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

if cases in the UK keep growing at the current rate they will have the most cases they've ever had in any single day just before lift all restrictions (july 19).

the next two wembley matches are going to be even bigger, by design. like, why?

in order to "let it rip through" the population so that "bodies pile high in their thousands" iirc

Never change Australia pic.twitter.com/UcSAai2lNG

— Ian Makgill (@ianmakgill) June 28, 2021

Have started feeling weird vibes wearing a mask in various places - not quite hitting "what's wrong with you asshole" looks yet.

The UK now has more daily cases than the entire EU. pic.twitter.com/TH6udUkyYe

— Steve Lawrence (@SteveLawrence_) June 30, 2021

Plague Island’s stadium-packing policy is bad but wasn’t it the case last wave that the eu were just a month behind uk?

six times the population of the UK but with less cases still is pretty shocking even if mainland Europe are a bit behind the curve

Not to worry, FREEDOM DAY is nigh.

What are the concurrent UK hospitalizations and deaths? That data seems like an important piece of the big picture.

Delta variant watch in the UK and Israel
UK—99% Delta, significant spike in cases, relatively small increase in hospitalizations/deaths
Israel—45% Delta, small spike in cases by absolute N, Today: no change (290), 0 deaths again; little rise in hospitalizations, none in deaths pic.twitter.com/ZxQajmX3HR

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) June 30, 2021

Have started feeling weird vibes wearing a mask in various places - not quite hitting "what's wrong with you asshole" looks yet.

― Joe Bombin (milo z), Thursday, July 1, 2021 3:21 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, in the last week the scales have tipped around here to the point where it's probably at least 75% of people not wearing masks in stores.

I was having a conversation with one of my regular supermarket cashiers the other day. She was asking after my in-laws, since I had been doing shopping for them last year in addition to my own shopping. I told her that they had discovered instacart or whatever, but they could get their own groceries since they're vaccinated now. Her reply was something like "Oh, not me." or "Oh, that's not for me." I didn't press further, but it was still a dispiriting moment. She's been one of my cashiers for years and we always shoot the shit. Still wearing a mask, which is interesting because some of the employees at that grocery store no longer wear masks and some do. I have no idea what their internal criteria for mask-wearing is.

I mentioned in this or some other thread, but I was reminded by a couple of cashiers that there are lots of reasons a grocery store employee might continue to wear a mask despite lack of an enforced mandate. They could have small kids at home, they could have someone immunocompromised in their life, they could themselves be only partially vaxxed or with someone partially vaxxed. Etc. Heck, they could be aware that a hunk of the unmasked staff is also unvaxxed.

still been seeing masks on most people indoors and not actively eating in Seattle but the requirement to do so is officially over as of a day or two ago. I will be wearing a mask in public indoor areas indefinitely.

Illinois starting to see the uptick in cases as well, week over week change in 7-day rolling average is up 32.3%. We bottomed out at right around 245-250 new cases per day for a few weeks, but 457 new cases today. Not terrible considering where we were two months ago, but disappointing to see. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the new cases are from the south part of the state bordering Missouri, which is doing terribly.

Counterpoint: they are doing awesome, because they don't have to wear a mask. Get your priorities straight, sheeple! Better dead than mask-ed!

I stopped in my favorite Little Village liquor store today and asked how they were doing. They said things are slowly getting back to normal, but that the store still has a mask requirement and that they've been getting a lot of people refusing, which has been trying for them. I bet.

Very good timing for the best US vaccinations in many weeks. Over 1.6 million shots with >660,000 newbies reported today. 👍
Maybe awareness of Delta is helping people get on board to build the immunity wall we need right now pic.twitter.com/frn4XLjO1j

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 1, 2021

(I don't quite share his optimism but)

Because people everywhere instinctively reduce complexity into binaries, the fact that the pandemic has receded from the level of catastrophic public health crisis down to the level of critical public health threat, is automatically translated as "whew! the pandemic is over". Here in the USA it's as predictable as sunrise that the Delta variant coupled with insufficient vaccination rates will add another 50,000 to 75,000 dead to the toll before the year is over. And I can't think of any viable path forward that will avoid that. People are very bad at assessing risk from sources that they have no immediate experience with.

the only path forward is to get more aggressive with vaccinations

more aggressiv? like, tackle people and hold them down while a burly nurse injects them?

Miami-Dade County has moved into 66% full vaccinations, a very good thing.

I spoke too soon: 68%!

The big problem is that the higher R(0) of Delta has increased the threshold for herd immunity enough that the goal jumped further away even while progress toward it was slowing down.

xpost re getting more aggressive - I mean, for a start it would be nice if organizations/companies/entities would quit half-assing requirements around vaccinations. One specific example that continues to annoy me is how many universities/colleges are requiring students to be vaccinated but won't extend the requirement to staff and faculty. Yes, I realize that unions and collective bargaining agreements at some of these institutions make this harder to do, but I'm aware of several local examples of institutions where this isn't an issue at all and they started out by requiring them of all employees only to instantly crumple and withdraw the requirement at the first sign of grumbling.

herd immunity was probably not attainable for the US even beforehand, in this country at least given that it requires somewhere between 70-85% innoculation as an estimate. it could have been if we had less assholes living here and had vaccination not turned into a left/right issue but here we are.

