wathe
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Posts posted by wathe
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Covid vaccine advocacy t-shirts. I bought some to wear when I work at the vax clinic. Now I wear them everywhere. DH and the kids each have a couple and also wear them all around town. Chris Hadfield, Hayley Wickenheiser, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Buble (AKA some Famous Canadian People) wear them too.
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Well, this is promising:
"Breakthrough infections are less likely to lead to long covid, study suggests"
It was a prospective case control study published in The Lancet. Link to paper
ETA quote:
The study, which was published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, also provides more evidence that the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines offer powerful protection against symptomatic and severe disease.
“This is really, I think, the first study showing that long Covid is reduced by double vaccination, and it’s reduced significantly,” said Dr. Claire Steves, a geriatrician at King’s College London and the study’s lead author.
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51 minutes ago, kbutton said:
I don't like the brainwashing terminology, but I do find that some medical people get ossified in their knowledge--they latch onto an idea and don't give it up when twenty years later it turns out to be a mistaken assumption. BUT, I find this mostly to be a problem with more rare stuff. It's just that, in my family, we have rare stuff, so we run into this really bad information more often. Rare things that are genetic are not rare in families!
I also think we have pockets of places with access to care, but local attitudes of physicians are super paternalistic, etc., which leads to people not being willing to bring up complaints.
There are some areas where doctors are persistently misinformed, such as with aneurysms. I think it's changing, but it has taken outside advocacy groups putting pressure on medicine to change in this way. When we go to conferences, the stories we hear from cardiologists about the advice patients got before ending up with them curl my toenails. Even now though, some doctors read recommendations and do their best, but they don't realize that they are still having their patients get tested for things by people unfamiliar with what they are seeing, and then they don't realize the results aren't always being interpreted carefully. So, well-meaning doctors can still inadvertently give poor care because they don't realize that it takes an entire highly skilled team to the get the i's dotted and the t's crossed.
But I don't like to discredit broadly since my DH is in healthcare and sees all kinds of good things too!
Sure. But the fact that it's impossible to be up to date on the best possible evidence for everything in all of medicine, particularly rare things, isn't brainwashing either. It's being human. I don't see anyone latching onto mistaken information and refusing to give it up. Unaware of new guidelines, yes, but that's different than latching-on and refusing.
Slightly tangentially, a significant number of people think that MD's should know all about complementary and alternative medicine, and that they should be incorporating it into their practices. I'm trained in western medicine. C.A.M. is outside my training and outside my scope of practice. That doesn't mean that I'm brainwashed. I means that I know what I don't know, and that I know where my professional boundaries are.
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I don't think that medical people are brainwashed. They share a professional culture and a body of knowledge. That's not brainwashing: "a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas". If anything, my MD peeps are more committed to pro-social beliefs and attitudes that other groups.
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3 hours ago, kbutton said:
Glad you made this distinction. A lot of hospitals were using airborne protocols at first but changed when it became clear that PPE was short and that docs that were using droplet protocols were mostly doing fine (wathe has mentioned lucking out on this).
Yes. Droplet protocols for 18 months. Oodles of covid patients through. Not a single outbreak in the ED.
There's airborne (TB, chickenpox, measles) and there's covid, which can be spread by aerosols sometimes, but seems to respect droplet precautions, at least in hospitals.
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5 hours ago, deBij said:
My doctor friends, who are also mothers, are scared of so many things, because they see so many bad outcomes. It skewed their assessment of risks.
When mentoring my kids for their future professions, long term mental health will be part of the discussion.
I don't know that I'd use the word "skewed", but definitely more aware of particular risks. When you see the same patterns of injuries over and over, it does affect your behaviour. We (my family) will never have a backyard trampoline, dirt bike, or motorcycle. I don't think that's due to a skewed assessment of risk, but because those things actually are relatively dangerous and I see the same injury patterns over and over. DH and I wear steel-toed boots when cutting the lawn, and bike helmets are non-negotiable for all family members while cycling. Children are not permitted to use lawn mowers or snowblowers. I am very careful when slicing round foods (avocados, bagels, separating frozen hamburger patties are big offenders). We've all had our covid shots. I don't think any of that is brainwashing. More a sensible response to lived experience.
