outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

How's everyone feeling about movie theaters at the moment? I'm still desperately hopping through listings, looking for sparsely attended screenings and generally avoiding weekends. But I look at a countless amount of seating charts all the time, and it seems most people don't care now. Am I still being overly paranoid?

We don't have too much of that kind of bellicose posturing in the UK that I've seen (other than musicians on the experimental circuit for some reason), more of a shrugging fatalism and the innate British attitude that it's all someone else's problem.

xpost

Fucked if I'm going to a cinema any time soon.

I'm certainly overly cautious but I have no plans to do theaters again anytime soon. Partly because the theater in our town closed last year and I'd have to go to more crowded screenings in the city, partly because very little has changed on the COVID front over the past several months even despite our ongoing mask mandate.

I will say that the Prince Charles Cinema is still doing social distancing, staggered showtimes, one way exits. So as much as they can short of not letting ppl w/o masks in.

It's quite possible to pay for a noon or 1 p.m. show and get a sparsely populated experience. I went in the middle of a Saturday to watch Titane, one of six people. I remained masked and felt perfectly safe.

i've been to the cinema plenty of times and there's never been more than about 10 people there. i don't mask because i'm constantly slurping soda and eating popcorn. AITA?

OL, since we've learned that we live near the same now shuttered theater, pretty much sums up my standing as of now, though I'm also holding off until my son gets jabbed.

I will say that I'm starting to dream of a future when I don't have to wear a mask for 9-10 consecutive hours per day (yet another minus for the open plan office, which means I'm effectively in a public space 100% of my day) at work. Illinois and Chicago are both saying the indoor mask mandate for everyone will stay "until more people get vaccinated". Given the number of intransigent assholes out there, I'm guessing this means... always? Don't get me wrong, given current cases, I'd rather have the mandate than not, but I can understand why even the most well meaning and obedient people are getting a little despairing about masks being a thing for many years to come.

vaccine take-up probably accounts for a lot of the difference in attitude. it’s easier for people to feel both personally safe and that they’re not running the risk of spreading anything when they know approx 80% of the eligible population has been vaccinated.

Quite like to go to see the new Velvet Underground doc in a couple of weeks.

Maybe taking day off and going at an early day screening could work out!

I mean, to be crystal clear, I'm not anti-mask and I happily wear it all day and whenever I pop into any indoor space. It's clearly helping to reduce transmission and I'm happy the mandate has in place here through the Delta wave, just noting that I can understand why fully vaxxed people might be ready to consider some real triggers/thresholds for when they might not be required and not just vague mutterings about "not forever".

I've meaning to write a "COVID endgame" thread for a while and I apologize this is somewhat delayed compared to media interviews like https://t.co/dQuo9i6ER7 and https://t.co/48MmCeq33g and to recent seminars like https://t.co/PGcgDinSNT. 1/17

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) October 13, 2021

Thanks for sharing, this tweet in particular stood out:

Together, this would suggest perhaps 40k or 100k deaths per year in the US from COVID at endemic state. Most infections would be relatively mild (just like flu), but there's enough of them that even a small fraction of severe outcomes add up. 15/17

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) October 13, 2021

Which would put this significantly higher than the flu, at least compared to the last ten years of data:

2010-2011 37,000 (32,000 – 51,000)
2011-2012 12,000 (11,000 – 23,000)
2012-2013 43,000 (37,000 – 57,000)
2013-2014 38,000 (33,000 – 50,000)
2014-2015 51,000 (44,000 – 64,000)
2015-2016 23,000 (17,000 – 35,000)
2016-2017 38,000 (29,000 – 61,000)
2017-2018* 61,000 (46,000 – 95,000)
2018-2019* 34,000 (26,000 – 53,000)
2019-2020* 22,000 (18,000 – 29,000)

That didn't format well at all, but the second digit is estimated flu deaths for each season, with the uncertainty interval in parentheses)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/09/negative-pcr-test-covid-symptoms-self-isolate

(Leaving aside wtf is a 'rapid PCR'?) this positive-LFTs-then-negative-PCR is definitely a thing where I am in the UK (anecdotally, usually occurring where the person is actually ill) but the messaging around it is a disaster for getting anyone to do anything other than essentially 'guess whether you think you have COVID'.

The past few weeks one of my kids has had 'covid symptoms' (ie a high temp, not that unusual in pre-schoolers) a couple of times, for the first time since before covid. There seems to be a lot going around as they say, requiring PCR tests which I'm now not as confident in as I was.

xp do bear in mind those are back of the envelope estimates/calculations, probably good to within a factor of a few. the low end of his 40-100k estimate in the US is pretty much in line with flu.

