Every camel has a straw that breaks its back, and I’ve just had mine! It’s a small straw, but as with the camel, it’s the last in a long line. In fact, the line stretches all the way back to the beginning of the pandemic when the Offspring and I first started to self-isolate.
But first, for non-Australians, who or what is Coles?
Coles is one of the two major supermarket chains in Australia. The other one is Woolworths. When the pandemic struck, Woolworths was the first to provide online shopping. Coles scrambled to follow, but their service has never been quite as good. What Coles do offer is $2 home delivery at certain times of the day. As I’m on a fixed income [pension], cheap delivery is a huge selling point. But no more.
I am not going to be using Coles’ online shopping any more because I have NEVER had a delivery that was exactly what I ordered. Most of the time I shrug it off because the substitute item[s] is ‘close enough’. The substitution for this last order though, makes no sense.
This is what I ordered:
Click on the image to make it bigger.
Essentially, I ordered two different kinds of chilled cat food. Chilled cat food is fresh meat. One sort wasn’t supplied at all. For the second one – circled in red – the ‘Picker’ substituted ‘wet cat food’ – i.e. tinned cat food.
The wet cat food looks like this:
I never order that stuff because Golli won’t eat it, which makes the substitution doubly annoying because Golli isn’t eating much of anything at the moment, but he does seem to like the ones that weren’t ‘available’.
Knowing how many types of chilled cat food [fresh meat] there are to choose from, I logged in to the Coles website and went to the chilled cat food section, to see if everything was ‘out of stock’. This is what I found [about half an hour ago]:
As you can see, there are TEN kinds of chilled cat meat and only one of them is out of stock [the purple one bottom right]. Curiously, the cat food I ordered is still showing as available.
So this is my question: even if my chosen cat food were out of stock, why not substitute it with some other chilled cat meat? Why select something completely different?
I rang Coles and asked that very question but did not get any kind of an answer. The only thing the customer service person could offer was a refund. But to get the refund I have to send the unwanted cat food back with the driver. And that means:
sitting by the front door between 11 and 12 so I can catch the driver when he arrives, [contactless delivery]
masking up
putting on gloves
going through each bag
finding the cat food and explaining that he’s to take it back
And no, I’m not exaggerating. Being in protective self-isolation means we wash or ‘air’ [leave outside for 3 days] everything we buy before we bring it inside the house. So for me to go out and return the offending cat food is a big deal, but I can’t afford to waste $5 on something I’ll just throw away.
A $2 delivery fee is simply not worth this much angst. Just not good enough Coles. Not. Good. Enough.
Before I begin, I have to clarify that I’m only looking at the effectiveness of vaccines against the original Omicron variant in this post. I have no information about the Omicron BA.2 variant.
First up, a truth that no government wants to admit: neither Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca do much to protect against symptomatic disease with Omicron:
Comparison of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines at 2 doses
I took this data from a study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2119451 If you scroll down to Table 3, which appears just before the Discussion, you can check the raw data for yourselves. This data compares the effectiveness of all three vaccines against the Delta variant and the Omicron variant. This is an example:
As you can see, AstraZeneca is shown by its scientific name rather than the one we’re all familiar with. The same applies to Pfizer – BNT162b2 – and Moderna – mRNA-1273. For each vaccine, Table 3 displays its effectiveness against Delta and Omicron at specific time points. The 2 – 4 week time point is when the vaccine is at its most effective in preventing symptomatic disease. You can then see how quickly that effectiveness wanes over time.
Because I found the presentation of the data a bit hard to follow, I translated it into a spreadsheet and made it more visually clear:
The data from Table 3 showing the results for the Omicron variant only
Despite my best efforts, the data is still confusing so let me walk you through it. On the far left you have the effectiveness of the three vaccines at just 2 doses. As you can see, after 5 months, none of them are very effective and AstraZeneca is the least effective of all. This means that if you are Australian, over 65 and received only 2 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, you have virtually no protection. AT. ALL.
Until just 2 weeks ago, I fell into the ‘no protection at all’ category.
Now let’s have a look at what effect the boosters have. I’m going to start by looking at each vaccine boosted by itself – i.e. by a third dose of the same vaccine.
AstraZeneca
Looking at the table above you can see that 2 doses of AstraZeneca boosted with a 3rd dose of AstraZeneca – i.e. 3 doses of AstraZeneca – provides a maximum of 55.6% protection at 2-4 weeks. By week 9 – just over 2 months later – that protection has dropped to 46.7%.
