American Politics: Discuss and Debate (Page 33 of 57)

Nobody test this theory.

This is the study:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 … 21262158v1

This is a web article on the study:
https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/202 … ious-covid

The upshot of the study is that while vaccinated and infected people were contagious, their viral particle count dropped within three days. In contrast, an unvaccinated and infected patient is contagious for 10 - 20 days.

I don't know anything about this at all, but I'd like to believe it. I don't know if it's true. But I'll march my mother to get a third dose as soon as she's eligible. In the meantime, I'm carrying extra boat shaped ASTM3 masks in my bag and restocking on hand sanitizer and watching BLACK WIDOW in VR at home.

US Marines killed in Kabul bombs.  Pentagon have been saying this is beyond dangerous.  That's why Biden wouldn't extend the date.  That's why he is only taking US citizens.  That's why he won't send helicopters all over the city for people.  There's no police or army in Kabul.  Just the useless Taliban on mopeds and pickups.  It's like being in the middle of The Walking Dead.  If I'm Biden, I tell the commanders to pick up the damn pace and get out of there ASAP.

I go out so infrequently that I haven't really used them enough.  The upper and lower flaps are tight across my face, creating a good seal (I assume) but they're small so they take a little bit of adjusting to get right. 

But I honestly only leave the house to pick up take out food (2-3 minutes) or have groceries/Target orders dropped in my car (where I usually don't interact with anyone enough to put on a mask at all).  With two kids and both of us working from home full time, it's pretty easy to social distance.

I did give some of them to my mom, who is working part time for the next few weeks.

Yeah I think I'd only go midday on a weekday with a mask on.  Even for Spider-Man, I'm sure I can find a showing with only a couple of people 6+ feet away.  I figure that would be fairly safe.  I had in-person jury duty over the summer, and I was able to get by with those rules.

I would absolutely wear my Kleannara mask and stay away from anyone.  I'll sit in the far corner if I have to

I do have a long running streak of seeing Bond films in the theater.  I may go after it's been out awhile and I know the theater will be empty.  Ditto for Ghostbusters Afterlife.

I wonder if Temporal Flux wrote this DEEP SPACE NINE fan webisode about the stupidity of NFTs.

https://twitter.com/joshuamartian/statu … 31622?s=20

Hahahahaha. That is great!

If anyone wants to learn how to build a filtration system as another factor to mitigate potential lingering covid in a closed environment, it's actually not that hard.  Fan, some filters, a box, duct tape.  I am sure Quinn and Arturo would have come up with something like this if not for penicillin!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEn2xzlvrdo
https://www.wired.com/story/could-a-jan … -covid-19/
https://www.texairfilters.com/iaq-resea … r-cleaner/

I don't want this post to contribute to vaccine hesitancy, so I won't quote the above.

Just to inform: The CDC does recommend that everyone 18+ get boosted *now* and not to wait.

*steps off soapbox*

Thank you, ireactions! I did not know that with my limited membership here. I was just playing it safe on my end.

My apologies, Slider_Quinn21!

Appreciate that!

Yaaayyyyyyy!! Well done, Slider_Quinn21.

I've had very little in the way of side effects from the vaccine + flu shot. Aside from a sore arm, I didn't have anything else. And the sore arm was even less on the covid side. I didn't even have a sore arm on the flu shot side.

I had a sore armpit from the booster and flu shot, that was all.

My allergist (MD) has gotten every vaccine on Earth at some point.  Several years ago she had some sort of illness, and ever since then any vaccine makes her ill but she still takes them.  The alternative is not worth it.  This omicron though is of such veracity that really nothing short of an N95 is going to keep you from acquiring COVID if any length of time is spent indoors with multiple people that are infected.  The vaccines/boosters seem to keep you out of hospital though.  The variant is exploding in the NYC-area here, although I have faith our level of vaxxing will keep severe cases down.  In other states such as the midwest, where people are not being vaxxed enough, it will be far far worse.  This may be a disastrous blow to restaurants and event spaces for the next several months.  Several people I know have tested positive from office parties in the last few days.

I'm getting my booster a couple days after SQ21.

May I ask: how is vaccine booking in the States? In my province, it's ridiculous; the system can't handle all the people logging on at the same time and puts everyone in a waiting room and when you get into the system at last, the appointments can be as late as February or March. I had time to stay in the system and keep rebooking my appointment to earlier and earlier dates as new appointments were added to the calendar over the course of a couple hours, going from January 25 to January 6 to January 4 to December 29, but not everyone can do this. Not everyone has time to sit for this long in front of a computer, booking, cancelling and rebooking, especially if that person works in construction or retail or food.

