johnh wrote:
I just noticed this morning that Bulgaria and Romania are now post-peak – in the case of Romania down nearly to pre-wave figures. I wish I could understand why…
the problem there is lots of people run far and away from tests, because they don’t want to be put in quarantine. So they only end up on the list once they are too sick not to go to the doc. At least that is what I am told. But it could also be that the wave there, which was brutal, is on decline, because quite a few people finally got the message and got either vaccinated or started to take this stuff seriously.
Edit: I should add: A lot of this is because people there often enough don’t get paid when they are sick! So a 10 day quarantine can be an existential problem.
Graham wrote:
This is why the ‘feeling safe’ idea espoused by @Mooney_Driver
There is a feeling of “safety” which concerns different things:
1st “safe” of hospital, dying or severe illness. I think that is the most important bit.
2nd would be that the majority opinion within scientists and doctors is that if you are vaccinated, your risk of infection is reduced. Also the mass of virus you spread appears to be reduced, even though that is contested as you rightly say.
3rd I feel safer around people who take this disease seriously enough to get vaccinated or, in the case of recovered, know what the heck this is all about. That makes me much more comfortable than knowing that I am surrounded by people who don’t give a rats backside about infecting others.
You will call “annectote” again, but the little “outbreak” we had at work (still ongoing) WAS 100% triggered by two unvaccinated co-workers. One of them is back at work after 3 weeks ill, the other we have no news from… literally, which probably means he is in hospital unable to communicate. All in all, 8 more people got infected (all vaccinated) and have “severe colds” as they describe it.
Clearly, the new mutation changes the ballpark yet again. The most prominent case in Switzerland of Omikron appears to be a 19 year old vaccinated student. The weird thing is, that he has no known contact with anyone out of SA or other countries of interest. As a result, over 100 students he interacted with are in quarantine and cases are mounting.
there is lots of people run far and away from tests, because they don’t want to be put in quarantine. So they only end up on the list once they are too sick not to go to the doc
That’s fine if you live alone, aren’t supporting anyone, never go out, and don’t mind getting ill and possibly dying. I don’t see a problem with it, otherwise 
If someone wants to starve themselves to death, I don’t have a problem with that either – so long as it isn’t a good poster on EuroGA 
the new mutation changes the ballpark yet again. The most prominent case in Switzerland of Omikron appears to be a 19 year old vaccinated student.
Data point of 1.
As a result, over 100 students he interacted with are in quarantine and cases are mounting.
Sure; it’s out there, everywhere, at some currently very low density – except where people do heavy partying.
Peter wrote:
That’s fine if you live alone, aren’t supporting anyone, never go out, and don’t mind getting ill and possibly dying. I don’t see a problem with it, otherwise
I should have added why: Most people there do not get paid if they are sick, either because they work self employed or their employers pay only for actual hours. So being sick for many is an existential problem, particularly if we talk about sickness which can take a couple of weeks.
I’ve edited my post above to reflect this.
From a Reuters report this morning. Personally, I think if one were to impose requirements to protect airline travelers from infection from communicable illness, the only thing that makes any medical sense is pre-boarding testing. Whether somebody is vaccinated seems irrelevant to me, and no business of anybody except themselves.
“In the Netherlands, health authorities called for pre-flight COVID-19 tests for all travel from outside the European Union, after it turned out that about 90% of the 62 passengers who tested positive after arriving on two flights from South Africa on Nov. 26 – including all those with the Omicron variant – had been vaccinated”
I have no current plans regardless to spend money anywhere that requires me to show my vaccination status to do so.
S Africa is not likely to deliver good data. Mostly poor education, and a long history of attaching negligible value to human life. It’s fairly normal to be killed for your mobile phone. That’s why HIV raged across the whole continent. They knew it was deadly, but most didn’t care… And the better educated and wealthier white community has quite a gung-ho attitude to risk.
after arriving on two flights from South Africa on Nov. 26 – including all those with the Omicron variant – had been vaccinated
I would put money on their testing being mostly fraudulent. After all, who is going to care about this for people leaving the country?
