Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

it was before I got to it

oh wait it's from Slacker! but now my brain thinks everything is an REM lyric

It's a quote from Slacker repurposed by R.E.M. into a lyric

I drive past where they filmed that scene all the time, where 13th Street hits I-35 on the East Side. Amazingly enough after 30 years it looks exactly the same!

my worst restaurant job-working experience

someone gave me free Foreigner tickets

to the Gramm-less, hired gun Foreigner.

still haven't recovered.

wow, that's cold as ice

Gramm booted, now we're real bad
Got a singer from a classified ad

Those dirty white boys playin' head games with u need an urgent kick in the head til they have double vision imo

Why has Victoria/Melbourne been having all the covid problems?

80% of Australia's 910 covid deaths have been in aged care homes in Melbourne. 40% of Melbourne's aged-care deaths last year were in just 10 homes. There have been 174 separate outbreaks in aged care homes in the state of Victoria; in 146 of those, a staff member was the index case.

The government set a target of vaccinating aged care residents and workers ahead of any other class, and promised to have them fully vaccinated before April.

The federal Aged Care Minister has repeatedly insisted this week that he is "comfortable" with the amount of vaccinations achieved against this target, while also stating that he literally has no idea how many of them have been dispensed. The Health Department followed up yesterday, when people kept asking the minister and he declined to bother to find out, with an announcement that they estimated (via phoning some facilities that morning) 8.7% of staff have been vaccinated.

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Thursday, June 3, 2021 9:12 AM (three days ago)

More today from the Guardian:

The four private companies responsible for vaccinating the aged care sector have given conflicting accounts about whether the government ever contracted them to inoculate staff, prompting further criticism about the confusing and delayed rollout.

The federal government, in the early stages of the rollout, said it would rely on private contractors to vaccinate 183,000 aged care residents and 339,000 staff, using in-reach teams that would attend each facility.

But the government’s in-reach teams focussed overwhelmingly on vaccinating residents, and data this week showed just 32,833 staff – less than 10% – were given the jab by in-reach teams, largely using leftovers from residents in accordance with the government’s excess dose policy.

The government’s panel of surge vaccination workforce providers – Aspen Medical, Healthcare Australia, International SOS and Sonic Clinical Services – have since given differing accounts on whether they were contracted to vaccinate staff.

Earlier this week, the Age reported that Aspen Medical was never contracted to vaccinate staff, quoting a company spokesman.

The company told the Guardian on Thursday that, in fact, it was contractually obliged to vaccinate staff.

“Aspen Medical has vaccination of aged care staff as part of its contractual obligations, and in that context has already vaccinated over 20,000 staff,” a spokesman said.

Healthcare Australia initially told the Guardian it was “contracted to provide vaccinations for aged care residents only”.

But it subsequently clarified it was “contracted to provide vaccinations to both the aged care residents and the workforce but was instructed by the department to prioritise the residents”.

Sonic Clinical Services, brought on after Aspen and HCA, said it was not contracted to do staff vaccinations.

“We have not been contracted to provide in-reach vaccination services to Residential Age Care staff in Victoria (or elsewhere) and have not been involved in a tender process to do so,” chief executive, Dr Ged Foley, said.

The fourth company, International SOS, refused to answer questions about what it was being paid by taxpayers to do, instead referring the Guardian to the health department.

These private contractors have so far been paid $76 million to not vaccinate the primary vectors of transmission in Australia's COVID deaths.

private contractors have so far been paid $76 million to not vaccinate

^^ reminder that the country has a national public health service that could have done this, instead of tendering the opportunity to not do it

Since Trader Joe's was always among the more consistently conscious stores locally, they have sort of been my default standard for how things are going. Context first, I live in an overwhelmingly educated/liberal/vaccinated part of Chicagoland, and equally overcautious; they just cancelled our Fourth of July parade (though the pool is now open on a timed-in/out basis, so who knows). Anyway, last time I went to Trader Joe's, most of the staff was unmasked, so checking out I took off my mask, too. This time, I went in unmasked, one of my first times doing that anywhere in 14 months, and while the staff was still mostly unmasked, there were a few masked employees, and the vast majority of the clientele *was* masked. I bumped into a friend (unmasked) that works there and asked what's up. I guess there is a lot of stuff at play. There are of course some people with small kids that can't be vaxxed yet. There are some older people that, while vaxxed, still feel more comfortable with the mask on. And there are some other people that are vaxxed but wear a mask because they've been conditioned to and are psychologically not ready to go unmasked. (I spoke with another employee that was vaxxed, but his wife had only just gotten the second jab, so after talking it over with her determined that he would keep the mask on, at least for a while longer.) Anyway, it felt really, really weird being among the 10% (max) without a mask, and while I didn't feel like I was being That Guy, nor did I catch anyway reacting negatively, I definitely felt out of place. I suppose these feelings and behaviors (both mine and theirs) will fade with time.