xpost

UK has a fighting chance of getting there

xpost re getting more aggressive - I mean, for a start it would be nice if organizations/companies/entities would quit half-assing requirements around vaccinations. One specific example that continues to annoy me is how many universities/colleges are requiring students to be vaccinated but won't extend the requirement to staff and faculty. Yes, I realize that unions and collective bargaining agreements at some of these institutions make this harder to do, but I'm aware of several local examples of institutions where this isn't an issue at all and they started out by requiring them of all employees only to instantly crumple and withdraw the requirement at the first sign of grumbling.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, July 1, 2021 2:56 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Leaving these decisions to employers will result in the same poor job they do providing health insurance. It shouldn't be their responsibility to require vaccines. This should be a governmental function/requirement.

. One specific example that continues to annoy me is how many universities/colleges are requiring students to be vaccinated but won't extend the requirement to staff and faculty. Yes, I realize that unions and collective bargaining agreements at some of these institutions make this harder to do, but I'm aware of several local examples of institutions where this isn't an issue at all and they started out by requiring them of all employees only to instantly crumple and withdraw the requirement at the first sign of grumbling.

Wow, fascinating. I can vouch for my institution going by anecdotal and hard evidence is like 85-90% jabbed on the faculty/staff leve; it's the fuckin' students we don't know about because the Tallahassee Lickspittle won't let us ask!

A bartender at one of the places I frequent let it slip without my prompting that their owner required staff to get jabbed unless they couldn't for medical reasons.

at what point would vaccines be expected to get full FDA approval, and would that move the needle on the ability to make firmer requirements?

xp to Alfred - as I understand it, my institution is at, I believe, 82% jabbed for staff/faculty and around 87% for students, so it's not bad by any means, but I've heard from a few folks, anecdotally, that at this point we aren't going to see that staff one move any higher because of hold outs.

I remember seeing that full FDA approval for some of the vaccines could come in August, I'll be curious to see if that moves the needle. I know I've seen a few skeptics in my timelines state that they are waiting for that, but I'll believe it when I see it.

this is the problem

🚨In a new piece, I lay out and explore 3 principles that now define the pandemic.

1) The vaccines are still beating the variants.
2) The variants are pummelling unvaccinated people.
3) The longer 2 continues, the less likely 1 will hold. https://t.co/T7izwOXWgA

— Ed Yong (@edyong209) July 1, 2021

I think it would be fine to simply use the coercive force of the state to get people to be vaccinated tbqh

I mean I don’t really

But I wish I did

just sneak up behind people and jab them imo

I recently got a job at a state university and during the interview I directly asked the Dean of my college about whether the vaccine would be required in the fall. She said that the main thing holding back any requirement is full FDA approval, after which the university system's lawyers seemed to believe they had a much better case for requirements. So, hoping that happens soon. The county where campus is located is only about 45% vaccinated at this point.

absence of full FDA approval was the argument used in court by the hospital workers in houston. judge didn't find it compelling.

our offices are opening in september but will require full vaccination where legal (which it is in the US and UK, but we have offices in hungary, india, etc., not sure of the situation there).

good article, caek. a lot to chew on. however, nobody read the Tweet responses below it. my god, such morons.

In that Atlantic article:

We’re unlikely to be as vulnerable as we were at the beginning of the pandemic. The vaccines induce a variety of protective antibodies and immune cells, so it’s hard for a variant virus to evade them all. These defenses also vary from person to person, so even if a virus eludes one person’s set, it might be stymied when it jumps into a new host. “I don’t think there’ll suddenly be a variant that pops up and evades everything, and suddenly our vaccines are useless,” Gupta told me. “It’ll be incremental: With every stepwise change in the virus, a chunk of protection is lost in individuals. And people on the edges—the vulnerable who haven’t mounted a full response—will end up bearing the cost.”

If that happens, vaccinated people might need booster shots. Those should be possible: The mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer should be especially easy to revise against changing viruses. But “if we need boosters, I worry that countries that are able to produce vaccines will do so for their own populations, and the division around the world will become even greater,” Maria van Kerkhove, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the WHO, told me.

everything ed yong has written on covid (and pre-covid tbh) has been outstanding. he absolutely deserved the pulitzer he won last month.

it's very grounded, easy to follow, and was exactly the type of article I had been looking for unsuccessfully over the last three weeks.

yep

My wife came home from work last night (here in Maryland) saying that she was starting to report out positive covid tests on people who are already double-vaxxed.

Eric Feigl-Ding has started doing his thing again on Twitter. Do ppl not know his Epidemiological experience isn't in infectious disease and that he's a grifter?

My recurrant vertigo (dizziness, nausea, pressure and mild headache) has recurred. I don't think it's a symptom of a blood clot but then if it was I'd be dismissing it as anything serious because it seems familiar, which whould be #ironic

Not totally debilitating this time but still unpleasant.

Hope you feel better soon!

Argh, gotta isolate, kid & teacher in nursery with the lurgi

Took a road trip with the family from Houston to Savannah. In all the has stations, hotels and restaurants, we saw perhaps five masks. I was bracing myself for some asshole to give us trouble, but it was fine.