outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

hopefully this will help with getting the vaccine to people who have language / cultural issues

.@POTUS is placing equity at the forefront of our nation’s vaccination program by investing $10B—much of it from the #AmericanRescuePlan—to expand vaccinations for low-income, minority, and rural communities. This will save lives.

Read Chair @WhipClyburn's statement:

— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (@COVIDOversight) March 25, 2021

a lot of people who work full time or will otherwise be constrained in their ability to make an appointment

I work full time but there's no way in hell I'm passing up an appointment if it's in work hours. I realize not all employers would accept this.

we're gonna run into waves of people calling in sick off the second shot; it's gonna be a month of half-capacity office attendance.

j/v/c, if the rest of the state is opening up from April 12, is there an option for you to drive to a site outside of Cook County? Or do they check your residence address when you're registering?

Yeah, that's def an option, but it depends on how far out I'd have to go. An hour or two could be something I swing, but so far I'm seeing that it's more likely 4-5 hours one way that people are having to head downstate before hitting open appointments. Unless that huge uptick in supply starts showing up before April 12th, I don't see that situation changing too much - supply is just nowhere near the demand in Cook County and it's making it harder for a pretty big radius.

Was just reading this morning that Cook County opened up 16,000 appointments earlier this week for their mass vax sites and the website crashed due to half a million hits per second from people trying snag one. Until supply catches up to demand around here, I think it's still going to be a long wait.

afaict that's the case for healthy younger people all over the world. i'm in a vaccine "success story" country - the UK - and i won't have my second jab until august. probably.

jvc's letter to illinois vax authorities unearthed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqoNKCCt7A

lol

Obviously I can't speak to everywhere, but I'm hearing from friends in other states that it has been surprisingly easy for them to set up appointments.

Hey has anyone gotten the Johnson & Johnson shot? I'm scheduled to get one today. What should I expect?

free baby powder?

(seriously though, reports are that the J&J shot causes symptoms akin to the second Moderna/Pfizer vaccine... you will feel quite bad for a day or two)

Thanks!

more J&J coming

Big — and surprising — news: Biden’s team announces Johnson & Johnson WILL meet its goal of 20 million vaccines in March. Around 11 million will go out next week. This had been in doubt as of just a few days ago, given less than half the 20 million had gone out.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) March 26, 2021

Ulp. I believe Russia are in a similar position too.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/28/mexico-covid-death-toll-rise-60-percent

Mexico’s government has acknowledged that the country’s true death toll from the coronavirus pandemic now stands above 321,000, almost 60% more than the official test-confirmed number of 201,429.

Mexico does little testing, and because hospitals were overwhelmed, many Mexicans died at home without getting a test. The only way to get a clear picture is to review “excess deaths” and review death certificates.

On Saturday, the government quietly published such a report, which found there were 294,287 deaths linked to Covid-19 from the start of the pandemic through 14 February. Since 15 February there have been an additional 26,772 test-confirmed deaths.

Mexico has twice the population of UK, covid death toll slightly more than twice the UK (which passed 150k this week)

Yeah here's the current high-flyers according to Worldometers, the first figure is deaths per 1M population, the second figure is the actual population of that country. UK still the worst comparative death toll among the more populous countries of the world. Mexico in 17th place but that's with the older figures.

Gibraltar 2,791 33,684
San Marino 2,472 33,984
Czechia 2,413 10,723,629
Hungary 2,071 9,642,235
Montenegro 1,976 628,125
Belgium 1,967 11,626,775
Slovenia 1,933 2,079,149
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1,905 3,265,728
UK 1,857 68,148,586

Sorry let's make that more legible

Gibraltar - 2,791 / 33,684
San Marino - 2,472 / 33,984
Czechia - 2,413 / 10,723,629
Hungary - 2,071 / 9,642,235
Montenegro - 1,976 / 628,125
Belgium - 1,967 / 11,626,775
Slovenia - 1,933 / 2,079,149
Bosnia and Herzegovina - 1,905 / 3,265,728
UK - 1,857 / 68,148,586

Am I right in thinking, leaving aside the barely disguised schadenfreude with which they are reporting it, the UK media are ignoring the fact that the putative third wave of COVID in EU countries is down to the Kent strain that was killing over a 1000 day in the UK a few months back? Granted the EU's vaccine fuck ups have made the situation worse.

Or maybe I've got that wrong and it isn't the Kent strain that's rampaging round Europe?

that's what i heard (and posted at the time). means we're ahead of the curve on that (not without cost) and hopefully won't follow Europe onto a 3rd wave. but there are always other variants...

The UK strain is thought to be about 1/3 of current cases in the US, extrapolating from 5,000 positively identified, and projected to be the most prevalent come April. Shame there’s no way of stopping it from leaving or entering a country: there are headlines in Queensland because a third case, in total, has been identified, so testing and quarantining obv wouldn’t make a difference in the US or UK.

T(xp) hat's what I thought, amid all the tut-tutting about the situation in Germany or France it doesn't really get mentioned that the death toll is still a lot lower than it was in the UK when the Kent variant was on the loose here.

america needs to be treating central america like a neighbor and distributing vaccine to their governments both local and federal the instant it is fully available to all north americans.