It’s a tricky economic policy decision though, because the only test which is any good, and cannot be fiddled (short of you getting someone else to take the test for you), is a pre-boarding PCR test, and that just wipes out the airline business, because a) it is hard to organise to complete within the 24-48 hr window and b) any pre-boarding-to-get-home test will kill tourism because nobody wants to risk getting stuck in some hotel, or some secure facility, in a foreign country. This was clearly shown in the UK, with the pre-return-home tests, which were not only expensive (LFT+certificate – now ~£20 so that’s cheap enough) but which most people don’t know are – for the LFT – trivial to fiddle, and the result is airline travel some 80% down.
Most people there do not get paid if they are sick, either because they work self employed or their employers pay only for actual hours. So being sick for many is an existential problem, particularly if we talk about sickness which can take a couple of weeks.
They should get vacced then, and (if applicable) lose some weight, and (if applicable) take some personal responsibility for their life, e.g. not go out to crowded bars. The basics aren’t rocket science.
Unfortunately the media is constantly showing stories of moaning and complaining people who want the State to fix everything, while they refuse to take personal responsibility. It’s like me going on the BBC and demanding that I have a human right to free 100LL.
I think the article says or implies that inbound passengers weren’t tested before the flight, and that they were tested after arrival in the Netherlands. The testing in the Netherlands then showed that 90% (56 of 62) of those passengers shown by testing in the Netherlands to be infected with CV-19 were vaccinated.
I’m personally unconcerned and happy to fly on e.g. airline flights that require no CV-19 documentation, as with the thousands of flights in the US every day. It’s not proven to be a real world problem. On the other hand, if one wishes to slow the importation of e.g. the latest wave of European infection into the US, testing is the only thing that will have any effect. It won’t make any difference long term, but it might have an effect in the short term.
Florida BTW is stIll at roughly zero fatalities per day due to CV-19 and very low infection rate, with restrictions on normal life being essentially zero. I suspect that natural immunity must be playing a strong role. Anyway a good place to go on holiday, perhaps for some winter flying.
Silvaire wrote:
“In the Netherlands, health authorities called for pre-flight COVID-19 tests for all travel from outside the European Union, after it turned out that about 90% of the 62 passengers who tested positive after arriving on two flights from South Africa on Nov. 26 – including all those with the Omicron variant – had been vaccinated”
That is an interesting statement by itself because as far as I know even before omicron you were not allowed to travel from SA to the EU without being vaccinated. Therefore 100% of the passengers should have been vaccinated. If only 90% of the infected customers have been vaccinated, the question is, where these 10% come from ?!?
Are citizens of the Netherlands required to be vaccinated before they can return to their country of citizenship from South Africa? That is not for example currently the case for Germans returning to Germany, when flying from the US.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
2nd would be that the majority opinion within scientists and doctors is that if you are vaccinated, your risk of infection is reduced.
As I said before, I simply don’t believe this is true or that majority scientific/medical opinion supports it.
You have to be careful how you frame the question. We are talking here about the precise event of becoming infected, no matter how mildly. Not how quickly your body fights it off and kills the infection because you’re vaccinated, not whether you become ill or not, nothing like that. And nothing about about other issues which affect the likelihood of becoming infected such as behavioural differences, whether others you are exposed to are vaccinated, etc. The hypothetical test which @Malibuflyer described where a vacced and an unvacced person are given the same exposure to an infectious person.
The real benefit of vaccination in terms of transmission is probably more akin to masks – i.e. a benefit to others because a vaxxed person sheds less than an unvaxxed one.
Graham wrote:
The question of individual infection is of course black and white. One is either infected with the virus, or not. You cannot be a bit pregnant.
It is certainly not black and white.
What “infected” means is not well-defined. You have one virus particle in you body? 1000? A million? A billion? Enough to show at a test? Do all tests have identical sensitivity or thresholds? Enough to infect someone else? With what likelihood? Etc, etc.
On the other hand, it is well-defined what “being pregnant” is. Pregnancy is a process. At any given point in time, either this process is in progress or it is not.
