COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

Looking at a small but for me significant data point curbside pickup will likely continue for a long time. My local HEB went through a recent site regeneration where about 25% of their lawn & garden space was removed to allow an expanded access area to curbside pickup and extended the number of parking spaces from eight to 26.

Coronavirus Worldometer

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Deaths: 1,001,175

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Ahh, Mother Nature. She's such a caring provider. I can feel the universal love through the web of our extended consciousness.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

The good news is that the death rate is still under 2% of the known infected population; just over 1% in fact. Since it's most likely that the known infection number is grossly understated the actual death rate is more likely under 1%.That's still unacceptably high and ignores the still developing long term effects of Covid-19 but better than might be expected.

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Worldwide Coronavirus Cases:
477,312,885

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Deaths:
6,130,814

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Recovered:
412,392,966

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I'm not sure where the other 58,789,105 cases are. (Worldwide cases- recovered-deaths) When you look at the overall numbers it looks like we got lucky. Trying to imagine a death rate of 5% or 10%... Seeing hospitals overwhelmed with patients and dead bodies though made it seem worse, to me , on a personal level.We can see pretty clearly now that a pathogen with a long symptom free incubation and contagious period cannot be stopped from becoming a global pandemic. I will not be surprised if we find that Long Covid may effect most survivors. And lets hope there isn't some longer term Gotcha like Shingles from Chickenpox.

Been there, couldn't wear the t-shirt.

Tanypteryx wonders: i think they are still hospitalized cases. They would represent the ICU beds occupied and walking/recovering patient cases at the moment.

Matches something I heard on the radio this morning. We're hearing about celebrity cases, most of them breakthrough, but those were diagnosed with home test kits and so were very unlikely to have been added to the official case tally. Home test results do not normally not reported to the statistics gatherers and hence tend to not be included in the statistics, whereas the hospitalized cases would get reported. That would mean that positive COVID cases are underreported. There are more people getting infected than we are aware of.

I was in the grocery store yesterday, a once a week outing, and mask wearing was something south of 10%. As a state we seem to believe the pandemic over. I wondered how many of my fellow shoppers knew that our state, New Hampshire, is one the country's most severe hotspots, that BA.2 is now the dominant subvariant in the state, that case rates in our county had been dropping until a few weeks ago, at one point reaching 6 cases per 100,000 before rising again. They're now at 10 cases per 100,000 and rising. My state doesn't do number on weekends, but tomorrow's number, which I won't find out until Tuesday morning, will likely be around 12.I also wondered how many of my fellow shoppers understood how serious this illness is. Very few, I thought. They've probably all heard the stories about loss of taste and smell and lung damage and kidney and liver damage and neurological damage and and deaths, but they don't internalize the meaning with any immediacy. They hear about it, but they almost never, if ever, see it. A neuropsychologist friend believes that in 20 or 30 years the country will be hit with an Alzheimer's epidemic with many who believed they'd escaped a bout with covid unscathed finding out they were wrong.I have a friend who caught covid at the beginning of the pandemic. In May of 2020 he fainted while driving his municipal handicap bus and crashed into the side of a daycare (no one in the building was injured). He was hospitalized, diagnosed with covid, given a pacemaker because of an irregular heartbeat, and fired from his job to become involuntarily retired. He also has long covid and is still unable to exercise for any reasonable period of time. He refuses to get vaccinated, even though a second bout in his current condition could be devastating to his already compromised health. For myself, I am relearning the lesson that it isn't possible to make a human being do something they don't want to do, even when you supposedly have an in because they're a close friend. Push too hard and they're not a friend anymore.We're never going to beat this thing. Probably beating it completely was never possible, but we're going to be living in a world where it is much easier to become ill with covid than it has to be. My wife and I have decided that at some point soon we'll begin living normal lives again, meaning easting out again and traveling freely with mostly no masks. We don't know exactly when that will be. A few weeks ago we thought it would be very soon, but with numbers rising again it seems further off. We'll have to wait and see how severe this current increase in cases becomes. Will it top out at 15 or 20 per 100,000, or will it just keep going? No way to know yet.Though the country is done with covid, covid isn't done with us, and that's very bad news for us all.--Percy

We have the highest level of infections we've ever had. We have no restrictions on anything and mask wearing is a thing of the past.But hospitalisations and deaths from it are low.Here we've moved to the 'living with it' phase. The newest variant is more infectious but no worse that the last - people are treating it like a mild cold. Which seems reasonable actually.

Folk tend to forget that each new variant is in-addition-to all the prior variants and not a replacement of them.

By-and-large, that's not true apparently; the more infectious variants out-compete the less. I remember being surprised when I heard that said by an epidemiologist. eg Omicron pretty much saw off Delta here.I suspect this is an open invite to google…

One variant will reign supreme ... eventually ... temporarily. But the tailend of that curve from the old one can be quite long, lasting for months.For the long term I'm wondering if this covid stuff should be mixed in with one of the annual flu shots. After a generation of that we can see where we are.Mask or no mask is up to you. Live back to normal. Take the vaccines or not as you so desire.I know the pathology leaves a lot of vulnerable victims to the stupid but the majority of the deadly cases should be among the stupid themselves who will not follow health guidelines because, freedom.And it appears to be mostly a red state thing (deep in the heart of Trump MAGA land) so I say let nature take her course.

Well, the vulnerable victims keep this from being a silver lining, but I think of it as a shiny lining. Lots of the vulnerable now have lots of valuable data from 2 years of this pandemic to make informed decisions about staying uninfected. It's looking like more and more of the infected are also the stupid.I keep reading articles about possible super vaccines that will target multiple vulnerabilities of all variants SARS-CoV-2 virus, but also the same for all Coronaviruses.We clearly have the technology and all the variants' genomes have been sequenced, so why aren't these developed yet and in clinical trials?That reminds me I'm going to schedule the 1st shot of the newest shingles vaccine this week.

They are trying.https://phys.org/...aca-nanobodies-neutralize-sars-cov-.html