Coronavirus thread

[MusicTurner]

Yes, that made the news around here---maybe a week or so ago?  Hard to keep track of time these days.  By the way, in case anyone here doesn't know, the ad campaign was created by someone else (I forget who).  That's a fake funeral home.  Wonder how many people got the point and then got the jab?

PD

Thank you for the info. Looking closely at the picture, indeed, some traces of a possible photoshopping can perhaps be seen.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Thank you for the info. Looking closely at the picture, indeed, some traces of a possible photoshopping can perhaps be seen.

MT,

No, it wasn't a case of photoshopping but more of a gimmick trying to get people to realize the implications of not getting vaccinated.  It sounds like the advertising agency was spending its own money, but I could be wrong.  You can read more about it here:  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vaccine-billboard-funeral-home-truck-pro-vaccine-goes-viral-charlotte/

PD

[MusicTurner]

MT,

No, it wasn't a case of photoshopping but more of a gimmick trying to get people to realize the implications of not getting vaccinated.  It sounds like the advertising agency was spending its own money, but I could be wrong.  You can read more about it here:  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vaccine-billboard-funeral-home-truck-pro-vaccine-goes-viral-charlotte/

PD

Thank you, I get it

[DavidW]

Wonder how many people got the point and then got the jab?

Doubtful.  Talking down to the unvaccinated is not going to help, it just comes across as liberal condescension.  If they don't agree with the premise of your statement, then what is done (as in this case) is just posturing for the already vaccinated.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Doubtful.  Talking down to the unvaccinated is not going to help, it just comes across as liberal condescension.  If they don't agree with the premise of your statement, then what is done (as in this case) is just posturing for the already vaccinated.

Sadly, if one just does even the briefest of googling, one can read myriad articles on how funeral homes are being overwhelmed in a number of states/areas. 

I did a bit more digging and apparently the "hoax" worked:  "The advert had the desired effect, Mr Hummell said, revealing that since the weekend, traffic to book a vaccine appointment on the site had seen a "significant boost".

You can read more about it here:  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ad-shows-funeral-home-sharing-105730737.html  The above quote is from that article.  It seems that the ad agency partnered with StarMed.

PD

[Karl Henning]

Doubtful.  Talking down to the unvaccinated is not going to help, it just comes across as liberal condescension.  If they don't agree with the premise of your statement, then what is done (as in this case) is just posturing for the already vaccinated.

This is true. Also true is that some percentage of the anti-vaxxers are not guided by reason, and therefore cannot be reasoned out of their position.

[DavidW]

This is true. Also true is that some percentage of the anti-vaxxers are not guided by reason, and therefore cannot be reasoned out of their position.

That is why Biden made the right call on mandating wherever he could.  They either vaccinate or remove themselves from positions where they increase the spread.  Somtimes the best thing is to take action instead of trying to persuade.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

That is why Biden made the right call on mandating wherever he could.  They either vaccinate or remove themselves from positions where they increase the spread.  Somtimes the best thing is to take action instead of trying to persuade.

It was hard to see two nurses (who had been working as nurses for many years) being interviewed (on CNN I believe?) who were refusing to get vaccinated and knowing that they would probably soon be losing their jobs though.    

And no, "talking down" to the unvaccinated won't help either....and also isn't kind.  Trying to get people talking though--and hopefully thinking--is a good thing IMHO.

PD

[Karl Henning]

That is why Biden made the right call on mandating wherever he could.  They either vaccinate or remove themselves from positions where they increase the spread.  Somtimes the best thing is to take action instead of trying to persuade.

Exactly.

[Karl Henning]

It was hard to see two nurses (who had been working as nurses for many years) being interviewed (on CNN I believe?) who were refusing to get vaccinated and knowing that they would probably soon be losing their jobs though.    

And no, "talking down" to the unvaccinated won't help either....and also isn't kind.  Trying to get people talking though--and hopefully thinking--is a good thing IMHO.

PD

There's a trenchant line of Ian Anderson's on the mock concept album Thick As a Brick: "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think."

