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

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.

cases are nationally now on the rise in the US from two weeks ago. knew it was coming, but uggggh. Deaths are continuing to shrink but you know, trailing stat, etc etc, and we don't know about the virulence of the Delta strain when compared to Alpha.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/curbing-deltas-force-vaccines-keep-israels-hospitals-calm-and-avert-lockdown/

also promising, but of course it's still early: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/561212-data-delta-variant-is-not-sparking-mass-hospitalizations-in-england

data suggest(s) that delta spreads much easier but has about the same effect on people that other strains do. and that vaccines are very effective against it.

was going to say that case increases in UK seem to be slowing, somewhat, most days ranging between 25,000 - 27,000 per day for the last week (which is still mega high, but more consistent). but it did something similar a few weeks ago before a sudden mega jump in cases, so I don't trust that assumption until this week is out.

It's safer to compare seven-day periods. Today's update says the last 7 days' total is 53% higher than the previous one. I'd agree that it does look the increase is possibly starting to slow down, though. Fingers crossed.

england getting to the final of the euros would mean lots of super-spreader events id imagine

They'll die happy though.

I don't think risk of superspreading is as great outdoors. But certainly spread is still possible

i have hugged strangers when celebrating goals in the past, even had a random jump up on my shoulders once (i was in the first row of the second tier of the stadium so that was a bit hairy)

The news just gets shittier:

https://nationalpost.com/news/israel-notes-decline-in-pfizer-vaccine-efficacy-against-mild-covid-19-ynet-news

This is the real story though.

More importantly, those who were vaccinated remained far less likely to be hospitalized, with protection dropping only slightly to 93 per cent from 98 per cent in the period

Boosters and trebles all round.

I think we already knew boosters would be a thing.

yeah I'm not surprised

also the headline on the exact same piece on the bloomberg website is much less dramatically clickbaity.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-05/israel-sees-decline-in-pfizer-vaccine-efficacy-rate-ynet-says?srnd=premium-asia

most news reporters should not be allowed to tweet COVID news

the other thing to look at is 64% efficacy doesn't mean "36% of those exposed who are vaccinated will get sick", but rather they are 64% less likely to get sick.

the other thing that's weird is some folks keep citing a Scottish study saying this strain is more deadly, whereas most public officials are stating either that there's no evidence that it is or that it doesn't seem to be. wish we had a consensus, though obviously it's wise to react as if it might be if we don't know.

annnnnd here's an expert I trust that is kinda saying "hmm pump brakes on taking that as gospel"

Israel, now >90% Delta variant
mRNA vaccine >93% effectiveness against Delta-> severe illness, hospitalization and deaths
is it less effective than previous >90% against mild illness? Not possible to know yet.
No data, not even a preprint. Restrictions lifted simulatenousely. pic.twitter.com/99UE0tFcMr

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 5, 2021

Seems fairly certain that mild covid is much less likely to be reported no matter which variant it was caused by, so both current and historical data about mild covid will be somewhat incomplete as a result. You can only count what you can see.