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

What if my mask had a gun on it and could shoot someone?

first, we need to start taking back state legislature majorities from the Republicans, which is growing more difficult due to gerrymandering, but.....also part of the issue is we don't highlight it as a goal or a platform enough. like we think state legislatures don't matter but as we saw in the last election or during COVID YES THEY FUCKING DO.

I wonder how many people who vote for President actually don't bother to pick people that far downballot. fuckery doesn't just happen at the National level, but at the state level, the Federal government can't actually fix a lot of it unless the states are outright passing unconstitutional legislation. and there's a lot of wiggle room to fuck people over without being unconstitutional.

I downplayed the worries of DeSantis being elected Governor in 2018 due to my relief at the Dems getting back the House, but knowing what I know now, I might have wept more.

rapid COVID test is back. negative.

By the way, if this is at all representative of the minds of the great unvaxxed ...

The Chris Cuomo interview with Huntington Beach, CA restaurant owner Tony Roman was next level WTF.

It was almost comical. #CuomoPrimeTime #chriscuomo #cnn #tonyroman #California #COVIDIOTS pic.twitter.com/jybiIDamSk

— AC Junior 😷 (@CamJunior1972) July 29, 2021

proof of being unvaccinated.

i'd just whip out my dick at the owner and piss on him and tell him to get the piss tested

Your proof of eating there will be diarrhea.

total vaccinations in the US today exceeded 800,000. cannot even remember the last time we hurdled that, I think we had a random day over 1 million a month or two ago but that to me seemed like spillover from one day to the next.

let's hope it keeps moving up.

One thing Delta and the hullabaloo has brought us: more US vaccinations. Biggest day all month with 560,000 newbies; 860,000 total.
Finally about to reach the July 4th goal of 70% adults with ≥1 dose pic.twitter.com/916Ga5IIqk

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 30, 2021

this and the reply to it gave me a much needed laugh today:

The Delta variant should make the "at least 1 dose" now practically useless, surely?

— Mookie Alexander (@mookiealexander) July 30, 2021

Exclusive: At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans tested positive for Covid https://t.co/8MCPVw5orl via @strickdc

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) July 30, 2021

Subhead is vital: “The 125,682 "breakthrough" cases in 38 states represent less than .08 percent of the 164.2 million-plus people fully vaccinated since January.”

nobody will read the sub-head, and the lede will be buried for eternity.

I would wager there's probably many more true breakthrough cases than that based on the data taht just came out, those are just the ones we know about.

still doesn't make it statistically significant, but more than we saw during Alpha (but there was also less overall transmission too)

So frustrated by the massive failure by much of the media to consider nuance and immediately default to the most clickbait worthy pull for the headlines.

Countering Delta
Sure 😷help, better fit & quality even better
But how do you tell if a vaccinated person without symptoms is infected w/ Delta?
A rapid home antigen test.
Free & frequent testing is done in many countries
But not in the US; they're ignored, not a word about them

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 30, 2021

this is otm and if you're worried e.g. you have out of town visitors or your live with kids and if you can swing the $$$, a reminder that you can buy rapid tests for $25/pair on amazon. we have kids and we have visitors who don't have kids and have being getting out there hitting the pubs and clubs and licking doorknobs etc., so we have a stack by the front door and ask people to take one and hang on the stoop for 15 mins. they're a fact of life in the UK and it's kind of baffling they've never caught on here (especially since there's money to be made).

it's turned into a terrible game of telephone.

The CDC should have said "We should all temporarily mask indoors again, as some new data we got indicates that there is a larger chance of vaccinated people spreading the virus than there previously was with Alpha, and because Delta is so much more transmissible, we should just be safe. Then when transmission gets much lower, we can possibly revisit."

What they actually said was something like "We should all temporarily mask indoors again if you're in a place with hella mad cases, like we think some vaccinated people gots more virus in their nose too and this means breakthrough ppl more likely to get other ppl sick, so like mask plz. there's a report, it's coming out. hot. hot off presses."

then an unnamed source leaks the presentation to the media, provides some commentary, but the media can't get the CDC itself to comment yet, so they all arrive at this message: "We should all vaccinate everywhere again because apparently vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people, and breakthrough cases are everywhere."

and what probably 40% of the world heard was "vaccines don't work".

xpost I had no idea that was a thing elsewhere until Topol mentioned it. I'm buying some.

i paid $395 for my test today (I will get it all back with insurance, but they didn't take any so I have to file a claim myself - it was a lab-observed PCR test, using the Accula system, that provides results in 30 minutes).

