COVID-19 News and Discussions

[andmar74]

Mutation rate of Covid19 virus is at least 50 per cent higher than previously thought

That's great, if Covid-19 is headed for a common cold virus.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

United Airlines workers with religious objections to COVID vaccine will be placed on unpaid leave

United Airlines told employees that they will be placed on indefinite unpaid leave if they refuse to get a Covid vaccine for religious reasons.

The company's vaccine mandate is much tougher than those imposed by many other companies, or the ones announced by President Joe Biden Thursday. The federal mandate, and many already announced at other companies, give employees a choice between getting vaccinated or getting weekly Covid tests. At United, it's essentially vaccination or termination.

Although United is granting accommodations for employees who have a valid medical or religious reason not to get vaccinated, it disclosed this week there would be costs for those who cite their religious belief as a reason not to be vaccinated.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/unite ... ar-AAOjoLH

[Yuli Ban]

The delta variant may be slowly killing the family movie

Last November, the movie business was in desperate need of good news when an unlikely savior appeared in “The Croods: A New Age.”

At a time when many movie theaters were closed, DreamWorks Animation’s sequel about a family of outspoken cave men defied the vaccine-less moment and opened strongly in a reduced number of venues, selling an average of nearly 800 tickets at each screen. The data sent a clear and reassuring message: No matter what hurdles moviegoing faced, it could always count on family films.

Nearly 10 months later, a tougher reality is unfolding: People have stopped buying tickets to family films. In a striking development, the great all-ages unifier of American pop culture is struggling.

Over this past summer, these family-friendly movies arrived — “The Boss Baby: Family Business” and “Spirit Untamed,” “Paw Patrol: The Movie” and “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” And, one by one, they went, attracting just a small fraction of the usual ticket buyers — sometimes even smaller than the titles aimed at older audiences in a dismal box-office summer. No family film this year has exceeded $100 million in domestic receipts. In 2019, 11 of them did.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Ken_J]

wow, never thought I'd see the day when I thought, maybe the population could really benefit from more douche bags.

[Yuli Ban]

It's all beyond belief
I've never been more baffled by my species than in these past few months

[raklian]

It's all beyond belief
I've never been more baffled by my species than in these past few months

Yeah, I've been thinking deeply about this as well. I realized all of this is to be expected. Yep, you heard it. It was ALL TO BE EXPECTED. As it turns out, we were never a species apart from the rest. We are just one of the millions out there. See those apes? See how generally stupid they are? We're their cousins and there is next to no difference between us. Having a larger prefontal cortex than them doesn't put the distance between us as much as we think it does - it's purely ego to think it does.

[wjfox]

1 in every 500 US residents have died of Covid-19

Updated 1509 GMT (2309 HKT) September 15, 2021

The United States has reached another grim milestone in its fight against the devastating Covid-19 pandemic: 1 in 500 Americans have died from coronavirus since the nation's first reported infection.

As of Tuesday night, 663,913 people in the US have died of Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University data. According to the US Census Bureau, the US population as of April 2020 was 331.4 million.

It's a sobering toll that comes as hospitals in the US are struggling to keep up with the volume of patients and more children are grappling with the virus. In hopes of managing the spread and preventing more unnecessary deaths, officials are implementing mandates for vaccinations in workplaces and masking in schools.

They're fighting against daily case, hospitalization and death rates that jumped after the early summer as the highly contagious Delta variant became dominant.

The country averaged more than 152,300 new Covid-19 cases each day over the past week as of Tuesday -- more than 13 times than what it was on June 22, when the average was at its lowest of 2021 (11,303 daily), according to Johns Hopkins University data.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/15/heal ... index.html

[Yuli Ban]

[raklian]

Emergency medical care will need to automated by AI to eliminate this problem from happening again.

[wjfox]

Idiots.


Canada: Alberta healthcare system on verge of collapse as Covid cases and anti-vax sentiments rise

Wed 15 Sep 2021 11.30 BST

A surge in coronavirus cases has pushed the healthcare system in the Canadian province of Alberta to the verge of collapse, as healthcare workers struggle against mounting exhaustion and a growing anti-vaccine movement in the region.

The province warned this week that its ICU capacity was strained, with more people requiring intensive care than any other point during the pandemic – nearly all of them unvaccinated.

“It’s not easy to go to work every day and watch people in their 30s die,” an ICU nurse in Edmonton told the Guardian. “Having to help a family say goodbye and then going through the actions that are required at the end of someone’s life, is worse than anyone can imagine.”

Alberta has long boasted of its loose coronavirus restrictions – including advertising the previous months as the “best summer ever” as it rolled back those few restrictions. It has also been the site of North America’s highest caseloads.

In a province with a long history of skepticism towards government, the pandemic has become fertile ground for protests and anti-vaccine rhetoric, including from elected officials, firefighters and police officers. During the ongoing federal election, the People’s Party of Canada, a fringe rightwing party that has come out against public health measures has seen its largest support base in rural Alberta.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... cases-rise

[erowind]

.

