January 2022 Covid-19 Pandemic megathread

Start by reporting it to the college's administration. The professor is almost certainly going against the school's policies.

She should try talking to her advisor or a dean

Call the dean and the student newspaper.

There's an emergency cash asst program -- https://www.pa211.org/agency/19380/35284/

https://www.senatorhughes.com/pa-offering-emergency-assistance-program-for-those-affected-by-covid-19/

Non-govt assistance -- https://www.uwp.org/pacovid/

I haven't heard of any cases of transmission from dogs or cats to people, though it does go the other way.

You're likely very safe to walk the dog .

You could probably wash your hands after you come home. There’s not much you could do beyond that.

I’d walk the dog but take a shower once I get home.

You're a good friend.

There's no relation between side effects or the severity of them and immunity. We know that because the hundreds of thousands of people in the vaccine trials were tracked for their side effects and immunity and there was no relationship.

People are just different.

That's a federal (and likely state) crime. Please report them to your state's dept. of health, the Inspector General of the Dept of Health and Human Services -- https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/report-fraud/

and the FBI -- https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus/combattingfraud

Yes you can remain anonymous. You can also report to all three agencies. Thanks for caring about that!

See if your local health department has a place to report things like this

In addition to what Bobbo34 says, you can also call the employer directly. Ask to speak with their HR department. They’ll ask you for your name, but you don’t have to give it.

I would get tested because then you know to stay isolated so you don’t infect friends and loved ones.

Find a site with drive-thu testing and don’t go anywhere else. Your chance of exposing anyone in that situation, if indeed you do have it, is minuscule.

I would stay home. No sense getting tested since you already feel sick. Dont risk it

Explain to them that in the 200+ years we've been using vaccines none, not a one, has had a side effect crop up after years. None.

There's not really a mechanism by which that could happen. All the ingredients in the vaccine (even the mRNA ones) are out of your body in a week or so. The point of a vaccine is to teach your own body to make something.

Think of it like an instruction book for a piece of IKEA furniture. Originally, we were giving people live viruses, like an entire instruction book. Then we used dead and inactivated viruses, which is like a shortened instruction book. The mRNA vaccines are just like a half page showing what tools you need -- because by the time you're out of toddlerhood, your immune system is like if you've put together dozens and dozens of pieces of IKEA furniture. You get it. You know how their drawers go together, you can figure it out really well and quickly.

Once you put the furniture together, you don't need the instructions anymore. That's the vaccine. It's gone. You make your own antibodies.

Vaccines can cause side effects, some which can have lasting effects, like G-B syndrome. But the EFFECTS of the side effect can last, you don't get G-B syndrome 5 years after a vaccine, you get it weeks after bc it's a side effect.

The summarized version of u/Rewardiflost's answer is:

We've never known the long-term side effects of ANY drug cleared by the FDA at the time they're cleared. What we do know are the COVID vaccine's short-term side effects (like allergic reactions), and the fundamental properties of the COVID vaccine, and neither of those suggest a worrying possibility of long-term side effects.

Ask them when they think the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (Prevnar-7/Prevnar-13) was developed, and if they took it? (Older folks and people with lung issues are more likely to have it)

Ask them when they think the HPV vaccine (Gardasil/Gardasil-9) was developed, and if they took that? (Younger folks, sexually active folks, and people attending college in the last 10 years are more likely to have gotten it).

Those were both developed less than 20 years ago. Why do they trust those and not this vaccine?

Also ask if they understand how vaccines work. Vaccines don't make lasting changes to anything in the body except a few immune cells. Most of us encounter new germs all the time, and that means our immune system is changing all the time.
Even tattoos depend on the immune system - if white blood cells didn't hold the pigment particles in place, then tattoos would fade pretty quickly over short periods of time. Tattoos affect immune cells, too.

A list of links that may be helpful:

How to Stand Up to Science Deniers

Interview with the author of How to Talk to Science Deniers (not the same guy who wrote the previous link)

Categories of anti vaxx narratives. Useful if you are trying to use technique rebuttal.

A podcast about how to talk to people about getting vaccinated. It is very long, but you can skip to 21 minutes in if you must.

A short video about how to convince people to change a behaviour, with vaccines as an example.

A set of in depth PDFs of advice

I think the issue isnt them being afraid of vaccines maybe theyre upset at a mandate so try coming at it from a kore empath angle? I think in this day and age the number of true antivaxxers is minimal. Most likely your family has had other vaccines.

"Ok"

The same reply you give to your family and friends who are trying to force you to get the vax... "you do you and I'll do me ☺️"

It's all super simple and doesn't need to divide people.. Mind your business and hopefully everyone else will mind theirs too

"I understand and respect your choice."

The pandemic's been going on for 2 years now, let's say 700 days.

50 US states + 100 major cities + 100 provinces/whatever in other countries + 100 countries with major outbreaks is 350 places generating daily reports - at least, but I think this is a massive underestimate.

That's 245000 randomly generated numbers. So it's quite reasonable (in hindsight) to expect that every number from 1000 to 9999 has been covered. There might be a handful of exceptions, but they'd be hard to find.

Fantastic observation, I really liked this one :)

I'm glad you're feeling better! Lots of people have very mild symptoms or even no symptoms at all, and it's great that you were one of them.

Had a runny nose and congestion. Yeah it could be that easy with vaccinations.