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3 hours ago, Jean in Newcastle said:
Hasn't it been proven that people packed together are still a transmission risk? Our local health department just had warnings issued about attending the state fair coming up. It's (mostly) outdoors and even though we have a mask mandate for the indoor venues, they are still concerned about transmission in the outdoor unmasked crowds.
I think the biggest issue is that outdoor is rarely truly outdoor. People cluster in indoor spaces - food venues, bathrooms, tents, and maybe at a fair, livestock barns. And cluster together in cars to travel to and from , and cluster together in lodging and restaurants before and after. So "outdoor" events end up driving spread.
I think that , if packed tight enough, true outdoor spread could happen too, but I don't think that it's the main risk.
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1 hour ago, Lecka said:
I am going to be blunt about the problem with unhooking.
Some people can back up to where the hitch meets the — whatever it is called — on the trailer. They make it look SO easy.
Then there are people who back up and go back and forth for 15-20 minutes because their wife is not good at giving signals or something.
I have seen people who have ZERO issues backing up to a hitch.
My step-dad — he seems like the kind of person who would have zero issue, but actually he has a hard time! Depending on the space, too, some are more forgiving — there is more room to pull forward and then back up. Some don’t have as much space — you pull in the first time, and then un hook and drive out. But then you have to get back into that space to hook the hitch back up. Some places have a ton of room and some don’t have as much room.
We also would have problems on and off with the trailer’s lights working as far as traffic signals — ideally (legally, I don’t know) you are supposed to push the brake pedal and have the brake light on the back of the trailer light up. This would frequently take a lot of messing with on my grandparent’s pop-up trailer.
Re hitching solutions:
Expensive but super convenient : our tow vehicle has a back up camera with a hitch mode. It's really easy.
Cheap: flags on the hitch and the ball that attach with magnets. They're tall, so you can see them through the rear window. Just back up and match them up. I used ones like these in the previous tow vehicle that did not have a camera
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1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:
I don't know that it's THAT unexpected. There are plenty of diseases where natural immunity is very robust. That's what it's looking like here.
The one thing I'll say is that I worry about the fact that people who've had COVID may simply not test. Since there isn't surveillance testing, this means that the "infections" data may not be that robust. This is where more hospitalization data would have been helpful, although the 8 to 1 ratio (despite the lack of statistical significance) does make me feel better.
Anyway, this is great news.
I agree that there might be significant selection bias regarding who chose to test.
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6 minutes ago, Pawz4me said:
But was that a van? Those don’t typically have any outside storage.
You are right - it was. a class C
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3 minutes ago, Pawz4me said:
Van/B RVs aren't horrible on gas. On our NC to CA and back trip I think we averaged right around 20 mpgs.
One thing you really, really would need to consider is storage space. Not only for clothing and towels and food, but . . you'll have a power cord, a fresh water hose, a sewer hose and possibly some attachments for that. Those things are bulky, and a sewer hose isn't something you want to toss on a bed while traveling. 😉 I have no idea how storage for those things are handled on rental Bs. On ours we used a hitch mounted cargo carrier and totes, but . . can't do that on a rental.
In the one we rented, the sewer hose slid into the rear bumper. The rest fit into an hatch on an outside panel. It all came with the rental.
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My kids loved our RV trip. They keep asking when we can do it again. It would be a great memory-maker. Renting is expensive, but less expensive than buying a mistake.
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Just now, Not_a_Number said:
I did notice that, lol. But I don't WANT to stay in a hotel during COVID!!!
I get that!
Factor in ridiculously bad fuel consumption and campground fees, too.
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3 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:
I was vaguely pondering of renting one for a vacation, yes 🙂 . DH really wants to go see his friends in California, too, and we aren't comfortable flying during the pandemic with things like they are... so making a road trip of it could be cool. Plus, it sounds like the kids might adore it, and I'm really doing my darndest to create fun, positive memories for them during a pandemic. An RV trip might be such a thing.
This might all be a pipe dream, though. DH has to teach this year, for one thing, so it might be totally unrealistic. I'm just feeling things out, you know?
Check the rental prices. Super-expensive. Like, staying in really, really good hotels would cost a lot less.
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Pre-prints are a double edged sword. Quick pre-publication speeds up science - important during a pandemic! But it can also disseminate non-sense, fraud, misinformation, or just plain bad science, which we've seen can have very serious social consequences.