[raklian]

We don't need AI to prevent healthcare collapse. I mean, it may help I'm not denying that. But this is a governance problem first and foremost. Why were hospitals and critical healthcare infrastructure permitted to model their supply chains and care after the just in time manufacturing model meant for Toyota production lines? Yes, antivax sentiment is a problem but it's not the only cause. Hospitals should have excess capacity and they should be well staffed at all times. This stupid game of reducing capacity to try to precisely meet demand during good times (pre-pandemic times) only guarantees that the healthcare system cannot provide for the population in times of crises. Even if anti-vaxx sentiment didn't exist this still would have happened on a smaller scale in select metro areas like it did before the vaccine was even deployed.

We make mistakes all the time. We don't have the intellectual awareness to prepare for future pandemics, so the next best thing is to have AI help us with that by predicting future events using the past for reference.

The governance problem is going to repeat for as long as we exist, so we'll have to shore up this deficiency with something that will perform better than us in this area, namely AI emergency planners and mech-doctors that can physically treat us in place of human ones who are suddenly preoccupied with an emergency which results in a shortage of them. AI also has the advantage of changing its strategy as new information flows in to the nanosecond while humans take many weeks to months to even recognize a problem and come to a consensus on how to deal with it. AI is the future of pandemic preparedness and response, and it most certainly will have a dominant role to the point humans become peripheral tools for few cases where human involvement is optimal according to its calculations.

[raklian]

Here's why we need the booster shot despite what the health experts are saying (about their recommendation to hold off booster shots).

[raklian]

Anti-vaxxers in a nutshell.

[caltrek]

Vaccine Update: Pfizer Sticks It to Uncle Sam
by Robert Kutner
September 17, 2021

http://americanprospect.activehosted.co ... 08d315cf0c

Introduction:

(The American Prospect) The U.S. plans to purchase from Pfizer and donate to Third World countries hundreds of millions of doses of the COVID vaccine, according to a story leaked to The Washington Post. This is in addition to the more than 136 million doses already donated, according to the State Department.

This is a great thing, right? No, it’s a travesty. The total global need is at least 13 billion doses. Back in May, President Biden did something worth celebrating. He authorized U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to reverse the long-standing U.S. opposition to waiving the patent, copyright, and trademark protections of the WTO treaty known as TRIPS, to which the U.S. is a party.

With that waiver, countries with vaccine manufacturing capacity, such as India, could produce the Pfizer vaccine at cost, at adequate quantities, and deliver it worldwide. But since that brave gesture, career U.S. trade officials based at WTO headquarters in Geneva have slow-rolled the TRIPS waiver, and there has been no progress at getting vaccines actually produced in quantity.

It is even more of a travesty if Pfizer, which has already made many billions in windfall COVID profits, is charging Uncle Sam, aka the U.S. taxpayer, any kind of a markup. In the leaked Post story, terms were not disclosed.

The more the administration plays Pfizer’s game to purchase and donate what should be a public good, the more it plays into the drug industry’s hands and diverts public attention from the stalled TRIPS waiver.

[weatheriscool]

FDA vaccine advisers vote to recommend booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine in people 65 and older
Source: CNN

(CNN)Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously Friday to recommend emergency use authorization of a booster dose of Pfizer's vaccine six months after full vaccination in people 65 and older and those at high risk of severe Covid-19. Members of the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee also informally advised the FDA to include health care workers or others at high risk of Covid-19 exposure in the EUA.Earlier, the advisers had rejected a broader application to approve the use of booster doses of Pfizer's vaccines in everyone 16 and older six months after they are fully vaccinated.

Members of the committee expressed doubts about the safety of a booster dose in younger adults and teens, and complained about the lack of data about the safety and long term efficacy of a booster dose. Biden administration officials have previously announced a plan to begin administering booster doses to the general population during the week of September 20, pending signoff from the FDA and US Centers for Disease Control. Some of the advisers -- a group of vaccine experts, immunologists, pediatricians, infectious disease specialists and public health experts -- have said the process was rushed because of that target date. On Friday, several said they wanted to see more data, or they believed boosters were likely necessary, but for a more limited segment of the population.

"I don't think a booster dose is going to significantly contribute to controlling the pandemic," said Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, said during the meeting. It is very important that the main message that we still transmit is that we have got to get everyone two doses. Everyone has got the get the primary series. This booster dose is not likely to make a big difference in the behavior of this pandemic." During the meeting, Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of vaccine clinical research and development at Pfizer, said several studies indicate that people's immunity can and does wane and that giving booster doses restores that immunity -- sometimes to levels higher than seen at initial vaccination.

He said people who got the boosters did not have any more side effects than seen after the first two doses. And Gruber said while the two-dose Pfizer vaccine continues to protect well against severe infection, hospitalizations and deaths, there are hints that could change. The company relied heavily on data from Israel, where vaccinated people started to get breakthrough infections. Israeli researchers earlier told the meeting that adding booster shots in Israel helped keep many people out of the hospital. The Israeli experience could portend the US Covid-19 future," Gruber said. "The Israeli experience could portend the US Covid-19 future," Gruber said. "Israel and the United States real world evidence suggests that vaccine efficacy against Covid-19 infection wanes approximately six to eight months following the second dose," he added.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/health/f ... index.html

[wjfox]