Re: Coronavirus
 

Politicians and Public Health Medics have different priorities don't they. One aims to stop the spread of disease and the other aims to get votes improve the overall life of the populace
Here's the link for your perusal
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrI...84b1901a59f556

Re: Coronavirus
 

I see that their figure for total ICU numbers since 2020 was only 47. This seems like a reasonable figure considering what some areas around the world were reporting. I agree that politics and health advice do not always go hand in hand but one would wonder what is the right way to go? Masking in some areas and not others and asking travelers to fill in online forms to enter the country would not appear to be particularly useful at stopping the spread. Asking a passenger to fill out a form and submit information on his/her vax status and well being if they dared drive south for a few days yet not bothering to do same if they travelled from Vancouver to Toronto seems meaningless.

Re: Coronavirus
 

You speak a truth .

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The federal government has decided to drop the vaccination requirement for people entering Canada, end random COVID-19 testing at airports and make the use of the ArriveCan app optional by the end of this month, a senior government source told CBC News.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Maybe since Justin has been enjoying his hassle free trip to the UK he has seen the light?

Re: Coronavirus
 

Well it's certainly not gone away... my wife is currently ill with COVID. She felt ill on Tuesday - sore throat, cough and flu symptoms - tested positive Weds am and is still very poorly in bed. She's been triple-vaccinated so who knows how bad it could otherwise have been.

Re: Coronavirus
 

You never know what's going to come up.

Khosta 2 may be a problem, or at least it's something to watch out for.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vacci...202200722.html

Re: Coronavirus
 

My daughter was quite ill for approx 1 week with Covid a couple of weeks ago. She also had it at the end of March…again she was quite ill. She’s been vaxed 3 times.

I had it a few weeks ago. Felt a little under the weather, but ok the next day, apart from shivery feeling across my shoulders for about 1 week. Hubby caught it from me, he said it felt like a bad cold for several days. We have had 4 shots, getting the 5th today.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Interesting that despite the number of vax shots there was still issues with feeling very unwell. I get jingsamichtys comment about just how bad it might have been without the shots but of course we will never really know. To have had 4 shots and still get ill seems to suggest the vaccination is not doing it's job because so many are getting mild forms of this virus now that you wouldn't generally expect the average healthy person to be too badly affected.
Prior to COVID flu was a big issue and affected some much more than others and again some had the flu jab some didn't. I just think in general terms this is now much more like flu and will indeed cause some more issues than others. Vaccinations will be a personal choice and hopefully if those that are ill stay away from others and take necessary precautions we can move on without our health services collapsing under the strain

Re: Coronavirus
 

The 4 shots certainly worked for me. I felt a little grotty during the first afternoon and evening. Woke the next morning feeling fine, apart from the shivery feeling which was nothing really. Hubby said it felt like a bad cold, but he carried on as normal, so probably more like ‘man flu’. ;) So IMO the 4 shots worked for us. Unfortunately 3 shots didn’t work so well for our daughter. She has the 4th booked for this Friday.

5th shot booked next month

Re: Coronavirus
 

Our 36 year old daughter had severe myocarditis symptoms following a Moderna jab that are still not fully resolved over a year later. Two separate hospitals refused to acknowledge a possible vaccine injury. I had two shots of the Oxford vaccine in 2021 and that is it for me, I'm won't be having any of the Moderna/Pfizer mrna "boosters".

Re: Coronavirus
 

Apart from the medical people and their data confirming it.
That's wholly misleading.
Its job was to lessen severity overall and everything points to that being a success.

Re: Coronavirus
 

The early days of the virus compared to now are totally different. Anything and everything was being thrown at this virus to prevent deaths and massive overload of ICU depts and the vaccine rollout was one such tool that was being heralded as the only way out. However we know that as time went by the virus changed and became much less serious for most. The vaccine wasn't the only reason people were managing to carry on without dropping like flies it was a combination of factors but the main one for sure was the current strain versus the original. There are still many who aren't vaccinated and many who will not get anymore than the 2 or 3 they have had. At the same time even Canada has decided that these vax shots are now more of a precaution or at least that's the message i'm getting from the recent continued relaxing of the remaining rules.
I'm not saying the vaccination wasn't a success in general but i don't think we would be heralding it's success if we were still dealing with the original strain. You have to admit that the weakening of the strain is just as important if not more so than taking multiple vax shots.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Hang on, which is it, the vaccine was the only way out or one of many things thrown?
Hang on (again)...the message is that the vaccine is still protecting against the original but while it's less successful against Omicron it's still proven better than not having it and there's now a new vaccine that deals better with Omicron and also the original.
Not when it's infecting more people to make up for the less severe damage to the individual I don't. That would either be foolish or dishonest.

