Coronavirus COVID-19

[SDHornet]

Not gonna lie, gonna love spiking the football on the Covidians for the rest of my life.

[SeattleGriz]

I brought this topic up a couple months ago. All cause mortality is up and they're not sure why. Current thought is consequences of lockdowns. Didn't go see doctor and should have.

[SeattleGriz]

Not gonna lie, gonna love spiking the football on the Covidians for the rest of my life.

This sort of talk was everywhere. She changing jerseys now. On a rehabilitation tour. She claims covid changed, but she neglects there were plenty of people that called this exact scenario and were labeled as "fringe". She chose to go against previous pandemic experience and went for hype instead. What a gigantic asshole.

[JohnStOnge]

Not gonna lie, gonna love spiking the football on the Covidians for the rest of my life.

This sort of talk was everywhere. She changing jerseys now. On a rehabilitation tour. She claims covid changed, but she neglects there were plenty of people that called this exact scenario and were labeled as "fringe". She chose to go against previous pandemic experience and went for hype instead. What a gigantic asshole.

They are operating on the basis of a false premise. "They" did not say that if you get vaccinated you can't get COVID or spread it. "They" said that if you get vaccinated the risk that you will catch it and the risk that you will spread it is reduced. Both of those things were true then and both of those things are true now.

The risk reduction got lower with the emergence of new variants. But there has always been and continues to be risk reduction.

[JohnStOnge]

Not gonna lie, gonna love spiking the football on the Covidians for the rest of my life.

If you are spiking the football you are saying you never understood what public health officials were actually saying.

[SeattleGriz]

This sort of talk was everywhere. She changing jerseys now. On a rehabilitation tour. She claims covid changed, but she neglects there were plenty of people that called this exact scenario and were labeled as "fringe". She chose to go against previous pandemic experience and went for hype instead. What a gigantic asshole.

They are operating on the basis of a false premise. "They" did not say that if you get vaccinated you can't get COVID or spread it. "They" said that if you get vaccinated the risk that you will catch it and the risk that you will spread it is reduced. Both of those things were true then and both of those things are true now.

The risk reduction got lower with the emergence of new variants. But there has always been and continues to be risk reduction.

Go back and watch the videos, there are plenty out there. They told people if they got vaccinated, they'd be a dead end for the virus and then incorrectly said masking and lockdowns were going to be the rest of the answer. The powers that be ignored history and have done untold amount of damage.

Great Barrington Declaration was the way to go from the start and now we are finally heeding their advice.

[GannonFan]

This sort of talk was everywhere. She changing jerseys now. On a rehabilitation tour. She claims covid changed, but she neglects there were plenty of people that called this exact scenario and were labeled as "fringe". She chose to go against previous pandemic experience and went for hype instead. What a gigantic asshole.

They are operating on the basis of a false premise. "They" did not say that if you get vaccinated you can't get COVID or spread it. "They" said that if you get vaccinated the risk that you will catch it and the risk that you will spread it is reduced. Both of those things were true then and both of those things are true now.

The risk reduction got lower with the emergence of new variants. But there has always been and continues to be risk reduction.

Come on, you can't really believe that? Of course they said the vaccine would end transmission. I'm not trying to argue that they shouldn't have said that, there was plenty of hope that the vaccine would stop the spread and it was early on, but unfortunately it wasn't and there's not a lot of protection against acquisition now. But to try to revise things now to make those folks look better in the revisionist version of history doesn't help anyone and looks like you're hiding something. Just be honest - there was a lot of hope and people took the now-debunked position that the vaccine would stop the transmission of COVID. They were wrong. It happens. You feed the conspiracists when you purposely pretend that what happened and what was said didn't actually happen, even though we have ample video evidence to the contrary.

[SDHornet]

Not gonna lie, gonna love spiking the football on the Covidians for the rest of my life.

If you are spiking the football you are saying you never understood what public health officials were actually saying.

Their story changed constantly...and they were fucking wrong every time.

