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

She sounds bad at this xp

As POLITICO has reported, several senior White House officials — including some on the White House Covid-19 task force — said the CDC did not warn them until the morning of the announcement that vaccinated people can forego masks in most situations.

Damn! Just the opposite of what I had thought. That politico story also states Walensky kept the announcement under wraps so the CDC could 'more tightly control the messaging', but the messaging was terrible from almost any angle you look at it.

They are about to start testing boosters in uk

The public is being urged to take part in trials to find out whether a third dose of Covid vaccine could protect against new variants.
All seven vaccines the UK has ordered will be tested on working-age people and over-75s as part of a randomised trial.
Data on side-effects and immune responses will be gathered.
The findings will help vaccine advisers decide if re-vaccinating some people in the autumn is necessary.

Trials obv good but as per convo in the other thread it would be kinda fucked if we started giving third doses here while most of the planet remains unvaccinated

UK people can sign up for that booster trial here (if you had your first dose in december or january)

EXCITING NEWS!

The @CovBoost clinical trial is open for registration of interest!

What is the @CovBoost trial you say?

Let me tell you!https://t.co/L0CLM1rPes

1/6

— Alasdair Munro (@apsmunro) May 19, 2021

haha nice

Highlights from Nets CEO @JAbbamondi mtg w/ reporters today:
-Nets will have increased fans for playoffs -- vaccinated and unvaccinated sections.
-Tickets will be MORE expensive in unvaccinated sections. "We are not neutral, we want people to get vaccinated."

— Malika Andrews (@malika_andrews) May 20, 2021

That's how you do it. "You disgusting people sit over there, for more money, and you nice people sit over here for less money."

I'm skeptical about whether this would pass legal scrutiny

Can I sue them for requiring me to wear pants?

definitely worth a try

I will note that this is not me saying charging them more is a bad idea, just not sure that it will hold up in court

is "vaccination status" a protected class?

Earl Warren and William Brennan would've made them so

xp - but will anyone take them to court over it?

spend $2,000 to argue in court over $200 basketball tickets

I feel like some kind of MAGA driven class action suit is pretty much baked into this

Hah, non-vaxxers in terrible seats that cost more, u love 2 see it.

Like the way kooky Va. state senator Amanda Chase has to sit in a plexiglass penalty box because she wouldn't wear a mask.

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/virginia-state-senator-who-calls-herself-trump-in-heels-forced-to-sit-in-plexiglass-box-because-she-wont-wear-a-mask/

an unvaxed person needs a ring of empty seats around them. they should pay 9x more IMO.

I assume gun enthusiasts and anti-vaxxers will be the only protected classes recognized by the SC soon enough (if not already)

need guns that fire vaccines only

Bullets dipped in novavax

They should fire vaccine out of t-shirt cannons.

Beer bong vax delivery.

For the first time since March 2020, the SF hospital that I normally work at in-person has reported having no COVID patients in care. Long, hard haul but even if there'll be returning patients at points -- and I'm sure that'll yet happen -- a seemingly endless chain of continuity is broken and that's just great to see.

7-day average of current hospitalizations (32,299) is the lowest it's been since April 5th of 2020, per NYT

Today was the last mass vaccination clinic where I live. This time it was walkthrough, held at the high school, and teamed with Walgreens, so offering both Pfizer *and* Moderna. And I gotta say, it's kind of remarkable how many people I saw today that could have probably been vaccinated months ago. Really old people, people with disabilities, essential workers, obese people, just regular old people, and so on. Totally diverse in terms of age, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on. And that's where I live, which is close to 75% vaccinated, so it's kind of nuts they waited this long. The guy in charge basically shrugged and said the best they can do is offer shots to everyone that wants them, but if someone is reluctant, that's their choice. He's hoping more stragglers get on board this summer as whatever concerns they may have fade a little. He also told me they were going to start shifting focus a bit more to people on the margins, those without homes, that sort of thing.