[Pohjolas Daughter]

There's a trenchant line of Ian Anderson's on the mock concept album Thick As a Brick: "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think."

And an even older expression:  "You can lead a horse to water....." [and you know the rest of it I'm sure].

PD

[T. D.]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/pfizer-covid-vaccine-protection-against-infection-tumbles-to-47percent-study-confirms.html

The effectiveness of Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine against infection tumbles over several months, falling from a peak of 88% a month after receiving the two-shot series to 47% six months later, according to an observational study published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.

While the two-dose mRNA vaccine's efficacy against infection wanes, its protection against Covid-related hospitalizations persists, remaining 90% effective for all coronavirus variants of concern — including delta — for at least six months, according to the study, which was funded by Pfizer.

The findings confirm early reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Israeli health officials that found the protection against infection falls over several months even as its effectiveness in keeping people out of the hospital held up....

Meanwhile, my brother is a doctor, works at a hospital in Western NY. Today, in his words:

delay getting out the hospital today because of a bunch of assholes carrying confederate flags and signs saying "Ivermectin Now!" protesting vaccine mandates.
I weep for our country!

[Karl Henning]

Meanwhile, my brother is a doctor, works at a hospital in Western NY. Today, in his words:

delay getting out the hospital today because of a bunch of assholes carrying confederate flags and signs saying "Ivermectin Now!" protesting vaccine mandates.
I weep for our country!

[T. D.]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58170809

Some funny stuff.
Apparently, some of the studies claiming the highest efficacy of ivermectin come from Iran and Lebanon! [Scientists are dubious on both]
So MAGAites are now looking to Iran for guidance? 

[Pohjolas Daughter]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/pfizer-covid-vaccine-protection-against-infection-tumbles-to-47percent-study-confirms.html

The effectiveness of Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine against infection tumbles over several months, falling from a peak of 88% a month after receiving the two-shot series to 47% six months later, according to an observational study published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.

While the two-dose mRNA vaccine's efficacy against infection wanes, its protection against Covid-related hospitalizations persists, remaining 90% effective for all coronavirus variants of concern — including delta — for at least six months, according to the study, which was funded by Pfizer.

The findings confirm early reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Israeli health officials that found the protection against infection falls over several months even as its effectiveness in keeping people out of the hospital held up....

Meanwhile, my brother is a doctor, works at a hospital in Western NY. Today, in his words:

delay getting out the hospital today because of a bunch of assholes carrying confederate flags and signs saying "Ivermectin Now!" protesting vaccine mandates.
I weep for our country!

I had read that recently re the Pfizer jabs.     Have you (or anyone else here) heard more about the other vaccines and any further news about their effectiveness?

I feel for your brother.  How is he holding out energy and moral-wise?  I'm sure that this must be taking a toll on him and his own health!

PD

[T. D.]

I had read that recently re the Pfizer jabs.     Have you (or anyone else here) heard more about the other vaccines and any further news about their effectiveness?

I feel for your brother.  How is he holding out energy and moral-wise?  I'm sure that this must be taking a toll on him and his own health!

PD

I thought that story was valuable because it more or less confirmed a fairly shocking Israeli study that surfaced months ago.
I don't intend to post a lot on COVID issues; I follow a variety of respectable news sources (mainly Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, The Economist), and most worthwhile news should be accessible and widely disseminated.

My brother is a cardiologist, so the referenced COVID demonstrations, though depressing, are mostly nuisances for him nowadays. However, in the early (2020) months of COVID he had to work some in that area, which was definitely stressful and hazardous.

[Karl Henning]

What do all these stories of vaccine denial deaths do to our sense of empathy?

By Maura Judkis

After Alexis Haug got the last raspy-voiced call from her unvaccinated, covid-stricken 51-year-old father, after he was intubated, after she had driven eight hours, alone, to Jasper, Ala., to say her final goodbye to him in the hospital, after she had him cremated and split his ashes with her stepmother and three distraught sisters — that was when she found out what people were saying about him on the Internet.

"Anti-vax — STUPID hill to die on. He died for nothing," wrote one commenter.

"They get what they deserve," wrote another.

