TallGuyJohninBKK

https://ddc.moph.go.th/covid19-dashboard/?dashboard=main Thailand's weekly new COVID hospitalizations continued their upward spiral last week, now almost five times higher than the admissions from just two months ago, and having increased for seven of the past eight weeks, according to the latest update from the Thai Ministry of Public Health. The MoPH's latest weekly update says Thailand had 590 new COVID hospitalizations for the week of Dec. 3-9, up 10% from the 536 recorded the prior week, and nearly five times higher than the recent low of just 124 new COVID hospitalizations for the week of Oct. 8-14. The most recent 590 new weekly COVID hospitalizations is Thailand's highest tally in the past five months, since the country reported 613 new COVID hospitalizations for the week of July 9-15. The current spike in new COVID hospitalizations is Thailand's second of 2023, but thus far remains well below the earlier spike that began after Song Kran in April. From mid-April through early June, Thailand's new weekly COVID hospitalizations rose steadily and ultimately peaked at 3,085 for the week May 28 to June 3. After that, the weekly numbers mostly steadily declined until the trend again rebounded starting in early October. Starting with the week of Oct. 8-14, Thailand's successive weekly new COVID hospitalizations have tallied at 124, 191, 206, 304, 287 (the only weekly decline in the recent period), 390, 480, 536 and now 590 for the most recent week. During the same period since mid-October, the MoPH reports also show that the tallies of ongoing COVID hospitalized patients considered in serious condition have risen 147%, from 38 in the mid-October period up to 94 for the most recent week. The prior week's tally was 88. Officially declared COVID deaths have remained very low in Thailand, though the MoPH has not recently publicly clarified their criteria for counting such deaths. The MoPH tallied five official COVID deaths last week, up from three the prior week, but well below the year's high figure of 69 for the week of June 4-10. Thailand stopped publicly reporting COVID infection/case data last fall, as have many countries, so tallies of COVID new hospitalizations have become one of the key indicators that public health officials these days use to monitor the successive up and down waves of COVID infections. The Thai MoPH posts its weekly COVID reports mostly every Monday at the following website: https://ddc.moph.go.th/covid19-dashboard/?dashboard=main A pull-down menu in the upper right corner of the website provides access to all of the MoPH's weekly COVID reports since the start of the year. The red-colored sections show the new COVID hospitalizations counts for that week and the cumulative number thus far for the year. The gray colored sections show the new officially declared COVID deaths for that week and the cumulative number for the year. The dark purple colored sections show the current number of serious condition COVID patients hospitalized for that week. According to the latest weekly report, Thailand thus far this year has had 36,794 COVID hospitalizations and 831 officially declared COVID deaths. Since the start of the pandemic, the MoPH has reported a cumulative total of 4.75 million COVID hospitalizations and 34,500 officially declared COVID deaths.

Thailand MoPH Weekly COVID report for Dec. 3 - 9: --590 new COVID hospitalizations, up 54 from the prior week --5 new COVID deaths, up 2 from prior week --94 COVID patients hospitalized in serious condition, up 6 from the prior week --49 COVID patients hospitalized requiring intubation to breathe, up 9 from the prior week https://ddc.moph.go.th/covid19-dashboard/?dashboard=main

Anyone here ever taken that flight? I've always wondered about it... What's it like? The prices can be pretty good for a trans-Pacific flight. But I'm afraid it would be a long... stretch of cattle-car seating just like Air Asia's domestic flights.

Yes, and they did find some very rare side effects that weren't caught in the original clinical trials, BECAUSE those side effects were so rare... But they all were ones triggered relatively shortly after administration. The experts say the long into the future scenario is very unlikely, even for mRNA vaccines, especially now 3 YEARS after they were first rolled out and since then have had many BILLIONS of mRNA doses given. "But long-term or late effects that do not show up for the first time until years after inoculation, as some vaccine skeptics fear, are not possible, according to the immunologists we interviewed, and are also not known from other vaccines. This is because vaccines are rapidly broken down in the body and thus cannot trigger any lasting reactions." https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-can-covid-vaccines-lead-to-long-term-health-problems/a-59667465 The "unknown future" argument is a popular one among anti-vaxers. But thus far, there's no science to support it.

