outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Not as many people quit as I'd hoped, tbh, though I still think there are a number of departments "unofficially" working remote. There seems to be a lot of silence on that topic and I know quite a few people I interact with that are definitely NOT on campus full time. So I think some departments held on to staff by not toeing the party line. Some longtime staff did leave though, and it's been "funny" to watch the leadership be absolutely baffled[ as to why.

I’m kind of stunned by the difference between the UK and US on some things. Most arts venues here in the DC area and East Coast in general require proof of vaccine AND masking. The Kennedy Center will no longer accept proof of a negative PCR test as a substitute for vaccination although I think other venues still do. The Baltimore Symphony bans attendance by under-12s outright. Masking is enforced by ushers. Drinks and snack concessions at these venues are currently mothballed.

I haven’t been to a rock club yet, but I am pretty sure they still require proof of vaccination or a negative test but don’t know if masking is required.

if the UK is 90% vaccinated, how is it that things are going so far off the rails? the US isn't anywhere close to that, and people over here are just wildin', yet overall it seems not so bad. Am I missing something? Is it just a matter of the US being massively larger and more spread out?

haha, come to Texas. The actively will try to stop you from enforcing any kind of mask or vaccine requirements for most things.

xp

Yeah I just cannot wrap my head around those UK stats, especially with the vaccination rates being reported. It's wild. Is it really down to the AZ vaccine? I can't imagine that it's just mask wearing, given how masks are essentially non-existent once you drive an hour or so outside most major cities here.

Five million people have died. Eight thousand people a day are still dying. Saying “numbers are low now, people who are in the second-most vulnerable age group should go out in shouting crowds of thousands of unmasked people” when numbers have just risen 18% in a week to their second-highest peak is viscerally distressing. There’s no reason to think it, unless ppl saying it have fallen completely for major English-speaking governments’ 19-month attempts to propagandise citizens into sacrificing themselves on a blood-soaked wheel of capitalism, Murdoch’s culture-war version of the same, or are simply so ground down by All This that they’ve decided to just act like it’s over.

Which on an individual level, I can’t fault anyone for #1 or #3. But in twenty years here, we’ve seen all sorts of dumb shit that somebody said sincerely and without malice become accepted wisdom. IMO eight thousand human beings with lives and friends and families dying every day, from something we could have wiped out last June by govts and individuals not pretending that it would go away on its own, is a lot of people dying. Even if it’s “down” from ten thousand in March or April.

I’m sorry if ppl here whom I like lots think that I suck for “well actually”-ing “cases are low now” with “cases rose 18% last week to the second-highest peak of the pandemic.” But if someone can idly say “cases are low now” bcz they believe it, it genuinely worries me that one or five or twenty other ppl might read it and also believe it. 8,854 people died yesterday!


It's interesting that cases are getting low again over the last couple of days. One to monitor.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 307,716 cases p/w yesterday is less than 320,594 the week before. Less is not low.

(over an hour’s xp of pecking at Zing, there)

xps UK isn’t 90% vaccinated, it’s 68% vaccinated tbf - tracer was referring to adult population only

Worth stressing again that the rise in cases was the stated aim all along according to the govt, the idea was to let the virus circulate among the younger unvaccinated cohort as much as possible so we would get a shitload of cases (models at the time suggested as many as 100k a day) but hopefully not a concomitant rise in hospitalisation & we would get the big spike out of the way before flu season. Sort of a return to the original herd immunity strategy but this time with most of the older people vaccinated. If anything I think maybe they were hoping for more cases earlier on. That and they just wanted to lift all restrictions and they weren’t going to delay doing so a second time whatever

It's the hospitalisations that are unnerving me tbf

Javid predicted 100,000 cases a day last Wednesday, as part of his “wearing masks indoors is a nuclear option that we will not resort to lest it ruin Christmas” announcement iirc

(ie that is being projected again)

The UK is getting a lot of cases but the link between that number and serious illness & death appears to if not quite be broken at least hugely weakened. so yes cases are almost back where they were last winter but the consequences of being one of those cases are far smaller. I agree with everybody that masks in shops and public transport should be mandated, it's so simple, everyone already has the masks, everyone's used to it, it's not a big deal. I also think vaccine QR codes should be required for entry to events. Maybe even restaurants why not? The system is in place for it. That could have saved lives. It could save more. But the 'feeling' now that the risk of dying from COVID is much lower than it was last year is I think backed up by the facts, frankly.