Pfizer
Two initial doses of Pfizer followed by a Pfizer booster – i.e. 3 doses of Pfizer – provides a maximum of 67.2% protection. By week 10 that’s dropped to 45.7% protection.
Moderna
Two initial doses of Moderna followed by a Moderna booster – i.e. 3 doses of Moderna – provides a maximum of 66.3% protection. I can’t tell you what that protection becomes at week 10 because there is no data for it. The reason there’s no data is because there were only 7 people in the study who had 3 doses of Moderna. I guess that was simply too small a sample size to be significant.
To recap, 3 doses of the same vaccine at weeks 2 – 4 – i.e. when protection was highest – resulted in:
55.6% protection for AstraZeneca
66.3% protection for Moderna
67.2% protection for Pfizer
Pfizer comes out on top, but only by a very small percent. AstraZeneca is roughly 11% worse than either of the mRNA vaccines. That said, the level of protection still isn’t stellar…for any of them.
Now, let’s see what happens when you mix-and-match vaccines.
When AstraZeneca is boosted by Pfizer, the level of protection at week 2-4 is 62.4%. AstraZeneca boosted by Moderna provides quite a bit more protection at 70.1%.
Significantly, boosting with Moderna causes that protection to also wane less by weeks 9 – 10:
60.9% with Moderna
39.6% with Pfizer
I’m pleased to say that I received my Moderna booster two weeks ago so my protection is reasonably high. I say ‘reasonably’ because I only have 1/2 a thyroid. That means my immune system is a bit compromised and the vaccines can’t provide me with the same level of protection.
The most interesting bit of data, however, is yet to come.
If you received two doses of Pfizer and followed that up with the Moderna booster, you will have the highest level of protection at 73.9%. By contrast, two doses of Moderna followed by a Pfizer booster will only give you a 64.9% level of protection.
So in conclusion:
Get a booster as soon as you hit the 3 month mark [after your second dose of whatever].
If at all possible, get the Moderna booster, especially if you received AstraZeneca as your base vaccine.
Any booster is better than none.
Keep taking precautions even after you receive your booster – even 73.9% protection isn’t all that much.
The study I’ve referenced here only looked at protections from symptomatic disease. Not severe disease. Not death. If the vaccines work the same way against Omicron as they did against earlier variants then there’s a good chance they will protect against severe disease and death, but the data isn’t in yet, so they may not. And given that BA.2 is a bit of an unknown quantity, we don’t even know if the boosters are as effective against it as they are against BA.1.
Governments and media have gone quiet on the pandemic, leading a lot of people to believe that the danger is over. It’s not. It’s just that no-one wants to admit that vaccines are not the magic bullet we were promised. The continuing death toll here in Australia and elsewhere in the world is proof of that.
Get your booster. Wear a mask. Don’t be a fool, the life you save may be your own.
Right from the start of this pandemic, one of the two largest supermarket chains here in Australia has been leading the way when it comes to innovation.
First they got online shopping with a contactless home delivery service running smoothly.
Then they set up a ‘Direct to Boot’ service that allows me to order online and have someone bring the shopping out and deposit it straight into my boot. Quick, efficient, NO CONTACT! And free.
Today Woolworths gave me something I’ve wanted for years – paper carry bags.
We’d all just become used to taking our own bags with us [for shopping] when the pandemic hit. Since then, if you wanted contactless shopping you had to accept the old plastic shopping bags. I have about a million of them stashed away. Now, at last, I can have the convenience and peace of mind of contactless shopping without the guilt of all those damn plastic bags.
Seriously, I’m just about jumping for joy. I haven’t checked the composition of these paper carry bags yet, but I’m hoping they’re made from recycled paper. That would kill two very big birds with one stone.
And in case you’re wondering about the strength of these paper carry bags, have a closer look at what I bought:
What’s inside the bag?
This first bag contains butter, yoghurt, and…ta dah…chicken thigh cutlets in the big paper parcel. Yes, the chicken is inside a single use plastic bag inside the paper, but it’s still ‘leaky’ stuff, and quite heavy, but the bag held up without a single problem.