1. The history of vaccine related side effects is that they typically present very shortly after administration -- not years later. How can we know the COVID-19 vaccine won’t have long-term side effects? "Going back at least as far as the polio vaccine, which was widely released to the public in the 1960s, we’ve never seen a vaccination with long-term side effects, meaning side effects that occur several months or years after injection. And, in every vaccine available to us, side effects — including rare but serious side effects — develop within six to eight weeks of injection. ... mRNA technology isn’t brand-new, and mRNA degrades quickly in the body." https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/covid-19-vaccine-long-term-side-effects 2. Meanwhile, it gets in the way of your vague, generalized conflicts of interest argument above that the main authors of the OP cited study here reported no financial connections with the mRNA COVID vaccine manufacturers. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3

The rise in infections coincides with the very rapid spread of the JN.1 variant, although the new strain does not appear more likely to cause severe forms of the disease "Covid-19 is on the rise again in France, according to the latest data published by Santé Publique France (SPF) on Wednesday, December 6. For the week from November 27 to December 3, the network of SOS Médecins associations reported a 28% surge in suspected cases among adults compared with the previous week. The increase is 24% in hospital emergency departments. In terms of volume, however, medical activity linked to Covid-19 remains moderate: emergency departments recorded 4,353 visits for this reason last week, representing 1.2% of activity (versus 1% the previous week) and resulting in 1,824 hospitalizations." (more) https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2023/12/10/covid-19-epidemic-returns-in-france-as-christmas-approaches_6328161_114.html

From the above cited BBC report and another of this study's main authors: "Co-researcher Prof Anne Willis said: "This is really important because this technology [mRNA vaccines and therapies] is amazing and it is going to be revolutionary as a new medicine platform for all sorts of things."

Independent is one thing. But credible is an equally important thing... The people you're talking about, in large part, are those with extended and documented histories of peddling COVID and COVID vaccine misinformation. That's why they're for the most part confined to the gutters of the internet. If there was some "political" narrative on COVID vaccines that can't be crossed, then of course the researchers here wouldn't have studied and reported on issues with the mRNA vaccines. But of course, that's exactly what they did, disproving your politics assertion.

Nice try.... Your attempted analogy above might hold, IF it were just the vaccine manufacturers with a vested financial interest in the product who are making the claim. But that's not the case here. The authors of this research on COVID vaccines are independent and in fact are reporting on details not found by the vaccine manufacturers. And it's not just those independent researchers making the claim, but other independent scientists who have reviewed their research and come to the same conclusions -- COVID vaccines are safe and have saved many millions of lives: Such as from the OP Science article above: "Rolf Marschalek, a molecular biologist at Goethe University Frankfurt, says he would like to see more evidence before he is convinced that frameshifts are a significant issue for modified mRNAs. He agrees, however, that the new work is not a reason to worry about the safety of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. “It’s a much bigger problem that people are underestimating the Omicron variant and are not getting the updated booster,” he says." And from the BBC report above, quoting one of the lead researchers on the research here: "Lead researcher Dr James Thaventhiran, from the MRC Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: "Research has shown beyond doubt that mRNA vaccination against Covid-19 is safe. "Billions of doses of the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines have been safely delivered, saving lives worldwide."

Very sad to hear this news.... Khun Nopakun set an example for how the Thai government SHOULD communicate with its expat community in English. He did an excellent job with the regular EN language COVID briefings during very trying times, and was a rarity when it came to the Thai government communicating clearly to expats on important matters. I dealt with him personally several times, and he always was helpful and articulate -- a rarity among government officials here.

June 15, 2021 "There is no proof that spike proteins created in response to mRNA vaccines are harmful to the body, scientists have told Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-safe/fact-check-no-evidence-spike-proteins-from-covid-19-vaccines-are-toxic-idUSL2N2NX1J6/ ...

Really? Because I'm not seeing or reading that from anyone credible in the field (and that includes the study's own authors), your unsourced claim notwithstanding. From the Science report above: 'Other scientists say there is nothing alarming about the new work, reported today in Nature, and agree that it could help improve the design of mRNA treatments still under development." And from the BBC report above: "Existing mRNA vaccines are effective and safe, they [the study authors] say." And from the study authors themselves in their report: "there are no adverse outcomes reported from mistranslation of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in humans" And lastly from the same Science report: "There is no evidence that these mistakes compromise the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives..." AND "The Cambridge team emphasized at a press briefing that its work doesn’t indicate COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe."

