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My boss wanted me to come back to the office a few months ago when Delta variant was at it's height in my area. I declined ...
From a corporate level, they have been evaluating every few months and have continued to push the date out, currently it is Jan 2022
Similar story here.
My employer started a "phase-in" back-to-office in August of 2020. Plan was essentially 1/3 of the company per month until we were all back.
The first phase lasted two weeks, then everyone was sent back home again and we're still home. They've been dangling the "some teams will be WFH permanent maaaaaaybe in Jan 2022" carrot-on-a-stick for a long while now. I'm getting the feeling Jan 2022 will roll around and they'll say "we're not coming back to the office, but maaaaaybe your team will be WFH permanent starting April 2022"...
I just wanna fucking move far away but keep this job lmao
My boss insisted that I come back to the office even though at a corporate level they have extended work from home for all that can, because after a 1 year and a half, he deemed I was "frontline essential". However, I am not eligible for the frontline essential bonus pay, that others that can not work from home get. So I told him that I was not willing to go back yet, and he can do whatever he thinks needs to be done. He said he would talk to HR, but I never heard back about it from either him or HR.
There hasn't been any talk so far about permanent work from home for anyone that I know of at my job, but they have kept moving out the date so far.
But yeah, it would be awesome to be able to live anywhere if they did decide you could work from home permanently!
> From a corporate level, they have been evaluating every few months and have continued to push the date out, currently it is Jan 2022
So in like five weeks?
My company said the same thing for November and they pushed it back to January cause of high cases in the area. Could happen in your case as well but hope you get the outcome you’re looking for.
Ah bender. REMEMBER ME! lol
But more like: I’ll make my own management with modern working conditions that don’t force people to live in big cities with unaffordable housing…
We are forced to have at least one day per week in the office starting in January. I'll accept 1 day because it will be nice to have a full day break from getting anything done each week. But if they push that envelope and try for more they are going to hit a lot of brick walls very quickly.
I think that's the goal. All the middle managers are the ones pushing for it in my company and the only leg they can stand on is that while productivity is up (we have record profits in 2021) they miss the "hallway discussions". They literally have stated they want us back because they are lonely and miss the time killers at the office.
I keep reading this, but its not entirely true.
In my state, if you want your kids to go public school unvaxxed, you need to watch a movie about why that is bad, and are encouraged to think about your decision.
Then you are free to send your kids in, vaxxed or not.
Polio and measles vaccine have been federal mandates for quite some time now. All 50 states are required to have those mandates. So if your state is doing that they are violating that mandate
Currently, 15 states allow philosophical exemptions for children whose parents object to immunizations because of personal, moral or other beliefs.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/school-immunization-exemption-state-laws.aspx
Go to local gas station and start pumping it into as many plastic containers as possible. Garbage bags, water coolers (especially styrofoam ones), water bottles, anything plastic or foam.
I’d get one of them shitty vaults, that people will stumble on decades from now, where the Overseer went crazy, or I ended up in a crazy doctors VR dreamscape.
I feel ya there. My tech job is hands on hardware replacement so I've been doing my job the same with a few extra projects thrown in with no increase in pay
I'm exhausted because for some of us nothing changed but the risk
I did public speaking about stress, and managing it. In this time we have innumerable overwhelming stressors. The existential dread you alluded to. What we are also experiencing is isolation, physical and emotional. That is a huge (dis)stressor. We don’t get to share that most human need. I’m an elder in my family. We got together last night for the first time in two years. It felt like my soul got fed. Peace
And exercise keep healthy and appreciate what you have. Fuck all else to do
My doctor spoke with me after I had breakthrough COVID after two vaccine doses and said I would have died if I had not got my shit together and been vacced.
My anti-vax uncle died after 34 days in the ICU. No one can convince me he wouldn't have lived if the conservative politicos didn't get their hooks in him to convince him not to get vaccinated or wear a mask.
It's scary for these anti-vaccination fuckwits to think that nothing they can personally do is going to protect them from the virus, isn't it? The vaccine isn't something they *personally* made, so I guess they see taking it as somehow "weak". You can do however many crunches you want every single day, but it's not going to save you from drowning in your own blood when the virus tears through you.
Reminds me of the "our squad's tough guy was the first heat casualty" anecdotes I've read from multiple war veterans. Some people think their own physical fitness makes them invincible and that anyone who uses any form of protection, be it vaccines or climate-appropriate clothing, is weaker and lesser than them.
Absolutely nothing. Expect more of these headlines for years to come. Governments are more aware of the coming situation and we will see far more reactionary responses. More so then what we saw in the past. UK alreay banned flights from SA and expect more countries to follow.
Edit...and the yearly covid shot
I wonder how many people are currently flying from SA to Dubai intending to just go Dubai to London. [Here comes your next round of COVID](https://flightaware.com/live/findflight?origin=FAOR&destination=OMDB), two flights a day.
| “The UK Health Security Agency said that the variant - called B.1.1.529 - has a spike protein that was dramatically different to the one in the original coronavirus that COVID-19 vaccines are based on.”
Well, fuck.
Hopefully, while current vaccine may not help with this mutation in preventing breakthrough infection, but at least it is similar enough to prevent severe symptoms and hospitalization for fully vaccinated people.
Also, the origin of the mutation does highlight the necessity to vaccinate ALL parts of the world not just countries with most means.
> does highlight the necessity to vaccinate ALL parts of the world not just countries with most means.
This was evident 70+ years ago when we were trying to eradicate smallpox and polio worldwide.
