outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Maxine Walters tells Jim Jordan to shut his mouth

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/overnights/548497-shut-your-mouth-chairman-cuts-off-jim-jordan-fauci-sparing-at?fbclid=IwAR3sYqVsZMKdv2fyq1OJi_2cmqw9KHrthROW1CuL9sDO_Qn80v8IVJc_FOE

posted itt because it was a COVID hearing and he was idiotically demanding to know from Fauci what vaccination level would allow people to "restore their liberties".

"1 Brazilian"

'Double mutant' most common variant now: India's genome data

The analysis shows for the first time how the detection of various variants of the coronavirus may have changed

(report by @VinayakD and @AnonnaDutt)https://t.co/nT6Gnv588Y pic.twitter.com/JoUEb8ewYE

— Hindustan Times (@htTweets) April 16, 2021

Been terrifying being updated on COVID in rural India. In my parents village (pop of a few 100), they've been burying one or two people everyday with more & more people coughing. Same story in all the neighbouring villages where most people have little or no access to healthcare.

— Ilyas Nagdee (@ilyas_nagdee) April 18, 2021

This is absolutely incredible news 🥳 pic.twitter.com/HaFTgYxv7t

— Nadine Batchelor-Hunt (@nadinebh_) April 22, 2021

what?!??

"developed the first jab... to show more than 75% efficacy."

Does this mean there was already a vaccine for malaria at 75%? Because then obviously 77% is better but doesn't seem "incredible"

I’m not sure the significance of 75% but I’m pretty sure the vaccine which rolled out a couple of years ago was something like 30% effective

Yeah, just googled it and appears there's only one approved vaccine, RTS,S which has pretty low efficacy, especially in kids (who are the most affected by malaria) and also needs 4 doses so this does indeed sound like pretty incredible news if it pans out

is Bill Gates going to take credit for this y/n

Is Bill Gates going to make poverty-stricken villagers pay $7500 per jab is more to the point

Probably

...

As soon as BJP government comes to power in West Bengal, COVID-19 vaccine will be provided free of cost to everyone. pic.twitter.com/gzxCOUMjpr

— BJP Bengal (@BJP4Bengal) April 23, 2021

Haven't seen this study discussed https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/04/23/mit-researchers-say-youre-no-safer-from-covid-indoors-at-6-feet-or-60-feet-in-new-study.html

Its conclusions go against the six foot social distance rule and make total exposure time the important factor.

Headline is bs

Please fix this headline, as the model they used ASSUMES that the room is instantaneously and continuously well-mixed, like if you blow a smoke ring, it immediately spreads evenly throughout the room in zero seconds. The headline is a tautology. @zeynep /1

— Linsey Marr (@linseymarr) April 24, 2021

hasn't it been pretty well known that indoor buildings with poor ventilation could spread COVID much further than 6 feet?

lol nevermind, Linsey said exactly that in another tweet

Glad I read more than the headline!

I think the reason this is confusing is that 6 feet has always been the guideline from the very beginning, but nobody was like "you literally cannot get COVID from someone more than 6 feet from you," it has always been understood that there needs to be a guideline so stores can put markers on the floor, etc., but that likelihood of infection is some function of distance from infected person (which also depends on a hundred other local variables in some complicated way) not some kind of sharp threshold!

Meanwhile in England, people are donning yellow stars with “no covid certificates” on them. Photos from @chloe_adlestone. pic.twitter.com/OCTtFdMFQy

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) April 24, 2021

Brits having a normal one

Same thing happened in Nouméa, of all places. Idiocy spreads fast.

recurring theme in UK protest unfortunately

XPs re MIT study:

Many mitigation measures which made sense for past respiratory infections likely had poor returns on effort with Covid-19, a disease that transmits mainly through small respiratory particles (airborne) rather than heavier ones landing on surfaces, mainly between households through superspreader events where only a few asymptomatic / presymptomatic infected generated a lot of infectious particles in indoor spaces with poor ventilation. So much effort screening with thermometers, sanitizing surfaces, mandating mask use outdoors, closing down beaches and parks, was in hindsight rather futile.

From my skim at the paper, the best responses for small businesses would have instead focused on requiring quality masking and limiting occupancy of public interior spaces, and importantly, increasing ventilation, so that each user of those spaces has less potential exposure to "infectious quanta" from current and recent occupants.

Interior choir practice may have been among the most dangerous activities for superspreader events. Lots of potentially assymptomatic/presymptomatic infected participants, producing a lot of respiratory particles, in spaces with limited ventilation. Move it to a breezy beach, and the same activity likely poses little risk.

I mean, yeah -- that's why limiting occupancy of public spaces was mandated and masking at the park, in most places at any rate, wasn't.

"You're not catching it off surfaces" was already conventional wisdom, like, a year ago

I think the one really big shift over time has been the importance of refreshing indoor air.

Infectious quanta of solace

XP eephus!:

There are still businesses that hire disinfection surfaces (which spray down the store with chemical sprayers) when an employee tested positive or transmission is discovered. As I recall, many experts had their doubts, but it wasn't till early this Spring that we started seeing news stories pointing out this probably did more harm than good.

Someone should tell the thousands of school districts and transit authorities (including the New York City subway) still practicing “deep cleaning” about this conventional wisdom.

people are saying things, caek

people are telling me all the time

finally read https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/how-the-west-lost-covid-19.html.

it's good.

there's a dash of mixture of jk simmons at the end of burn after reading, and contrarianism, but it's generally excellent.

the strongest conclusion (it's a long article, this doesn't do it justice) is that the dominance of the medical establishment (as opposed to the public health community) in "The West" is a problem. reading this bit (which was written before the J&J and AZ suspensions, but seems of a piece with it:

“One of the common features is that we are a medical-centric group of countries,” says Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist who has spent the pandemic advocating for mass rollout of rapid testing on the pregnancy-kit model — only to meet resistance at every turn by those who insisted on a higher, clinical standard for tests. “We have an enormous focus on medicine and individual biology and individual health. We have very little focus as a group of nations on prioritizing the public good. We just don’t. It’s almost taboo — I mean, it is taboo. We have physicians running the show — that’s a consistent thing, medical doctors across the western European countries, driving the decision-making.” The result, he says, has been short-sighted calculations that prioritize absolute knowledge about everything before advising or designing policy about anything.

...

These were not narrowly American issues, or western ones—in fact, much of the problematic guidance came from the WHO. But in East Asia, countries didn’t wait for the WHO’s guidance to change on aerosols or asymptomatic transmission before masking up, social-distancing, and quarantining. “They acted fast. They acted decisively,” says Mina. “They made early moves. They didn’t sit and ponder: ‘What should we do? Do we have all of the data before we make a single decision?’ And I think that is a common theme that we’ve seen across all the Western countries—a reluctance to even admit that it was a big problem and then to really act without all of the information available. To this day, people are still not acting.” Instead, he says, “decision-makers have been paralyzed. They would rather just not act and let the pandemic move forward than act aggressively, but potentially be wrong.”

This, he says, reflects a culture of medicine in which the case of the individual patient is paramount. In the early months of the pandemic, the “heroic” medicine of doctors trying out experimental treatments on patients may have raised the death count considerably. And at the level of public guidance, throughout America and Europe, there has been a tendency to regard anything that didn’t offer perfect and total protection against transmission as needlessly risky behavior — outdoor exercise, socializing with masks, holiday travel with a negative test in hand. If you’re advising a single, vulnerable patient, Mina suggests, it might make sense to propose staying at home through a surge, but it’s not necessarily useful advice for everyone, and neglects to offer practical guidance for how to navigate a pandemic world in favor of an indefinite, exhausting, abstinence-only piece of quasi-propaganda. That’s not really public health, he says, it’s medicine. And even so, the guidance that was offered wasn’t all that illuminating at the individual level — with 10,000-times higher lethality rates hidden behind vague language like “the elderly are more at risk,” or comorbidities discussed as an almost uniform additional risk, so that my kidney-patient father-in-law, for instance, didn’t know that he was significantly more vulnerable than my mother with COPD.

yeah that part definitely hits home - I saw so many of my friends say something to the effect of, "we don't know exactly what this is yet so I'm not gonna change my life" when it's like uhhh shouldn't you be doing the exact opposite then

banaka to thread

And at the level of public guidance, throughout America and Europe, there has been a tendency to regard anything that didn’t offer perfect and total protection against transmission as needlessly risky behavior — outdoor exercise, socializing with masks, holiday travel with a negative test in hand. If you’re advising a single, vulnerable patient, Mina suggests, it might make sense to propose staying at home through a surge, but it’s not necessarily useful advice for everyone, and neglects to offer practical guidance for how to navigate a pandemic world in favor of an indefinite, exhausting, abstinence-only piece of quasi-propaganda.

