outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

i've had all of 2020/21 mentally reserved for living hell, for quite a while, since early last summer i think. i haven't really though about 2022 yet but it's coming

xp whatever works on a personal level, I guess I expect large event organisers to be a bit more responsible - particularly since as Karl says it would be a disaster if these events actually did go forward when they say they will

If the estimates produced by computer models developed by public health officials are correct, then the 25 million known and confirmed cases of covid-19 in the USA should be multiplied by a factor between 3 and 4, meaning something between 75 million and 100 million actual cases already.

So, it appears that at this pace of infections we've already come anywhere from a quarter to a third of the way to that semi-mythical herd immunity after one year of this living hell, at the cost of 410,000 dead and counting. Now with the vaccines added to new infections as a source of newly immune people, one way or another this should be much less hellish by year's end. Just don't think too hard about the next three months, ok.

I have pretty bad chilblains atm, only about 45 years after first being warned about going straight in front of the three-bar fire after coming in from the snow. I guess I had a pretty good run. The COVID link may be coincidental rather than causal? I’m certainly spending a lot more time in a chilly house rather than a warm office, and there’s a lot of hand washing going on. But the way it’s working its way through the extremities does feel a bit viral. Three weeks of this now.

tbh we've been swinging between "this is chilblains"/"this is covid toes" on an hourly basis

Fingers too? Because it's much worse on my fingers (and these "Covid toes" articles - of which I've seen several - never seem to mention the hands). I have lousy circulation, and seem a pretty good candidate for just common or garden pernio.

Far-right and anti-vaccine protestors blocked access to Dodger Stadium, where people were lined up to get inoculated https://t.co/bvjJkvC8CZ

— Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian) January 30, 2021

they would protest for the right to be shot and killed if people tried to take away being shot and killed from them

oh wait they already do

makes me so goddamn fucking apoplectic reading shit like that. we are such a profoundly stupid country and the people who pay the bill for that stupidity are the good ones

they would protest for the right to be shot and killed if people tried to take away being shot and killed from them

oh wait they already do

you gotta fight
for your right
for the death penalty

makes me so goddamn fucking apoplectic reading shit like that. we are such a profoundly stupid country

yep. same here. my first thoughts are just "fight back. do not ignore this shit. FUCK them."

"no MAGA wear, we want our message to resonate with the sheeple", the dude who was blindly following Trump said

If it's any comfort, here's footage of a covidiot protest-turned-rave from Perpignan, France:

#Covid #Perpignan rave party en plein centre ville de Perpignan. Les teuffeurs défilent et dansent dans la rue pour dénoncer notamment les restrictions imposées par le gouvernement depuis le début de la crise sanitaire pic.twitter.com/O8eGO7qpvC

— Seb Berriot (@SBerriot) January 30, 2021

those LA protestors likely just killed someone, indirectly, because someone that should have gotten vaccinated today (and tried to do so!) will get covid, spread it to someone else, etc etc. we'll never be able to prove it, so these "far right protestors" get to go home and fight global pedophilia or whatever and never think about it again.

i don't know, no one is ever sympathetic to the "they are murderers!" argument, because then you have to think about mcconnell and how many people state GOPs have murdered by denying them access to expanded medicaid that was already funded by taxpayers. or drones, and stuff. so yeah, i guess these anti-vaccine protestors are just part of the murder gang

I was never a vengeful person before the Trump era but I'm increasingly all 'push these people into a pit and then back a cement truck up to that pit and fill it'. Like what purpose do they serve beyond willfully making life more miserable for as many people as possible.

That is their purpose

Old lunch = a lib who is being owned

Also very glad to see Joe Rogan is getting millions of dollars from Spotify to tell his massive fan base to avoid the vaccine. Jesus.

...Research findings published in recent days have shown that vaccines will still likely work against mutated variants of the coronavirus. But they may not work as well, as the slippery virus continues to adapt to its new host, the human species. Scientists are ramping up genomic surveillance of the virus and vaccine makers are retooling their formulas in an attempt to keep pace with this morphing pathogen.

“We’re very worried,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “All it’s going to take is a couple more mutations on top of that, and you’re really going to have to start worrying.”

There is also the issue of reinfection. Collins said Friday that he is troubled by information from the biotech company Novavax, maker of a vaccine that proved effective in clinical trials, that the new variant circulating widely in South Africa showed signs of eluding natural immunity among volunteers who had previously survived an infection with the more common coronavirus strain. The Novavax vaccine was strikingly less effective against that variant, called B.1.351, than against other strains.