The second closeup shows fruit and veg – not in individual single use plastic. Brilliant. Again, not a problem at all:
Fruit and veg
The best part though, is what happens once those bags are emptied. I’m going to fold them up and put them straight into the recycling bin. Easey peasey. 😀
Seriously, Woolworths deserves to be congratulated on all the innovations it has implemented these last two years. I hope the other supermarket chains take notice and follow suit.
I have very personal reasons for wanting the pandemic restrictions precautions to remain in place, but I realise that most young, healthy people have no such concerns. They know they’re immortal so the death toll from Covid is simply a number…right?
Wrong. The numbers shown on the graph below are for the US only, and while the great majority of Covid deaths occur in the 50+ age brackets, there are some eye-wateringly large numbers in the younger age groups as well:
The numbers shown in the graph above are already out of date but they provide a useful snapshot of who’s been dying in the US. As a mother, I can’t look at 795 children dying of Covid without getting a lump in my throat. Covid is an awful way to die.
And what about the young adult age group? 5,581 deaths doesn’t seem like a lot in a population of 360+ million people, but what if we compare those deaths to military personnel lost by the US in the last 100 odd years?
Afghanistan
‘Only’ 1,928 young lives lost during the 20 years the US military spent in Afghanistan:
Covid 5,581 vs Afghan War 1,928.
I’m not going to bother working out the yearly average. These numbers speak for themselves.
Iraq
Click on the pic below to see the full sized version. There you will see that ‘only’ 4,431 young people died in the Iraq offensive.
Covid 5,581 vs Iraq War 4,431.
Vietnam
Going further back in time to a period in which I was a young adult, the Vietnam war resulted in 58,220 deaths from a range of causes:
That’s a lot more than the 18 – 29 year olds [5,581] who’ve died from Covid thus far, but the Vietnam war went on for roughly ten and a half years – from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975 – and the youngest soldiers to die were only 16 while the oldest was 62:
I don’t want to create shifty numbers by counting those Covid deaths under 19 or those in the 40 to 64 year old age brackets. Instead, I’ll just add the 18-29 year old group to that of the 30-39 year olds – i.e. 5581 + 16,343.
Why? Because 18 to 39 is a realistic age range for people fighting in wars, and if I’m going to compare Covid deaths to military deaths then I want it to be as accurate as possible.
So, combining those two age groups gives a total of 21,924 Covid deaths. Divide 21,924 by 2 [ie the two years of the pandemic], and you get an average of 10,962 Covid deaths per year.
If you now divide the total number of Vietnam deaths [58,220] by 10.5 [i.e. the number of years of the war], you get an average of 5544.762 deaths per year.
Covid = 10,962 deaths per year Vietnam = 5544.8 deaths per year
Korea
Further back still, US forces suffered a total of 36,913 military deaths in Korea from 1950 to 1953:
Although the Korean War never officially ended, active fighting only lasted for three years so I’ll base my calculations on the 3 year number. If you divide the total number of deaths in Korea [36,913] by 3 [ie the number of years], you get an average of 12,304 deaths per year.
Covid = 10,962 deaths per year Korea = 12,304 deaths per year
For the first time, we get a war that’s been more deadly than Covid, but we had to go back almost 70 years to do so.
And finally we go all the way back to World War II.
World War II
In World War II, the US lost 407,300 military lives from December 11, 1941 to September 2, 1945. That’s a period of almost 4 years. If we divide the total number of military deaths [407,300] by 4 [i.e. the number of years of the war], we get an average of 101,825 deaths per year.
Covid = 10,962 deaths per year WWII = 101,825 deaths per year
Another war that has beaten the number of Covid deaths…or has it?
What if I add up all those military deaths and average them over the total number of years in which wars were fought?
The screenshot above is from an Excel spreadsheet I created. The Covid deaths by age group are eight days out of date but they were the only ones I could find so I inserted a more up to date figure in the final Totals row.
To me, two things almost leap off the page:
there have now been almost twice as many Covid deaths in the US as all military deaths combined [since 1941],
the military deaths in the US took place over a period of 45 years. The Covid deaths occurred in just two years. And the pandemic isn’t over.
If the US lost this many people in a war, the nation would be in mourning for a century. Why do these Covid deaths not inspire the same sense of horror…and respect?
A lot of people say that restrictions cannot last forever. They say that people have to be given their personal freedoms back.
I say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Personal freedoms are not a right. They cannot exist without a society to support them. The social contract says that individuals give up some things in order to receive the protection of the ‘group’.
