In the United States, people who are hospitalized and require a blood transfusion or other invasive procedure must be vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 in order to receive care. It has been shown that this vaccine can reduce the transmission of covid-19 from patient to person when it is administered before exposure, but the jury is still out as it is still experimental.
Unless you have had your head in the sand for the last year there is a lot of controversy on the efficacy of these vaccinations, government mandates, how long "protection" lasts and it seems the goal posts on what is classified "fully vaccinated" keeps changing as fully vaccinated people are getting covid-19, and the variants of 2021. Dr. Fauci told the main stream media just last week the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change it is not IF but WHEN.
"It is a bit of semantics in that fully vaccinated for the purpose of the regulations and requirements that people have is to be what are you considered as being fully vaccinated." Fauci said in an interview with CNBC’s "Squawk Box." "But there’s no doubt that optimum vaccination is with a booster. I mean, there is no doubt about that."
Today, every person that I know that has been recently tested positive for Covid is vaccinated. We see this in sports, governmental officials and schools as well. Those that are unvaccinated have made a choice not to be vaccinated for personal reasons such as "natural immunity" and/or previous infection and the risk/return on a vaccine that is known to come with many side effects including death. Every single medicine that we take has side effects and it is buyer beware. Sometimes the "cure" is worse than the disease such as many forms of chemotherapy.
This blog is not about my personal opinion on vaccines but just an attempt to ask the question, when will enough be enough? When will we see the light at the end of the tunnel? When will fear not run our lives? When will our children be able to function like healthy developing members of society without covering their faces? Why are some states that have less restrictions (Florida) have less positive cases and deaths than places like California and New York with strict mandates and vaccine enforcement?
Most recently the omicron variant was reported from South Africa and soon again became the ticker tape on every major news network. While the symptoms are descried to be nothing more than a slight cold and "raspy throat" it is the year ends variant of the month.
A U.K. study of around 750,000 people found recently that the top five symptoms for both the Delta and Omicron variants are currently a runny nose, headache, fatigue, sneezing and a sore throat. According to the South African doctor who first detected the Omicron variant, initial patients also experienced body aches and a scratchy throat.
Omicron appears to be more contagious, but there are questions about how severe it is
Preliminary studies of the Omicron variant have suggested that infections may be less severe than those experienced from the Delta variant. However, it spreads more quickly. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said that Omicron is spreading faster than any other previous strain and that the variant is probably already in most countries, even if it has not been detected yet. Source: https://fortune.com/2021/12/17/omicron-blindsided-world-symptoms/
I was recently sent a Time Magazine article attached that discusses the need for the world to begin getting back to normal and the jury is still out on how we get there. We have seen so many break through infections in those vaccinated and statistically we have seen more deaths in America since the vaccines became available than before. Where have we gone wrong?
The Journal calculated when the number of known Covid-19 deaths in 2021 surpassed 2020’s figure by using Johns Hopkins and CDC data. The Johns Hopkins numbers reflect a near-real-time count from states, but can lag behind when deaths actually occurred. CDC death-certificate data don’t track the changing pandemic as quickly, but do reflect the actual day of death.
Source: Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-covid-19-deaths-in-2021-surpass-2020-11637426356
America has begun the gradual process of accepting that COVID-19 is going to be endemic—meaning it will always be present in the population to some degree—due to inherent properties of the virus (animal reservoirs, high transmissibility, long period of infectiousness, symptoms similar to other pathogens), and will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, the U.S. has an impressive suite of tools to deal with this reality. Vaccine eligibility is widening and boosters are available for all adults who want one. Two effective oral antiviral drugs that prevent hospitalizations and death in people newly infected with COVID-19 are about to be authorized. There are also monoclonal antibody treatments for people whose immune systems do not mount a robust response to infection. The CDC signaled this important and realistic shift by acknowledging that herd immunity is not achievable. With this admission from our most important public health agency, policy must shift also.
We have reached a point in the pandemic where policy should no longer be based around the idea that we cannot resume normal life until case numbers are below a particular (arbitrary) level.
One reason is that those levels were set before vaccination, and have not been adjusted accordingly, even though a large proportion of cases, in part due to the growing proportion of cases that are breakthrough cases, are now mild. Another reason is that these metrics were set at a time where policy makers were scrambling to set thresholds to open and close social institutions in the absence of robust data. Setting thresholds for activities according to cases no longer makes sense, but U.S. states and counties are still reporting daily case numbers and fluctuations as though policies should revolve around these numbers.
Florida is currently reporting half as many new daily cases as California (7 per 100,000 compared to 13 per 100,000). Is this lower case count real and due to higher natural immunity (the two states’ overall vaccination rates are very similar), or are lower cases an artifact of less testing, lower test reporting, less breakthroughs due to later vaccination, or other unmeasured factors? No one knows. This uncertainty argues strongly for looking at the more reliable and much more important metrics of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, not cases, even if both are artificially inflated by people hospitalized who happen to have COVID-19 on routine screening (COVID-19 nasal swabs are generally performed for all hospitalized patients for infection control purposes).
We also know that you really have to dig into the cause of death in these number because we know that you could have been brought into an emergency room in grave condition from a motorcycle accident and happen to test positive for Covid-19 and the cause of death would not state it was a head injury or accident but Covid-19. How many of these cases do we have? How many people that had stage 4 cancer that have passed since this started have their death certificate list cancer as the cause of death vs. the reality of cancer?
Source: Attached is a thought provoking timely article from Time Magazine. What do you think?
Lets hope 2022 gets better for all of us.
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