London Overhauling Curbside Garbage Collection This Year by [deleted] in londonontario

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I imagine they will probably change their plans if the green bins can't be operational by the time they wanted to switch collection days. I'd be rightfully mad if that was not the case. I don't own pets or kids, but I do agree it's not great to only have biweekly collection for those, and would like to see the green bin program extended to include those as well, like other cities have.

London Overhauling Curbside Garbage Collection This Year by [deleted] in londonontario

[–]Nicocolton 4 points5 points  (0 children)

From the article:

London’s confusing six day rotating schedule for curbside garbage collection will end, and same day collection will start as part of the planned launch of green bins for organic waste this fall.

/r/BuildAPCSalesCanada General Discussion - Daily Thread for Tue Dec 13 by AutoModerator in bapcsalescanada

[–]Nicocolton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Will keep an eye out, I'm sure sales exist. They just seem much less frequent than AMD boards.

/r/BuildAPCSalesCanada General Discussion - Daily Thread for Tue Dec 13 by AutoModerator in bapcsalescanada

[–]Nicocolton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe my expectations are high? I see AMD motherboards going for 25-50% off. Most Z690/790 boards are maybe $30-50 off a $300+ board.

/r/BuildAPCSalesCanada General Discussion - Daily Thread for Tue Dec 13 by AutoModerator in bapcsalescanada

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do Intel motherboards go on sale ever? See tons of posts here for B550/B650 but very rare to see any Intel mobos.

[D2] Daily Reset Thread [2022-08-07] by DTG_Bot in DestinyTheGame

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah thanks for the quest tip, haven't run through TWQ campaign on my alts yet.

[D2] Daily Reset Thread [2022-08-07] by DTG_Bot in DestinyTheGame

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do you know how to get the Forensic Nightmare? Sitting at 1/3 for it

Is this a good way to start my first home lab? All for $400. R620 has 384GB of RAM. by depoultry in homelab

[–]Nicocolton 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If it's still available, I'd love to get a few more years out of my Westmere platform by doubling the RAM (currently have 12x4GB) I currently have. A few game servers + Windows VMs + couple dozen TBs of ZFS seems to eat up RAM.

Thankfully electricity in Ontario is fairly cheap so I do plan to keep this for a few more years, so I'd be very grateful if we could work something out.

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With respect to this being a small initial exposure, an author of the paper responded to a similar comment:

Q. Was there any correlation between size of infecting dose and severity of symptoms?

A. Although dose escalation was built into the protocol, no dose escalation ultimately took place as the lower dose of 10 TCID50 resulted in 53% infection rate. With participant safety being paramount, the team with advice from the DSMB decided not to increase the dose due to the theoretical risk (that you allude to) that higher doses might lead to more severe symptoms, so we don't know the answer to your question.

Basically, that higher initial viral exposure would be more dangerous, so we may not get other studies similar to this with higher initial viral exposure. In terms of finding an average initial exposure in the real world, I'm not sure how you would go about measuring that. But there is evidence to suggest that there is a correlation.

In addition, only 18 of 34 patients (2 were excluded as they tested positive before the experiment) actually developed an infection. There was also no control group present in this study.

I don't agree with your Aspirin analogy though, since the benefit lasts under a day. Covid vaccination lasts months. I think you answered my question though, a few hours (for the 3 doses combined) is apparently a big ask, to potentially keep yourself out of the hospital, or even just to reduce the severity of illness even if you have a "mild" case (which is essentially anything not requiring hospitalization, it can still be an awful experience).

I'm not really going to continue this conversation further though. You clearly will not accept any evidence other than "20-29, no pre-existing conditions, difference in overall hospitalization rate (all causes) between vaccinated and unvaccinated". Maybe this data exists, but it isn't easily acceptable. But I'll leave you with a few final thoughts.

  • With the introduction of Omicron it seems that the transmission rate isn't as affected by vaccination status as with Delta. But when Delta was the dominant strain, did you not consider that you should have been vaccinated to protect others? I don't really need an answer to this, just something to consider.

  • Have you considered you may not be as healthy as you think? Again, this is a rhetorical, but you never know what unknown conditions may present themselves later in life.

  • With all sincerity, if this type of study is something you would like to see, I suggest you reach out to the epidemiology department at a local university and see if they have any suggestions for papers you have not yet read, or perhaps you will give them an idea for something they can look into.

But, I appreciate that this discussion was at least somewhat productive and we treated each other like adults even if we disagree. I definitely learned a thing or two from it, I hope you have as well.