What kind of protection? Education, healthcare, law enforcement, a justice system, public transport, roads, jobs, homes, high tech gadgets, nightclubs, parties, power, food, clean water to drink and flush indoor toilets…
Now think about what would happen if all electricity stopped being produced for two weeks. Would you survive without light, aircon, heating, food delivered to supermarkets, rubbish removed from the streets, street lighting, access to hospitals, public transport etc etc.?
Some of you would, 99.9999999% of us wouldn’t.
All the protections I’ve listed plus thousands more are our reward for contributing to society and abiding by its rules. If we don’t want to abide by those rules we are free to find a desert island and live like savages.
If we can’t survive on our own, we have to accept that personal freedom, individual freedom can only exist within the context of a society of some sort. But that freedom must be earned.
How? Through social responsibility towards all members of society, even those you don’t personally care about.
Why? Because everyone will get old and sick eventually. If you want to be cared for when your time comes then you have to pay your dues now.
And finally a word about restrictions. Wearing a mask to protect yourself and others is not fun, but it’s miles better than dying of Covid. It’s also preferable to having your economy collapse because everyone is off work being sick.
Good hygiene is something everyone should practise all the time, not just when a pandemic hits. Not washing your hands after pointing percy at the porcelain, or wiping your bum, or picking your nose is disgusting. Only creeps do that. Yuck.
Keeping your distance from others so as not to spread the virus may not be ‘fun’. In fact, it can crimp your social life if clubbing or getting pissed at the pub are your favourite things in life. But keeping your distance from others won’t kill you. It could kill me, and dying is no fun either.
More to the point, dying is permanent. No coming back from the grave. No miraculous resurrections. Dead is dead is dead. Forever.
By contrast, missing out on your social life is temporary. Equating the two is like saying that stubbing your toe is as bad as having the whole leg amputated.
With the greatest respect, grow a pair and grow the fuck up.
I almost missed this interview in which Dr John Campbell talks to Swedish whistleblower, Dr Jon Tallinger. I was shocked. Then I went to Dr Tallinger’s Youtube channel and watched him tell the world the truth about the so-called Swedish experiment. In brief, it boils down to this:
Sweden didn’t expect Covid-19 to hit and hit hard,
the Swedish government did not have a plan for dealing with Covid-19,
once the virus hit, the plan became to ‘let it rip’ with minimal interference,
All the way from the top to local councils, the directive was to not treat Covid patients over 80, or the over-60’s if they had co-morbidities,
People from this vulnerable population were not to be sent to hospital if they presented with Covid-19 or Covid-19 like symptoms,
Instead, care homes and GPs were to administer palliative care only,
This palliative care included morphine to make the patients comfortable, but also to make them appear as if they were not suffering when family came to visit,
Morphine is contraindicated for people with respiratory diseases because it depresses their breathing. In other words, it speeds up the moment of death.
The people in this vulnerable population were not even to receive oxygen to help them breathe. Top health officials lied about this directive saying that administering oxygen outside of a hospital setting was too ‘dangerous’.
This is a lie with just enough truth in it to make it plausible to the public. A small number of people with certain kinds of respiratory problems shouldn’t be given oxygen, but almost all Covid-19 sufferers should. Remember Boris Johnson of the UK? When he was hospitalised with Covid-19, the press made a big point about how he needed oxygen but wasn’t sick enough to need a ventilator.
There has been a cover up at all levels of government, and the reason could be that health care for these unproductive members of the Swedish population is just too…expensive.
These damning accusations don’t begin until minute 8:30 because Dr Tallinger clearly fears he won’t be believed and because…this is his own country doing what amounts to involuntary euthanasia:
“…that we let the virus, Covid-19, effectively eliminate those that aren’t contributing. And they [the Swedish government] are doing this with open eyes…as a strategy for Sweden.”
Transcript starting at minute 13:31
The architect of Sweden’s strategy for Covid-19 is Anders Tegnell. On June 3, 2020, the BBC reported that Anders Tegnell now admits that too many died. In that report, Tegnell implies that the deaths of the elderly were an unforeseen accident. Dr Jon Tallinger has called him out as a liar, pure and simple.
If anyone believes that going for ‘herd immunity’ is a good thing, then watch what happens to Sweden in the coming months and years.