I cant imagine being certain enough about any of this to the extent where id be telling anyone anything

That goes for anyone who routinely posts very-sure information or interpretation across any of the threads, and like thats hardly confined to sic tbf

we're a long way in and the line between what "works" ito even agreeing what "works" means here let alone gotten certainty on the balance between eradication vs some sort of living in the medium term is very much an individual one and thats not a lol boris lets all get it and see who lives approach and its not a "everyone stay home and spray everything" approach its a "i dunno but im not reading any more message board paragraphs about it" approach and ill play the rest by ear

It's the hospitalisations that are unnerving me tbf

as I posted last week iat (apologies to jvc for bringing covid discussion to the previous safe space of the “covidiots in music” thread): a UK friend of mine was notified that day that her regular consultation regarding a daily medication has been postponed for 11 months. If the current surge/trend continues, a lot of dominoes that have been wobbling for the past year are likely to start tipping.

rmde

sic, you always seem to have a "what, me?" innocence card to pull. it isn't that the covidiots in music thread isn't adjacent to this topic, it's that your out of left-field responses and continued insistence that everyone else is incorrectly posting about the pandemic that is the problem. maybe you mean well, but it very rarely comes across as anything less than hectoring and condescending. i genuinely don't think you are trolling and you are rarely "wrong", but maybe look into the fact that it's not the what you are posting, but the how.

and, yeah, whatever, i know this is rich coming from an incredibly unpopular poster such as myself, but, your approach is overbearing at this point.

yeah, I don't think anything is truly that obvious about this stuff. The truth is, I see patterns of cases in all sorts of places that don't fit with the narrative, like how Louisiana went from having dire stats to one of the lowest covid rates in the country. It wasn't masks and vaccines that got them there. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't be doing more about getting people vaccinated and enforcing masking, but more about how that isn't necessarily the silver bullet we hope for and other completely different factors play a role too.

my impression, having not been home for two years, is that the UK's NPI response (by government and people) is much better than the US at it's worst but worse than the US at it's best.

the masking thing is weird on one level (they started late, and stopped early IMO), but once you open up indoor entertainment with booze and an unventilated underground mass transit system, the incremental value of requiring masks indoors is pretty negligible so part of me is like, fair enough, *if* you're going to open up like that then masks probably won't help when i talk to my friends back home, who i am politically very similar too, and they act like i'm crazy for still wearing a mask, i can see where they're coming from tbh.

fwiw, the case rate per population in the UK is about 3x the US, but deaths per population are half those in the US. presumably this is partly due to higher vaccination levels, and partly due to a less dysfunctional healthcare system, and partly due to the fact that, while the UK right is crazy, they've not yet reached the level where they're injecting horse juice instead of seeking medical care.

it's

It's interesting that cases are getting low again over the last couple of days. One to monitor.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 307,716 cases p/w yesterday is less than 320,594 the week before. Less is not low.

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Wednesday, 27 October 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Correct. But it's less, and after another day of lower cases there might be a trend there. In any case, you are looking at the case numbers only -- even when they have not reached the levels pre-vaccine rollout -- and not the levels of hospitalisation and deaths. Which are lower.

No one is under any illusions that the government's approach has been disastrous, driven by incompetence and the need to get ppl commuting again so that commercial rents are paid and things can go on as before. No one is saying things are normal, we know appointments are at a backlog, for example. But that is just as much to do with an approach to try and run the NHS down.

In denying how the vaccine has been effective and enabled people to actually get out of their house again I'd say this isn't a million miles away from anti-vaxxer style bullshit from the other direction. Stop it.

it may well be that the elevated case level that has lasted over a longer time span in the UK is also tied to higher vax rates because the vaccine simply acts as a speed bump vs places like the US south where we just let delta rapidly burn through the population until it just ran out of targets.

The truth is, I see patterns of cases in all sorts of places that don't fit with the narrative, like how Louisiana went from having dire stats to one of the lowest covid rates in the country

In Florida it's (a) delta scything through unvaccinated people in such large quantities in July-Aug such that there's fewer to infect (b) delta created some community immunity.

I'm sure an epidemiologist has more.