It's really bad. Surely the best bet would have been pre-registration and wait-listing followed by a randomized system within specific demographics (age, chronic conditions, frontline and health workers) sending out notifications that the person would have 24 hours to accept or reject an appointment. The average pharmacy can do this, but they don't have the staff for mass vaccinations. The province has the staff but can't seem to get the digital infrastructure together despite having had over 10 months to prepare.

Omicron is now the dominant strain in the United States, jumping from 3% of cases to 73% of cases nationwide.

I don't know what this means, you're being unclear.

When it comes to pandemic information, we should endeavour to be clear. At two doses of vaccination, you have 33 per cent protection from being infected by Omicron exposure and about 70 per cent protection from hospitalization and death. At three doses, you have 75 per cent protection from being infected by Omicron exposure and about 90 per cent protection from hospitalization and death.

People who are unvaccinated and unmasked have no protection. They infect others with COVID-19. They themselves will become infected with Omicron and require hospitalization. The mass numbers of unvaccinated hospitalizations slows health care systems to the point where they have to cancel routine and emergency surgeries; instead of treating patients with cancer or hurt by assaults and car accidents and chronic conditions, nurses and doctors are tied up treating people who won't get vaccinated and won't wear masks.

People who refuse vaccinations and refuse to mask are stealing health care from people with blood vessel disorders, with diabetes, with heart conditions, with genetic disorders.

I can't wear a KN95, my face sweats so bad and my nose runs.  Better off double masking with two looser fitting ones I think.

My nose runs all the time, especially outside in the freezing Northeastern cold.  I wore the KN95 indoors at times during the summer this year at conventions, not comfortable at all.  Eventually ditched them for double play cloth masks although obviously this was in the absence of a surge.  I'm not intending on going anywhere for the next month or so though.

Every time someone says they got a booster, I feel a great sense of relief.

My reading indicates that for reasons scientists don't fully understand yet, alternating between Pfizer and Moderna has provided a higher number of antibodies than matching vaccines. I encourage mixing. I've had two doses of Moderna and I'm expecting a third, but I'd be happy to get Pfizer on Wednesday.

On average, early reports indicate that Pfizer and Moderna give you about 75 percent protection against getting sick at all, but after 10 weeks, that drops to anywhere from 30 - 45 per cent. Omicron has unfortunately rewritten the rulebook; earlier, Grizzlor shared a doctor's expectation that a third dose could be the last vaccination needed, but that was only for Alpha to Delta, not for Omicron. However, even if the 10 week wane is true, the booster would still protect you from getting seriously sick, from having to go to the ICU, from being put on a ventilator, and from dying of COVID.

No vaccine could have ever granted permanent immunization. Even if Delta had been the last variant, a third dose would not have prevented people from getting sick from Delta; a third dose would prevent people from dying of Delta.

Vaccines aren't cures as much as teachers; they teach your body how to create the antibodies against a specific virus; they teach your body to cure itself. Anyone who calls vaccination useless because it doesn't prevent infection is either ignorant or lying. Vaccines don't stop you from getting infected; they stop you from getting so sick that you die. This is the case with all vaccines whether it's tetanus, measles, flu, polio, hepatitis or COVID-19.

People in the first 10 weeks of their third dose could still get infected by Omicron; they just have a 70 - 75 per cent chance of never developing a fever or a cough. Michael Rosenbaum caught Delta after two doses of an mRNA vaccine and lost two weeks of his life to fever and exhaustion -- which is significantly better than losing his whole life.

I salute Slider_Quinn21 for doing his duty and protecting his family, his friends, his neighbours and his country.

Well, I've read the (negative) reviews and the Wikipedia summary and it seems like a pretty good movie to me, but I would never watch it. I'm sure it's great, it's just that if I want to see people being self-destructive and incompetent, I'll just read the newspaper. I turn to entertainment for what is somewhat inflammatorily described as "competence porn." I want fantasies of people being good at things, sometimes at the expense of their needs in other areas.

**

I got my third dose. Pfizer not available to my age bracket, only Moderna. Canada currently has lots of Moderna and not as much Pfizer.

Well, reading the Wikipedia summary was an unpleasant experience, but it's clearly a story that's meant to be unpleasant. Ultimately, we live in the world of DON'T LOOK UP and we can watch that movie any time we read a newspaper which I do every morning and evening. I have an annual subscription to The Toronto Star, so I have to read it or it's like burning money.

My preference for a movie on such subject matter would be the film TOMORROWLAND, but that's because my preference is to look for something with hope. That said, TOMORROWLAND is only a movie and despite having a character who is relentlessly determined to do SOMETHING about the problems of the world, the movie doesn't (and can't) offer a solution to climate change and world hunger. All it can do is ask people to serve their best impulses and not their worst.

