Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

(was not criticizing you btw, just the usual alarmism)

fwiw I have been masking again indoors, however my guess is that anything other than a properly fitted N95 is going to make little difference with the contagiousness of Delta and the increasing awareness of transmission by small aerosols that build up in indoor air. Vaccinate and accept there's a pretty good chance you'll still get a mild case of COVID sooner or later imo. It's here to stay.

If the point is to protect the unvaccinated (1) masks aren't going to do a great job at that (2) it's hard for me to care if people don't bother to get it (yes there's a tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage of people who can't, but my guess is that there are ten people who have a bullshit medical reason for every person with a real one), (3) the CDC had better tell people what the target % vaccinated is where the restrictions aren't necessary. We can't structure life around a forever war against one virus.

Didn't think you were, it's cool. I get that wearing a mask outside is less than ideal, I was just taken aback by the vehemence of some of the responses.

On another, more personal note, we had a near miss in our house last week. My son had been attending a "sports camp" (literally just a 4-hour day camp) that was 80% outside, fully masked, good distancing - we've been really happy about how the programs this summer have been run. I picked him up last week and he said something about a kid who had gotten back from vacation, came for one day, then was out sick and I instantly cringed a little inside. Sure enough, the email about our son being in "close contact" came about an hour later. We've all stayed fine with no fevers and no symptoms, just finished our second round of PCR tests this morning (the 7-days after exposure as recommended) and they were all negative, thank god. But he's still gotta quarantine until the 12th and I was supposed to start back in the office full time Monday, so we're still dealing with child care struggles, but really thankful to have (knock wood) hopefully avoided it. My wife and I are both fully vaxxed so mostly just worried about our son, particularly worrying about him at the exact time of all the dire news over the last week. Credit to his camp and the public health contact tracers for doing a thorough job too.

some of the responses to the news I've seen:

personal request to keep this shit on reddit and twitter

Cool, love to be the only one consistently policed for what I can and can't post itt. Instantly regret sharing anything personal on this thread.

Our office is now doing masks in common areas and meetings again, but is requiring the remaining ~300 unvaccinated people (out of thousands) to get vaxxed.

jfc this thread is filled with links to Twitter threads of people saying obnoxious shit, but suddenly I'm called out for it? If that was just a tweet embed it would have been fine? I feel like there are separate unspoken rules around here depending on your ilx popularity. Fucking annoying.

the offspring drummer:
"Given my personal medical history and the side-effect profile of these jabs, my doctor has advised me not to get a shot at this time," his note read.

"I caught the virus over a year ago, it was mild for me - so I am confident I'd be able to handle it again, but I'm not so certain I'd survive another post-vaccination round of Guillain-Barre Syndrome which dates back to my childhood and has evolved to be progressively worse over my lifetime."

His 'doctor' advised him, and then recommended a magnetic bracelet and some colloidal silver spray

i think i should just block this thread tbh

from the UK, not....great, though I don't know that it's time to assume cases are climbing again just yet

First day in a while where reported cases data is higher than a week prior.

An 8% increase. pic.twitter.com/anCWwZWv5N

— Ryan (@ThatRyanChap) August 4, 2021

Not that many people have Gulliain-Barre, but it really does suck, and the one person I know who has G-B had a shitty reaction to the first dose of Pfizer and was advised by her doctor, an actual doctor, not to get #2 -- the person in question also has a PhD and can read studies -- I gotta say, if he has Gullain-Barre I'm on Team Offspring Drummer

xpost but the rate of drop had been slowing significantly so it's not a great sign

ie, the wave could be bouncy, down, up, down up

Yeah maybe he's telling the truth but I've always been very suspicious of Offspring drummers in general

what about Pearl Jam, huh -- 16 drummers in 25 years? Shifty bastards.

The offspring drummer also gave lip service to various personal freedoms-based reasons in some of his tweets, didn't he?

Yeah, he added this: "I do not find it ethical or wise to allow those with the most power (government, corporations, organisations, employers) to dictate medical procedures to those with the least power.”

So maybe he's in the clapton/van morrison school of public health

I read that something like 30% of antivaxxers have played drums for the Offspring at least once.

Fwiw I actually have been seeing stuff suggesting a significantly lower CFR in the delta wave. May not be clear yet if that’s the virus itself or who is mostly getting infected.

Not everyone has played drums for the Offspring, but every one of them has gone on to be an antivaxxer.

An amusing / sad snippet from the Offspring bloke’s Wikipedia is that he joined in 2007, is their second-longest-serving drummer, but the first album he played on in full came out in April. 14 years in the band, and he / his doctor sacked himself on the verge of touring a record he made, for the first time.

(Josh Freese played on all of and most of the previous two they released in the last 13 years, which you probably would have guessed if asked. (Atom from RFTC was touring with ‘em before this fourteen-year newbie.))

May not be clear yet if that’s the virus itself or who is mostly getting infected.

