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

May not be clear yet if that’s the virus itself or who is mostly getting infected.

I would guess the latter -- but that's good! There's a lot of discourse about the irrationality of the public but one very clear "people in the aggregate are not totally irrational" signal is that in places with widely available vaccine, almost all old people are vaccinated, which means that whatever happens next, we have massively limited the potential amount of severe illness and death in places like the US and the UK -- that is unequivocally good!

Florida should provide more of a view on that soon enough -- state did a very good job vaccinating its elderly, mediocre job otherwise, is now getting hit hard by Delta. So far it looks like cases have increase eightfold over the last 30 days in Florida but deaths have only doubled. Not sure how that compares with past 30 day windows.

'deaths have only doubled'

Welcome to the horror of 2021

I'm on holiday with my spouse and kids; spouse and I are double-vacced. just went to a pub for dinner (early cos kids) that we'd chosen as it had a nice outside space and a decent menu. but when we got there the menu for outside was different and you had to sit inside for the "restaurant" menu. Bear in mind we never get to go out for decent food (cos kids) we chose our taste buds over covid safety (also there was literally no-one inside) but was pretty fucked off at this dumb system they wouldn't let us circumvent even after saying we wanted to be cautious re Covid and hadn't mentioned when we called to book.

Have been less cautious than normal for the past few days tbh, doing activities with the kids etc, but the only really iffy feeling I had was in the pool when they just let tons of ppl in despite having said they were limiting numbers to 25. will do rapid tests when we get home.

I can't help it, to me "vacced" is short for "vacuumed" and pronounced as such, I know some people hate "vaxxed" but I'm unable to mentally pronounce the word correctly unless it is spelled that way

why I prefer "jabbed." Also: it's physical.

"poked" is pretty good too

if only

so this article came out, showing 60% effectiveness against symptomatic infection based on a UK study:

https://www.ft.com/content/df4db947-8697-49a7-b38b-e46bd86ba915

because it's a UK study, only AstraZeneca, and Pfizer were used in the study, and results were not broken down by product, so.....that's 60% across both, I guess.

and Chise chimes in. lol that every time new news comes out, there's always "this is good news", "no it's not", "yes it is!" debates:

Did you read this at all? https://t.co/16eyZGQZLK “In React-1, 40 per cent of participants testing positive were asymptomatic and many others had very mild symptoms. Effectiveness estimates always decrease as researchers include less serious disease.” It is combining the two.

— Chise 🧬🧫🦠💉 (@sailorrooscout) August 4, 2021

Don't be so sure about Florida, Florida takes three days of data and divides it by three to come up with the daily weekend numbers. DeSantis is hitting back today too so the number coming out today is probably pretty bad.

— sharinky (@SharonAConklin) August 4, 2021

woops

There's little good news for the US Delta wave, but we may be seeing the peak case growth rate for the top 2 states, Louisiana and Florida pic.twitter.com/0S5CVvN7Mp

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 4, 2021

It's extremely Twitter that someone tweets about what we "may be seeing" and four minutes later someone shoots back "don't be so sure"

It gives one a sense of comfort and security in these difficult times.

I've never been more convinced that we as a species know basically nothing with any certainty than I have over the past 1-5 years. Some people know more and are more rigorous than others but the ego won't let most people admit openly that we're mostly real fucken ignorant.

Have to say I agree with that. Pushing aside all of the complete bullshit and blatant misinformation out there, even the best seem to contradict one another and themselves. I suspect that, in a way, it's because we know more than ever that we realize more than ever how little we know.

Just for example, I don't think a widespread virus has ever had the level of genetic surveillance that COVID has. Yet that surveillance confuses as often as clarifies.

You also see the limits of certain kinds of information, e.g. new variant comes out, it appears more contagious, but it becomes murky how much is due to intrinsic vs extrinsic factors (viral load? ability to evade vaccines? people have let their guard down and are out more? seasonality?). And how can you ever separate all those things?

Science has always been like this and always will be, especially science about novel phenomena, but it's rare people are paying attention to science about novel phenomena this closely.

Or that it's taking shape in the public sphere minute-by-minute, among a populace that demands instant gratification and increasingly pooh-poohs rational thought.

immunity in particular seems like a really confusing thing to my simplistic mind

Public access to such a wide range of media also confuses things further, from dumbed down local news, legitimately bad/false news, facebook, but then also scientific journals as well as PREPRINT scientific articles! It makes a mess.

The import thing is that we continue to receive timely, important epidemiology information from random know-nothing strangers on the internet

immunity should be thought of as a tendency of varying strength, not as an absolute state

Unequivocal good news:

Jackson health's Dr. Peter Paige says at Miami-Dade press conference that the county vaccination pace has basically doubled in the recent COVID-19 spike

— Doug Hanks (@doug_hanks) August 4, 2021

why I prefer "jabbed." Also: it's physical

Only logical

D-d-d-d-d-digital

one two three five!

Went to a friend's place last night, hugged someone, sat outside with them a few feet away for like ten minutes. Then they tested positive with a high-quality rapid test.

Soooo I'm skipping a garden party and a flight tomorrow.

CDC guidance says as a fully-vaccinated people I don't have to quarantine, but seems like that they haven't updated that guidance for the increased chance for vaccinated people to get Delta.

definitely take a rapid test but if you're still feeling okay tomorrow (delta hits fast) no need to quarantine imo

Masks are voluntary and people are still dicknosing in the supermarket. Devolution is real.

These fucking dipshits

Oh my. The same team that the WHO has hired to review evidence on transmission of COVID *still* says it likely spreads by droplets and contact, rather than being airborne. (Competent countries' scientists had concluded it was airborne in February of 2020.) https://t.co/eOnsyXIcRa pic.twitter.com/EyuiucEwCZ

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 9, 2021

has there been any data showing the impact of lollapalooza on covid in chicago?