Yeah, I'm not taking those numbers as gospel or anything, was just curious to compare.

Mudhoney bassist Guy Maddison, who is an ER nurse by day, on his experience working through the pandemic (in Seattle, where the initial US outbreak was), and his attitude toward returning to shows as punter or performer:

https://crosscut.com/culture/2021/10/mosh-pit-er-mudhoney-bassist-being-nurse-during-covid

Good stuff, thanks.

Yes, great read. I'm still not quite at live shows yet but I'll see how I feel post-booster next month. At this point I'm comfortable with going to the theater and just watching a movie, no food or drink. (It helps there's an Alamo five blocks away and they've got empty seat policies separating ticket buyers, which is all right by me.)

Good thread on the under reported mortality:

For example, the Economist’s analysis is brilliant and uses this data to infer excess deaths worldwide, suggesting that currently over 16 million deaths have occurred worldwide. Over 3 times as many as reported. Thank you @Sondreus for all this work https://t.co/IJrASYk3B6

— OJ Watson (@ojwatson92) October 14, 2021

Wish the Economist article didn't require registration.

Try this: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fgraphic-detail%2Fcoronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Thanks!

i try not to follow this stuff closely too days, but it's hard not to notice. i assume this is a common dynamic between police in cities that mandate vaccinations

Tensions between Chicago’s mayor and police over the city’s vaccine mandate grew this week as the head of the police union urged officers to ignore a deadline to report their vaccination status.

Chicago city employees, including police officers, are required to report their vaccination status by Friday. Employees who aren’t vaccinated will be required to get tested twice weekly, a temporary measure until the end of the year as the city decides what to do with unvaccinated employees.

But the head of the Chicago branch of the Fraternal Order of Police, John Catanzara, urged members of the union in a video message this week to “hold the line.”

He told officers not to submit their vaccination statuses, and instead to flood the city with exemption requests on Thursday.

“Submit those all on Thursday, give them everything at one time, and that’s it,” he said. “Do not fill out the portal information,” he added, referring to the reporting of vaccination statuses to the city.

Officers and other city employees who fail to report their vaccination status by Friday will “be placed in a non-disciplinary, no pay status,” according to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office.

Catanzara said that “it’s safe to say the city of Chicago will have a police force at 50 percent or less” over the weekend.

“Whatever happens because of that manpower issue, that falls at the mayor’s doorstep,” he said.

They've already been working at 50 percent capacity, if that, all year now, so, good, fuck 'em. They haven't done jack shit anyway.

I'm not usually one to be doomposting about the violence in the city, but shit has gotten wild this year. I'm not arguing that we need more police, but this summer was rife with motorcycle and car groups taking over intersections for hours at a time to film each other doing donuts and there was, if I'm remembering right, three rolling shootouts in River North in four days, an area that doesn't usually see that sort of thing. In all cases there wasn't a cop to be seen anyway, so not sure we'd notice a difference even if these crybabies throw another temper tantrum.

his summer was rife with motorcycle and car groups taking over intersections for hours at a time to film each other doing donuts

looks like you don't take too kindly to the hyphy movement

Untrue. If it was E-40 and Mister FAB out there instead of a hundred ding-dongs TikToking each other for the clout, I'd be all for it!

Damn it, Mistah FAB. I knew that too.

As a person who does not give the tiniest fuck about sports, it amuses me greatly that the anti-vax basketball player is also a literal flat-earther.

I've resumed the cautious dining indoors again, always at lunch at a place I know with open doors and windows and whose staff is masked.

Speaking of Chicago, I could have sworn I saw, at least in passing, that despite a supposed vaccine mandate the mayor is letting the unvaxxed school employees slide, at least for now. I mean, you want labor shortage? The Chicago schools can't even afford to lose 1% of their employees. Apparently it's been a mess at the relatively stable local middle schools where I am, with kids just wilding out, lots of fights, pushing back against teachers, all often overseen by old folks brought out of retirement to help but unable to intervene. There was a big fight a couple of weeks ago, and one of these retired teachers supposedly looked to a student and implored, feebly, "do something." So the kid got involved, got punched in the face, and then got suspended for fighting.

And re: violence in Chicago, I never thought shootouts on the highway were a thing, but ... they're sure a thing now.

never thought shootouts on the highway were a thing, but ... they're sure a thing now.

