outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

FWIW, I think it pretty clearly curbs the spread less than previously thought, or at least the delta variant is so contagious that the vaccines are not curbing spread as much as they used to. But no question they still have some impact in slowing the spread.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, August 24, 2021 1:01 AM bookmarkflaglink

recent study showed vaccinated Health Care Workers who get a breakthrough infection with Delta are spreading the virus less than unvaccinated who got a breakthrough infection with Alpha. Something like only 68% of breakthroughs had infectious virus that they could spread in the most recent Netherlands lab study. That and after 3 days, viral loads begin rapidly decreasing. So it still does have a big role in preventing spread - but you're right in that there is still plenty of ability for vaccinated people to spread, hence masks.

problem is Director Walensky publicly saying it doesn't stop transmission at all, which is complete nonsense.

My wife was telling me about friends of hers that have had "brain fog" during pregnancy and the like, and yeah, it does sound pretty disruptive. Like walking into a room and forgetting why you're there, but x10.

I still don't feel like I've seen good data on a comparison of people who recovered from COVID to people who didn't have it as far as long COVID symptoms, esp ones like brain fog and fatigue, which can have many causes. And I think it would need to be from the same time period, because stuff like isolation, being inside a lot, anxiety, and depression can also cause fatigue and brain fog.

My cognition has been clearly impaired since sometime this winter but it’s hard to pick out a root cause between psychological effects of isolation, my crohn’s getting worse (which it certainly is) and possibly having mild COVID somewhere along the line. In any case, it’s like nothing I’ve experienced before.

I have a friend who writes & teaches for a living who hated isolation and remote teaching but was cognitively fine all through the pandemic. They got covid late in the game and says they can't think or write clearly since then.

From my own experience, the brain fog of a celiac reaction is not like other kinds of distraction, tiredness, being hungover, or having the level of ADD I normally have. It's more than any of that. If long-covid is similar, I'm truly sorry for anyone going through it.

if you’ve never had covid then “long covid” is not a possibility for you i’d have thought…

there is a pretty substantial literature on long covid now, it’s not just “i feel tired/bad”

It's all sorts of stuff, from chronic fatigue to constant low-grade fever to impaired/altered taste.

there is tons of "good data" on it from NIH, etc.

i'm sorry this just makes me angry. why the impulse toward skepticism or minimizing it as just fatigue or anxiety like everyone has? because if it's real we might have to keep wearing masks longer?

I think there's some legitimate frustration that it's still not well understood or nailed down (though people like Dr Nisreen Alwan have started to really do a good job of publishing studies on it), combined with people who simply don't want to believe it's a thing because then it makes their recklessness even more assholish? idk

i definitely have a friend with it. we did a Fringe Festival play with swordfighting when the pandemic was in remission, and she had to pull the fight choreo aside and say that she was out of breath often due to her long COVID and just couldn't do it as-is, and the choreo was modified so she could more easily do it without being out of breath. and she said she'd never had this problem previously.

I still don't feel like I've seen good data on a comparison of people who recovered from COVID to people who didn't have it as far as long COVID symptoms, esp ones like brain fog and fatigue, which can have many causes. And I think it would need to be from the same time period, because stuff like isolation, being inside a lot, anxiety, and depression can also cause fatigue and brain fog.

if only there was some kind of international system of networked computers that held something approaching the sum total of human knowledge that could help you find whatever meets your standard for 'good data' on this

fwiw my wife has spent pretty most days since april 2020 with a high temperature or outright fever or physically exhausted or both and a battery of tests has rulede out every other possible causal factor except long covid and is now part of a study on the long-term effects of the disease, hope our family can do its bit to help you get that sweet sweet good data

really sorry to hear about your wife, bg :( <3

Nisreen Alwan's piece: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6554/491.full

damn that really really sucks bg

Sorry bg, I can't imagine how awful that must be.

So sorry bg. and Jon not Jon, I'm sorry to hear about the cognitive stuff you're dealing with, that's so rough.