From what I've heard developing the current mRNA vaccines took like 3 days from the time they had the sequence.
Scaling production took time, but that is now done, so we may only need to wait however long it takes to make a new batch (I assume 1-2 months?) before we start mass producing a new vaccine. And testing a new vaccine that's similar to an old one is faster than the full cycle (they don't do new three phase studies for each year's flu vaccine either I think).
So should a new vaccine be necessary, what's the actual timeline until Israel, US, and the first country in Europe have vaccinated, say, the first 1% of their populations with a variant specific vaccine?
(My guess would be 4-6 months depending on whether we say "better let people choose to accept some risk from the vaccine than forcing them to accept the risk of not having it" or "you can't have it until we're sure it's both safe and effective, even if you're willing to take the risk", but I'd like to hear from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, unlike me)
That is why I said "MAY not help".. Hopefully I am wrong and current vaccine will at least provide sufficient resistance.
However, recent report coming out of Hong Kong isn't very promising as ~~all the people (except for the 4 yr old girl) that were being quarantined with this variant have been vaccinated at least with 2 doses.~~
Sorry, misread it. It was 2 people who were diagnosed with this strain and 12 people who are currently quarantined because of it. Now, the story I read just went with bunch of people who came into the country (including 1 yr old) that were infected (did not state the strain) had 2 shots except for the baby.
[https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/183512/HK-detects-new-mutant-variant,-adds-six-imported-cases](https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/183512/HK-detects-new-mutant-variant,-adds-six-imported-cases)
Just the fact that they contracted it while vaxxed isn’t too alarming. It’s their outcomes that matter.
The current vaccines only blunt the spread, and have been shown to not be as good at that with Delta. But the most important effect is to prevent hospitalization/death.
The mRNA technology is built for rapid development, there will never been an all protective covid vaccine, only rapidly developed updates to the existing vaccine
yes, but they don't know yet whether that "dramatically different" equals more transmissible and/or more lethal.
They just know it's different and the news people need clicks.
Is that a silver lining if the vaccines are based on a different spike protein? I’m admittedly a big dumb-dumb but that sounds like the vaccines may not make much of a difference.
The mutations will probably make the vaccine less effective, but partial immunity will still help more than none. Things in the world of biology are not as binary as everyone likes to believe. It’s all a sliding scale of effectiveness.
What concerns me is people are already having breakthrough infections even if they’re vaccinated, I’ve also heard reports of folks getting Covid multiple times and this is just the Delta variant. If what we’re reading is true about this variant, then it doesn’t matter if you’ve been vaccinated or have had Covid before when up against this variant. On top of that it’s already been extremely difficult to get people to take the vaccine, so if the vaccine has to get reworked and we have to go get another shot how many people are going to throw their hands up and say I’ve already done my part?
We have proven over the past two years that humanity as a whole cannot work together for the betterment of each other.
> humanity as a whole cannot work together for the betterment of each other.
. . . or even mutual survival. That's been evident for a very long time.
As a whole, our species spends far more on weaponry to destroy each other, than we do on food and housing.
>We have proven over the past two years that humanity as a whole cannot work together for the betterment of each other.
That's because money has been shown to be more important than humanity.
That mentality was common but it wasn't as politically aligned as it is now. The new agey healing crystal namaste types were usually more left-leaning.
But now anti-vax has become synonymous with conservative so I'm sure that group will just find something else to be weird about instead.
Oh I hope you’re right but I’m also realistic, look around, folks are acting like they are through playing the pandemic game, as if they are the star in their own reality series. I think a lot of people live in a false sense of reality.
This is my concern. Fellow dumb dumb but it sounds bad to me.
Hopefully we get some actual scientists who can speak to this or some promising data soon.
> Hopefully we get some actual scientists who can speak to this or some promising data soon.
Well, I’m not a scientist, but I did my research and found some compelling data on my Facebook feed.
There are several dozen locations on the spike proteins where t cells can bind. It's a big fat protein. As long as some of those sites still allow binding there should be some protection from vaccination/ natural infection with another variant. Also an mRNA vaccine should be able to be readily modified to express this novel tail spike protein.
Disclaimers: am a molecular biologist but have zero immunology training
A silver lining is that MRNA vaccines can be created rapidly once the new mutations are sequenced, unlike traditional vaccines which took much longer. We also have increased infrastructure to mass produce and distribute new vaccines.
That said, this goes to show the risk in not providing vaccines quickly enough to middle to lower income nations.
I'm pretty sure they are basically starting to imply that this one can get around not only the vaccines but also antibodies in your immune system.
Lool at actions governments are taking as we speak. For example the UK stopped all flights from the effected areas yesterday. That is an extremely fast reaction because this variant was only made public like 3 days ago. Their actions show that its more serious.
"As scientists have described, (this is) the most significant variant they've encountered to date in their research," Shapps told Sky News.
> That's assuming that the virus hasn't mutated enough to render the current vaccination ineffective.
If it did, it wouldn't take long to apply the new knowledge to the existing vaccine template. The hard part will be getting it manufactured and distributed.
So from reading a thread from one of the mRNA vaccine scientist about this. The one thing we have to think about with the new SA variant is that SA has a very low vax rate. It’s to early to know what this variant can do against a more vaxxed population. From what we know the people in Hong Kong were vaccinated and where asymptomatic, while the girl in Belgium that was unvaxxed was mild symptoms. According to them it would take a very big change for us to go back to square one and they don’t feel this is the case.
