outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

That. Like there have been years where I've wanted the flu vaccine and just never got around to it. Obviously I took the COVID vaccine much more seriously and got it as soon as I possibly could. But there are people who treat COVID like I treat flu.

Of course the media's absolutely terrible reporting on breakthrough cases is not helping things either. Just so disappointed in everything right now.

The reporting and honestly even the CDC's messaging has been such a mess that I can't even completely tell what kind of mess it is.

Also, just worth noting (and I continue to find this absurd and a bizarre policy failure), that the only proof of vaccination I received was a small and very easily forgeable piece of paper.

This is in NY State, under the Great Cuomo who vanquished COVID.

One thing I am trying to get my mind around: do we have an achievable end game in mind? I mean I understand that the situation shifts, new variants change the picture, but say we are stuck with this super contagious version of COVID and it turns out that people can easily get infected and spread even vaccinated? Then what? Do we rest on the fact that at least the vaccine protects against severe illness? Do we have an idea of a % target for vaccination that would allow normalization of life? I just feel confused by the calls to lock down again, because I don't understand what that accomplishes other than prolonging the inevitable unless it's "until we can do ____." As a vaccinated person, from what I know now, I'm comfortable with my own risk. I don't want to spread COVID to an unvaccinated person, but at the same time it's like, how much do I need to alter my behavior for the sake of someone who, for whatever reason, doesn't feel concerned enough about their own risk to have gotten vaccinated? And I'm even willing to be the bigger person and take that person's risk into account, but for how long? What is the goal here?

Death.

good band

In the states most severely affected by Delta (per capita), there's some signs of slowing of case growth, especially in Missouri and Arkansas, the initial epicenter pic.twitter.com/kY1hlpNz13

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 2, 2021

(naturally our shitty testing in the US muddies the waters there but)

I don't think there's a real end to this at least until many more people are compelled to get vaccinated

Or, alternatively, until Covid evolves into an even more deadly, more transmissible form.

Which isn't going to happen until more employers and companies get serious about enforcing vaccine requirements. That's really the only realistic path forward I see - make these dipshit refusers suffer some actual consequences like being locked out of the Applebee and Cracker Barrel until they get jabbed.

I mean *this wave* is definitely going to end sometime, eventually natural infection plus the millions of people vaccinated means it won't stay at the level it's at now forever (though it'll kill and hospitalize and long COVID many people in the interim). when that happens is murky - UK is much more vaccinated than us and our hospitalization trends are not following their trajectory (ours are continuing to increase around the time theirs leveled off).

but you are right that COVID will endure for a long while. vaccination is ticking up, but not enough to put this in our rearview anytime soon.

I do agree upthread that COVID Zero is impossible and I really wonder what strategy people think would get us there (even a 2 year lockdown until 2024 wouldn't do it by now). that doesn't mean that we should throw all caution to the wind either though, which is what too many people want to do (vaxxed and un-vaxxed). caek's link from earlier about how controlling the spread was helpful in illustrating that COVID becoming endemic doesn't mean we can stop taking measures and just go "ok it's here to stay now, guess we should just let it run its course", as that will mean years of high transmission, hospitalization, long covid, and death, but with effort, it could at least be a much less harmless virus once it's much less 'novel'.

The fact that we're only discussing those scenarios in mid-2021 because a gaggle of dipshits put their freedoms ahead of public health makes me unspeakably angry. And that's the shit I want to mash into the face of every anti-vaxxer: WE COULD BE BACK TO (somewhat) NORMAL NOW IF NOT FOR YOU.

it is their fault (i know, i know, the anti-vaccine people, not the people who have good reasons or just can't understand). they are to blame. and there is no accountability. that went away at the end of the previous era.

i think it would be a good idea to construct a new jerusalem in the sky above the existing one, and then put a sign called "heaven" on it and a bunch of stairs, and tell all the anti-vaxxers that the rapture happened and to go to the new jerusalem in the sky. i bet they would do it. then, when they're all in one place, maybe the actual rapture would happen and they really would go away. i think that's the only way to trigger the rapture and get rid of them, is to actually make the rapture happen. reagan understood this instinctively but did not complete his mission

^ some heavy viral shedding going on there

in heaven there is no sickness. because if you get sick they send you back to earth

The bonus? Liquidating the anti-vaccers also liquidates a healthy component of Trumpists.