Most of that excerpt makes sense to me, but this part seems off-base. Other countries banned mildly risky activities too; in fact they banned them more quickly and more thoroughly, back at the start of the pandemic when we didn't really know how the virus was transmitted or where the highest risks were. And while I agree with the basic premise that the US is more focused on the individual than the group, this paragraph gets the effect of that completely backward imo.

If you're advising one patient, you could reasonably tell them it's not that risky for them, personally, to travel during a surge. But if you don't want the surge to get massively worse, you need to tell everyone not to travel unless they have to. Our focus on individual rather than collective risk is why people did travel at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it's why there were Covid surges after both holidays.

Second Pfizer is weird - I've never really felt bad, no fever, but now (22 hours post-shot) all my joints feel like I did a high school football two-a-day at my current fitness level.

I had none of the usual effects, but the next morning upon waking my right ankle felt like a joint was dislocated, and I walked with a limp for a couple days. That's never happened before. Most likely I managed to twist it oddly in sleep, but I don't discount some systemic inflammation contributed.

In November, the @nytimes published an article about efforts in Asia to fight back COVID. They mentioned specifically 3 countries (Hong Kong, Korea and Japan) and outlined long histories of policy implementation by health officials in these nations trying to combat infections

— Siyanda Mohutsiwa (@SiyandaWrites) April 25, 2021

Well worth reading that whole thread. US coverage of Africa is absolute garbage.

it's worth noting that the over 65 population of sub-saharan africa is 3%. this is at least part of the reason there have been so few deaths in africa.

the assumption of corruption and incompetence and death is of course extremely condescending and racist.

Good

WASHINGTON (AP) — AP Exclusive: US to begin sharing up to 60M AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses with world after federal safety review.

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) April 26, 2021

There are so many variables in COVID by country (age, population health, density, government system, climate) that I think it's a bit pat to try to make COVID death toll about any one thing, let alone a "selfish culture of individualism" that "disdains the public good" or w/e. I'm sure American individualism is a factor, but so are high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure, poor levels of medical care for many people with those conditions, densely populated cities in colder climates, Trump's botched response, amount of interdependence on foreign economies, and the fact that even the best president would have a hard time creating a unified national response as a result of our federalist system/limitations on federal power.

Also the constant focus on holiday travel, the super bowl, etc.--while those are factors, they are a bit too easy to place all the blame on from the herman miller armchair of a keyboard warrior, while COVID also spreads heavily in the takeout kitchens and meat processing plants and amazon warehouses servicing the keyboard warriors.

quit making this as complicated as it is

It's almost as if countries where processed food is shoveled down peoples' gullets to keep them passive and addicted to government-sponsored propaganda might be...bad.

¿?

The Twinkie Offense

I'm sure American individualism is a factor, but so are high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure, poor levels of medical care for many people with those conditions, densely populated cities in colder climates, Trump's botched response, amount of interdependence on foreign economies, and the fact that even the best president would have a hard time creating a unified national response as a result of our federalist system/limitations on federal power.

Lol, in other words, American individualism.

My post was rightly taking to task the idea that the blame for all of these health problems and the poor level of medical care can be placed entirely at the feet of the individual; to do so is ignorant and patently ridiculous.

Right, that's also what I was getting at - I mean, yes, on some level a lot of the things I named could be said to add up to "culture of individualism" but that still makes it sound like the byproduct of a bunch of selfish individuals making poor decisions instead of living under a particularly harsh form of capitalism and under a constitutional government that is designed in a way that makes it harder to use for national social good.