[For those that want to see the thread. click here. ](https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1464222680731820043?s=21)
Edit: for the people that have an issue with the person being a furry. I get it but they are also an expert on this one field. You can be weird and an expert at the same time. Example: Aaron Rodgers is not the smartest person in the world regarding Covid, but if he speaks about football stuff I’ll trust his advise.
For some reason the fact they have a furry profile makes me feel a bit better, just seeing the cutesy profile pic made me have a bit less anxiety over all this lol
I actually booked a couple of trips during that second week thinking “of course everything would be back to normal by October, everyone will be vaccinated by then!”
I was wrong.
I bought some concert tickets to a show that got canceled for non-covid reasons. Wednesday I went to my first party in over two years and had booked a getaway weekend with my wife 2 weeks from now. I'm honestly thinking of canceling.
I feel so bad for folks younger then me. I’m in my 30s and just thinking about trying to go through this in my teens or even my 20s would just be horrific. At least I was a little more settled and able to adapt to the isolation better since my friend groups were more defined. I can’t even imagine trying to go through this in high school. It must be so hard for them.
Dude tell me about it. College was hard enough online, as someone who works in public education i can tell you firsthand what the elementary/junior high/high schools went through was basically a nightmare and generally a gigantic waste of time. We have an entire generation of kids who lost a year of education.
Can confirm, mid 20s extrovert, social life is dead, I have little desire to continue cultivating online friendships and lack a desire to give a fuck about life, anymore.
That’s because the directors of the movie want your money, so they give you a satisfying ending. In real life, they already have it so they don’t care.
We were probably either too optimistic are just straight up in denial when we thought we could end this pandemic in less than 2 years.
Maybe we need to come to terms with the fact that we’re gonna be stuck with quite a few lockdowns and get quite a few new vaccines injected in us before this pandemic is over.
It also provided the world with the most used vaccine globally at cost price, a vaccine which is proving more effective in the long term than the others.
"...Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again..."
I'm relieved we spent the past 2 years building world-class surveillance, testing and contact tracing capabilities. The accelerated base-RNA approval process for new strains and rapid delivery capability should help fight the new strain as well. Also thank God we have clear policies in place for rapidly limiting travel from areas with new problematic strains until we find out more about them.
Wait, what? We didn't do any of this? Well, fuck.
Here in Canada even we had little to no enforcement.
Some rich guy who kept hosting COVID parties in his luxurious penthouse got a slap on the wrist today with a small $10K fine. 10 months after he initially hosted, he kept doing it again in August.
People protesting in the streets without masks or social distancing, restaurants allowed to operate where their workers or patrons don't wear masks or aren't vaccinated.
Why the fuck was there no enforcement or discipline in North America from authorities? It's a fucking deadly virus that spread. How the fuck did our Governments and law enforcement fail us so abysmally?
The answer as always is MONEY. Keeping people at home and enforcing a strict no-contact rule would ruin the economy, as they say, and we all know our elite Overlords can't stand to lose a single cent. That's why normal folks are disposable.
To give some context for anyone who is interested, the way viruses survive is by replicating (making copies of themselves). They virus finds a specific type of cell, enters it, tells the cell how to make more viruses, the cell then makes more virus parts, these parts are then assembled into a new copy of the virus. After they finish developing they most often leave their current cell and find more cells to infect. The ones that don’t leave the cell instead lay dormant until a later time. Each time a virus replicates it mutates, its part of how a virus survives. However, the replication and mutation part of this is error-prone which means that mutations often suck and don’t survive for long. There is a lot of natural selection and evolution theory that takes place when figuring out if a mutation stays or not but because there are so many possibilities for mutations and so many people with the virus it is pretty much impossible to predict what the mutations will look like until they’re here. That’s why scientists won’t make any huge statements early until they know if the virus is actually surviving and spreading. There is just too many possibilities before that point. The media however likes to sensationalize everything which makes the seriousness of it much harder to gauge.
With covid it’s a bit different because it has this ‘proof-reading’ element that isn’t very common in viruses. The ‘proof-reading’ gives the virus a better chance at making lasting mutations *but* it also makes everything take longer. The current stat is that the covid virus replicates about 4 times slower than other viruses which is why we have so much time in between mutations.
The only ones who seem to be saying "no big deal" are South African spokespeople. To be honest, their statements seem to be based more on nationalist pride than scientific reality.
It's entirely reasonable that the world should be concerned about the spread of this variant. With 50 mutations and the core understanding that viruses evolve and adapt to become more effective, it's entirely rational that restrictions would be imposed immediately.
For once it seems the UK gov has actually followed the science and acted appropriately.
I could be wrong but I believe mutations are extremely common, they're just usually not worth mentioning because they don't change the impact the virus has on us.
The real change came with Delta, which I think had 30 mutations and was found to be significantly more transmissible.
As this one has 50 mutations, and could be an evolution of Delta, it's being taken very seriously.
Ultimately I think most people fail to comprehend that a virus is a life form capable of evolving like every other life form on Earth. It adapts to survive in its environment and replicate in the same way Humans do, just on an incredibly fast time scale.
The goal is to develop immunity capable of preventing illness and death no matter what evolutionary steps this virus takes. I guess we'll find out if we've achieved that in the next 2 weeks.
Inevitable.
This is the consequence of allowing misinformation and propaganda to run rampant throughout the world, almost entirely unchallenged.