One of the NRA's stupidest and most loathsome pieces of propaganda was their pushing the idea that arming everyone would ensure a more polite society, because everyone would realize that if they made anyone else angry, they'd get shot, and therefore everyone would go out of their way never to anger anyone else. I used to hear this one a lot when I was around gun nuts. It's the kind of 'logical conclusion' that also spawns libertarians who believe the cure for all our social ills is pure, unfettered laissez faire capitalism.

xpost - Yeah, Lightfoot is doing a tremendous job at buckling every time a union pushes back about a mandate. Fwiw, I don't think she's changed anything about the school employees, but pushed back the deadline six weeks (which still sucks, but it's not really changing - they always could opt out by testing 2x per week (which is also still dumb, but hardly unique to Chicago at this point)).

This is what I saw in the Trib

Chicago Public Schools employees who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Friday’s deadline will still be able to work Monday, but they will have to undergo weekly testing at their schools, the district’s CEO said Wednesday.

“Employees will not be barred from coming (to) work (the) Monday after the Oct. 15 deadline. What we’re going to be doing is just working with them. They will have to get tested, and we’ll have COVID testing at their schools, so that will be convenient for them,” new CPS CEO Pedro Martinez said at a news conference.

“And then we’re going to just work with them to see where they’re at in the vaccination process, what hesitation they might have, what information we can give them. I feel fairly confident, just based on how high our (vaccination) percentage is, that it’s not going to be a big issue in our district.”

Martinez said more than 85% of CPS staff are vaccinated, and employees are submitting proof of vaccination every day.

The similar thing with city workers, I guess, who now have until the end of the year to get vaxxed. Same test-out option, I think, but at their own expense.

j/v/c, yes, it was all jokes.

trust me when i say that i find the dirtbike and quad crew in Philly to be fucking rad, but also terribly noisome and occasionally dangerous. luckily it's most just lots of group rides that move at a rapid clip, no taking over intersections for hours...at least in my neighborhood.

I knew you were joking, hence my E-40 post.

it's kind of striking to look at the graphs of new cases by individual state. Most of the southern states had massive spikes and now have some of the lowest daily rates. Did delta just burn through the population to the point where it's run out of places to go? Is this what herd immunity looks like? I don't expect this will last, but I wasn't expecting such a dramatic turnaround.

it's sort of what it's been doing in most places.

Florida right now has 3.8% test positivity rate and less than 20,000 cases this week. we didn't get there by actually giving a shit or anything.

- Fewer people left to infect

- However small the daily numbers, people get vaccinated every day; the totals rise

- Masks and social distancing observed in major cities

- Some kind of low level herd immunity

I'm fairly skeptical about #2 and #3 being a factor here

It is in Florida's cities, overwhelmingly blue.

https://covidactnow.org/us/florida-fl/?s=24301344

fully vaccinated was 49% august 1 and it's 59% now. fraction with one dose also up by 10% in the same period.

this is a pretty handy chart to see how vaccinations have progressed by state

https://ourworldindata.org/us-states-vaccinations

looks like a uniform 10% climb across southern states during that same period of time, although Florida has been way out ahead overall during that time

See, we'll all put up different charts.

I use the CDC's. Even given Miami-Dade County's propensity to count visiting Latin Americans who give phony addresses, our rates, if you discount them, are above 60-65%

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations-county-view|Florida|12086|Vaccinations|Administered_Dose1_Pop_Pct

also didn't realize until just now that nearly half the world's population, 3.73 billion people, has had at least one shot. I imagined it was hundreds of millions but not yet billions. That's pretty impressive!

especially given the time frame. got to be some sort of first in human history.

this suggests that human behavior doesn't have too much to do with it.

Worldwide, cases have also dropped more than 30 percent since late August. “This is as good as the world has looked in many months,” Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Research wrote last week.

These declines are consistent with a pattern that regular readers of this newsletter will recognize: Covid’s mysterious two-month cycle. Since the Covid virus began spreading in late 2019, cases have often surged for about two months — sometimes because of a variant, like Delta — and then declined for about two months.

Epidemiologists do not understand why. Many popular explanations, like seasonality or the ebbs and flows of social distancing, are clearly insufficient, if not wrong. The two-month cycle has occurred during different seasons of the year and occurred even when human behavior was not changing in obvious ways.

The most plausible explanations involve some combination of virus biology and social networks. Perhaps each virus variant is especially likely to infect some people but not others — and once many of the most vulnerable have been exposed, the virus recedes. And perhaps a variant needs about two months to circulate through an average-sized community.

Human behavior does play a role, with people often becoming more careful once caseloads begin to rise. But social distancing is not as important as public discussion of the virus often imagines. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” as Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota, has told me.

The recent declines, for example, have occurred even as millions of American children have again crowded into school buildings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/briefing/covid-caseload-retreat-us-cases.html