Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Mike]

We live in interesting times.

[THE_WIZARD_]

STFU

[Dr. Strangelove]

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I found the exact article about United canceling flights. They don't give an exact number of how many flights were canceled.

https://money.yahoo.com/united-airlines-cancels-flights-3-191800701.html

So how are things going over at Southwest, the only major airline to NOT require employees to get vaccinated? Only a few days difference in the article below.

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Southwest Airlines made a point during the holiday travel mess to say its flights weren't being impacted by the spike in COVID-19 sick calls other airlines were seeing.

With back-to-back days of more than 500 flight cancellations absent significant winter storms, the airline isn't saying that anymore.

Southwest, the nation's largest domestic carrier, canceled nearly 650 Thursday flights, or 1 in 5 flights, after canceling 534 flights, or 17%, of its Wednesday flights, according to flight tracker FlightAware. In total, the airline has canceled nearly 1,200 flights in two days-plus, more than any U.S. carrier. The airline accounts for nearly one-third of total U.S. flight cancellations Thursday, according to FlightAware.

Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said the airline continues to be "challenged" by the weather but is also now seeing an "uptick" in COVID sick calls due to a spike in infections and requirements for close contacts to also quarantine, which hurts its efforts to recover from storms

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2022/01/06/southwest-airlines-flight-cancellations-covid/9116618002/

[Hannibal]

Shouldn't United have zero cancellations? I thought that the magic Fauci juice prevents both infection and transmission? Isn't that why we suspended "my body, my choice"?

[Jeff Buchanan]

On Hannibal's post that implies, if I'm reading it correctly and I think DSL is, flight cancellations have a direct correlation with the now enjoined vaccine mandates. They may be correlated but its a weak correlation. IOW, flights aren't getting cancelled because the government mandated aircrew, ticket/baggage agents and aircraft maintainers get vaxed and thousands quit. That hasn't happened.

TBC, I'm opposed to vaccine mandates for private entities. I'm not buying the line that, if we just had higher vaccination rates .....!!!! At one point researches said a 70% rate of vaccinations plus previous exposure, illness and recovery (hybrid immunity) would turn the pandemic into an endemic of controllable local outbreaks. Apparently, that didn't happen. According to who? I think it has and probably 6 months ago.

When you age stratify both risk and serious illness, only a very small segment of the US population is at risk yet everyone is being told they must wear masks, get vaccinated and avoid situations where you're going to interact with large numbers of other people. Nonsense.

But that nonsense is driving PH policy. That government heavy handedness reflected in vaccine mandates was even considered is a result of the mostly misguided policies intended to, at first, eradicate SARS2 and latter, (much, much later) when it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, to slow it's spread..... repeatedly, "flatten the curve." Frankly, that never happened in past (surges) as a result of human interventions and sure-as-shit isn't happening right now with Omicron. Why have these dumb-fuck PH polices survived and continued? Fear driven decision making devoid of scientific fact, anecdotal facts on the ground of sufficient value to be acted upon and sound mathematical analysis of all available data. I get this when body bags were getting stacked up outside Italian hospitals in early 2020 and a few weeks later in NYC. Within a year, there was enough data available to stop the fear mongering and start learning how to live with SARS2, manage it and avoid outbreaks causing as much disruption to personal mobility, education and economies. Yet, the BS got worse in year 2 and the same BS continues today. Developing reasonable approaches to the pandemic has been delayed by dumbfuckery for two years. Time to get heads out of assess .... oh, wait. That's unlikely to happen.

3 years into this, the WHO continues to spout crap and most nations, with a few exceptions, are still ginning up stupid pandemic PH policies whose costs, far exceed any benefit to the PH. I posted some data up thread from an encouraging NYTs piece that provided substance to the claim that at this point, the risks of dying from COVID are about the same, age correlated, as they are for Influenza and those risks are probably over-stated due to reporting and data collection errors. Have those risks EVER been much different? Well, yes, early on it appeared that they were but not significantly when you looked at the math instead of pictures of people in the hospital, their faces blurred out, on ventilators. And now, the risk of dying or getting seriously ill so as to need hospitalization from COVID are definitely not higher than influenza. That is fact, I'm not pulling that out of my ass and damn-it, for 98% of the US population, we need to be treating SARS2/C-19 the same way we've treated the flu for decades..... you get infected, you feel like shit for a few days, treat yourself symptomatically and return to your normal routines in usually 5d or less. Instead, nations have collectively fucked over their citizens, their educational systems and their economies severely damaging a decade or more of full employment, improving global standards of living, sustained growth and economic development. IOW, government is more responsible for the damage that has been wrought than the SARS2 pandemic itself.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Just wear your mask....get your vax...and shut your hole.

[lineygoblue]

Just wear your mask....get your vax...and shut your hole.

you forgot "... and vote Democratic"

[Jeff Buchanan]

When it comes to COVID, I'm a mandatory vaccination opponent. OTH, COVID vaccines are saving lives. It comes down to elevating freedom of choice over a perceived public good. Because of the lack of trust I have in COVID related data collection, analysis and reporting I have my doubts about how much public good is actually being realized by forced vaccination. Note this a separate kind of argument from requiring vaccinations for already subdued pathogens to attend school so as to prevent new outbreaks. I favor these.

