Covid-19 in Europe

OsricPearl wrote:

Sary wrote:It appears that we are headed for our first dark winter, just as Biden predicted, with more lockdowns and death.
I don’t like going to work anymore and having to wear a mask all day, dealing with people... worrying about the virus. They tell us to stay home, be safe and then I go to work with 20 people in the department, plus patients.
It is almost a joke, the restrictions.
I am feeling a bit jealous and resentful towards the people that are able to work from home or even better they don’t work at all!
The news that the first round of the new vaccine will be given health care workers gives me anxiety. How can anyone be sure that it will be safe and effective?

I also work with a mask all day. It's very hard, and I'm sorry you have to go through it. I have known many who have gotten it, but not many have died (two). I don't think these harsh, economy destroying things are not necessary. We shouldn't have to be reminded that we're living in a plague.

Thank you for the kind words OP.
I think I am slowly getting burnt out. Moral is low at work, everyone is scared. The small hospital that I work at is almost full, with 42 Covid patients. Two of my coworkers had it, but both recovered quickly. I know one old person that died.
l give you a lot of credit working a job, through this plague, raising children is hard enough!
Good to see you posting again, I was getting a little bit worried

I declined the Pfizer vaccine, it is not mandatory yet. A lot of doctors and nurses have gotten their first dose.
I am not an anti vaxxer, it just that it scary for me to be one of the first people to take the first ever mRNA vaccine approved for use in humans. The whole “operation warp speed” makes me feel very uncomfortable. Who knows the long term effects.
Now I am hearing more and more about a new strain of Covid-19 that is emerging in England.
It seems as though this will last for a very long time.

Sary wrote:I declined the Pfizer vaccine, it is not mandatory yet. A lot of doctors and nurses have gotten their first dose.
I am not an anti vaxxer, it just that it scary for me to be one of the first people to take the first ever mRNA vaccine approved for use in humans. The whole “operation warp speed”  makes me feel very uncomfortable. Who knows the long term effects.

I've been thinking very similarly. I just don't see how the new vax can possibly have been tested to the usual safety standards, and since I'm not in a high-risk group I'll wait for a while before having it. Also, they might come up with a better one.

Now I am hearing more and more about a new strain of Covid-19 that is emerging in England. It seems as though this will last for a very long time.

They say the new variant might already be elsewhere and was just picked up in England due to intensive testing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55413666 But this one sounds more serious: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55428953

Two graphs from the BBC website:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9229505/Zoonotic-diseases-jump-animals-humans-pose-big-threat-humanity-nuclear-war.html#comments Quoting:

Earth's deadliest enemy: Zoonotic diseases that jump from animals to humans pose as big a threat to humanity as nuclear war or climate change, argues John Vidal . . .

‘The more we destroy or change nature, the more likely we are to see fearsome diseases like Covid-19 emerging,’ says Kate Jones, professor of ecology at UCL. The coincidence of the appearance of new diseases with the simultaneous expansion of human dwelling and destruction of the natural environment is highly significant, she argues. Peter Daszak, the British-born ecologist now in Wuhan as part of the World Health Organisation team investigating the Covid-19 outbreak, agrees. ‘Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species, have created a “perfect storm” for the spill-over of diseases,’ he says.

One of the side-effects is a growth in the number of interactions between humans and nature at its most red in tooth and claw.

‘Intensive farming increases the frequency of contact between humans and wildlife and exposes us to diseases never encountered before,’ says Sean O’Brien, president of NatureServe, a U.S. group of scientists working with conservation organisations. ‘We are bringing together wildlife that would never naturally encounter each other in nature, creating bizarre links in a chain that can allow a disease to jump from one species to humans via another species.’

While hundreds of millions of lives and the economies of many countries have been devastated by Covid-19, it may be that with this pandemic, the world has actually dodged a bullet. Covid is highly contagious — as shown by its rapid spread around the globe — but so far it has not proved nearly as dangerous as other new diseases, killing ‘only’ around 2% of the 105 million people it has so far infected. Many new influenzas and zoonotic diseases are far more dangerous but not nearly so easily spread. Ebola, for example, kills more than 60% of the people it infects; Mers 34%; and many other diseases more than 20%.