I think there's some legitimate frustration that it's still not well understood or nailed down (though people like Dr Nisreen Alwan have started to really do a good job of publishing studies on it), combined with people who simply don't want to believe it's a thing because then it makes their recklessness even more assholish? idk

That tracks. People are like, "You're young/healthy/vaccinated! You statistically probably won't get it/get it badly/have lasting symptoms" and then dismiss the need for people to be cautious, use NPIs, etc, as extra levels of precaution to PROTECT THEMSELVES AND OTHERS.

anti-NPI people scare me. I wore a fucking black balaclava in hot-assed Florida before cloth/surgical/KN95s were readily available. yeah, it sucked...but now the mask options are a lot better and you get used to it after a while. like for all the things for "man up" alpha folk to whine about. but it's not the mask-wearing, obv, it's the 'symbolism' of it, and the attached tribal reaction to it.

there is also a feeling of 'information overload', which I'm suffering from, but others as well. those who don't know science think that understanding never changes, so changing guidelines = "were you lying the first time?" (no - we went with what we knew!).

but even those laypeople who do know how science works are overwhelmed by the overwhelming number of studies and which ones are legit and which might be 'noise', and the divide that keeps growing on major things like "should we get boosters".

but most problematic is the sheer number of people with MD in their name using their profession to spread anti-vax, anti-mask COVID-hoax nonsense. it's outright scary how many I find daily just on Twitter.

It's not really a 'fuzzy' thing when it happens, either - after my mother's death in January, my sister's whole family caught Covid, and they all recovered except my brother-in-law, who was fucked for 3-4 months until he got vaccinated - it cleared up a few weeks afterwards, and he's back to work now, nearly* entirely recovered.

I don't mean to suggest the vaccine as a cure for it, by the way, the reports I've seen suggest that he was lucky - which is good!

* The last time I was talking to my sister, a few weeks ago, he was about to go back in to work, I should check with them now.

there is tons of "good data" on it from NIH, etc.

― criminally negligible (harbl), Tuesday, August 24, 2021 9:52 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is there? All I can find is that it's being studied.

The question is not whether anyone ever experiences acute symptoms for a prolonged period after testing positive for COVID. The question is how common that is, and also how common it is compared to a control group of people who didn't test positive for COVID during the same period. And you also need to measure how long the symptoms last. Sorry if that's aggravating, but that's how science works. Without hard numbers and a control group, you don't have a very clear picture of how likely COVID is to cause prolonged acute symptoms. Post-viral fatigue and other prolonged post-viral symptoms have happened before with other viruses and I'm certainly not doubting that they can happen with COVID or that anyone's symptoms are real or terrible.

It's just that we have to make actual decisions about how cautious to be and how to live our lives, for example, there's a difference for me between sending kids to a school if there's a 10% chance they'll have lifelong severe impairments if they catch COVID (which I doubt) vs if there's a 1% chance they'll have moderate symptoms such as fatigue for up to three months but they'll most likely resolve after. If it was the former, I don't know that I'd send them to school at all, masked or not. And everything I read about Long COVID is extremely vague - again, not saying it isn't real, but it's not clear how common it is, how common the more severe symptoms are, and how common the more prolonged symptoms are, especially when compared to an identical population for the same time period who didn't have COVID.

what the fuck is the matter with you, FP'd

yeah, I am just about done with this shit.

Take this shit to the irrational covid confidence thread.

oh ok, that's how science works. thanks for the lesson. i didn't know anything about science but now i am educated.

just be honest and say that you think people with long covid are faking it, stop dancing around it with all this ‘hmmm my science brain needs data’ like an antivaxxer pretending he’s scrutinising every published vaccine paper

I think there's room for middle ground between saying there is no long Covid and questioning how much we currently know about it. Those studies are being done but I think it's too early to say very much conclusively. I believe that currently long Covid is a "diagnosis of exclusion", meaning if you present to a doctor with any of the symptoms listed above and they can't find anything else wrong with you, you can be diagnosed as having long Covid. So most likely that's a big net that catches things which may not actually trace back to Covid in any direct biological sense, which of course doesn't mean that many cases aren't real.

did anyone say we know all there is to know? it didn't exist two years ago! and no one in "science" (as far as i know, i just learned science this morning) says very much "conclusively" and every paper talks about limitations!

