outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I've said it before, but Trump's egotism and fundamental incompetence was what I worried about more than anything when he was still in the primary race, because of things like this. Granted, I was very much not thinking of a pandemic, but something a little more temporary which required a strong federal/Executive response.

I had to stop thinking of all the things that went wrong in the early stages of COVID-19 because so much of it was so easy to avoid. I don't think we would have magically avoided COVID-19 even with a strong Federal response. Even countries who handled it well still had to deal with it.

But without a flawed initial COVID test or ridiculously low number of tests available, we may have identified the cases that arrived early a lot sooner, been able to more effectively contact trace, and perhaps manage to keep the person to person spread to more manageable numbers. I'm sure a lockdown would have been needed at some point - not in reaction to an out of control transmission, but proactive measures to stop what eventually happened.

Death tolls would be much smaller. Our way of life would still be disrupted but maybe not as severely/for as long? I do think state government obstinacy and "live free or die" rebellion would have played a factor, but now, the incoming administration is going to be like Atlas trying to continue to hold the globe while a bunch of tiny gremlins keep whacking him in the knees with baseball bats.

I think we'll get there eventually, but the idea that vaccines are going to be this fast-working miracle is a pipe dream. Just glad my folks are getting their doses starting...this weekend!

Here’s the math: If the goal is to reach 80% of Americans vaccinated with a 2-dose #covid19 vaccine, it will take 10 years at our current pace. We are at 1 million vaccinations a week. To get to herd immunity by June 2021, we need to be at 3.5 million vaccinations a day. pic.twitter.com/E78e0xg10z

— Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) December 29, 2020

the rollout of the vaccine has been very bad, but the "if we continue at our current pace we'll fall far short" point is not very illuminating, given that we're still in the initial roll-out phase

Dr. Wen otm. These initial weeks of vaccination have been at a creeping rate wholly unequal to the need.

xxp I don’t think that stands up? For one thing, we already know that even the initial vaccines confer protection on people. They don’t know with certainty whether vaccination stops you passing the virus on - a big unanswered question - but once the most immediately vulnerable are vaccinated and deaths and cases start falling... people are not going to wait for everyone to be vaccinated and no government will encourage them.

xp to aimless

agreed on that, for sure.

the initial goal for december was 20 million. they've fallen far short of that - only 11.4 million doses sent to states so far, and only 2.1 million doses given to people

June 2022, maybe.

Still betting I'll be forced to vaccinate for my job by September. But as a school worker (not teacher) I might be in one of the early rounds

I've said it before, but Trump's egotism and fundamental incompetence was what I worried about more than anything when he was still in the primary race, because of things like this. Granted, I was very much not thinking of a pandemic, but something a little more temporary which required a strong federal/Executive response.

this is what kept me up at night in November 2016 - I figured we could get through 4 years somewhat intact so long as he didn't have to face any real challenges but the combination of knowing nothing about anything and insisting on being in charge of everything was a guarantee for disaster as soon as any real decision had to be made. I think it's probably true that any Republican response would've been a disaster but Trump actively made things worse in ways that even idiots like Rubio and Cruz wouldn't have done. I feel like when people are gonna be learning about this in 50 years Trump is gonna be a central figure

Are textbooks even honest about Reagan yet?

Pretty sure the Reagan era in survey-type textbooks would be mostly foreign policy stuff, Iran hostage crisis resolved, Gorbachev summitry, Nicaragua war, some Iran-Contra material, maybe touch on the Grenada invasion and the Volcker-Reagan recession. Criticizing his horrifying domestic policies would be too touchy for public school textbooks since we're still in that era, politically speaking; they'd vague it down and pretty it up and try not to offend anyone.

*whispers* we could increase the rapidity of vaccine uptake by just making them mandatory for everyone

That seems like it would be counter productive in the current environment

Demand will outstrip global availability for at least 6 months anyway - might as well cross that bridge when doses are more available

The very high incidence of side effects like fatigue, headache and muscle soreness, even though they're short duration and non-life-threatening makes it difficult to mass vaccinate entire hospital or care-giving staffs in a few days. But spacing out vaccinations for those reasons can't explain the problems getting this done faster. These have to be failures in communication, coordination, and logistics, which all should be controlled by a central authority, meaning the facilities of the US government.

first U.S. case of the new covid variant, and a person with no travel history, so obviously missing some links in the chain

Colorado officials on Tuesday reported the first known case in the United States of a person infected with the mutation-laden coronavirus variant that has been circulating rapidly across much of the United Kingdom and has led to a lockdown of much of southern England.

The case involves a male in his 20s who is currently in isolation in Elbert County and has no travel history, according to a tweet from the office of Gov. Jared Polis.

i'm sure it's been here for weeks. the US has barely been doing the necessary sequencing to pick it up.