For her part, my friend said her biggest challenge was having gotten used to making faces at shoppers from behind her mask, and needing to get out of the habit now that her mouth is not hidden.

I wonder if it is indeed possible to make a "face" with your mouth but not your eyes. I kinda think the eyes reinforce the mouth to a large degree.

Ha, I was kinda wondering the same thing. Any face I would make at (or in response to) someone annoying would definitely be reflected in my eyes as well.

She specifically said she would mouth various profanities to bad shoppers, actually, so I guess that needs your mouth.

Def done a silent fuck you under the mask with smiling eyes a few times

Muttering under the mask makes sense and I've been there, I guess I'm just not talented enough to avoid scrunching my eyes when I frown or grimace.

Just get someone to print your normal mouth onto a mask. Then you look maskless but you can still tell people to fuck off

can't turn my mask into a heart

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/world/florida-covid-19-cases-vaccine.html

fucking MORONS.

other states apparently joining. this will make data and trend analysis much more difficult. thanks, home state, once again.

oh I saw this last week

i missed it but I figured out something was afoot when we had several days of 0 cases :/

NEW: latest data now show a clear rise in hospital admissions in the UK, and numbers could climb rapidly.

Admissions & patient numbers in the North West are ~straight lines on a log-scale: exponential growth

Our story, with @mroliverbarnes & @AndyBounds: https://t.co/r88OUAEdUs pic.twitter.com/vuaAoHh5WA

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) June 8, 2021

note this is a log plot so the absolute numbers are still relatively small, but UK new cases have been rising for a few weeks and overtook the US about a week ago https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-03-20..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~ISR~GBR.

the UK is only just offering 25ish year olds their first dose, and is delaying second doses (that seem to be necessary to confer protection against 2021 variants) by 12 weeks, so this seems about what you'd expect tbh :(

I had seen the beginnings of that a week ago, had hoped it was a temporary anomaly :(

in the US, it's going to be difficult to tell if/when we see increases again, if other states besides Florida also move to weekly reporting instead of daily (Johns Hopkins is fuming about this on their site). this week, the 7-day average of cases and deaths sharply jumped upward from Sunday to Monday, but that was expected, as the unnaturally low reporting on Memorial Day weekend fell out of the 7-day rolling period. hospitalizations however have continued to go down during the same period as their reporting didn't seem to be interrupted by the holiday.

I noticed that uptick too. I wonder if three weeks after the CDC's latest recommendations we'll ever see a spike.

the UK is only just offering 25ish year olds their first dose, and is delaying second doses (that seem to be necessary to confer protection against 2021 variants) by 12 weeks, so this seems about what you'd expect tbh :(

To be fair the official policy is now 8 weeks for second doses for over 40s (and has officially been 8 weeks for over 50s for a while). Unofficially it's been 8 weeks for at least over 40s for weeks now (you can just book online for 8 weeks to the day from your first dose), and unofficially it's less than that (e.g. I got my second dose at 6 weeks to the day). Not sure what the situation is for under 40s but I don't think it's likely to turn out to be anything like 12 weeks in practice.

In addition the vaccination percentages (for both first and second doses) are ahead of the US and the gap will presumably increase significantly in coming weeks unless something very odd happens (like massive vaccine hesitancy in young UK people, or a big turnaround in US vaccination rates), so my best guess is that this is more about the delta variant than anything else (either that or random bad luck where some communities were somehow never hit before and are being hit now).

I'd say it's the Delta variant.

Yeah, my sister (UK, in her '40s, preggers) is pretty frustrated, because first they wouldn't give the vaccine to pregnant women, and now that she finally got the first jab she has to wait that extra bit for the second. But she's at least relieved she'll be fully vaxxed well before her due date.

apparently with Pfizer at least, it's only 33% effective against Delta variant after one dose, 88% after two. so that does seem to be the culprit.

The UK situation is certainly delta variant but a different dose strategy and/or more use of mRNA vaccines would have helped.

The US might (probably will tbh) see the same thing. Most people who got vaccinated here got a more effective vaccine with less delay, but fewer people are vaccinated and we’re just doing it and being legends wrt masks, reopening a etc.

