outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

My take on where the current stage of the pandemic is in the USA.

On the good side: The virulence of the symptoms people commonly experience is clearly not as bad as with earlier variants. The infection fatality rate is way down compared to the start of the pandemic. Anti-virals seem to help a lot, if you get on them immediately after the first positive test. The knowledge base about the disease has grown tremendously since 2020 and we have vaccines, which is huge.

On the bad side: I've seen one virologist compare the R(0) of latest variant of omicron as being 'getting up around the level of the measles', which is just about the most contagious disease out there. The incubation period is so rapid that as the antibodies from a vaccine or a recent infection decline after a few months, re-infection is likely to become common, especially because NPIs like masks and distancing have been discarded by a large majority of people. Case numbers are still extremely high, and home testing occludes any clear view into the true numbers. And while the medical system here isn't in acute crisis mode any more, there is chronic burnout among caregivers. Long covid is still a mystery we probably won't know much about for several years.

I'll be masking up in public places for some time to come.

Fwiw it looks like the current wave has just peaked nationally in the US

Until the next one, etc.

And while the medical system here isn't in acute crisis mode any more, there is chronic burnout among caregivers.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

welp, time for corporate to send out another email calling everybody "heroes" and providing links to more online resources to webinars about burnout

the mention of zero COVID made me go look up new Zealand's stats and it went from double figures to 1.5 thousand deaths IN TOTAL only very recently. UK was getting that every single day during the worst and is still around that every week.

lol

NEW: @WhiteHouse COVID Coordinator Dr. @ashishkjha expects #COVID19 vaccines will become available for youngest kids starting June 21, and that every family who wants a vaccine for their children should be able to get one in the weeks that follow

— Kayla Tausche (@kaylatausche) June 2, 2022

don't worry everyone; florida is now open for business

SCOOP: The State or Florida threatened the Special Olympics with $27.5 MILLION in fines because the organization had a vaccine requirement at its games in Orlando this weekend.

Late yesterday, the Special Olympics pulled the requirement. 1/3

— Jay O'Brien (@jayobtv) June 3, 2022

to think the Jeb Bush years are now the salad days in comparison.

fuck I hate this place.

I suppose the international participants required to get jabbed in their home countries will be safest.

Unless DeSantis threatens to suck the vaccine out of them.

Keeping an eye on local rates (reported always lower than actual, as state public health officials have repeatedly mentioned), I waited 'til my county went back into deep red, got second booster on May 31rst (first booster was in Oct.): efficacy est. 4 months, so that'll get me to this Oct., when there may be another vax or update of this one or booster or something, according to CDC (right?) I continue to mask, especially indoors, outdoors if in crowd, which hardly ever happens. Not a crowd fan anymore anywhere, because of gunplay (not nec. mass shootings) as much as Covid, or almost as much.

Got the second booster this morning, gang! I can feel the magnetism!

that's because the heavy presence of magnets is highly correlated with good health and wellbeing. that's why i skip the pseudoscience vaccines and instead apply heavy magnets around my 3rd chakra

Tanning my balls just in case, but I do that anyway.

i'm sexy and i know it

Omicron thrashing Austin right now, I know half a dozen people who caught it in the last week not including myself. Ditched my cloth masks and I'm going 100% N95 going forward.

Florida's growth continuing to slow, hoping the plateau and then fall is forthcoming. wager we're only a little bit behind the NE.

I have maybe two other friends who have never (knowingly) had the VID. so many of the rest that had lasted this long went down finally.

fortunately don't know any that got BA.2 after BA.1.

i have just about every therapeutic treatment on speed dial in case it finally happens. thinking I might want to do the Paxlovid if I get it as my blood pressure is already hypertensive even when I'm well, and will likely shoot up when I get sick.

my BP, i'm not planning to do heroin

and right on time, my brother just got it. (he doesn't live with us, don't worry). really thought he had magical capabilities considering how many people he's around at the theme parks/theatre.

guess it's better he gets it out of the way now so he'll be recovered by mom's surgery/recovery from

he is the fittest of all of us so he will probably beat it easily

Hope it's mild for him. My daughter (a teacher) is mostly recovered after 2 weeks - double boosted with Moderna, tested positive on Tuesday 5/24. Terrible headaches, nausea, head congestion

he, weirdly, has the same symptoms I did when I had my weird COVID-not-COVID episode - scratchy throat. suppose it'd be asking too much for that to happen for him too. he's losing a $500 gig due to this.

glad to hear your daughter is mostly recovered. it's still not fuckin' around :/

a friend posted the following. I had to explain who he was.

Last month, many experts were smugly confident that #monkeypox epidemic can be contained, and dismissed notions otherwise. ➡️Now, @WHO is no longer sure if monkeypox outbreak can be contained. WHO needs to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) asap! https://t.co/b0yQ36rM9F

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) June 3, 2022

Bob Wachter's new thread just now is, well, disconcerting.

Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 848
It’s been a few weeks since my last update – the flow of Covid news & research has slowed a bit. But there’s still plenty of questions that come up, so in this🧵I’ll answer a few that I get asked commonly, including how my wife is doing. (1/25)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) June 13, 2022

Ugh

"I’m living a fairly full life (no hesitation to travel, for example), but it’s with a KN95 in place in most indoor settings" is pretty much where I've been.

Same. Yesterday in the supermarket it was down to me and one other person ( worker) with a mask. As recently as a couple weeks ago, there would always be at least a dozen

Ned, how's your dad?

Thankfully recovered and there doesn't seem to be any continuing ill effects; just chatted with him the other day. We'll be on vacation in mid-July and I'll take the chance to see how he's doing then; being 81 he's naturally slower and has been for some time so I don't want to mistake one thing for the other. But again, I won't know in full until I have a chance to hang with him for a while.

As for masking, always still, and I'm holding off on concerts until at least late August. Movies, only if I am substantially away from everyone in a crowd. Said vacation I mentioned is for the world track and field championships in Eugene, and since they're outdoors that's a relief, but we could be sitting near enough people for a stretch each day that I will likely mask there too.

Movies have (at last!) resumed late morning screenings, so I'm often the only person in the damn theatre -- as was the case with Crimes of the Future, which, you know, of course.

I've mentioned it to a number of ilxors but not on ilx proper:

I tested positive on 5/26, finally negative on 6/5. I didn't regularly check my temperature, but as far as I can tell, I never had a fever. Had the booster way back at the end of November last year, right before Thanksgiving. Not eligible for a second booster as, despite my bad habits in the last year, I'm still relatively young and relatively healthy.

I'm a strong proponent of doing whatever you can to avoid this crap. I have no clue when or where I picked it up. My suspicion is that I probably had an asymptomatic infection that wasn't even detectable, was an idiot and drank too much, and the virus took the opportunity to rear its head. I'd already felt kind of crappy for weeks (thanks, allergy season) and my protocol of working from home for the first part of the week -- I'm basically on a limited time-in-office schedule -- if I was anywhere around people over the weekend didn't work out. I was in the office helping a couple coworkers do some pretty heavy troubleshooting and, of the handful of people I was near, I managed to infect one. I feel terrible about that!

Luckily, a couple of kind friends urged me to contact everyone I'd been around ASAP. Sent an email to coworkers, texted a friend, and people adjusted their behavior accordingly. My coworker had a worse time, but he credits the quick warning with his successful effort to keep his pregnant wife uninfected and he's been vocal in the past about enjoying working in the office and has said he knows he's been balancing that with the risk.

I think the thing I'm left with is this stupid thing that every ding-dong has said for several years running where "it's just like the flu." I think this is wrong, in that we've got this new virus with a changing profile, it's more infectious, and the average number of days it runs and the possible severity and affects are worse. But on the other hand, this is influenza:

Other possible serious complications triggered by flu can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscle tissues (myositis, rhabdomyolysis), and multi-organ failure (for example, respiratory and kidney failure). Flu virus infection of the respiratory tract can trigger an extreme inflammatory response in the body and can lead to sepsis, the body’s life-threatening response to infection. Flu also can make chronic medical problems worse. For example, people with asthma may experience asthma attacks while they have flu, and people with chronic heart disease may experience a worsening of this condition triggered by flu.

I know a number of people who had weird long-term affects from the flu, and this was when they were in their 20s. We've got this standing culture, at least in the US, where we don't properly let people isolate, recover, and receive ongoing care. On the other hand, we've got a completely voluntary system of flu shots, where strains that are predicted to hit are inoculated against one or twice per year. Right now, the funding and interest in researching vaccinations targeting new strains seems somewhat minimized, and it's mind-boggling to me.

I think an ongoing effort to normalize the creation, production, and distribution of targeted vaccines, and the infrastructure to get those to as many people as possible, is the best route, along with keeping public awareness high and encouraging masking when possible. I feel like flu shots are unevenly distributed, and it follows the broken health system and capitalization of health among employers. I started getting a seasonal flu vaccine years ago when my employer had them for a small fee, and once they realized a vaccinated workforce pays off, they made it free. I literally would just walk into a meeting room and get a vaccine between meetings. I got a flu vaccine at my local health department last year with my covid booster, free of charge. Make it easy, make it standard, and keep it rolling.