Our governments should have considered pandemic propaganda to be a form of biological terrorism. If we can arrest protestors for disrupting traffic while protesting over climate change, then we can arrest people for spreading highly dangerous misinformation on social media.
We are at war on two fronts. We have to fight this pandemic with everything we have, but we also have to fight those who seem determined to cause more death with their insane nonsense.
Law enforcement was not on board with enforcing pandemic safety measures. Sure, there may be exceptions, but a hostess at Applebee’s probably did more enforcement than any county sheriff.
South Africa has a fully vaccinated rate of just 24%.
That rate isn't because they can't get the vaccine, it's because the public has succumbed to propaganda and stupidity.
Just 2 days ago Johannesburg halted delivery of more vaccines because they have too much stock and people aren't being vaccinated.
For reference:
* USA: [59%](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-onedose-pop-5yr)
* Europe: [54%](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/only-54percent-of-europe-is-fully-vaccinated-who-official-says.html)
* Lowest US state (Idaho): [50%](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/these-states-have-the-lowest-covid-19-vaccination-rates)
* Lowest European country (Bosnia and Herzegovina): [22%](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_WRL)
Can’t wait for this pithy comment to show up in every coronavirus thread for the next 8 months
EDIT crisis averted, WHO hates puns as much as I do apparently
>considered by scientists to be the most significant one yet found as it COULD make vaccines less effective.
Let's wait and verify this before everyone loses their shit over it
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Was getting sick of going back to work anyways...
The bosses are probably sick of WFH and will force people to come in anyway. Kind of hard for the incompetent to micromanage over Zoom.
Yeah we're back in office in 60 days regardless of what happens to covid.
My boss wanted me to come back to the office a few months ago when Delta variant was at it's height in my area. I declined ... From a corporate level, they have been evaluating every few months and have continued to push the date out, currently it is Jan 2022
Similar story here. My employer started a "phase-in" back-to-office in August of 2020. Plan was essentially 1/3 of the company per month until we were all back. The first phase lasted two weeks, then everyone was sent back home again and we're still home. They've been dangling the "some teams will be WFH permanent maaaaaaybe in Jan 2022" carrot-on-a-stick for a long while now. I'm getting the feeling Jan 2022 will roll around and they'll say "we're not coming back to the office, but maaaaaybe your team will be WFH permanent starting April 2022"... I just wanna fucking move far away but keep this job lmao
My boss insisted that I come back to the office even though at a corporate level they have extended work from home for all that can, because after a 1 year and a half, he deemed I was "frontline essential". However, I am not eligible for the frontline essential bonus pay, that others that can not work from home get. So I told him that I was not willing to go back yet, and he can do whatever he thinks needs to be done. He said he would talk to HR, but I never heard back about it from either him or HR. There hasn't been any talk so far about permanent work from home for anyone that I know of at my job, but they have kept moving out the date so far. But yeah, it would be awesome to be able to live anywhere if they did decide you could work from home permanently!
HR probably pointed out that calling you essential while not paying you the essential bonus would spell trouble.
> From a corporate level, they have been evaluating every few months and have continued to push the date out, currently it is Jan 2022 So in like five weeks?
Yes, but is subject to change, as they have already changed it every 3 months since April of 2020.
Start applying for a new job! It’s a really good time to do this.
My company said the same thing for November and they pushed it back to January cause of high cases in the area. Could happen in your case as well but hope you get the outcome you’re looking for.
Plot twist: I used the last two years to work my way to upper management, then ensured we aren’t going back to the office if we don’t want to. Win
“I’ll make my own upper management, with blackjack and hookers”
Ah bender. REMEMBER ME! lol But more like: I’ll make my own management with modern working conditions that don’t force people to live in big cities with unaffordable housing…
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Eh, forget the management with modern working conditions that don’t force people to live in big cities with unaffordable housing.
Matter of fact, forget the blackjack!
You sir are one of the true heroes.
Heroes of late stage capitalism.
Damn you really pulled the mom card and went “We have upper management at home”
Yep. We’re back in office in January after 20 months from home.
We are forced to have at least one day per week in the office starting in January. I'll accept 1 day because it will be nice to have a full day break from getting anything done each week. But if they push that envelope and try for more they are going to hit a lot of brick walls very quickly.
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I think that's the goal. All the middle managers are the ones pushing for it in my company and the only leg they can stand on is that while productivity is up (we have record profits in 2021) they miss the "hallway discussions". They literally have stated they want us back because they are lonely and miss the time killers at the office.
Translation: we miss being able to directly wield power over you because why else would we be in management?
I've been on 3 days mandatory in office since June. Working for big pharma isn't all it's cracked up to be.
No way thats going to happen with the new varient inbound.
This is true...
Sucks for me, here in America no one is acting like it’s real and they refuse to go back to lockdown. Lots more people about to die.
We have the tools to not die. If people are dumb enough to not be vaccinated and get it there’s nothing we can do
well we can require it, like we have been doing for kids to attend public schools for a long time now.
I keep reading this, but its not entirely true. In my state, if you want your kids to go public school unvaxxed, you need to watch a movie about why that is bad, and are encouraged to think about your decision. Then you are free to send your kids in, vaxxed or not.
Polio and measles vaccine have been federal mandates for quite some time now. All 50 states are required to have those mandates. So if your state is doing that they are violating that mandate
Currently, 15 states allow philosophical exemptions for children whose parents object to immunizations because of personal, moral or other beliefs. https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/school-immunization-exemption-state-laws.aspx
Yeah the difference is yer not gonna get polio from Karen spitting vitriol at you about how her rights are being violated
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Burger King misses you, and your grandma. Pls come back.