Those were some of the milder ones.

A website called Sorry Antivaxxer, which catalogues the covid-19 deaths of people who had publicly posted their rejection of the vaccine, had found out about Haug's father, Ron Munoz. It posted his photo, along with images from his Facebook page where he had shared anti-vaccine, anti-government memes. Commenters from Sorry Antivaxxer then posted images from the Facebook profile of Munoz's widow and also left comments about vaccination on her page.

Haug's sister had sent her the site while she was on her lunch break at work last week, and she began to scroll through the unsympathetic things that strangers on the Internet were saying about her father, not yet three weeks gone.

"By the time I came back to do my job, I was bawling," she said. She had to leave work for the rest of the day. One of her younger sisters posted a comment: "This is my dad. He was a very intelligent individual and very well loved. We as a family should be able to grieve without adults harassing/bullying us during this time."

Another commenter's response took Haug's breath away. They wrote to her sister: "I can't wait to read about you on here."

For the past two months, the Internet has been a graveyard of stories about unvaccinated deaths, which make up the majority of the pandemic's current victims. News outlets, The Washington Post included, track down cautionary tales — the new mother who got to hold her baby only once, the husband and wife who died two weeks apart, the young and healthy athlete struck down in his prime, the autistic 28-year-old — and record their family's sorrow. The narrative is even more potent when the victim expresses a dying wish for others to get vaccinated, and regrets their decision not to.

"One thing that psychologists know about persuasion is that it doesn't operate through statistics and evidence. It operates through emotion. When you give people an identifiable victim, as opposed to kind of abstract aggregate statistics about harm, then that's compelling," says Piercarlo Valdesolo, a visiting associate professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., who studies moral judgment. He recalls the adage: "One death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic."

The problem is that there are now, well, not a million, but tens of thousands of deaths just like these, from the past two months alone. Because of a toxic stew of political hostility and distrust, many of the unvaccinated die unrepentant. And the vaccinated are fed up.

Compassion fatigue, one of the pandemic's buzzwords from earlier this summer, is passive: It's an exhaustion, especially among health-care workers, with the level of death and hostility, resulting in complete apathy. But a subset of the fatigued have lapsed into schadenfreude, that apt German psychological term, which is active: It's invested in another person's pain or loss as an outcome. It's the pleasure in another person's misfortune. It's sites like Sorry Antivaxxer, or the Twitter account Covidiot Deaths, or the Reddit forum called the Herman Cain Award, named for the former Republican presidential candidate who died of covid in July 2020.

These feelings were predictable and inevitable. Our political and epidemiological circumstances have created the "perfect cocktail for schadenfreude," says Valdesolo. It pops up in the presence of three conditions.

First, "it's associated with in-group/out-group psychology," he says. "When it comes to vaccination, that's a political identity. So this issue has been associated with this already vitriolic and hostile intergroup conflict."

Second, "it needs to feel like the sufferer has done something harmful and that they deserve it," Valdesolo says. "People who are vaccinated interpret the vaccine as something you do not only for yourself but to protect others, and not taking it actively harms other people. And when you've got an out-group member who is harming other people, perhaps people in your own group, now you're prone to think, 'Okay, this person deserves it.' "

And finally, "the third is the ability to have behaved otherwise or perceived the agency here. And it seems like the person who hasn't taken the vaccine could have easily done so. They had the ability to choose otherwise. And any time we think someone's got that, then we feel like they're more responsible for their bad choice."

You won't find stories of vaccine regret among the Herman Cain Awards winners. The subreddit has standards for what makes a "winner": The victim must have made public declarations against vaccination or masking (private Facebook posts do not count). The victim must have been admitted to a hospital and received a covid diagnosis. "Suffering the consequences of believing covid misinformation is not sufficient to merit a nomination/award. Propagation of covid misinformation, or public declaration of being anti-vaxx/anti mask is necessary," according to the rules. "Award is granted upon the nominee's release from their Earthly shackles." (Asked for comment, Cain's daughter, Melanie Cain Gallo, replied in an email: "I had not heard about this, and it has no effect on our family because that group is insignificant and irrelevant.")

