Wuhan virus 2020

[Jimbuna]

Wasn't looking to make any point Dave, simply showing each country in individual terms imho gives a far clearer picture of the state (no pun intended) each one is in.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by August

Since you're generalizing about a large and diverse group i'd say their education ranges from should-have-paid-more-attention in high school science class right up to folks holding medical degrees. Does implying that they are all ignorant peasants make it easier for you?

It was not my intention to generalize.

No doubt that some of them do have an education in virology.

I should have written "Among ordinary people" Like our friends or friends friends on the social media.

I see it almost daily a friend or a friends friend share some text written a by a person who claim to have an education.

I myself does not have any education I therefore don't believe anything I only follow what our expert and our authorities tell me what I shall do and not do.

Markus

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

So here is my link https://www.statista.com/statistics/...de-by-country/

I reckon I just prefer E.U. CDC and U.S. CDC government sources for clarity. All else is just what Trump coined as fake news and Biden says is misinformation.


BTW State and Country are synonymous. According to Obama we have 57 states in our Union and the European Union has 27. Each with their own borders, flags, laws, anthems or song, and leaders.

[mapuc]

Been thinking and came to the conclusion that Rockstar is correct.

Let me give an example why.

Denmark and Sweden has lost almost 90 % of their domestic, foreign and economic policy to EU.

I guess Texas is more independent than these two countries.

Markus

[Skybird]

Focus writes:

The concern about the fourth corona wave is unfounded, says statistician Christian Hesse, and for several reasons. That applies at least to the general population. Because a dangerous trend is becoming noticeable among the unvaccinated.

It has been there for months: the great fear of the fourth wave. The concern of overcrowded hospitals. Against renewed closures and restrictions. Autumn has now begun and the figures are still at a relatively low level. Does that mean there is no fourth wave?

“That's exactly what it means,” says statistician Christian Hesse in an interview with FOCUS Online. The head of the department for mathematical statistics at the University of Stuttgart has been observing the infection process since the beginning of the pandemic and is developing models to assess its development. What
Three reasons why there is no fourth wave:

1. The incidences

"Some federal states, such as Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, have been showing the incidences for vaccinated and unvaccinated people separately for some time," explains Hesse. “And you can see that the incidence of those who have been vaccinated is on average only 10 to 20 - in the case of the unvaccinated, however, it is ten to 15 times higher.” That the proportion of those who have been vaccinated is gradually increasing and the incidence among them is increasing stabilize at a very low level, has the effect that the nationwide incidence has been slowly falling again for around two weeks.

2. The situation in the intensive care units

Hesse makes another point. "On average, there are 20 unvaccinated patients for every vaccinated corona patient in intensive care units," he explains. "Or, to put it another way: Around 95 percent of Covid patients who are currently being treated intensively are unvaccinated." The vaccinated people are therefore not at risk of overloading the health system.

3. The deaths

What also speaks against the fact that we are dealing with or will be dealing with a fourth wave, according to Hesse, are the daily deaths. “The number of those who died from Corona has been very low and stable for weeks. It is an average of 40 per day. ”At the height of the pandemic, it was well over 1000.

“If we take these points together, we see: there is no fourth wave. Rather, we are dealing with an epidemic of the unvaccinated. "


The rate of vaccination must not decrease any further

The statistician does not know why the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) does not publish these values ​​separately, especially the incidences in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. He hopes, however, that the institute will change that in the future. Such a differentiation would reflect the infection situation much more clearly. "And it would also make it clearer to the unvaccinated what risk they are taking if they do not get vaccinated."

How important the vaccinations are will become clear, according to Hesse, with a view to the coming months. The statistician does not expect a fourth wave in autumn and winter either - under one condition: "According to my modeling, the incidence will continue to decrease - at least if our vaccination rate does not decrease any further."


Herd immunity - before spring 2022?

Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn called again a few days ago to be vaccinated against Corona. Otherwise unvaccinated people risk infection. "Herd immunity is always achieved," said the CDU politician of the "Augsburger Allgemeine". “The only question is how: whether through vaccination or infection.” With this herd immunity, the pandemic is “overcome in spring”.

According to Hesse, this works out. “We currently have a quota of fully vaccinated people of around 64 percent across all age groups. For herd immunity, we would need 80 to 85 percent of the population to be immunized - but this value does not only refer to the vaccinations. ”This also includes those who have recovered. "And according to a new study, that is significantly more than we previously thought," emphasizes the statistician. Scientists at the Mainz University Medical Center had determined that for every ten people who were infected and had symptoms, there were eight who had not noticed anything about their infection.

“In addition to the 64 percent, there is certainly another ten to 15 percent who are immunized because of an infection,” estimates Hesse. "And then it is so that there are unfortunately many people among vaccine skeptics who are rather careless when dealing with the virus." Thus, in this group, infection also ultimately leads to immunization. "So Spahn's forecast for spring is realistic - but we will probably reach herd immunity even earlier."

[Rockstar]

https://www.aier.org/article/who-del...m-its-website/

… So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.

What is herd immunity?

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. This means that even people who haven't been infected, or in whom an infection hasn't triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person. The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear.

That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.

Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.

However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.

What is herd immunity?

'Herd immunity', also known as 'population immunity', is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it. Read the Director-General's 12 October media briefing speech for more detail.

Vaccines train our immune systems to develop antibodies, just as might happen when we are exposed to a disease but - crucially - vaccines work without making us sick. Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question. Visit our webpage on COVID-19 and vaccines for more detail.

As more people in a community get vaccinated, fewer people remain vulnerable, and there is less possibility for passing the pathogen on from person to person. Lowering the possibility for a pathogen to circulate in the community protects those who cannot be vaccinated due to other serious health conditions from the disease tarted by the vaccine, This is called "herd immunity'


What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.

In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.

What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.

[Catfish]

^ American Institute for Economic Research?

[Skybird]

Hypothetical new strain -> which can evade existing immunizations -> means end of herd immunity.



Likely example: Mu. It is known to have significantly higher resistence against existing vaccines, and creates a multiple times as high virus load in the infected than earlier strains. Infected thus can infect others much more easily.



Herd immunity depends on the reproduction value of a given virus strain. With Sars-Cov-II, these vary, early strains had lower R values than later ones. Thats why the vaccination quota needed for herd immunity was calculated higher and higher, actually it must be even higher than calcuated because the calculation assumes a 100% efficiency of the vaccines, and that is not given. And this just assumes the new strain still are vulenrable for vaccination effects/immunity effects. If the viorus turns to become able to dodge existing antibody, the game starts new.



Thats why it is important to keep infectous activity in the wild as low as possible. By vaccination, which accelerates the process. The less opportunity the virus has to play around, the smaller the chance it learns a new trick to dodge existing immunization.



There are many virusses that constantly change, and for which therefore no herd immunity exists, or will ever exist.

[Skybird]

And Rockstar, that article spills over from simpyl false claims. For example that BionTech vaccine expose the immune system to the virus as if an unvaccinated person would meet the virus in the wild, by getting infected. Thats exactly how mRNA vaccines (and vector vaccines as well) DO NOT WORK. Wiuth mRNA vaccines it is no virus at all, and with vector vaccines it is deactivated (="dead") virus.

That author has not medical facts. What he has, is an agenda to mislead people and spill oil into a fire to keep it burning.

[mapuc]

False beliefs can cost your or someone near you life.

No your authorities in your country is not trying to lie to you.

Markus

[Sean C]

Originally Posted by Catfish

^ American Institute for Economic Research?

If an economist told you that water is wet, would you laugh at that, too?


If the WHO changed their website, it doesn't really matter who points it out. Even if the part about how the vaccines work is incorrect, they are still sweeping facts under the rug. The statement that "Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it." is simply not true. It is a well known fact that herd immunity can be achieved by exposure. Otherwise, humanity would have probably gone extinct long, long ago.