[SDHornet]

They are operating on the basis of a false premise. "They" did not say that if you get vaccinated you can't get COVID or spread it. "They" said that if you get vaccinated the risk that you will catch it and the risk that you will spread it is reduced. Both of those things were true then and both of those things are true now.

The risk reduction got lower with the emergence of new variants. But there has always been and continues to be risk reduction.

Come on, you can't really believe that? Of course they said the vaccine would end transmission. I'm not trying to argue that they shouldn't have said that, there was plenty of hope that the vaccine would stop the spread and it was early on, but unfortunately it wasn't and there's not a lot of protection against acquisition now. But to try to revise things now to make those folks look better in the revisionist version of history doesn't help anyone and looks like you're hiding something. Just be honest - there was a lot of hope and people took the now-debunked position that the vaccine would stop the transmission of COVID. They were wrong. It happens. You feed the conspiracists when you purposely pretend that what happened and what was said didn't actually happen, even though we have ample video evidence to the contrary.

'Member that "winter of death" that was supposed to happen to us un-vaxxed folks? Yeah, I 'member.

[SeattleGriz]

Oh. We were told the shot would stay localized and be gone almost immediately.

Immunostaining with anti-coronavirus spike protein (SP) antibody revealed the SP expression in the intravesicular cells in the epidermis and endothelial cells of the inflamed vessels in the dermis… In addition, the SP was also found in the endothelial cells of venules in the subcutaneous fat tissue underlying the herpetic vasculitis lesion.

Hmm. Seems I've been talking about methyl-pseudouridine for awhile.

A plausible hypothesis was that the stabilization of RNA by substituting methyl-pseudouridine for all the uridine nucleotides for BNT162b2 might result in long-time pro-duction of the encoded SP from any cells.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epd ... cia2.12278

[JohnStOnge]

They are operating on the basis of a false premise. "They" did not say that if you get vaccinated you can't get COVID or spread it. "They" said that if you get vaccinated the risk that you will catch it and the risk that you will spread it is reduced. Both of those things were true then and both of those things are true now.

The risk reduction got lower with the emergence of new variants. But there has always been and continues to be risk reduction.

Go back and watch the videos, there are plenty out there. They told people if they got vaccinated, they'd be a dead end for the virus and then incorrectly said masking and lockdowns were going to be the rest of the answer. The powers that be ignored history and have done untold amount of damage.

Great Barrington Declaration was the way to go from the start and now we are finally heeding their advice.

The Great Barrington Declaration is not in place nor can it ever be because the idea of the Great Barrington Declaration was a plan for what to do before vaccines were developed. The basic idea was to isolate high risk people from contact while letting the virus spread among the rest of the population to move towards herd immunity. The concern among the overwhelming majority of those in the public health world is that such an approach would result in a far larger number of deaths. The approach was also criticized because a large percentage of the US population was, at the time, at high risk of severe COVID-19 disease or death.

We are in a completely different situation now. As of August 24, 92% of the US >65 population is fully vaccinated. 65% of the US >65 population is fully vaccinated and boosted. We are not relaxing things in the absence of vaccination as was the plan in the Great Barrington declaration.

We also have treatments we didn't have then.

BTW, as of now, the CDC provisional death counts site has the total pandemic COVID-19 death count among those <65 at 263,313. If I go with the first US COVID-19 death being on January 9, 2020, that works out to an average rate of 99,286 deaths per year among those under 65 in this country. I think the Great Barrington Declaration proposition that we could isolate all the high risk people in the country while letting the virus run wild among others in an effort to achieve herd immunity was extremely questionable.

Fortunately, we never did what the Great Barrington Declaration recommended. We phased things down as vaccines and effective medications became available.

[JohnStOnge]

Posting this because I heard Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, during their popular radio show, spreading misinformation again. It was about the COVID-19 situation. That's something they spread misinformation on a lot. I don't know if they're lying or they're just ignorant. Either way it's bad.

This time they were calling the idea that "red" states have fared worse than "blue" states the "media narrative" as though it is false. It's not false. I just checked the Worldometers data again. As of the end of yesterday, the average case rate (cases per million population) for States that voted for Trump in 2020 was 305,526 while that for States that voted for Biden was 288,851. The average death rate for Trump States was 3,315 while that for Biden States was 2,860.

