Yah.......kinda like my wife was a DOJ litigator when we got married, but she moved to Houston after the wedding and took a job at a major accounting firm.....later she took a job in industry. Neither company is a law firm, and she hasn't "practiced" law since. Still, both companies happily paid for her CLE courses, and she's maintained her law license. Pretty common. Many hospital administrators have backgrounds in actual medical care.
It's VERY VERY EASY to say, for this simple reason. Assume no vaccine ever. What is the end result? EVERYONE eventually gets COVID, of which variant and strength tbd, but at some point of a strong enough strength - ala Delta or more - to be fairly devastating. That's the entire world, more or less eventually, with covid. So hundreds of million dead, and likely a billion plus with long-covid symptoms. In a vaccine world, which we have, if everyone does their part, that doesn't happen. By not doing your part (not you specifically, since at least you have some anti-bodies now), you are saying either (1) I am ok with that no vaccine world and will risk it even recognizing lots and lots of people will die or be ****ed up (SELFISH), or (2) I know that the vaccines are needed to get this under control, but I'm not taking it (because I'm scared, an idiot, whatever) - SELFISH... let everyone else do the "work" for me. The exceptions are those that for true medical reasons can't get vaccinated.
At the bare minimum, continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing. You can't control what others do, but you can definitely control what you do.
Okay, well you just used a hypothetical where either nobody gets the vaccine or everybody does. There’s no reason to discuss that bc neither option is a tangible reality. The vaccine is already here, and every single person isn’t going to get vaccinated. I can see you’re passionate about this, and I’m sure you have your reasons. I can respect that, but there’s no reason to engage with you further on this topic.
Yes, that's where we're at in Austin. All over Texas, except for some lightly populated rural counties, there is a spike in Covid infections that is likely going to become a wave similar to the early days of the pandemic. Today, right now, Florida is experiencing a higher rate of severe Covid infections filling their hospitals that is worse than the worst days of the pandemic. The hospitalizations are overwhelmingly patients that are unvaccinated. Tragically, there have been reports of some patients begging to be vaccinated as the ventilator is about to be put in, not understanding that it is far too late for that. The patients in the ICU's cannot even see their family members. I can only imagine what their families are going through.
The thought I have been having since last year - is realizing how little prep we do have for an even more serious virus (say like airborne ebola) - I mean literally no ppe for medical staff last year and then the other issue I have is the media sensationalizing everything. I feel sometimes the headline style reporting (ie 100% more contagious/deadly) leads to reactive thinking/response on the vaccines. I honestly wish it were just scientists explaining things (and also the general public realizing how fast science/ideas/data/research etc changes and not needing a title to be make things exciting for clicks/views). Like the one last week or whatever showing low pop counties w/ low Vax rate / low positive counts vs the higher dense population areas with higher vax but also higher positive counts - but not taking into account any stats/pop density until much later in the news (I can't even recall if it was mentioned/updated but only going off the title/first minute like some people do isn't helping things at all). I mean some people quickly have confirmation bias, and because of that they won't take things too serious - obviously there's more reasons for that but the general media I don't think is doing any favors when the attention span of some viewers is probably fairly low. Not trying to get into specific news but I think a lot of them are doing a disservice. Anyway more science education - even at a basic level would help out a lot.
@LosPollosHermanos expert opinion. Unless someone wants to tell us what their chiropractor said…. How ****ed is texas? My paramedic buddy said his shifts have been worse this week than they were during the first peak. And he had shifts with multiple cardiac arrests then.
