outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Celia Farber is more awful than you think (a galaxy brain thirty years ago can only get exponentially worse)

https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/a-family-that-lost-their-daughter

and on and on

She was Bob Jr’s girlfriend when I was interning at Spin.

fuck

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/01/first-human-avian-flu-case-texas-00149949

Good news:

1/n update on Covid in U.S. first some good news, latest from CDC shows we’re now at about our lowest levels of new COVID hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic… pic.twitter.com/yhTVKi0EN3

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) April 26, 2024

Looks like the spectacularly well-named FLiRT variants are the next ones for which we'll need a fall booster.

Roffle. But yeah, things are definitely calmer. My hospital has been in low single digits for a while. Thankfully masking is still required in the main building; I work at an outlier with a window I prop open right behind me so in combination with relatively lower usage levels compared to pre-pandemic that enables me to split things nicely, since I only use the main building to grab lunch most days.

Pfizer’s own large clinical trial of paxlovid, the first since the vaccines and omicron just came a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/paxlovid-covid-treatment-most-beneficial-for-unvaccinated-people-with-risk/

They found no evidence it has any effect on their subjects, which were vaccinated people with risk factors, and vaccinated and unvaccinated people without risk factors.

Basically seems like the only people who should bother taking it are unvaccinated people with risk factors (age, immunosuppresive drugs, etc.)

But if you’re immunocompromised there’s a new prophylactic in town that replaces Evushield https://www.statnews.com/2024/03/22/covid-immunocompromised-antibody-protection-invivyd/

New bird flu vector just dropped

"Since March 25, when the bird flu virus was confirmed in U.S. cattle for the first time, weekly sales of raw cow’s milk have ticked up 21% to as much as 65% compared with the same periods a year ago."

This is why we can't have nice things. pic.twitter.com/04ajQJXs7m

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) May 14, 2024

well anecdotally I'd say Paxlovid had a huge effect on me. Maybe placebo effect. Who cares. Both times COVID symptoms disappeared almost immediately after starting it.

same as dan.

my symptoms went away immediately and my path to a negative test was halved in time.

^ hard statistics, hard science

I'd like to think that raw milk uptick is anti-vaxxers trying to own the libs.