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MWC Barcelona Conference Planning for 50,000 In-Person Attendees in June
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Yeah, I’m guessing this will mostly be an EU only event and the under vaccinated parts of the world are prevented from attending by travel restrictions? I haven’t checked for a while, but is the EU allowing general passengers from the US yet?
Yea, typically with quarantine but the different countries have different rules...
historically MWC was global, and imho it would be considered “anti-competitive” if they’d only allow EU in person...
The vaccines are good.. but let's not get ahead of ourselves. There is no "100%"
Coronavirus
This kind of stuff makes me nuts. It literally took me 10 minutes to prove this spectacularly wrong-- might I suggest you put a few minutes into educating yourself before posting this kind of nonsense?
In 2019, over the course of the entire year, 28,817 people under the age of 65 died in car accidents in the US. I could probably dig deeper and figure out how many people that is per mile driven and the average number of miles to a COVID vaccination site, but let me just simplify it a bit and say you have to travel twice to get vaccinated in most cases, so I’ll divide by 365 and multiply by 2:
- 160 people under the age of 65 can be expected to die in car accidents on the days they travel to their vaccination.
- At least 94,000 people under the age of 65 have died of COVID.
It is possible to actually know things before speaking, and it’s worth the effort to try.
But it’s already free. And vaccinations will be widely available to everyone by June
This is awesome! The liberals want everyone to stay at home forever and rake in gov checks...some of us don't want or need the gov telling us how to live! One full year later and FINALLY people are realizing MENTAL health is important and that humans need social interaction that a Zoom call can't provide! Happy One Year Anniversary of "two weeks to slow the spread!"
The vulnerable - over 65 and those with health conditions - have already been vaccinated...no need to be concerned anymore!
The vulnerable - over 65 and those with health conditions - have already been vaccinated...no need to be concerned anymore!
Of the 50,000 expected, how many are vendors in booths? Can't be that many. These trade shows are so not necessary for walk in spectators. They're also always pretty boring. I can't see the general public being enthusiastic about visiting this event
The vaccines are good.. but let's not get ahead of ourselves. There is no "100%"
Coronavirus
www.simplemost.com
He said "The vaccines (at least the three approved in the US) offer 100%, complete protection against hospitalization and death due to covid-19".
He did NOT say "The vaccines offer 100% protection against infection or mild cases"
Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J vaccines all are 100% effective against death and hospitalization. Very easy to confirm for yourself...
Both the premise and the conclusion of this sentence are currently wrong.
States have already moved to phase 1b; the vulnerable have already been vaccinated. The rest of the "healthy" population never needed to and still doesn't need to be concerned with COVID-19. Life is full of risks, viruses, illnesses, accidents, etc. We never had a problem accepting those risks every day...why so outrageously more concerned with this one?
Remember..."two weeks to slow the spread" and "protect the vulnerable" and "trust the science." What is it now? "Stay at home until everyone in the world is vaccinated?" "Wear a mask forever?" "Never go outside again?" Always moving goal posts...
Sure, but that doesn't mean that it offers complete protection. What it means is that nobody died in a fairly limited test sample over a limited period - with no control over whether or not any of the subjects were even exposed to Covid*. Unless these vaccines are the most wonderful, best, magical vaccines in the history of vaccines, there will be deaths now the jabs are being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people.
...anyway, "hospitalisations and deaths" isn't the issue here - that tells you nothing about the effect on mild cases and asymptomatic cases which could be transmitted to others. Even the published "efficacies" often only count symptomatic cases during trials. The figures for that simply aren't established yet (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00450-z) and while the vaccines will most likely have a substantial effect on transmission rates, nobody, but nobody is expecting 100%.
...and nobody currently knows how long the immunity will last.
...then there's the variant issue. Again, the data just isn't there beyond some reassurance that the current vaccines still offer good - but possibly reduced - protection, and that's only the variants we know about. Yes, they can be tweaked - but that still takes months during which a new variant can spread like wildfire.
The level of vaccination required to get herd immunity is quite high, and depends strongly on the vaccine efficacy (95% for Pfiezer, 66% for J&J from clinical trials - real-world figures, and effect against variants still uncertain) the length of protection (still uncertain) and the famous R number (~ 2.5-3.5 with no lockdown, possibly higher for some variants but hugely affected by lockdowns, masks, living conditions, environment etc.) - it can very easily end up at needing 90%+ of the population vaccinated to work - but some people have genuine medical reasons for not being vaccinated and, tempting as it sounds, rounding up anti-vaxxers and forcibly jabbing them probably isn't the Right Thing To Do.
So no, even with the vaccine, deliberately and avoidably organising a huge event that will (even locally) spike the R number and create a petri dish for variants from around the world is a stupid and irresponsible thing to do... and even though the IT execs at this beanfeast may not be going back to sharing their single-room flat with 4 generations of family members, they will still want their beds made up and meals cooked.