I did a statistical test on Trump State average rates by treating the 50 State case and death rates as finite populations and calculating the probability that the Trump means could be as much different from the overall means as they were by chance. There's only 1 chance in 28,448 that the Trump State case rate mean could fall at least as far as it did from the overall mean and 1 chance in 159 that it would happen with the Trump State death rate mean.

The States that voted for Trump have fared worse and it's to an extent that can't reasonably be accounted for by chance.

Travis and Sexton also attacked vaccination again. But there continue to be highly significant correlations such that States with higher vaccination rates have lower case and death rates over the course of the pandemic. States with higher vaccination rates have tended to fare better and that also can't reasonably accounted for by chance.

It should be noted that the average fully vaccinated rate for Trump States as of August 24 (see https://usafacts.org/vis.../covid-vacci ... er-states/....) was 59.0% while that of Biden States was 72.8%. The average boosted rate for Trump States was 26.4% while that for Biden States was 38.6%.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there were also lower rates of attention to other public health recommendations in Trump States.
Whatever you do, do NOT listen to Clay Travis and Buck Sexton expecting to hear truth. I thought Rush Limbaugh was bad about misinformation when he was i that time slot but these buys may be worse.

[JohnStOnge]

I looked up the thing about Fauci saying vaccination meant a dead end for the virus. See https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-tal ... ronavirus/.

The statement was true at the time. i remember when that discussion was going on. At that time, with the variants circulating, a vaccinated person who did get infected had a lower viral load. That changed to at least some extent with variants that appeared later. And when it did change public health officials said so.

i say "changed to at least some extent" because a study i just happened across at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0 suggests the "reduced viral load" effect is still there to some extent. The authors concluded:

In conclusion, this study provides significant evidence for higher infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 Delta as well as a significant effect of full vaccination on infectious VL and its speed of clearance. In addition, we show that Omicron BA.1 has lower infectious VLs compared to Delta in fully vaccinated individuals. Last, after Omicron BA.1 infection, lower infectious VL is observed only in boosted individuals. Our findings highlight the beneficial effect of vaccinations beyond the individual protection from severe disease and underscore the importance of booster vaccination.

i have suspected that vaccination continues to reduce viral loads to some extent. But this is the first recent study I've seen providing some evidence that such is the case. It does pretty much say you have to be boosted to get the benefit with Omicron though. And it was before the more recent Omicron variants.

[SeattleGriz]

Posting this because I heard Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, during their popular radio show, spreading misinformation again. It was about the COVID-19 situation. That's something they spread misinformation on a lot. I don't know if they're lying or they're just ignorant. Either way it's bad.

This time they were calling the idea that "red" states have fared worse than "blue" states the "media narrative" as though it is false. It's not false. I just checked the Worldometers data again. As of the end of yesterday, the average case rate (cases per million population) for States that voted for Trump in 2020 was 305,526 while that for States that voted for Biden was 288,851. The average death rate for Trump States was 3,315 while that for Biden States was 2,860.

I did a statistical test on Trump State average rates by treating the 50 State case and death rates as finite populations and calculating the probability that the Trump means could be as much different from the overall means as they were by chance. There's only 1 chance in 28,448 that the Trump State case rate mean could fall at least as far as it did from the overall mean and 1 chance in 159 that it would happen with the Trump State death rate mean.

The States that voted for Trump have fared worse and it's to an extent that can't reasonably be accounted for by chance.

Travis and Sexton also attacked vaccination again. But there continue to be highly significant correlations such that States with higher vaccination rates have lower case and death rates over the course of the pandemic. States with higher vaccination rates have tended to fare better and that also can't reasonably accounted for by chance.

