Closed again

[Van Dalton]

My point is about the way the story was presented and the depths to which they sank just to make a buck. It's pretty sick...mentally ill...the way they stoop so low!

I don't have cable TV, nor do I receive OTA television. I have a television hooked to a streaming appliance but no commercial TV. I don't want it. Stuff like this is the reason why. I refuse to pay $100+ per month just to watch a hundred channels of rubbish like that! When I go to visit my parent's house on holidays and other occasions, I see people sitting around the living room sitting, slack-jawed, staring at the television and I feel shocked and horrified at what they are watching.

I feel just as shocked and horrified at things that news organizations do to sensationalize news in order to make a buck.

Mostly, I just turn it off.

It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry
Can we film the operation
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the newsroom have a running bet
Get the widow on the set
We need dirty laundry

What you describe is the very reason I got rid of all my television equipment in 2018. That was still a good couple years before it devolved to the total madhouse it is now! It took a week of backpacking at the coast to realise just how little I missed one-way television and needed it in my life. Now I have a small ATSC receiver/DVR thingything I acquired earlier this month at Fred Meyer's, mostly to record Oregon Propaganda Broadcasting's "Yule Log" show on Christmas, and chances are it'll probably be sitting there unused the rest of the year, unless I take it town and put it away, or some event of major importance happens that merits recording (Mount St Helens finally blows (again), Kim Jong-Un abdicates/is assassinated and the Koreas are reunited under Seoul's control, etc.).

I play with the cable TV when I'm at my buddy's place or staying in an independent hotel that uses the area's local system. Out of these 100-300 channel systems there are maybe only like two or three (commercial*) channels worth having. The rest are not worth losing five minutes out of your life over.

Mostly, though, I just run my own DVDs and download and watch a few Youtube people -- particularly shango066, bigclivedotcom, bakerxderek, vwestlife and grahamjarvis. That's really all I need. That's the beauty of a doubleheader video card; put TV shows/Youtube on in the background on the spare monitor and glance up at it occasionally, and continue to use the main one to get shit done. Flaky under X11R6, but doable.

* The local public/school/community access programming can sometimes be rather interesting; it's different, anyways.

If you listen to George Carlin's albums from 1988 until his death, he predicted almost everything that's happening today, from viruses and diseases and catastrophes all the way to the breakdown of society that we're now starting to see.

I've never really thought about that untill you pointed it out; yes, he was quite prophetic, as was Orwell.

[Randy Stankey]

I officially cut the cable in 1999. I had moved to North Carolina for my job and I lived in an apartment where I spent, maybe, three days per week. The rest of the time, I was on the road. If I needed to see the news or burn a few brain cells, staring at a glowing rectangle, I did it in the motels I stayed in. Maybe only a couple of hours per day. Weekends, I was home but on call. I wanted mostly quiet. I used my computer for nearly everything. After a while, I just didn't care for television.

I didn't even own a television until 9/11/01. The only reason I bought one (a 20" JVC) was in case the fit hit the shan and I needed to get news and information.
Then, without cable, I only watched OTA stations long enough to know what the local stations were.

I moved back to Pennsyltucky and got married. My wife "needed" to have a TV. I got a 32" Sony and a DVD/Blu-Ray player as hand-me-downs from my parents. I installed a rooftop antenna on our house and got a converter box. We kept that arrangement until 2013 when I got divorced. She took the TV. I didn't want it.

At my current, post-divorce home, I have a 40" Vizio TV and an AppleTV box and cable internet. I could put up an antenna and get OTA stations but I'd have to get permission from the landlord to install anything external. I just don't want it bad enough.

I have a Blu-Ray player but it isn't even hooked up. My girlfriend likes to play X-Box games and my cheapo TV only has so many inputs. I can hook it up if I want it but I'd have to unhook the game. We use the game more than the Blu-Ray.

I don't necessarily hate TV. It's just not interesting anymore.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I don't own a TV either. There is nothing worth watching on it, especially the News. Way too many talking heads giving their impression of the clip we just watched, and as always... I didn't see what they saw in the clip. .Anyway, if there is something I need to see it is probably available to watch on my computer.

[Lyle Romer]

This latest covid wave could have been prevented if the bosses in charge world-wide had gotten their shit together when this pandemic first got started. Over the past 2 years it has been a parade of pooch-screw errors. All the errors have been wrapping around, compounding on themselves. The anti-vax hysteria, disorganized mitigation policies and "rich" countries being general douchebags to poor countries by hoarding vaccines and supplies are all serious problems that go back to poor crisis management and poor messaging.

