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CH3MTR4IL5 said..

Paradox said..

That article from Vox is reasonably good, but I can't agree with the view on masks. I have seen no study which gives any statistically relevent benefit to cloth masks. Expert opinion: www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data

caldronpool.com/heres-a-list-of-the-published-side-effects-of-lockdowns/

the references don't entirely support the commentary though- cloth masks do reduce the amount of viral material expelled to a significant degree. But the bigger point is that surgical masks do work, and much better than cloth masks.

www.nejm.org/do/10.1056/NEJMdo005745/full/?requestType=popUp&relatedArticle=10.1056%2FNEJMc2007800

It does feel like cloth masks are a 'hey this is better than nothing', rather than an actual response. I am surprised that there is not more push to wear surgical masks now that they are readily available.

enviro impact vs health benefit. depends on whether you're a bird or not i guess

Blah blah?

Bottom line is : we took the bloody vaccine,

OPEN THE FRIGGIN BORDER UP

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tarquin1 said..
My wife is a teacher here in France. She did 13 hours overtime this week. There are so many teachers that either have Covid or are direct contact. Same with my kids. Going to 1 out of 5 classes per day. Over 9000 classes closed in France now.
So although not as bad as Delta health wise its definitely messing with "the system".
They are expecting 500 000 cases a day next week.

Look out WA, it's coming and will likely hit you guys far harder than the rest of Australia. Eastern states have had many months of conditioning and adaptation. Right now the effects of the virus is far worse than many of us ever thought it was going to get - it's getting close to chaos. All sorts of supplies are getting more difficult to obtain. Many people are burnt out. Your health system is not as robust as ours in the Eastern States, and your remoteness will not work in your favour.

Follow the health advice, go with the flow, major disruptions will be inevitable and good luck.

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CH3MTR4IL5 said..

Paradox said..

That article from Vox is reasonably good, but I can't agree with the view on masks. I have seen no study which gives any statistically relevent benefit to cloth masks. Expert opinion: www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data

caldronpool.com/heres-a-list-of-the-published-side-effects-of-lockdowns/

the references don't entirely support the commentary though- cloth masks do reduce the amount of viral material expelled to a significant degree. But the bigger point is that surgical masks do work, and much better than cloth masks.

www.nejm.org/do/10.1056/NEJMdo005745/full/?requestType=popUp&relatedArticle=10.1056%2FNEJMc2007800

It does feel like cloth masks are a 'hey this is better than nothing', rather than an actual response. I am surprised that there is not more push to wear surgical masks now that they are readily available.

enviro impact vs health benefit. depends on whether you're a bird or not i guess

Fully agree N95 masks work if fitted properly.

They are not really something you can get the public to wear though. Certainly great if you are at risk. That was the real point from that commentary from the experts, cloth masks are mostly useless and any benefit could be undone by people thinking they are more effective than they really are and relying on them instead of other measures like social distancing or as you say N95 masks.

All irrelevent with Omicron now though. With an R0 value of 10 nothiing stops it from a community perspective.

At risk people should be wearing an N95 mask for sure. Voluntarily though.

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myscreenname said..

tarquin1 said..
My wife is a teacher here in France. She did 13 hours overtime this week. There are so many teachers that either have Covid or are direct contact. Same with my kids. Going to 1 out of 5 classes per day. Over 9000 classes closed in France now.
So although not as bad as Delta health wise its definitely messing with "the system".
They are expecting 500 000 cases a day next week.

Look out WA, it's coming and will likely hit you guys far harder than the rest of Australia. Eastern states have had many months of conditioning and adaptation. Right now the effects of the virus is far worse than many of us ever thought it was going to get - it's getting close to chaos. All sorts of supplies are getting more difficult to obtain. Many people are burnt out. Your health system is not as robust as ours in the Eastern States, and your remoteness will not work in your favour.

Follow the health advice, go with the flow, major disruptions will be inevitable and good luck.

Of course. We will need to battle this. There will be casualties (like going out Sat night and been king hit at Northbridge), but we need to march on.

Some here think we can avoid it forever, or think giving Mc Clown another 2 yrs to "fix" the health system.

Guess what? He needs to open the borders to fix it!

