outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

remember all the stuff about how black and south asian people might be genetically predisposed to getting severe COVID? are the people who suggested that going to apologise now for overlooking the role of racial inequality??

I don’t, thankfully

Yeah me either

I recall some speculation on blood type being a factor in severity. The main thing I remember hearing about race here (King County, WA) was how to make sure info and then vaccines were reaching BIPOC and marginalized folks. Could very well be my self-selected bubble though.

I do remember when smoking was supposed to protect you, whatever happened with that

Pretty sure that got debunked since smoking was a risk factor that let folks qualify for the early vaccine access in places.

This dude murdered his brother, his brother's wife, and an elderly family friend. Apparently motivated by his pharmacist brother distributing covid vaccines.

https://patch.com/maryland/ellicottcity/man-killed-brother-pharmacist-giving-out-covid-19-vaccine

This has been weighing on my mind more and more.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/This-is-a-crisis-Tens-of-thousands-of-children-16515894.php

Yeah, that one case where both parents died and left behind four or five kids, including a newborn...it's just the worst. So much needless collateral damage.

Cases in the UK really going up again. Pandemic not over

But but my boss keeps telling me it is!

the UK situation (cases high and stable for like 20 months) is so anomalous with the rest of europe and the US that i feel like it can only be explained by the use of AZ? the NPIs in the UK aren't *that* different.

(maybe not, just speculating here. IIRC they use non-mrna vaccines in india too and there's nothing UK-like happening there)

*2 months, not 20 months

Some models earlier in the summer were predicting 100k cases. Never went near that and it felt like cases were coming down even more.

Over the last week it's really going up again though. No new strain. 80% + of the adult population has been double vaxxed.

people have really stopped taking precautions ime. i'd say public transport is down to like 60% masked. shopping malls maybe 30%. shops, bars restaurants - nobody's wearing a mask at all. everybody's forgotten about handwashing. maybe each of these things is small but thinking back to that metaphor about a 'pile' of safety, and each little thing you do adding to society's total pile, i think the pile has gone down A LOT.

Would estimate that the number of unmasked passengers going through Gatwick has at least doubled and probably tripled since late august, and then loads of them come into our shop looking to buy masks when they find out whichever airline they are flying with requires them.

meanwhile, Florida's occupied ICU beds *finally* just dipped below 1,000 for the first time in....*checks notes*....*checks notes*...*checks notes*...

I mean… the government lifted *all* covid restrictions at the beginning of august, which I don’t think other European countries have done? I’m not surprised our numbers look worse than places which are doing similarly well with vaccines but didn’t tell everyone to stop wearing masks or to go fucking clubbing without getting vaccinated 1st &c

Worth remembering too that the stated plan all along was to basically let it spread unchecked now to ensure max population immunity for winter, & even the predicted 100k cases would have been part of that — so if you buy the theory, maybe an increase in cases now is good not bad idk

Yeah lifting the mask restrictions could have been a huge mistake. Just one more to add to the pile. Covid inquiry reported too soon.

UK heading blindly towards a combined flu/Covid winter surge, a huge amount of people seem to think being vaccinated automatically makes you immune so mask wearing etc is way down. Not to mention social media-sponsored anti-vaxx misinformation as high as ever. I'm half wondering whether there'll be another lockdown if it gets really bad. Sigh.

It's so frustrating to keep getting these "please remember to wear a mask" warnings at places where no fucker whatsoever is doing so. Went to a London Film Festival screening at the Royal Festival Hall, full fucking house, maybe 10% of ppl wearing masks? Sure everyone else was exempt.

I understand venues can't really do anything because there's no way for ppl to prove they're exempt but at this point I'd rather we just dropped the pretence.

i have to say i don't even see warnings like that anymore. the pretence has been dropped afaict.

London Film Festival does them, so does the Prince Charles Cinema, and TFL.

Probably 95% compliance at the Royal Opera House but the audience trends towards ‘high risk category’.

TFL is asking for people to wear masks but yes less than 50% compliance on my trip at the weekend.

TBF, we're currently under a state, county, and city mask mandate with respect to any indoor space that isn't your private residence, and there's still scofflaws a-plenty. Wearing a mask is such a bummer, you guys!!!

I was in line at a fast food place this weekend and there was a guy in front of me who was unmasked. The counter girl called out "Next in line!" twice and the guy was just staring off into space. I was standing 6 feet behind him and I heard it. After she called it a third time, the guy took notice and walked up to the counter. "Sorry, I couldn't hear you because of your mask."

We were in a hotel for the first time since March 2020 this weekend. The hotel had a mask mandate which was followed 98%. We were on the elevator two different times with people with people who didn't have masks on and both times my wife told them about the mask mandate and they put masks on. One time was a family and the dad's mask had an American flag on it.

How's everyone feeling about movie theaters at the moment? I'm still desperately hopping through listings, looking for sparsely attended screenings and generally avoiding weekends. But I look at a countless amount of seating charts all the time, and it seems most people don't care now. Am I still being overly paranoid?

