Covid 19 CRISIS

[Punisher Bass]

As expected the delta variant is spreading through the area and while they haven't reinstated mask mandates, they are encouraging everyone (including those fully vaccinated) to wear them.

In the last several weeks I did relax a tiny bit, I'm not wearing my gloves and I've switched to cloth masks instead of an N95 but now I'm thinking I need to go back to being full on paranoid. A few days ago I did accidentally break my "WEAR A MASK NO MATTER WHAT!" rule by running into the grocery store without one. It was late at night and I was out of my mind with pain and it just totally slipped my mind, it wasn't until I was at the self checkout when I realized I was sans mask.

I'm still kicking myself over it because not once in the last 16 months have I fucked up like that.

 

[Dr_Grip]

If one needs a soccer club president to provide some sanity, politics is in a dire state.

Enter Borussia Dortmund's Watzke:

Why shouldn't we have a stadium at full capacity of vaccinated people? What's the problem with that? What do we do when the first vaccinated people go to court because they can't see a game? It seems like nobody has thought about this yet.

If we are not willing to allow this at some point in time, we have to say: OK, covid-19, we capitulate. Then we will never get our old lives back. Or does anybody believe that there will be zero covid cases sometime in the next years? Then we can also believe in there being no more flu. Or no more Christmas even.

What I think is important here is the focus on the rights of those vaccinated. Once everyone who wants a shot had one, keeping covid restrictions in place means handing control of society to vaccine refusers. This means at some point we will need two sets of rules - one for those vaccinated and one for those that are not.

EDIT: To make it clear, this is not about football (I don't care that much) and not about high-risk experiments with letting anyone back into arenas. This is about the rights of those vaccinated vs. the amount of control an unvaccinated minority can wield.

 

[calvinhobbes]

He may have a valid point, but the timing is terrible. We are currently witnessing the results (superspreading events) of the utter insanity that is holding a pan-European football championship this summer, i.e. long before even the “everyone who wants one” goal is in sight.

But perhaps this can be a little nudge for the sceptics to get vaccinated so we can protect those people who want to, but can’t get vaccinated for some reason.

 

[Dr_Grip]

He may have a valid point, but the timing is terrible. We are currently witnessing the results (superspreading events) of the utter insanity that is holding a pan-European football championship this summer, i.e. long before even the “everyone who wants one” goal is in sight.

I agree about the "insanity" part - see edit above.

But I think the timing is just right since we have to make plans for autumn now, and not when everyone already got their shot.

 

[narf]

vaccinated people pose little risk to themselves and others, goal #1 is getting as many shots in arms as possible.
Dangling a stadium-shaped carrot may help convincing more people in the fast-approaching phase of dwindling demand later this summer.

 

[calvinhobbes]

Dangling a stadium-shaped carrot may help convincing more people in the fast-approaching phase of dwindling demand later this summer.

Fingers crossed! We’ve had reports of anti-vaxxers putting on masks to “protect themselves from the vaccine”, so this sort of carrot looks positively rational in comparison.

Basically, let’s try (almost) anything to get more people vaccinated.

 

[calvinhobbes]

I agree about the "insanity" part - see edit above.

But I think the timing is just right since we have to make plans for autumn now, and not when everyone already got their shot.

I’m not sure we really can make plans for the autumn. The football and summer holiday travel as well as the virus variants are unknown variables and we will have to see what happens.

 

[Dr_Grip]

I’m not sure we really can make plans for the autumn. The football and summer holiday travel as well as the virus variants are unknown variables and we will have to see what happens.

This is the Laschet approach... "Covid is so unpredictable, there is no way we can do anything but to fly by sight".

I disagree. We know vaccine escape is highly improbable (not according to me, according to Drosten et al) and should it happen boosters can be quickly deployed. A "immunoliogic original sin" of dimished booster efficacy does not exist in covid, as we know from studies. We know vaccines work very well, against transmission as well as against actually getting sick. The mRNA vaccines even work against the original SARS. We know we got enough of them for everyone. This is enough knowledge to plan on.

The rest is down to political will. And I repeat here: Either covid is so bad that we have to continue with "lockdowns" and keeping kids out of school, then vaccination has to be mandatory at least for everyone who has a customer-facing job, including but not limited to teachers, craftsmen, and salespeople.
Or covid, as I think StIko's Mertens put it, "is not as bad as measels". Then anyone who does not get vaccinated gets infected in their own peril and there's no need for further covid measures.

To put it differently - Like the majority of adults in Germany (64% of 18+ as of yesterday) I behaved responsibly and got vaccinated. Why should my life, my ability to go to a restaurant, to the movies, to a concert, be impacted by irresoponsible people who went on holidays or a soccer match while unvaccinated, driving up covid numbers among other unvaccinated people? As long as the vaccine still works for me and I thus am not a health threat, there is no moral or legal ground to keep me at home.

