[News] Coronavirus

A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.

"It can't be the 'Rona, that's a hoax! Tell me what I really have!" People died believing that. Sigh.

It's ironic because anti-vaxxers claim that the vaccine is completely destroying people's immune systems.

Flu can be pretty rough too, best to avoid it!

The belief runs deep. A guy at my wife's hospital had internal bleeding and needed a transfusion to keep him alive while they tried to stop the bleeding. He would only accept a transfusion of non-vaxxed blood. Well it turns out they don't put that on the blood bags. His family was testing to see if any of them were compatible but that is a 3-5 day process and this guy had 1-2 days to live.

He's dead now, but he died pure I guess.

Pure and a moron....well to be charitable a rube who bought the conservative lie train.

My Randian libertarian friend always says that words can't hurt anyone. But if your choices are based on lies, well... That's been bad news since the days where your enemy might tell you there's good game right outside the lion's den...

Words can, and do, harm people and stir up trouble. Lies matter.

And the thing is, they think "It's my life. My choices won't effect anyone."
Tell that to your family who could suffer worse illness or your same fate. They now have to deal without a dad, husband, brother, etc. And then there is the impact on your co-workers, the stress on the people caring for you, the hospital bed you used that someone else needed more. The costs associated with this that would have been put to better use...

Hospital warns of ‘tragic battle’ as Covid spreads in China

A Shanghai hospital has told its staff to prepare for a “tragic battle” with Covid-19 as it expects half of the city’s 25 million people will get infected by the end of next week, while the virus sweeps through China largely unchecked.

After widespread protests against strict mitigation measures, China this month began dismantling its “zero-Covid” regime, which had taken a great financial and psychological toll on its 1.4 billion people.

China’s official death count since the pandemic began three years ago stands at 5,241 — a fraction of what most other countries faced — but now looks bound to rise sharply.

China reported no new Covid deaths for a second consecutive day for Wednesday, even as funeral parlour workers say demand for their services has increased sharply over the past week.

Authorities — who have narrowed the criteria for Covid deaths, prompting criticism from many disease experts — confirmed 389,306 cases with symptoms.

Some experts say official case figures have become an unreliable guide as less testing is being done following the easing of restrictions.

According to Bloomberg, China Is Likely Seeing 1 Million Covid Cases, 5,000 Deaths a Day

In a roundabout way they might have been right about keeping up their extremely strict restrictions (but only because they didn't spend all this time being better prepared/vaccinated).

It might also put another nail in the coffin for the claims from some people on how restrictions don't matter.

Shadout wrote:

In a roundabout way they might have been right about keeping up their extremely strict restrictions (but only because they didn't spend all this time being better prepared/vaccinated).

It might also put another nail in the coffin for the claims from some people on how restrictions don't matter.

You're assuming that the numbers they are sharing are true. I can't believe that a country as populous as China has only had 5241 deaths over three years. That just doesn't seem possible, even with locking up your citizens.

JC wrote:

You're assuming that the numbers they are sharing are true. I can't believe that a country as populous as China has only had 5241 deaths over three years. That just doesn't seem possible, even with locking up your citizens.

Oh definitely not. But also much lower than what they have now. Regardless of their lockdown on free information, they would not have been able to hide years of significant death rates, so I very much do believe that, while obviously much higher than 5241, it also has been comparatively low, compared to many other countries.

My wife, who follows is much more closely, as pointed out that they have done a terrible job of vaccinating their populous and the vaccines they developed are not nearly as good as the ones that we have.
So they opened up without having their population vaccinated and even those that were vaccinated were poorly protected. It was a recipe for disaster for them, and for us, if huge numbers of the population are unable to work tons of things that we just take for granted will suddenly become very hard to find.
Not to mention, this disease is proving very good at mutating so having a huge population to play and will give it more time to do so

Without being to do them and gloom, I don’t think we’re fully grasp how this has changed humanity, and will shape us for the next hundred or more years.

Yeah, I thought I saw a figure that only about high 60% of their over-80 population had received an initial dose of vaccine and only about 40% had gotten boosters meaning a lot of NaiNais are going to be dying over the next couple months.

Their vaccine requires multiple doses to be effective, but I read somewhere they have a new aerosolized nebulizer-inhaled mucosal vaccine that is much more effective.

But you're right that the next couple of months are going to wreck havoc on the global supply chain because a lot of Chinese workers are about to become sick.

China estimates COVID surge is infecting 37 million people a day - Bloomberg News

https://www.reuters.com/business/hea...

A reporter from the Washington Post called around to see the times at crematoriums in Shang-hi and it was six to twenty days!

farley3k wrote:

China estimates COVID surge is infecting 37 million people a day - Bloomberg News

https://www.reuters.com/business/hea...

A reporter from the Washington Post called around to see the times at crematoriums in Shang-hi and it was six to twenty days!