Here's the U.S. CDC's breakdown of cumulative actual U.S. COVID deaths by age group. Lots of COVID deaths of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, in addition to the oldest age groups. source link Percent of U.S. COVID deaths by age group (partial list from above): 30-39 -- 1.72%, 19,872 deaths 40-49 -- 4.01%, 46,250 deaths 50-64 -- 17.62%, 203,123 deaths 65-74 -- 22.35%, 257,640 deaths 75 and above -- 53.54%, 617,187 deaths Nearly half of the total U.S. COVID deaths have been in people age 74 and younger.

Here's what the real world says about Ioannidis and his COVID numbers: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Perhaps Ionnidis here should have taken a lesson here from his own past comments on published research: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False John P. A. Ioannidis Published online 2005 "There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims [6–8]. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ And yet this same guy keeps publishing his own nonsense.

Well well, John Ioannidis (one of the paper's authors here) is back with more of his dubious projections... This is the same man who predicted back in 2020 that COVID might result in 10,000 total deaths in the U.S. -- when of course the world ended up at 7 million official and up to 20 million or more estimated, including 1.1 million official COVID deaths in the U.S. So hey, he was only off by a factor of about 100 -- 10,000 projected deaths vs. 1.1 million actual ones. March 17, 2020 article by Ioannidis: "The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco." ... "If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths." https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ This guy has been so wrong about the pandemic it's not even funny.... And it also brought scorn on his career: From a Dec. 2020 profile of the guy: "But his critics say the Stanford doctor is violating the principles of intellectual rigor he has spent much of his career espousing — refusing to admit his mistaken judgments and recklessly lending a scientific imprimatur to forces that defy public-health directives for irrational reasons." AND "The predictions of a second wave Ioannidis had told Fox News viewers not to trust had proved right. The 10,000 American lives he said might be lost to the pandemic were vanishing almost every week." https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioannidis-coronavirus-lockdowns-fox-news/

Indeed, as they further explained: "It also finds the link between school closures and academic setbacks was “not so direct.” A survey of students found about half faced closures of more than three months, but it didn’t always lead to lower scores. There was “no clear difference” in performance trends between countries that had limited closures, including Iceland and Sweden, and those with longer closures, including Brazil and Ireland, according to the report."

"WASHINGTON (AP) — Students around the world suffered historic setbacks in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic, with declines in test scores so widespread that the United States climbed in global rankings simply by falling behind less sharply, a new study finds. The state of global education was given a bleak appraisal in the Program for International Student Assessment, the first study to examine the academic progress of students in dozens of countries during the pandemic. Released Tuesday, it finds the average international math score fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning. Reading scores fell by the equivalent of half a year." (more) https://apnews.com/article/pisa-international-test-scores-pandemic-4ce5780904f2e3f6f16af57912242224

Rising COVID cases there are akin to pouring gasoline on an already smouldering fire in the health system.

There are plenty of members on here who repeatedly post that there is no risk from COVID out in the world and/or they believe they personally have no risk from COVID, mountains of evidence notwithstanding. Some even deny that the COVID virus really exists. Also, the poster above wasn't commenting to you, but rather, a different COVID denier / dismisser.

Covid study: mRNA vaccines could be fine-tuned 6th December 2023 "The revolutionary messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology in some Covid vaccines given to millions of people could be fine-tuned for even greater accuracy, UK scientists say. Genetic instructions in the jab could be tweaked to avoid a harmless tiny "slip" sometimes seen as the body reads the code, the Medical Research Council team suggest. Existing mRNA vaccines are effective and safe, they say." (more) https://www.bbc.com/news/health-67625180

But some folks still wanna go outside in the pouring rain without wearing a raincoat or carrying an umbrella... Go figure....

From the OP: "a range of viral and bacterial infections all back in circulation, with COVID-19 still chief among them." AND "COVID, meanwhile, is still circulating widely. From Nov. 21 to 28, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital increased, the latest national figures show. Public Health Ontario's respiratory virus dashboard currently shows 20 per cent test positivity for COVID, far higher than any other viral threat."