Just a very quick update regarding the possibility of viral spread via air conditioning in close, confined spaces:
I remember some years back there were a spate of Legionnaire Disease outbreaks caused by contaminated air conditioning units. You’d hope that the technology has improved since then, but if it hasn’t, then shopping malls, supermarkets, trains, trams, buses etc could be pathways for the spread of this virus.
If true, the wearing of masks becomes even more important.
The Dept of Health & Human Services [VIC] publishes Covid-19 case data, but it’s not wildly accessible. There are no graphs or charts, and the breakdown of infections – i.e. the source of the infections – is only available on the day of the media release. In other words, it’s buried.
I don’t know whether this is a deliberate attempt not to ‘worry’ people, or simply typical DHHS bureaucracy. Either way, the messaging is not getting out there, so I trawled through the data and created a simple Excel spreadsheet.
First up, the raw data for MAY, 2020:
Next, the raw data for JUNE, 2020:
As you can see, I wanted to show the source of the infections, but gave up when the data was too hard to find. Apologies, but I do have a life.
Now for some charts from that data. The first one is a line graph showing the ups and downs of infections [in Victoria] for all of May and June.
This chart gives a decent overview, but the data is squashed up because you can’t fit almost 60 days onto a small chart. Despite this, you can clearly see three things:
Victoria only had two days on which we recorded zero new cases: June 6 and June 9.
Victoria never really got rid of the virus. That was why Premier Dan Andrews resisted Scott Morrison’s push to reopen as quickly as possible. Sadly, he didn’t resist enough. Or Scott Morrison proved to be a bigger bully than expected.
Apart from a few small dips, new cases in Victoria have been rising steadily since June 9. This is in stark contrast to May. In May, new cases fluctuated up and down, but the overall trajectory was down. In other words, the lockdown was working.
The next two graphs show this more clearly. The first is for May:
The second graph is for June:
What’s even more worrying than that upward trajectory for June is that the number of new cases has doubled in just four days – i.e from 20 on June 24 to 41 on June 27.
All up, we’ve had 10 consecutive days of double digit new cases. 10 days in a row. And in the latest news, a nurse working at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, one of the biggest in Melbourne, has tested positive for Covid-19.
Scott Morrison may believe that we can control this virus, but that is pure, arrogant bullshit. The numbers don’t lie. We can’t ‘control’ this virus any more than we could control the bushfires that devastated two states just a few months ago. Remember them? Remember how good Scomo was at ‘fixing’ the inferno? Yes, I thought so.
The truth is that nothing has really changed [for the better] since we originally went into lockdown:
Despite all the hype about the contact tracing app, I’ve heard nothing new about it since it was revealed that it doesn’t work that well with iPhones.
We have some more intensive care units, and more medical personnel trained to use them, but overseas data has shown that even the most sophisticated health care system can be overwhelmed when the virus surges out of control.
We have more PPE [personal protective equipment], but I don’t know whether we have enough for medical personnel in a surge. Pretty sure we don’t have enough for medical personnel and the general public if shit hits the fan.
So where exactly is Australia’s magic bullet supposed to come from?
One option that does work is the mandatory wearing of masks in public – to protect us from those who are infected but don’t know they are. Masks stop them from breathing on us.
South East Asian countries, like Thailand, that have mandated the wearing of masks have almost ridiculously low infection rates. Here is Oz, however, people still give you funny looks if you wear a mask in public, so I guess masks are a no-go.
So what else is there?
Well, there is testing. If there were random, compulsory testing [like in booze buses] we’d get a much better idea of how many asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spreaders there are, but it seems that testing is a) voluntary and b) mostly looking for people who are already sick. People who fear they may be forced into self-quarantine for 14 days are refusing to be tested. The irony is that they could well be the very people we most need to test.
When it comes to therapeutics, there are a couple of existing drugs that have an anti-inflammatory effect and may reduce the number of covid-19 deaths, but they’re still largely untested.
And that’s about it. Short of another draconian lockdown, we don’t really have any effective way of controlling the virus, which leads me to think that our success the first time around was due more to luck than good management. Sadly, I fear that our reopening won’t be as lucky because the ‘stages’ are based on the idea that all of us will ‘do the right thing’. Yeah, right. -facepalm-
The reality is that the messaging has been wrong from the start. People were told that they wouldn’t be badly affected by the virus, so now all they can see is that they’ve been made poor, bored and unhappy just to save a few oldies who were going to die anyway. ‘Eff that… Little wonder then that when the leash is loosened there’s a rush of me,me,me behaviour.
