The thing about public health is that it's a game of averages. Smallpox vaccination, because of the specific details of the vaccine itself, has significant potential side effects well beyond any other modern commonly-administered vaccine. These side effects can be permanently disabling, or in some cases even cause smallpox-like illness itself. When smallpox was widespread, the downside of vaccination (side effect risks) was much smaller than the downside of not vaccinating (dying of smallpox). Now that smallpox has been eradicated, the calculation is changed - on average the damage that will be done by side-effects in a wide-spread vaccination campaign are outweighed by the extremely small risk caused by not vaccinating.
That leaves the question of whether a better (safer) smallpox vaccine could be developed - I don't know enough about medical science to know if that's feasible, but even if it is it's likely not worth the cost and effort to develop a new vaccine for a disease that is no longer really a threat.
I know one Covid long-hauler personally. She's in excellent physical shape, and has worked for several years as a paramedic (which is, in fact, where she caught Covid). She's got medical training, professional expertise, and is generally an all-around no-bullshit kind of person. It's been six months since her original diagnosis, and she still has lingering symptoms - on bad days she can't climb up a flight of steps without getting winded, despite literally running 10Ks earlier this year. This is just a single anecdote, and COVID long-haulers may not be as widespread or as significant as the article suggests, but having witnessed her experience firsthand I'm absolutely not willing to write it off.
I think part of it a cultural idea, perhaps driven by our employment system and antibiotics, that it takes about 1-5 days to get over a most illnesses.
If you read older literature, you see people taking months to get over things like the flu, a whole process of recuperation completely unheard of even among those who may have the affluence today to do it.
There are the outliers who may never recover from COVID, people who assign their general discontentments to it, but I suspect there is another group that maybe just needed more than a week or two to recover and are suffering the consequences of not taking it or not being allowed to take it.
I’ve had flu about 6 times in my life (I mean real flu, not sniffles/cold) and even when I was younger, a 5-day recovery would have been a miracle. For me it’s 2 weeks to feel normal, at a minimum!
I've had flu, or something with symptoms like it, twice as an adult, and both times it took a whole month to get through the "really feeling awful and stuck in bed" stage.
Recovery was quick afterwards. But just being ill was much more than a 1-5 day event.
I also know what really sounds like a COVID long-hauler personally. She's in her 30s, in shape, ran long races as recently as last year, worked as a dev at a healthcare startup and is in the final stages of applying to med school as a returning student.
She's been down for 5-6 months now with recurring symptoms like fatigue and shortness of breath. She's had a very extensive health workup to exclude a number of possibilities (thyroid disorder? CMV?), but is now basically resigned to living with what amounts to moderate asthma and exercise intolerance.
We are saying exceptional stories like hers are repeated and spread by the media. These stories scare the general population because they think it could happen to them. Statistics tell us otherwise but most people don't know that but instead they react emotionally and get scared.
On one hand these people's stories need to be shared. On the other hand sharing them spreads fear and, indirect, mis-information about the potency of the virus.
I don't have a good answer but stories like this bring eyeballs and viewers to the media. That's their goal and by attaining that goal they're scaring the public.
Studies and statistics also tell us that as a young person below the age of 50 you have a 0.01% chance of succumbing to COVID. Yet, you will read the stories of the unfortunate few as if it's NORMAL that this happens to people. It's not. Those are outliers but media report on these real cases but inflate them as if the bubonic plaque has hit the planet.
Coronavirus is very dangerous and worse than the flu. But we need to stop acting as if this is a population killer virus. We have a pandemic and we need to stop it but the amount of panic-inducing articles and videos is insane. We need a level-headed approach.
Make no mistake - I believe in and support the measures we take. Fully. I wear mask whenever required and even more often than that. I want to keep others safe from this virus and keeping distance/wearing a mask costs nothing. We need to stop this virus especially since it's rather novel.
BUT. And this is a big but. You have to explain to the same people who shut down their shops a few months ago and might have to do so again that we are tanking the economy on purpose (Germany in my case).