Re: Coronavirus
 

You are being picky. I stand by my comment that whilst there were a raft of measures brought in to try and slow the spread ultimately none of them were sustainable in the long term. The vaccine however was being seen as the one tool that could get us back to some normality. Closing businesses, lockdowns and closing borders to travel was never going to last and the vaccine was certainly being heralded as our way out.
Jerseygirl has just had her 5th shot according to her comments. The US started vaccinations i believe on mass in January 2021 which means that if she had hers at the start she has had one every 4 months. Was there ever a plan to vaccinate this much? The flu shot is one yearly if you get it and that seems acceptable but every 4 months, and do you add in a flu shot too?

Re: Coronavirus
 

The flu shot is annual because flue season is annual. Covid is continuous and changing, hence vaccine adjustments.

Covid vax currently wanes, hence renewals. When Flu vax wanes, flu season has ended.

Re: Coronavirus
 

And now that there's increasing research into their effectiveness, it's looking like none made much difference in the short term either.

In fact, now they're testing old stored nasal swabs and wastewater samples it's looking like some countries went through the whole winter of 2019/2020 with Covid spreading there and no-one really noticed. It looks like by the time Covid hit the media in 2020 restrictions were pointless because it was already too widespread to stop.

I also find it interesting that my girlfriend is currently down with some horrible lurgy which I seem to have either a mild case of or early case of when we rarely caught anything bad before 2020. I'm guessing that working from home and getting pickup orders from stores means that we missed the chance to develop much protection against the regular bugs that are going around.



How many people do you think would have gone out and got the vaccine if the government had told them they'd be getting four doses in a year and more every year after that?

Re: Coronavirus
 

Medical researchers knew by late 2021 that any protection the vaccines provided lasted at most 2-3 months. At least in the general population; it might have been more effective in vulnerable groups, and might have been more effective against the original virus that the vaccine was designed for... but that had disappeared a year or more before then.

For example, I remember reading a paper back then which looked at Covid infections in US prisons and found that there was essentially no difference in outcomes between unvaccinated prisoners and those who were vaccinated 2-3 months earlier. Up to that point there were fewer severe outcomes in the vaccinated, but the protection rapidly waned over that period.

It's also not the narrative that people were fed in 2021, even though the test results showed that short-term reduction of symptoms was the best that the vaccine was likely to do and even the vaccine manufacturers were saying it was the only thing the vaccine was likely to do. The general population were led to believe that they wouldn't catch Covid if they got vaccinated, then told they'd need another injection every few months for years to come.

Classic bait-and-switch.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Except we now know that the early days of the virus were September and October 2019, when nothing out of the ordinary was being done. By November 2019 some medical folks in Italy had begun to notice an increase in elderly deaths from respiratory infections, but nothing special was done about it. And recent research has traced it back in Italy to at least as early as September, around six months before the panic began.

The mass deaths and overloaded ICUs literally didn't start until Covid became a media sensation and they began taking heroic measures to try to save people. Measures which the Chinese already knew to have only a 15% survival rate, and which by mid-2020 we also knew to have only a 15% survival rate because Chinese researchers published their data then.

I would really like to know what happened to Covid between September 2019 and March 2020. If the claims about infection rates are true then just about everyone in Italy should have had it before March. Hopefully we'll learn more over the next few months as the researchers dig into it more deeply.

Edit: yeah, they were originally claiming something like each person would infect six other people if nothing was done, so if you assume it takes two weeks to go from infection to infecting others that would mean in six months where nothing was done they should have infected over two billion people. Something really doesn't add up.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Latest Covid surge a ‘heavy straw on camel’s back’ for every hospital in UKAnd still there are deniers and conspiracy theorists :rolleyes:

Re: Coronavirus
 

So the article says its the sixth leading cause of death, so 5 other causes of death are ahead of COVID yet we still focus on COVID as per the article. And then there's this comment:
People at higher risk of Covid should get vaccinated as soon as possible, Raleigh said. “This is especially important for people from deprived and ethnic minority communities, given the disproportionately brutal impact Covid-19 has had on them
The problem is that's all very well in these rich countries like UK and USA where 5 doses have been at least offered if not given as yet. Stark contrast to poorer countries who have struggled to even get the two shots for most of their people. There still seems a massive gap between countries and their vaccination availability and take up. This is still a global virus but it's not an even playing field.

