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

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.

Case counts where I am are very low and > 80% of adults are vaccinated. I'm still a little nervous about going to a nightclub.

I dont think my CA family understands our NYC trauma

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

the Cheltenham Festival horse race, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and the Trump campaign event where Herman Cain caught the cov' and died, were predominantly outside. any of these events also involve thousands of people being indoors with strangers that they would not otherwise encounter, as they enter open-roofed structures, and use bathrooms, and purchase foods and boozes and betting tickets.

someone in my son's school bubble has the rona and his escort just phoned me and said he's coming back home and can't return for 10 days. He's in a bit of an agitated state she says. Sheeit I hope he doesn't have a meltdown.

I said the risk is not as great outdoors, not zero. This is established fact at this point so idk why you keep trying to gotcha me.

Cheltenham happened long before vaccines and there are differing accounts as to how much it impacted outbreak as it was early in the pandemic.

Nope. There are no confirmed superspreading events or large clusters that are outdoors only. We saw no surge in cases after BLM protests & they were nationwide. Measures taken to restrict outdoor activities are disproportionate compared with the risk they pose. Thread w/links. https://t.co/Lj18BXhHcN

— Muge Cevik (@mugecevik) March 14, 2021

You said “certainly spread is still possible,” and I added to this by noting that ostensibly “outdoor” events (even on lower scales than large international sporting competitions) provide many, many opportunities for indoor contact. That is expanding on your own point, not gotcha-ing it!

Nearly everybody at a soccer stadium is at least going to go through a crowded tunnel or corridor on the way in or out; on a statistical level, nobody at the protests last year was under a roof with others.

what are we arguing about

Who makes the drinks later.

More riots, fewer sports.

Sturgis was an absolute affront to science and safety, especially at the time: the least likely to be cautious about *anything* in the best of circumstances aggressively chumming around with others just like them at the exact wrong place and wrong time. Also, you've got to assume Sturgis is functionally an outdoor event only in the sense that, sure, you have to travel outdoors to get to the bar, but I bet a lot of said outdoor event was spent in close proximity indoors. That Trump rally, similar situation: the least likely to be cautious at the worst time and place, stationary, in close proximity for a prolonged period of time. I'm not terribly worried about catching covid (again) anymore, but if I were I would avoid gatherings of Trump supporters in any number first and foremost.

We had our neighbors over for drinks last night and they were telling us horror stories of India, that seemingly all of their family back home there caught Covid at one point or another this past year, and that them being perhaps better off than most really underscored how almost unknowingly terrible it must still be for much of the country who lack money and good health care. You want large outdoor gatherings? That Kumbh Mela back in April literally attracted *millions*. Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time.

My Australian family is currently pretty much in lockdown mode, hunkered down at the farm with masks and sending the only one among them that's fully vaxxed out and about for supplies as needed.

I'm just really disheartened about the stalling vaccination numbers, mostly because I just don't see any feasible path to goosing the numbers in any meaningful way. I mean, if they still haven't done so by now, I simply cannot imagine what would help at this point. Common sense and stressing the need for the greater good obviously isn't doing it. It seems like most of those lotteries and prize drives fizzled out fairly quickly. Another lockdown, which isn't likely to happen anyway, is only going to make those folks dig in even harder, "see? you all got your vaccines and we still have COVID".

Ultimately, short of forced mass vaccinations, I just don't see a path to the numbers we need to see. And it sucks.

All we can do is to avoid visiting counties with low jab numbers.

last week was an improvement after vax numbers bottomed out the previous week. At this point, slowly and steadily cranking out a million per day may be the best we can hope for.

All we can do is to avoid visiting counties with low jab numbers.

I'm a little more concerned about the opposite - these folks from low jab areas aren't going to stop at state lines, see the increase in Southern Illinois case numbers because Missouri is an absolute shit show.

At the risk of prolonging this, Trump’s Tulsa rally where Herman Cain caught Covid that sic referred to above was indoors. They dismantled the outdoor part of the rally due to lack of interest.

In news reports about the local state of the pandemic lately I often see phrases such as "reported new cases are at their lowest level since last September" as if this were excellent progress, to which my brain responds 'holy shit! half the people in Oregon are fully vaccinated and we're still at levels higher than last summer?!'

cases are technically still at the lowest levels they've been at (nationally speaking, only) since March of 2020, at ~13,000 per day (whereas by September, we were much higher than that), but Delta will likely change that soon since cases are indisputably on the rise again. the 4th of July pause in reporting most states took have fucked the data for a day or so though, unrealistically lowering the 7-day averages.

according to the Oregon COVID site, the lowest total case day in September was 165, and every day since June 24 2021 has been lower than that. Oregon still looks to be down to late May/early June 2020 levels at the moment, so maybe not as low as other states, but going in the right direction.

going in the right direction

may it continue so

oh if we're talking state-level yea then yeah, different ball of wax.

i think my state is going the wrong way again

are you in Seminole County, Nean?

yup