outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

hence why I stocked up a few days ago on ketchup, my favorite vegetable.

wasn't the dept of education one of rick perry's infamous "2 out of 3" list of agencies he wanted to dismantle?

"Commerce, Education, and the … what's the third one there? Let's see."

(EPA)

CA now requiring all indoor event attendees (for things with 1000 people or more) to provide proof of vax or negative test starting Sep 20.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksbw.com/amp/article/ca-requires-proof-vaccination-negative-covid-19-test-for-indoor-events-larger-1k-people/37342856

A number of DC/area venues now going full vax only

Learn more about these policy updates: https://t.co/FtXGwdvqYu pic.twitter.com/Mrn5OBSjGv

— 9:30 Club (@930Club) August 19, 2021

San Francisco, thankfully, not messing around -- and the story rightly notes how much of the resistance is a small minority:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-moves-to-suspend-police-fire-and-16399089.php

The overwhelming majority of the city’s 36,000-person workforce said they are vaccinated, but there are still about 4,300 employees who have not gotten the shots.

According to city data, many of the unvaccinated are frontline workers, including at least 634 employees in the Municipal Transportation Agency, 500 in the Police Department, 490 in the Department of Public Health, 242 in the Fire Department and 190 in the Sheriff’s Department.

Also, this bit:

Meanwhile, a San Francisco firefighter sued the city last week over the requirement that all municipal employees report their vaccination status and eventually get vaccinated. In a San Francisco Superior Court filing last week, Eigil Qwist said the mandate violates the religious freedom of city employees, even though he may apply for a religious exemption.

The suit asks for an emergency restraining order against the city that would prohibit it from asking for vaccine status and requiring vaccination as a condition of employment.

The suit says Qwist objects to requiring employees to share their vaccination status because “it is our religious belief that it is important to keep said information to ourselves and not let it fall into the hands of those who do not have our best interests at heart.”

Legal experts have said employers can in fact require employees to get vaccinated.

Qwist was among the nearly 200 employees who attempted to rebuff the mandate and other COVID-19-related protocols — like testing and mask wearing — by submitting identical, conspiracy-tinged letters to the Department of Human Resources. The letters suggested the city is infringing upon their “God-given and constitutionally secured” rights.

When reached by phone Thursday, Qwist said he is “fighting for choice and rights,” but declined to comment further.

idk 88% doesn't sound like an "overwhelming majority" to me, unless we're talking about a Senate vote or something

fire eigil qwist

xpost Almost nine out of ten? Dare I say presidential elections have been decided for far less.

Mr. Qwist's facebook profile has a "Studied Life Science at THE STREETS".

Lock down your aerial

Mr. Qwist is going to be pissed his suit is dismissed in 5...4...3...2...

WaPo headline:

U.S. officials reviewing possibility Moderna vaccine is linked to higher risk of uncommon side effect than previously thought

Not. Helpful.

Literally one of the last paragraphs:

The myocarditis side effect is extremely rare and even if it is more likely in people receiving the Moderna vaccine, it probably is still very uncommon. Officials want to be careful not to cause alarm among the public, especially when officials are trying to persuade more people to be vaccinated amid a surge of cases fueled by the fast-moving delta variant.

but higher risk than they previously thought!!!!

Yeah, WaPo just telling it as it sees it. Meanwhile, this is a sad tragedy in slow motion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/19/unvaccinated-alabama/

https://i.imgur.com/usakFWG.png

by the time the conservative fascists get the first shot, it'll be time for their 5th booster

Okay here’s a result that’s not overwhelming but is a majority in any event

NEW AP-NORC poll: Close to 6 in 10 Americans say they favor requiring people to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to travel on airplanes or attend crowded public events, as well for mandates for hospital and government employees and members of military https://t.co/8TxIb9Eaow

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) August 20, 2021

Aren't we around 60% vaxxed now, give or take? That other 40% is going to take some work.

BREAKING: Facing legal setbacks, Texas drops enforcement of school mask mandate ban.