Re: Coronavirus
 

I don't think that's true - there is a lot of focus on the other leading causes - better diets, stop smoking, mental health support, cancer research, etc. All of these have been around for many years, and we don't notice the message any more.

COVID is a new cause compared to the others - and is the only transmissible disease.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Good sensible logical post.

Re: Coronavirus
 

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulat...s/february2022

Third leading cause here.

COVID has also caused a drop in the average life expectancy

Re: Coronavirus
 

No that's from February, if you look you can click on the link for an updated version which takes you to August 2022 and there it says 6th leading cause.
I see that the leading cause is Dementia and Alzheimer's. This surprised me somewhat.

Re: Coronavirus
 

I look forward to reading your piece about how we needn't worry about heart attacks or cancer if Dementia kills more.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Every two minutes, a child dies of malaria. It is preventable and curable.
If Malaria was all of a sudden rampant in the western word, people would lose their minds. Poor old sub-Saharan Africa :(

Re: Coronavirus
 

Here's s snippet from Google: The United States banned the use of DDT in 1972. Some countries outside the United States still use DDT to control of mosquitoes that spread malaria.

I remember when there was a big fuss about DDT. I remember it was banned in many nations, largely because of a book called "Silent Spring". It may still be banned in some places. Of course there are several different kinds of malaria. I caught it in the New Hebrides (in the south Pacific, now Vanuatu) and was in bed for a week in 1973 or '74, with no after-effects. I now live in Cayman in the Caribbean, where malaria-carrying mosquitoes are kept in check by an extensive government program. Our neighbour JamaIca, has a problem with "dengue-fever", a variant of the common or garden malaria. It can kill.

Re: Coronavirus
 

So right back in the early days of Covid we - New Brunswick - had zero cases day in, day out, and then the odd one and then days before any more and so on. It was always considered that we had such a low population that any spread was limited.

I always wondered just how true that might be. As a reason I mean. Yes, we had a lower population but most people's activities would be similar - like the bus you're getting to work has the same number of passengers in Moncton as Montreal; you only work on one floor of one office coming into contact with a similar number of people; a bigger city has more grocery stores so the number of people in them at any given time are broadly similar, ditto for banks and so on.

I thought it was perhaps because more people in this province were more compliant with the measures brought in plus the provincial borders were "closed" and that was something that didn't happen throughout Canada.

But here we are now and New Brunswick has far higher weekly Covid deaths than everywhere else. When I saw that first time I thought that as it's well known we have a higher proportion of old folk here and older people are more likely to succumb to covid, that would explain it. But the figures. :ohmy:

Deaths per 100,000 of the population.
NB 2.2
NS 1.3
BC 0.2
ON 0.5
QU 0.6

That's quite the difference. 11 times the death rate of BC. Almost 4 times the rate of Quebec which had a high rate back at the beginning IIRC.

Actual Covid case numbers in NB are running at 124 per 100,000 while the National Average is 42.

So we're getting case rates three times as high as the rest of the country and getting it is far more likely to result in death.

Maybe we've just gone from complying to believing covid is over. Certainly my SD hears that a lot from customers at work.

Re: Coronavirus
 

I certainly think that most people now appear to be in that phase of not wanting to believe it's still potentially an issue, most countries appear to have moved on although some are seeing rapid rise in cases again, UK of course and now New York is apparently in the grip of the latest Kraken variant which is causing rapidly rising cases.
From an article dated Jan 10th:
New York COVID hospitalizations are at their highest level in nearly a year just after a new, ultra-transmissible COVID variant XBB.1.5, known as Kraken, achieved dominance in the northeast U.S.
Yet they then go on to say that they don't have nearly enough people vaccinated and again i quote:“We don’t have nearly enough people vaccinated still,” he said, referencing CDC data that says only 15% of Americans ages 5 or older have received an updated Omicron booster.

While the booster “probably doesn’t work as well against [preventing] infection” as well as it did against previous Omicron variants, “it’s still protective against severe disease, and that’s what’s most important,” he added.
From my perspective myself and other half had the latest booster and flu shot as we had both been quite ill with flu a while back yet many people we speak to say enough with boosters and they aren't getting any more so it doesn't surprise me that there are issues with getting people to get behind any government campaigns for boosters.
Do you know if the vaccination rates for your area are similar to here in BC for example? Could that play a part in the difference because as you say it seems odd based on the earlier data.