The rising incidence of blood closets after AZ vaccinations is starting to look more concerning, especially as the Australian government has staked the almost whole vaccination campaign on AZ. Still doesn’t seem to be a causal link yet but it’s harder to brush off than it was at the beginning of the weak.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/03/australian-covid-vaccine-astrazeneca-experts-urgently-meet-after-blood-clot-case-in-melbourne

the UK as well

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56620646

but 30 cases (7 deaths) in 18m is being deemed acceptable

isn't that comparable to how many clots were found for other vaccines?

initially i was thinking similarly isn't this just an incidence of blood clots that you would expect to see at placebo level - ie not statistically significant? but i think it's due to a combination of issues.

FT has this (£):

Thirty cases of blood clots combined with low platelet counts equates to roughly one case in every 600,000 people who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine. This was a sharp increase from the number of such incidents recorded in the previous MHRA report on 22 March. That showed 4 cases of CVST and no fatalities for the period from January up to 14 March.

All of the reported cases involved people who had received only their first dose of the shot, the MHRA told the FT. “Of the 30 cases in our statement . . . sadly seven have died,” it said.

The UK has not recorded any of the same incidents among people that have received the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, the MHRA said.

“No medical intervention is ‘safe’, and the balance of benefit to risk is crucial,” said Professor David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk at the University of Cambridge. “A month’s delay in vaccinating 500,000 people between 44 and 54 would be expected to lead to around 85 severe cases requiring hospitalisation, of which perhaps 5 would die.”

jfc

Belgian police go wild on kids hanging out in a park because it’s April 2021 and European governments are still too stupid to understand how a respiratory disease works, and confident enough in their ignorance to crush their people. pic.twitter.com/6m7nYeKJ8B

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) April 3, 2021

https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2021/75309a-eng.php

I've been using two packages of masks made by BYD Electronics the last while that the school gave to me. Had to look around online--the packaging tells you nothing--but they seem to be okay. Did find this from a year ago:

https://cntechpost.com/2020/04/02/chinese-team-develops-new-graphene-mask/

Something new to mess with your mental health.

yeah, I got an email from my son's high school about a week and a half ago telling us to stop using the masks that were distributed at his school. It's totally unclear to me if all graphene masks or unsafe or only those from specific manufacturers. The recall seems to indicate it is all graphene masks. The packaging of the masks did clearly indicate "disposable facemask with biomass graphene". The masks themselves had a grey color rather than white, so if you just have the regular white and blue disposable mask I think you're ok.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-routinely-attacks-pandemic-health-measures-while-implementing-them-its-own-staff

The good news just never stops with this thing.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/health/covid-neurological-psychological-lancet-wellness/index.html

As I've told my wife, there are no 'low risk' ways to catch covid19 and no sure fire ways to avoid it, except zero contact with other humans, which is exceptionally difficult to achieve. You do whatever you can and hope for the best.

The good news just never stops with this thing.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/health/covid-neurological-psychological-lancet-wellness/index.html

― clemenza, Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:47 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

If I might temper this a bit, the headline is extremely sensationalized, but nearly all of the "brain disease" is just garden variety anxiety and mood disorders. And the rates aren't massively higher than the control group. And it's not actually clear that there's a biological link between the disease and the anxiety (gee, you think maybe elevated rates of anxiety might be common during a pandemic?)

Don't know if we already talked about this but it confirms what we (happily) suspected:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/outdoor-transmission-accounts-for-0-1-of-state-s-covid-19-cases-1.4529036?

xp it's a terrible headline. it says 17% of people who survive covid have an anxiety disorder. that's ... pretty much the prevalance in the general population, no?

ha it's actually 19% in the general population, so if anything it seems like people find covid a soothing and calming experience.

The percentage refers to those receiving a diagnosis within 6 months, not the prevalence in the population overall.

Yeah if anything the best comparison would probably be % of people within the non-covid having equivalent population who received a diagnosis during the same time period. Like many of these studies that get blown up in the media, however, it's not properly controlled.

Even that aside, calling anxiety a "brain disease" is highly sensational and misleading. I mean yes, it's a "disease" in the most general sense of the term if it reaches chronic/disorder levels, and yes, it does involve the brain. But there are a lot of potential reasons increased anxiety or mood disorder could be correlated with COVID without having any direct connection to the virus.

Also, who is the control group for people recovering from COVID having anxiety? Who doesn't have anxiety right now?

It’s a cnn dot com article

Apparently no less than 92 variants have been identified in Brazil, where the situation is completely out of control and 100 000 additional deaths are projected by the end of April. Not only is that fucking psychopath Bolsonaro murdering the population of his own country, I'm starting to think he'll get the rest of us killed as well.

never forget:

Jair Bolsonaro is a dangerous populist, with some good ideas https://t.co/hwHnFLbvUI

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 3, 2019

jfc

We should always trust an incompetent authoritarian to implement the few good ideas they espouse in public. Like Trump and his big infrastructure ideas. That went wonderfully.

Man that is so sad.

Yup, but tell me again about how Lula and Dilma were "corrupt."

Disappointed to learn that rock critics, either past or present, have not been deemed essential workers.

Hey, take it on over to Rock-Star Journalist Lisa Robinson Has Lived in Her Apartment for 45 Years

If you are in IL and were waiting for eligibility to open up on 4/12, go look for appointments NOW. Tons just opened.