“That is something I had not seen before,” Collins said of the reinfection claim. “It is very tentative, and the numbers are not huge, but I would be alarmed if natural infection . . . is not sufficient to provide immunity.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-mutations-herd-immunity/2021/01/30/0741722e-627c-11eb-9430-e7c77b5b0297_story.html

The serious point about covid toe is that there is a wide spectrum of symptoms associated with covid and in the uk we have completely given up on the idea of proactive clinical diagnosis, we just narrowed it down to 3 symptoms (fever, dry cough, loss of taste/smell) & told everyone “book a test if you get one of these”. As I said in another thread this means, rather bafflingly, that we have missed off the fourth “main symptom”, shortness of breath, that other countries list (all of the eu I think). Seems like an important one idk! And we also ignore the other symptoms:

https://bestpractice.bmj.com/topics/en-gb/3000201/history-exam#keyFactors

Including some that are quite common! So as well as the fabled covid toed diarrhoea wanderers, anecdotally I’ve seen sick ppl turn up to work and say “oh it isn’t covid, I’m phlegmy and have a headache” (there is a wider issue here of a fucked up culture where sick ppl feel they should come to work obv)

Another thing that isn’t talked about nearly enough is that children with covid tend to present a slightly different range of symptoms than is common in adults - so again last year when cases were rising and rising for months and infection surveys were showing the fastest rise was among school age children, a reason for that (along with the fucking schools being open in the first place, thanks boris and kieth) might have been a lack of clarity on what to look out for

i've been talking to people who've tested positive all day for 6+ months and fever isn't even present in 40% of the people i speak with. body aches and extreme fatigue seem to hit more like 75% of those with symptoms. A doctor i spoke with that works in a ER disagreed with what i was saying, implying that he sees the average Covid19 patient when he's at work. Some healthcare people are so damn arrogant

There have been studies about this, which are presumably more reliable than your anecdotal evidence.

that’s really out of line, pom.

here in the UK, though it is as wins said in terms of official symptom recognition, the Zoe app is flagging up stuff like covid toes and rashes (I had a weird viral rash in the autumn, I never have them), and people are at least a bit conditioned to think “covid” for symptoms you’d probably associate with colds previously.

sry if i hit a nerve, doc
xp

uh I would not discount “anecdotal evidence” from a contact tracer

I was not aware of that. And it's not a debate I'm interested in having.

I mean it’s right there in the post

Ok.

This Harvard medical school article from this week lists the known covid symptoms variously as

What are the symptoms of COVID-19?

Some people infected with the virus have no symptoms. When the virus does cause symptoms, common ones include fever, body ache, dry cough, fatigue, chills, headache, sore throat, loss of appetite, and loss of smell. In some people, COVID-19 causes more severe symptoms like high fever, severe cough, and shortness of breath, which often indicates pneumonia.

People with COVID-19 are also experiencing neurological symptoms, gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, or both. These may occur with or without respiratory symptoms.

For example, COVID-19 affects brain function in some people. Specific neurological symptoms seen in people with COVID-19 include loss of smell, inability to taste, muscle weakness, tingling or numbness in the hands and feet, dizziness, confusion, delirium, seizures, and stroke.

In addition, some people have gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, such as loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain or discomfort associated with COVID-19. These symptoms might start before other symptoms such as fever, body ache, and cough. The virus that causes COVID-19 has also been detected in stool, which reinforces the importance of hand washing after every visit to the bathroom and regularly disinfecting bathroom fixtures.

Main symptoms

The main symptoms of coronavirus are:

a high temperature – this means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature)

a new, continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or 3 or more coughing episodes in 24 hours (if you usually have a cough, it may be worse than usual)

a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste – this means you've noticed you cannot smell or taste anything, or things smell or taste different to normal

Most people with coronavirus have at least 1 of these symptoms.

my best friend during the first two weeks of her COVID bout said it "hurt to breathe so much she wanted to cry" and basically didn't sleep. also had a stabbing pain one night and her then-b/f almost whisked her to the hospital.

fatigue has definitely been one of the common symptoms mentioned by the few friends I know who had it.

It's definitely up there with the most common symptoms and I agree that omitting it is strange.

sometimes I wonder if the bigger benefit of the vaccines = the reduction of severity, if it winds up reducing hospitalizations, long-term effects, deaths, etc. not getting it is even better but it'd also be nice if getting it was a much less significant deal too.