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myscreenname said..
Look out WA, it's coming and will likely hit you guys far harder than the rest of Australia. Eastern states have had many months of conditioning and adaptation. Right now the effects of the virus is far worse than many of us ever thought it was going to get - it's getting close to chaos. All sorts of supplies are getting more difficult to obtain. Many people are burnt out. Your health system is not as robust as ours in the Eastern States, and your remoteness will not work in your favour.

Follow the health advice, go with the flow, major disruptions will be inevitable and good luck.

The biggest issue in Eastern states are the isolation requirements that have to be followed, not Omicron itself.

Omicron is a game changer, it's going to spread very quickly no matter what you do, it's symptoms are very mild and very quickly gone in the vast majority of people. Get on with life, stay home if you feel unwell just like you did with a cold or the flu.

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Paradox said..

The biggest issue in Eastern states are the isolation requirements that have to be followed, not Omicron itself.

Omicron is a game changer, it's going to spread very quickly no matter what you do, it's symptoms are very mild and very quickly gone in the vast majority of people. Get on with life, stay home if you feel unwell just like you did with a cold or the flu.

Yeah, pretty much. Just that lots of people are sick or stuck at home, and those that aren't are lying very low. Omicron is a new level of unpredictability.




A friend just posted this pic from her Aldi store in Melbourne. Reminds me of photos taken of supermarket shelves in Russia before the failure of communism

This is becoming the problem here. The isolation requirements. So many people have it or are direct contact they can't go to work or kids can't go to school, then 1 parent has to stay home. With numbers going ballistic its only going to get worse.
The govt keeps changing their mind and what protocol is and now no one knows.
My wife is getting texts at 2200 from students, my friend that I saw 2 days ago has Covid, I've had 1 vaccine shot, can I come to class tomorrow?

^^^Studious kids, going to school in the middle of summer

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tarquin1 said..
..... They are expecting 500 000 cases a day next week.

So in 120 days then 100% of people will have had it.

But given google tells me over 11 million already had it in France then say 90 days from now and 100% of people will have had it once and so.... why bother with any excessively restrictive control measures after that ?

The initial covid modelling I recall from March 2020 was an anticipated 81% (I recall 81% because 81% was such an accurate number, not 'around 80%' or 'about three quarters' but '81%') of the population to catch it no matter what - and so the response was supposed to be to spread that 81% over a long enough time period for the medical system to cope.



Seems to me that in Aus, by having this state-premier dick-waving competition about who has the lowest number in the morning press conference for the last two years and trying to have zero cases no matter what else, then all that will happened is what tarquin1 says France now has - the curve was made so flat it is now going to be a near vertical bell curve for the 80%.

The longer WA delays and suppresses I suspect the steeper the bell curve will be.

And thus the dumb-arse policies will deliver the exact thing that the original, but now abandoned for no good reason policies sought to achieve - a very steep curve totaling 80% with and overwhelmed medical system.

Thought-out and Agreed Plan A : 90 days of suppression and then spread infection of 80% over two years to not overwhelm the system
Political dick-waving Plan Delivered : Two years of suppression followed by 90 days for 80% to get it overwhelming the system

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Mr Milk said..
^^^Studious kids, going to school in the middle of summer

Middle of winter in France.

Boosters now becoming mandatory for many jobs and with booster eligibility now being shortened to 4 months that means close to 3 mandatory boosters per year. I've had 2 jabs and a booster but wasn't planning to rush for the second booster. Not that comfortable with where all this is headed.

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Harrow said..
Boosters now becoming mandatory for many jobs and with booster eligibility now being shortened to 4 months that means close to 3 mandatory boosters per year. I've had 2 jabs and a booster but wasn't planning to rush for the second booster. Not that comfortable with where all this is headed.

It's probably going to end up in endless boosters & immune system failure for some people.

Wait till a new variant pops up again this year & everyone starts scrambling for more jabs.

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CH3MTR4IL5 said..

i am open to any metrics what is a successful covid response in general, balancing public health with other societal outcomes - but you need to define what that is to measure and compare it.

Deaths and cases are a pretty good metric of the effectiveness of the public health response, because thats sort of the whole point. if more of your population are dying proportionally than others, you're not successful, whatever the underlying factors are.

if the metric is that Florida have had very few restrictions, well we have had less lockdowns and less mandated mask wearing in WA than in Florida. And less cases. So why is Florida the best response?

i'm not bashing Florida (although i am not a fan of the place!), the start of this debate was around people saying Florida had a great response, and I don't think it did on any metric. Happy to listen to arguments as to why it was better, but it seems to be a statement rather than a consideration.

if there was one better response, everyone would have followed it- different states/countries had different start points and experiences and none of them have been that effective as to be the be-all and end-all.

www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22456544/covid-19-mask-mandates-lockdown-debate-evidence

Deaths due to COVID and cases is only a metric of deaths due to COVID and cases. Public health is more than deaths due to COVID and cases. We could very easily reduce both metrics to zero, y'know...