Just for the avoidance of doubt: the vaccine is a good thing, get it at the first opportunity for the sake of yourself and others, the best version (Pfizer, AZ, J&J, Moderna...) is which ever one you can get into your arm first. However, pretending that it is infallible and will let you do freaking stupid things like flying to a massive overseas conference puts the whole program at risk. Hopefully it will end the worst of the restrictions, but some of the precautions will need to stay.
Frankly, we've got complacent with "just" the flu (kills 650k people a year worldwide, clogs up hospitals, loses millions of bucks of lost working hours, but we still dose up on TV advertised super plus strength zombie drugs and stagger into that "vital" meeting to share it around) and have dodged a couple of bullets with SARS, swine flu etc. We now know Covid is a lot worse than flu, but it could have been worse still. If something really bad comes along we better not spend a couple of months wondering if maybe we should close the borders for a bit...
* AFAIK there's only one so-called "challenge trial" where people are deliberately which has only just started, and (D'oh) will be working with young, healthy volunteers who are already at very low risk of hospitalisation or death: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/...enge-study-receives-ethics-approval-in-the-uk
If you look at the current trending charts, the virus might be completely gone by then. We are down 25% of where we were in peak January. This is not a result of vaccines either as we haven't done nearly enough to cause heard immunity. It appears that Corona is running it's course. In my county in NC, out of 330,000 people only 0.019% (19 1000ths of 1 percent of the population) has died with (not from) Covid. I feel pretty safe.
Unfortunately, heart disease and cancer have been at the top of the causes of death list for a long time. But Covid went from unknown to #3 cause of death in US in 9 months. It reduced the average life span by 6 months. The only other time this has happened in the last 100+ years was the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic when people again denied that the Flu pandemic was real, and masks and distancing would help.
Why don't we learn from history?
And as a society we will have to accept some. No hospitalizations in tens of thousands of trial participants is, for all intents and purposes, complete protection. I have been in favor (generally) of lockdowns, quarantines, restrictions, etc, but we cannot disrupt the entire world's economy and people's mental health and livelihoods indefinitely in a post-vaccine world when those vaccines render covid as no worse than the common cold. We can't. It is unethical and wrong.
I mean, sure, if this vaccine doesn't follow any logic or works unlike any other vaccines humanity has created. It would be incredibly shocking to the trained medical community if covid could pass easily from a vaccinated person.
Ok, I'm glad you wrote this after the previous section I quoted. Again, we have to separate 100% from "effectively 100%". You simply cannot live as a human if your only concern is mitigating risks 100%.
By your logic the world cannot return to "normal" ever. No large indoor sporting events, no indoor concerts, no crowded bars, etc. Your bar for reopening the world is so high that it will never be met. This is not only ridiculous and unrealistic, it's wrong. Covid will go away as a very deadly disease and it will turn into the common cold or the flu. That doesn't mean the flu doesn't kill people - but we do not organize our society around it and shouldn't. You can live in that world if you wish. Lock yourself, vaccinated, in your house and participate in society as a virtual being. I really don't mind if you do, but to pretend as if that is the only responsible way to live after covid has been rendered as dangerous as a cold is wrong. There will be future pandemics. We should absolutely be prepared for them - but we must not stop life because of the possibility they may occur.
Correct.
No. We cannot succumb to changing everything about how we live for the avoidance of small risks. Please note that I am NOT talking about covid pre-vaccine. Many of those changes were and are necessary.
None of what you are saying is correct.
There are 700 million people over the age of 65 (remember the WC in MWC is “World Congress”), and 300million doses of mostly 2 dose vaccines delivered. That means that not even a quarter of those over 65 have been vaccinated, let alone the vulnerable.
In the US, 16.5% of the population is over 65, 9.4% of the population is vaccinated. If all of those are over 65 it’s only half of that demographic and again doesn’t include all of the vulnerable.
The goal posts don’t keep moving, poor decision making based on fabricated data keeps costing us yardage on each play.
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Entirely untrue
If a person is vaccinated, they could still contract the virus and.... die. Odds are against it, but there is no 100% guarantee
How many of those were obese or have preexisting conditions? As I said, 60 or at risk... healthy under 60 dying from this is an anomaly. Vaccines are becoming widely available and becoming easier to get.
We are at the same levels of new cases we were in late summer/fall last year and we know where what happened after that. And that was with some strong restriction requiring masking, closings, and distancing.
We all need to get our vaccines as soon as we can to reach 75-80% vaccinated. Hopefully, we can do that before the virus mutates to a strain that is immune from the vaccines. If we can do that, we will slow the number of new mutations down to a rate low enough we can treat Covid more like flu strains.
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I don’t disagree with any of this in principle, though the numbers are a bit fast and loose. My point of disagreement was with putting a 100% efficacy threshold on vaccinations. It doesn’t need to be 100% to bring this to an end, we just need to keep R under 1— the further below, the faster this goes away.
If you think comparing a war to a global pandemic is good...one is a choice, the other is nature.
Vegas will have to make the transition from family experiences back to its Sin City days once and for all. They know that booze, gaming & sex sells best of all. ? ? ?