outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Isn't there anyone who can keep her from speaking publicly, for the love of christ? This is only about the fourth time she's pulled this kind of shit.

we're meeting up at The Mighty around 11 p.m. She's buying.

Really good interview.

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/07/prof-francois-balloux-the-pandemic-has-created-a-market-for-gloom-and-doom?

Wallensky seems kind of bad at messaging, which is sort of her one job isn't it?

no

That interview was indeed good, thanks.

Reassuring:

Another concern is a mutation that enables the virus to “escape” the vaccines…

Over two million viral samples have been sequenced, and we’ve probably already seen all the mutations that are technically possible. From our observations, we know that vaccine escape will not appear after one or two mutations – it will require an accumulation giving rise to the right combination. We will not go from one day everyone being protected to everyone being vulnerable the next. We will have time to update the vaccines.

Also, while a vaccine-escape variant would indeed be able to infect vaccinated people far more easily, it would not nullify the protection against severe disease and death provided by the vaccine and prior infection.

That's also what Angela Rasmussen has been screaming

the market for doom and gloom has been red hot since at least 1994, tracking right along with the rise of the internet rather closely

New Orleans JazzFest postponed to April 2022.

The vaccines not being tested for transmissibility seems like one of those inevitable outcomes of the urgency to get this done. Presumably some massively-funded rounds of research are gearing up right now to try to address that. If the vaccines reduce severity and infection rates, then they're still important until better ones get here.

Meanwhile, I found this pretty sobering:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/too-many-people-are-dying-of-covid-19-right-now.html

Partly because I remembered the previous much rosier (in retrospect) article just a few weeks ago:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/how-bad-could-the-delta-variant-get.html

i think the thing we've learned is forecasting this pandemic is next to impossible. pessimistic predictions at least have the benefit of leading to action to mitigate the spread and letting people know what could happen.

but far too often we've underestimated this thing (myself included)

yup

it's just like hurricane forecasting.

hurricane forecasts tell a vast expanse of civilians they might get a dangerous storm and it might hit in the next 5 days, and what they could expect. that allows these civilians to evacuate if they're in a location that might be a severe risk.

except instead of thanking the forecasters, if the storm misses the civilians after all, said civilians scream and yell and talk about how nobody knows what they're talking about, whereas had they taken a direct hit they'd be thankful af.

it's the advantage/disadvantage of empathy. the advantage is in understanding what's really happening and what could happen. the disadvantage is having to feel the emotions associated with it

god, that gloomy article was written by Eric Topol, one of my favorite scientists to follow. not exactly a 'doomposter' - he had been a lot more optimistic a while back. it matches the tone of his Tweets - he's scared.

Yeah that was one of the most dispiriting things I’ve read

Okay, fair enough, but look at Topol's latest tweet.

Reassuring. Current data from San Diego County, California's 2nd largest, which tracks vaccinated status and vaccine for new cases, ~58% total population vaccinated (national 50%).https://t.co/xDxRRMJL5p
But March -> June are before Delta pic.twitter.com/yityL7Vp3R

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 8, 2021

I guess he says "reassuring," but then says "but."

good night!

It seems that, even from the more temperate voices, we get bad news just as often as reassuring news at this point. For me and most people in my orbit, it feels bleak as fuck. We canceled our trip to see family in Michigan, my sister canceled my nephew’s outdoor birthday party, people are pulling back and (essentially) locking in again for a long fall and winter. It’s hard to feel hopeful, that’s for sure.

Don't know if I'd go so far as locking down and not seeing people outside, if only because we vaccinated are not where we were a year ago or even January.

There are so many factors not traceable in the data to figure out why delta is acting as it is. We can trace things like vaccination rates county-by-county, but not elective population behaviors, like masking or exposing oneself in crowds & indoor settings. We can probably overlay some of the co-morbities in a various regional populations, but not with much granularity. It's the sort of statistical sloshing that makes things very hard to model.

like, if you have an outdoor vacation with jabbed folks I see no reason to cancel it if you're careful

It’s less about the jabbed folks, it’s that we were all going to meet up in the UP for a long weekend. My father in law is fully vaxxed, but he (fairly!) got spooked and bailed, which just sort of became the first domino to fall and everything basically fell apart from there. We may end up driving up to spend a quiet day with him, but that’s about it.

With him, at his house instead of the UP, that is.

I feel lucky we managed to have our planned fully-vaxxed family get together the 2nd week of July. Anything later I'm sure some people wouldn't have wanted to do it.

We had dinner indoors at a restaurant tonight, because we had made the reservation weeks ago and had been looking forward to it. But we agreed that's it for us indoors until further notice. Sad.