This is what we need, and we can do it for much less money:

https://media0.giphy.com/media/l2Je87QlNqPh2QdDW/200.gif

Is there any good data on how many people are legit hardcore "antivax" vs just hesitant/lazy?

one of my friends posted something on Facebook like "so in order to combat the Delta variant, Fauci is telling us to do all the same things that didn't work the first time?" and honestly I wanted to just strangle him

That's like blaming the instructions for the Ikea desk that collapsed because you were drunk when you built it.

delta peaked and then cases dramatically decreased in india already:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/coronavirus-how-india-is-doing-now-after-delta-variant-spread.html

the problem is we may be in this "endless" loop where a new mutation (delta plus) is stronger at "defeating" the vaccines and then a new vaccine is developed to defeat it. at that point, it seems like scientists are in a race against new variants and we wait until they become too weak to actually hospitalize anyone, if that ever happens.

there's a bunch of variables that are unknown, but even at a full vaccination rate that is "high," the question is does a variant just need a "few" hosts (as opposed to "a lot") to turn into a deadly or serious virus? mathematically, you're odds rise the more hosts you have, but this all seems like unexplored territory and has really revealed how corrupt and poorly science is done across the world. i think we're just left with trying to avoid overburdening hospitals for now.

endless
defeating
high
few
a lot

fuck, that was almost a perfect grid!

The bonus? Liquidating the anti-vaccers also liquidates a healthy component of Trumpists.

Pretty sure the GOP establishment is well aware of this... as is Hannity et al. Some elections hinge on a handful of votes, this can't be lost on them.

Or can it?

That this obvious case and obvious decision counts as good news shows you where we are:

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a request to enjoin Indiana University’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, letting the Bloomington-based school system proceed with its requirement that students, faculty and staff be inoculated against the virus before returning to campus this month.

Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote for the unanimous appellate panel that also included Judges Michael Scudder and Thomas Kirsch. The panel on Monday handed down the order denying the injunction sought by a group of IU students in Ryan Klaassen, et al. v. Trustees of Indiana University, 21-2326.

The eight plaintiffs had argued the mandate violated their 14th Amendment rights to bodily autonomy and integrity and to medical treatment choice.

The school allows exemptions for medical, religious and ethical reasons, and at the time of the initial 7th Circuit filings, seven of the eight plaintiffs had either been granted an exemption or were eligible. Those granted an exemption must wear a mask, practice social distancing and participate in regular COVID testing.

The Indiana Northern District Court denied the students’ request to enjoin the mandate, then declined to stay its ruling pending appeal. The plaintiffs likewise asked the 7th Circuit to stay enforcement of the mandate pending appeal, seeking relief by July 31.

The appellate court waited until Monday to hand down its denial.

“Given Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), which holds that a state may require all members of the public to be vaccinated against smallpox, there can’t be a constitutional problem with vaccination against SARS-CoV-2,” Easterbrook wrote Monday. “Plaintiffs assert that the rational-basis standard used in Jacobson does not offer enough protection for their interests and that courts should not be as deferential to the decisions of public bodies as Jacobson was, but a court of appeals must apply the law established by the Supreme Court.”

Jacobson defeats the plaintiffs’ argument that IU’s vaccine mandate violated their fundamental rights, thus implicating substantive due process, Easterbrook wrote. And, he added, “this case is easier than Jacobson for the University, for two reasons.”

First, Jacobson upheld a vaccine mandate that did not allow for exceptions for adults, while IU’s mandate does have exceptions. And second, unlike in Jacobson, “Indiana does not require every adult member of the public to be vaccinated … ,” the 7th Circuit held.

“Each university may decide what is necessary to keep other students safe in a congregate setting. Health exams and vaccinations against other diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, varicella, meningitis, influenza, and more) are common requirements of higher education. Vaccination protects not only the vaccinated person but also those who come in contact with them, and at a university close contact is inevitable,” Easterbrook wrote for the panel.

Mind, this is a circuit court with two Trump nutjobs.

Lindsey Graham has the cove! Let's all cross our fingers

I mean, at least he's advocating for vaccinations... I hate that I have to give him credit even for that, but if it changes a few minds...