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2 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:
Less than 1% of people die from COVID. Pretending those survived, even if 10% of that 1% got reinfected (why would they??!!), it wouldn't create the giant discrepancy that we're seeing in this study.
I'm not understanding the amount of criticism this is getting 🤷♀️. I feel like everyone's priors are set to "Rah, rah vaccine!" and that's affecting people's judgments. I'm incredibly grateful for our vaccines, but I'm also really GLAD to hear that natural immunity is looking like it's very effective, because it makes it likelier than the pandemic will eventually be under control.
The fact that the result is so unexpectedly huge is exactly what gives me pause.
If it's really true, that would be great, I agree. But it needs peer review, and then replication.
I think that we've seen the media run with promising pre-prints that didn't pan out wrt this pandemic, and how that can morph into an ugly spiral of misinformation for certain therapeutics. I think that this one has the potential to have a similar effect wrt anti-vaxers. Hence the concern.
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Just now, Not_a_Number said:
Where did you guys take it?
Localish road trip from provincial part to provincial park, stopping to see the sights on the way.
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We rented one 2 years ago. DH loved it, I most definitely did not.
Pros: DH and the kids thought it was the best thing ever. Super high novelty value. A tiny house that's car!!
Cons: I hated driving it. It felt huge. Coudn't fit in a normal parking spot. Had to plan everything based on would the thing fit in the parking lot, could it get around that tight corner etc...... It used an obscene amount of gas.
A trailer you can leave parked at the campsite while you go places in your car. And RV you have to pack the whole thing up to go anywhere - short runs for firewood etc are impossible.
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6 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:
I mean, you can NEVER match non-randomized populations. It's impossible. They were obviously extremely careful on age, gender and SES, and that's quite impressive. (You can see their numbers align exactly.) That's kind of the best anyone's going to do.
Agreed. The mismatch in co-morbidities is concerning though, and decreases the value of the results. It's also consistent with a survivor bias (the non-vaxed previously infected population was healthier because many of those with comorbidities didn't survive their covid infection in the first place).
Retrospective studies need to be interpreted with caution. I'd really like to see the result replicated in another population.
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Just now, kokotg said:
huh. the immune compromised thing seems huge when you're talking about vaccine response.
I know. They've also included a bunch of tables with odds ratios suggesting that co-morbidities weren't didn't affect outcomes in way that was statistically significant.. The only one that was statistically significant was age >60, I think, and SES.
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Just now, Not_a_Number said:
Seems almost impossible for those to be statistically significant, lol. Their others numbers were, though, so it's worth including this one, just as a "this suggests also that..." kind of thing, I think.
Yes. But then, unfortunately the public and the media sometime s interpret those numbers as more meaningful than they really are.
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Just now, Not_a_Number said:
Interesting. That's a good point. It'd be interesting to know whether any of the categories had really disproportional rates of infection.
It's still a big enough effect that it seems unlikely the mismatches are responsible for most of it.
Agreed. It's a clue that their might be other confounders that weren't measured though, and weakens the study, I think
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19 hours ago, regentrude said:
8 and 1? Those numbers are way too small to make statistical statements.
ETA: Ouch, just saw the absolute numbers - that is really bad analysis.
They didn't;t make statistical statemtents about those particular values (8 and 1 hospitalized), just stated that those were the numbers in each group. Leading me to believe that they weren't statistically significant. Otherwise they would have included a p value and CI, like they did for their other numbers.
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I looked at it a little more closely today. The vaccinated group was sicker at baseline than the previously infected group. (Table 1a, poorly stitched series of screen shots below). The vaccinated group had higher numbers of patients with co-morbidities in every category. Particularly poorly matched for for immune compromised (420 vs 164) and cancer (636 vx 324). They state that they corrected for this with their math, but IMO, once you start correcting with math you sometimes just end up magnifying other flaws/biases that weren't measured. I don't think that you can math away the fact that the vaccine group was sicker to start with.
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What have you bought lately that you are loving?
in The Chat Board
Posted
I'm surprised that there isn't some sort of USA equivalent, but you're right - a google search came up empty. The CDC has some pretty nice downloadable printable stickers though!