Not many people went to Lollapalooza, but every one of them started an outbreak

I haven’t seen any. I did see a study demonstrating the effect of euro 2000 in England by noting that cases went up much faster along young men than young women.

I saw one expert theory stating the large "football effect" on cases had less to do with outdoor transmission and more to do with people packing into pubs/restaurants to watch the matches. any known truth to that or does it seem like hooey?

This is fun. Play around! https://www.microcovid.org/

fwiw, here's a big reddit thread on Lolla-goers describing their post-fest Covid (or lack thereof) experiences:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lollapalooza/comments/oxtopg/covid19_megathread/

Here's a follow-up thread that someone compiled with napkin-math results:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Coachella/comments/p0vvi1/post_lolla_covid_test_results/h89q3wa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

So I tallied all the responses from that thread. Approximately 7.2% of posters fully vaccinated with Pfizer reported positive results, 8.7% for Moderna and 12.5% for J&J. 1/3 of unvaccinated posters reported they tested positive.

It's not necessarily an accurate or scientific poll in any way but those numbers make me feel a bit more uncomfortable about attending Bonnaroo in a few weeks.

This is fun. Play around! https://www.microcovid.org/

lol this is what all the polyamorous nerds in the Bay Area are using to coordinate their overlapping circles

Alfred, that seems to be saying getting together indoors w/o masks for 5 hrs 1X per wk with two other vaccinated people (i.e. dinner and drinks) is no bueno.

I saw one expert theory stating the large "football effect" on cases had less to do with outdoor transmission and more to do with people packing into pubs/restaurants to watch the matches. any known truth to that or does it seem like hooey?

i would be surprised if that *wasn't* true, but i don't think there's any data. the UK doesn't do systematic random contact tracing, which is what you'd need to answer that question.

the best we have is the circumstantial evidence that it rose more quickly among the demographic more likely to be watching the euros in groups, i.e. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/surge-covid-cases-among-english-24546468.

Alfred, that seems to be saying getting together indoors w/o masks for 5 hrs 1X per wk with two other vaccinated people (i.e. dinner and drinks) is no bueno.

― Carlos Santana & Mahavishnu Rob Thomas (PBKR),

I mean, it's automated responses.

Not sure what that means.

Have to say I agree with that. Pushing aside all of the complete bullshit and blatant misinformation out there, even the best seem to contradict one another and themselves. I suspect that, in a way, it's because we know more than ever that we realize more than ever how little we know.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, 4 August 2021 19:59 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Its cos we keep asking ppl who arent experts in things about those things

Generally once you decide to apply a minor enough level of effort in filtering who is saying what before investing very much in it youll find things are pretty ok

According to this page, it's as risky or riskier for a fully jabbed person to sit indoors with other vaccinated people than to sit in a restaurant where I don't know if my server or other guests are vaccinated. Which can't be right.

Re: the Football Effect. A whole lot of Scottish fans came down to London to watch the England v. Scotland game and ended up taking the Delta variant back to Scotland. A case of history repeating itself supposedly as, in 1349, Scots tried to take advantage of the English dropping like flies with the Black Death by invading and ended up taking it back to Scotland. As I said, supposedly.

Rock clubs in Oakland reopened, then promptly closed again. And that's okay.

xp to dmac: very prominent health officials in places with reputations for good governance and great data/monitoring have been wrong throughout, including very recently.

like this is the main guy in the UK. he's wrong all the time!

COVID cases have fallen to 33K per day (7-day average) since Neil Ferguson, perhaps the UK's most prominent epidemiologist, said it was "almost inevitable" that cases would hit 100K/day.https://t.co/zE6fYgw2eh pic.twitter.com/pzFgU2gmBg

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 28, 2021

I don't care that the prediction is wrong, I'm sure this stuff is hard to predict. It's that he's consistently so overconfident. Now he says he's "positive" the pandemic will be over by October. Well, probably. But there are downside risks: new variants, waning immunity, etc. pic.twitter.com/rfoWbCtwoh

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 28, 2021

and here's the big guy at UCSF highlighting that he has no idea what's going to happen next

Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 504

To me, the most confusing time in the pandemic was May 2020, as we exited lockdown and nobody quite knew what they should & shouldn’t do (clean the mail? touch the dog?).

But now is giving May 2020 a run for its money. (🧵1/25)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) August 4, 2021

you can always touch the dog

I saw one expert theory stating the large "football effect" on cases had less to do with outdoor transmission and more to do with people packing into pubs/restaurants to watch the matches.

Only a thorough system of contact tracing could provide useful numbers by which to test this theory, but new cases of covid (esp. delta) overwhelmed our ability to do contact tracing long ago.

This is one frustration I feel about the current 'delta' surge in the USA. It is glaringly obvious that delta variant is extremely contagious and that it can infect fully vaccinated people at a much higher rate than other variants, but how those breakthrough cases relate to an individual's exposure to high risk environments is not known. Maybe most of the breakthroughs happen in people who believed vaccination allowed them to completely resume 'normal life', including traipsing around unmasked in high risk situations. Or maybe there's no obvious pattern. Nobody can say.

I do get annoyed at people using polio and smallpox to insinuate we can easily get COVID down to Covid-Zero.

polio spread through fecal matter in water and food, and on occasion, saliva. it was not very easy to spread. (it's also not eradicated, but it's much more rare now obv)

smallpox, unlike COVID, didn't often spread in enclosed settings, spread more through droplets, required longer close-contact to spread, and while it was incredibly infectious, viral shedding didn't start until you witnessed the signature rash appear on your skin, which means you'd never unwittingly transmit it to other people. it spread more slowly and less easily than COVID.