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

"relatively high vaccine prevalence" relative to what? the UK average? the US average?

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, September 8, 2021 3:19 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I meant relative to the US average.

I found that tweet annoying because all indications from contact tracing, etc. at universities are that, yes, classroom transmission, EVEN PRE-VACCINE, was not a major issue relative to indoor socializing. It's not valuing labor over leisure, it's the fact that students sitting quietly in a big lecture hall with masks on is less of a transmission risk then students packed into a house unmasked and shouting. Like, I'm sorry if the messaging "doesn't land well" but it is what it is.

Oh I agree with this, absolutely, I was just more struck by the second half about how companies are all about pretending the pandemic is over when it comes to getting back to the office or making sure workers stay productive. But I do think messaging has been pretty shit, though my concern has been less about in the classroom than about the big "welcome back to campus" indoor events that involve food and drink while they also shame students for any "unofficial gatherings".

Hang out with your friends. Play frisbee. Have sex two at a time.

PS, yes, I meant these three in sequence. That's how I remember college working, anyway.

I don't understand the need if you're already requiring vaccination to be on campus.

I mean you have a pretty self-contained group of already low risk people who are all vaccinated. If that's not enough to lift restrictions I don't understand what ever will be.

we've done this before. the thing we're waiting for to lift restrictions is case rates not being extremely high.

my university has 50,000 students who are 'required' to be vaccinated with repercussions if you are not, but there's nobody actually checking cards or anything - it's all self-reported. There are repercussions if you get caught but that's only going to happen if you get sick and the contract tracing kicks in.

My students are all wearing masks in the classroom but then I see images on twitter of massive groups huddled together maskless waiting to get into the shitty bar where 170 people got covid last summer with the caption 'looks like everyone is rushing delta this fall' and feel like we're going to be back to online only in a month.

man alive, you do understand how Covid and the Delta variant work, right? and you do understand that "college-age" might be "low-risk," but the behavior of college-age people is generally "high-risk"? I mean I don't know about y'all, but I used to go around drinking half-empties and snorting random bits of dust off mirrors in college.

I used to go around drinking half-empties and snorting random bits of dust off mirrors in college.

"mommy, where do poets come from"

You'd have to include LSD ingestion in that equation too, fwiw

we've done this before. the thing we're waiting for to lift restrictions is case rates not being extremely high.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 9 September 2021 17:26 (three hours ago) link

But even if they go down, they will go back up when we lift restrictions. This is why I have been banging this drum. It's endemic. It's not going away.

man alive, you do understand how Covid and the Delta variant work, right? and you do understand that "college-age" might be "low-risk," but the behavior of college-age people is generally "high-risk"? I mean I don't know about y'all, but I used to go around drinking half-empties and snorting random bits of dust off mirrors in college.

― Kind regards, Anus (the table is the table), Thursday, September 9, 2021 2:04 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ok, so some vaccinated college students will catch it and suffer cold or flu like symptoms. And very few will go to the hospital or die, certainly no moreso than of flu or other illnesses or drinking half empties and falling down flights of stairs.

I think the problem is that even they don't get very sick they will spread it to the rest of the population, keeping it very active.

"even if..."

very few will go to the hospital or die, certainly no moreso than of flu or other illnesses or drinking half empties and falling down flights of stairs

certainly?? i don't think that available facts back up that conclusion.

Ok, so some vaccinated college students will catch it and suffer cold or flu like symptoms. And very few will go to the hospital or die, certainly no moreso than of flu or other illnesses or drinking half empties and falling down flights of stairs.

Good thing it's well established that the virus knows to stop at the borders of campus and will absolutely not in any circumstances be transmitted to the larger community beyond.

It's like man alive has never heard of schools with commuter populations

Or students who eat in restaurants, go to movies, etc.

Even if they do live on campus.

But even if they go down, they will go back up when we lift restrictions. This is why I have been banging this drum. It's endemic. It's not going away.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, September 9, 2021 4:31 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

1. "go back up" is not what endemic means.
2. "they will go back up when we lift restrictions". once again, i am asking people to remember the existence of other countries in the world from which it might be possible to learn something.

"go back up" is the opposite of endemic in fact!

It's like man alive has never heard of schools with commuter populations

― Kind regards, Anus (the table is the table), Thursday, 9 September 2021 20:54 (forty minutes ago) link

Um, I went to one, so yes I'm familiar. But again, vaccination requirement.

Are you being purposely obtuse on this point?

I mean, I really wish a vaccine requirement was a magic wand that just completely eliminated the chances of contracting and transmitting COVID but that's just not how it works, for a wide variety of reasons. It's certainly a great way to reduce the risks, undoubtedly, but it's not magic.

The meaning of endemic has nothing to do with whether cases rise or fall with intervention afaik, but point me to a source that says otherwise.

we get it

Just got an email from our local healthcare provider that due to global supply shortages, rapid PCR tests will now only be allowed for symptomatic patients and everyone else (i.e. non-symptomatic folks and those needing a result for travel) will have to stick with the standard PCR test with results in 72 hours. Cool.