Re: Coronavirus
 

It's almost impossible to tell anything, really, other than deaths and hospitalisations.
You'd think you'd get something recent from a search but I got this and it's 2021 :blink:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/british...fb5c22d33c.png

CBC (yesterday) says A total of 29.4 per cent of eligible New Brunswickers have now received their second booster, up from 28.8 per cent.

The 50% with the third dose (that would be the initial 2 and a first booster) has become 29% with the 2nd booster. I had mine last May and my third booster (Bivalent) in November.

One would hope these figures have been improved but just not updated yet otherwise much fewer than 29% will have the latest "full" or best protection.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Thanks for that but unless I'm missing something I can't really make a comparison. I've had a third booster (bivalent and has been available for several months) and those figures don't seem to go beyond a second booster.

The 21% you quoted says
So in the last 6 months some people have only had their 2nd and others have had a booster. But there have been three boosters available by this date.

The CBC figure I found was supposedly from new figures and had 29% with 2nd boosters. 21% would make more sense for those who had 3rd boosters.

It's all a bit headache giving. :lol: (but not a covid headache)

Re: Coronavirus
 

Maybe its a vaccination headache, you can make a claim. :rofl:

Re: Coronavirus
 

Looks like Japan has seen the light...
Covid-19 is categorized as a Class 2 disease, the same status as tuberculosis and avian influenza, according to Japan’s Health Ministry. Officials will now discuss reclassifying it to Class 5 – the lowest rank, which includes seasonal flu.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/japan-...ules-1.6238801

Re: Coronavirus
 

I am travelling to the UK in March and September last year was when I had my 4th shot. I will get another jab just before travelling. I have not had any adverse effects from any of the 4 previous jabs so I have no concerns on receiving a 5th one.
Each to their own should they wish to receive a jab or not and most of us are just fed up and do our own risk assessments.

I do wonder if for example they made it mandatory in the respective age groups that you have proof of having 5, 4, 3 jabs before boarding a plane. Might see a few more empty seats open up however I don't see this happening.

Re: Coronavirus
 

I, like others, became a bit lax about vaccinations. I'd had three, I was in no rush for more. Then, just before Christmas, a colleague caught covid. It was only by happenstance that the team hadn't been in the same room after she was infected. Watching her vomit and choke through Teams meetings sharpened our focus and we've all had four shots now. When there's a fifth or an nth, I'll be getting it.

Re: Coronavirus
 

There is a 5th…I had mine in October.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Yes, I was pretty sure NB and Ontario are aligned on this. It was the bivalent jab, to deal with omicron as well as well as the earlier one.

In related news, like just about everywhere else, the covid measures had obliterated regular flu but now that the precautions have been done away with, seemingly people are thumbing their noses at responsibility now because NB just had the highest death numbers from flu for 10 years and flu season isn't over yet.

Well done people. :rolleyes:

Re: Coronavirus
 

There is still this mistrust of government and even health authority advice which was initially all being driven by science and what we had learned yet more recently seems to be more political or bloody mindedness on the part of some. Nobody in BC's healthcare system was allowed to work without being fully vaccinated yet this was and still is only based on 2 shots despite the fact that those with only 2 have way less immunity if any than those with boosters. Other provinces did away with that mandate yet BC stuck religiously to its guns despite some rather dubious claims it was in the patients interest when other health authorities weren't doing same and despite the fact we were and are still desperate for extra staff. I would be interested to know how many doctors and nurses in BC got the shot primarily because they wanted to keep their job and how many of those have not gotten any more.
Generally as you say we have become lax overall and of course flu has taken off big time. I noticed today while taking lunch in a local cafe that half the empty tables had not been wiped down and some had still to be cleared. People were coming in and flicking crumbs off the tables themselves and moving cups or plates just so they could sit. We had to ask for the table to be cleaned. Clearly there was a staffing issue and serving customers and making drinks had taken priority over cleanliness. They had even run out of clean mugs at time of ordering. A far cry from those heady days of everything being cleaned and sanitized before you were even allowed near the table

Re: Coronavirus
 

I don't know why they bother to report about the testing given there's not much of it. But the deaths are up significantly and hospitalisations are up slightly. Although 2 admissions followed by 14 followed by 17 is not what I'd call a slight increase.

Not many, granted. But it's almost like bad outcomes are happening with people not knowing they have it until it's too late. :rolleyes: