outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Just in case you were wondering...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/03/gavin-williamson-britains-a-much-better-country-than-all-of-them

These are iPad stations being prepared for virtual ICU end of life visits by a palliative care doc I know. Jesus. pic.twitter.com/lIgbg0FhaL

— i cant drive, n95 (@roto_tudor) December 3, 2020

.

xp... and a 9/11 Memorial-style Covid 19 memorial park that will be a forest of blank iPads on stands

sorry that's pretty fucking dark, I preemptively denounce myself

Kinda hit me hard that as I keep forgetting it's not just infected covid folk that are dying alone staring at screens. No-one gets family.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/03/gavin-williamson-britains-a-much-better-country-than-all-of-them

cool story bro

We're the best because we were first to accept this thing all the other countries made and tested.

https://i.imgflip.com/1xvnfi.jpg

lol, that's a great cartoon

daily tests have dropped significantly in illinois over the past 2 weeks. at first, i thought that might be because the rest of the U.S. is spiking so tests are in short supply. but overall U.S. tests are down, too:

https://i.imgur.com/PVh2w5C.png

so, repeating this...does this mean that that the whole world is spiking so global tests are scarcer?

Honestly I think it's because tons of people got tested before Thanksgiving travel and that's the spike you see right before the last two weeks

It doesn’t really make sense for tests to go down while presumably the prevalence of the disease is going up. It would make sense for tests to flatten out if there’s a supply chain problem.

The simplest explanation for a drop is slow reporting of data that will likely later get backfilled. I’m guessing tests in particular are subject to backfill because they get reported more slowly than eg deaths (especially negative tests). I bet if you come back in a month and look at the data for the last two weeks of November that drop will have disappeared.

but would you bet 1 million dollars on that?

actually, make that a $4-10 bet, or a beer on me, sometime after all this. miss you, old friend.

Hello, looking forward to beers!

Me and Karl malone after we get the vaccine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fenXptAOBY8

i think that's the closest i've gotten to an authentic pub experience, other than a bunch of french dudes in my apartment singing their national anthem in the kitchen in the middle of the night, at my housemate's party, a few years ago!

also i'm sure you're right about the reason behind the testing drop, i just wanted to bet :)

Things escalated quickly on CNBC this morning....way to go @andrewrsorkin keeping that idiot Santelli in check pic.twitter.com/MD2zzfQxVk

— Icculus The Brave (@FirenzeMike) December 4, 2020

why do all of these people act like kindergartners

"I don't want to, waaaah!"

I'm getting vibes of complete covid burnout even by nominally smart people who have followed basic quarantine through the summer. Quarantine is over and all covid mitigation efforts might as well be in the garbage until a vaccine is successful and widespread.

A lot of vaccine sceptics popping up on Facebook, mostly because my sister keeps talking about it and, unfortunately, a lot of her FB friends seem to be Tory voting Rangers fans in their 50s (she isn't btw).

lately I've heard Joe Exotic's name pop up as a potential pardon and every time I hear that name I just think of the early days of this when people were just like "well let's make the most of this, maybe it'll be fun to stay home for a month, I mean how long is this really gonna last?"

there's this confirmation bias type thing as well, like - well, nothing bad's happened TO ME so far, so i've probably already had it / i won't get it / etc

part of it is just this slow acceptance that this is just what life is now. you can wrap your head around doing something different for a month but I feel like we're probably not gonna be vaccinated until 15 months into this and life probably won't be "normal" until a year after that, and that's a really long period of time to just put half of your life on hold. kinda feel like a lot of people are gonna have some sort of low-level trauma from all this when it's all said and done

normalization and legitimization of voices like those of the Santelli person from that tweet upthread are among the greater sins this administration has perpetrated on the human race

he's the tea party guy from 2009 right?

Sure is!

new mexico is about to issue an order to ration care:

Lujan Grisham (D) is on the verge of acknowledging just how grim conditions have become: She will, she said in an interview, soon allow hospitals to move to “crisis standards,” a move that frees them to ration care depending on a patient’s likelihood of surviving.

It is a step that she and other governors have avoided through nine months of battling the pandemic, and one that doctors dread.

“That’s a physician’s nightmare,” said Jason Mitchell, chief medical officer at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, one of the state’s largest providers. “We want to save every life we can.”

But given the severe strain on medical systems statewide and the lack of available ICU beds as covid hospitalizations near 1,000 statewide, Mitchell said there was likely no other choice.

“We’re headed there very quickly,” he said. “There’s no more room at the inn.”

anyone know how many other states have issued similar orders?

No similar orders in California but only 13% of icu beds in Southern California were available yesterday, and it was 20% on Thursday, so it sounds like we’re going to run out early next week if not sooner. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-04/state-covid-19-cases-and-hospitalizations-soar-as-shutdown-nears

similar situation here. 3,316 ICU beds in Illinois, 35% occupied by Covid patients, another 46% by non-Covid patients, leaving around 19.5% open at the moment.

http://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19/hospitalization-utilization

this is illinois-centric, sorry, but this was also alarming:

https://i.imgur.com/G09Mb8N.png

we lost about 500 beds at the end of november. i missed it on the news, but it seems like an adjustment that could be applicable to other areas too:

For overall hospital beds, the state lowered the number of free beds to 8,132 from 10,232 from Nov. 18 to Nov. 19. IDPH removed 495 available ICU beds in the same time frame, taking the number from 1,113 to 618 free ICU beds.