If our leaders really had wanted to reopen ‘safely’, they should have started with an education campaign that focused on the reality of the virus and what it does to people. Then they should have made any reopening, no matter how minor, contingent on the lack of new cases. Clear rules with clear targets.
Finally, they should have made it very clear that the instant people stop obeying the rules, the whole town/state/country will go back to lockdown. And when the inevitable happened [like toddlers pushing the boundaries], the consequences should have been followed through. Again, clear rules and clear consequences.
Instead, we’ve had a wishy-washy ‘plan’, mixed messages all over the place, and media showing how hard it is to live with the lockdown instead of how hard it is to die of the virus… And yes, ABC and Ita Buttrose, I’m looking at you. Since when did the people’s ABC pander to the likes of Scott Morrison?
To be honest, I think we should have had another Grim Reaper campaign:
The Grim Reaper advertisement
Right at the end, the voice over says ‘Prevention is the only cure we’ve got’. Sounds familiar, don’t you think?
There’s been a lot of controversy about the Grim Reaper strategy, but the truth is it worked. It made us aware of both the danger and what we had to do to stay alive.
Overkill? I don’t know. If we act like toddlers, shouldn’t we be treated like toddlers?
Sadly, none of the possibilities I’ve outlined have actually happened. We had a poorly organised, draconian lockdown that resulted in massive queues outside every Centrelink office in the country. And we’ve had big chunks of society thrown under the economic bus, but in terms of ‘management’, that’s about it. Now, I fear we’re having a reopening that’s being ‘managed’ as well as you’d expect.
We could have reopened safely, but Scott Morrison didn’t do a single thing to make a safe reopening possible. He just laid out his ‘plan’ and expected everyone to make it happen. Yeah, the smirk may be gone but #ScottyFromMarketing still knows bugger all about human nature.
Buckle up for stage two my fellow Victorians. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
I think a lot of people do not understand what ‘herd immunity’ actually means. This first graphic is what the very first case of Covid-19 would have looked like – 1 infected person surrounded by millions of people with no immunity at all:
Now contrast this with what happens when a population has 70 – 90% herd immunity:
When a newly infected person crops up, he or she is surrounded by people who have already developed immunity to the infection so the virus has nowhere to go and dies out.
Or to put it another way, the virus cannot reach new victims because they are protected by a barrier of people with immunity.
This is what is meant by ‘herd immunity’ – the protection of the uninfected by those who have already been infected. You could also say this is the protection of the weak by the strong. Bear that in mind.
But, and there’s always a but, you can only reach herd immunity if almost everyone in the population is already immune. The question then is: how do we get to herd immunity?
In the modern world, vaccination programs have all but eradicated diseases such as measles, small pox, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis, rabies etc. More importantly, people who have not been vaccinated are still protected because of herd immunity.
Is there any other way of acquiring herd immunity?
The simple answer is no, the more complicated answer is ‘maybe’. If you look at the list of quite deadly diseases eradicated by vaccines, you notice that they’ve been around for thousands of years. Assuming they were infecting quite a lot of people for all those thousands of years, why did humanity not gain herd immunity to them?
The answer is that 70 – 90% mentioned above. Relatively benign infections that didn’t kill off their hosts may well have led to herd immunity in the past, but deadly ones like small pox clearly didn’t. Isolation probably protected a lot of populations in the ancient world, but even today, with so many people travelling from one side of the world to the other, it’s still not possible for that many people to be infected and recover all at once.
Without an effective vaccine, Covid-19 will continue to circulate through the global population for years, much like the Spanish Flu.
If an effective vaccine against Covid-19 is never found, we will have no choice but to gain herd immunity the hard way. But the cost will be heavy. The elderly and those in ‘care’ will die. A lot of medical personnel will die. And so will people of all ages who have pre-existing medical conditions.
One of the highest co-morbidities for Covid-19 is diabetes.
Other co-morbidities include high blood pressure, lung conditions, HIV etc.
Now imagine all these people dying, year after year after year until we reach the magic number of 70 – 90% immunity.
It’s a horrible scenario, yet many governments are flirting with the concept of ‘natural herd immunity’ because they see it as a magic bullet that will save their economies. Sweden is one such country, and the almost inevitable results are now in:
From left to right, we see Country, population, number infected [with Covid-19] and number died [of Covid-19].
Sweden has roughly twice the population of Norway, Finland and Denmark, but about five times as many infections. When it comes to deaths, however, Sweden is waaaaay out in front. But it’s the breakdown of those deaths that’s truly horrifying. A great many have occurred in care homes where the sick have received next to no basic care. Instead, many doctors have recommended cocktails used for end-of-life palliative care. These cocktails often have a negative effect on the respiratory system. And yes, that means the sick and elderly die faster.
When I was a kid, I remember learning that the ancient Greek state of Sparta would place newborn babies out on a hillside overnight, so that only the strongest would survive to become warriors. Later on, I learned that in [some?] Eskimo tribes, the elderly would walk out onto an icefloe and calmly wait to die, so they would not be a burden on their communities.
I do not know how accurate either of those stories are, but they taught me the difference between voluntary euthanasia and state sanctioned, involuntary euthanasia. I felt sad for the Eskimo elders, but even now, so many decades later, I still feel nothing but contempt for the Spartans. They mandated that helpless babies should die to save Spartan society from becoming ‘weak’…
Do I really need to spell it out? Any society that puts money and saving ‘the economy’ ahead of lives, no matter how much of a ‘drain’ those lives may be, is no better than the Spartans.
I used Sweden as the example in this post because the results of that country’s experiment have been so stark, but almost all of the countries of the First World have flirted, or are still flirting, with herd immunity…as a choice. Instead of saving lives while waiting for a vaccine to become available, they’ve chosen strategies that encourage herd immunity in the hope that their economies won’t suffer.
The reality, however, is that no country is near the magic number required for herd immunity to actually work. Not one. Meanwhile, the death toll rises.
So who is to blame?
The epidemiologists who recommended that governments aim for herd immunity?
Or the politicians who accepted those recommendations and went ahead with what amounts to involuntary, state sanctioned euthanasia?
Or are we, ultimately to blame?
Yes, us. The highest death tolls have so far occurred in prosperous, Western, democratic countries. That means we voted those politicians into power. Or maybe we just didn’t vote at all and allowed them in by default. Either way, we got the leaders we deserve.
With so many countries re-opening after lockdown, the risk of a second wave grows every day, especially as research now shows that the standard social distancing recommendations are…far too optimistic.
The research, conducted in Japan, uses lasers and special cameras to capture how the virus is spread, and how far it goes. The video below has some English dubbing and/or English sub-titles. Although the whole, hour+ video is interesting, the segment about the actual research begins at 29:10 and ends at approximately 35:18:
The research shows that even speaking can spread the virus via both large droplets and tiny micro droplets. The large droplets fall to the ground fairly quickly, even in an enclosed space with little air circulation, but the micro droplets remain in the air for over 20 minutes. Because they’re so small, they also spread a great deal further than the recommended 1.5 or 2 metres.
The take home message is that confined spaces – like public transport, office buildings, shopping malls, supermarkets and classrooms – are the perfect breeding grounds for micro droplet borne virus particles.
The good news is that masks do reduce the distance that both large and small droplets can travel. And /that/ is why countries that mandate the wearing of masks in public have less viral transmission than Western countries in which people are ‘self conscious’ about wearing masks. Apparently it’s okay to become infected and infect others, but heaven forbid that we should look silly…
And now a word about the hypocrisy of my government in scolding protestors attending the Black Lives Matter demonstrations:
those protests ALL happened in the open air where normal air circulation [with or without wind] would have dispersed the droplets quickly,
this is in contrast to people returning to work – at the behest of this government – in confined spaces with air conditioning instead of natural ventilation. Does anyone else remember the legionnaire outbreaks caused by contaminated, commercial air conditioning units?
a great many of the protestors wore masks,
this compares to people travelling or working in confined spaces without masks.
the organisers of the protests, at least here in Australia, were handing out masks and hand sanitiser to help reduce the risk of infection,
I’m not aware of any public transport employee handing out masks or hand sanitiser to travellers. Ditto supermarkets. Office buildings etc etc etc.
It’s the height of hypocrisy to say that it’s okay to catch the virus from public transport, or offices, factories, shops, restaurants etc…to save jobs…and the economy…and the effing budget bottom line…but it’s not okay to catch it while protesting state sanctioned murder.
And we all nod wisely and say ‘tut tut’.
I find that more disturbing than I can say. When did we turn into such placid sheep?
Meeks
p.s. My thanks to Dr. John Campbell for talking about the Japanese research in his latest video update: https://youtu.be/kmo_1Tcdp30
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably reached a point where you’d like to forget about Covid-19 altogether, so sorry, but these developments could be important.
As always, my source is Dr John Campbell. You can find his latest Youtube video here. The three things that worry me from this video concern:
the implications of skin colour
the new inflammatory syndrome in children
the results of Germany’s cautious re-opening
Skin Colour
If you’ve watched Dr John’s videos before there’s a good chance that you’ve already heard his views on the role of vitamin D in possibly easing the severity of Covid-19. As people with darker skin produce vitamin D more slowly, he has been advocating that they be tested for vitamin D deficiency and prescribed supplements if necessary.
As someone with olive skin who was tested for vitamin D some years ago – and found to be deficient – I’ve made it a point to get out into the sunshine more. The connection to race though, that has made me feel a little uncomfortable. I hate racism in all its forms because I had a tiny taste of it as a kid in ‘White Australia’.
But…this statistical data from the UK is too stark to ignore:
The graph shows data that has been adjusted for socio economic factors and other risk factors that could skew the results. Despite this, the stats show that there is a continuum of increased risk based on skin colour. Basically, people of mixed race are just as likely to die of Covid-19 as the control group, which is white people.
From there, however, the likelihood of dying increases as skin colour darkens. People with black skin colour are shown to be twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as white people. And this is the graph that has been adjusted for other, known risk factors.
There may be some other, unknown risk factor at work, but if there is the slightest chance that skin colour, and hence vitamin D production is involved, then taking vitamin D could save lives.
There has been well documented research done on vitamin D and the effect it may have on protecting cells from viruses:
‘Vitamin D has long been recognized as essential to the skeletal system. Newer evidence suggests that it also plays a major role regulating the immune system, perhaps including immune responses to viral infection. Interventional and observational epidemiological studies provide evidence that vitamin D deficiency may confer increased risk of influenza and respiratory tract infection.’
There is also a lot of research that shows the health impacts that result from a lack of various other vitamins. The following are just a few of the best known ones:
Vitamin K
‘Vitamin K deficiency in adults is rare but does occur in infants. The main symptom of a vitamin K deficiency is excessive bleeding caused by an inability to form blood clots.’
I’m no expert on nutrition and vitamins, but it seems clear to me that vitamin D may save the lives of those most at risk. If that’s true, it must be acknowledged and used.
Inflammatory syndrome in children
So far, this new syndrome is quite rare – about 20 cases in the UK and 64 in the US – but it has been associated with Covid-19 so parents should be aware of it. The screenshot below was taken from Dr John’s video:
No one knows exactly what connection this new syndrome has to Covid-19, but any connection is worrying.
The syndrome has been named: Paediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome.
Re-opening in Germany
As Australia is also looking to cautiously ease the lockdown that’s protected us so well, I found the results from Germany less heartening than Dr John. The statistics shown are for only the first ten days since the lockdown in Germany was officially eased:
Even if every German citizen immediately raced out and kissed everyone they met, the incubation period for Covid-19 is between 2 and 9 days, give or take. As such, the numbers of new cases are not likely to rise exponentially for a week or two yet. In other words, I don’t think we’ve seen the true effect of the easing in Germany. Not yet.
I may be overly pessimistic, but I’m seriously scared that money, and human impatience, will give rise to a second wave of the virus, a second wave that will be significantly worse than the first.
During the Spanish Flu pandemic, the second wave was caused by a mutation in the original virus that made it much more virulent:
‘Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.’
The Covid-19 virus does not appear to be mutating yet, but the more people that are infected, the greater the likelihood that one of them will host a mutated version of the virus.
Scientists all over the world are trying to develop a vaccine that will stop the spread of Covid-19, but they’re not there yet. They need more time.
I believe it’s up to us, and our governments, to do everything in our power to slow the spread of this virus. Not just to reduce the number of people dying from it, but also to reduce the chance that it will mutate. If the Spanish Flu is anything to go by, that mutation will not be benign.
I truly hate to be a Cassandra, but I’m really scared that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Meeka's Mind 