Lindsey is craven, but not stupid. He probably is vaccinated, in which case this would be a breakthrough case that would very likely not kill him.

yeah he's jabbed

Yeah, he says as much in his advocating for others to get vaxxed.

the cruel thing about all this is we'd finally gotten to the point where we collectively realized that the Trump wing were people who absolutely could not be bargained with or convinced of anything and therefore it was much easier to just ignore them and let them be idiots and now we're in a situation where we actually need their cooperation

delta peaked and then cases dramatically decreased in india already:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/coronavirus-how-india-is-doing-now-after-delta-variant-spread.html

the problem is we may be in this "endless" loop where a new mutation (delta plus) is stronger at "defeating" the vaccines and then a new vaccine is developed to defeat it. at that point, it seems like scientists are in a race against new variants and we wait until they become too weak to actually hospitalize anyone, if that ever happens.

there's a bunch of variables that are unknown, but even at a full vaccination rate that is "high," the question is does a variant just need a "few" hosts (as opposed to "a lot") to turn into a deadly or serious virus? mathematically, you're odds rise the more hosts you have, but this all seems like unexplored territory and has really revealed how corrupt and poorly science is done across the world. i think we're just left with trying to avoid overburdening hospitals for now.

― Punster McPunisher, Monday, August 2, 2021 2:15 PM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In the past, I always remember learning that movies/sci-fi kind of exaggerate the "mutant virus" threat. That yes, viruses mutate, but it's pretty unusual for them to become both more contagious and more deadly. Is there something about COVID that mutates differently than other viruses? Shouldn't every cold and flu and every other virus out there pose some risk of mutating into something more dangerous? I just don't ever remember people becoming this concerned about hypothetical future versions of a virus before.

Like why would this be "unexplored territory" when we have history with so many other viruses?

mRNA vaccines are remarkably and beautifully protean.

xpost Because in the past other deadly viruses were countered and stalled with vaccines that people actually took?

In retrospect, it's seems slightly delusional that the J&J vaccine could be administered in a single dose. That's the one I got, and wanted at the time

Humankind has a very long history with cold and influenza viruses, so we have a reservoir of immunity that is constantly refreshed as the various strains circulate. But you may recall that it was a new, more-deadly strain of influenza that caused the 1919 worldwide pandemic that killed between 20 and 50 million people, so yes, flu virus can mutate into something more dangerous and kill a ton of people. It happened not so long ago.

Sure, it can happen, it just seems like people act like they are expecting it to happen any day now. I mean, to this day the flu vaccine has a very low uptake rate and isn't even that great at preventing transmission, yet it seems like we only get a substantially more deadly strain every few decades or so?

viruses like COVID becoming more deadly actually is the antithesis to their goal, because killing a significant amount of their hosts puts their survival in jeopardy, though obviously plenty of viruses have a high mortality rate.

I think Dr Angela Rasmussen had it right - yes we should be worried about future variants that might have more ability to escape immunity, but isn't Delta enough of a motherfucker that we should finish fighting it first? and it is unlikely that a future variant would be able to evade immune response from the vaccinated entirely (her words).

Beta was actually a mutation that better evaded immune response than even Delta itself but it was so much less transmissible that it got alpha-maled the fuck out of the way by delta

Just because it's a small bugaboo of mine, most of those that died in 1919 died of pneumonia, not the flu, because we didn't have antibiotics yet.

right -- so, the 1918/19 flu outbreak was, biologically, a different kind of pathogen. one of the main reasons it was so deadly was it was spread so quickly by infected soldiers in a time when science didn't have very good telescopes to analyze the virus. also, the world was less connected. no real sharing of information or internet or database of scientific research/data. a similar kind of flu would not create such an issue these days.

obviously i'm not a virologist, but my unexplored territory comment was because, depending on which origin theory you believe in, it looks like there was no need for a different host species for the virus to mutate into a stronger variant. in other words, mutation, transmissibility, and strength happened between bats and directly jumped into an ecosystem (the human species) where it appears to be flourishing. and now humans have been able to spread it so quickly and strongly; this is already a huge problem because most viruses die in a new host species quite easily.

the other issue is, and i know i'm wording this poorly, the more the virus encounters its host species, the more it finds a way to evade its immunity.

this is pretty interesting:

https://scitechdaily.com/new-research-finds-sars-cov-2-the-virus-that-causes-covid-19-jumped-from-bats-to-humans-without-much-change/

Pond comments, “what’s been so surprising is just how transmissible SARS-CoV-2 has been from the outset. Usually viruses that jump to a new host species take some time to acquire adaptations to be as capable as SARS-CoV-2 at spreading, and most never make it past that stage, resulting in dead-end spillovers or localized outbreaks.”