I would guess the latter -- but that's good! There's a lot of discourse about the irrationality of the public but one very clear "people in the aggregate are not totally irrational" signal is that in places with widely available vaccine, almost all old people are vaccinated, which means that whatever happens next, we have massively limited the potential amount of severe illness and death in places like the US and the UK -- that is unequivocally good!

Florida should provide more of a view on that soon enough -- state did a very good job vaccinating its elderly, mediocre job otherwise, is now getting hit hard by Delta. So far it looks like cases have increase eightfold over the last 30 days in Florida but deaths have only doubled. Not sure how that compares with past 30 day windows.

'deaths have only doubled'

Welcome to the horror of 2021

I'm on holiday with my spouse and kids; spouse and I are double-vacced. just went to a pub for dinner (early cos kids) that we'd chosen as it had a nice outside space and a decent menu. but when we got there the menu for outside was different and you had to sit inside for the "restaurant" menu. Bear in mind we never get to go out for decent food (cos kids) we chose our taste buds over covid safety (also there was literally no-one inside) but was pretty fucked off at this dumb system they wouldn't let us circumvent even after saying we wanted to be cautious re Covid and hadn't mentioned when we called to book.

Have been less cautious than normal for the past few days tbh, doing activities with the kids etc, but the only really iffy feeling I had was in the pool when they just let tons of ppl in despite having said they were limiting numbers to 25. will do rapid tests when we get home.

I can't help it, to me "vacced" is short for "vacuumed" and pronounced as such, I know some people hate "vaxxed" but I'm unable to mentally pronounce the word correctly unless it is spelled that way

why I prefer "jabbed." Also: it's physical.

"poked" is pretty good too

if only

so this article came out, showing 60% effectiveness against symptomatic infection based on a UK study:

https://www.ft.com/content/df4db947-8697-49a7-b38b-e46bd86ba915

because it's a UK study, only AstraZeneca, and Pfizer were used in the study, and results were not broken down by product, so.....that's 60% across both, I guess.

and Chise chimes in. lol that every time new news comes out, there's always "this is good news", "no it's not", "yes it is!" debates:

Did you read this at all? https://t.co/16eyZGQZLK “In React-1, 40 per cent of participants testing positive were asymptomatic and many others had very mild symptoms. Effectiveness estimates always decrease as researchers include less serious disease.” It is combining the two.

— Chise 🧬🧫🦠💉 (@sailorrooscout) August 4, 2021

Don't be so sure about Florida, Florida takes three days of data and divides it by three to come up with the daily weekend numbers. DeSantis is hitting back today too so the number coming out today is probably pretty bad.

— sharinky (@SharonAConklin) August 4, 2021

woops

There's little good news for the US Delta wave, but we may be seeing the peak case growth rate for the top 2 states, Louisiana and Florida pic.twitter.com/0S5CVvN7Mp

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 4, 2021

It's extremely Twitter that someone tweets about what we "may be seeing" and four minutes later someone shoots back "don't be so sure"

It gives one a sense of comfort and security in these difficult times.

I've never been more convinced that we as a species know basically nothing with any certainty than I have over the past 1-5 years. Some people know more and are more rigorous than others but the ego won't let most people admit openly that we're mostly real fucken ignorant.

Have to say I agree with that. Pushing aside all of the complete bullshit and blatant misinformation out there, even the best seem to contradict one another and themselves. I suspect that, in a way, it's because we know more than ever that we realize more than ever how little we know.

Just for example, I don't think a widespread virus has ever had the level of genetic surveillance that COVID has. Yet that surveillance confuses as often as clarifies.

You also see the limits of certain kinds of information, e.g. new variant comes out, it appears more contagious, but it becomes murky how much is due to intrinsic vs extrinsic factors (viral load? ability to evade vaccines? people have let their guard down and are out more? seasonality?). And how can you ever separate all those things?

Science has always been like this and always will be, especially science about novel phenomena, but it's rare people are paying attention to science about novel phenomena this closely.

Or that it's taking shape in the public sphere minute-by-minute, among a populace that demands instant gratification and increasingly pooh-poohs rational thought.

immunity in particular seems like a really confusing thing to my simplistic mind

Public access to such a wide range of media also confuses things further, from dumbed down local news, legitimately bad/false news, facebook, but then also scientific journals as well as PREPRINT scientific articles! It makes a mess.

The import thing is that we continue to receive timely, important epidemiology information from random know-nothing strangers on the internet

immunity should be thought of as a tendency of varying strength, not as an absolute state

Unequivocal good news:

Jackson health's Dr. Peter Paige says at Miami-Dade press conference that the county vaccination pace has basically doubled in the recent COVID-19 spike

— Doug Hanks (@doug_hanks) August 4, 2021

why I prefer "jabbed." Also: it's physical

Only logical

D-d-d-d-d-digital

one two three five!

Went to a friend's place last night, hugged someone, sat outside with them a few feet away for like ten minutes. Then they tested positive with a high-quality rapid test.

Soooo I'm skipping a garden party and a flight tomorrow.

CDC guidance says as a fully-vaccinated people I don't have to quarantine, but seems like that they haven't updated that guidance for the increased chance for vaccinated people to get Delta.