Yeah, last week we went to the beach with my wife's family in two rented houses, 20+ of us, all vaccinated bar two children under the age of 5. We enjoyed it, it was great to see everyone in person again, in some cases, for the first time since Thanksgiving 2019, but definitely had very low levels of background anxiety the entire time. My wife and I have agreed that was the last indoor activity with people in a while, bar a trip to the Berkshire's with another couple that have been even more quarantined than us.

I have zero concern about being unmasked at normal distanced outdoor activity such as a backyard party.

tweet that beautifully sums up the state of COVID-19 on Twitter:

How it started.
How it’s going.#WearAMask #StopMansplaining pic.twitter.com/Z1opBhoztj

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) August 9, 2021

also!

A small but very interesting study on breakthrough infections (post 1 or 2 mRNA vaccine doses). Breakthrough infections became PCR negative quickly and in asymptomatic cases, no culturable virus could be recovered (all alpha variant). https://t.co/I5Nokmnya4

— Dr CJ Houldcroft 🕷️ (@DrCJ_Houldcroft) August 9, 2021

(sadly, all alpha variant)

also ERic Topol after that article was published - thinks he knows why the ratio is fucked up in the US

Agree. This became clear to me in subsequently reviewing the marked reduction in US testing and how poor it is (<1/5) compared to the reference countries UK and Israel that I discussed w/ Davidhttps://t.co/v7NEHWrvTy

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 8, 2021

That does make sense. Does not reduce our actual hospitalization numbers though.

I know this isn't the apolitical thread, but I'm a little aghast that people are cancelling small indoor get-togethers with family and friends who are also vaxxed. Everyone has their own ideas and thresholds for safety, and I respect that— for example, I met with some friends and their toddler the other afternoon on their back porch, which was lovely despite the heat.

But I'm not spending another 6+ months not seeing my parents or friends for dinner at our places of residence— it's simply not happening.

xpost - nope. they're still way higher than in the UK, presumably due to how less vaxxed we are.

I'm in a similar position, which I suppose readers were able to figure out from my comments last night. Unless a lockdown were to happen again -- not bloody happening -- I'm not shutting in again. I'm single and have no children, though.

xpost - Well, sure, but there's a difference between going to visit family in their houses, in small groups, than all of us getting together somewhere that requires travel for all of us and unavoidably mixing in with a lot of other people in an area less heavily vaxxed (it's the latter that essentially undid our planned family gathering).

This may depend on your local climate, but we have another 3 months at least where outdoor socializing will be easy, so I don't think we'll have to give up too much social life in the near term. I certainly would still have dinner at a friend's house. I don't know if I'd go to a hundred-person basement kegger, but it's been a few decades since I was invited to such a thing. And I just told my poker circle I'm out of in-person games for now — we have up to 10 people crammed into a tiny room with limited ventilation, and the host of the game is in a demographic risk group, so I don't feel totally comfortable there (much as I enjoyed the game's in-person return).

But yeah, there's going to a lot of guesswork for all of us, I don't think anyone vaxxed who's being reasonable about it should be guilted for their choices, there are so many factors.

I have four plane round trips planned for the next few months, two of which are essential for family reasons, wish me luck

Topol's own new piece is not sanguine.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/09/america-is-flying-blind-when-it-comes-to-the-delta-variant

I really never understood the CDC's rationale to stop collecting breakthrough data except for severe cases. unless they truly thought the pandemic was pretty much over.

Topol's frustration is apparent in his tweets. he outright murdered one rando on twitter the other day and asked him to stop posting "bullshit".

nobody's been listening to him, maybe the more of these articles he writes that shit on the CDC (along with Gottlieb's own) will make them defensive enough to inadvertently do something right for once.

There are 2 levels to flying blind in the Delta wave.
One is the CDC's void of data 👇
The other is our testing, << 1/2 of 3rd wave, w/
very poor availability
A no show: home rapid antigen tests, which should be freely provided to every household to help safely open schools https://t.co/h9CvtLIsdH

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 8, 2021

somewhat more reassuring

The latest Israeli data that shows sustained high effectiveness of mRNA vaccines vs severe illness in people age > 60, during the Delta wave, but amidst increasing breakthrough cases. Via @AArgoetti and @LittleMoiz pic.twitter.com/1J2uTWkC2Z

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 9, 2021

Ironically, on 1 May, the CDC announced it would stop monitoring post-vaccination breakthrough infections unless they led to hospitalizations or deaths. This decision can be seen as exceptionally ill-advised

Everyone wants the pandemic to be over and so it is.

I think the new administration may also want to bury any bad news. It's not just Trump.

The American Academy of Pediatrics Tells the FDA to Speed Up and Stop Endangering Patients

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/81683.html

Meantime, a few days old but more on how/why we're holding up in SF (the key reason is the obvious one)

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/The-vaccination-advantage-How-San-Francisco-s-16370752.php