outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

It seems bit odd that they are publishing all that information as an Op-Ed. I guess they still fact-check everything? But it would seem more natural to have their own reporters do some reporting and investigation rather than out-source the whole thing to an independent investigator. But maybe the political will is not there for the Times to invest too much investigative firepower into this hypothesis at this time.

Don't think NYT opinion pieces are fact-checked.

This says they do fact-check Op-eds:

We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html

The Tom Cotton NYT op-ed about how the military should be deployed in cities against leftists didn’t seem to have much fact checking, as it cited facts related to “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”, etc. I guess at least the editors issued a “we fucked up” after that, at least

Do we do it perfectly? Of course not

do we do it at all? yes, if by "it" you mean "assign the job to an overwhelmed intern"

The WHO is now advising people to mask up even if vaccinated

I'm still masking indoors in public spaces, but never outdoors. Oregon is about to 'lift all restrictions' on July 1. I think I'll still be masking on an ad hoc basis for a while, yet. It isn't clear to me how our daughter's group home will be affected in terms of masking and other precautions.

There's been a steep drop in mask usage here and that includes me. I was basing it off CDC guidance that masks are not needed if you are vaccinated. So I guess that isn't true anymore?

WHO is global. CDC is USA only. Add political considerations to that and they can disagree on recommendations for both sound and unsound reasons. Uncertainty is the ocean we all swim in.

ok, but this seems to indicate a very large disparity in the belief that vaccines are effective. If they are indeed not effective, that would apply just as much to the US.

Vaccines reduce your risk of passing on the virus, they don’t eliminate it. Masking also reduces your risk of passing in the virus.

The who’s advice might be good in this case (we’ll see) but I don’t think there’s much evidence for it, and generally speaking, as an individual, I would ignore anything they say. They’ve been wrong/late on pretty much everything.

xp

Ok, but at what point are we doing this stuff just to protect people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks?

There are people who are vulnerable for reasons other than an informed but stubborn refusal to wear masks or be vaccinated. It is a very mild imposition on me to wear clothing in public, even though it would be legal to not.

(But I already had no plans to stop this year, regardless of changing WHO guidelines.)

So I need to give extra special care to people who are imunocompromised and can't get vaxxed and who love to spend time in crowded indoor areas with no mask?

For example, if I were to dine in at a restaurant here (something that is widely available where I live), what would be the best way to protect people who have also chosen to that and are vulnerable for reasons other than vax refusal?

doing this stuff just to protect people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks

whether it's worth it depends what "this stuff" is, but I certainly consider it important to protect people who refuse to get vaccinated, since they are people

My sympathy for people who refuse to take steps to protect their own health is very low. Sorry if that makes me an awful person.

I have had an outdoors drink this month, and may see a movie this week, with a friend who has a developmentally disabled and immunocompromised daughter. We took our masks off at the picnic table, knowing we are both vaccinated (he has been working for the public health department in his city, administering vaccines, for the last five months). Wearing a mask when indoors with strangers, or passing them outdoors, reduces my risk of asymptomatically acquiring and passing the virus to him, and thus to her.

Regarding WHO and CDC, there are no established societal norms for how to deal with an event whose closest counterpart occurred a century ago. The scientists can collect and interpret data, but they cannot inform societies on how to deal with the broader issues of collective responsibility, collective action, and enforcement of policies.

This is a more sensible reason than trying to protect theoretical people in the wild

xp

Yes, but it is extremely frustrating and confusing when they contradict each other repeatedly.

xp to Aimless

All but one of the restaurants I patronize dropped their employee mask mandates, two of which I learned made jabs a requirement for continued employment. At the library this morning, where I worked for three hours, I was the only unmasked patron -- a first. The times are a-changin'.

I've never heard anyone in the UK say people who are vaccinated don't need to wear masks btw. Everyone is expected to wear masks when required.

This is a more sensible reason than trying to protect theoretical people in the wild

Any actual person I pass in the wild might have a vulnerable person in their home, or might be a maga covidiot who is forcing their offspring not to be vaccinated. It is very, very few skin cells off my nose to wear a mask on it.

The existence of unvaccinated people is what makes it valuable to continue masking, not a reason to cease doing so.

I think that makes sense up to a point, but also would note that the consensus on here seems to be CDC guidance is either wrong or best ignored either way.

I can't speak to other countries that may be experiencing completely different situations.

I see no reason to stop wearing masks in crowded indoor environments for the foreseeable.

So yes, the CDC is flat out wrong in this case? Perhaps the WHO is taking it upon themselves to do damage control?