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/breakthrough-covid-cases-least-125-000-fully-vaccinated-americans-have-n1275500?fbclid=IwAR3QiT4RnczbEUpS0Qj1bcJnm2aNxfv1YiQ5wFDqJCNjUW69q9rzWvEGLrQ

Real headline: less than 1/10 of 1% of fully vaccinated people have contracted covid

caveats apply, obviously (some of these people had covid before and now have super-immmunity, this number will go up with Delta, blah blah)

but still

lol still no change in the expectation that we are all starting back in the office full time on Monday morning, but they did squeeze out that 4:45 email to confirm masks are now required in all indoor spaces.

Real headline: less than 1/10 of 1% of fully vaccinated people have contracted covid

I mean, the percentage of unvaccinated people who have contracted COVID since, say, March 2021 (the time interval over which large populations of vaccinated people existed) is also pretty small. (But bigger than 1/10 of 1%!)

I guess important caveat to my post - that number won't capture undiagnosed people.

OK here's an irrational thought I'm having. I feel like a lot of my friends are low-key happy that delta is here because in their view it means there's no real point in mitigation measures anymore, this is just going be an endemic disease that kills vaccinated adults at about the same rate flu does and becomes part of the general ambient background level of sickness and death, accept it and drop the masks.

I am not totally sure their view is wrong, is the thing. But I think it's wrong to be happy about it. But I think it's an irrational fear I have, thinking they're happy about it.

Using delta to justify not hanging out with people i genuinely dont like tomorrow :)))

It's one thing to envisage the hazy future point at which covid has been generally controlled by widespread vaccination to an acceptable level, but that skips right past the horrors that will happen in the interim before we arrive there. otoh, willful blindness like that is very common and helps people cope with situations that are frightening or depressing, so it has its purpose.

I can see there being a certain kind of relief in knowing more or less what sort of future we're looking at. Uncertainty is stressful in itself.

When post-vaccination Delta breakthrough infections do occur, they are much shorter in duration (and less potential for spread) than in unvaccinated people. https://t.co/n1DPHeHwTO preprint today pic.twitter.com/rpJuQtfk2v

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

Anecdotally, the mom of one of my best friends, I may have mentioned three weeks, got COVID. She's vaccinated. Other than a mild fever and feeling lightheaded for a couple days, she was fine in two days. Ten days after her positive test, she tested negative.

*may have mentioned three weeks ago

Also: she's 72.

I can see there being a certain kind of relief in knowing more or less what sort of future we're looking at. Uncertainty is stressful in itself.

To be clear, I am interpreting the relief they're feeling not as "at last, certainty" but as "I don't like wearing a mask or restricting my indoor socializing and I'm relieved that it would now be pointless for me to do so because all hope of containment is gone"

Yea that's definitely a motivator for the lazy.

I've got cool KN95s now. I look like Bane

Worth the read as an attempt to call out the unlettered clickbait on Twitter.

Neanderthal, photographed candidly yesterday

https://i.imgur.com/7mTSaMi.jpg

Wallensky said this today:

“People might come out and say, ‘oh, my friend was vaccinated and got COVID,’” she said. “And what I would say is, if these vaccines are working at 90% protection against symptomatic disease, if you know 10 people who’ve been vaccinated, one of them may be a breakthrough case.”

and I'm kind of at a loss because that is most certainly not what 90% efficiency means, and I guess she's trying to simplify it for laymen, but that's a completely incorrect explanation and the CDC's own website contradicts her as they have entire chapters on how to calculate it.

it greatly overstates the likelihood of breakthrough infection. why give the idiots more rope.

What can I say, you're right, I can't imagine why she said this and I'm sure she's gnashing her teeth over it now.

anybody with expertise even tangentially related to this area that can parse this for me:

The P-town study was not a study that should have been used as the basis for an abrupt change to national policy.

It had (at least) three major issues:

1. exposure misclassification
2. generalizability
3. weak proxies

🧵

— Joseph Allen (@j_g_allen) July 31, 2021

other stuff. ok I'm done doomscrolling today. this isn't a doomy one but it's frustrating to see how much chaos last week's news sewed :(

Delta's Ro is ~6, meaning an average infected, unvaccinated person, unprotected by prior infection or distancing measures, would pass it on to 6 others
That's bad enough, don't make it worse:@CNN keeps saying it's 9.@CDCgov compared it to chickenpox, which has a Ro of 10-12 pic.twitter.com/fdvQatCKCC

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

I don't think we know it's 6 and I don't think we know it's 9 and I don't think there's a single R value that "the truth," but I think "it's at least twice as contagious as the original strain, definitely not as contagious as measles though" is pretty safe.