It should be noted that the average fully vaccinated rate for Trump States as of August 24 (see https://usafacts.org/vis.../covid-vacci ... er-states/....) was 59.0% while that of Biden States was 72.8%. The average boosted rate for Trump States was 26.4% while that for Biden States was 38.6%.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there were also lower rates of attention to other public health recommendations in Trump States.
Whatever you do, do NOT listen to Clay Travis and Buck Sexton expecting to hear truth. I thought Rush Limbaugh was bad about misinformation when he was i that time slot but these buys may be worse.

Well thank God we have you listening to Travis and Sexton so that you can tell us not to listen to Travis and Sexton.

[JohnStOnge]

Posting this because I heard Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, during their popular radio show, spreading misinformation again. It was about the COVID-19 situation. That's something they spread misinformation on a lot. I don't know if they're lying or they're just ignorant. Either way it's bad.

This time they were calling the idea that "red" states have fared worse than "blue" states the "media narrative" as though it is false. It's not false. I just checked the Worldometers data again. As of the end of yesterday, the average case rate (cases per million population) for States that voted for Trump in 2020 was 305,526 while that for States that voted for Biden was 288,851. The average death rate for Trump States was 3,315 while that for Biden States was 2,860.

I did a statistical test on Trump State average rates by treating the 50 State case and death rates as finite populations and calculating the probability that the Trump means could be as much different from the overall means as they were by chance. There's only 1 chance in 28,448 that the Trump State case rate mean could fall at least as far as it did from the overall mean and 1 chance in 159 that it would happen with the Trump State death rate mean.

The States that voted for Trump have fared worse and it's to an extent that can't reasonably be accounted for by chance.

Travis and Sexton also attacked vaccination again. But there continue to be highly significant correlations such that States with higher vaccination rates have lower case and death rates over the course of the pandemic. States with higher vaccination rates have tended to fare better and that also can't reasonably accounted for by chance.

It should be noted that the average fully vaccinated rate for Trump States as of August 24 (see https://usafacts.org/vis.../covid-vacci ... er-states/....) was 59.0% while that of Biden States was 72.8%. The average boosted rate for Trump States was 26.4% while that for Biden States was 38.6%.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there were also lower rates of attention to other public health recommendations in Trump States.
Whatever you do, do NOT listen to Clay Travis and Buck Sexton expecting to hear truth. I thought Rush Limbaugh was bad about misinformation when he was i that time slot but these buys may be worse.

Well thank God we have you listening to Travis and Sexton so that you can tell us not to listen to Travis and Sexton.

i said not to listen to them expecting to hear the truth. Because you won't. I listen to people like that so I'll be aware of the misinformation being distributed. I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh in that tie slot. And, as was the case with Rush, what you hear when you tune in to Travis and Sexton is a constant barrage of falsehood and/or out of context. Like, it is technically true that a study concluded that lockdowns had limited effect and were not worth it. But what you won't hear discussed is the fact that it was done by economists, that it has been roundly criticized by the community of epidemiologists, and that there have been numerous studies concluding that lockdowns saved lives at least in the hundreds of thousands in the United States alone. There is a lot of "See I told you so" when they were not really shown to be correct.

[SeattleGriz]

Well thank God we have you listening to Travis and Sexton so that you can tell us not to listen to Travis and Sexton.

i said not to listen to them expecting to hear the truth. Because you won't. I listen to people like that so I'll be aware of the misinformation being distributed. I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh in that tie slot. And, as was the case with Rush, what you hear when you tune in to Travis and Sexton is a constant barrage of falsehood and/or out of context. Like, it is technically true that a study concluded that lockdowns had limited effect and were not worth it. But what you won't hear discussed is the fact that it was done by economists, that it has been roundly criticized by the community of epidemiologists, and that there have been numerous studies concluding that lockdowns saved lives at least in the hundreds of thousands in the United States alone. There is a lot of "See I told you so" when they were not really shown to be correct.

So you're saying we should tune into Travis and Sexton because you listen to them. Got it!