6 month safety and efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full-text Supplementary appendix there https://www.medrxiv.org/content/med....21261159/DC1/embed/media-1.pdf?download=true Overall, it's kind of an underwhelming study. It seems like the group they used was overly healthy based on the Charlson Comorbidity Index that they used to list the comorbidities. Roughly 21% of the participants had 1 comorbidity and they had lower rates of diabetes and chronic pulmonary disease compared to the general population. There was no discernable reduction in death between the control group and vaccine group. 15 deaths in the vaccine group and 14 in the control group. There were 2 covid deaths in the control group and 1 covid death in the vaccine group. There is no data on the ages or comorbidities for the deaths. There was a strong reduction in severe covid. From 1 week after the 2nd dose 1 person out of 6,663 had severe covid and 23 out of 6,505 had severe covid in the control group. No data on the severe cases is listed and hospitalizations were not stated. I would assume that all the severe cases were hospitalized, but it doesn't say if non-severe cases required hospitalization. There was no tracking of asymptomatic cases. Covid testing was only done once someone started to feel symptoms. The efficacy was strong initially but seems to decline somewhat quickly. 96% VE from 1-8 weeks after 2nd shot down to 83.7% 16 weeks after the 2nd shot. Further, the data seems a bit odd with the people who were put in the SARS CoV 2 positive group. If we ignore that data and only look at the covid negative group then we see an overall efficacy of 89%. Another oddity was efficacy from Argentina, which represented 13% of the study, was only 78.3%. The US represented 76% of the study. We had 90% efficacy and that was the highest out of all the countries in the study. Lastly, 24% of the vaccine group had adverse events related to the vaccine versus 6% of the placebo group. There 262 severe adverse vaccine events and 150 severe adverse placebo events....1.2% to 0.7% respectively. Interestingly, that 24% adverse event number is somewhat close to the 21% number I saw in a recent poll from YouGov. Even more interesting that 21% number was the only thing that Democrats and Republicans were in perfect agreement with related to the vaccines.
it’s not passion. When/of covid “ends” I won’t give af about it. I’m passionate about the Rockets lol. I just want to get past this stupidity. and yes I used a hypothetical. To prove the point. Again… if you’re not getting vaccinated (absent medical reasons… and potentially having natural antibodies), pure relying on the others To take care of the problem. Definition of selfish. That’s the point.
Ya know man I actually have no idea this time. I’m not doing this a second round, already spent 3 months in the first surge being used as a covid tampon . Someone else can do it this time around.
At the end it’s selfish. Even if that’s not the intent. Heck most people acting selfish don’t know they’re doing so. It just is what it is.
8/5/21 - TEA released public health guidance for school. Of note (changes from 2020/21) - mask mandate is not allowed - contact tracing is now optional and not required - notification of close contact to positive cases is now optional and not required - student do not need to stay home if they in close contact with positive cases - if student does stay home (either as positive or in close contact), school are not required to deliver remote instruction - if school decided to provide remote instruction, they will be reimbursed for up to 20 days of remote instruction My other notes (to the bolded) - 2020/21 data is outdated and in completely different context. Delta is at least 2x more contagious. 20/21 school has mask mandate, classroom was half full, student must stay home if they have any covid like symptoms or in close contact, contact tracing and notification is standard practice, it's inconclusive if student spread less than adults SY-20-21-Public-Health-Guidance.pdf (texas.gov) Given the data from 2020-21 showing very low COVID-19 transmission rates in a classroom setting and data demonstrating lower transmission rates among children than adults, school systems are not required to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing. If school systems are made aware that a student is a close contact, the school system should notify the student’s parents. Parents of students who are determined to be close contacts of an individual with COVID-19 may opt to keep their students at home during the recommended stay-at-home period.
Daily TMC: Here are the key data trends: R(t) for the Greater Houston Area was 1.50 which indicates the virus spread has decreased 2.05% compared to last week’s daily average of 1.54 The COVID-19 testing positivity rate is 13.0% for TMC hospital systems which is 13.5% higher than last week’s daily average of 11.5% 4,066 people tested positive for COVID-19 in the Greater Houston Area which is an increase of 77.1% compared to the last week’s daily average of 2,296 new cases per day. The average daily new positive cases for last month was 133/day, meaning that today’s new positive COVID-19 cases are 2967.0% higher than last month’s daily average. TMC admitted 336 new COVID-19 patients in TMC hospital institutions which has increased 36.4% compared to last week’s daily average of 246/day. 2,097,062 doses have been administered by TMC institutions. Over the last week, an average of 1,641 doses per day have been administered. 1,120,808 people have been fully vaccinated. Dashboard & Monitoring Metrics docs attached
What's the sample size though? Total Sample: ?? People Infected: 469 Out of the people infected: 346 occurred in vaccinated people Among persons with breakthrough infection, four (1.2%) were hospitalized, and no deaths were reported While DPH has identified cases in the cluster associated with vaccinated individuals, the total number of cases among vaccinated people in Massachusetts remains extremely low, at 0.1% or 5,166 cases out of over 4.3 million fully vaccinated residents.” So we can probably extrapolate that it's over half a million people as the sample size.......that's great news. Not sobering. Don't let people blow things out of proportion using percentages.
The protective effect from one vaccine shot (any type) after having covid is dramatically stronger than 2 vaccine shots and no prior covid infection. Obviously we don't have any sort of clear data relating to delta infections yet, but it seems to be the strongest protection.
