outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

c'est doux non ?

si si, unless you’re a cranky old man who lives on the road to the school like my father-in-law. every year he swears he’s going to take it up with la mairie.

The odds of the Trump administration successfully producing and rolling out a vaccine months, even years, ahead of schedule seem so, so low, considering it would literally be the first thing in four years that they did not royally fuck up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=tjkRd288caQ&feature=emb_logo

erm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjkRd288caQ

frick, wrong thread, never mind

ah the music of clattering wheelie cases laden with dictionaries and cahiers du soir

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, 3 September 2020 14:22 (fifty-five minutes ago) link

c'est doux non ?

― Joey Corona (Euler), Thursday, 3 September 2020 14:24 (fifty-three minutes ago) link

si si, unless you’re a cranky old man who lives on the road to the school like my father-in-law. every year he swears he’s going to take it up with la mairie.

BREAKING: #PennState's director of athletic medicine, Wayne Sebastianelli, says that cardiac MRI scans revealed that roughly 30-35 percent of Big Ten athletes who tested positive for COVID-19 appeared to have myocarditis. https://t.co/md4p1IoaLh

— Parth Upadhyaya (@pupadhyaya_) September 3, 2020

what???

Saw that.

Oh my god, UIUC reopened because of an ISING MODEL where CV+ students randomly interacted with their nearest neighbors. https://t.co/hllrVNTjwF

— Quantian (@quantian1) September 3, 2020

never let nerds be in charge

lol as soon as I saw it was uiuc physicists i knew it would be G01d3nf31d

still take them over gmu economists

sitting in classes together all day every day possibly spreads the virus but then we don't get to blame irresponsible students

the “clusters” tab here is fucking grim:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

just an endless list of prisons and meatpacking plants. maybe somebody should.... do something about this?????

marshall project has been reporting damning evidence on the prison population covid disaster more or less nonstop; it's a lack of political will
https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/8793-covid-19

This is why I posted my high horse comment on the politics thread a few days ago about donating to the National Bailout Fund. We need to get as many people out of those hellholes as possible, and absent advocating for early release or burning the prisons down, Bailout funds are the next best thing.

Go outside (with a mask, 6ft from others), everyone!

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/09/03/Vitamin-D-deficiency-raises-COVID-19-infection-risk-by-77-study-finds/7001599139929/

got em

i actually had been prescribed Vitamin D due to deficiency before this all started.

also sad lol @ 77...been on irc too long

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/06/as-other-cities-go-into-lockdown-why-isnt-london-having-a-second-wave?CMP

I've been wondering about this a lot over the past few weeks, New York doesn't appear to be spiking again either. Has any big city or region that experienced a massive early spike seen a second one? In eg Spain are things escalating in different regions to the first time round?

I think it's been suggested that herd immunity doesn't work quite the way we thought - that it's not so much a matter of percentages as of who got infected. The idea is that in cities with a huge initial outbreak, the people who are most likely to get and spread it have already done so, so the infection rate goes way down.

Given some of the numbers we've seen around asymptotic carriers - and the fact the virus was circulating uncontrolled much earlier than originally thought - I wonder if the proportion of people exposed to the virus is much much higher than that 17.5%. London was going about its business perfectly normally until well into March.

they also think some people might have hidden immunity to COVID, though a lot of this is still theoretical rather than proven:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200716-the-people-with-hidden-protection-from-covid-19

I could have sworn that whenever they do bigger studies of general populations, a surprisingly small percentage have antibodies without having knowingly had covid. that is to say, it's not as widespread as people might assume.

my rule of thumb is that for obvious reasons useful population-level statistics are hard to come by in the middle of global pandemics

yeah... when they say "surprisingly small" i've seen stuff like, oh, it's only 20% of the population instead of 60-70%. though of course it'll vary by region

I’m pretty sure I’ve also read that antibody tests are likely to underestimate the number of people who’ve had the virus, since they quickly fall below detectable levels particularly if it was a mild case.

my younger brother (back at secondary school in s yorks today) just sent me a whatsapp video of the corridor between lessons that looked like the ones that did the rounds in the the US south a couple of weeks ago (i.e. insane crowding, followed days later by the inevitable), the the difference is almost none of them are wearing a mask in the UK.

At my daughter's secondary school each class has one room that they stay in all day and only the teachers change room for each lesson. Plus side is it avoids what you've just described, but the downside is it restricts some of the lessons (eg she's in a science lab all the time, which means the other four years can't do any science practicals).

AstraZeneca drops as much as 10% after-hours; company puts Covid-19 vaccine trial on hold - report https://t.co/BkVUNv6KSd pic.twitter.com/cyik89Gcwn

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) September 8, 2020

Was that the most promising one?