The founder and two moderators of the Herman Cain Awards spoke to The Post on the condition that only their first names be used because they have received threats from Reddit users.

When he first discovered the subreddit, moderator Jon "felt bad that I didn't feel bad," says the 45-year-old computer programmer from San Diego. "It's like, wow, you're suffering the consequences of your actions."

But as he's spent more time on the site, scrolling through death after death, he has come to view more of the awardees as victims of misinformation. "It's hard. It hasn't jaded me. I'm more compassionate."

They do this because "we really care," says Michelle, 43, a health-care worker from Philadelphia who also serves as moderator. "We're not just dancing on graves."

The subreddit was founded last year by Bob, 53, an academic researcher who lives near Los Angeles, but it didn't attract much attention until this summer. Since then, it has grown rapidly: There are more than 350,000 members, and approximately 150 posts, most of them awardees, go up every day.

Initially, Bob says, the posts were about public figures for whom there has been no shortage of schadenfreude, including former president Donald Trump's family, which was stricken with the virus last fall. Public figures have generally been considered fair game for criticism, from Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's diagnosis last week to "The Daily Show's" segment on the satirical "Pandemmy" awards, complete with an "In Ironic Memoriam" montage of several conservative radio hosts who died of covid this summer.

But the subreddit is more often turning its attention to the deaths of regular people on Facebook who weren't in any position of power, which has given Bob mixed feelings about his creation.

"I feel like we're punching down," he says. "I found it distasteful. But I also, at the same time, thought, 'Who am I to say what should or shouldn't be posted on this subreddit?' "

The moderators often say they look forward to the day the Herman Cain Awards no longer exist, which could happen in two ways: One is that more people get vaccinated and the country achieves herd immunity. The other is that the virus burns through the candidate pool and kills all the remaining nominees.

He has considered leaving the subreddit.

"It is a toxic environment in a lot of ways," he says. He had recently instituted some new rules — among them, banning screen images that are purely political and not related to covid — and had been shouted down by the subreddit's own subscribers, some of whom wanted the freedom to post whatever they wanted. "I spent three hours on it last night, and by the end of it, I had become toxic, and kind of a jerk in my replies to jerks, which is not typically something I would do."

The site has its share of bad apples. But many of the people who are drawn to it are hurting, too. Greg, a 54-year-old call-center worker from Indianapolis, found himself attracted to the Herman Cain Awards a year after his mother died of covid. Because she caught the virus last summer, she never had a chance to get vaccinated. Greg, who agreed to share only his first name because he fears being doxed on Reddit, has been dismayed to see people squander the chance his mother never got. He said that looking at the site felt like "therapy, in a way."

"It's a little bit dark," he says, but "it has helped me cope, in that there's still a lot of anger."

Does stewing in schadenfreude make that anger go away or does it just exacerbate it?

"That's probably a great question for a therapist," he says.

Two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. The sites can be ghastly places for trolls to act their cruelest, and they can also do a little bit of good by motivating a subset of their audience to get the jab.

Last month, HCA moderator Michelle began noticing people posting pictures of their freshly minted vaccination cards, in what the subreddit's lingo has deemed "IPAs" — "Immunized to Prevent Award." People who posted them often told stories about how they were hesitant to get vaccinated but didn't want to end up as another face on the site.

"I knew as soon as I saw them, I wanted to foster and herald them and help them grow and spread vaccine awareness," she says. "It was like a silver lining on what they've been posting." As of last week, more than 64 people have attributed their vaccination to the Herman Cain Awards.

Stories about unvaccinated deaths have served a similar purpose, perhaps with even greater reach. After Danielle Peterson's husband, Chris, died of covid in late August, she and her daughters appeared in a segment on the local news in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where they live. Danielle was vaccinated because she works in health care, but Chris was not — "He's a very proud, hardheaded conservative," Danielle says.

The healthy 35-year-old had been a sports nut who never missed one of his daughters' cheer competitions. Originally from the D.C. area, he was a die-hard Capitals fan.

