Coronavirus in Massachusetts (Boston: home, legally, stats)

[NewfieMama]

Originally Posted by redplum33

https://twitter.com/denise_dewald/st...54585107595269

People DO understand that the virus travels in the air. We've known that for a long time. We know the risks. Just like we have done through this ENTIRE pandemic, we make choices based on those risks. Those who are vaccinated are willing to take more risks because they feel they are more protected. The risks are less risky. Those who never felt at risk are living their lives as they always have. We've done the lockdowns. Every single one of us made sacrifices. Most of us had a super sh*tty 2020 and still mostly sh*tty 2021 as we navigated through every phase of this pandemic.

With vaccinations available nobody is willing to back to a pre-vaccinated world. We have accepted that it spreads among the vaccinated. We have accepted that covid isn't going anywhere. We have accepted that we will need to live with it and manage it personally in whatever way we feel comfortable.

[htfdcolt]

Originally Posted by msRB311

I work with people who haven’t set foot on a restaurant since feb 2020.

I'm married to one.

[NewfieMama]

redplum, I cannot roll my eyes enough. When I say "I would rather" and "I would prefer" that is because that is my PERSONAL experience with covid. I would rather have covid than MANY other ailments because covid causes no symptoms for me. I also prefer fall over spring for many reasons, so I guess I'm a spring minimizer.

[BostonMike7]

Originally Posted by redplum33

What does that mean?

I don't see many choices here. Are the hospitals going to turn down people and send them home to die? With staff shortages, it's not like they can just open up a bunch of field hospitals.

People are saying there's no appetite for restrictions/shutdown. Was there ever?

What i mean by that is i don't see any more shutdowns, restrictions, mandates, closures, etc being rolled out now similar to what we saw back in March '20. Pretty much what is in place now is what it's going to be.

[timberline742]

Originally Posted by BostonMike7

What i mean by that is i don't see any more shutdowns, restrictions, mandates, closures, etc being rolled out now similar to what we saw back in March '20. Pretty much what is in place now is what it's going to be.

The hospitals will further curtail elective surgeries, if they need to. Some have started to already.

It's really an issue because a good deal of the capacity being used now isn't for covid but for other conditions people put off treating when covid was much worse.

[in_newengland]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

Personally, I’d rather have air exchange and filtering standards. That way, I could pick restaurants that meet the standard. Right now, I have no idea if some super spreader 20 feet away is going to infect the whole restaurant. Some places were built in the days of cigarette smoking and wouldn’t be hard to update to HEPA filters.

That would be great. The air quality in most schools reeks--I know that from experience. Lack of funding to change the filters, lack of money for anything. But on tv the other day they showed volunteers and others making air purifiers for classrooms @ about $70 each. A fan, a box, a hepa filter. It's a matter of assembling them cheaply because the only part that seems to cost much is the hepa filter.

I can't find an article about it but if the employees of the restaurant could do what these people did for a school system, you'd have pretty decent air quality.

[Space_League]

Here we go again

[OutdoorLover]

Originally Posted by rach5

Data from MA (over 400 of the 1000+ in the hospitals with covid are vaccinated), and a call for for action now by others than myself: https://www.boston.com/news/coronavi...?p1=hp_primary
It is simply not true that covid does not contribute to the health care crisis in significant ways. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/o...gan-surge.html
AND if you extrapolate from current cases to hospitalization increases 1-2 weeks down the road, THAT is when true **** will hit the fan. The covid data for RI https://ridoh-covid-19-response-hosp...ub.arcgis.com/
Dec 6 2020 hospital beds 494, ICU 48, vent 25
Dec 6 2021 hospital beds 226, ICU 35, vent 18
Last year Dec 6, Rhode island was at its peak. Now we are far from a peak, without any mitigation and with a worse staffing crisis. How can any governor, or Director of Public Health not look at this and despair?
We know how to stop this, at least pre-Omicron. The problem with doing anything here now is that our government has screwed up our covid response from the very beginning, in almost all dimensions (testing, masking, vaccination, lockdowns). We are quite literally the world leaders in how not to do pandemic response.

We could do things FAR better in the US, with the principle problem being vaccination levels that are far short of complete. But the reality is, there's been a concerted disinformation campaign going on for over a year to get people to distrust all the virus countermeasures, and to accept the virus as having minimal risk. That campaign, for many people, has worked! And after 16+ months of that, they are simply not looking for and not open to any new information. It is what it is!

All that said, Europe is not without people who distrust all the virus countermeasures, who rant about government and industry conspiracies, and who aren't afraid to get Covid-19 - in short, they have many of the same issues with disinformation and gullible people who've been taken in. It's not just the USA.

[OutdoorLover]

Interesting new study looks at Covid-19 and direct impacts on adipocytes - fat cells. Note that these observations could explain why obese patients often have poorer outcomes and how long Covid occurs. "In a recent study, posted to the preprint database bioRxiv on Oct. 25, scientists experimented with fat tissue obtained from bariatric surgeries, to see if the tissue could be infected by the coronavirus. They found that fat cells, known as adipocytes, could become infected and developed a low level of inflammation. They also found that immune cells housed within the fat tissue, called macrophages, also became infected and kicked off a much more intense inflammatory response.

In addition to these experiments, the team examined fat tissue from patients who died from COVID-19 infections and found coronavirus particles in the fat that surrounded various organs. Viruses like HIV and influenza can squirrel themselves away in fat tissue, as a way of hiding from the immune system; several experts told the Times that SARS-CoV-2 could theoretically do something similar, making fat a reservoir for the virus."

https://www.livescience.com/coronavi...ect-fat-tissue

[OutdoorLover]

Originally Posted by Space_League

Here we go again

Yes, decent vaccination rates here should help us relative to the experience in the Gulf states this summer, and we should have lower hospitalization and death rates per case. But people who thought that we were immune to the Delta surge because of these vaccination rates were being too optimistic and not really looking carefully at all the data.

70% immunization isn't THAT different from 50% immunization. It still leaves 30% completely unprotected (a lot of people), and as we know, Delta can infect and be transmitted by vaccinated individuals with reduced, yes, but still significant frequency, so even the 70% are not inert the system. 70% vaccinated is definitely better than 50% vaccinated, but it's far from invulnerable.