Wow, 37 million .. Does China have any real effective way to deal with this? Also, that's a pretty big petri dish and breeding ground for new variants ...

I think they have one effect way - I have heard no news stories about this since that first one. I can't believe the magically infections have stopped so they are doing great at keeping things quiet.

MMA fighter Victoria Lee died the day after Christmas. She was 18 years old. Covid conspiracy theorists are pushing some bullsh*t about her dying from the booster vaccine. No cause of death was mentioned, but lots of folks are speculating that it was self harm.

Shadout wrote:

In a roundabout way they might have been right about keeping up their extremely strict restrictions (but only because they didn't spend all this time being better prepared/vaccinated).

It might also put another nail in the coffin for the claims from some people on how restrictions don't matter.

seems to me that the only point of restrictions is to have a slow drip of infections so that your health care system can keep up. completely blocking everything only builds the pressure behind the damn before it inevitably breaks.

Maybe going from complete restrictions to no restrictions wasn't the best.

FiveIron wrote:

seems to me that the only point of restrictions is to have a slow drip of infections so that your health care system can keep up. completely blocking everything only builds the pressure behind the damn before it inevitably breaks.

Maybe going from complete restrictions to no restrictions wasn't the best.

Indeed. It seems like they had zero plans, either when they had full restrictions, nor when they removed them.
If all that time had been spent on vaccinations, that actually were effective, surely things would be different.

China being so unprepared in their actions surprises me a bit. But maybe it is not so different from Russia and Putin after all. A bunch of Yes-men telling the leadership that things are fine, since doing anything else might result in a fatal encounter with a window.

I think it China it might result in the family being billed for a bullet...

farley3k wrote:

China estimates COVID surge is infecting 37 million people a day - Bloomberg News

https://www.reuters.com/business/hea...

A reporter from the Washington Post called around to see the times at crematoriums in Shang-hi and it was six to twenty days!

Ive been hearing that Chinese tourists are going abroad too. They are tired of lock downs too and that sounds like a disasters for other places that desperately want that money.

China being China doesn’t/won’t report any death remotely related to Covid.

JohnKillo wrote:

Ive been hearing that Chinese tourists are going abroad too. They are tired of lock downs too and that sounds like a disasters for other places that desperately want that money.

Sounds like the US. We certainly don't have standing to criticize that behavior.

JohnKillo wrote:

China being China doesn’t/won’t report any death remotely related to Covid.

Sounds like red states in the US like my own state of Iowa, where the pandemic is "over" so we don't really report numbers reliably anymore.

COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the United States

Between August 2021 and July 2022, COVID-19 was a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US, ranking eighth overall.
COVID-19 was the top cause of death in children from an infectious disease, in the same period.
Deaths in children from COVID-19 were highest in the US during the Delta and Omicron waves.
Infants aged less than one year were the most vulnerable, with a COVID-19 death rate of 4 per 100,000.
Pharmaceutical and public health interventions continue to be important to limit transmission of the virus and to mitigate severe disease in this age group.
COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940,000 people in the US, including over 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged 0–19 years. Until now, it had been unclear how the burden of deaths from COVID-19 compared with other leading causes of deaths in this age group.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science investigated this using data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases. The results are published today in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Because we sent them all back to in person school and in a lot of cases without masks?

farley3k wrote:

COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the United States

Between August 2021 and July 2022, COVID-19 was a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US, ranking eighth overall.
COVID-19 was the top cause of death in children from an infectious disease, in the same period.
Deaths in children from COVID-19 were highest in the US during the Delta and Omicron waves.
Infants aged less than one year were the most vulnerable, with a COVID-19 death rate of 4 per 100,000.
Pharmaceutical and public health interventions continue to be important to limit transmission of the virus and to mitigate severe disease in this age group.
COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940,000 people in the US, including over 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged 0–19 years. Until now, it had been unclear how the burden of deaths from COVID-19 compared with other leading causes of deaths in this age group.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science investigated this using data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases. The results are published today in the journal JAMA Network Open.

I am sure that the covid deniers will all say it is because fentanyl overdoses are being counted as covid deaths or some sh*t.

Stele wrote:

Because we sent them all back to in person school and in a lot of cases without masks?

Also because we've made our culture increasingly risk-adverse for kids, so it doesn't take a big uptick to become "the leading cause".

I mean I guess it will help the 2nd amendment nuts to say guns weren't the leading cause of death for kids finally for one year.

Paleocon wrote:

I am sure that the covid deniers will all say it is because fentanyl overdoses are being counted as covid deaths or some sh*t.

Nah, they'll just blame the vax, as with everything.

Prederick wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

I am sure that the covid deniers will all say it is because fentanyl overdoses are being counted as covid deaths or some sh*t.

Nah, they'll just blame the vax, as with everything.

This. They’re even blaming covid vaccines for the deaths of people who never got vaccinated now, saying that the vaccine itself is contagious and can jump from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated.