outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

belated OTM and solidarity to Lily Dale upthread who is essentially suggesting that if you want to have public schooling that maybe your child's discomfort is worth her life

eeeeeeeeyyyyy time for me to hit the clubs and airports

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/31/coronavirus-vaccine-children-under-5/

it’s good that they spoke to people with knowledge, rather than the other kind, imo

xp thanks forks. I'm not entirely pro-mask, and I'm not all that worried about myself right now, though I do expect that if/when masking stops I'll go back to getting sick every year. It's just that I don't think it's ever going to be as easy as "Oh, masks don't actually work, so it won't make a difference to your risk." It will make a difference, there will be more illness in the schools, and maybe that's worth it at this point. I just want people who are making the argument to acknowledge that the downside - that the classrooms will be less safe - is real.

sounds like i'll be hitting the clubs and airports even sooner than yesterday's reports suggested

FDA has asked its vaccine advisory committee to hold Feb 15 for a meeting, per a source, potentially to review Pfizer application for vaccine for under 5s https://t.co/5j8Zr1qvGj

— Meg Tirrell (@megtirrell) February 1, 2022

I really don't want to sound aggro but.... why is this a big deal? Am I wrong that being under 5 is already far better protection from serious illness against COVID than vaccine+booster? And I don't think reducing transmission in toddlers can possibly have a major effect on the speed of spread through the community overall. I guess for households that have a toddler in daycare and an elderly grandparent. But for everybody else?

I guess for households that have a toddler in daycare and an elderly grandparent.

this is ... most households that have a toddler?

other reasons

this will likely mean that public health departments/preschools that currently require/recommend quarantining on contact and infant masking will loosen restrictions.

makes international travel easier (everyone in the household is vaccinated)

I don't think reducing transmission in toddlers can possibly have a major effect on the speed of spread through the community overall.

i agree this will likely not have a significant macro public health effect (not least because very few under fives will get it), but i also don't think my getting the flu shot has a significant macro effect. i still do it though because i don't want to get people sick.

i mean, no, this will not have a big macro effect on the pandemic

6 month to 5 year old vaccination is a really big deal for some people but it's hard to imagine that many parents are actually going to do go through with it https://t.co/JaayDWpjqZ

— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) February 1, 2022

I definitely know people who are still basically home-bound/isolating because of their little kids?

xp Plus a lot of the headache I've seen with people right now is reacting to their kids testing positive & scrambling to meet quarantine requirements, finding childcare, and/or the trouble of working around a sick kid at home, whereas if the little kids just never tested positive it would be A LOT EASIER.

who cares who dies

that was a concern of the past

nowadays it's about getting what is yours

I definitely know people who are still basically home-bound/isolating because of their little kids?

right. we're lucky to be a essentially zero risk of losing our jobs, but we're excited to reduce the likelihood we lose a month of daycare and preschool and a month of help from immunocompromised grandparents as covid works its way through our household.

this is wild

https://i.imgur.com/8meNTgU.png

People hear that the US surge has peaked and is receding, but many are so desperate for a break in strict covid discipline that they're eager to act like it is completely over today. Still about 2300 US covid deaths daily and around 150,000 in hospital who test positive for covid. Maybe by the equinox it will have settled back into something much less dire. Not yet.

aimless ... thank you.

Wow @ that data.

I find it very hard to believe 97% of Asian-American 5-12 year olds in New York City are vaccinated.

Wait why? They have the highest rates in every age category.

I'm looking at the spread between white kids in Manhattan and white kids in Staten Island. No other group has that much daylight between the highs and lows.

I just think vaccination numbers have generally been pretty noisy, with a lot of figures coming out over 100% and being threshholded down after the fact by fiat

Like I think I just don't really believe that there exists a demographic in which 99% of people are vaccinated

Miami!

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.page

High 90s for kids seems prima facie fishy to me and the caveats here suggests there may be some multiracial double counting and tourists screwing up numerators and old population numbers screwing up denominators.

I’d be surprised if these numbers were correct for kids yet. NYC will get 90s when they require it for school attendance and not before.

my understanding is that the FDA approval means that they likely can and will require it for attendance

My son has been sick a lot less than usual this past year, but I'm not sure how much of that should be attributed to masking or other safety measures like plexiglass in school itself and how much is related to all the other changes in people's behavior outside of school: working from home, decreased travel, decreased social gatherings and other activities, reduced social interaction in general.. If the other kids in his class aren't catching colds and flus as much, they won't be spreading them as much.

I have a five year old who is 2vaxxed as of three weeks ago and a 1 year old who as of this most recent development will be eligible hopefully in a few weeks…and yet reading about children as small as my 1 year old participating in trials makes me sick to my stomach… the ethics of having toddlers subjected to trials as such is confusing to me…does anyone know of any shit to read as to how they are conducted, various pros and cons?

xp masking works is the thing, both in clinical tests and in real world situations
it seems weird to argue about that

No doubt they have some effect. My question was just how much of an effect relative to other factors.

since masks are obviously beneficial, is it necessary to know exactly what percentage of benefit it provides compared to the other factors you named? or are you just idly wondering aloud, because you find it an interesting question to ponder?

I assumed that was more in response to the specific poster who keeps insisting that masks are nearly useless in a school setting.

I mean I'm assuming at some point the masks in school are going to come off. Just wondering how that will correlate with the return of the usual seasonal cycle of colds and flus known to all parents of school-age children.

We'll see more of them, I imagine.

We had no flu season in fall '20 because masking/home work was still a thing

Yes, but will they come back immediately to pre-pandemic level when the mask requirement goes away, or will it be a more gradual return as people start to travel more, attend large public gatherings, etc.?

travel is already at levels sufficient to spread flu virus easily from region to region, so I don't think any further increase in travel will make much difference. large public gatherings will only spread the virus in a limited circumference around each infected person, so they are not much distinguishable from smaller gatherings, like an office or a classroom. the lack of flu season last year (and substantially reduced season this year) has enlarged the pool of potential hosts.

if I had to bet, I'd say when the masks come off across society the flu will return to 'normal' levels very swiftly.

this will surprise no one, but i don't think flu is down solely because of masks or that flu will abruptly return to normal specifically when masking stops. for one, a every significant fraction of the northern hemisphere, including a lot of the the US, is already not wearing masks, and yet flu down globally. and seasonal flu was a thing in countries where mask wearing was common even before covid.

masks certainly play a part in its reduction in 2020 and 2021. but so does restricted travel, drop in economic activity, physical social distancing, and probably even things like handwashing being up (which makes no difference with covid, but is a big deal for cold and flus).

I'm sorry if I didn't make clear that restricted travel, etc. I compressed into "masking."

right. NPI generally.

although this point:

"for one, a every significant fraction of the northern hemisphere, including a lot of the the US, is already not wearing masks, and yet flu is down globally"

could be restated as:

"for one, a every significant fraction of the northern hemisphere, including a lot of the the US, is already *not doing any NPIs*, and yet flu is down globally"

By way of contrast, the percentage of residents of the northern hemisphere, especially in the USA, who are masking in public, restricting their social and economic contacts, and practicing NPIs in general is many thousand percent higher than in pre-pandemic years.

Flu is down to approximately zero and maybe half the population of the world is behaving exactly as they did pre pandemic, except for travel.

one flu strain, influenza B/Yamagata, may have actually gone extinct during the pandemic:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4

Without trying to open up any can of worms here, is there a reason for the absolute explosion of "CDC admitted masks don't work at all" posts and tweets I'm seeing all over the place within the last week or two? I'm assuming this is tied to the CDC thing about cloth masks, but that talking point is seemingly everywhere recently.

it's 'all over the place' because twitter and other social media are very effective echo chambers

Maybe, and I know it's always been there in some respect, but it seems even more omnipresent all of the sudden.

More reasons to go outside:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0263069

Patients with vitamin D deficiency (<20 ng/mL) were 14 times more likely to have severe or critical disease than patients with 25(OH)D ≥40 ng/mL

During the heights of Omicron a month ago, I ate vitamin D gummies like they were Dots.

Without trying to open up any can of worms here, is there a reason for the absolute explosion of "CDC admitted masks don't work at all" posts and tweets I'm seeing all over the place within the last week or two? I'm assuming this is tied to the CDC thing about cloth masks, but that talking point is seemingly everywhere recently.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, February 7, 2022 1:23 PM bookmarkflaglink

an article just came out where the CDC publicly said wearing N95s/KN95s made you 83% less likely to catch COVID, which I'm guessing is it. people can't stand the idea that a bunch of plandemic sheep are healthier than they are because they listened to the government.

one thing about people who say "masks don't work" is:

1) they will say "studies prove masks don't work"
2) they won't be able to point you to any
3) if you get beyond two responses, the remaining responses will all be meme responses, at least one will be an alt-right meme, and the person's username will be their first name followed by a series of numbers

people who say "masks don't work" are wrong.

but i don't think i linked the study i've mentioned a few times, so here goes: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/evidence-summary-covid-19-children-young-people-and-education-settings

this is the closest (and only!) thing i've seen to a controlled apples and apples study of reasonable size, where schools in similar communities at similar stages of the pandemic were selected to randomly mask/not mask. it found masks have an effect on school transmission that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

since masks do work (we know this) the implied conclusion to me is "kids don't wear masks properly for 8 hours (no kidding!), and the main thing that determines whether schools are safe is the community in which they are embedded".

p.s.

daycare/school mask mandate ends in e.g. NJ next month, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-governor-end-school-mask-mandate-rcna15168.

likely just in time for under fives to get their first shot

FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet on February 15 to review data on Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for children 6 months through 4 years of age. https://t.co/8G2dxKU8aQ

— James E.K. Hildreth (@JamesEKHildreth) February 7, 2022