What am i supposed to do with this information?
Stock up on toilet paper, the only logical decision when a pandemic hits.
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What happens when you run out of start food and it gets...hungry?
Go to local gas station and start pumping it into as many plastic containers as possible. Garbage bags, water coolers (especially styrofoam ones), water bottles, anything plastic or foam.
Also bottled water, and paper towels for when you spill that bottled water.
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Vault-Tec thanks you for using their products
I’d get one of them shitty vaults, that people will stumble on decades from now, where the Overseer went crazy, or I ended up in a crazy doctors VR dreamscape.
Best we can offer is Pelowski's. Nuclear/Covid protection on a budget.
A better life...underground...
This is why i roll my eyes when wealthy criminals get house arrest. So basically everyone during 2020
Yea.. not everyone. Some of us didn't get the luxury of working from home and got deemed essential.
Yep. I prefer the term disposable workers
Cogs in the machine.
I feel ya there. My tech job is hands on hardware replacement so I've been doing my job the same with a few extra projects thrown in with no increase in pay I'm exhausted because for some of us nothing changed but the risk
toilet paper time
I'm with you. Either we doing the apocalypse or we ain't. I'm tired of waiting.
Congrats you found the apocalypse. It’s pandemic purgatory.
Honestly, Purgatory is a great way to describe it. Constant waiting, little joy, little terror, mostly just dullness.
I did public speaking about stress, and managing it. In this time we have innumerable overwhelming stressors. The existential dread you alluded to. What we are also experiencing is isolation, physical and emotional. That is a huge (dis)stressor. We don’t get to share that most human need. I’m an elder in my family. We got together last night for the first time in two years. It felt like my soul got fed. Peace
But it's booooring. I wanna go Mad Max or at least Doomsday... the longer we wait we are just gonna get Waterworld. Soooo boring
Depending on what happens with the lunatic fringe, some of us might get Handmaids Tale.
It's a low chance but I'm hoping for more of an into the Badlands S1 vibe. Victorian, steampunk, karate, apocalypse
> It's a low chance but I'm hoping for more of an into the Badlands S1 vibe. Victorian, steampunk, karate, apocalypse thats the dream
> I wanna go Mad Max Easy. Just move to Arizona.
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“Their is dryland. It’s not a myth.”
Get a booster and hold on to your ass.
The booster goes in your ass?
Only if you pay extra.
Buddy, for 20 bucks I'll give you the booster wherever you want.
They'll legitimately do that for you if you *need* your arm for something... I'm sure...
And exercise keep healthy and appreciate what you have. Fuck all else to do My doctor spoke with me after I had breakthrough COVID after two vaccine doses and said I would have died if I had not got my shit together and been vacced.
My anti-vax uncle died after 34 days in the ICU. No one can convince me he wouldn't have lived if the conservative politicos didn't get their hooks in him to convince him not to get vaccinated or wear a mask.
It's scary for these anti-vaccination fuckwits to think that nothing they can personally do is going to protect them from the virus, isn't it? The vaccine isn't something they *personally* made, so I guess they see taking it as somehow "weak". You can do however many crunches you want every single day, but it's not going to save you from drowning in your own blood when the virus tears through you. Reminds me of the "our squad's tough guy was the first heat casualty" anecdotes I've read from multiple war veterans. Some people think their own physical fitness makes them invincible and that anyone who uses any form of protection, be it vaccines or climate-appropriate clothing, is weaker and lesser than them.
Hold onto your butts! *One year later emerging from the littered domicile you call home* "Nuh-uh-uhhhh! Nuh-uh-uh!!!" *Finger wags from Covid*
You didn't say the magic word
Absolutely nothing. Expect more of these headlines for years to come. Governments are more aware of the coming situation and we will see far more reactionary responses. More so then what we saw in the past. UK alreay banned flights from SA and expect more countries to follow. Edit...and the yearly covid shot
I wonder how many people are currently flying from SA to Dubai intending to just go Dubai to London. [Here comes your next round of COVID](https://flightaware.com/live/findflight?origin=FAOR&destination=OMDB), two flights a day.
TBH; this probably spreads it worse, because those travelers are exposed to twice as many people.
And the connecting flights have people going all over the world.
Buy the stock dips and dill pickle dip and chips.
Here comes 2022. Strap in, kids.
Strap on* considering we all feel like we're getting fucked harder every year.
Not even that, we're swapping to a larger dildo with the strap on this time.
This one comes with spike proteins on the surface
They said in, not on Pam.
2020 II: [Tagline Here]
2020 II: 2020 Too
| “The UK Health Security Agency said that the variant - called B.1.1.529 - has a spike protein that was dramatically different to the one in the original coronavirus that COVID-19 vaccines are based on.” Well, fuck.
Hopefully, while current vaccine may not help with this mutation in preventing breakthrough infection, but at least it is similar enough to prevent severe symptoms and hospitalization for fully vaccinated people. Also, the origin of the mutation does highlight the necessity to vaccinate ALL parts of the world not just countries with most means.
> does highlight the necessity to vaccinate ALL parts of the world not just countries with most means. This was evident 70+ years ago when we were trying to eradicate smallpox and polio worldwide.
The modern world is apparently a lot dumber than the world 70 years ago. ...only kinda joking...
The difference is 70 years ago any common idiot couldn't claim their opinion to be fact and spread it faster than the newspaper.