Obviously developing an immunity without getting sick is preferable. And the vaccines can do that. There's also a non-zero chance they can make you extremely ill. There is no [good] reason to distort the truth. It certainly isn't going to change the mind of an "anti-vaxxer". All it does is erode trust, and I think that's the opposite of the desired effect.

[Rockstar]

The NYT's Partisan Tale about COVID and the Unvaccinated is Rife with Sloppy Data Analysis

The Times' piece on "Red Covid" obscures the reality of the pandemic and manipulates data in favor of a self-congratulatory liberalism.

https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p...le-about-covid

By Jeremy Beckham

A widely shared article recently appeared in The New York Times’ “The Morning” newsletter titled “Red Covid,” authored by David Leonhardt. This article, presented as news reporting and not an opinion piece, argues that deaths from COVID-19 are “showing a partisan pattern,” with the worst impacts of the disease “increasingly concentrated in red America.” Given that this narrative perfectly flatters a liberal sense of superiority, it has predictably gained substantial traction on MSNBC and on Twitter.

One particular claim in the Times' article caught my attention: that there is a clear and strong association on a county level between COVID deaths and support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Specifically, the article alleged that those counties which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump had more than a four-fold greater mortality rate than those counties which decisively voted against Trump. If true, that would indeed be a striking observation.

But, as is often the case with epidemiological observations, the question is more complicated than two variables. There are three analytic errors that can lead someone to make false conclusions from what appears to be a meaningful association between two variables: bias, confounding variables, and random statistical error. In this case, the Times’ analysis failed to discuss significant confounding variables.

Age is a common confounder in public health research, and COVID-19 is no exception. The mortality burden of COVID-19 is not randomly distributed across age groups. Indeed, age appears to be the “strongest predictor of mortality” from COVID-19, with one’s risk of death increasing exponentially with age. According to CDC figures, the oldest populations experience a rate of death 570 times higher than that of the youngest populations. This is precisely why older populations were vaccinated first; we knew that prioritizing this population would have the most dramatic effect in curtailing hospitalizations and deaths. Yet the crude county-level analysis reported in The New York Times failed to adjust or account for age at all.

Why is it especially important that we adjust for age when comparing COVID-19 mortality rates in “red” counties with “blue” counties? Because age is not randomly distributed geographically, nor is it randomly distributed on a partisan basis. Republican voters tend to be older than Democratic voters. And rural counties, where Trump won by the largest margins, have older populations than suburban and urban counties. So this means that age is clearly a third, unaccounted for factor that is associated with both the independent variable (a county’s political affiliation) and the dependent variable (COVID-19 fatality rate) in question. This makes it a significant confounder that could easily exaggerate or distort the measured effect and lead one to spurious conclusions.

To be clear, age affects a wide range of health outcomes, and the presence of age as a confounder doesn’t necessarily preclude a subject from methodologically sound inquiry. But you do need to account for it typically by using a statistical process like age-adjusting. For instance, one study looked at seven different nations with widely different crude COVID-19 case fatality rates, ranging from 0.82% to 14.2%. However, once the study’s authors performed age-adjusting, they found that the difference in fatality rates between these countries almost evaporated. If this research technique is not feasible on the county level, perhaps because the available data is incomplete, then it’s important to explicitly state that a known confounder is a limiting factor in extrapolating the significance of your research, so that the reader knows to take the findings with a grain of salt.

Another way researchers try to tease apart a confounder from the variable being investigated is looking only at data where the distorting effect of the confounder is not present. We could do something similar for this research question. Take my home state of Utah, for example. Utah is a very red state. Trump won Utah by more than 20 points in 2020. But Utah also has the youngest population in the country, with a median age of approximately 31 years old. If partisan affiliation were a significant factor that explains deaths from COVID, we would expect Utah to have a greater COVID death rate than the national average, and the younger population helps us minimize the effect of this confounder. But instead, what we find is that Utah ranks 45th in the nation for COVID deaths, with 91 deaths per 100,000 population, far below the national average of 210 deaths per 100,000. This suggests (without proving) that age, not partisan affiliation or ideology, is paramount.