In the TV segment, Peterson pleaded with viewers to get vaccinated. It worked. She says hundreds of people have messaged her on Instagram to tell her they've gotten their shots.

"They'll send me their vax card and say, I'm vaccinated because of Chris. I was against the vaccine, and it's made me go get vaccinated," she says.

But those uplifting messages were interspersed with nasty ones.

"I've had people private message me on Instagram and say I'm using his story for fame," she said. After she posted a GoFundMe to request help for funeral expenses, "They were like, you wouldn't even need to be collecting money if your husband took the free vaccine, and now you're asking other people to pay for his irresponsibility."

But Chris Peterson didn't share anti-covid memes on his Facebook page. Instead, it's filled with tributes to his wife and daughters. Some photos even show him wearing a mask. Nevertheless, six weeks after his death, he appeared on the Twitter account Covidiot Deaths, which announced that it had learned via Facebook that Chris's parents, too, had succumbed to covid. Danielle Peterson confirmed their deaths, but had not been aware of the tweet until a reporter brought it to her attention. Knowing that a stranger had been monitoring her family's Facebook pages compounded her grief.

"This isn't a soap opera, this is real life," she says. "These people need to realize that some of these families' kids are affected, they have social media accounts."

Alexis Haug believes that one of her stepmother's "so-called friends" had made screen images of her father's posts and sent them to Sorry Antivaxxer. Unlike the Herman Cain Awards, the site doesn't blur out victims' names. When her sister began commenting on Sorry Antivaxxer, the site took the comments down, but later put them back online. (A man who says he is Sorry Antivaxxer's founder was willing to speak to The Post, but because he has received the same kind of threats as the Herman Cain Award moderators, he wouldn't reveal his full name to a reporter, which doesn't meet standards for quoting him anonymously.)

"I respect that these people have opinions," Haug says. "But at the same time, we literally just lost him, like not even three weeks ago. We are going through the stages right now, and some of us have small children and we're terrified to even leave the house." Because strangers have been bombarding the family's Facebook pages, Haug fears that people will look up their addresses. Sorry Antivaxxer commenters have also posted about attempts to get the family's GoFundMe taken down.

Despite her father's death, Haug says she is still undecided about getting vaccinated: "For now, I just want to grieve and be in this moment." She wants to remember Munoz as the handsome dad who coached her childhood basketball team and hosted big bonfires for all the neighborhood kids. She doesn't want to feel the way the website has made her feel.

[Holden]

https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/news/126619242/australia-is-becoming-a-laughing-stock-in-the-world-of-travel

Anthony Dennis is editor of Traveller in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.

OPINION: Aside from notching up more tests than Allan Border, one of the biggest challenges of our first overseas trips for almost two years may be trying to explain Australia's conduct during the pandemic to the people you meet along the way (let's reverse park climate change, for now, shall we?).

I experienced such a moment recently when I was invited, in my capacity as a non-travelling travel editor, to explain Australia's rather impressionistic plan to finally reopen its international borders to an overseas audience, for the World Business Report on the venerable BBC World Service.

Even if you point to Australia's death toll from Covid-19 being, along with that of New Zealand, among the lowest per capita on the planet, it can still be hard to explain to an incredulous world how our federated state and territory borders system works and doesn't.

Australia remains a fabulous destination but most other nations have decided that if you're open for tourism, it needs to mean precisely that, with as few strings attached as possible.

Australia remains a fabulous destination but most other nations have decided that if you're open for tourism, it needs to mean precisely that, with as few strings attached as possible.

You begin by explaining that the two most populous states not only closed to each other but also to five other states and territories. (Don't even try and elucidate further on Western Australia or Queensland as no radio interview spot anywhere is long enough).

It's also difficult for those overseas to fathom how tens of thousands of our fellow citizens have been unable to return to their homeland for the duration of the pandemic for the sake of the greater good. This is a great facet of the Australian character that is hard for others to understand (the odd Scandinavian, perhaps sans the Swedish, may comprehend it).


Perhaps I should have also stressed in the interview that Australia's belated border reopening is several months late due to the clumsy procurement of vaccines by our authorities. But I did manage to inject the point that this reopening is, despite the hoopla, only a partial one.