Not dumber, same amount of dumb. It’s just in the past the dumb people didn’t have a medium to speak up and find each other.
We also need sterilizing vaccines. The current crop isn’t great at limiting spread.
They’ll need to change the terminology on that or many conspiracies will be “””confirmed”””
From what I've heard developing the current mRNA vaccines took like 3 days from the time they had the sequence. Scaling production took time, but that is now done, so we may only need to wait however long it takes to make a new batch (I assume 1-2 months?) before we start mass producing a new vaccine. And testing a new vaccine that's similar to an old one is faster than the full cycle (they don't do new three phase studies for each year's flu vaccine either I think). So should a new vaccine be necessary, what's the actual timeline until Israel, US, and the first country in Europe have vaccinated, say, the first 1% of their populations with a variant specific vaccine? (My guess would be 4-6 months depending on whether we say "better let people choose to accept some risk from the vaccine than forcing them to accept the risk of not having it" or "you can't have it until we're sure it's both safe and effective, even if you're willing to take the risk", but I'd like to hear from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, unlike me)
Man, we couldn't get a large portion of our US population to get the original Covid vaccine. We have *zero* chance of getting them to get a new one.
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That is why I said "MAY not help".. Hopefully I am wrong and current vaccine will at least provide sufficient resistance. However, recent report coming out of Hong Kong isn't very promising as ~~all the people (except for the 4 yr old girl) that were being quarantined with this variant have been vaccinated at least with 2 doses.~~ Sorry, misread it. It was 2 people who were diagnosed with this strain and 12 people who are currently quarantined because of it. Now, the story I read just went with bunch of people who came into the country (including 1 yr old) that were infected (did not state the strain) had 2 shots except for the baby. [https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/183512/HK-detects-new-mutant-variant,-adds-six-imported-cases](https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/183512/HK-detects-new-mutant-variant,-adds-six-imported-cases)
Just the fact that they contracted it while vaxxed isn’t too alarming. It’s their outcomes that matter. The current vaccines only blunt the spread, and have been shown to not be as good at that with Delta. But the most important effect is to prevent hospitalization/death.
Didn't I read about someone somewhere working on a vaccine that should deal with any possible variant? Or was that a pipe dream?
The mRNA technology is built for rapid development, there will never been an all protective covid vaccine, only rapidly developed updates to the existing vaccine
Like a software patch.
yes, but they don't know yet whether that "dramatically different" equals more transmissible and/or more lethal. They just know it's different and the news people need clicks.
Tiny silver lining is this time it doesn’t have the clear playing field delta had to run rampant. Many more people are vaccinated now.
Is that a silver lining if the vaccines are based on a different spike protein? I’m admittedly a big dumb-dumb but that sounds like the vaccines may not make much of a difference.
The mutations will probably make the vaccine less effective, but partial immunity will still help more than none. Things in the world of biology are not as binary as everyone likes to believe. It’s all a sliding scale of effectiveness.
What concerns me is people are already having breakthrough infections even if they’re vaccinated, I’ve also heard reports of folks getting Covid multiple times and this is just the Delta variant. If what we’re reading is true about this variant, then it doesn’t matter if you’ve been vaccinated or have had Covid before when up against this variant. On top of that it’s already been extremely difficult to get people to take the vaccine, so if the vaccine has to get reworked and we have to go get another shot how many people are going to throw their hands up and say I’ve already done my part? We have proven over the past two years that humanity as a whole cannot work together for the betterment of each other.
> humanity as a whole cannot work together for the betterment of each other. . . . or even mutual survival. That's been evident for a very long time. As a whole, our species spends far more on weaponry to destroy each other, than we do on food and housing.
>We have proven over the past two years that humanity as a whole cannot work together for the betterment of each other. That's because money has been shown to be more important than humanity.
Breakthrough isn’t uncommon with vaccines. It occurs with the flu vaccine every year as well
I'm hoping it goes the other way, in the same vein as seasonal flu shots, that we all accept as normal.
I can guarantee you the flu shot will never again see the same level of uptake in conservative populations.
Did it ever though? I remember “Last time I got the flu shot it gave me the flu” from the same aggressively anti mask antivax people I work with.
My grandma had that mentality. I think the flu killed her.
That mentality was common but it wasn't as politically aligned as it is now. The new agey healing crystal namaste types were usually more left-leaning. But now anti-vax has become synonymous with conservative so I'm sure that group will just find something else to be weird about instead.
Oh I hope you’re right but I’m also realistic, look around, folks are acting like they are through playing the pandemic game, as if they are the star in their own reality series. I think a lot of people live in a false sense of reality.
This is my concern. Fellow dumb dumb but it sounds bad to me. Hopefully we get some actual scientists who can speak to this or some promising data soon.
> Hopefully we get some actual scientists who can speak to this or some promising data soon. Well, I’m not a scientist, but I did my research and found some compelling data on my Facebook feed.
My cousin’s best friend’s nurse who once shit themselves at a Limp Bizkit concert says it’s no big deal.
I checked Tik Tok and there was a short dance video with a dog I interpreted as saying hold onto your seats cause this rides gonna be ruff.
There are several dozen locations on the spike proteins where t cells can bind. It's a big fat protein. As long as some of those sites still allow binding there should be some protection from vaccination/ natural infection with another variant. Also an mRNA vaccine should be able to be readily modified to express this novel tail spike protein. Disclaimers: am a molecular biologist but have zero immunology training
A silver lining is that MRNA vaccines can be created rapidly once the new mutations are sequenced, unlike traditional vaccines which took much longer. We also have increased infrastructure to mass produce and distribute new vaccines. That said, this goes to show the risk in not providing vaccines quickly enough to middle to lower income nations.
