Bummer.
My barber is a center-right Italian immigrant and says some cringe things but he’s too damn good at his job to leave over that. Went through quite a few barbers until I found one that wasn’t a hack.
All true but there are a bunch of other factors and/or accelerants at play too. A culture that values a largely imagined rugged individualism. Decades of anti-government propaganda from the right. A whole generation of people that never suffered any real hardship so were not capable of rising to meet a real challenge.
As disappointing as this all is, what really is tragic is that not only is this global crisis not going to “save” society by making people realize the folly of the post Reagan global culture of deregulation, tax cuts, consumerism, and hating your neighbor, the overwhelming trend is that we are going to keep doing all of that stuff buy even more so. Instead of drawing together people into a unified group in response to a shared crisis, we’re just going to double down on all of our faults and do it with more deeply ingrained fault lines. The next decade is going to involve more entrenchment - more wealth inequality, more fenced communities, more “litmus testing” of people and immediately discarding them if they’re on the wrong side. A major source of global problems pre COVID was the inability of people to come together with necessary collective action to solve shared problems. That’s going to get even worse now. You can’t sit down and negotiate a collective action with anti vaxxer Freedom Convoy dipshits that live in an alternate reality.
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24 hours without a post in the COVID thread, wow.
Anyway I had somehow missed that Florida’s Surgeon General is borderline anti-vax, but it does not come as a surprise.
My friend sent me this, experts, is this something to be worried about? Surprising/unsurprising? Complete BS?
Thread (I’ve posted just a few of the key tweets in it):
https://twitter.com/COVIDnewsfast/status/1499589585365389312
https://twitter.com/COVIDnewsfast/status/1499589593472983042
https://twitter.com/COVIDnewsfast/status/1499589595087835138
https://twitter.com/COVIDnewsfast/status/1499589604499869697
We’ve moved on from armchair virology and epidemiology to armchair international relations and military science.
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Wow huge if true. I wonder why the ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine makers are keeping this a secret though? Cause I’d be like so pissed at the government if I worked at the horse paste company and knew all this. Feels like there’s gotta be some way to get this message out there? The person who did could probably make a lot of money. Ah well, probably never going to happen. Damn media.
Seems interesting but not a bombshell if it’s true imho. I’m sort of concerned by the complete lack of any citations.
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Anthony probably confirmed it by thinking about it, but I would like to see more research jumping off of this as long COVID is still sort of fog of war stuff and reinfection data is mixed. I do worry about cumulative damage from reinfection.
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All the technical stuff in the paper is over my head but I agree with Trolly that it doesn’t really seem like a bombshell if true, and it’s just an opinion article anyway. I would summarize it as “dude has a theory about T-cells and COVID”.
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Uhhh I’m tired but this seems like gibberish to me at first glance
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The opinion piece he is quoting is from a guy with a Ph.D. in immunology from prestigious colleges so it is presumably not gibberish. I think the Twitter guy’s summary of it is maybe not accurate, but I don’t understand the paper well enough to know for sure.
fuck me, Covid is going to lead to a whole host of antibiotic-resistent super germs isnt it?
I dug into the research on efficacy on the boosters against Omicron and timing of peak effectiveness and waning. Of course, I’m drawing conclusions from data on a third shot and applying it to a fourth, but…
For a Moderna booster, the peak efficacy appears to kick in about 2 weeks after the shot, possibly sooner. Data is grouped at 1 week and 2-4, so I’m doing a little guesswork. One week is higher than 2-4, but I’m assuming it keeps going up after that.
For a Pfizer/BioNTech booster, it’s higher in the 2-4 week range, so I’m guessing it peaks about 3-4 weeks after the shot.
Now, all that said, I think that the difference is pretty negligible in both cases between Week 2 and Week 4, and peak efficacy is about 66%. Moderna slightly higher. Peak efficacy against severe cases/hospitalization is around 90%, against death is around 80%. That’s against a sample of people with 2 shots, though, so compared to no shots at all it’s probably even better.
The waning begins in the 10-14 week range after the shot, and the Moderna shot seems to last a little longer. The efficacy is going to drop to like 40-45% at this point against a case.
So for me, I’m going to wait until either 1 or 2 weeks before the trip to get a shot because the trip itself is 10 weeks, and I want as much efficacy as possible for the duration and will trade a little on the front end for that.
I also took a deep dive into various arguments on the prevalence of Long Covid, lasting more than a few months without resolving on its own, and it seems like the risk for a vaccinated individual who catches COVID is in the neighborhood of 0.2% to 3%, and would likely be further reduced by Paxlovid.
How so?
No masks required at hotel in Bulgaria apparently.
Bulgaria was super loose with restrictions when I was there last summer. I mean they had them. Just nobody enforced them.
Only places that were enforcing anything were in Sofia.
Italy going strong with green pass in most of Milan at least.
The long COVID estimates seem plausible, but I have no idea how to put any level of certainty around them. Not enough time has passed.
Getting the shot a couple of weeks before your trip seems fine, otherwise wouldnt overthink it. If you are worried about getting COVID wearing a good mask will reduce your chances way way more than whether you got a booster 14 or 21 days before exposure or w/e.
I think my wife and I are going to go to our first indoor meal in two years tonight - a banquet for my son’s swim team. It’s going to feel strange as hell.
Also, not sure I have pants that fit - I’m pretty sure I haven’t worn anything dressier than jeans in two years.
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Yeah we’re still pondering what our masking protocols will be once boosted. Right now it’s N95’s indoors in public, and limiting our actual exposure to my parents and our close friends, and making sure they’re either being similarly careful or quarantining before the visit or testing before the visit.
Outdoor dining is probably going to be in play once the weather allows, and on the trip. We’re debating whether to do anything indoors unmasked after the boosters. We’ll see how case numbers are.
There’s definitely no certainty on anything past the first say 12 months from infection. This is just speaking to the fatigue, heart, lung, and brain issues that linger 3, 6, 12+ months from an infection. I read a lot of takes and statistical analysis and that seems like a good estimate. The rate within 3 months is much higher.
As for the long-term, it’s really anyone’s guess. There could be a mono → Epstein-Barr → MS type thing that we won’t know about for decades.