As this is the metric you've settled on lets stick with it, and taking the worst-case data you presented before (not the "right in the middle" position from Vox)..
If what Florida has done is completely opposite the prevailing "wisdom" then why aren't they leading the negative outcomes.
If restrictions and lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates and arrests and prosecutions and fines are so effective, why isn't Florida leading the negative outcomes.

That's the point. That's it.

Is it the best policy? No, nobody here is saying that so far as I can tell. But there's a conversation to be had about what may be better than what's been done, and it isn't limited to deaths due to COVID and case numbers.

But by your own selection of metric, it isn't the WORST policy.

Vox can sod off -- they spent half the article declaring it was complicated and unpredictable, then declared that masks make a difference even though all the evidence they'vejust statedmakes nonsense of this. And considering the restaurant mandates are "wear the mask until you're sitting at the table" I'm calling BS on that, and the rest of their spurious correlations and unfounded conjecture. And I doubt they actually read the studies *ugh* thanks for making me read Vox NOT.

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Harrow said..
Boosters now becoming mandatory for many jobs and with booster eligibility now being shortened to 4 months that means close to 3 mandatory boosters per year. I've had 2 jabs and a booster but wasn't planning to rush for the second booster. Not that comfortable with where all this is headed.

Why would you care? Aren't you employed in SF via Oatley or somewhere near there?

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CH3MTR4IL5 said..

the references don't entirely support the commentary though- cloth masks do reduce the amount of viral material expelled to a significant degree. But the bigger point is that surgical masks do work, and much better than cloth masks.

www.nejm.org/do/10.1056/NEJMdo005745/full/?requestType=popUp&relatedArticle=10.1056%2FNEJMc2007800

It does feel like cloth masks are a 'hey this is better than nothing', rather than an actual response. I am surprised that there is not more push to wear surgical masks now that they are readily available.

enviro impact vs health benefit. depends on whether you're a bird or not i guess

No, they don't. RCTs from Denmark and Bangladesh have proven there's no statistically significant difference to wearing no mask, and I've seen a study from Japan that shows cloth masks are worse than no mask for particle spread. Surgical masks are good for 10% improvement.

I'm not getting anything from that link, something broken.

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myscreenname said..
A friend just posted this pic from her Aldi store in Melbourne. Reminds me of photos taken of supermarket shelves in Russia before the failure of communism

No, far too much product on the shelves to be any time during Soviet Russia.

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myscreenname said..
A friend just posted this pic from her Aldi store in Melbourne. Reminds me of photos taken of supermarket shelves in Russia before the failure of communism

To be fair though, any picture of any Aldi store anytime, anywhere looks like a picture of Stalinist Russia.

That's just Aldi.

Not got anything to do with anything else.

Pronounce ALDI backwards in a German accent

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Mr Milk said..

Harrow said..
Boosters now becoming mandatory for many jobs and with booster eligibility now being shortened to 4 months that means close to 3 mandatory boosters per year. I've had 2 jabs and a booster but wasn't planning to rush for the second booster. Not that comfortable with where all this is headed.

Why would you care? Aren't you employed in SF via Oatley or somewhere near there?

He's pissed 'cause he didn't get into bitcoin years ago and is still shifting pixels around: same place he was in a decade ago. But now he complains about getting jabbed - like he's one of Rolf Harris's daughters girlfriends.

Good time to buy now Harrow.

They just arrested a lady player who was around for a week and already played???

WTF

They lost the plot totally

People are losing the plot in general.

Well let's see you unqualified douches try and pull some more irrational crap out of your holes with yet another world acclaimed and published scientist - the inventor of the MRNA technologies used for these so called vaccines (who has just been banned from twitter go figure).

open.spotify.com/episode/3SCsueX2bZdbEzRtKOCEyT?si=JS3UVVlUQ8GtKG9w_d4pdw&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk

honestly if you don't think something fishy is going on then you are either dead, blind or just down right stupid.

now listen carefully formulanova (however you spell your weird name) I don't want have to correct you twice again mis representing what is actually being said. Listen dude . someone way smarter, at the forefront of all of this, with way more runs in the board is speaking..