13-year-old kiddo just got first dose today

10-year-old? A ways off, but I can remember when it didn't even seem plausible that us adults would be vaccinated by now

The United States is adding fewer than 30,000 cases a day for the first time since June of last year, and deaths are as low as they’ve been since last summer. Nearly everywhere, the U.S. outlook is improving.

More than 61 percent of American adults have received at least one vaccine shot, and though the pace has slowed, the share is still growing by about two percentage points per week.

“I think by June, we’re probably going to be at one infection per a hundred thousand people per day, which is a very low level,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday on the CBS show, “Face the Nation.”

The share of coronavirus tests coming back positive has fallen to below 3 percent for the first time since widespread testing began, and the number of hospitalized patients has fallen to the lowest point in 11 months, Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translational Institute noted this week. For the first time since March 5 of last year, San Francisco General Hospital had no Covid-19 patients — “a truly momentous day,” Dr. Vivek Jain, an infectious disease physician at the hospital, said on Thursday.

Michigan, the state that reported one of the largest surges in the spring, has rapidly improved. About 1,400 cases were identified on Sunday, compared with about 7,800 cases a day in mid-April.

Feel like it's all still very region-dependent. The numbers here certainly seem to be on the decline but it's been a very slow decline. We're still averaging almost 600 new cases/day in Cook County.

Michigan changed their mask policy this week and when I went to whole foods yesterday there was a sign that masks are optional if you’ve been vaccinated. Everyone in the store was still wearing a mask, other than four white guys between 45 and 60 or so, shaved bald heads, all wearing goatees and muscle t-shirts. It was kind of hilarious how totally on brand they all were

Feel like it's all still very region-dependent. The numbers here certainly seem to be on the decline but it's been a very slow decline. We're still averaging almost 600 new cases/day in Cook County.

― Slime Goobody (Old Lunch), Sunday, May 23, 2021 5:06 PM bookmarkflaglink

It's actually a pretty expedient decline! It just doesn't look like it when we're dealing with smaller numbers, but Cook County's trajectory is very good. for example, only one month ago, Cook County's average was 1,149, and as of today, it's 577, which is a 49.8% reduction, which, while isn't as impressive as the national decline in that same timeframe, is still very good. and over the last two weeks, Cook County's 7-day moving average for daily cases has decreased 33.6% from 868 to 577. Again, behind the national rate, but still very good.

same thing with Florida - the case average is still really high, but it's declined 56% in the last month, and 32.2% in the last weeks.

Of course, one question is whether numbers will spike up again significantly come fall, just like they did last year. Probably, but it might be restricted to even fewer pockets.

In other news, a friend told me she went to Trader Joe's the other day and, being fully vaccinated, asked if she needed a mask. They said, nope, if you're vaccinated it's optional. So she didn't wear a mask, which she said felt weird but felt even weirder when she was saw she was literally one of two without a mask in there. The one other guy without a mask at one point ambled up to her and sotto voce made the same observation.

It depends what we mean by a spike. I'm no scientist but we're not going to see January or last July's numbers.

In other news, a friend told me she went to Trader Joe's the other day and, being fully vaccinated, asked if she needed a mask. They said, nope, if you're vaccinated it's optional. So she didn't wear a mask, which she said felt weird but felt even weirder when she was saw she was literally one of two without a mask in there. The one other guy without a mask at one point ambled up to her and sotto voce made the same observation.

xpost I have no idea. I do remember how last summer looked OK and then suddenly turned worse again. Unless I saw the wrong numbers, the number of new cases in Chicago, for example, was almost exactly the same yesterday as it was last July 11, 2020 (to pick a random summer date). Last I saw only 38% of Chicago had been vaccinated.

Last summer looked OK and then became worse again because we had no vaccines and states re-opened despite few if any of them meeting the Federal requirements for re-opening. and a lot of people were forced back to work prematurely. everybody reacted like OH HEY PANDEMIC'S OVER and predictably we had a second wave that led to a new baseline and then a third wave.

virus has far fewer places to go right now, as this week we're going to hit 50% of American with one shot. I do think states that are extremely far behind the curve on vaccination MIGHT see a slower decline for their numbers or possibly an uptick (Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, etc), and I plan on boycotting those states for a while.

Today in anecdotal data, no one at Trader Joe's without a mask. More surprisingly, no one in the garden section of Home Depot, which is open air, was wearing a mask either, on a 90 degree day no less.

Yesterday in Trump-voter Hudson Valley, everyone at the grocery store was wearing a mask except 4 teenaged boys who looked like date rape waiting to happen, tan and tousled little princes of the world and obviously too hot right now to wear masks.

Also my checkout person was barefaced even though all her colleagues were still masking. The assholes are really outing themselves.

I take it back, I saw one guy at Home Depot without a mask. He looked like he could have been 20, had a mullet, and his shirt just said Oklahoma.

Oh, What an Ignorant Asshole!

Lol that one took me a second.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/health/cdc-coronavirus-infections-vaccine.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage">CDC will no longer investigate mild COVID cases:

Julie Cohn was fully vaccinated when she went to cheer at her 12-year-old son’s basketball game in March. Midway through the match, he asked to remove his mask because he was getting so hot. She thought little of it.

Three days later, he had a sore throat. He tested positive for the coronavirus, as did his younger brother a few days later. Ms. Cohn cared for them, thinking she was protected, but she woke up with what seemed like a head cold on March 28. The next day, she, too, tested positive.

No vaccine provides perfect protection, and so-called breakthrough infections after coronavirus vaccination are rare and unlikely to lead to serious illness. Federal health officials have told fully vaccinated people they no longer need to wear masks or maintain social distance because they are protected, nor do they need to be tested or quarantine after an exposure, unless they develop symptoms.

Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped investigating breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people unless they become so sick that they are hospitalized or die.

Earlier this year, the agency was monitoring all cases. Through the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the C.D.C. had received 10,262 reports of breakthrough infections from 46 states and territories, a number that was very likely “a substantial undercount,” according to a C.D.C. report issued on Tuesday.

Genomic sequencing could be done on only 555, or about 5 percent, of the reported breakthrough cases. Over half of them involved so-called variants of concern, including the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants.

Some 995 people were known to have been hospitalized, and 160 had died, though not always because of Covid-19, the new study said. The median age of those who died was 82.

The numbers suggest that the vaccines are highly effective and generally working as expected.

^ Confirms the results from the original trials and every report I've heard for months. The vaccine is extremely effective, more than good enough to achieve herd immunity and stop the pandemic once everyone eligible gets it, but it doesn't confer 100% immunity and shouldn't be viewed as such.

Any American ILXers still waiting for their first jab?

Today in random anecdotal data, every single person at a run-of-the-mill grocery store and also at Costco was wearing a mask. Oddly, there were two people at Costco wearing half assed gaiters, which is weird, because the mask is totally optional now anyway, so if you're going to do it at all, why half-ass it?

At Target this morning around 8:30 I saw three unmasked employees and a handful of unmasked customers. So: more than the weekend, far less than I feared two weeks ago.

This weekend was the first time I've noticed a big drop in mask usage around here. At my son's baseball and soccer games, less than half of the parents were masked, despite the league having yet updated their original policies from March that require masks for all participants and spectators. No one was really enforcing it on the parents, just on the field and dugouts.

On two separate trips downtown, I'd estimate that 60% of the people I saw out and about were wearing masks but almost zero mask usage among college students.

were the parents outside?

My boyfriend's dad came for a visit for a few days and at dinner one night says (you have to imagine this in a heavy Polish accent) "I read on internet that masks not even work!" and I was like I AM NOT HAVING THIS CONVERSATION RIGHT NOW THANK YOU FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF.

Where did he read it? Who the fuck knows. This is the man who gave me a copy of The Closing of the American Mind and told me if I read it I would understand everything that's wrong with the world.

were the parents outside?

Yes and, to be clear, I'm not faulting them. The science backs them up, just noting that they were technically in violation of the league's rules.