A political reporter asked Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Dr. Ngozi Ezike about the Illinois Department of Public Health’s website reflecting the thousands of available beds no longer on their record.

“We actually need to know how many beds are available that have staff that could actually work it,” Ezike said. “When you put that extra clause, that actually you would have the staff to man that bed now, the numbers drop significantly.”

Pritzker called the issue “subjective” on the hospitals’ part.

“If you’ve got an empty room that’s in a hall and you’ve got a certain number of staff and you’ve been serving, let’s say, ten rooms, and you’ve got two others on a hallway, could you fill the other two with the same staff and still manage that? Again, with double shifts and people working longer hours. It’s possible.”

Ezike used the sudden change in available hospital beds earlier in the news conference to exhibit how quickly COVID-19 resource scarcity could hit the medical industry.

When we had our last shortage, we had assholes going into the publicly available availability workbook for FL and saying WE HAVE PLENTY OF CAPACITY, 20% STATEWIDE without looking at the number of hospitals who had little to no availability or mistaking a day with lots of discharges with "we're past it!"

Apparently the USA set a new daily record for COVID-19 deaths a day or two ago, with ~3100 dying in a single day. For the record, this one day total surpasses the official death toll for all of the different terror incidents on Sept. 11, 2001, which was 2,977. Yet, nobody's going to hold annual memorials to "Remember Dec. 3, 2020", because it is nearly indistinguishable from the day before or day after.

In summation: we're still fucked.

We’re back at 50% hospital bed capacity and 60% ICU capacity but we’ve also been back in shutdown since early November, needing documentation to leave the home for rather few accepted reasons. Our new cases are plateauing at about 10k per day though, not the 5k the government has set to begin déconfinement.

My mom is still in hospital for non-Covid reasons, getting nervous because of course everyone who spends time in hospital is more likely to get it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/health/covid-vaccine-placebo-group.html

god, here’s a question I’m sure glad I don’t have to be the one to answer. before reading the article I had the same thought as fauci: give vaccine to the placebo group and vice-versa. this would allow these people who took a risk on our behalf to be vaccinated, and assuming they continue to be followed would still allow us to estimate long-term efficacy, though probably not ideally. but our ability to detect very rare side effects would probably be compromised

I didn't even think about that - the effect on the trials in progress if a placebo recipient got vaccinated. I don't think Moderna made us sign such a consent form for ours?

that's a rough decision to be sure. the downside of having to issue a vaccine during the very early phases of the study

Sentencing Law and Policy: The new death penalty: COVID has now killed in nine months more US prisoners than capital punishment over last 50+ years

The Marshall Project continues the critical job of counting via this webpage deaths from coronavirus reported among prisoners, and as of Friday, December 4, this accounting had tabulated "at least 1568 deaths from coronavirus reported among prisoners." As I have said in other posts, this considerable and still ever-growing number is sad and disconcerting on its own terms, but it is even more remarkable given that it now amounts to more than the total number of prisoner deaths resulting from carrying out formal death sentences in the United States for the entire "modern era" of capital punishment. According to DPIC data, there were a total of 1527 executions from the 1970s through today.

Release the vaccine in vape form and I promise no one will ask what is in it

— Caitlin (@caithuls) December 6, 2020

nyt. . . thank’s

Change in Headline pic.twitter.com/uy7wf2r6ZD

— Editing TheGrayLady (@nyt_diff) December 7, 2020

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html

there are some surprising errors in this article (for example, the assertion that HCQ increases the risk of death, which has not been shown in RCTs), but it’s a very sobering and interesting read

I say sobering purely due to the fact that it’s existed so long. but it certainly hasn’t been “available” (ie, manufactured at scale) that long, and while I have a lot of respect for folks like krammer and rasmussen, there’s a lot of speculation there

still amazing to think there's been a viable vaccine designed since before a single American died of covid and there's people who won't take it a quarter of a million deaths later because it's been "rushed"

xp kevinK:

In the meta-analysis of randomized trials of HCQ (through 16 Oct), randomization to HCQ treatment did significantly increase mortality by about 11%

The combined OR on all-cause mortality for hydroxychloroquine was 1.11 (95% CI: 1.02, 1.20; I2=0%; 26 trials; 10,012 patients)... We identified no subgroup effects. We found that treatment with hydroxychloroquine was associated with increased mortality in COVID-19 patients.

oh here we go

ha, definitely don't mean to turn this into an HCQ discussion. hadn't seen that preprint actually, skimmed the abstract (and the authors, lol) though and that's consistent with what most of the big trials had been reporting, so I'm not too surprised

So the second person to officially receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is a Mr. William Shakespeare... from Warwickshire! I suppose being 456 years old puts him in the 'at risk' catergory.

That would have something of a Boris wheeze about it if the first person hadn't been some old dear from Norn Iron.

This is cool. The Pfizer/BioNTech looks like its effective 10 days after the first dose:

https://i.imgur.com/9x1LWx7.jpg