[JohnStOnge]

i said not to listen to them expecting to hear the truth. Because you won't. I listen to people like that so I'll be aware of the misinformation being distributed. I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh in that tie slot. And, as was the case with Rush, what you hear when you tune in to Travis and Sexton is a constant barrage of falsehood and/or out of context. Like, it is technically true that a study concluded that lockdowns had limited effect and were not worth it. But what you won't hear discussed is the fact that it was done by economists, that it has been roundly criticized by the community of epidemiologists, and that there have been numerous studies concluding that lockdowns saved lives at least in the hundreds of thousands in the United States alone. There is a lot of "See I told you so" when they were not really shown to be correct.

So you're saying we should tune into Travis and Sexton because you listen to them. Got it!

No, I would say that people who are not in the conservative false "reality" echo chamber should expose themselves to things like that radio show at times so that they are aware of the kind of nonsense people in that echo chamber are being exposed to. There are people who talk to the echo chamber folks and hear this stuff. Knowing what they are saying allows one to be better prepared to debunk the nonsense when talking to people who are not hopelessly lost in the echo chamber but who have heard some of this stuff from people that are hopelessly lost in it.

[JohnStOnge]

This is a follow up to the 9/2/2022 post I did about Travis and Sexton saying the idea that Red States having fared worse during the COVID-19 pandemic is a media narrative that is false. I did a correlation matrix using the same data I used for that earlier post. Here it is:



The Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Rates are as of 8/24/2022. The Case and Death Rates are as of 9/1/2022. Trump State is a variable whereby a State that voted for Trump in 2020 is 1 while a State that voted for Biden is 0.

Every coefficient in the matrix is significant for a single test at >95% confidence. The 0.422 (99.7% confidence) and 0.279 (95.01%) for Trump State vs. Case Rate and Death Rate are consistent with the analysis described in my initial post in that they support concluding Case and Death Rates tended to be higher in States that voted for Trump.

The -0.337 (98.31%) and -0.376 (99.29%) coefficients for Case Rate vs. Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Rates support concluding States with higher vaccination rates tend to have lower case rates. The -0.508 (99.98%) and -0.570 (>99.99%) coefficients for Death Rate vs. Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Rates support concluding States with higher vaccination rates tend to have lower death rates.

And, interestingly, the -0.762 (>99.99%) and -0.739 (>99.99%) coefficients for Trump State vs. Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Rates support concluding that States that voted for Trump in 2020 have lower vaccination rates.

All of that is consistent with the "narrative" that people on the "Red" side of things tend to be more resistant to following the advice of public health officials and that States with proportionately more people like that in them tend to have higher COVID-19 case and death rates.

The thing about a "narrative" is that a "narrative" can be true. "Narrative" is just "a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/narrative). In this case, the "narrative" is clearly true.

[JohnStOnge]

Thanks to a NASA Engineer I know for turning me on to the article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... iZ7ToPatU4 during an on line discussion of the stuff I posted above. More of the same, though the article is about more than just COVID-19. Here's an image:



This text follows:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the link between politics and health became glaringly obvious. Democrat-leaning “blue” states were more likely to enact mask requirements and vaccine and social distancing mandates. Republican-leaning “red” states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones. That divergence continued through 2021, when vaccines became widely available. And although the highly transmissible Omicron variant narrowed the gap in infection rates, hospitalization and death rates, which are dramatically reduced by vaccines, remain higher in Republican-leaning parts of the country.

I WILL say that I interpret the author as suggesting that it's not as much the individual choices by individuals who call themselves Republican or Democrat as it is the policies that are generated depending on whether Democrats or Republicans are in control of the government. Don't know about that, but I think it's what the author is suggesting.

[JohnStOnge]

The Scientific American piece made me wonder about individual behavior. I think some of the polling data in the YouGov report at https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/kqp1ntoj7v/ ... Report.pdf strongly suggest Republicans and/or Conservatives are less likely to follow public health recommendations than Democrats and/or Liberals are.

On page 68 you can see that 86% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans have received at least one vaccine shot. Ideology wise, 88% of liberals and 60% of Republicans have.

On page 70, you can see that, among those that got any vaccine shots, 64% of Democrats and 51% of Republicans have received at least three. 69% of liberals and 48% of Conservatives have.

On page 58, you can see that 26% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans never wear masks. 27% of liberals and 66% of conservatives never wear masks.