I don't have the expertise to produce a good analysis of whether "the CDC is flat out wrong in this case". It's not a simple matter of deducing that everyone masking in public would reduce case numbers and protect immune-compromised people.

The data I've seen published suggest to me vast number of cases that will require hospitalization or ICU confinement will be among the unvaccinated. Since vaccines are widely available, free of charge and massively publicized, it makes sense to think that government has done what it can, short of mandatory vaccination, to mitigate the main risks to society. Allowing the fully vaccinated to go without masks if they choose, without their openly defying public edicts, seems pretty reasonable right now.

This is admittedly shitty for immune-compromised people who cannot safely be vaccinated, but it's easy to see why the government is reluctant to use its biggest hammers to mandate their safety through other means. Attempting to enforce mandatory universal vaccination in this political climate is a non-starter.

Moodles do you have a link for tha WHO guidance? I looked around but don't see anything. Like, is this a truly global recommnedation, or areas where vaxx rates are low and/or where the Delta strain is burgeoning?

https://huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/covid-19-delta-infecting-vaccinated-in-israel_n_60d6661ce4b066ff5aba8faa

interesting. thank you, wins

There's data in that article, but it is delivered in such strange locutions that it's hard to get a good grip on what the fuck those dangling bits of data really mean, other than two doses of Pfizer are not reliably able to prevent infection by the delta variant. What's hard to derive from the article is the extent of the failure or the average severity of the symptoms.

We have known for weeks that the vaccines are less effective against Delta. We don’t know how much less, because we have only known for weeks.

But half of the adults infected had been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, Balicer said

That’s in the article too right

Also not in the huffington post article but in other coverage of the same results: every single delta case in a vaccinated person in this sample was apparently asymptotic.

Thread *every reporter* should read. The seemingly "alarming news is actually perfectly consistent with the Pfizer vaccine being no less effective against Delta than it was against old school covid." https://t.co/CiJgRQwOcO

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) June 26, 2021

This is “alarming news” (first sentence in that article) only if you’re a journalist uninterested in giving people accurate if unsurprising information.

are they just randomly testing people in Isreal? I recall studies last summer which suggested that way more people had Covid than previously thought, it just happened to be asymptomatic in most of them

I’ve had it with the huffington post. From now on I only get my news from USA Today, America’s finest newspaper

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/27/delta-covid-variant-may-be-edging-race-against-vaccines

The calls for caution come at a time when research in Australia indicates just how easily the Delta variant can potentially spread. Based on CCTV footage, health officials suspect it has been transmitted in “scarily fleeting” encounters of roughly five to 10 seconds between people walking past each other in an indoor shopping area in Sydney in at least two instances.

Uhhh…

A very detailed and more level-headed thread about effectiveness of vaccines against delta variant

DELTA variant. To discuss this, let's actually start with discussing the spike protein of the virus. Remember, the spike protein of the virus is how the virus binds to our host cell. The spike protein is the protein that is encoded by the mRNA & adenovirus-DNA vaccines (J&J) pic.twitter.com/IaLEfRa6Yd

— Monica Gandhi MD, MPH (@MonicaGandhi9) June 16, 2021

^ that thread entails a very long read to fully absorb, but it is extremely thorough and informative. thanks for posting it.

Pom, Australia if particularly fucked because almost no one is vaccinated. It’s about 3% with 2 doses (depending on the source you ready, data is poorly collated and published)

It's a shame because covid-zero seemed like a very appealing strategy at first. Then again, it's not like a choice *had* to be made between locking down to a T and preordering enough vaccines to go around.

It’s COVID-0 but with very little effort to improve process and procedures in the last year. We’re still using the same hotel quarantine we were a year ago and COVID infects people in adjacent rooms. We still have unvaccinated people working wi the arrivals.

Sydney outbreak is down to a driver that drove a freighter crew from the airport to quarantine; no mask, no vaccine.

The other outbreak is some really dumb stuff. Mine worker who lives in Bendigo, VIC, but works in a remote gold mine 600km from anywhere in the NT. He flew up to Queensland to get his FIFO flight to the mine. QLD has border restrictions on with VIC, so puts him in a quanrantune hotel with incoming travellers. He gets infected, flies to the mine, infects a bunch of other people who fly back home all over the country.

We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one.

COVID-0 was a great idea but nothing has been done to combat the complacency, many people haven’t been in a hurry to get vaccinated and there’s been bugger all advertising to change people’s minds. Plus a deluge of anti-vax bullshit.

We had the whole summer to sort this shit out and did nothing. In fact the feds have actively worked against fixing quarantine.