Absolutely. There are innumerable households where everyone has it and one parent is asypmtomatic, one is very ill, one kid has mild sympyoms, one ends up in hospital or whatever. Tons of those cases, where people get hit differently.

You are correct. Just because people are part of the same household doesn't mean that they will have the same symptoms. This is particularly true if there's a difference in how recently they've been vaccinated.

Yes. Most people report it returns eventually.

Don't know the answer but I love this question so much

Uh, no. Is the medical answer. But you’re not gonna listen and take it anyways. Soooo.. let us know if you die.

In addition to the other poster's answer -- it's not "super mild." It seems to cause less severe infection in general, but it's hard to tease out because many infected people are vaccinated, previously infected, etc.

In unvaccinated people, the difference in severity in general may not be as big.

Omicron IS mild compared to Delta and the others, but it can still kill you. It's like would you rather get HIV, Syphilis, or none of the above? HIV can turn into AIDS and kill you. Syphilis if left untreated can also kill you. Not having either is the best approach.

It might be both.

Omicron is spreading far faster, and to many more people. If 90% of people just have minor symptoms, and only 0.1% get serious enough to need hospitalization, that's a pretty mild thing. But, if 0.1% of people who get sick wind up in hospitals, and we in the US are seeing close to a million cases a day - that still means one thousand people getting admitted to hospitals every day.
Those folks don't go back home right away. They stay in the hospital for at least 5 days, and possibly months before they either die or are released.
(Those aren't actual numbers - just a math example)

The math matters. Even "relatively minor" still means a huge number when looking at millions of people.

We know the hospitals in the USA are getting overwhelmed.
We can see the HHS map, and look at all the red dots where capacity is low

Massachusetts, Denver, and San Diego have said they are straining. 15 hospitals in New Jersey are deferring new patients.

*edit -added a few words

It's the delta variant that's putting people in hospitals, it's still floating around.

The clotting disorder is called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), and it is rare—in 17 million people who got J&J, 54 cases of TTS were reported, 36 of those people were cared for in an intensive care unit, and nine people died (which represents over 15% of cases). Two additional deaths also may be linked to the vaccine. Based on these numbers, the risk appears to be greatest—1 in 100,000—in women ages 30 to 49. source

The AstraZeneca vaccine (not used in the US) also had some reports. source.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are not connected to any known cases of blood clots.

And, the risk of blood clots with COVID is much higher than the risk of blood clots with vaccines.

[removed]

As to be quite honest I am incredibly underwhelmed by the effectiveness of our current options still having very high numbers of breakthrough cases when compared to the absolute efficiency of say the polio vaccine

They worked great against the variant they were designed for.

The more mutations, the more possibility for vaccine evasion.

Sure. There are still over 100 under development.

Pfizer has already started production on an omicron-specific vaccine.
Walter Reed army hospital in the US is just done with phase 1 testing using a 24-faced protein. They can put a different spike protein on each of the 24 faces, giving immune protection against several different variants.

The polio vaccine wasn't all that when it first came out. Some people were actually infected with live polio virus, and passed that on to others. There were three strains of polio when vaccination started, and they needed separate vaccinations. The oral vaccine came with it's own difficulties. It was only because we worked through all those things that we now have a 3-dose vaccine that works around 99% of the time for the one remaining strain left in the world.

Novavax

B, sort of

What they have been doing is cancelling normal appointments and shifting patients to other hospitals. A covid patient that needs an ICU bed might find themselves on a 2 hour ambulance ride to a distant hospital.

And yes, some have died due to lack of beds.

You would need a far more deadly disease and a far more effective vaccine to actually properly cull a population that does not get it

Sure. Manpower and lying.

Around me, the extra treatment centers were staffed by volunteers, military, and doctors/nurses that were out of work because their plastic surgery or other non-essential practice was closed.
Today, those doctors/nurses are working, and the military isn't deployed here.

Once people know there are two tiers of service, they'll just lie about being vaccinated somewhere and losing their documentation. The US states don't share vaccine info with each other, nor with other countries.

It seems like a really elegant solution: no one's rights are violated

No one's rights are violated now,.

Why would we set up entire hubs of likely infection, at great costt? That's not a solution to anything, and nothing needs a solution.

Also, a handful of nurses cannot provide health care in a hospital setting on their own.

healthcare workers making that same personal choice will still be able to practice and share their skills and expertise.

What am I missing?

What you are missing is that an unvaccinated healthcare worker is a danger to their patients. Even more so if the patients are also unvaccinated.

For the sake of public health, it is better if patients (vaxed or no) are treated by fully vaccinated healthcare professionals, so they don't face the danger of contracting covid from the very people who are caring for their health.

As for those health care workers who have not been vaccinated, they can still practice their skills - by getting vaccinated first. They may have made a "personal choice", but there's nothing stopping them making a different personal choice. In low opinion, they really ought to know better, and have already made a different choice.

If a doctor chose not to disinfect their equipment before operating, we would very rightly want to bar them from practicing. It's the same thing if they choose not to be vaccinated.

If you want the honest truth, most people don't give a fuck what happens to the unvaccinated. I'm certainly not in that boat and I think it's fucking disgusting, but a lot of people seem to have a very "Us vs Them" mindset.

Everything mentioned is correct. Also while there are a small minority of nurses that are anti vaxx there are almost no docs who are unvaxxed. 96-99 % of doctors are vaxxed so you wouldn't be able to staff these places.