BristolUK

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.

MarkG

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?

MarkG

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.

MarkG

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.

BristolUK

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

printer

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.

old.sparkles

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.

BEVS

Good sensible logical post.

bats

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

Third leading cause here.

COVID has also caused a drop in the average life expectancy

printer

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.

BristolUK

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

Danny B

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

Gordon Barlow

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.

BristolUK

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.

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.

printer

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.