outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Was very happy to see my ER nurse cousin in Indiana got the vaccine this week. Much happier to see that than another “it’s a hoax for doctor dollars” member of congress getting one.

extremely wonky thread that IIUC implies "the new variant(s) are not being found in the US because the US is months behind with its genomic sequencing relative to the UK"

So, the core issue with US genomic surveillance is not volume but cadence. We absolutely need faster turnarounds between specimen collection and sequence sharing. @CovidGenomicsUK has shown what's possible. 12/12

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) December 23, 2020

Happy Birthday to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who turns 80 years old today.

i thought you were joking HOLY SHIT that is old

And he still has a job!

HB, Dr. Fauci! Sorry about the Christmas Eve thing. I'm sure it sucked as a kid.

It looks like he might survive the Trump Administration... I think Trump is distracted and isn't too worried about "Showboating Fauci" stealing his thunder anymore.

He's not an appointee, he's a civil servant with protected job. Trump can't fire Fauci without due process (though he could lean on HHS and NIH, but everyone involved would simply slow-walk it and run out the clock).

In any case he's guaranteed a job in the Biden administration so wgaf

Nerves are frayed:

USA Today: COVID-19 patient fatally beats hospital roommate with oxygen tank after he 'started to pray,' California authorities say

I've driven past Pfizer's campus in Puurs, Belgium, many times before and the only thing I knew about the company then was "haha, hardon pills for grampas" but this time there was this - even though it's exactly the same mutinational capitalist blablabla - this weird sense of "This Is Now An Important Place For Humanity"

nothing unimportant about hard-on pills for grandpas, might save humanity a war or two

hah! true.

is there a pill that stops an erection

i feel like teens would buy the shit out of that

yr average SSRI is pretty good for that

Hardoff from the makers of Boioioing

Rotterdam Termination Source?

yr average SSRI is pretty good for that

― early-Woolf semantic prosody (Hadrian VIII), Saturday, December 26, 2020 11:05 AM bookmarkflaglink

Lol truth bomb.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/ten-reasons-we-got-covid-19-vaccines-so-quickly-without-cutting-corners

Reading that reminded me that this was on tv in 2018 (and repeated in March this year...) https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/17/contagion-bbc-four-pandemic-review
"Vaccines are useful when already stockpiled but they take four months to make – by which time humanity will be reduced to a few stragglers fighting over rusty tins of Spam."

Some new and very welcome news if true:

BREAKING—95%—new data from Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine shows 95% efficacy & is “100% effective” in preventing severe 🏥illness, says AZ CEO. That’s on par w/ Moderna & Pfizer. No official data yet, but UK 🇬🇧 said to likely approve in days. HUGE🧵. #COVID19
https://t.co/e4ra7GgmxG pic.twitter.com/YYn0MsORcy

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 27, 2020

4) Why is the Oxford #COVID19 vaccine so critical for the world?

—8-10x cheaper than Moderna/Pfizer

—Does **NOT** require any freezing! Only simple refrigeration.

—Is the #1 vaccine on order worldwide.

➡️Hence a cheap, easy to handle vaccine at 95% is huge!! pic.twitter.com/DZMMXaCWil

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 27, 2020

Great news!

I cannot trust information delivered with this many emojis

that guy is a clown

Yup

I can’t see the whole linked article but this is very strangely worded, and unless they conducted another trial since they announced the results of the first one they completely fucked up, I don’t think it’s saying the AZ vaccine has been proven to be “95% effective”. And you can ignore that guy’s interpretation. He’s covid Louise mensch.

Sorry this is very strangely worded:

Astra Zeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, today reveals that new data will show the vaccine is as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna jabs that have already been approved, protecting 95% of patients, and is “100% effective” in preventing severe illness requiring hospital treatment.

Thanks for the context, duly noted. The FT are now saying that the vaccine will be approved within days, so fuck knows, tbh?!

💥 Good news!

UK will approve the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine within days. Announcement could come from MHRA as soon as Tuesday, with vaccinations starting in the first week of January.

Latest with @SarahNev and @donatopmancinihttps://t.co/l3PyBP4pY8

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) December 27, 2020

Oh sorry no. It will be approved. But the trial results are already known and they’re not 95%.

new data will show...

what new data? where from?

Ironically the true efficacy might actually be 95 rather than the “60-90 (but who knows really)” they reported. They messed up the trial very badly, probably badly enough that several countries will not approve it. The UK kind of has no choice though and it will probably be fine.

_new data will show..._

what new data? where from?

xps: Dr. Feigl-Ding is talking more out of urgency than expertise (his field is medical economics, IIRC), but he was spot-on that the coronavirus would be a global problem in mid-January, that masks were a critical element for reducing transmission in mid-February, and that airborne was the major means of transmission in March=April. When practicing infectious disease epidemiologists were wrong, he was earning credibility. I don't follow him as he spends most tweets repeating himself, but I'll pay attention when someone else retweets.