Maybe it's just my brain fog talking, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

have you had any long COVID symptoms, mh?

I appreciate the honesty.

It's only a week out, so I've no clue. I usually tend to not have that much of an appetite when ill and that started bouncing back after the initial five or so days of being sick. I've had a few moments where my quick immediate memory is a bit off, but I've been kind of frazzled for a couple months between returning part-time to the office, questioning what returning to semi-normalcy (hah, hah) looks like, etc. so I'm not sure if it's a true brain fog.

I'm back to a normal amount of sleep and haven't done a lot of strenuous physical stuff lately, so I'll find out as I attempt that. The weather's been mediocre so I haven't had the opportunity to go on any long walks yet.

Ah, and in case it wasn't clear, the prior weeks definitely were just allergies. I took a few tests on days when I felt particularly congested but was in the clear.

The covid-related sinus congestion was... different.. in that I noticed my throat felt weird and the cough was different. I was congested, but I think my sinuses were just incredibly swollen for a few days. Tried to clear my eustacian tubes by blowing one morning and regretted it immediately, because I could not get my ears to pop until the next day and everything sounded underwater and I could feel sinus pressure. It was several days until I could really yawn and feel things clear naturally. When I searched for that among symptoms, I found a few articles about covid-related hearing loss which didn't put me in a great mental place. Everything's fine on that front. Note that I kept up my normal allergy season regimen of pseudoephedrine, steroid nasal sprays, and antihistamines and I think that helped in the long term.

I’m now just, hey, Yakov Smirnoff voice, what a virus!

blargh

Over the past few weeks it's been noticeably how the number of COVID patients at the hospital I work at continues to steadily increase. We've had zero patient stretches before, and the most recent was I think two months back or so with nobody being treated. We're now at 32.

the actual reporting numbers have been a mess here, as most places, and my go-to source for how risky it is out there is my city’s wastewater testing program. the sewage doesn’t lie
https://i.imgur.com/TiXcYCs_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

that highest point at the end of May was about the day I tested positive 🤦‍♂️

Florida is finally beginning its descent. wastewater is declining in Orange and Seminole Counties, and today's 7-day average case total is 5% lower than last week's.

expect transmission is way higher than in other states with similar case numbers because our positivity rate is insanely high, much higher than other states, meaning we're significantly undertesting. figure transmission will remain high for a bit but hopefully by sometime in mid July it'll be low again.

my brother is already back to normal.

thankfully

everyone i know (pretty much all remote worker types) is getting it an there's an outbreak at daycare, but wastewater evidence is that the wave isn't that big relative to prior waves. so i guess this is the the 20%(?) of the population who have avoided it so far running out of luck in the presence of an incredibly contagious strain. was bound to happen.

anecdotally of course, but p much majority of my friends who got it were people who managed to avoid getting it for 2 years and, as you said, ran out of luck. few of them were people that had a previous strain, and none that I know of that had BA.1 (though it is *possible*).

I sort of have that "everyone I know is getting it" feeling but I think it's an effect of a steady drumbeat of hearing about cases -- when I ACTUALLY think of my close circle of friends in an attempt to be exhaustive, and these are people who have been traveling, out and about, etc., I would say a minority have gotten COVID (rather: a minority know themselves to have gotten COVID) and certainly a small minority have gotten it in the current wave.

I would say a minority have gotten COVID (rather: a minority know themselves to have gotten COVID)

in the US? certainly a majority have had covid.

given no more than 1 in 3 *symptomatic* cases get reported (per CDC), and 86m cases have been reported, it seems unlikely to me that a minority know they've had covid.

I mean obviously I only know if they've told me, so maybe better would be "it's a minority who have found out they had COVID and told me so."

Or more accurately still: "it's a minority who have found out they had COVID and told me so and I remember this about them."

haha ok

feel like pretty much everyone I know has gotten it at some point in the last 6 months. mostly around January but this last month or two has also been pretty bad. I don't know anyone (including myself) who actually reported their case, so I suspect the *actual* number of infections is way way higher than what's reported

for sure, but we know from wastewater it's not like 100x higher than reported. this really is a smaller wave than last winter.

lmao

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVUJL3IWIAU6Nqn?format=png&name=large

biden next probably

No one in my immediate family, including me, my two unvaccinated nieces and unboosted sis and bro-in-law, has gotten yet, which is some kind of miracle. The latter work from home, the two have had school all year.

I still have about a dozen friends who've escaped.