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

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.

colleague posts picture of 25+ developers in a pub for leaving drinks, none of them masked or distanced.

another colleague, who attended the above, rants about the "unmasked idiots on the tube"

it's the same thing!

From the beginning of the pandemic up through the present, I don't know a single person (myself included) that professed to be cautious or concerned yet didn't do things completely counter to those considerations. The cognitive dissonance of, say, having a friend voluntarily fly to Florida for fun in the middle of everything last year but still claim to have been "very careful" has been as humanizing as it has been distressing.

I don't know a single person (myself included) that professed to be cautious or concerned yet didn't do things completely counter to those considerations.

I can't tell if you're criticizing this behavior or just pointing out the cognitive dissonance we all have no choice but to live with. If the former, what is the level of purity of caution and concern that would eliminate this distress? We all have to live our lives, which includes recreation and maintaining our well-being. I went on a vacation by air in June when COVID rates were lowest, before Delta. We wore masks the whole time in the airport and plane, ate at restaurants only outdoors... I don't think it belied our caution and concern to do that.

i read it as the latter, but that's me.

I think it's the huge swings between caution in everyday life and risks when something special comes up that can be startling to anyone who's trying to, like, make predictions about how someone they know is likely to behave in a given situation.

For example, my aunt met me and some other fully vaccinated family members in the park for a walk and refused to take off her mask, even though we were outside and there was no one else around. The rest of us kept our masks on as well, because she was so clearly uncomfortable with even the most microscopic risk. A month or so after that, she flew across the country to attend a doll collectors' conference. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that one.

so I also read it as the latter

i do think there are lots of medical professionals who don't seem to acknowledge the crushing mental health impacts of near 2 years of isolation and increased anxiety involved w/ being out in public. oh, they acknowledge it, but seem to respond by saying 'well this is what happens when we don't handle the pandemic properly', as if that is a helpful statement to someone on an individual level as opposed to the collective.

it's not so strange... we judge others by their actions, ourselves by our intentions

otm

xxpost The latter, not criticizing at all, everyone needs to make the choices that are right for them. My uncle and aunt, for example, they came to visit a couple of weeks ago and wore two masks, even while outside. It was a family commitment, so there was at least some incentive to be there and take a risk traveling. But just a few weeks before that they went on a trip to Nashville, strictly for fun, and while I assume they were as careful as could be, they're older and more at risk and Tennessee is a much less vaxxed state than here or where they are from, and the trip was 100% optional, which underscores that dissonance: they were concerned enough about covid to wear two masks outside, but still opted to take a trip to a riskier destination. My cousin, their son, was a little perplexed, but conceded that at a certain point doing *nothing* and going *nowhere* will wear on you.

This is all in response to koogs's post about 25 people maskless in a bar, complaining about people going mask free on the train. I can totally imagine the complainer insisting the way they appeared to be less safe in a bar was still being safer than how they perceived people were being unsafe on the train. It's maybe related to how much control we think we have over the situation. Who am I with, are they all vaxxed, where am I now and where am I going, will the people around me also be mostly vaxxed, etc.

it's not so strange... we judge others by their actions, ourselves by our intentions

― Jaime Pressly and America (f. hazel), Thursday, September 23, 2021 10:09 AM bookmarkflaglink

otm

i stopped judging people that I personally know a long time ago unless they were outright anti-vax cranks. people present themselves online in a way that they don't live up to, regularly.

a friend of mine got COVID, he's an airline pilot, and he was vaxxed with Pfizer. in his announcement he said "I haven't been doing much anyway" when talking about quarantining, but he was frequently at the bar multiple times a week, and quite a few of us knew this, and wondered why he didn't just acknowledge it. at the time case loads were not what they are now. but he was probably trying to avoid being dogpiled.