You’ll know if you get the vaccine from Oxford because it’ll tell you

— Billie (@_BillieBelieves) December 27, 2020

Highlighting how underreported coronavirus in Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Russia has been:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqQmZ9IXEAEGIKF?format=jpg

turns out an n95 with a valve is not ideal, but it's probably the next best thing to an n95 without a mask

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/default.html

These findings show that FFRs with an exhalation valve provide respiratory protection to the wearer and can also reduce particle emissions to levels similar to or better than those provided by surgical masks, procedure masks, or cloth face coverings.

you mean without a valve?

right. next best thing to an n95 without a valve.

LA county reported 13,492 cases today. Factor 0% ICU availability to that number and the next month in LA might be as bleak as NYC in Mar/Apr.

(just drilled down and the STATE of New York never had more than 13k new cases in a single day in Mar/Apr)

it's very difficult to make meaningful comparisons between *case counts* in march and now because testing is ubiquitous now in a way it wasn't then. official counts are missing many (probably most) cases earlier this year.

you can compare deaths though. NYS was running about 1000 deaths a day in march/april. LA county (half the population of NYS) is currently around 100 deaths per day. very bad, to be sure!

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-28/hospitals-postpone-surgeries-warn-of-rationed-care-amid-covid-19

some select quotes:

At Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the situation reached “massive crisis” mode Sunday evening, according to chief medical officer Dr. Brad Spellberg.

“We are just completely overwhelmed,” Spellberg said, adding that the hospital is trying to “daily, hourly, cobble together solutions to get us through this crisis.”

Conditions at the hospital — one of the largest trauma centers in the western U.S. — have been steadily worsening since Thanksgiving, with an average of 10 new COVID-19 patients arriving each day.

As of Monday, the hospital had about 240 COVID-19 patients in all areas of the hospital, according to Spellberg, nearly twice the amount as during the July surge.

And the expected “Christmas bump” hasn’t even begun.

“When you walk into the ICU, and you see every bed occupied by a ventilated COVID patient, with tubes coming in all orifices of their body, you begin to understand that we are not dealing with what we were dealing with 10 months ago,” Spellberg said.

Hospitals are so inundated that they’ve resorted to placing patients in conference rooms or gift shops. Some are contending with aging and insufficient infrastructure that threatens to interrupt the flow of life-saving oxygen.

Health officials said Monday they are sorting through a reporting backlog they expect will add 432 deaths to the toll.

“As bad as it is, the worst is almost certainly yet to come,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, the county’s health services director.

“The situation,” she added, “is truly dire.”

There are situations in which 10 ambulances are waiting to offload patients at emergency rooms, forcing patients to be treated in the vehicles for as long as eight hours.

Among the four county-operated hospitals, a stunning 86% of ICU patients have COVID-19, Ghaly said. The majority of nonessential surgeries and procedures in those facilities have been postponed, and officials are working to discharge patients to skilled nursing facilities, outpatient dialysis sites and other locations.

Watching case counts spike day after day you know that hospitalizations will climb soon after, predictably followed by ICU beds filling up. This is as predictable as water flowing downhill. This is the dynamic playing out in nearly every state. Some are just getting there quicker.

xp yep i hear the sirens. it's terrible and if it gets a little worse it's going to get a lot worse because of ICU capacity. i'm just saying the number of cases confirmed by testing anywhere in march (when we were barely testing in the US) is not a useful comparison.

yeah, i wasn't saying what is happening in LA today is on par with peak COVID in NYC, but rather that there exists potential to be at that level and very soon. Newsom has ordered thousand of bodybags and refrigerated container trucks to be shipped to LA county hospitals.

When ICU patients are filling up the gift shop, the breaking point is only days away. No matter how many tents and beds you can truck in, there are only so many nurses and physicians and they need to sleep and eat sometime or they collapse.

the only positive in LA right now is, even accounting for holiday reporting weirdness, the daily cases seem to be flattening off a little. but flattening off at 15k/day is still on track for a disaster. and even this might be wishful thinking.

https://i.imgur.com/05vC90y.png

we were thinking about sending the kid back to daycare if the case rate got below 1000/day and stayed there for a few weeks, which it nearly did.

t's very difficult to make meaningful comparisons between *case counts* in march and now because testing is ubiquitous now in a way it wasn't then. official counts are missing many (probably most) cases earlier this year.

you can compare deaths though. NYS was running about 1000 deaths a day in march/april. LA county (half the population of NYS) is currently around 100 deaths per day. very bad, to be sure!