The nightmare scenario that governments are having to face up to is the emergence of a new disease — or a new strain of an older one — which is as contagious as, say, measles, and as deadly as Ebola. Then humanity could face a far worse pandemic than Covid-19, possibly on the scale of the Black Death, which killed up to one in three people in Europe in the Middle Ages. Because of air links and global trade, a virus could be spread round the world in a few weeks by people unaware that they are infected, killing tens of millions of people before borders could be closed.

‘Covid-19 may be only the beginning. Future pandemics are likely to happen more frequently, spread more rapidly, have greater economic impact and kill more people if we are not extremely careful about the possible impacts of the choices we make today,’ warns Josef Settele, biologist and co-author of a new UN-level study on future pandemics. And he is no solitary voice. ‘I think we will get a wave of new zoonotic diseases emerging, a mixture of old and new ones,’ says Delia Grace Randolph, co-leader of animal and human health at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. ‘Animals have thousands of viruses. Some of them are now familiar, like Ebola and Marburg and avian flu. But some will emerge which we did not know about. The worst may be yet to come.What we are doing is destroying the natural world, constantly chipping away at wildlife habitats. When you put animals in situations where they have to eke out resources in a human situation you get diseases. The trouble is, we don’t know what else is out there.’

Despite a global pandemic of a new respiratory illness or virulent influenza strain being one of the highest priorities on the risk registers of most developed countries, our experience of Covid-19 this past 12 months has shown just how unprepared we were for that reality. Surely now is the time for politicians to do more than deliver platitudes about population growth and urban expansion, environmental destruction, hunting and the lucrative trade in wild animals around the globe. Yes, we must maintain plentiful supplies of PPE (personal protective equipment), be able to expand intensive care space rapidly at short notice and establish an international network of well-funded vaccine labs that are constantly vigilant and primed to react instantly if a new virus emerges. But, above all, we cannot continue on the path of wilful disregard of our duties as custodians of the natural world, and we must take global measures to defeat the threat our destruction of the environment poses. We may have chosen to ignore those facts before — but we know now that our lives depend on it.

The highest 25 death rates from CoViD19 so far (source: BBC.co.uk), but I think it's hard to make sense of the differences:-



Some good news - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/widespread-long-term-covid-immunity-found-in-town-at-centre-of-europes-outbreak-160259784.html :

"High levels of COVID-19 immunity have been found in the residents of an Austria ski resort that was at the centre of Europe's pandemic.

A study of residents in the ski resort of Ischgl which, was the site of Austria's worst coronavirus outbreak, found that at least eight months after contracting the virus the vast majority of people remained immune. The findings provide more insight into how long immunity lasts after infection, and also suggest that herd immunity may start to kick in earlier than widely believed, the team behind the study said."

^ Yeah that graph is hard to read, it kind of looks like genes on chromosomes . . . very complicated!
My state has been flying the flag at half mast this week. At first I thought it might be for something else so, I googled it.
It is because the USA has reached a milestone, 500,000 American lives have been lost to Covid.
The good news is infections are slowly but steadily decreasing. Maybe the vaccines are working, maybe herd immunity is beginning to take hold?
The new, traditional, 1 shot Johnson and Johnson vaccination will soon be available here.
I think that i will probably take it when offered.

This graph puts the current pandemic into historical perspective and it really doesn't look like something to be very alarmed about. Our modern expectations of life are very high.

Today my state lifted the mask mandate. Vaccinated people are now allowed to move about freely maskless, indoors or out. The unvaccinated still need to wear a mask indoors, but not outside.
It is all very confusing, because every state has different rules, as well as private businesses making up their own guidelines.
I am grateful that the COVID vaccine is not yet mandatory.
I have no problem wearing the mask, I am getting use to it.