We don't have too much of that kind of bellicose posturing in the UK that I've seen (other than musicians on the experimental circuit for some reason), more of a shrugging fatalism and the innate British attitude that it's all someone else's problem.

xpost

Fucked if I'm going to a cinema any time soon.

I'm certainly overly cautious but I have no plans to do theaters again anytime soon. Partly because the theater in our town closed last year and I'd have to go to more crowded screenings in the city, partly because very little has changed on the COVID front over the past several months even despite our ongoing mask mandate.

I will say that the Prince Charles Cinema is still doing social distancing, staggered showtimes, one way exits. So as much as they can short of not letting ppl w/o masks in.

It's quite possible to pay for a noon or 1 p.m. show and get a sparsely populated experience. I went in the middle of a Saturday to watch Titane, one of six people. I remained masked and felt perfectly safe.

i've been to the cinema plenty of times and there's never been more than about 10 people there. i don't mask because i'm constantly slurping soda and eating popcorn. AITA?

OL, since we've learned that we live near the same now shuttered theater, pretty much sums up my standing as of now, though I'm also holding off until my son gets jabbed.

I will say that I'm starting to dream of a future when I don't have to wear a mask for 9-10 consecutive hours per day (yet another minus for the open plan office, which means I'm effectively in a public space 100% of my day) at work. Illinois and Chicago are both saying the indoor mask mandate for everyone will stay "until more people get vaccinated". Given the number of intransigent assholes out there, I'm guessing this means... always? Don't get me wrong, given current cases, I'd rather have the mandate than not, but I can understand why even the most well meaning and obedient people are getting a little despairing about masks being a thing for many years to come.

vaccine take-up probably accounts for a lot of the difference in attitude. it’s easier for people to feel both personally safe and that they’re not running the risk of spreading anything when they know approx 80% of the eligible population has been vaccinated.

Quite like to go to see the new Velvet Underground doc in a couple of weeks.

Maybe taking day off and going at an early day screening could work out!

I mean, to be crystal clear, I'm not anti-mask and I happily wear it all day and whenever I pop into any indoor space. It's clearly helping to reduce transmission and I'm happy the mandate has in place here through the Delta wave, just noting that I can understand why fully vaxxed people might be ready to consider some real triggers/thresholds for when they might not be required and not just vague mutterings about "not forever".

I've meaning to write a "COVID endgame" thread for a while and I apologize this is somewhat delayed compared to media interviews like https://t.co/dQuo9i6ER7 and https://t.co/48MmCeq33g and to recent seminars like https://t.co/PGcgDinSNT. 1/17

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) October 13, 2021

Thanks for sharing, this tweet in particular stood out:

Together, this would suggest perhaps 40k or 100k deaths per year in the US from COVID at endemic state. Most infections would be relatively mild (just like flu), but there's enough of them that even a small fraction of severe outcomes add up. 15/17

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) October 13, 2021

Which would put this significantly higher than the flu, at least compared to the last ten years of data:

2010-2011 37,000 (32,000 – 51,000)
2011-2012 12,000 (11,000 – 23,000)
2012-2013 43,000 (37,000 – 57,000)
2013-2014 38,000 (33,000 – 50,000)
2014-2015 51,000 (44,000 – 64,000)
2015-2016 23,000 (17,000 – 35,000)
2016-2017 38,000 (29,000 – 61,000)
2017-2018* 61,000 (46,000 – 95,000)
2018-2019* 34,000 (26,000 – 53,000)
2019-2020* 22,000 (18,000 – 29,000)

That didn't format well at all, but the second digit is estimated flu deaths for each season, with the uncertainty interval in parentheses)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/09/negative-pcr-test-covid-symptoms-self-isolate

(Leaving aside wtf is a 'rapid PCR'?) this positive-LFTs-then-negative-PCR is definitely a thing where I am in the UK (anecdotally, usually occurring where the person is actually ill) but the messaging around it is a disaster for getting anyone to do anything other than essentially 'guess whether you think you have COVID'.

The past few weeks one of my kids has had 'covid symptoms' (ie a high temp, not that unusual in pre-schoolers) a couple of times, for the first time since before covid. There seems to be a lot going around as they say, requiring PCR tests which I'm now not as confident in as I was.

xp do bear in mind those are back of the envelope estimates/calculations, probably good to within a factor of a few. the low end of his 40-100k estimate in the US is pretty much in line with flu.

Yeah, I'm not taking those numbers as gospel or anything, was just curious to compare.

Mudhoney bassist Guy Maddison, who is an ER nurse by day, on his experience working through the pandemic (in Seattle, where the initial US outbreak was), and his attitude toward returning to shows as punter or performer:

https://crosscut.com/culture/2021/10/mosh-pit-er-mudhoney-bassist-being-nurse-during-covid

Good stuff, thanks.