(citation for that: https://newrepublic.com/article/160743/us-already-covid-variant-wouldnt-know)

we'll know if it's here by 2026

while we're fighting Swine Gonorrhea

I must say that another year or two of this and I will throw myself off a bridge.

better sequencing for the presence of this variant would be helpful for identifying where it's emerging and slowing its spread, but looking at the whole picture, the USA would only do a sporadic and incomplete job even if that info were swiftly available. even if our government(s) were operating like a precision machine, the US populace is just not built for an effective unified response to a pandemic like this. we're all out here building our little personal fortresses. or not.

xpost i v much don't want you to do that but at the same token I'll probably be r there with you

i just get upset daily by what it's turned me into. I'm a type of nasty that I never was before and I have to retrain myself to not take things out on other people which used to be the one thing I could count on myself to never do

This is the situation right now in one of the largest single site hospitals in the UK. For context, this hospital has the largest single-floor critical care unit *in the world* with 100 beds https://t.co/LdkN7dqzYc

— Bill Hanage (@BillHanage) December 29, 2020

better sequencing for the presence of this variant would be helpful for identifying where it's emerging and slowing its spread, but looking at the whole picture, the USA would only do a sporadic and incomplete job even if that info were swiftly available. even if our government(s) were operating like a precision machine, the US populace is just not built for an effective unified response to a pandemic like this. we're all out here building our little personal fortresses. or not.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Tuesday, December 29, 2020 6:14 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you'd think america might have learned that having thousands of layers of government while simultanously hating all of them is not a good idea.

bleak thread re: how this is playing out with vaccine distribution:

There appears to be no investment or plan in the last mile

No effort from Feds to help states launch a real vaccination infrastructure

Did the Feds not know vaccines were coming?

Shouldn't planning around vaccination sites, etc not have happened in October or November?

10/11

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) December 29, 2020

(this is the kind of shit i had in mind when i objected (on this thread?) to the idea that healthcare providers should be the ones to figure out vaccination rollout)

xp I posted a similar picture from a London hospital in the UK thread. There has been a disinformation effort going on for some time to try to convince people that hospitals are “empty”, that most people dying have “underlying conditions” (never mind in this country that that could include a history of mental illness and that most people would be living with their conditions normally if not for covid) and when doctors and nurses post on twitter about the desperation of the situation they are attacked by conspiracists and cunts who accuse them of not working hard enough.

I hate it, and I hate them.

me too
asthma should not be a death sentence ffs
it's appalling, all of it

lmao so because argentina have a habit of sovereign defaults, pfizer asked them for fishing rights as an indemnity on their vaccine contract?

— joolsd (@joolsd) December 30, 2020

Ive been trying to tell ye, fishing rights are important

I hate it, and I hate them.

Especially as they are getting away with it and they will continue to get away with it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/30/boris-johnson-2021-vaccine-rollout-brexit

The majority of the cabinet take the view that once you have vaccinated everyone on the first priority list (everyone aged 50 and over, plus those aged 16 and over with underlying health conditions), then the bulk – if not all – of the restrictions should go. Johnson is also thought to be keen to get rid of constraints as soon as possible. However, government aides are braced for a battle – they anticipate opposition from some in the scientific community against a full unwinding.

lol we're all quite literally gonna die

Someone was telling me as well that the plan is to give everyone on the first priority list their first dose, and the second dose would then follow like 3 months later? Rather than restrict to just the very highest priority and make sure they all get both their doses within weeks of each other?

lol we're all quite literally gonna die

60% of Ohio nursing home staff refusing covid vaccine @GovMikeDeWine says

— Marty Schladen (@martyschladen) December 30, 2020

it brings me little pleasure to advocate coercing people to do something that has not been specifically collectively bargained but I’m sorry, make them take it or they can stay home. (also pay them better.)

also this was published today, unfortunately it’s a sleepwalk by people who probably publish too much that takes no point of view and doesn’t bother getting into the details
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2774712

60% of a specific nursing home, or 60% of ALL Ohio nursing homes? if the latter, holy shit

If it’s the latter, we are absolutely fucked.

The vaccine is only 52% effective starting two weeks after the first dose. When you get the second dose, the vaccine is 91% effective seven days later. This is a reckless headline. https://t.co/sYHCIPiHmS

— Nato Jacobs (@dcmadness202) December 30, 2020

the UK plan is to vaccinate using a (completely untested!) protocol of waiting months to give the second dose https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55280671.

this a vaccine whose trial results are already pretty unclear. millions of partially immune people (how partially we don't know because we don't have any data!) behaving like they are totally immune, plus a virus that demonstrably mutates. could end badly!

I can't be the only one who is unexcited by the prospect of a purportedly more transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variant, possibly with mutations conferring partial antibody resistance, propagating in a UK population that is 'semi-immunized' for 12 weeks. Experiments in viral evolution...

— Paul Bieniasz (@PaulBieniasz) December 30, 2020

btw the untested single dose rollout seems like exactly the kind of big physics brain idea that comes from dominic cummings types.

people have advocated for *running trials* to see whether it's a good idea (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-doses.html), but the UK attitude seems to be let's just do it and be legends.

Let's just muddle through, what?

until it's over we'll have to, somehow

Oh great thank you mainstream press.

California nurse tests positive over a week after receiving Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine: ABC https://t.co/wTZNqtTBmD pic.twitter.com/xwceAlccW6

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 30, 2020

More on that 52%

1/ The MHRA has approved a longer gap between doses for both the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine. The latter has concerned some people. Specifically many are citing a figure of 52% for protection after the first dose.

Here is why this 52% figure isn't useful [1/n] pic.twitter.com/ZdFJNMtRxd

— Theo Sanderson (@theosanderson) December 30, 2020

Nearly 4000 dead over the last 24h in the US… jfc

holiday reporting is going to be unevenly distributed, so i'm hoping the 4000 is just offsetting a lower-than-usual day

but yes. it is grim

grim should be dictionary.com word of the year for 2020

In less than ten months, covid-19 has killed more than one of every thousand US residents -- 338,500 dead out of a population of about 335,000,000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYy6YY0EC94

this is as depressing as it sounds from the URL. this was new to me: "Keep in mind that, in 1947, New York City vaccinated 5 million people against smallpox in two weeks." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/americas-vaccine-rollout-disaster.html