So, in review of those data along with data from my posts on how States fared:

1. States that voted for Trump tend to have higher COVID-19 case and death rates.

2. States that voted for Trump tend to have lower vaccination rates.

3. Republicans and/or conservatives are vaccinated at a lower rate than Democrats and/or liberals are.

4. Republicans and/or conservatives are less likely to wear masks than Democrats and/or liberals are.

None of those four assertions are seriously debatable.

[JohnStOnge]

Oh. We were told the shot would stay localized and be gone almost immediately.

Immunostaining with anti-coronavirus spike protein (SP) antibody revealed the SP expression in the intravesicular cells in the epidermis and endothelial cells of the inflamed vessels in the dermis… In addition, the SP was also found in the endothelial cells of venules in the subcutaneous fat tissue underlying the herpetic vasculitis lesion.

Hmm. Seems I've been talking about methyl-pseudouridine for awhile.

A plausible hypothesis was that the stabilization of RNA by substituting methyl-pseudouridine for all the uridine nucleotides for BNT162b2 might result in long-time pro-duction of the encoded SP from any cells.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epd ... cia2.12278

it is a case study. The authors did not claim to have identified a cause and effect relationship or even a "significant" association between COVID-19 vaccination and the condition. They just said it is something to look at as a possibility.

[JohnStOnge]

Not gonna lie, gonna love spiking the football on the Covidians for the rest of my life.

This sort of talk was everywhere. She changing jerseys now. On a rehabilitation tour. She claims covid changed, but she neglects there were plenty of people that called this exact scenario and were labeled as "fringe". She chose to go against previous pandemic experience and went for hype instead. What a gigantic asshole.

I just listened to that again and saw another idiotic statement that i don't recall catching the first time. It was the statement about the percentage of hospitalizations and deaths among the obese. 40% of the US population is obese. What are they saying? if you are among the 40% of the population that is obese you deserve to die?

Also back to the thing about people saying you could not catch COVID-19 if you got the vaccine. That is nonsense. Even in the clinical trials there were people who received the vaccine and got COVID-19. "They" were never saying you could not get it or could not die from it if you got the vaccine. The idea was ALWAYS that the risk was reduced.

This is the sad thing about the COVID-19 denial crowd. Always setting up false premises then acting like something that was not asserted was disproven.

[SeattleGriz]

Oh. We were told the shot would stay localized and be gone almost immediately.





Hmm. Seems I've been talking about methyl-pseudouridine for awhile.



https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epd ... cia2.12278

it is a case study. The authors did not claim to have identified a cause and effect relationship or even a "significant" association between COVID-19 vaccination and the condition. They just said it is something to look at as a possibility.

So you're saying it didn't really happen because it's a case study?

[SeattleGriz]

So you're saying we should tune into Travis and Sexton because you listen to them. Got it!

No, I would say that people who are not in the conservative false "reality" echo chamber should expose themselves to things like that radio show at times so that they are aware of the kind of nonsense people in that echo chamber are being exposed to. There are people who talk to the echo chamber folks and hear this stuff. Knowing what they are saying allows one to be better prepared to debunk the nonsense when talking to people who are not hopelessly lost in the echo chamber but who have heard some of this stuff from people that are hopelessly lost in it.

Stop dude, we get it. You want us to listen to Travis and Sexton because you say so. I'll start listening now.

[JohnStOnge]

it is a case study. The authors did not claim to have identified a cause and effect relationship or even a "significant" association between COVID-19 vaccination and the condition. They just said it is something to look at as a possibility.

So you're saying it didn't really happen because it's a case study?

No. What I'm saying is that there is no way one can infer cause and effect or even association (in a statistical sense) based on a single case. In looking more closely at the paper and one of the references it looks to me like varicella zoster virus reactivation is recognized as a possible rare side effect and what they did with their study is point out a possible reason for it.

I found an article that says that the mRNA vaccines themselves tend to stay near the injection site but I don't see anything saying that the spike proteins produced by the body's cells do that (https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where ... roteins-go).