The apparent incredulity on the other end of the line in London continued when the British interviewer asked me if the border reopening announcement meant he could now visit Australia and see its considerable sights?

Well, yes, I replied. Sort of. Maybe. As long as he and any companions are fully vaccinated and are prepared to quarantine for seven days and foot the bill. Oh, and for the foreseeable future you'll likely only be able to travel within New South Wales and possibly Victoria.

Perhaps by the time he is able to visit, quarantine mandates will have been abandoned as completely unworkable. The fact is, few tourists are going to come to Australia and sacrifice a week of their lives in quarantine, especially when most people overseas receive half or even less annual leave than we antipodeans enjoy, as leaders of the tourism and aviation industries have pointed out.


Australia remains a fabulous destination but most other nations have decided that if you're open for tourism, it needs to mean precisely that, with as few strings attached as possible.

The dilemma in trying to explain Australia's Covid-19 border policies wasn't helped when, a few days later, in one of these "uh oh" moments to which we've become accustomed, our federal tourism minister declared international tourists would be able to return to Australia by December, only to be overruled by the Prime Minister who said that they wouldn't be allowed back until at least March.

That's more than four months away - there may not be much of a tourism industry left by then. Clearly, we've now returned to another "it's not a race" scenario, despite the fact that before the pandemic the total expenditure of international visitors was worth almost A$61 billion (NZ$64 billion) to the national economy, more or less the equivalent of coal. It also employs as many as 30 times more Australians as the coal industry, and a good many of them in regional areas.

Tourism-generating major events, and Australia's ability to run them, is another area of concern. It looks like the Ashes series will go ahead over summer following tense and protracted negotiations between England and Australia teams and doubt remains around the Australian Open tennis early next year.

Already the England netball team abandoned a tour to Australia, largely due to the requirement to quarantine even if fully-vaccinated. And few, if any, top-ranked overseas tennis players will be prepared to quarantine a second year in a row (some also refuse to be vaccinated), especially when so many heavily-vaccinated countries have already opened up in an attempt to put Covid behind them. (The approaching Northern Hemisphere winter may prove to be the first big test of these strategies).

Australian Open tennis organisers in Melbourne will fight hard to stage the event, amid speculation that the Chinese have been coveting a grand slam tournament of their own for years.
No wonder the bruised, battered and barely upright tourism industry, particularly international airlines, are confused and frustrated by the lack of a transparent plan. It doesn't help that, when compared to, say, the coal equivalent, tourism is a fragmented industry without a proper united voice. Even now it struggles to be taken truly seriously in political and media circles.

Australia used to be a country that worried too much about what the rest of the world thought of it. Now we tend to be too little concerned about the wellbeing of our international image across not only tourism but a spectrum of issues.

We may well end up having the last laugh on the world in Covid terms, but meanwhile we risk becoming the laughing stock of world travel until we get our tourism story straight. The world to which we reach out for visitor dollars will move right on without us - that's if it hasn't done so already.

[MusicTurner]

A simple map showing the current vaccine status around the globe, country-wise (sorry, NZ and Eastern Australia...).
.
There's a long way to go.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I thought that story was valuable because it more or less confirmed a fairly shocking Israeli study that surfaced months ago.
I don't intend to post a lot on COVID issues; I follow a variety of respectable news sources (mainly Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, The Economist), and most worthwhile news should be accessible and widely disseminated.

My brother is a cardiologist, so the referenced COVID demonstrations, though depressing, are mostly nuisances for him nowadays. However, in the early (2020) months of COVID he had to work some in that area, which was definitely stressful and hazardous.

Hi T.D.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be dismissive of your story/news re Pfizer and apologize if it came across that way; I certainly didn't mean to sound like that.

Glad that he's not in the front lines though I suspect that things still aren't easy even though he's a specialist.  What happens, for example, if someone comes in needing emergency surgery and they test positive?  One can do the best possible in terms of precautions, but wonder if they have the Delta variant or some other one?  I would think that it would still be stressful at least at times?

PD