From The Telegraph, 17th July 2021:

Standard face coverings are just "comfort blankets" that do little to reduce the spread of Covid particles, a scientist advising Sage [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] on ventilation has said.

Dr Colin Axon, who has advised the government on minimising the risk of cross-infection in supermarkets, accused medics of presenting a "cartoonish" view of how how tiny particles travel through the air. He warned some cloth masks have gaps which are invisible to the naked eye, but are 500,000 times the size of viral Covid particles. "The small sizes are not easily understood but an imperfect analogy would be to imagine marbles fired at builders' scaffolding, some might hit a pole and rebound, but obviously most will fly through," he told The Telegraph.

The mask debate has been reignited this week after the Government published 'Freedom Day' guidance recommending their continued use. It led to Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, enforcing their continued use on the London Underground.

Dr Axon said the public need to be offered a wider view of the science behind face masks, rather than the "partial view" of information being pushed by medics over their effectiveness. "Medics have this cartoonised view of how particles move through the air - it's not their fault, it's not their domain - they've got a cartoonish view of how the world is," he said. "Once a particle is not on a biological surface it is no longer a biomedical issue, it is simply about physics. The public has only a partial view of the story if information only comes from one type of source. Medics have some of the answers but not a whole view."

Dr Axon, Brunel University's senior lecturer in engineering, said that the true mechanisms involved are best evaluated through science. "When the particle enters another body it returns to a biomedical issue but the mask debate is about the particle journey," he said. "Masks can catch droplets and sputum from a cough but what is important is that SARS CoV-2 is predominantly distributed by tiny aerosols." Dr Axon said that medics were "unable to comprehend" the miniscule elements at play, adding: "A Covid viral particle is around 100 nanometres, material gaps in blue surgical masks are up to 1,000 times that size, cloth mask gaps can be 500,000 times the size."

Dr Axon, whose report on ventilation in supermarkets was used by both Nervtag and Sage to aid decisions, says that medics "cannot have it both ways" over asymptomatic spread. He added: "Not everyone carrying Covid is coughing, but they are still breathing, those aerosols escape masks and will render the mask ineffective." Droplets from coughs are much larger, and more likely to be stopped by a properly used mask, Dr Axon says.

An Oxford study last summer concluded that masks were "effective" in reducing the spread of the virus. 'We are entrenching bad behaviour' However, other studies have cast doubt on their effectiveness. A subsequent Danish study involving 6,000 people concluded that there was no statistical difference in infection spread in non-wearers, while data on US states with non-mandated usage failed to show a correlated uptick in cases.

"The public were demanding something must be done, they got masks, it is just a comfort blanket," Dr Axon noted. "But now it is entrenched, and we are entrenching bad behaviour. All around the world you can look at mask mandates and superimpose on infection rates, you cannot see that mask mandates made any effect whatsoever. The best thing you can say about any mask is that any positive effect they do have is too small to be measured."

I am so happy that last week our state, after three long years, has finally lifted the mandate that people be required to wear face masks in hospitals!
It feels so liberating, then again there are those that are still wearing them for what ever reason and that is fine.
It should be personal choice.

It's been a trial. I've noticed that doctor's offices have finally lifted their face mask ban. I remember when my daughter went to get her eyes tested, we were all required to wear face masks. About a month later, when her glasses arrived, no one was wearing one anymore. The lady behind the counter had such a wide grin. It made me happy to see.

The state started requiring hospital employees that are face to face with people to wear masks back in October. Patients are not required to mask up but visitors to inpatient are. After not having to wear a face covering for 6 months it is hard to get used it again.  
This year we are seeing people getting COVID for the second and third time, there is also a lot of influenza A going around. Lots of sick people.
It’s different though this year, they are not mandating us to take the latest COVID vaccine or else lose our job and strangely enough they are not even requiring us to take the flu vaccine.
It’s like a 180 from two years ago!