For an infection that relies on person-to-person transmission, to be endemic, each person who becomes infected with the disease must pass it on to one other person on average. Assuming a completely susceptible population, that means that the basic reproduction number (R0) of the infection must equal one. In a population with some immune individuals, the basic reproduction number multiplied by the proportion of susceptible individuals in the population (S) must be one. This takes account of the probability of each individual to whom the disease may be transmitted being susceptible to it, effectively discounting the immune sector of the population. So, for a disease to be in an endemic steady state it is:

{\displaystyle R_{0}\times S=1}{\displaystyle R_{0}\times S=1}
In this way, the infection neither dies out nor does the number of infected people increase exponentially but the infection is said to be in an endemic steady state

it doesn't matter. he's using it to mean "it's over".

hey now
hey now
don't dream it's endemic

it's endemic, it's endemic, it's ENDE-E-E-MIC

Isn't it endemic

Doncha think

A little too endemic

Good thing it's well established that the virus knows to stop at the borders of campus and will absolutely not in any circumstances be transmitted to the larger community beyond.

remember how in Sydney a few months ago they closed the pubs on one side of the street but not the other, because the virus knew not to cross the road, and now there's no covid in NSW? man alive does

Sydney a few months ago had a very low vaccination rate

man alive? more like man i'm dead of covid because a bunch of idiots cared more about their lifestyles and sacrificing themselves to a bloodthirsty global economic structure than other human beings.

so Eric Topol posts this after the new CDC report comes out today:

3 new @CDCMMWR reports today provide very strong reassurance of vaccination benefits vs Delta and point toward a potential edge of @Moderna_tx for real-world effectiveness https://t.co/EYnnzPbSst by @bylenasun and @JoelAchenbach pic.twitter.com/BGb1trUqsg

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) September 10, 2021

cool, ok, reaffirms a lot of what we knew

Then someone else, who identifies as a mechanicist and a biologist, posts this, which...doesn't seem to be the same message Eric just tweeted, and yet...Eric retweets it.

CDC released a report today on monitoring COVID-19 cases and severity. Vaccines do work! However, once infected, analysis of CDC numbers suggest that the difference in Case hospitalization ratio or case fatality ratio between V and U is not big. @EricTopol @NigelGoldenfeld pic.twitter.com/mU1XNmaQbQ

— Ahmed Elbanna (@MCSlab_uiuc) September 10, 2021

So everyone's freaking out, because it looks like they're saying vaccines don't really protect much against hospitalization/death once infected. of course it's probably more that we're laypeople misunderstanding the message, but his conclusions don't even seem to line up with Eric's.

and then the kicker, someone tags Chise ITT and they post:

That is not being interpreted right. You can see the real world data for yourself and read the report. I noticed there is no link.
•https://t.co/hBSKly9QtT
•https://t.co/OOwcKJAXYN
•https://t.co/VDRCSNFbRk

— Chise 🧬🧫🦠💉 (@sailorrooscout) September 10, 2021

I give up

i don't get the impression Ahmed is an expert though

or he's saying something that is rather benign but saying it in a way that is confusing

I would probably unfollow COVID Influencer Twitter.

just trying to make sense out of new news reports since the media usually gets them wrong

It’s a fools errand at this point, science Twitter is a mess. And I don’t lay the blame with the good, smart and conscientious scientists, rather that the app itself functions in such a way as to make everything noise and nearly impossible for the signal to breakthrough (pun not necessarily intended).

This is the conversation I keep having with my gf. We're doing the best we can to suss out the actual facts but getting within spitting distance of certainty is an absolute fool's errand. Given the schismatic disagreements within the field, chances are you can find an expert of some repute who will tell you some variation of whatever you might want to hear. So I guess I just continue to err on the side of overcaution until we're outta this shit sometime in mid-2025.

NY designated covid as an airborne infectious disease outbreak under their recently adopted NY HERO act which means employers now have to activate their infectious disease plans and potentially take other actions. So my employer held a meeting this morning to discuss and most of the participants were taking the Teams call together in a conference room.

It's okay, because they all held their breath until the meeting was done tho

We got a phone call last night informing us that a caregiver at our daughter's group home who'd been quarantining after an exposure to covid had her test come back positive. She'd been doing a lot of double shifts lately, but she was vaccinated and stopped working when she felt symptoms, so there's a chance she didn't spread it far and wide. We'd been noticing that mask discipline among the staff was very lax the past few months and this caregiver often had hers pulled down at work.

After some back and forth last night trying to find a reasonable response, we've decided to cancel our weekly visit today and wait for test results on residents and staff to yield some clarity. This sucks bigly. I'm trying to stay hopeful, but not all the staff is vaccinated and this could snowball into a very bad situation quite easily.

Yeesh. Hoping for the best.

What Ned said.

thanks. nothing much else to say or do until we know more.

I suspected this:

https://www.local10.com/news/local/2021/09/22/90-of-miami-dade-vaccinated-its-just-not-true-experts-say/

The pathetic part? MDC probably DOES have the highest vac rate without the bullshit.