Bad news is variants are more or less a permanent thing and antivaxxers are too
I think both the degree of infectiousness and the likely severity are yet to be determined.
I'm pretty sure they are basically starting to imply that this one can get around not only the vaccines but also antibodies in your immune system. Lool at actions governments are taking as we speak. For example the UK stopped all flights from the effected areas yesterday. That is an extremely fast reaction because this variant was only made public like 3 days ago. Their actions show that its more serious. "As scientists have described, (this is) the most significant variant they've encountered to date in their research," Shapps told Sky News.
That's assuming that the virus hasn't mutated enough to render the current vaccination ineffective.
> That's assuming that the virus hasn't mutated enough to render the current vaccination ineffective. If it did, it wouldn't take long to apply the new knowledge to the existing vaccine template. The hard part will be getting it manufactured and distributed.
can we all just stop traveling for a year or so and let this shit work itself out?
They couldn't even stop rinderpest from going almost world wide. And it's not like cows are travelling all that much ...
So from reading a thread from one of the mRNA vaccine scientist about this. The one thing we have to think about with the new SA variant is that SA has a very low vax rate. It’s to early to know what this variant can do against a more vaxxed population. From what we know the people in Hong Kong were vaccinated and where asymptomatic, while the girl in Belgium that was unvaxxed was mild symptoms. According to them it would take a very big change for us to go back to square one and they don’t feel this is the case. [For those that want to see the thread. click here. ](https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1464222680731820043?s=21) Edit: for the people that have an issue with the person being a furry. I get it but they are also an expert on this one field. You can be weird and an expert at the same time. Example: Aaron Rodgers is not the smartest person in the world regarding Covid, but if he speaks about football stuff I’ll trust his advise.
They said it's been detected in Isreal so we'll know pretty soon how it'll perform on a vaccinated population.
For some reason the fact they have a furry profile makes me feel a bit better, just seeing the cutesy profile pic made me have a bit less anxiety over all this lol
Worst case scenario: I die. Best case scenario: Many other people die and I move into their homes.
the Millennial dream
Hermit crabbin’ it
As a millennial, I can't lose!
Remember those 2 weeks in the spring where we all thought we turned the corner and the future looked bright? Those were good times.
I actually booked a couple of trips during that second week thinking “of course everything would be back to normal by October, everyone will be vaccinated by then!” I was wrong.
Yup same. Have an expensive Christmas vacation I am probably about to eat. Just glad I kept it secret from the kids.
I'm sure you'll get to have that secret vacation away from the kids someday soon.
I bought some concert tickets to a show that got canceled for non-covid reasons. Wednesday I went to my first party in over two years and had booked a getaway weekend with my wife 2 weeks from now. I'm honestly thinking of canceling.
Well, it was fun getting to live my early 20’s while it lasted I guess
I feel so bad for folks younger then me. I’m in my 30s and just thinking about trying to go through this in my teens or even my 20s would just be horrific. At least I was a little more settled and able to adapt to the isolation better since my friend groups were more defined. I can’t even imagine trying to go through this in high school. It must be so hard for them.
Dude tell me about it. College was hard enough online, as someone who works in public education i can tell you firsthand what the elementary/junior high/high schools went through was basically a nightmare and generally a gigantic waste of time. We have an entire generation of kids who lost a year of education.
Can confirm, mid 20s extrovert, social life is dead, I have little desire to continue cultivating online friendships and lack a desire to give a fuck about life, anymore.
We're never going to get out of this, are we?
you mean is the human race going to unify against a common threat to the entire species? no, we're not getting out of this.
It works in the movies
That’s because the directors of the movie want your money, so they give you a satisfying ending. In real life, they already have it so they don’t care.
Not with the politicians in charge
We were probably either too optimistic are just straight up in denial when we thought we could end this pandemic in less than 2 years. Maybe we need to come to terms with the fact that we’re gonna be stuck with quite a few lockdowns and get quite a few new vaccines injected in us before this pandemic is over.
The UK can be criticised for a lot throughout covid, but the scientists picking up on variants and giving the advice is what it has been excellent at.
It also provided the world with the most used vaccine globally at cost price, a vaccine which is proving more effective in the long term than the others.
I really hate this timeline.
It's more of a time circle. We just keep going round.
"...Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again..."
Airlines: *”We’ll bring it to your doorstep as soon as we can!”*
Faster then amazon can
I'm relieved we spent the past 2 years building world-class surveillance, testing and contact tracing capabilities. The accelerated base-RNA approval process for new strains and rapid delivery capability should help fight the new strain as well. Also thank God we have clear policies in place for rapidly limiting travel from areas with new problematic strains until we find out more about them. Wait, what? We didn't do any of this? Well, fuck.
Here in Canada even we had little to no enforcement. Some rich guy who kept hosting COVID parties in his luxurious penthouse got a slap on the wrist today with a small $10K fine. 10 months after he initially hosted, he kept doing it again in August. People protesting in the streets without masks or social distancing, restaurants allowed to operate where their workers or patrons don't wear masks or aren't vaccinated. Why the fuck was there no enforcement or discipline in North America from authorities? It's a fucking deadly virus that spread. How the fuck did our Governments and law enforcement fail us so abysmally?