This will also cost lives. It's just harder to make that connection but people will die as a result of lockdown measures. Why is death by Corona less okay then death by shitty economy and its effects? What is this weird disregard for other deaths when compared to Corona? Because it's more tangible?
All kinds of metrics are telling us that poor economic performance and economic depressions are directly correlated with increased deaths, e.g. suicides or simply shittier healthcare.
It's just impossible to openly talk about this without causing a demon rampage.
The point the original post is making is that it's not just about dying. You don't know what the other effects may be on your body. Are you willing to roll the dice on it?
Furthermore, the more people that have it, the more out of control it will be. Obviously. And while on average your chances of death or debilitation are low, it will have outsized effects on minorities, frontline workers, and other groups. You're not just rolling the dice on your own health, you're doing so with the health of everyone you interact with as well.
Your quoted figures were surprising to me so I went and read the source. Are you aware that the statistics you're citing explicitly don't include over half of the deaths in the sample? It's the fifth paragraph,
> Although nursing home residents were not tested, they represented 54.9% of Indiana's deaths. Thus, we excluded nursing home residents from all calculations (that is, deaths and infections).
That's not too far fetched. It is well known that heart and, obviously, lungs are affected by COVID19. Add to that a potentially week long sickness and I am not surprised your friend is in a bad shape. Compare this to coma patients, for instance.
The question is: Is her condition chronic? That is, given a good treatment, diet, and specific exercise, could she return to normal? What did she do after recovery?
Hilariously, around like the third sentence of this I thought to myself "I bet this guy would like Steve Ramsey". He really is head-and-shoulders above anyone else making content in the hobby.
I'm gonna sound like a paid shill if I praise him anymore than I already have but there's no way I'd be building my own cabinets if I didn't try making his BMW (basic mobile workbench) back in 2017.
Yeah, I'm thinking the simpler answer here is that this data is basically trash. Based on some of the other comments in this thread, it really seems like it is not a good quality survey with pretty poor quality control.
It reports fewer agency developers in China than in Andorra. The difference between the two represents 1% of Andorra's total population and 0.7E-4% of China's.
Standard practice for Google SREs in any serious outage is to communicate via internally-hosted IRC, since it has a minimum amount of dependencies outside of itself
Yes, though exactly why depends on the jurisdiction. In some areas a tenant blacklists is explicitly illegal; in others this would fall afoul of credit monitoring registration laws. Additionally the fact that they're using AI opens the door for a lot of issues; for example, if it turns out that their blacklist flags a disproportionately large share of African-American renters they're on the wrong side of fair housing and anti-redlining laws.
Closure, the printer spool “book” in question, is one of the best works on the philosophy of software engineering and life on the modern internet ever written.
It seems to me that while any one of those metrics isn’t particularly useful in isolation, if the same person is consistently at the top of all of them, that’s telling you something.
Maybe. but what if their peer has far fewer commits to their name, far fewer written unit tests attributable to them, because they spend most of their time using their indepth domain knowledge to assist other developers, who then make commits based on that contribution?
Do they have to sit around and ensure that their coworker includes a "Co-Authored-By" in the commit message? One commit message? All commit messsages? etc. etc.
This guy was also top in terms of the number of FAQ entries written to help people. In fact he wrote the FAQ system itself and also wrote a right-click plugin so if you rightclicked on a question in chat it would auto-search the FAQ.
_What_ it tells you, however, depends on whether or not the combined metrics are used to evaluate people (or more accurately, whether people _think_ they're being evaluated by those metrics). Goodhart's Law[1], ruining everything since 1975.
There are ~230,000 Persian Jews in Israel, ~70,000 in the US, and under 10,000 left in Iran. As a non-Persian Jew who grew up with lots of Persian Jews, I can tell you that 300,000 left for a reason.
I didn't go through a bootcamp but I know plenty of folks who have, and in my experience the overall average quality of bootcamps did seem to be significantly higher several years ago.
That leaves the question of whether a better (safer) smallpox vaccine could be developed - I don't know enough about medical science to know if that's feasible, but even if it is it's likely not worth the cost and effort to develop a new vaccine for a disease that is no longer really a threat.