Quite a long article but explains what happened here.
www.france24.com/en/europe/20220104-schoolchildren-face-fraught-return-to-class-as-omicron-runs-amok-in-france
The education minister was warned that Omni would rip through schools. They put a pretty hard core vaccination campaign out for kids just as the 2 week school holidays were starting. At the same time only a few new restrictions over the holidays. Everyone went off and had Christmas as normal. Omni spread massively over the holidays. The kids were vaccinated too late and didn't have antibodies. Teachers were told on Sunday night before going back too school of the new protocols. The education minister said there is no point giving teachers FFP2 masks as its too difficult to talk with them and the protocols, distancing etc work fine. He was warned by doctors that Omni was different.
At the same time everyone else is told to work from home for a minimum of 3 days per week and stricter laws are bought in for restaurants etc.
Result, over 9000 classes closed and lots of teachers and kids with Covid. Kids that were vaccinated still got Covid because they didnt have time to build up antibodies, again the education minister was warned about this.
I know the vaccine dosn't stop you from getting it. Maybe it would have been worse?
The education minister keeps saying he will keep schools open at all costs!

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eppo said..
Well let's see you unqualified douches try and pull some more irrational crap out of your holes with yet another world acclaimed and published scientist - the inventor of the MRNA technologies used for these so called vaccines (who has just been banned from twitter go figure).

open.spotify.com/episode/3SCsueX2bZdbEzRtKOCEyT?si=JS3UVVlUQ8GtKG9w_d4pdw&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk

honestly if you don't think something fishy is going on then you are either dead, blind or just down right stupid.

now listen carefully formulanova (however you spell your weird name) I don't want have to correct you twice again mis representing what is actually being said. Listen dude . someone way smarter, at the forefront of all of this, with way more runs in the board is speaking..

Says the qualified douche

Iteresting read about mRNA.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

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eppo said..
Well let's see you unqualified douches try and pull some more irrational crap out of your holes with yet another world acclaimed and published scientist - the inventor of the MRNA technologies used for these so called vaccines (who has just been banned from twitter go figure).

open.spotify.com/episode/3SCsueX2bZdbEzRtKOCEyT?si=JS3UVVlUQ8GtKG9w_d4pdw&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk

honestly if you don't think something fishy is going on then you are either dead, blind or just down right stupid.

now listen carefully formulanova (however you spell your weird name) I don't want have to correct you twice again mis representing what is actually being said. Listen dude . someone way smarter, at the forefront of all of this, with way more runs in the board is speaking..

Hah! Now I understand why you use Eppo as your username. More letters would be a struggle for you and its easy to spell.

I even copied a transcript of the last guys statements, but somehow I am misrepresenting him. Well, its pretty clear he said that Omicron is less transmissable than Delta.... hmmm, I wonder how that one worked out.

I don't have time to look at your sterling evidence on this other guy, but I vaguely recall that people have said that he has gone nuts too.

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eppo said..
Listen dude . someone way smarter, at the forefront of all of this, with way more runs in the board is speaking..

Well, maybe way smarter than you... 'runs in the board'?

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Mr Milk said..
Why would you care? Aren't you employed in SF via Oatley or somewhere near there?

Still required to be vaxxed for my work, as are the rest of my family. I've never been anti-vax, but I am hesitant about mandatory tri-yearly shots of a new vaccine that isn't stopping the spread of a virus.

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Carantoc said..
To be fair though, any picture of any Aldi store anytime, anywhere looks like a picture of Stalinist Russia.
That's just Aldi.
Not got anything to do with anything else.

Yep, you could get that photo on just about any Sunday afternoon at Aldi. I've always assumed they are just saving money by not rostering shelf stackers over the weekend. As long as there is still plenty of Jaffa Cake on the shelves, I'll be happy.

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myscreenname said..
He's pissed 'cause he didn't get into bitcoin years ago and is still shifting pixels around: same place he was in a decade ago. But now he complains about getting jabbed - like he's one of Rolf Harris's daughters girlfriends.

Good time to buy now Harrow.

No, I've never moved pixels around. I advise people how to move electrons around. The pay is much better.