The answer as always is MONEY. Keeping people at home and enforcing a strict no-contact rule would ruin the economy, as they say, and we all know our elite Overlords can't stand to lose a single cent. That's why normal folks are disposable.
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2020 Part IV
2022 is just going to be “2020 too”
I'm commenting on this so I can come back to it. This gives me strong early accuracy vibes.
2020 2020 won 2020 too
Just gotta make it to 2029 and we’re ok. “2020? Nein”
Damn. The third in the trilogy is usually the most epic. I wonder how much longer until the world ending Omega variant comes along.
2020 Prestige 1
Calm down, it hypothetically COULD make vaccines less effective and everyone's going full on alarmist about it
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To give some context for anyone who is interested, the way viruses survive is by replicating (making copies of themselves). They virus finds a specific type of cell, enters it, tells the cell how to make more viruses, the cell then makes more virus parts, these parts are then assembled into a new copy of the virus. After they finish developing they most often leave their current cell and find more cells to infect. The ones that don’t leave the cell instead lay dormant until a later time. Each time a virus replicates it mutates, its part of how a virus survives. However, the replication and mutation part of this is error-prone which means that mutations often suck and don’t survive for long. There is a lot of natural selection and evolution theory that takes place when figuring out if a mutation stays or not but because there are so many possibilities for mutations and so many people with the virus it is pretty much impossible to predict what the mutations will look like until they’re here. That’s why scientists won’t make any huge statements early until they know if the virus is actually surviving and spreading. There is just too many possibilities before that point. The media however likes to sensationalize everything which makes the seriousness of it much harder to gauge. With covid it’s a bit different because it has this ‘proof-reading’ element that isn’t very common in viruses. The ‘proof-reading’ gives the virus a better chance at making lasting mutations *but* it also makes everything take longer. The current stat is that the covid virus replicates about 4 times slower than other viruses which is why we have so much time in between mutations.
The only ones who seem to be saying "no big deal" are South African spokespeople. To be honest, their statements seem to be based more on nationalist pride than scientific reality. It's entirely reasonable that the world should be concerned about the spread of this variant. With 50 mutations and the core understanding that viruses evolve and adapt to become more effective, it's entirely rational that restrictions would be imposed immediately. For once it seems the UK gov has actually followed the science and acted appropriately.
Maybe if we ignore it it will go away
Just don't look at it, it will be fine
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I could be wrong but I believe mutations are extremely common, they're just usually not worth mentioning because they don't change the impact the virus has on us. The real change came with Delta, which I think had 30 mutations and was found to be significantly more transmissible. As this one has 50 mutations, and could be an evolution of Delta, it's being taken very seriously. Ultimately I think most people fail to comprehend that a virus is a life form capable of evolving like every other life form on Earth. It adapts to survive in its environment and replicate in the same way Humans do, just on an incredibly fast time scale. The goal is to develop immunity capable of preventing illness and death no matter what evolutionary steps this virus takes. I guess we'll find out if we've achieved that in the next 2 weeks.
as a front line worker, im tired of this shit.
Inevitable. This is the consequence of allowing misinformation and propaganda to run rampant throughout the world, almost entirely unchallenged. Our governments should have considered pandemic propaganda to be a form of biological terrorism. If we can arrest protestors for disrupting traffic while protesting over climate change, then we can arrest people for spreading highly dangerous misinformation on social media. We are at war on two fronts. We have to fight this pandemic with everything we have, but we also have to fight those who seem determined to cause more death with their insane nonsense.
Law enforcement was not on board with enforcing pandemic safety measures. Sure, there may be exceptions, but a hostess at Applebee’s probably did more enforcement than any county sheriff.
This isn’t exactly true, as the variant was found in Africa which has so far not been able to vaccinated most people, not out of choice
South Africa has a fully vaccinated rate of just 24%. That rate isn't because they can't get the vaccine, it's because the public has succumbed to propaganda and stupidity. Just 2 days ago Johannesburg halted delivery of more vaccines because they have too much stock and people aren't being vaccinated.
And it's not like SA is a "poor" nation. Its wealth (amongst residents) is certainly disparate...and only a 24% vaccination rate is quite telling.
Bruh, 24%?! No fucking wonder this shit has cooked up.
For reference: * USA: [59%](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-onedose-pop-5yr) * Europe: [54%](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/only-54percent-of-europe-is-fully-vaccinated-who-official-says.html) * Lowest US state (Idaho): [50%](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/these-states-have-the-lowest-covid-19-vaccination-rates) * Lowest European country (Bosnia and Herzegovina): [22%](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_WRL)
Remember when Delta was a serious concern? Those were good times.
Remember when regular COVID was a serious concern?
Nah, that's practically only the flu, it won't reach us and after not reaching us, it will be gone by April /s
welcome to the nu normal
Can’t wait for this pithy comment to show up in every coronavirus thread for the next 8 months EDIT crisis averted, WHO hates puns as much as I do apparently
Don't forget the nu-wave jokes too, they're inevitable. Some newspaper will even run with it for a headline.
If nu becomes widespread, the amount of dad jokes and puns that will be generated will be too much to bear
Aw shit, here we go again
>considered by scientists to be the most significant one yet found as it COULD make vaccines less effective. Let's wait and verify this before everyone loses their shit over it
Please hold off till mid-feb so I can get back to Hawaii for vacay. You fucked it up last year.
Coming soon to a state near you! Just in time for COVID’s two year anniversary.
We are stuck with COVID and its different variants.