I find you to be an intelligent contributor to this forum and I always respect your opinions even when I disagree with them. However, the assertion that we wouldn't have COVID waves now if the various leaders around the world had done things differently is patently ridiculous. Humans like to think that we can control everything but a highly contagious virus that spreads through the air and can be spread by pre-symptomatic and/or asymptomatic people and has animal reservoirs is one thing we can't control.

Pretty much everywhere went into some kind of a lockdown in March of 2020. All that doing so accomplished was suppressing the spread temporarily while the lockdowns were in place and delaying the inevitable. Even if you don't consider the animal reservoirs, the only way that any human action could have led to eradication in the beginning was if there had been a 6-8 week, worldwide lockdown where nobody anywhere had any interaction with people outside of their household. Even this might not have worked in apartment buildings, condos or townhouses where there are shared walls, attics and/or hallways.

I guess there was a chance at the very beginning if Hubei Province had been completely locked down and isolated from the rest of the world as soon as the first case was discovered. Possibly that would have prevented spread to anywhere else.

Blaming this pandemic on "leaders" is a coping method because we don't want to admit that bad things can happen that we can't control. If the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan (I don't know if it did or if it was just a natural jump from an animal to humans) then you could blame whoever didn't follow safety protocols. Barring that, there is nobody to blame.

Yes, fewer people would have died or will die if more got/get vaccinated instead of believing looney conspiracy theories but no matter how many people get vaccinated it still won't eradicate the virus. The vaccines simply don't prevent infection and transmission well enough for it to be mathematically possible. Maybe they did against the original variant but the Delta variant had already appeared before there was anywhere close to enough vaccine supply for all Americans, let alone all people in the world.

The Omicron variant is probably the best case scenario. Although it is highly contagious, it is definitely far less severe than prior variants. Looking at data for Florida where the Delta variant was pretty much stamped out (by a combination of vaccination and a boat load of people getting infected over the summer), under 3% of new cases (which are likely almost all Omicron) are ending up hospitalized. With Delta it was around 9% of cases and currently is about 2% of cases. That indicates a 78% reduction in severe cases. Extrapolating deaths from that would suggest that the fatality rate from an Omicron case will be the same or lower than the rate for the typically flu strain.

Assuming SARS-CoV-2 continues to follow the pattern where viruses tend to mutate in a way where they cause less virulent disease, then I think we've reached the point once Omicron takes over as the overwhelmingly dominant variant that we can just stop obsessing over COVID and get on with life.

[Bobby Henderson]

I find you to be an intelligent contributor to this forum and I always respect your opinions even when I disagree with them. However, the assertion that we wouldn't have COVID waves now if the various leaders around the world had done things differently is patently ridiculous. Humans like to think that we can control everything but a highly contagious virus that spreads through the air and can be spread by pre-symptomatic and/or asymptomatic people and has animal reservoirs is one thing we can't control.

This latest wave here in the US was made possible by human choice.

Every mitigation effort the US has tried has been flawed, even the so-called the lock-downs. There has been a great deal of mixed messaging from the top and a whole lot of the general public playing dumb as fuck. Today, efforts at stopping new variants have been even worse, even with vaccines now widely available in "rich" countries. So many self-centered knuckleheads are doing all they can to keep the virus alive. That includes the "leaders" I talked about. Certain policy makers, business heads and media personalities are worsening the situation by spreading bullshit about vaccines, masks and any other mitigation efforts. Certain Americans go into a psychotic rage when encountering a sign in a store front door asking them to mask up. That's some serious "fragile snowflake" behavior right there. Most sane people don't want to deal with any confrontations and other bullshit. They're giving up and letting it be every man for himself.

Omicron appears to cause less severe disease than earlier variants. A smaller percentage of people are made seriously ill by it. But Omicron is spreading at a record breaking scale that is currently getting bigger and bigger each day. The proportion of seriously ill people in this much larger new wave is threatening to overwhelm hospitals. As I said earlier, Omicron won't be anywhere near the last SARS-CoV-2 variant we encounter. There is no guarantee future variants will be as mild or even "nicer" than Omicron.

We were already looking at a very difficult, if not near-impossible task at distributing vaccines world-wide, even to poorer, developing nations. There are many millions of people who want vaccines but can't get them. So how does that make us Americans look to the rest of the world when the vaccines and boosters are easily available us, for free yet as much as half the public in some regions remains unvaccinated? Oklahoma is one of the worst states in that metric. We look like a bunch of morons.