I think that’s probably true, like if the efficacy fails you then you still benefit from the reduction in severity?

which is why J&J's vaccine, while some of my friends are viewing it as a failure, I think there's still probably benefit to it even if it's not the preferred of the three in the US so far. if it's a choice between a large part of the population getting J&J or nothing, I'd definitely prefer "J&J".

in other news, my mom got pretty brutal side effects (as expected), yet dad weirdly seems to be acting as if someone gave him cocaine instead. he'd been walking slowly all week, today he's been walking so fast I've been telling him to slow down as he's thwacking his walker into walls.

The big benefit of vaccines in general (we don’t know if it’s true of these ones yet) is protecting the unvaccinated. They are exponentially (literally!) more powerful than a perfect cure because they do that.

There’s a suspicion the NHS list of symptoms is so short because they were struggling with testing capacity early on.

xxpost biggest pet peeve rn, friend of mine asks question on FB specifically targeting medical professionals asking questions about the lasting effects of vaccine, what we know and don't, and so far every response has been from non-medical people, usually touting wrong information.

does everybody wanna seem like they know everything, what is the benefit of talking about shit you have no clue about other than getting mentioned in an Aerosmith song

The big benefit of vaccines in general (we don’t know if it’s true of these ones yet) is protecting the unvaccinated. They are exponentially (literally!) more powerful than a perfect cure because they do that.

Possibly being fatigued doesn't make the NHS shortlist as everyone is fatigued anyway.

This mathematician believes that the vaccine effect in the UK is already showing up in the data

I have updated my analysis of potential vaccine effects in over-80s cases with today’s latest dashboard data. I am increasingly confident that this does show an actual impact of vaccines, for the following reasons: (THREAD) https://t.co/3fFCpNERGr pic.twitter.com/hAgZQWTEnf

— James Ward (@JamesWard73) January 31, 2021

Just heard, Captain Tom has been hospitalised w/Covid.

I daresay there will be fuller details in every newspaper, prominently displayed.

This mathematician believes that the vaccine effect in the UK is already showing up in the data

*bit

welp now dad is pretty down for the count, he can barely stand up on his own power. come to find out mom didn't give him pain reliever cos he didn't say out loud he wasn't feeling good. HE CAN BARELY TALK, mom, and lol he lied about how he was feeling when he was a chatterbox.

but hey, better this than actual COVID!

yow! Was that the second dose by any chance? I've heard it's rougher than the first. H got the first and she had a sore arm and was a little tired for two days.

Yea second. They had similar symptoms to the ones i had after my second stab.

Fortunately neither works anymore so...easy enough to rest

BREAKING: NYC releases, for first time, data on race/ethnicity of those who have been vaccinated so far.

As feared, reveals picture of profound inequality.

White: 48%
Black: 15%
Latino: 15%
Asian: 11%

We need dramatic action NOW to fix this.

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) January 31, 2021

These numbers are out of vaccine recipients who provided their race/ethnicity. 40% did not, either because providers didn't ask or the patient declined to say.

— Erin Durkin (@erinmdurkin) January 31, 2021

i knew the UK had overtaken the US in vaccinations (thanks to AZ coming online) but this is better than i realized (congrats to the NHS and logistics people, fuck you to the tories of course):

Astonishing vaccination numbers released today in the UK: the NHS provided a vaccine dose to ≈1.2% of British adults *yesterday* alone. 1 out of every 87 adults got a vaccine dose yesterday! The UK has screwed a lot up, but the vaccination effort so far is a huge accomplishment.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) January 31, 2021

also this is kind of good news (?). we're now not vaccinating more in the US because we don't have more vaccine, which is an improvement over the previous reason (i.e. fucking everything else up)

We are *supply constrained* in the 1.3-1.5M range. Here’s data from CDC showing our DAILY ALLOCATION total has been constrained between 1.0 and 1.7M all month https://t.co/TN6ra7BWrz pic.twitter.com/2dRA9MWwyD

— hk (@hassankhan) January 31, 2021

I want the juice

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/01/south-african-variant-of-covid-found-in-eight-areas-of-england

Door-to-door testing is being launched after cases of the mutation were found in Hertfordshire, Surrey, Kent, Walsall, Sefton and in the London boroughs of Merton, Haringey and Ealing.

Spent a moment bemoaning the fact that I live in Haringey before realising that the SA variant is probably everywhere else already.