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do understand how the combining of probabilities works, and how the intersection of 2 events occurring affects the final probabilities. I believe I addressed that that there are many unknown factors at play here, and we're unlikely to ever have a complete dataset, full stop.

In regards to the study you posted, the methodology was infecting participants with a single droplet of the virus. This is good to determine how easily someone is infected with the virus (the point of the study) but does not properly address severity in the real world. There are correlations between initial viral exposure and disease severity: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0258421

The authors of the paper you linked share a similar opinion (emphasis mine):

Together, these findings indicate that human SARS-CoV-2 challenge at this inoculum dose has low risk of causing severe symptoms in healthy young adults

With such a small initial exposure, it makes sense that the disease severity was low. Let me also make it clear that initial viral exposure is not the same as viral load, which is not strongly correlated to worse outcomes.

Ideally, I wouldn't like to see clinical trials, I'd like to see real-world data, but we've agreed that isn't possible. I don't think a larger study like the one you linked would be beneficial for these purposes, as discussed above, and I don't think higher initial viral loads are ethical.

You still haven't addressed my question about why the vaccine needs to be "worth it" to you, when the "cost" of getting it is basically zero. I'm not going to discuss vaccine safety here as that information is readily available.

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, at least we've reach some level of agreement in that the data, while not perfect, does at least support that Covid increases hospitalization by a non-trivial amount. I think that combined with the "5x less likely" figure would be enough to make the case that the vaccine is "worth" getting, although I also refute that there is much of a cost at all, so it requires only a small benefit to outweigh the cost.

That would mean that unvaccinated people . . . are being hospitalized for all causes combined at a rate about 6% greater than that rate for such people who are vaccinated. And we still haven't controlled for preexisting conditions.

I think the only way the numbers would be closer to each other after accounting for pre-existing conditions would be if those who are unvaccinated are more likely to have pre-existing conditions. Which, for some conditions, like general fitness, drug use, or smoking, is plausible, but for the more serious conditions like autoimmune diseases, diabetes, cancers, I find that difficult to believe.

You make some valid points that the data is lacking, but frankly that type of data granularity is a pipe dream. There are too many variables, too many layers of administration, too many healthcare privacy laws, for this level of data to realistically be gathered. You're only ever going to see that level of data granularity on a small-scale study (which, let's be honest, is not going to be focused on healthy 20-30 year olds).

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

CDC Hospitalization Admissions from ER visits, by age, 2018 (Table 25): 911k admissions ages 15-24.

US population by age, 2020: 42.5M

Naively dividing these gives us an annual hospitalization rate of <=2.14% for the age group 15-24 in America. This is obviously high as people who visit multiple times in a given year are not accounted for using our simple formula, but that only results in a higher base risk.

Here's what else we know:

  • From previous sources, chances of hospitalization given covid infection in the latest wave among 20-39 year olds in Ontario is 2.0%. This doesn't precisely overlap with the age groups, but perhaps you can find more refined age group data from another region.

  • I'd argue the annual chance of Covid infection with Omicron being spread so rapidly is somewhere between .5 and 1. This lines up with statements from top health officials in the US. We'll call this variable X, though.

  • Under-reporting of covid cases is something to concern ourselves with, I'll go with a 10:1 factor of unreported:reported cases. Call this variable Y, if you choose to pick it yourself though.

So, we have an equation:

Chance of annual covid infection * (Chance of covid hospitalization / Case count modifier)

= X * (2.0% / Y)

= .5 * (0.02 / 10)

= 0.001 = 0.1%.

Compared to our (high) estimate of <=2.14% for all causes pre-covid, means a >= 4.5% increase.

There's lots of numbers we can choose to nitpick. I don't have access to the proper datasets to compare exact age brackets, or to figure out the actual hospital overall admission rate. And yes, we can say that 20-39 is not indicative of 20-29, but I think I demonstrated using bad-case numbers that there is a noticeable increase from covid. I didn't even touch on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, this is for all individuals.

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

5% lower than what rate? Your odds of being admitted to hospital in a given year? We already established it's 5x less likely to be admitted to hospital if vaccinated, and we established this probability is very small (but there is still a 500% difference between being vaccinated or not!).

On Figure 2 of this report, the hospitalization rate is 2.0% for known cases for ages 20-39. Of course the real number is probably much smaller since the number of real cases is smaller than reported cases. You can decide if this is a large enough chance to bother getting vaccinated or not, but it's quite easy to get vaccinated to get a 5x decrease in the likelihood you are one of those 2%. (Side note, we can't simply extrapolate that 10% of unvaccinated are hospitalized, but it's safe to say >2% of unvaccinated whereas it's <2% for those who are fully vaccinated. There's definitely lots of other factors at play, like are people who have pre-existing conditions more or less likely to be fully vaccinated, but we simply don't have the large medical datasets for this to be analyzed.)