[Steve Guttag]

If you look at a place like New Zealand; it is an island and the most easy sort of country to lock up tight and isolate. They did that and they stamped it out. They also have a mandatory quarantine for anyone coming into the country. So, in theory, if the leaders got it right, C19 is over for them. Right? Nope. Yeah, they have had a much better outcome than us...even adjusting for population differences but they have not stamped it down to zero and like a spring it just comes back. Check out the last three months (Source: Worldometers) Screen Shot 2021-12-31 at 10.10.36 AM.png :

My question to the medical community is: If Omicron has a low-mortality rate, particularly with the vaccinated and it also is highly contagious...would this not be the variant to go for the herd immunity concept? The notion of eliminating C19 via mere isolation and masking is clearly not going to work. It would require the entire world to participate in the vaccination, isolation, masking and we cannot even get 33% of our population in the USA to do anything on any particular subject.

Yeah, hospitals are getting slammed, again. But that won't change with the current strategy. Furthermore, it is the unvaccinated that are filling up the hospitals. There is where the problem is. Those that are medically unable to vaccinate and would have a bad outcome with Omicron, we isolate off and only those with a negative test could be in proximity until the wave blows through the population. We've always had viruses and the like but we have not always responded to them as we have on Omicron. With Alpha and Delta, they were killing people at high rates, Omicron doesn't seem to be doing that. So, why the same reaction?

[Carsten Kurz]

I guess they are thinking about that. It's not so much different from re-opening after a successful vaccination campaign - you accept higher infection rates and then let go, as the UK did in early summer.

Just that for Omikron, I guess they are still waiting for reliable data to prove that. Also, even with Omikron causing a less severe illness for most people, statistically, it can still cause chaos in hospitals if you let it run uncontrolled at the rate it spreads. With hundreds of millions of people, you still run out of hospital beds quickly

Omikron comes from south africa. Last night I heard that the mean age in africa is as low as 17 (!!!). Now imagine what the pandemic was like if the mean age of the whole world was just 17. We probably barely had noticed Covid-19 existed at all. Also, because of the lack of vaccinations in africa, many people there have probably already acquired some immunity the natural way before Omikron showed up. So, early data from Africa may be deceiving or incomplete.

We will probably know better within a few weeks. Just that by then, Omikron is already dominant...

But yes, it may be that Omikron could actually end the pandemic.

[Mike Blakesley]

They should start naming the variants after movie villains. Then people would pay attention, boy!

”Stay away from him…he tested positive for the Darth Vader variant”

[Geoff Jones]

The chart Steve shared makes NZ look bad because of the big grey spike on the right, but on closer examination, New Zealand's numbers put the rest of the free world to shame.

NZ - Population 5M
10 deaths per 1 million people (51 deaths total)
75% of the population fully vaccinated
3-day moving average of cases: 53 cases

Comparison with a similarly-sized U.S. state

AL - Population 5M
3,360 deaths per 1 million people (16,455 deaths total)
48% of the population fully vaccinated
3-day moving average of cases: 5,978

Comparison with a U.S. island state

HI - Population 1.4 M
766 deaths per 1 million people (1,085 deaths total)
64% of the population fully vaccinated
3-day moving average of cases: 1,956

Comparison with another island nation

United Kingdom - Population 68.4M
2,169 deaths per 1 million people (148,421 deaths total)
69% of the population fully vaccinated
3-day moving average of cases: 179,944

Comparison with a similarly-sized "island nation"

Ireland - Population 5M
1,178 deaths per 1 million people (5,912 deaths total)
77% of the population fully vaccinated
3-day moving average of cases: 15,329
Note: data for Northern Ireland (1.8M) is not included here, so it isn't a perfect comparison

Comparison with the "leader of the free world"

U.S. - Population 334M
2,533 deaths per 1 million people (845,745 deaths total)
62% of the population fully vaccinated
3-day moving average of cases: 462,468

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...-in-your-state

Omicron doesn't seem to be doing that. So, why the same reaction?

I'll hazard a guess: Our healthcare system cannot handle an increase in hospitalizations (even if it comes from a smaller percentage of the infected total).

To be honest, though, I don't think Omicron is getting the same reaction...

Omikron comes from south africa.

This statement may not be true.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/omicron...-alert-raised/

Dutch health authorities announced on Tuesday that they found the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus in cases dating back as long as 11 days, indicating that it was already spreading in western Europe before the first cases were identified in southern Africa.

Belgium and Germany have also said that sample tests confirm the variant was in those countries before South African health officials alerted the world on November 24 to its existence.

[Steve Guttag]

You couldn't afford that name! You'll probably be contacted by Disney lawyers for merely typing it!