EDIT: Also, I think the "people who want to get vaccinated but can't" thing is a strawman, especially in Germany where no one gives a flying fuck about the chronically ill, the disabled, and other minorities, until their interest serves another agenda by pure chance. LIke right-wing politicians suddenly discovering their inner feminist when it's against muslims.
How many people actually exist in the real world that have so bad allergies that they can't take any of the four different covid vaccines? Three?

 

[calvinhobbes]

I guess we’re approaching this from different perspectives. The efficacy of the vaccines isn’t really in question and I certainly hope that we can rule out really troublesome immune escape variants.

My concern isn’t with the science and efforts involved in the vaccination campaign, but with the risks that I mentioned outpacing the campaign. If the more infectious delta variant does combine with stadium and holiday (mass) gatherings to give us more superspreading events before we get to something approaching herd immunity, we’re going to get another wave. I don’t think that would be acceptable.

You mentioned responsible behaviour versus recklessness. I agree that in an ideal world, other people’s poor decisions should not have an impact on someone else’s liberties, but we don’t live in one. So let’s keep the testing going and the masks on for a few more months (depending on the availability of vaccines). If after that, the numbers are still low, Mr Watzke’s industry can open the stadia and admit people who have recovered or been vaccinated or tested.

 

[narf]

Pace is indeed important. Had Alpha swept over a month or two later, German wave three might have been much much less tall and deadly. Had Delta swept over a month or two earlier, it might have been a similarly tall wave four.

I have no idea what the right pace is, but "early autumn" feels very good for "everyone who wants has had all shots". Until then we need to continue balancing around low absolute numbers, and avoid, idunno, stadiums packed with maskless shouting hugging young (= less vaccinated) people.

 

[Dr_Grip]

You mentioned responsible behaviour versus recklessness. I agree that in an ideal world, other people’s poor decisions should not have an impact on someone else’s liberties, but we don’t live in one. So let’s keep the testing going and the masks on for a few more months (depending on the availability of vaccines). If after that, the numbers are still low, Mr Watzke’s industry can open the stadia and admit people who have recovered or been vaccinated or tested.

I fully agree, but from my point of view we are already fucking this up.
Because politics and pundits were busy chasing imaginary failing vaccination campaigns and predicting never having happened immediate third waves (with covid rates reaching the 500s by easter, if not 1000s by July, being claimed as a certainty by "experts"), we did not prepare for the best case.
There was, and still is no plan as to how to manage things going well. Instead of keeping up mandatory testing and indoor masking to keep Delta at bay right now, people are chasing doomsday scenarios for fall. Mask and testing mandates are removed, and then people will stare bewildered if cases tick up again.

And this is also why I think Watzke's statement comes at the right time - we need a plan for the case of everything going well. How shall we deal with the 25% or so percent of vaccine refusers? And their kids? This needs to be debated right now, but we focus on doomsday scenarios.

 

[calvinhobbes]

As for the alleged straw man, I disagree strongly. We do not have a vaccine that is approved for children under twelve and it’s not just allergies that stop people from getting a jab. For instance, there is no general recommendation for pregnant women.

As for giving “a flying fuck about the chronically ill, the disabled, and other minorities”, your statement is very unfair towards everyone who does care. That includes every single healthcare worker who cares for someone who cannot get vaccinated, all parents (see above) and every single donor whose blood stem cells my colleagues and I transport to the immunocompromised patients whose lives depend on it. I really think you got carried away.

 

[Dr_Grip]

[Y]our statement is very unfair towards everyone who does care. That includes every single healthcare worker who cares for someone who cannot get vaccinated, all parents (see above) and every single donor whose blood stem cells my colleagues and I transport to the immunocompromised patients whose lives depend on it. I really think you got carried away.

What unites all these people is that they have no political lobby. Political Germany hates parents and children (which is why we are the only EU country not vaccinating pregnant women or kids over 12 - these neither work full time nor vote CDU), and does not give a fuck about healthcare workers or private individuals doing care work.

I got carried away in not specifying that the "not giving a fuck" relates to political descision-makers, not the general public.

 

[calvinhobbes]

I got carried away in not specifying that the "not giving a fuck" relates to political descision-makers, not the general public.

OK then, that’s made it clear. And with decades of examples as a basis for your verdict, I naturally agree.

 

[calvinhobbes]

we need a plan for the case of everything going well. How shall we deal with the 25% or so percent of vaccine refusers? And their kids? This needs to be debated right now, but we focus on doomsday scenarios.

Thanks for the explanation.

Could the reason for the absence of such plans be that the government believes that we can simply “go back to normal” after the pandemic is declared over? I don’t need to explain how the German population in general feels about change, so the idea of a “new normal” is not one for the election campaign.

 

[Dr_Grip]

Could the reason for the absence of such plans be that the government believes that we can simply “go back to normal” after the pandemic is declared over? I don’t need to explain how the German population in general feels about change, so the idea of a “new normal” is not one for the election campaign.