Vaccine numbers for the us are wrong here (see thread) but delta is extremely here.

The delta (B.1.617.2) variant is clearly outcompeting alpha (B.1.1.7) in the US, d/t both enhanced transmissibility and immune evasion, on its way to becoming dominant
Our 2-dose vaccines provide powerful protection
But 42% no vaccination; 52% 1-dosehttps://t.co/vBFxb0SgaQ pic.twitter.com/JqMOs8kikX

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) June 9, 2021

if it's 48% no vaccination, then "52% one dose" doesn't seem right?

or does he mean 52% of those who have been vaccinated have only gotten 1 dose?

I think I saw that Chicago is down to less than 100 cases a day, the lowest since the start of the pandemic. Fingers crossed.

this was his follow up, fwiw

That should be 48% Americans without any vaccination (not 42%)
Latest @CDCgov datahttps://t.co/xqLwtfAwQn pic.twitter.com/qepoTA87PF

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) June 9, 2021

It's kind of creepy and predicable that even vaccination reveals a near 50/50 divide.

At least I can take some solace in my City being 70% fully vaccinated (85% with at least 1 dose) as of June 1st. One of the ways living in a liberal bubble helps, I suppose.

surprised nobody has devised a vaccine of pure COVID and people haven't defiantly infected themselves.

The US case numbers look like they've stopped their rapid decline and that feels like bad news -- I have truly been believing that the level of vsccination was such that even in the less vaxxed states we were just looking at questions about speed of decline. i.e. I thought we had a lot of cushion away from the tipping point. Hope that's true.

have they really? I think we are still looking at speed of decline.

The 7 day average for new cases definitely seems to have hit a sort of point where it just fluctuates between 14,000 and 15,000.

Yes that's what's bugging me.

Reporting on Memorial Day weekend stopped, and several states (like uh mine) have stopped daily reporting.

it may be plateauing or seeing a temporary rise, but really it's only gone back up in the last couple days after going steadily downward since mid April, so pretty hard to make any call on it at this point.

Maybe I'm a little unclear about how the reporting works, but if states have stopped daily reporting and the numbers are holding steady, isn't that kind of worse news? I mean, the cases are holding steady even without some states reporting their new cases, would that imply even more cases?

Well while we're irrationally venting, just saying that steady improvement followed by plateau would be exactly what you'd expect to see if the level of vaccine-induced immunity were plenty high enough to handle OG COVID but not enough to prevent resurgence of the more transmissible delta-variant, which is now at 6% of US infections and is only going to go up.

But you're right, the plateau is pretty short-duration so far and could easily have to do with reporting hiccups so who knows. Just keep encouraging and easing vaccination is all I'm saying.

True and, I mean, compared to anywhere we've been since March 2020, even 14,000 cases per day plateau is a marked improvement.

Memorial Day fucked the stats. Something like 5,000 cases reported that day as several states didn't report, and there were already several states who report much less/not at all on weekends, so the 7-day average dipped unnaturally low.

Likewise, one could surmise testing availability was much less on Memorial Day and that people weren't spending their holiday getting tested, so numbers stayed lower than normal for another day or so before they returned to normal.

Those artificially low days are now no longer in the 7 day average, so the average "jumped", but it's like the average was artificially low to begin with. I actually predicted that'd happen itt before Memorial Day!

The two week decreases in cases rose from like 35% to like 46%, which was a definite clue - case average rapidly went from like 21,000 to 17,000 over a matter of a few days which isn't normal.

I'd wager the numbers are closer to "correct" now this week (sans FL), but last week's were so low it makes for a poor comparison. Too soon by far to indicate any plateau. I'd give it until like next Monday to get a more accurate read.

Media mostly had done a good job of acknowledging this, but there's a stupid panhandle paper that reported an alarming 137% spike in FL cases as a headline, indicated the decline was over, and inexplicably in the next sentence acknowledged that week to week comparisons weren't accurate because of Memorial Day

Was just browsing Twitter and saw a post about Jeff Garlin on ESPN radio today, getting a little worked up about MLB players that are refusing vaccination. Probably should have expected it, but I'd say 90% of the replies were rabidly anti vaccination. It's sad on so many levels, not least because the type of person to respond to a tweet about sports is exactly the person most likely to be filling the seats in these stadiums now that capacity limits are being removed.

It's depressing as fuck, not just for COVID, but to think that this will be what we go through for every other newly developed vaccine moving forward.

by 2071, there will be 70 people left in the world.