Moderna's the one Fauci is involved in

Guardian has a tracker that covers most of the vaccines that have entered Phase I test.

Personally, I'm fine isolating and wearing a mask. I'll wait for the vaccine of the first half-dozen with the best preventative efficacy, and that won't be clear till next Spring or later.

The oxford Astra Zeneca one is the one you hear mentioned most outside the US, and I think it’s the one in the most advanced stage of stage iii testing (started first, most countries) and it’s the one with the most “preorders”. This is the second time they’ve paused for a possible adverse event. First time was apparently a false alarm.

I do think we kind of place too much faith in the idea a vaccine is imminent. I think we need to strongly consider avoidance measures not just as a means to keep things under control, but ultimately as a way to reduce it to zero.

I don't think I've got much faith in an imminent vaccine but I've got hope, because the alternative gets increasingly bleak.

Like... I miss going to bars and seeing friends and dating and eating the best ramen in 300 mile radius in a standing room only restaurant.

(and re: friends, between people with compromised immune systems and people including me in virus-risky employment situations even distanced meetups aren't comfortable)

halloween canceled in LA

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-09-09-20-intl/h_ef0979aeef8a7ff7a5165a6af57f6ec7

I think we need to strongly consider avoidance measures not just as a means to keep things under control, but ultimately as a way to reduce it to zero.

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Tuesday, September 8, 2020 11:25 PM bookmarkflaglink

that ship has long sailed.

the issue isn't a vaccine getting approved, methinks. one will be approved before Phase 3 testing is done, which, for example, for Moderna, won't be until 2022.

it'll take a while to get to everybody and take it in sufficient numbers to be effective in a population. but even then it isn't going to suddenly make the virus vanish, either. even if enough take it, most experts I've read have guessed it'll just reduce its numbers, and the thing will probably still be endemic. it'll just be a seasonal thing like the flu.

i don't think there's a chance in hell of eradicating it, this country isn't going to take care of its civilians for the length of a multi-month full-fledged lockdown (even with a Dem White House and Dem Congress, unless we get rid of the filibuster). life is probably going to be this awkward tug-of-war for a while. it's hell, but I can't really deal with much more isolation so I take what I can, find joy in those moments I can find.

and one thing I'm getting really sick of is the constant internet shaming and the smug tone. not for people who refuse to wear masks in public, fuck them and their entire families IMO. but my best friend got called out publicly by some piece of shit that didn't even really know her for going out with a friend, sitting masked outside at a bar that wasn't crowded. called her 'performative' and suggested she was hurtful.

a lot of my friends post variations of "JUST STAY THE FUCK HOME". the funny thing about it is every one of them that posts this either lives with a significant other, or their best friend, or with 3 or 4 roommates they're close with. to where they can stay home and have some level of socialization. I realize that is still a diminished experience as it's the same people all of the time and you can still get stir crazy being around people, but that's preferable to living either alone or with a roommate you barely know, some random guy your landlord found. and not everybody can work from home (I can, but my brother, without the theme parks being open, would be out of a job, the majority of his pay).

that's one reason I took a week break from FB last week, as I got sick of watching some of my normally compassionate friends posting constant shame shit over things not as severe as 'not masking', but having the audacity to leave the house and meet another human being, regardless of what precautions were taken. some were even criticizing friends for having "social circles that were too big". yes, there are reckless things we still shouldn't do, but some people (like my friend L!n) are coming apart and are trying to safely do things with other people to keep their sanity.

anywho....i'm ok at the moment, but we have to temper our expectations for this vaccine, as hopeful as I am.

i am game for wearing masks for the forseeable future though. I've gotten used to it

should also be noted AstroZeneca pausing its trial isn't exactly an unusual thing - this is SOP whenever there's an unexplained illness. may be completely unrelated, but they have to pause and make sure.

I'm down with mask wearing in many situations being normalized forever, even if only to cut down marginally on colds and flu.

I masked the one time I had flu as an adult. the CVS actually had free ones for us if we "had flu-like symptoms" at the Minute Clinic

but surprised at how not widespread it is. my 3 asshole roommates last year practically were trying to infect me.

Yeah the AstraZeneca thing has already happened once in this trial process and the hospitalisation may have had nothing to do with the vaccine itself, it's a routine thing. (They may not even have had the vaccine, just the placebo/control, I guess?)

Neanderthal, I think my rage only comes out when I see people taking lavish vacations, or cavorting around in large groups unmasked.

Like I'm taking a camping trip with three friends in early October, so maybe I sound hypocritical, but some *cough* circuit queens and punk rock types I know are posting pictures of crowded house parties on Fire Island and NoLA. No one is wearing masks. To me, that kind of behavior is a far cry from sitting around a fire eating beans and going hiking with two of my best friends (plus two spouses) for a few days.