outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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.

Gov. Abbott loses this round in Texas Supreme Court to @CDMenefee, the top civil attorney for the state’s largest county.

Harris County and school districts can keep enforcing mask mandates—for now.https://t.co/GNyH0xMdaH

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) August 20, 2021

i read somewhere that the main advantage in applying mRNA to flu vaccines will be in reducing how soon they can roll them out, which is currently anywhere between 4 months to 6 months or more. with mRNA, expect that number to be reduced to 1-2 months. the other advantage is being able to target a more common spike protein that can potentially cover more strains in a given season, which results in protection from more strains, but that still needs to be tested out.

(sorry if any of that is mentioned in the article rob posted; i did not read it.)

yep

One limitation of the current flu vaccines is that they take about six months to develop, meaning scientists must choose which strains they think will be prevalent in the next flu season — even before the current one is over. So by the time the vaccines are ready for distribution, a different strain may have emerged as the better target.

An mRNA flu vaccine, on the other hand, can be developed in about a month or so, giving researchers much more time to determine which strains to protect against.

there are some other problems (the cold storage we're all familiar with), and development is slow—apparently they've been working on a mRNA flu vax since 2018—but it does sound v promising

good job everyone

The city of Orlando is asking residents to reduce water consumption IMMEDIATELY. Liquid oxygen used to treat water is being diverted to the hospitals to treat COVID patients. They believe if water consumption doesn’t change, water treatment could hit a critical point in a week.

— Dave Puglisi (@DavePuglisiTV) August 20, 2021

It's getting beyond crazy out there.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/chris-johansen-maine-lawmaker-whose-wife-cindy-johansen-died-of-covid-joins-anti-vaxx-rally

And that story links to this one:

https://people.com/health/south-carolina-gop-leader-pressley-stutts-dies-from-covid-19/

the 15th percentile of journalism xp moodles

looking forward to the final collapse of the USA here in a few weeks

Meanwhile in Oregon

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/inside-icu-bend-oregon-overwhelmed-covid/283-a0b54c1e-1069-46bf-97b2-510674ce8516

I live in Winter Park, wonder if that'll also affect me here since that's on the outskirts of Orlando.

just watch, now all the "freedom" folk are gonna take six showers a day.

and then wind up in the hospital for drinking bad water

Possibly could - Winter Park does do ozonation: https://cityofwinterpark.org/departments/water-wastewater-utilities/water-treatment/

Looks like they primarily chlorinate as treatment but ozonation helps with taste.

There have been times over the last couple of years when I've genuinely wondered if there's something in our genetic makeup that exists to detect when we're no longer a viable species and then steer us towards hastening our own end. This (see news items posted this afternoon) is one of those times.

i just sent that oregon article to my mom, first correspondence to her since early april. maybe THAT will convince her!!!!

In terms of limiting covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths per thousand, Oregon was a success story up until late July. Of course, the success of NPIs meant Governor Brown was targeted for massive criticism by the usual suspects: business owners objecting to limitations, anti-vaxxers, Republican politicians riding the wave of resentment, parents clamoring for school reopening, rural people who felt safe from infection, even sports fans who wanted to attend games. She finally relented and on June 30 passed all responsibility for setting NPI policies down to the county governments. That, plus low vaccination rates and delta has meant an onrushing, almost instantaneous disaster. Now she's being widely criticized for not taking strong enough steps to stop the surge.

On a grimly lighter note, I guess

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gun-makers-afraid-of-covid-abandon-nras-big-party

And but of course

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/568730-city-hosting-trumps-rally-in-alabama-declares-covid-19-emergency