I think you are right in a way. German politics believe that the far right threat can only be fought by appeasing the far right voter until they come back to voting conservative.
This is why the hard truth - "if we ever want to get back to normal for those vaccinated, we either have to make shots mandatory or exclude refusers from any activity that's not grocery shopping." - can't be communicated. This is "Imppflicht durch die Hintertür" ("backdoor mandatory vaccination") in far right speech and something our government in is genius has promised never to do.

What makes this so darkly funny is that the same government has no problem with excluding the unemployed from anything except bare survival by a stubborn refusal to raise the benefits level even a bit. Seems like "being unemployed" is another kind of "own fault" as "refusing to get a vaccine".

In the end this will mean while grown-ups will be able to mostly get back to normal, unvaccinated kids will suffer since schools will close. Old and sick people will suffer since covid prevention will keep them from getting visitors in care homes*. And maybe just people having an accident in rural Saxony will suffer because neo nazi covid deniers filled up the ICU beds they would need to survive.

*we are the country that rather forces care home residents to wear masks in their own home than force people working their to vaccinate. We are the country that acutally says (Mertens of StIko): "Allowing kids to take part in social activities or keeping schools open is not a valid reason to vaccinate".

EDIT: Or the classic from the Social Democrat's Karl Lauterbach: "We must not allow young people to get vaccinated only to party again."

 

[RdKetchup]

Shot 2 (Pfizer Biontec) received.

This morning, 45 minutes before my shot I also had a Covid PCR test booked, to be able to enter Germany in 2 days.

Last time I went to that testing center, I was out by the scheduled time of my appointment.
This time, they took me in 25 minutes late. I was not happy, and getting quite stressed about missing my vaccine appointment (there is some vaccine shortage right now, so I don't know what would have happened if I had shown up late).

In the end, I made it on time, and everything is well.

 

[rickhamilton620]

Right now I'm continuing to wear my N95 mask at work and in public indoor spaces. I have felt better popping into some local stores when needed but I try to not make a habit of going in there without a specific goal in mind, always with my N95, and a max time allotment.

I am planning on going to see some friends later in the month who live on Long Island for a outdoor fully vaccinated meetup in a friend's backyard - I was initially planning on driving, even considering renting a car so I'd have AC, but my friend is like "you should take public transportation, it takes forever to drive through NYC to LI"

For me that's a MegaBus and two train/subway rides each way. With Delta rearing its ugly head, I'm not quite sure I want to do that - driving provides a far greater level of control plus you're breathing your own air lol.

 

[Dr_Grip]

@rickhamilton620 @Punisher Bass you realize that Delta increases risk of infection for someone fully vaccinated by a whopping 1.3%?
I am all for caution, but for a fully vaccinated person Delta makes no difference at all.

 

[Dr_Grip]

@rickhamilton620 @Punisher Bass you realize that Delta increases risk of infection for someone fully vaccinated by a whopping 1.3%?
I am all for caution, but for a fully vaccinated person Delta makes no difference at all.

@DanRoM asked me to elaborate on this.

What's at play here are two figures. Firstly, the vaccine efficacy. This number tells us how many percent less likely a person is to get covid than one that is not vaccinated. So, scientists look at a (part of) the population and count how many people who are vaccinated get covid versus how many who are not. They then correct for the percentage of the population vaccinated* and get a efficacy number against infection. For the mRNA vaccines, this drops from 94 to 88 percent with Delta, so, not a lot.

But for the risk of an individual, what is more important is the secondary attack rate. This measures how many of his or her contacts an infected person infects. And even if it's a lot higher for Delta compared to Alpha, it's still lower than measels at a whooping 90% (yes, if you encounter a measels-infected person and are not vaccinated, your chance of not catching measels is a whooping 10%).
To determine secondary attack rates, you look at close contacts in controlled environments - care homes, army barracks, or simply families living under one roof. And you count the percentage of these close contacts getting covid. Of course this is kind of a worst case scenario since it looks at longer term unmasked contact in enclosed spaces. And here you see that Delta infects 11.3% of those contacts, versus 8.0% for Alpha.

Now you can do the math, given slightly lower vaccine efficacy (from a relatively high baseline) and significantly higher secondary attack rate (from a relatively low baseline), your risk of catching covid while vaccinated is computed.
This means my statement above is wrong. Your risk of getting infected when exposed to a Delta spreader while fully vaccinated is 1.4% (1.356% to be precise). This is a up by 1% from the 0.4% risk with Alpha, but still low. Very low indeed. Anyone driving a shitbox with less than 10 airbags takes more chances when going for a cruise.

*This is also why scare stories of "half of the Delta infected adults in Israel are fully vaccinated" are misleading - at 90-ish percent of adults vaccinated, a large amount of cases will be fully vaccinated even at super high efficacy.