outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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

weed?

Amazing

But of course what this SF data suggests is the possibility that even with very high vaccination rates and high compliance with mitigation measures, cases are going to grow exponentially and eventually affect most of the population, vaxxed and not, and that people who are either vaxxed or young will very likely escape serious harm but the old/unvaxxed will not. And if that's the case, it makes you wonder how useful the mitigation measures are, esp. once we can vaccinate everybody 5 and up.

A buddy and myself got the J&J vaccine on the same day in April... he's now decided that wasn't good enough, so he went in and got dose #1 of the Pfizer.

Apparently that's becoming a thing for Bay Area folks who got the J&J, heard so on the radio.

gonna keep happening until we find some data on boosters that people can agree on.

like I don't even know if my 'boost' was worth it or not but....since my trial didn't give me the option to be part of the booster trial, and I live with elder parents, I was kind of forced into a corner there.

so i was reading the news here in canada and bell's palsy is now a side effect, albeit rare, of the pfizer vaccine (https://nationalpost.com/health/pfizer-vaccine-label-amended-in-canada-to-list-bells-palsy-as-possible-side-effect).

work forces us to take time off in the summer, so that piece of news coupled with my discovery of alex berenson today led me down a rabbit hole of reported adverse effects.

i couldn't find any tracking system for canada, but i found one for the US -- VAERS. this isn't meant as fear-mongering, because the weird ones are all super rare, but it was kind of interesting to see all the anomalies. i sorted it by pfizer and the most "common ones" (all below 19%) but you can reverse the sorting by percent of 203,069:

https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=3A8E8483E7316E74ED74AE36F98D?stage=results&action=sort&direction=MEASURE_DESCEND&measure=D8.M2

i wonder how easy it is to report adverse effects in the US? i did a bit of reading and apparently it's a glitchy system, but it's still pretty cool that you're able to submit adverse effects through your phone

the link broke so you can just click here

Yes, I signed up for the phone reporting immediately after my first shot in early January, and was regularly surveyed for some time. Presumably there's a huge data pool now.

I guess I'm gonna have to bookmark this fucking thread again, good luck everyone

there's a local company (in vancouver, canada) called sanotize that is testing a nasal spray. it's currently in phase 2 clinical trials and has only been tested on 79 people, unfortunately. phase 3 is really where you see if any treatment is of any use, though, so don't get your hopes up.

anyway, it was able to decrease the UK variant's viral load by 95%, if i'm reading this right: https://sanotize.com/enovid/

never listen to alex berenson

I really want the nasal vax

the bels palsy thing kind of freaks me out, because my dad developed bels palsy in his 40s and his face never recovered from it, so I'm already a little afraid the same will happen to me. And I got pfizer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCl7qeAuwEA

never listen to alex berenson

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/

re: Gottlieb, that's the thing. southern states that were the first to see spikes will probably start eventually seeing a recession, but then other states that weren't as badly hit are going to start seeing their own bigger spikes.

being this big of a landmass really sucks.

that's not me saying that I'm fat

a bit surprised to hear Gottlieb so confident about a coming downward trend in the South but I suppose every spike has burned itself out.

what a fucking joke: Florida's lying-assed DOH claims CDC mis-reporting its cases

I do not trust Florida's DOH so

xpost Gottlieb is a little bullish on that compared to other experts, so I'm not 100% sure it will happen that fast.

this fuckin' guy:

As the majority of Florida's K-12 schools prepare to reopen campuses at full capacity this week — many of them on Tuesday — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state Board of Education could withhold pay from school leaders who implement mask mandates for students.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/08/09/1026299001/florida-governor-desantis-school-superintendent-salary-masks