[Steve Guttag]

I did indicate that NZ, even adjusted for population is an example of a country that "did it right" yet STILL they get nailed with Omicron. And given that you aren't going to get the mass acceptance here as there, the current game plan is a no-winner and just a slower bleed. Would it not be better to let a less (and relatively low) killer loose to try and stamp it out than let it mutate into a fast spreading high-killer? You never know which way it will go on a mutation. A problem with Omicron is that it mutated into a version that the vaccines are less effective with (which is why Flu vaccines are so miserable...they never precisely target the strain going around because they have to predict what will be there and manufacture in advance so they are just near-misses to far-off misses).

Omicron, around here is getting the same reaction as Delta...places are going into lockdown, shutdown, masking is coming back. I'm wondering if that is just the wrong strategy for this variant.

As to hospitals, again, it is just about all the unvaccinated...the very people that aren't going to follow any other rules either. You aren't going to slow that down with more rules. You just inconvenience the population and threaten the businesses.

[Geoff Jones]

yet STILL they get nailed with Omicron.

Does a 3-day moving average of 53 cases (or hell, even 200, from their recent peak) really seem like "getting nailed?"

As to hospitals, again, it is just about all the unvaccinated...

Hospitals aren't just about the unvaccinated. Hospitals are also about heart attacks, accidents, organ transplants, strokes, cancer treatments, infections, appendicitis, etc.

[Steve Guttag]

For them? Yeah. There should be zero there. If it is non-zero, the notion of being able to stop it by merely lockdown and quarantine is a fallacy. It's all relative and for their system, Omicron hit them harder than Alpha and Delta. They went from 3,000 cases (total history) in August 2021 to 14,000 in approximately ⅓ of a year...a nearly 5x jump in a short period. Yeah, nailed.

[Bobby Henderson]

Yeah, hospitals are getting slammed, again. But that won't change with the current strategy. Furthermore, it is the unvaccinated that are filling up the hospitals. There is where the problem is. Those that are medically unable to vaccinate and would have a bad outcome with Omicron, we isolate off and only those with a negative test could be in proximity until the wave blows through the population.

As simple as that sounds we don't have the capability of isolating unvaccinated, vulnerable people in hospital wings or anywhere else. It's physically possible to do that. However, a political shit-storm would flare up, aided in part by certain media figures generating outrage in return for ad dollars.

We've always had viruses and the like but we have not always responded to them as we have on Omicron. With Alpha and Delta, they were killing people at high rates, Omicron doesn't seem to be doing that. So, why the same reaction?

We're still in the early days of this Omicron-flavored wave. Numbers of infections are still ramping up day by day. Hospitalizations and deaths lag farther behind. Early signs look promising Omicron will be less lethal. But if it ends up infecting a million or more Americans per day hospitals may end up bombed with far more patients than they can handle anyway. A lot of deaths that would otherwise be preventable might occur.

If Omicron is inspiring new lock-downs they're not happening everywhere. Here in Oklahoma most people are determined to get back to normal regardless of the virus. Even our one multiplex theater in Lawton is going back to pre-pandemic hours starting next week. We'll actually have late shows for the first time in 2 years.

As for the strategy of gaining herd immunity via natural infection, that's not going to work. SARS-CoV-2 variants have already been re-infecting people previously recovered from COVID-19 second or even third times. And now the newer variants, Omicron in particular, are getting better at evading vaccines. If everyone had formed a unified front against this virus, like we did with diseases such as polio, we would be in better shape. The virus would probably still be around, but we would at least be making progress. Right now it feels like we're going nowhere. Like I said, it's every man for himself.

But yes, it may be that Omikron could actually end the pandemic.

The only way Omicron is going to bring an end to the pandemic is if it burns through all the available fuel (unvaccinated people) world-wide before the virus can shit out a new variant. Omicron appears far more contagious and able to infect vastly more people at once. But I'm not optimistic it will be fast enough to prevent another variant from getting started.

[Steve Guttag]

Herd immunity does not require 100% unaffected. Just because some people are getting it multiple times (and I know of some...it's awful...but they are vaccinated, have had it and still have had it multiple times...some people definitely have drawn the unlucky card when it comes to susceptibility to C19).

What is evident, you aren't going to stop it with vaccine alone (that will provide an overwhelming majority their best protection however). So, what's the end game. I say, with a variant that is seemingly on the low-end of the mortality scale, pull the band aide off quick. Because as an endemic, it is going to infect everyone, sooner or later. The notion that one can avoid it a false. I do believe that it is possible to keep the most vulnerable away from it (if we can't then it is just a matter of when anyway). However, if it infects enough to hit herd immunity in a short time...where can it go? Most people that have been hit multiple times have had a period of time between infections.