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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2021 2:41 am 
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Because getting Covid isn't enough of a negative incentive. I wonder how big the Venn diagram overlap is between people who swear up and down that vaccines will make them infertile/put 5G chips in their bloodstreams and those who will get jabbed anyway to avoid a $100 fine.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2021 11:53 am 
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I was thinking something closer to 'lose your job/certification and be unemployable' than 'pay a hundred bucks'. Though a legal mandate of a paid day off to get the shot would keep it fair; because there are a lot of working poor who have been scared stupid by their economic situation, and don't get vaccinated simply because they can't force themselves to give up pay voluntarily (the last estimate was about a quarter of the American unvaccinated are in this group).

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed Jul 28, 2021 5:56 am 
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A vast country without proper electronic medical records and where vaccine certificates are just pieces of photocopied cardstock? You'll get an even more roaring trade in fake vaccine certificates.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed Jul 28, 2021 7:45 am 
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I've no idea what the actual percentages are, but from my bubble i would say hardline conspiracy nuts are outnumbered by people, whos position is more "where there is smoke there might be fire, so i wait at the sidelines, while other people get vaccinated and see how it goes", or who simply find one reason to not get vaccinated right now after an other, which indicates some unspoken reason, like maybe they don't like needles or something.

A negative incentive or some deadline could work for them.

Oh and an other potential solution for working poor: Employers could organize vaccination appointments for their employees. That way it does not have to be a whole day off, the employers can make sure that they have enough employees working at any given time and for large employers that could even do the vaccination on their premises, which avoids time for commutes. Maybe you also need to give employers some additional incentives to take part.

Austria has used a similiar system, though the reasoning was more to ensure that people in higher risk professions are vaccinated first, as you already are allowed to make doctors visits during your worktime by law, after all we are like a first world country.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2021 2:05 pm 
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As some might have heard, the Creatures of the Right are promoting a verterinary anti-parasite drug called Ivermectin against Covid infections; a drug with a reputed tendency to suppress male fertility. Now the folks who make the drug are quick to point out that it only has a slight negative effect on apparent male fertility in studies done on rats; so it must be fine, right?

Well and good; but there was one (small) study done on Humans in Nigeria, where it was being taken by people to deal with river blindness. It wasn't pretty. If it's anything like correct, then humans are vastly harder hit than rats (which would not be very surprising); and at least temporary sterility is the predicted outcome of a man taking this stuff.

I suspect the Creature media isn't playing up that study, somehow.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2021 5:31 am 
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Ironic, given that the anti-vax crowd has been spreading paranoia about vaccines causing infertility. So I imagine there is much ostentatious wigging out to be seen about the new federal OSHA vaccine/testing mandate. But the stats show that vaccine hesitancy is on its way down, so it is a loud and shrinking minority. Does not necessarily stop them from being a destructive political force, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, on my side of the planet, the government is clearly using pandemic control rules as a tool for political repression. Pop concert, OK. Wedding, OK. Cinema, OK. Five hold an outdoor protest, immediate social distancing penalty ticket. Cops will even order unrelated strangers to stand together and then fine them for violating social distancing. So either you take the ticket, or you get arrested for obstructing an officer. (They're not even protesters, necessarily. Just anyone who happens to be walking down the street in the vicinity of some undesirable political expression.)

The inbound travel quarantine requirement has been extended to a scientifically silly 21 days. If you travel into Hong Kong, you have to quarantine at a designated hotel for 3 weeks (or 2 weeks if you are vaccinated). Talk of opening a travel bubble with Singapore keeps comically being delayed. They appear to be deliberately discouraging international travel in the hopes of staying zero Covid long enough for Beijing to reopen the border to tourists from the Mainland. They're the mainstay consumers of the Shampoo, Cosmetics and Gold Jewellery Racket that the landlords depend on, plus the government gets to do the whole Bow Down and Be Grateful to the Motherland For Rescuing Our Economy With Their Milk Powder Purchases song and dance thing. It hasn't worked though.

So we have very little Covid. So people haven't felt the urgency to get vaccinated. I think our vaccination rate is still hovering around 50%. Some people were holding out as a silent middle finger to the government (they're NEVER going to lift social gathering restrictions, so what's the point?). But the vaccination rates are actually the lowest among the elderly - the most "patriotic" demographic. They have absorbed quite a lot of media-driven paranoia about the side effects, and also been given some truly appalling medical advice by lawsuit-averse doctors and nursing home staff. Since there's so little Covid around, healthcare professionals perceive the risk of getting sued in the event of an adverse reaction to the vaccine as greater than their patients catching Covid. So the popular wisdom here is that you should NOT get vaccinated if you have any kind of pre-existing condition like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems, etc. Which is like most old people.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:28 pm 
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Sounds like that's going to be fun if, or more likely when, the next outbreak takes hold.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:46 am 
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They've so far kept Delta out with really strict testing, contact tracing and quarantine. If you get Covid you are sent to the hospital and placed in a negative pressure room immediately, even if you are asymptomatic. Everyone who lives in your apartment is subject to a mandatory test. Everyone you were in close contact with during your incubation period (that they can trace) is sent to quarantine camp for two weeks. You are required to leave your name and phone number at every public facility and restaurant you visit. If they think there might be a cluster in your apartment building, they "ambush lockdown" your whole building overnight and nobody goes in or out until everyone is tested. If you are visiting someone, shopping, or working in a building when it is suddenly cordoned off, tough luck, you're not going home tonight. The ambush lockdowns are hygiene theatre, they usually identify zero cases - you're very unlikely to catch it from an elevator button.