Science is the process of doing the same thing, over and over, until something changes, and of talking with peers, reviewing findings, researching

no that's posting

in case anybody seems the alarmist DELTA IS PRIMED TO BECOME THE MEGA SUPER VARIANT THAT EVADES ALL IMMUNE PROTECTION pre-print study going around, here are some reassuring responses from virologists, who....are pretty angry about the study:

A couple problems with this preprint that do not support the alarmist take is pushes… 🧵 https://t.co/QNJGCCNtxB

— Jeremy Kamil (@macroliter) August 24, 2021

well *this* is a deeply irresponsible shit paper.

shows escape from NTD nAbs which also put RBDs in the "up" position which might improve infectivity. somehow goes on to claim that loss of serum neutralization is the same as vaccine resistance (it's not).

in short, crap. https://t.co/GwsYzDPRnP

— Jasnah Kholin - 8964 - ACAB - 💉💉 (@wanderer_jasnah) August 24, 2021

seems like these pre-print jokers don't know how science works

It took me 3 seconds to find this article and about 5 minutes to read the entire thing
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/

And I’m a dumbass

maaaaaaan alive that is a bad post

(not you, el tomboto.)

If you don't want to engage with what I actually said because you're convinced I'm personally accusing your loved ones of faking fevers, fine. I think it's best I retire from this thread.

good thread:

There is a lot of concern/confusion about vaccine effectiveness against the delta variant. How effective are the vaccines against Delta & how to interpret real-world observational data? So much misinformation is being circulated, so this thread brings key data together. 🧵(1/n)

— Muge Cevik (@mugecevik) August 24, 2021

man alive no no please, who will now gaslight us about long covid?? this is a crisis

look i think it’s important that, despite scientific evidence that long covid can be a very serious condition and the existence hundreds of thousands of documented cases around the world, that we still find time to properly engage with posters whose thoughts on the topic include the phrase ‘everything I read about Long COVID is extremely vague - again, not saying it isn't real, but’

Most people are happy with saying it's a real risk and leaving it at that, but I can sympathize with the urge to put some kind of hard numbers on the risk, and I think that's where things start to get fuzzy. Is the risk analogous to the risk of lingering effects that can occur after any serious illness? How common are long-term debilitating effects after even a mild initial case? I wish we had more certainty about questions like that.

if only there were scientists working around the clock to get those answers

hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, all over the world

If you don't want to engage with what I actually said because you're convinced I'm personally accusing your loved ones of faking fevers, fine. I think it's best I retire from this thread.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, August 24, 2021 2:08 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago)

Ok, here's a question: why have a control group of Covid-negative subjects from the same time period in your study unless the point is to test the hypothesis that long covid is psychosomatic? That strikes me as prejudicial, but I'm not a scientist so maybe it's normal to do this?

TBH I don't get the anger at man alive's post -- I too am sending my unvaxxed kid to in-person school (all teachers vaccinated, all indoor time masked.)

I don't think the chance is tiny that my kid will contract COVID. If I thought my kid had a non-tiny chance of developing debilitating illness that would last years, I wouldn't be letting her go to school. If you know people whose kids under 12 are going to school in person right now, you know people whose estimation of the risk of long COVID are similar to man alive's, I would assume.

cmon, people are mad bc he wrote "Sorry if that's aggravating, but that's how science works"

Ok, here's a question: why have a control group of Covid-negative subjects from the same time period in your study unless the point is to test the hypothesis that long covid is psychosomatic?

This is a great question! The answer is that it's normal for people to develop long-term debilitating symptoms for which there's no discernible explanation, and that does not in any way mean they're psychosomatic, just that the cause is unknown. And that's why it's important to understand whether that's happening to COVID sufferers more frequently than the ambient rate. (Which is a very reasonable hypothesis to test, since LOTS of viruses have weird long-lasting aftereffects, that's why it's being tested!)

It's exactly the same as the reason that we don't just ask "how many people had a stroke / had a blood clot / had a seizure a few weeks after getting vaccinated," we ask "how many people XXXXX a few weeks after getting vaccinated compared to the number of people who XXXXXX out of a similar size/demographic population who didn't get vaccinated" -- because sometimes people just have a stroke! And you don't want to classify that as a vaccine aftereffect just because it happened shortly after vaccination.

eephus! why, in August fucking 2021, do you think what people are getting angry about is the risk to the kids?

yeah i think it's reasonable to have a control of non-covid havers but i'm not an experiment designer

as i said, before the extremely patronizing post that followed later, i was mad about "the impulse toward skepticism or minimizing it as just fatigue or anxiety like everyone has." this could be a justification for the decision to send a child to school but in my opinion it's fine to just say "i don't know what the risk is, i'm just making a decision based on what information is available now" instead of baselessly downplaying it.