outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Wasn’t Twitter just clowning on an article that asserted HK’s “Zero Covid“ policy actually made them vulnerable?

…the company?

what's made them vulnerable is a lowish 2 dose vaccination rate, an extremely low booster rate, and (i assume, don't know for sure) some use of attenuated vaccines (sinovax etc.) which are about as effective as paracetemol against anything other than the original strain.

and apparently particularly low vaccination rates among the elderly according to tufekci. NZ by contrast has among the highest booster rates in the world (about the same as western europe, double that of the US and HK).

xxxpost Zero COVID should have given them the ability to achieve high vaccination, which would have prevented this, but one thing several Zero COVID countries ran into is that their strategies succeeded in keeping COVID at zero (or very low), so lots of people said "why the fuck should I get the vaccine, there aren't any cases!". then you run into extremely immune naive populations that have little infection-based or vaccine-induced immunity.

the other problem is, while Pfizer's vaccine is available there, the other one they use is CoronaVac, which studies showed that even with three shots of that vaccine, barely neutralized Omicron whatsoever. so anybody with that vaccine is quite possibly dealing with lower protection against severe disease as well.

not a great situation right now, though I don't know that I'd blame it on Zero COVID so much as that myriad of factors I mentioned above.

a good article on vaccine complacency in zero COVID countries: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00554-0

i guess the other challenge in HK is population density, although the case rate isn't actually any higher than NZ right now.

…the company?

Tweets on China
Never mattered before

China reports 500 new Covid cases on Monday - its highest number in two years.

Clusters in more than a dozen cities are posing a fresh challenge to Beijing's zero-Covid policyhttps://t.co/xdkBXTSAD3 pic.twitter.com/tjYemlm1MQ

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) March 7, 2022

New European wave just dropped.

Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia and Brunei all reached their peak of cases this week.

Iceland has risen to 82% of peak, Germany to 90% and NZ to 95%.

China has reached their highest peak since March 2020.

Australia is trending up (after trending up since first week of December, then trending down since the 1st of Feb. WA had their third and fourth deaths from local transmission.).

Wastewater COVID signs rising around the U.S.: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-14/are-covid-cases-going-back-up-sewer-data-has-potential-warning

😬 https://t.co/BUDIqfFV9z pic.twitter.com/yAfesj5Xsc

— Eric Ziegenhagen (@ericzieg) March 14, 2022

Going to be really fun around here next month when they start putting restrictions back in place. Half this country will absolutely meltdown.

when they start putting restrictions back in place

not going to happen

There weren't restrictions here anyway

xp to caek - fair enough, but I suspect some schools and universities might require students to mask up again

Would you not consider mask and vaxx requirements for entry types of restrictions?

i would, but tragically i am not in charge.

i would run on a platform of https://www.change.org/p/the-world-long-chile, free e-bikes for everyone, and adult masking in public places where the rate is above 25 per 100,000 and the three dose vaccination rate is below 85%.

Wastewater COVID signs rising around the U.S.: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-14/are-covid-cases-going-back-up-sewer-data-has-potential-warning

😬 https://t.co/BUDIqfFV9z pic.twitter.com/yAfesj5Xsc
— Eric Ziegenhagen (@ericzieg) March 14, 2022
― deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Monday, 14 March 2022 21:46 (yesterday) link

IDGI -- I see way more blue (decrease) than orange (increase) on this map.

The increase grabs the headline because if an editor has a choice between a continuation of the recent trend down and an indicator that's maybe going up, then up's going to lead because it is 'newer' and more emotionally grabby.

Maybe it's that I'm in Chicago and so the orange pops.

Doomposting and an orange pop in the last four hours, this thread is such a gift.

Yeah, sorry to take up your attention.

The article was worth reading. No need to apologize. Some places are seeing an increase in what's considered a leading indicator. Whatever bearing that may have on the near future is extremely speculative, but it is worth knowing that it has been detected. Headlines tend to be bad criteria for judging the contents of nuanced stories.

(my post was a joke about a post in the other thread, Eazy - sorry to confuse)

Seems pretty obvious to me that the levels in the sewers are going up because people are peeing out their vaccine, in turn lowering their effectiveness, which is why we might need more boosters. #bigpharma #science

when they start putting restrictions back in place

not going to happen

I think this is probably right but not definitely right? Where I live, we dropped all restrictions in the spring of 2021 and then brought indoor masking back at the end of the summer, and have recently dropped it again, but I think people here are pretty OK with "no mask requirement when COVID's not too bad and mask requirement when there's a bad wave." If the way things develop is that there's a wave this bad *every* winter, I could see that changing, but that's not where we are now and it's not clear to me that's where we will be.

Same where I live. The counties and states that gave no fucks, like, ever, will not change.

cool

Research into next-generation COVID vaccines will be curbed, and some surveillance for new variants will also be stopped, the White House said.

The administration said it also will need to limit its push to help poorer countries vaccinate people.

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) March 15, 2022

the story, headline, and tweets are confusing, though. I know the COVID funding got removed from last week's bill.

“What if I told you COVID funding was being curbed . . . during a pandemic? Next time on Serial.”

pulling the 4th tweet in the chain, without context, is confusing.

Last week, after two years of being painfully careful around covid -- like, so careful it annoyed the rest of my moderately careful family -- I decided to visit my new Canary Wharf workplace, where they never get covid, then go for an outdoor pint and have a nice long evening walk along the Thames to the Tate. Reader, I got covid.

Aw man!

My understanding is that the Republicans in Congress were once again threatening to shut down the government as leverage in negotiating the budget. The R's wanted covid funding offset by cuts, iow their usual switch to a deficit hawk posture when they don't run the government. A compromise was brokered where unspent covid money allocated last year would be redirected to cover half the the covid spending in the projected budget.

This infuriated some Dem legislators who represented states that had definite plans to spend that unspent money and they rebelled. The compromise with the R's blew up and as the deadline for passing a budget had almost arrived, that covid spending was removed from the omnibus budget and floated off as a separate bill, which drops it out of reconciliation and probably kills it.

But my understanding could be wrong in some of the particulars.

xpost - sorry, that one just felt particularly egregious because of the "limit to push to help poorer countries" part, which is why I shared it

egregious? it's the administration pointing out consequences if funding doesn't pass.

I understand that. I can still be upset that it's a risk, no?

Dr. Jay Varma, an epidemiologist who was a senior health adviser to former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, warned that people should be prepared for another wave of cases and not let their guard down.

“We have to plan for the worst and hope for the best, like hurricane season,” he said.

I feel like inevitably people are going to read this as saying "scientist says another wave is coming" when he's actually saying "another wave might or might not be coming so we should be prepared rather than assuming it's definitely all over"

There's a really good book someone recommended to me years ago called "The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present" (the then 2014 present, with a 2015 update). The gist:

In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them―and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything―a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

That's about where we are now. I think many of our brains naturally respond to "always be ready for the worst, which could come at any time" with a "then there's nothing we can really do about it" sort of fatalism. That may be where we are now, and perhaps is where we've been all along.

I feel like inevitably people are going to read this as saying "scientist says another wave is coming" when he's actually saying "another wave might or might not be coming so we should be prepared rather than assuming it's definitely all over"

caek otm

but there are some people right now getting really, really angry if you point out the inevitability of another wave coming

who?

Anyway, before the movement in Europe, I'd assumed we'd get another wave in a month, so if y'all have jabbed kids and are still hesitating about going to movies, eating indoors, etc., there's no reason not to do it now while positivity and case loads are bearable.

Anyway, before the movement in Europe, I'd assumed we'd get another wave in a month, so if y'all have jabbed kids and are still hesitating about going to movies, eating indoors, etc., there's no reason not to do it now while positivity and case loads are bearable.

People deep in denial. Lots of them in the expected corners of Twitter, Reddit, etc. but I've encountered a few of them in real life as well. A coworker got furious when we were talking about the European wave and shouted us down. An otherwise well meaning friend accused another friend of "doom and gloom fearmongering" for simply sharing a tweet about the European uptick.

Some people have their heads happily buried in the sand right now.

Which isn't to say anything about guessing the severity of the wave headed here, it's just that people don't even like it being pointed out. I think it's pretty naive at this point, though, to pretend that we aren't going to see an uptick in cases in the very near future.

Eh, for most people another wave is (arguably correctly) not going to change anything about how they behave, assuming it’s smaller than the first omicron wave (which seems likely).

Right, don't disagree with that at all. I was just taken aback by the coworker's vehemence when the European uptick was casually noted.