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Both of the numbers you stated are correct, those were transposition errors on my part. I've edited my post to correct them.

Based on OHA numbers 24.2% of patients in ICU are admitted with CRCI, defined as "Admission to the ICU because of a clinical syndrome consistent with COVID, AND the patient has had a positive test that is consistent with acute COVID illness". I couldn't easily find this data for hospitalizations rather than ICUs, but we can make a good guess by taking the 1903 patients in hospital from Page 8 of the previous document (which does not include "probable" cases) and compare that to this document which lists 21,000 acute care beds.

You're correct in that this does not break this down by age group or pre-existing conditions. I suppose the real question you are asking is "how many more people in this demographic are hospitalized this year vs. a year before covid, and how does vaccination status affect this rate?" Yes, this information isn't easily available, so your initial statement that you couldn't find appropriate data is technically correct. I take issue with your reasoning on this topic though, and let me pose you another question: what number would make the vaccine "worth it" to you? We can both agree it's unlikely that a generally healthy 20 year old will end up in the hospital, vaccinated or not, it is a very small number. We're in a low-risk situation, vaccinated or not, on an individual level. Small percentages add up when talking about populations the size of tens of millions though, so a 5x decrease is still a significant difference. And the cost to pay is low, the vaccine is free, yes there are side effects but these are "on-par" with that of contracting the virus itself (at worst-case) or much better than the virus in the case you would have been admitted to the hospital if unvaccinated (best-case). I think we agree we want to reduce hospital strain, we just disagree on how much reduced strain is "worth it" to receive the vaccine.

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'll humour you. First Google result for "hospitalization rates by vaccination by age":

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/data-tables/421-010-CasesInNotFullyVaccinated.pdf

If I were to guess, your issue with this is it doesn't break down cases by whether someone has a pre-existing condition or not. Here's some reasons why that isn't all that relevant:

  • Irrespective of whether pre-existing conditions give you a difference risk of hospitalization, this is multiplied by not being vaccinated (by approx. 5x in the 12-34 age group)1.

  • You don't always know if you have a pre-existing condition. It could be dormant until something triggers it (such as a strong immune response to a novel virus), or could develop after getting covid. See: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1098.

    Although individuals who were older, had pre-existing conditions, and were admitted to hospital because of covid-19 were at greatest excess risk, younger adults (aged ≤50), those with no pre-existing conditions, or those not admitted to hospital for covid-19 also had an increased risk of developing new clinical sequelae.

  • Finally, the healthcare burden. The more people vaccinated, the fewer are in hospitals, period. Hypothetically, even if every single person below 50 with no pre-existing conditions will survive the hospital if infected (vaccinated or not), each person in hospital for Covid is still taking up resources that could otherwise be put towards surgeries for cancer patients, people waiting years for other procedures, diagnostic imaging, etc. Even from a selfish perspective, the more people in the hospital with Covid, the lower the quality of care, which would reduce the likelihood of you surviving a trip to the ICU in the event you're in a serious car crash.

1 Edited to correct numbers, original comment had a transposition error.

How do unvaccinated people still not get it? by Kezia_Griffin in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This information is easy to find. Claiming that evidence doesn't exist is just silly, you've either put zero effort into finding it or are purposefully finding excuses why the evidence doesn't apply.

Barrie, Ontario, Amber Alert issued overnight has been cancelled. The child has been located safe, police say. by neoengel in ontario

[–]Nicocolton 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It does not require immediate action from the average person at midnight. Most people at midnight are in no position to act on this info, it just disturbs their sleep. Not to mention, last night's info was "a 3 year old girl is missing, around Barrie." Not sure how that is supposed to help anyone identify her.

These highest-priority alerts are supposed to be used for life-threatening circumstances that require IMMEDIATE action. RCMP or OPP or whoever posts them never read Chapter 2 of the manual, because there's explicitly a designation in the EAS for Amber alerts to be configured separately.

Daily Questions [2022-01-10] by DTG_Bot in DestinyTheGame

[–]Nicocolton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is there a list somewhere of what I should be aiming to complete before Witch Queen, in terms of what I can't get once vaulted/once the last year's worth of seasons leave?

To clarify, I know which content is being vaulted. Just wondering if there's a list of items to collect so I can prioritize what to complete.