Early estimates of the Wuhan emergent virus R(0) were in the neighborhood of 3. Obviously a value of 6 or 9 would reflect a far more transmissible disease.

It’s been sobering to see that no matter how many intelligent, capable and dedicated scientists and epidemiologists we have working to help battle a virus like this, the amount of time it takes us to get things relatively under control will still be dictated by the absolute dumbest members of our society.

I could use some advice. It’s getting down to the wire for us to decide if we are sending our daughter back to in-person school for 4th grade. We are in FL and the remote learning program we did last year is no longer an option. Before the Delta wave, we had decided (reluctantly) that it was time to send her back to school this fall. But now it seems ridiculous that we’ve been so careful and kept her home all this time, only to send her back now when Florida is peaking with the Delta variant and the school board just voted down the mask requirement. And after reading this article I really don’t want her around these kids who have been getting indoctrinated and used as political tools by their asshole death cult parents. There is still an option for remote learning but it is a less robust program and we would be largely responsible for teaching her day to day. She really struggled with remote learning last year, though, and we’re afraid she will fall too far behind if we put her through this for another year.

As a single childless man, I can't speak about the problem directly, but my sister and one of my buddies faces a similar dilemma. They worry but they're sending their kids masked to school. Remote learning was too much for them.

You can take (some) comfort in that infection and symptoms for kids your daughter's age, even exposed to the Delta variant, remains low.

I'm sending my kids masked to school and did starting last April. That said, I live in a high-vaxx area where currently there's not a huge outbreak (of course it could be different by September.) The issue with in-person school has always been more the danger from kids than the danger to kids, and I'd guess 95% of their teachers are vaxxed and I just don't think them being in school is going to contribute meaningfully to community spread given the level of vaccination already achieved and all the other interactions between people taking place in town.

Our schools aren't requiring masks this year either (or distancing, contact tracing or quarantines for people who have been exposed). Given how low our vaxx rates are this seems like a possible disaster, but I guess we're gonna find out. Both my kids (both vaxxed, and also they've both already had COVID) have voluntarily said they want to continue wearing masks, we'll see if that's true if not many of their friends or classmates are doing it. I'm not going to try to force them because I don't want to add stress to them, just telling them to use their own judgment. It's an imperfect approach, but none of the options are good.

The plan as of right now is to send our kids to high school in the fall (first day of school here is actually in less than a month; they'd each been going to in-person school to some extent the second half of the past school year, anyway). As I understand it they will still be required to wear a mask. My kids are both fully vaxxed and we live in a high vax area, and yet iirc the vax rates of high school aged kids here (around 15-18 years old, say) is lagging pretty dramatically behind the population here as a whole. The school is not yet requiring vaccines and I suspect can't require vaccines until the FDA belatedly waves its magic wand.

If this matters, one of my kids is vaccinated but the other is too young.

I suspect can't require vaccines until the FDA belatedly waves its magic wand

Again, this is absolutely 100% wrong. The FDA status of emergency approval v. final approval has zero effect on the enforceability of vax mandates. Vaccine mandates have and continue to be upheld in court whenever challenged.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/federal-court-upholds-employer-s-covid-19-vaccine-mandate

The court also rejected Plaintiff’s arguments that the vaccine mandate violated 45 C.F.R. 46.101, seq., which protects the rights of human subjects in research. In the complaint, Plaintiffs argued that they were subject to medical experimentation because they were required to receive a vaccine that has not been fully approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. According to the court, this claim “misrepresented the facts” because the hospital’s employees are not participants in a human trial, but instead merely employees subject to a vaccination requirement.

Nearly the only people this matters to are people looking for an excuse not to get the vaccine who will come up with another excuse when this one is hopefully soon removed.

The bottom line is that nearly all segments of society (employers, gov't, public accommodations, airlines, public transit, etc. etc. etc.) can and should require vaccines. If they do so, they will prevail and the vast majority of unvaccinated people will cave nearly instantly and get the vaccine when confronted with not being able to do things they want to do.

The only thing preventing this is the political will to deal with the issue.

I appreciate everyone’s perspective on this!