Movies and TV are great for normalizing sexual and gender identities and condemning transphobia and climate change denial, but actually offering a solution to defeating greenhouse gas emissions may be asking them to punch above their weight. It's entertainment.

I'd like to believe that people will band together, but that's proven untrue. Look at vaccinations: people accepted vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and flu without complaint; then white supremacists presented the COVID-19 vaccine as a divisive point and now we have a pandemic extended by the unvaccinated. People believe what they're incentivized to believe even if that incentive is as shallow and meaningless as claiming expertise and unassailability by virtue of privilege, even to the point of psychosis and eating horse de-wormer.

Look at the Center for Disease Control, supposedly run by sensible adults with President Joe Biden in the White House. They have nonsensically reduced the quarantine period from 10 days to 5 not because people aren't potentially contagious after 5, but because, as Dr. Anthony Fauci himself said, companies can force people to go back to work faster and keep the capitalist machine churning.

People are ultimately for themselves; they will only act in their own perceived best interests and those perceptions are often flat out stupid. My suspicion is that we will only work together if enough people can be convinced that what's in everyone's best interests is also their own, but people can have an incredibly shortsighted view. If my country and yours hadn't hoarded vaccines from poorer countries, COVID wouldn't have had the opportunity to continue spreading and creating new mutations.

Movies like TOMORROWLAND give me a little respite from all that and say that it's possible that people will figure it out. Not that they will; no movie can assert that sincerely. Just that it's possible.

From a TV standpoint: MACGYVER and SAVED BY THE BELL were both hit by the pandemic and had to shut down production in 2020 and resume under strict quarantine protocols. They were filming new episodes during the pandemic, and they proceeded to set their stories *after* the pandemic.

However, most of these stories are basically written as though they were *before* the pandemic despite references to COVID and 2020.

MACGYVER had to do this because its fifth season was using a number of unfinished Season 4 episodes. MACGYVER's fifth season opens with one of these started filming before / completed filming after episodes. A dubbed in line of dialogue declares how MacGyver had to shut down all missions during the pandemic, but they are back on the job now that it is over, having been resolved in some unspecified fashion during an unstated amount of time.

SAVED BY THE BELL ended up doing the same thing: Season 2 is set a year after the pandemic and has everyone declaring that everything is normal now that all have been vaccinated, and while characters lament a lost year, there is no talk of boosters or variants and there is no ongoing masking; the stories outside, of the lost time and year of social distancing, are clearly written in a pre-pandemic world.

In the real world for people who took COVID-19 seriously: people kept wearing masks, understanding that vaccination doesn't stop you from getting sick, it only allows you to get better after getting sick without needing hospitalization, and getting sick with COVID after two doses is still severe and debilitating for at least a few weeks. People were cautious about physical contact with anyone they hadn't known to have been fully vaccinated. People were worried about new variants and the need for booster shots.

This isn't a failure on MACGYVER or SAVED BY THE BELL. Both shows, filming during the pandemic, had no way of knowing how long the pandemic would last or how it would end. They took the view that life would go back to 'normal' because that was a world they could write, perform and render without guesswork outside of the guess that 2021 would be like 2019.

**

I do think we could be near the tail-end of the pandemic. Viruses can't mutate infinitely without losing what makes them transmissible, virulent or vaccine evasive, and for a virus to be transmissible, it has to be mild enough at least at the outset for the patient to be unaware that they're sick and spread it. Omicron is a serious problem even with a lower percentage of severe cases because that lower percentage is still a very big number when it's so contagious. However, Omicron's transmissibility will prevent other variants overtaking it in spread. Those who survive Omicron (which you can without hospitalization if you're vaccinated) retain the immune system responses needed to defeat this and previous variants. COVID-19, for the vaccinated and for Omicron survivors, would become a mild illness going forward.

I'm not a doctor, I could be WRONG.

https://www.salon.com/2021/12/23/some-s … cs-finale/

I've had several friends who all got the booster and all had very mild side effects.  My worst was a sore arm - I *might've* had a headache, but it might've been more my brain expecting a headache and making it feel like I had a really dull one.  No nausea, no chills, nothing else.  Now I got my shot strategically in the late morning so maybe I slept through the side effects, but I didn't wake up drenched in sweat like I did with shot two.

My wife got her shot while breastfeeding and, since it can cause lymph nodes to swell, it caused her to develop mastitis.  So she's hesitant to get another shot because of how rough her experience was.  Hopefully stories like mine will encourage her and others to get the booster.