— Andy Slavitt 🇺🇸💉 (@ASlavitt) August 20, 2021

very normal guidance

i think we've lost the plot. @_DCHealth's new guidance for @dcpublicschools says students *with a fever* should not stay home unless they also have other symptoms pic.twitter.com/qV7hWqVyod

— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) August 20, 2021

love to send a child to school if they only have ONE of fever, diarrhea, or vomiting

ffs you weren't supposed to send kids w/ fever to school pre-COVID, now it's ok!

just a little diarear during P.E. in the morning

the lacrosse goalie purposefully pooling it in front of his net so nobody would approach and instead shoot from distance

no one came within 20 feet of the crease

Meantime

Significant —>

Most private insurers are no longer waiving cost-sharing for Covid-19 treatment, which means people seeking hospital care (who overwhelmingly are unvaccinated) will be required to pay.https://t.co/P23vYJ6nLM

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) August 20, 2021

Well fuck

my position on universal health care has evolved

Why? Do you oppose universal health care for drunk drivers? People who get into gunfights?

i can't tell which of us is joking (I am joking btw)

wow, they just want people to fucking die

Not exactly, they want them to die (or live) *owing them money.*

sure. but also, covid lasts a really long time, and there's never really a clear time when it's "too late". there's always another day you can wait on the ventilator and the ecmo, another day to let everything heal and see if things start functioning again. when people die from it, it's often a family decision. every day is expensive as fuck if insurance isn't taking care of it on some level

the insurance company + the medical community has every reason to keep the patient alive, but in that scenario, the family has to figure out how much of their last money to spend on a 10% chance that their loved one will come back

or fuck that, "loved one". their "hated one". just a person, is the point, reduced to a financial decision. how much is a human life worth? it's an old, bureaucratic question. it's important for legal reasons, for all sorts of reasons. a good study would be to ask covid families how much their hated ones' lives are worth

honestly, you could study it!

how much is one additional week of human life worth, on average, given an X recovery chance % at that point on the ventilator. the wealth of the supporting family would be a variable of course, but easily controlled

It's almost like it's worth trying not to get covid after all.

i think the answer is: whatever you can fucking afford. shame on the insurance companies, shame on this entire fucking country for putting up with these monsters. they fucking kill people

karl otm

i want to say, also - i remember doing 20 minute of "research" to try to learn about what the likely outcomes were for people on ECMO (the machine that replaces the lungs to give them a chance to heal while the patient visits the inbetween world, or is unconscious, whatever you think happens there).

and coming on this: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32008-0/fulltext

https://i.imgur.com/WSGhT4f.png

i remember looking at the "death" part of that, the mauve area at the bottom, and realizing that there was this long tail of people who were already dead at 30 days, and the families kept it going to 60 (a key medicare number), then to 90 and beyond.

sorry, i'm being unclear. and morbidly "poetic" with my words, which is inappropriate with a chart, let alone covid. they weren't "already dead" at 30 days, sorry. i'm seeing my dad there. he seemed "already dead" at that point, but we kept going, to give him a couple more weeks of a chance. that's what i'm talking about

I feel like the "most of whom are unvaccinated" line in that tweet/story was kind of fucked, as if it was trying to suggest "don't worry that these folks will have a crippling, one million dollar bill, they were unvaccinated so it's ok".

I don’t care what anyone says I think vaccines are cool

166 million Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID. Of that entire population, 6,000 have been hospitalized or died of COVID — the vast majority over 65. That's a 0.0036% rate of death or serious illness among the vaccinated. https://t.co/g9PSUtJEZZ

— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) August 20, 2021

BTW seasonal flu is at ~.1%

Question for caek (or anyone else). Since the covid vaccines seem to be a runaway medical success, is it possible that similar highly effective vaccines could be soon made for flu, or is the issue with flu is that it is a much older virus with so many strains that the current flu vaccines (with lower effectiveness) are as good as we can expect?

Shared from a friend there with a young kid in school. You can guess his feelings.

Oklahoma COVID-19 Report - August 20

New Cases - 2851*
*521,525 to 524,376

Active Cases - 20,483 (UP)

New COVID DEATHS per CDC - 19
10-Aug, 8-July, 1-May

Total - 8956

In Hospital - 1487* (UP!)
(493 Tulsa / 345 OKC)

In ICU 398 (Up)

**56 pediatric hospitalizations (DAMN!)

— COVID-19 in Oklahoma... (@OklahomaCovid) August 20, 2021

I know people are excited that mRNA vaccines may effectively eliminate malaria, which is 1) cool 2) an indictment of the way we prioritize disease in the global south, given mRNA technology is not new.

i haven't heard anything about mRNA applied to flu. extremely not a virologist so no idea if it makes sense. and given flu evolves and has multiple strains, it would probably have the same limitations as current vaccines (i.e. different cocktail every year). but you might reasonably assume an mRNA vaccine would be more effective. current annual flu vaccines are like 20-60% effective, depending on the year.

the relative ineffectiveness of flu vaccines is one of the reasons most countries don't offer them to everyone. they save lives, but arguably "not enough" lives to be worth the cost. i don't think the US is more compassionate in this respect. it just has a very unusual (broken) set of financial incentives that mean it makes sense to offer the flu vaccine to everyone every year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/04/11/mrna-flu-shots/

Thanks, caek.

And thanks to rob for the link.