Studying the mutational processes of SARS-CoV-2 and related sarbecoviruses (the group of viruses SARS-CoV-2 belongs to from bats and pangolins), the authors find evidence of fairly significant change, but all before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. This means that the ‘generalist’ nature of many coronaviruses and their apparent facility to jump between hosts, imbued SARS-CoV-2 with ready-made ability to infect humans and other mammals, but those properties probably evolved in bats prior to spillover to humans.

Joint first author and PhD student Spyros Lytras adds, “Interestingly, one of the closer bat viruses, RmYN02, has an intriguing genome structure made up of both SARS-CoV-2-like and bat-virus-like segments. Its genetic material carries both distinct composition signatures (associated with the action of host anti-viral immunity), supporting this change of evolutionary pace occurred in bats without the need for an intermediate animal species.”

Robertson comments, “the reason for the ‘shifting of gears’ of SARS-CoV-2 in terms of its increased rate of evolution at the end of 2020, associated with more heavily mutated lineages, is because the immunological profile of the human population has changed.” The virus towards the end of 2020 was increasingly coming into contact with existing host immunity as numbers of previously infected people are now high. This will select for variants that can dodge some of the host response. Coupled with the evasion of immunity in longer-term infections in chronic cases (e.g., in immunocompromised patients), these new selective pressures are increasing the number of important virus mutants.

It’s important to appreciate SARS-CoV-2 still remains an acute virus, cleared by the immune response in the vast majority of infections. However, it’s now moving away faster from the January 2020 variant used in all of the current vaccines to raise protective immunity. The current vaccines will continue to work against most of the circulating variants but the more time that passes, and the bigger the differential between vaccinated and not-vaccinated numbers of people, the more opportunity there will be for vaccine escape. Robertson adds, “The first race was to develop a vaccine. The race now is to get the global population vaccinated as quickly as possible.”

having said that, i haven't read the PLoS research paper the article above is based on. it's this one in case you feel like checking it out:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001115#sec002

WHO said two weeks ago lab leak can't be ruled out fwiw

i write depending on what origin theory you believe in because of this, fyi, from the PLoS article (i gave it a quick look):

Nonetheless, the amount of time between the first spillover of the progenitor SARS-CoV-2 in humans and sequencing the first variants remains unknown. This raises the concern that important changes might have taken place in that “unsampled” period that cannot be picked up by our SARS-CoV-2 genomic analysis. Despite the inability to directly address these concerns without earlier SARS-CoV-2 sequences or broader sampling of the virus’s close relatives, such adaptive changes should theoretically be detected in our Sarbecovirus analysis. That we fail to find evidence of diversifying selection on the terminal branch leading up to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in humans (Fig 2B), indicates that the adaptations that created a generalist capable of efficient replication in humans and other mammals, probably did not occur in the unsampled SARS-CoV-2 lineage.

Just want to point out I remember being dunked on for comments like this months back:

But also, at some point there needs to be a non-shifting standard for what is "safe." Once teachers are vaccinated, do we also need to have the lowest possible community spread AND masks AND 6 feet distancing AND barriers AND cohorting AND no eating indoors? Because at some point that makes returning to school pragmatically impossible. COVID is here to stay, we aren't going to eradicate it.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, February 13, 2021 6:00 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Why not

― Canon in Deez (silby), Saturday, February 13, 2021 6:04 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, that's kind of the consensus among epidemiologists right now

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, February 13, 2021 6:09 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/coronavirus-dr-fauci-says-he-doubts-whether-covid-can-be-eradicated.html
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/21/world/science-health-world/vaccines-coronavirus-eradication/
the-scientist.com/news-opinion/sars-cov-2-isnt-going-away-experts-predict-68386
https://qz.com/1968898/will-the-covid-19-vaccines-end-the-pandemic/

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, February 13, 2021 6:11 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

to some extent, same reasons we never eradicated flu or the common cold, to some extent different reasons specific to COVID

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, February 13, 2021 6:12 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

let me rock that dunkie dunkie