Also, it's fascinating how these waves seem to last 4-8 weeks, sputter out, until the next about four to six months later.

to the extent this is true, it kind of presents you with two scenarios, one where lots of people get vaccinated which leads to a more drawn out period of high infections but lower risk of death or (maybe) serious illness, the other scenario is just throw caution to the wind, let it run out of control, lose lots of people to death and sickness, but get it done relatively quickly. The first scenario is obviously better to me, but it sets up a dynamic where people get increasingly frustrated that things aren't getting better the way they expected and probably builds some level of doubt toward vaccinations and masking. It's worth pointing out that these scenarios only are coming about now because delta is so much more contagious, the latter scenario was not really feasible with earlier strains.

xp to my previous post

this may turn out to be ridiculously optimistic, but I don't think we are going to see the pattern with massive spikes and lulls continue. My dumb outlook is that vaccines plus the massive infection rate with delta will greatly attenuate further spikes.

here's the graph that show the comparison between cases and deaths in the UK. note the first spike of deaths not reflected in the case numbers because testing basically didn't exist then.

https://i.imgur.com/FCqNTI3.png

but sic otm that part of the story here is hospitals getting better at treatment, and more pressure on hospitals means more 'excess deaths' and other bad consequences for people who don't even have covid at all but other things that can get them

there seems to be a tendency that when someone shares 'positive' developments, it's immediately smacked down as saying "the pandemic is over", as if facts should only be accepted if they meet the already-decided narrative. there's a wide gulf between "things might be improving" and "I'm going to eat Cheerios out of the toilet again, things are back to normal". not to mention that I don't see most Ilxors going out and being irresponsible.

this is mostly why I quit reading science twitter over a month ago and quit reading all of the shitty hot takes of amateurs and scolding contests and I am ever more the better for it. this thread is mild compared to that shit.

it's hard to look at those graphs and not come to the conclusion that a big part of it is that vaccines are doing their job

why can parliamentary staff simply not be convivial?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/masks-to-be-mandatory-again-for-parliamentary-staff-but-not-mps-covid

it's hard to look at those graphs and not come to the conclusion that a big part of it is that vaccines are doing their job

I mean, it would be nice to be in that situation

but sic otm that part of the story here is hospitals getting better at treatment, and more pressure on hospitals means more 'excess deaths' and other bad consequences for people who don't even have covid at all but other things that can get them

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 27 October 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Lockdown has decreased the overall physical and mental health of the population. And the overall lack of investment in everyone's wellbeing through years of austerity. It's all added up.

writer of this piece also has a linked series about the ongoing strain on hospital and health services in the region.

so that a.30 variant produced five known cases in the entire world and none in the last five months, apparently, and may be extinct already: https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/new-vaccine-resistant-covid-variant-found-heres-why-it-is-not-worrisome-683392

UK cases down 13% on previous week. Looking good.

half term in England this week though, school's back tomorrow.

Hospitalisations are still up, deaths flat so let's see but hopefully the former should start coming down again

xp - takes about two weeks from an event to see it's impact, and cases started coming down a few days ago when half-term was just starting.

leeeeeroy jenkins

CDC advisers vote to recommend Pfizer/BioNTech #covid19 vaccine for kids 5-11 under Emergency Use Authorization:

Yes: 14
No: 0
Abstain: 0

— Meg Tirrell (@megtirrell) November 2, 2021

14-0 vote ---- not suprising after today's conversation. CDC ACIP votes to recommend Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children 5-11. Expect CDC Director Walensky will make it offical later today or tomorrow.

— Sarah Karlin-Smith (@SarahKarlin) November 2, 2021

Great news.

Just got a call from our school system that they will be distributing vaccinations after school next week. So happy.

awesome! i hope more schools follow suit

i have two immunocompromised friends who have been desperate to get their kids vaxxed and they're over the moon. the kids are excited too!

a buddy already booked his kid this morning

my kid gets his first shot next tuesday, extremely excited about this

hoping it's a game-changer as it's an entire large age group of millions of people who haven't been able to thus far, but of course the benefits will take a while to register

in the US, the decline of cases nationally has seemingly stopped and started to tick up, which seems to correspond with rising cases in the midwest and northeast, whereas the South continues to decline since they were hit first.

am guessing we'll see the reduction resume again once these hot pockets peak and plateau.

and we'll see a holiday uptick too, no doubt, just hopefully not at last December and January levels.

mom's boosted, gonna get dad boosted when he comes home, and now my vaccine trial is offering a booster even though I technically got one in May. asking them uhhh if I should bother lol

who's going back to the office in january?

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/thats-a-big-poorly-camouflaged-red

Me, maybe?