I had to tell everyone I was in contact with when my dad got exposed and I was anxious that they'd get angry at me but nobody did. fortunately me and dad had 3 negative tests apiece.

i do think there are lots of medical professionals who don't seem to acknowledge the crushing mental health impacts of near 2 years of isolation and increased anxiety involved w/ being out in public. oh, they acknowledge it, but seem to respond by saying 'well this is what happens when we don't handle the pandemic properly', as if that is a helpful statement to someone on an individual level as opposed to the collective.

It would be less likely to be taken as a statement of medical actuality if they did acknowledge, though: the types of people who resist informed advice would take "I am suffering greatly from the isolation caused by people not taking the necessary steps to quash this in three months" as crybaby snowflake whinging, and either celebrate the suffering of an expert, or regard it as a further reason to dismiss the advice. Stating the fact flatly is the more practical approach.

also important to distinguish "medical professional commenting on the general state of things" vs "medical professional dealing with an individual person"

p acutely aware of the crushing mental health impacts over here, 50% of intubations in our ICU in march/april/may of this year were from ODs, not COVID

I was a bit clumsy in saying "medical professionals", actually, so I apologize for that. Doctors, whether working in hospitals, or as PCPs, or anywhere have been 'in the shit' for two years and I wouldn't even want to put that responsibility on them.

I was actually thinking more of the people guiding policy for COVID, which includes scientists who aren't actually doctors (virologists/epidemiologists).

my personal situation also clouds my vision on this. if the situation with my dad wasn't happening, I'd probably be managing a fuck-ton better. I was actually doing pretty ok when I was living alone last year, mostly was just stressed about the upcoming election.

The cognitive dissonance of, say, having a friend voluntarily fly to Florida for fun in the middle of everything last year but still claim to have been "very careful" has been as humanizing as it has been distressing.

I see no cognitive dissonance here. Being "very careful" doesn't mean "remove 100% of possible transmission events." It's also "very careful" to remove 90% of possible transmission events. If your friend has been socializing outdoors and masking at work and in stores for a year and half, I would say they *were* being very careful, Florida trip or no Florida trip.

the fact we are asked to wear masks is a tacit acknowledgement of risk reduction not being 100%. it says "I might be unknowingly infected right now, and I'm in the same room as you and might infect you, and I am wearing this mask that may not completely eliminate that risk, but at least it will reduce it".

the other problem is people fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of NPIs. NPIs do not eradicate disease. Sterilizing vaccines combined with these measures do, but our vaccines don't provide sterilizing immunity. they reduce transmission, severe illness, and death (which, frankly, is great, but not enough on its own to eradicate).

Lockdowns spread out infection over time to prevent overwhelming healthcare systems and keep transmission low (or at zero for a temporary period oftime), as well as reducing deaths. masks reduce transmission and death. distancing reduces transmission and death. capacity limits reduce transition and death. they can't eradicate a disease - esp since more than likely when you get to 'zero', you're probably not really at 'zero' (just zero 'known' cases).

the R-factor for the Delta variant pretty much makes eradication seem like a pipe dream. that doesn't mean we should let it spread uncontrolled though, either.

the problem is people immediately pivot from "COVID zero is probably not possible" to "and therefore we should just re-open without any restrictions", like our only two choices are to completely go underground forever or just spread the disease uncontrolled all we want. so acknowledging that COVID zero is not possible or that mitigation/transmission reduction are the way to go often is something public officials are likely to want to avoid because people then abandon all caution altogether.

Eradication is hard but I think absent delta we might have gotten to "COVID minimal" in highly vaccinated regions and all be in class without masks right now. It was in no way inevitable a much more contagious variant would spring up, but it did, and that's the reality we have to deal with.

Yea Delta was very much a game changer. Alpha was too but vaccines and natural infection were crushing it.

this is why it makes me so mad to see people post bullshit on Facebook like "ok Fauci, masks in social distancing didn't work the first time, and now we're trying it again, definition of insanity, heh heh heh", its such an idiotic bad faith argument. same as when they post nonstop about how much they don't wanna wear masks but flip the fuck out whenever they see a prominent Dem photographed without one. and yet these are the people we have to count on to slow the spread. it's so stupid.