I believe that when you measure public good in overall population risk reduction for a pathogen that is currently NOT subdued, the value of personal choice outweighs the value of risk reduction even though a measure of subjectivity interjects itself in the calculations. When you look at risk reduction by age cohort, risk reduction may out weigh the value of freedom of choice. Clearly, those over 65 and even more clearly those over 70 who get vaccinated have a better probability of surviving a COVID infection than those under those ages. The conclusion then is that vaccination benefits only a small portion of the overall US population in terms of risk reduction.

If you ask the question, is mandatory vaccination beneficial to the overall US public health, in the context I laid out above, it probably isn't of greater value than that of freedom of choice. At least that's the way I see it. YMMV.

What prompted me to write this is an article that appeared in this weekend's Economist that will have illiberal heads nodding in agreement and saying "told you so." It answered the question, do vaccination mandates move the population of antivaxers/not vaccinated to get vaccinated and the answer, according to the article is, yes (I'll get to that). NB: the article did not address the question, are vaccination rates strongly correlated to risk reduction in the overall population? I just opined that I don't think they do unless you age standardize the data and then only a small portion of the overall population benefits.

The Economist article based their position on this saying, "In the week after the announcement of pass-sanitaire requirements (a law passed in Canada that requires everyone that wishes to enter a restaurant, bar or gyms) first-dose vaccinations increased by 42% over the previous week; and by 71% over two weeks. They estimated that 287,000 more people were vaccinated within six weeks as a result." The article implies that this increase in vaccination rates lowered the risk of COVID related illness As I mentioned, and I want to emphasize this, the article said nothing about whether the Canadian approach benefited Canadian PH overall in terms of risk reduction. It probably did benefit a small age cohort but the overall Canadian PH was not likely to have improved that much ...... personal liberties were sacrificed for a questionable public good.

All of this is framed in bullets being aimed at SOTUS from the left for saying, nope, you can't mandate vaccines. Period. There's now no federal government employee carve out either. Actually, the estimate is that upwards of 95% of those employees are already vaxed. No matter .......I like the decision rendered on the various claims seeking to enjoin the government's mandatory vaccine scam. Why? Because I love the US Constitution that protects our personal liberties in almost every case where government steps in to try to limit them.

[THE_WIZARD_]

you forgot "... and vote Democratic"

Well that's a given liney...a certainty if you will...an axiom...like...Talent is a dipshit...or CGVT is an idiot...or HARBAUGH!!!!...or the '97 Huskers would have crushed M...

Some things just don't need to be stated.

[Hannibal]

Wear your mask.

Wear another mask

Get the jab

Get the booster

Drink the soy

Eat the bug burgers

Get the second booster

Replace your car with the $50,000 golf cart.

Take a knee for BLM

Vote Democrat

[THE_WIZARD_]

Sound advice.

[Hannibal]

Chairman Joe is now 14.8 points underwater in the latest RCP polling average. Trump’s average the day that he left office was -15.0

[Hannibal]

More data showing how blitheringly obvious it is that the vaccine has been worthless at preventing the spread of variants of Covid 19 over the past year.

South Africa and Israel — two countries on totally opposite sides of the vaccination spectrum.

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[iam416]

I assume he’s probably found bedrock. It won’t be this bad in 11 months. It can’t. That said, I think he’s also really lowered his ceiling. DJT could never really get above 45. I don’t think The Chairman is quite so constrained, but I’d personally surprised if he ever tops 47.

[lineygoblue]

It might be different if the actual science showed that getting jabbed/boosted/boosed X2+3 actually stopped infections and spreading of infections. But the science isn't showing that at all. You can be jabbed/boosted X5 times, and still get infected, and still pass the infection on to others. Yet people are being fired from their jobs for refusing the jab that doesn't work. In Canada, pastors of churches are being jailed for holding services. Police and firefighters are being fired in some areas because they refuse the jab/booster. The jab/booster that doesn't work, as in 'flattening the curve". Does anyone remember when Queen Gretch said all we needed was to obey her orders for 30 days, and we would flatten the curve and get back to normal? How did that work out?

Again, I'm not opposed to getting the vaccine. I've gotten the original shot and a booster. I did so because I do my flu shot every year, and I now include the Covid shot, because I work in a job where I come in contact with the public on a daily basis. I think its a sound decision to do so. But I have co-workers who do not have the shot or the booster, and will continue to refuse to do so. I respect their rights to make that decision. To me, its like wearing a seat belt when you drive your car. Its no skin off my nose if Wiz, or Jeff or Frooty wear their seat belts or not. That's their choice. If I wear mine, I have a better chance of surviving a bad accident. That's the way I view the vaccine/boosters.

Belated thank-you's to Senators Manchin and Sinema for showing some backbone and voting in favor of democracy instead of rampant socialism. I wish we had senators with that kind of backbone in Michigan. Instead we have nimrods like Stupidnow and Peters. Yippee