It works. They've squashed three outbreaks already that way. But if a Delta superspreading event takes place and overwhelms the isolation capacity, it's gonna get pretty dicey. Although frankly, it will be nothing on par with Florida. Good grief, Florida.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2021 9:13 pm 
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Just noted in passing that right now the death rates to covid infections in the most Trumpy tenth of the counties in the US is about 6 times that of the least Trumpy tenth, on a per capita basis. And it's diverging. This could get interesting; especially if blowing off the flu-like symptoms of the new variant for at least five days becomes a thing in Trump country; so the pill that can reduce death rates by some 89%, if taken in the first five days, won't be able to help.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 9:02 am 
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A number of Blue state governors are now lifting Covid restrictions, in a nod to political reality as much as declining case rates. That said, I can't help but wonder if the thought that at least 3/4 of the dead going forward will be Republican voters (with the rest split between Democratic voters and non-voters) didn't help nudge some of them along.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat May 14, 2022 7:27 pm 
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I recently heard two numbers bandied about as the US hits one million COVID deaths (and somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 million surplus deaths). The first is that the most Republican decile of counties had three times the per capita death rate to COVID infection as the most Democratic decile. The second is that that reddest decile had 21 times the surplus deaths per capita as the bluest.

Whether both can be true simultaneously aside: neither one bids well for long term Republican electoral prospects. And both would be entirely self-inflicted.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon May 16, 2022 2:01 am 
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I was wrong, we had a massive Omicron outbreak in March, and it was, at least briefly, worse than Florida. It was horrific. They had literal corpses piled up on the floor in at least one hospital because they couldn't move the bodies to morgues fast enough. 90% of the deaths were the unvaccinated elderly; despite the fact that we have had the vaccines for a year, only 20-odd% of people over 80 had been jabbed at the start of the wave. Hong Kong had no ideologically-driven anti-vax movement prior to this; this was entirely a result of bad messaging, misinformation, official complacency, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing and incompetence. It went through nursing homes like a brush fire.

You can't rely on border controls to keep out a virus with an R0 of 10. Shanghai's been in complete lockdown for a month with people going hungry in their apartments, and they still can't get a handle on it.

As for the US red state deaths, I imagine that even there, the deaths fell disproportionately upon poor immigrants and people of colour. Unfortunately they cannot confine their hoisting to their own petards.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 19, 2022 4:24 pm 
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I suspect life in North Korea is loads of fun now, for what little that's worth. Widespread malnutrition and no health care system worth mentioning is not the best way to head into this kind of an epidemic.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 19, 2022 6:13 pm 
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That China / Hong Kong couldn't get most of their elderly vaccinated is kind of baffling to me. It's not like we've had a wonderful COVID response in the US either, but at least we managed that.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 19, 2022 11:20 pm 
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I live here and I don't fully get it either, but this is roughly what happened.

1. We went into this pandemic with about 60-70% of the population freaking HATING this government. See: the entirety of 2019.
2. They introduced 2 vaccines, the Chinese-made inactivated virus vaccine Sinovac, and the US/German made MRNA Pfizer.
3. For reasons of patriotic boosterism, the government could not admit that Sinovac was less effective. It was rolled out first, despite the fact that clinical trials (mainly in Brazil) did not find enough elderly test subjects to collect sufficient safety and efficacy data on that age group. Government officials did photo ops of themselves being injected with Sinovac.
4. Within days of elderly people getting the jab, a few people reported adverse effects. A couple of people dropped dead. This was probably a coincidence - out of a pool of tens of thousands of folks over 60, perhaps one or two will die in any given week. But no matter, the media (which at this point had not yet been cowed into submission) ran with it. "IS THIS VACCINE EVEN SAFE????"
5. So why didn't people get the Pfizer, when that became available, instead? Because there were similar panicky reports of elderly people getting side effects from Europe. And the Chinese propaganda machine cast doubt on MRNA technology because they wanted to promote their domestic vaccines. Old people, who aren't the most sophisticated consumers of media, bought it.
6. Government looks at growing panic and passes the buck: "The people who had side effects had pre-existing conditions. If you are concerned, please consult with your doctor before getting a vaccine."
7. Doctors, as a group, punted. They were afraid of patients launching complaints to the medical council if they got jabbed and had some kind of reaction. They looked around at the strict border controls and low case numbers and told their patients it was OK to wait. They were also worried about the government throwing them under the bus if anything went wrong. The risk of side effects looked bigger than the risk of getting actual Covid. Not to mention, plenty of Hong Kongers don't have a primary care physician, they just rock up to the nearest government clinic when they get sick, and that's a take-a-number-and-see-whoever deal. You get 10 minutes and some pills. Ain't nobody got time to talk you through your anxieties.
8. Meanwhile, a lot of people (mostly younger people), held out on getting vaccinated out of sheer spite. Whatever the government tells us to do, we're going to do the opposite. We have no other way to resist except to control our own bodies. So they didn't encourage their elderly relatives to get vaccinated either. Younger folks eventually were persuaded or required to get jabbed by various incentives and mandates, none of which were particularly enticing or applicable to the elderly.
9. Conventional wisdom set in that you should not get vaccinated if you have a pre-existing condition. The fact that this was utterly bananas was met with a shrug as long as case counts remained low.
10. For a long time, nobody bothered to do much about the logistical barriers to getting the elderly vaccinated. You don't know how to make a booking online? Uh, call your district's social work centre. Or don't. In the end, the best they managed was allow old folks to line up outside vaccine centres first thing in the morning to sign up for an appointment slot in person. It was never like in the US where after the initial rush, you could walk into any pharmacy and get a jab on the spot.
11. The government got over-confident and complacent. They got really invested in trying to prove their loyalty by demonstrating the superiority of Chinese Zero Covid policies. Hong Kong beat 4 waves with quarantine and contact tracing. And then Omicron busted through.

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