arguments. (Not yours specifically, no one cared about the flu). But at the same time, they weren't arguing that we should ignore it if we have it.

[Jocephus]

Why are we letting Omicron influence ANYTHING in the day-to-day life for the average person?

When you wake up every morning and see death tickers on the news, you drive to work and the radio talks about deaths and mandates, you get to work and there are new Covid protocols, you get your temp checked at the door with an incorrect thermometer that reads mostly the room temp and says 95.6 (which means you are dead), you get to your desk and your coworker talks about their Aunt's neighbor that died of Covid, then you go out to lunch and you stand in line six feet apart with masks right before you sit 4 feet away from the same person to eat without a mask, you go back to work, get temp checked and its 98.8 which is probably a fever but the $15 thermometer from China said you're good, you go in and finish your day, you go to the grocery store on the way home and there's a lot of empty shelves and 1984-esque broadcast being played on the loud speaker encouraging social distancing, then you drive home and catch more Covid talk on the radio, arrive home and your family talks about their new Covid protocols at school/work, you turn on the TV and there are tickers counting deaths underneath our 80+ year old President giving a sweeping government mandate taking effect soon, you eat dinner and talk about Covid, you sit down and watch late night hosts joke about Covid while you fall alseep reading Facebook posts and news about Covid. Rinse and repeat.

talk about fear mongering. a public health message over a PA system is not a broadcast or orwellian.

always good to just make up scenarios that fit your world view, covid or not.

[cardinalkarp]

Curious as to what those questions are. While there are issues with a lot of how we collect COVID data, this one seems fairly cut and dry. Did the person die from COVID (Y/N)? Was the person vaccinated for COVID (Y/N)?

That said, when they give the total percentage of people who have died from COVID since day 1 that were unvaccinated, I agree that is disingenuous since we did not have a widescale vaccine program until 12-16 months into the pandemic. I am fine with making the cutoff basically since the start of the Delta wave - all adults had easy access to the vaccines by then.

I would like to know how many (current/previously) of the “unvaccinated” hospitalized and dying of COVID are in the process of becoming fully vaccinated…ie how many have had 1 shot, how many have had 2 shots and it hasn’t been a full two weeks? And I don’t believe it’s the case here (since boosters are only recommended currently) that they are considering anyone one not boosted in the “unvaccinated” category.

The message from the government has been get your shot and you’re good to go….when it’s been shown that a person is most vulnerable the first couple weeks after getting the shot when the immune system is suppressed…. So if people get the shots, then get COVID immediately after they go straight into the “unvaccinated” category.

This would be useful information, as people would then know….hey, I need to be VERY careful right after I get these shots.

[ghostrunner]

Why are we letting Omicron influence ANYTHING in the day-to-day life for the average person?

The same reason everyone is referencing an elderly Eastern European folk singer dying after getting Covid on purpose as proof that it's super deadly: fear. We couldn't even find an American Trump supporter as the laughing stock for that agenda.

Just going to say that was not the point of that. I think everyone could agree that woman infecting herself was a bad idea. Though I think it does show that natural immunity isn’t the way to go for everyone.