asmallcat

Hatorian said:

The one thing I swear science lies about is the fact that pop (yes pop!) actually dehydrates you more. 

Yeah I ran track and cross country in high school and the coaches always told us this bullshit (along with the lie that caffeine or carbonation, can't remember which, would "leech calcium from your bones") and even then I knew it was impossible. There are people who drink only pop. If it actually dehydrated you, they would die! It just doesn't hydrate as well as water, which fine, just tell us that, no need to lie. 

And like, if I'm stranded in the desert, and I come across a crate of coke, guess what, I'm drinking it! The only liquid that actively dehydrates you is salt water. 

My percentages were the same - what percentage of the population died from the disease. If there's a disease with a 100% fatality rate, but the only way to get it is, say, literally licking someone's armpit, it will have an extremely low transmission rate. Then let's look at a disease that has, say a 5% transmission mortality rate but is incredibly contagious. Which is more deadly? How deadly a disease is is a combination of both transmissibility and mortality.

The Black Death had about a 50% fatality rate once contracted. The human version of mad cow disease is 100% fatal if you get it, but you have to eat tainted meat to get it and you can't spread it to other humans (as far as we know - I suppose if you ate a person who had it you would get it?) So which of these diseases is "more deadly?" I'd argue that the black death iscause it was easily transmissible (at the time) and killed 30% of the population of Europe, even though it only had a 50% mortality rate for those infected. 

So yes, on a population level COVID is "more deadly" than Polio cause it kills more people (as a percentage of the population). Polio is "more deadly" once you get it, but you were far less likely to get it. 

Edit - FWIW the CDC estimated about 32,000 people died from the flu in the 2018-2019 season, so ~.01% of the population, again an order of magnitude lower than COVID and that's with essentially minimal efforts to contain it. 

Edit edit - had typed "transmission" when I meant "mortality" 

Hatorian said:

I’m saying you have to give someone an option when it comes to medical things that are not guaranteed our close to it.

I think this is where we disagree. The vaccines are essentially guaranteed to be safe and guaranteed to prevent thousands, or tens of thousands, of deaths, not just from not transmitting COVID but also from not overstraining the medical system causing overworked staff to make mistakes or taking up too much ICU space. And as I said, I'm not really for the government mandating the vaccines in any way with criminal penalties - I don't think that's a good road to start down. However I'm 100% fine with it being increasingly difficult to participate in society if you aren't vaccinated. The rest of society shouldn't have to tolerate typhoid Marys. 

And the reason you can't do medical experiments on someone without their consent is that it could be dangerous in a way we don't know (although with modern techniques is extremely rare that something makes it to human trials that is severely dangerous, end even more rare that it makes it to large scale trials), not because people have some fundamental right to never have to do anything medical while still participating in society. And these vaccines have gone through the trials, so there's no experimentation left to be done as to safety, only as to efficacy, and it would have been impossible to test for the delta variant since it didn't exist. 

So, no, when it's proven that something is safe, will save lives (not 100% of lives to be fair, but nothing does), and is trivial to get for the vast majority of people, yeah, I'm fine with not giving people the option as to whether or not to get it if they want to participate in society. We do this all the time! You wanna drive, you gotta get a license. You wanna fly, you gotta get screened. You wanna go eat at a restaurant, work in an office with a bunch of other people, or go to Disney World while a dangerous pandemic is on the loose? I'm fine with saying you gotta be vaccinated. 

And the government IS requiring it for the military (and all federal employees IIRC). If you refuse it you'll probably get a less than honorable discharge from the military or be fired from your job. Is that unfair? 

Hatorian said:

To get back on covid. Recent news says phizer is only 40% effective against Delta in terms of catching it.

you cannot force people to take something for the benefit of society if it’s a 50/50 shot they are still going to get people killed. 

Yes, its 99% effective against severe illness and death. But that’s only a reason to get it for yourself. 

That's about on par with the flu vaccine, and we still recommend everyone get that to protect the vulnerable. 

Plus, taking the Delta variants R value from 7 to 10 (where most estimated put it) to 3.5-5 will definitely save lives, so it's still going to save a lot of lives, especially when compared to the single-digit deaths in the US caused by the vaccines. And that assumes that people who are vaccinated are contagious for as long, which seems to not be the case, so it's probably reducing the R value even more than that. 

And we force people to do stuff that saves lives less than 50% of the time all the time. I have to say "well, since this mandate will only save 10,000 people instead of 20,000 people, we probably shouldn't bother" is a bizarre take. 

Dee said:

@asmallcat I think people hear mandate and think it means some government official coming to your house and pinning you down to jab you. In Australia, we have mandatory immunisation for children unless they fit into a (very) narrow medical exemption category. I could be wrong, but I believe that not even religious exemptions are accepted anymore. Children must be fully immunised to attend child care centres or kindergartens (pre-school), and there are also government child benefit payments that parents don’t get - one of which is a child care subsidy worth thousands of dollars to a full time working parent. So they can choose not to immunise their child, but they miss out on a fair chunk of money and may not be able to enrol their kid anywhere.  

We also have a government electronic health record that shows your immunisation status - I just got a message the other day after my second jab saying mine had been updated. So although I’m sure people could find a way to fake that, it’s not that easy for any random Covidiot to do. 

While we here in the US certainly should have had more robust vaccine tracking, due to the vagaries of federalism the federal government can't really do much in terms of making vaccines mandatory besides either requiring them to enter federal facilities (something that wouldn't impact most people), requiring them to work for a federal agency (which they are basically doing now), or making it a federal crime to not be vaccinated. The federal government can't order schools or universities to require vaccines for attendance, as they fall under the purview of the state governments, and we have about 50% of the states that won't ever do it because now it's become a political issue (even though these exact states already require probably ~10 other vaccines for students). 

FWIW it's become increasingly clear that giving so much power to the states in the US was a mistake. We would be much better served with a powerful federal government, killing the senate, and leaving to the states much smaller things, but that's a pipe dream.