Regarding the possible end of the pandemic, I agree and am hopeful.  I have a friend turning 40 this week and I'm going to skip his party.  I told my wife that if we hunker down for a couple months (our biggest risk will be our 2-year-old at daycare), we could start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  At least here in the US, we had a million cases the other day.  We've gotta be moving to some form of herd immunity / conversion from pandemic to endemic.

And once we're there, I've read that we might not even need the vaccines - that it might end up being lesser than the flu / more like a cold, and only the high-risk people would need a yearly booster.  That would be nice.  At the same time, if the science recommends a quarterly booster forever, I'm fine with that too.  My experience with the booster took 30 minutes from door to door, and that included 15 minutes sitting around to see if anything happened.

Ha, I'll convince her.  And its still months before she'd be eligible for a booster anyway.  And like I've said before, we're low risk since we very rarely go anywhere.

I've been disappointed in Biden in a lot of ways.  And the Democrats in general.  And I think, especially among younger voters, they're going to get punished.  What was the point of winning the White House and winning both Georgia Senate seats if nothing got done?  Sure, infrastructure got done, but while everyone likes infrastructure, no one loves infrastructure.  None of the hot-button stuff that people wanted has gotten done, and I think cynical young voters aren't going to have the same level of engagement.

I listened to a months-old Five Thirty Eight politics podcast that was essentially just an interview with Adam Schiff where Schiff had all these concerns about democracy.  The interviewer kept trying to get him to say what he's doing about it, and Schiff didn't have any answer besides passing HR1.  HR1 was written before 2020 and wouldn't solve all the problems.  Plus, it's entirely unpassable in this environment.  They needed to throw out HR1 and write a bill that actually fixed the problems that Trump was trying to exploit.

And I think it's easier than the Democrats are making it out to be.  It would just take compromise on their side, and they're already compromising on their side.  The Democrats are essentially saying that if the Republicans are going to make it harder to vote, they need to work harder to get people out to vote.  Well, okay...but you aren't getting anything out of that.  This needs to be codified, and I think there's a fairly simple way to do it.

Republican voters want election integrity.  Democrats want election integrity.  They just don't agree on what that means or who's doing it.  I think that's fairly simple to fix, though.  I think the Democrats needed to offer up the right compromise.  What I would've done is written a law that provides some sort of independent oversight to state elections - states get to choose how elections are done, but they don't get to choose who won.  I'd also do what I could to end partisan gerrymandering.

How would I pass it?  I'd give in on Voter ID.  It's a huge hot-button issue for Republicans that I think they'd have to vote for.  And instead of spending four years trying to get people excited to vote, I'd spend four years getting everyone voter IDs, which I think would've been easier and harder to exploit.  And instead of getting nothing in return, I'd either prevent Trump loyalists from messing with elections, and/or I'd get rid of partisan gerrymandering.  And if that doesn't pass, I'd see what I could get for national voter ID. 

I think this was an issue that they could've easily solved.  It would've been a win for everyone, just like when Cory Booker was so excited to vote for a rebuke to Defund the Police.  People agree on this, and I think it would've been really hard to get 40 Republican senators to vote against Voter ID, as long as the rest of the bill wasn't full of insanity. 

Plus, it wouldn't require ending the filibuster, which I think would be the most temporary of solutions.  You can end the filibuster, pass HR1, and there's a good chance that a Republican congress dismantles it before 2024.  It wouldn't matter.

Pass it legitimately, truly secure elections, and figure out how to work within the new lines.  I think in four years you could get voter IDs to everyone in the country, and if you do it right, maybe they never expire.  So it'd be a lot of work from 2021-2024 and then you're set for the most part.

Democrats don't know how to get out of their own way.

They have to vote for some things.  They voted for the "punishments for defunding the police" bill because it was political.  But the Democrats voted for it too because it put in stone that all Democratic senators are against defunding the police. 

You have to find the right issue.  The Democrats have toyed around with national voter ID, but they're not serious about it.  Find the voter ID that most Republicans would be happy with, title the bill the "Federal Voter ID Act", and you hammer Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax with ads for it.  And most importantly, don't fill it with any nonsense.  If getting rid of the filibuster is popular enough with voters, do that.  If it's protection against state legislatures, do that.  Whatever you need to do so that Ted Cruz isn't on Tucker Carlson every night complaining about how the bill helps illegal immigrants.  That's what was the issue with the Infrastructure bill.  It had too much stuff that Republicans hate.  Get what you want and give them what they want.  You don't have to be fully happy with it.

Because this isn't about getting a win for Democrats, it's about getting a win for the Constitution.  And if that means doing a bill that both sides reluctantly have to swallow, then do it.  If it can safeguard elections without ending the filibuster, then do it.