And all of this only accounts for one potential confounder (age). There are other potential confounders that should be addressed. For instance, the disparity in health outcomes between rural and urban populations likely means that people in counties that voted heavily for Trump have other comorbidities that place them at greater risk of death from COVID-19. And people who live in rural areas also experience significant disparities in health care access, with higher rates of uninsured, diminishing available health care facilities, and longer travel times to the nearest hospital. In the past decade, 138 rural inpatient hospitals have closed. This unjust inequity that persists in rural America has previously been a matter of persistent concern for writers at The New York Times, even in the context of reporting on COVID-19 when the pandemic was in its early stages.

To be clear: there is no question that COVID-19 vaccines are a safe, effective, and important tool in protecting people from severe disease and death. The vaccination rate for rural counties is 41.4%, while the rate in urban areas is 53.3%. This difference also surely has an impact on the different rates of death from COVID-19. But this is only one part of the equation, and The New York Times’ recent viral article contained no such nuanced or informative discussion about this complex web of interrelated factors influencing disease burden and health outcomes. If you search the article for any mention of ‘age,’ or ‘rural’ you get no results, because these factors didn’t appear in their analysis at all. In any discussion about factors influencing COVID-19 mortality rates, failing to mention the role of these important demographic influences is journalistic malpractice that grossly distorts reality.

So if it failed to account for any of these factors, how did The New York Times ultimately account for the higher death rate in Trump/rural counties? It does so entirely by invoking the ideological makeup of their knuckle-dragging residents and their apparent self-destructive desire to “own the left.” Under the subheading “Why is this happening?”, The New York Times asserts the following:

What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it. “With very little resistance from party leaders,” my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote this summer, many Republicans “have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.”

Part of the problem is that The New York Times relied on incredibly shaky source material. Much of the article is based on writings of an individual named Charles Gaba, who appears to be a web designer and “internet consultant.” Gaba runs a Patreon page where he disseminates his writings to subscribers, which are not submitted to reputable peer-reviewed publications. But this lack of rigorous scientific review was no barrier for The New York Times relying on his "findings," even as the Paper of Record in the same breath scolds those who it says remain “hostile to science and empirical evidence.”

The irony is thick indeed, and the reason why should be obvious: even if the methodology is unsound, the findings fit a preferred narrative that the overwhelmingly liberal readers of The New York Times want to hear. If Gaba’s blog had made the opposite claim – if it had focused on counties like those in Utah, for instance – I think it’s safe to say it would have never seen publication in The New York Times. For this paper, it appears that feeding its readers' desire to feel intellectually and morally superior to “Red America” is of utmost importance, even if it comes at the expense of accurately reporting on the complex reality of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We may not be better informed, but at least we know who to hate.

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Skybird

And Rockstar, that article spills over from simpyl false claims. For example that BionTech vaccine expose the immune system to the virus as if an unvaccinated person would meet the virus in the wild, by getting infected. Thats exactly how mRNA vaccines (and vector vaccines as well) DO NOT WORK. Wiuth mRNA vaccines it is no virus at all, and with vector vaccines it is deactivated (="dead") virus.

That author has not medical facts. What he has, is an agenda to mislead people and spill oil into a fire to keep it burning.

Yes there may have been issues with how vaccines work,he is an economist who never claims to be a virologist. The thing is when I read it it didn’t seem to me that was the point of his article. I thought it had more to do with agencies erasing decades long scientific understanding of how herd immunity can be reached through a combination of factors. Making it now look like humanity cannot survive or reach herd immunity without being injected with a man made concoction of chemicals.