outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

We are going to be dealing with this for another five years regardless.

and we're still not good at predicting intensity xpost

weather forecasting is still a long way from perfect, but it's leveled up to the point where almost everyone accepts forecasts as accurate enough to modify their behavior based on their predictions

Into my kids’ veins

We're announcing positive interim data from the Phase 2/3 KidCOVE study of our #COVID19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) in children 6 months to under 2 years and 2 years to under 6 years of age.https://t.co/CqdRMSv3Kv pic.twitter.com/whcObVY4CD

— Moderna (@moderna_tx) March 23, 2022

Has anyone here used an LFT test as proof of negative covid status before travel? Our five year old isn't vaccinated and we need proof to travel to greece, supposedly you can get an LFT from a certified provider, test at home and upload your test result and get the certificate emailed to you. But what's to stop you just faking the test?

Where do you live? We did lfts in London for travel to the US but we had to get them done supervised at a test site and upload the certificate.

Birmingham, flying from Stansted. We'll probably do one at the airport anyway. Found one test provider that says This is not a supervised service, please ensure that an unsupervised self-swab is acceptable for the country you are travelling to. so maybe that's it - the gov.uk site says the requirements are proof of a negative COVID-19 rapid antigen test from an authorised laboratory which is ambiguous.

Yeah, it’s not super helpful wording.

ledge, we've done supervised LFD tests with Qured-- you buy it online, they mail it to you, you book a video call for the day you need test done, they watch you swab and then you email them the photo of the test 15 minutes later. Did that in both directions on our US trip over the summer.

Interesting, thanks!

I did an unsupervised LFT back in January for a flight back to Ireland from UK. You basically take the test and then upload a photo of it with some ID in the frame. Then they send you a certificate.

You're correct that there's absolutely nothing to stop you from faking the test and the whole thing seems massively dodgy but we had no problems travelling on it

It depends on your destination. the US only allows supervised LFTs, hence them watching you swab, recording the number on the test, etc. I have no idea what the rules are for Greece, so it's possible you don't need that extra step, but I'm going to a clinic on Thursday to do my fit-to-fly test for the US.

9 new offical covid symptoms published today in the UK, at least 5 of which i had over the weekend

what people have done to travel to any country that isn't greece is not relevant, afaict.

sorry for answering the man’s question

he actually asked for experiences taking lateral flow tests for travel, not "please sort my trip to Greece"...

turns out you can post on ilx and it doesn't have to be a direct answer to a previous q precisely as asked? you can just say stuff.

I look forward to your policing of the deeply imprecise stuff posted in other threads. wtf.

Fwiw I found all the responses at least interesting, and as the official Greek website doesn't make things any clearer I'd be impressed if anyone actually manages to answer my implicit question.

I mean, what is the huge difference between a unvaccinated five year old taking a unsupervised test and an unvaccinated four year old entering the country without being required to test? Smacks of needing to be seen to do something without doing so. What stops you faking it? Idk, I guess you probably wouldn’t want to travel if your child was sick and therefore there was a chance of more of you getting sick?

Appalling..

Ensues a barrage of death threats, accusations of being a eugenist, a mass killer and whatnot (example below). I've got used to Covid twitter being a bit broken, but still ...
2/ pic.twitter.com/Jo7hpwgb2R

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) April 4, 2022

I'm having a hard time understanding what was even controversial about what he said, let alone "genocidal."

The vACCIne is GENOcide

A San Francisco Bay Area naturopathic doctor pleaded guilty Wednesday to selling fake COVID-19 immunization pills and forged vaccination cards that falsely claimed customers got the Moderna vaccine, the Department of Justice said in a news release.

Juli Mazi, a 41-year-old licensed homeopathic doctor... falsely claimed that the pills contained a small amount of the COVID virus and would generate lifelong immunity by creating antibodies, court documents said..

Isn't this basically what ALL homeopathy is based on? So why charge her for this and not all the other BS pills she's vending?

i like to think that one becomes licensed in homeopathy by ingesting a minute amount of knowledge about it, like in black books when manny eats the little book of calm

lol

Fiegl Ding retweeted that response? I stopped paying any attention to his alarmist nonsense over a year ago and I don't think any infectious disease experts take him seriously. He's a twitter attention whore and that is all.

What Balloux is communicating here is about what you'd expect; vaxxed and you get a breakthrough? you'll be well protected for a while. I hope so, because that just happened to me this week.

Just An Ordinary Bloke @Unusual_Times

Breaking News: President Biden said it’s up to individuals whether to wear masks, undercutting efforts by his administration to urge Americans to keep wearing them on airplanes and public transit after a federal judge struck down a nationwide mask mandate. https://t.co/2b2Kcs9o5h

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 19, 2022

congrats to my fellow americans who have defeated covid. we did it!!

WE DID IT! WE DID IT!*

* - ignoring my own anecdotal data point that shows I now know more people who have tested positive for COVID in the last two weeks than at any other point, including the January Omicron peak

i can't believe 95% of americans 65 or older got at least one shot, and 89.4% got both. that's impressive!

(wish my mom were one of them, but she has elected to be one of the 5 percent with not even one shot)

we're officially in stop the count territory

the important thing is that nothing bad could possibly happen as a result of this

oh certainly not

halting all bad things from happening is not an attainable public health goal. the end of restrictions was never going to mean the end of covid. it's still a nasty disease with a wide range of outcomes, but it is crossing the line from a pandemic to an epidemic, from a society-wide risk to an individual one. It's reaching the point where the public health position should be: if you aren't vaccinated, get the shot, if need a booster, go get one.

Is it though? I don't think the numbers bear that out yet.

Which numbers? Are hospitals overwhelmed with the sick and dying? Are businesses or schools unable to operate because their employees are all home sick? Are there no effective vaccines or treatments?

I'd say that those are legitimate pandemic measurements. High numbers of positive tests with an uptick in mortality, but society operating at near normal levels, would match an epidemic rather than a pandemic imo.

I guess if your metric is "society operating at near normal levels", sure. I'm not arguing that we are anywhere near the peak of the pandemic where hospitals are overrun, of course not. But I do think some of these localized upticks point to us not being yet to a level where we should collectively let our guards down. But Biden pretty much put the nail in that particular coffin today, so why should we argue over what it means?

1 in 13 people in England have covid rn, and 650 ppl died from it last Wednesday

Ugh

fwiw 1 in 13 was for the last week of march. the case rate is 3x smaller now.

admittedly i have cancelled my may trip to covid island on the grounds that i am willing to risk getting covid, but i'm not willing to definitely get covid.

I guess if your metric is "society operating at near normal levels"

nice cherry-picking

And of course, eliminating the measures that keep covid mitigated mean that it will stay mitigated and not suddenly get much worse again

One of my responses to weak rightists for two years has been, "I'm a gay man who has never enjoyed a normal sex life thanks to another viral epidemic, fuck you for freaking about something so stupid as wearing a mask for a little while." I'm so tired.

I don't personally plan on stopping masking with a KN-95 when I'm in public places, because I have ample reasons to continue to avoid becoming infected or spreading it among people I love. The tricky question is whether mandating NPIs in the USA is warranted now that such large percentages of the population have acquired a measure of immunity either through vaccination or infection or both.

I don't think the metric should be whether universal use of NPIs would reduce transmission or whether reduced transmission is desirable, but rather whether the situation requires universal deployment of NPIs for the protection of public health, as opposed to deploying vaccinations, boosters, treatment of the ill, and continued public education.

Covid won't go away by using NPIs. It will be continue to circulate for years and decades, even centuries to come. The question is how and when to switch from mandatory NPIs to voluntary NPIs based on the threat to society as a whole.

"The question is how and when to switch from mandatory NPIs to voluntary NPIs based on the threat to society as a whole."

That is the question, but it just seems too soon to abandon masks on airplanes and on public transportation

Today's asymptomatic test pos. rate @UCSFHospitals: 2%. So 1/50 people w/ no symptoms of Covid is +.
At 2%, on flight of 150 people there's 95% chance that at least one passenger has Covid.
SF has a relatively low Covid rate, so odds on a US flight today are likely worse. #MaskUp

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) April 19, 2022

Personally, I would have preferred to keep mask mandates on public transport a bit longer while BA2 is still in the process of revealing its capacities. The CDC thought so, too. But that mandate was scheduled to expire fairly soon. The real answer to the question of the necessity of NPIs is always going to be apparent in our hospitals. That tide has receded in the USA to levels not seen for a couple of years. That should be acknowledged and cautiously celebrated.

I think masking should still be required but I think requiring it on transit and nowhere else contributes to the American idea that transit (and people who use it) are especially dirty and dangerous.