for me I thought Modified Frequency Modulation, used to be all the rage in hard drives in like 1982. Some of those were as big as 10MB, nobody’ll ever need more space than that!
1 Like
MFM is coming back I think. Couple of people have asked me to do MFM for some of their projects.
1 Like
(I assume that’s the joke)
3 Likes
UP exceptionalism.
Also UP isn’t “part of the US”.
POG (and SE) in it’s heyday was one of the best things on the internet. RIP
5 Likes
I absolutely loved following SE during football season at its peak.
Will never forget how Tebow to Demaryius Thomas broke the forums.
6 Likes
As expected, everyone in my household now has covid. Daughter held out until this morning.
Good thing the pandemic is over or our jobs and education would surely be disrupted.
15 Likes
still testing positive, though i haven’t had a fever again, and didn’t need a decongestant to sleep through the night. although i’m definitely weaker than precovid.
partner tested positive too, hopefully her peak symptoms were yesterday or today
5 Likes
Now my dad has tested positive. I don’t see how he possibly could have got it from us.
He typically watches my kid during the week. Is there any chance this is a different strain that we could catch and get again in a week or are we good
2 Likes
Unlikely but not impossible to catch again that fast depending on which variants you each have.
1 Like
Moderna said it could supply doses in the next few weeks, but exactly who will get them has yet to be announced.
All over-50s and people in high-risk groups will be offered some form of booster from next month.
I really hope the US has a better vaccine rollout this time.
No restricting eligibility to high risk people—just reserve public health facilities for high risk groups, and allow pharmacies to give it to everyone. This will solve a lot of the wild imbalance between vaccine availability across different places during the initial rollout, and get shots into arms much faster with a lot less wasted.
I think there’s always going to have to be some kind of early rationing for high-risk folks because these vaccines are just hard to make quickly. “Good” news is that I expect far fewer people are going to be lining up to get the latest upgrade so I suppose it will be easier to get.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and this may end up being a pretty optimal situation for those of us taking boosters regularly. If the boosters have 90-95% efficacy against the Omicron variants, natural immunity to the Omicron variants wanes fairly quickly, and around 40-60% of people don’t get boosters, we may be in a situation where the unboosted allow Omicron to remain the dominant variant for a long time, while the rest of us get good protection against it.
Obviously it’s a pretty terrible outcome for the unboosted if there are long-term effects of COVID re-infections, which I think is fairly likely, but it’s not like the rest of us are trying to talk them out of boosters or stopping them from getting vaxxed.
Pharmacies are also mega overwhelmed right now and wouldnt really be equipped to handle a high uptake rollout. We’d end up effectively rationing by privilege (i.e., who can sit at the computer for hours to find empty slots, who can take hours out of their day to travel to the far flung vax opening, etc). Like Trolly said though “fortunately” I kind of expect boosters to be less popular than flu shots.
Do we know for sure natural immunity wanes quickly for Omicron? Could it also be that ba.5 isn’t closely related to the other Omicron variants so you may be immune to whatever strain you had for a normal amount of time, but not the new one?
We dont know, but research for previous Omicron strains have found limited natural immunity to the same strain.
That seems possible, and I’m not sure we know yet. But in theory, if that’s the case, it could keep mutating within a tight range that the vaccines protect against and natural immunity doesn’t, and that’d have the same effect.
What I’m hoping here is that we’ve sort of cornered the virus down a string of mutations. If you think of it like a decision tree or something, we’ve hopefully blocked a bunch of branches of the tree with vaccinations and naturally acquired immunity. There are a limited number of branches that retain the ability to infect humans, allow a high R0, and will cause us significant problems. Now, maybe there are 5 branches and maybe there are 5,000. I don’t know. My hope is that it can’t find a new branch to go down, and we’re now forcing it down the Omicron branch where we can corner it and hopefully turn it into something no worse than the common cold (in short and long-term effects) for the vaccinated and regularly boosted.
Obviously that’s somewhat hopium, but it’s possible, and we don’t seem to have any new VOCs right now that are much different than the BA.4/BA.5 lineages, so there’s at least a chance!
Yeah boy I’m sure not optimistic about having an RNA virus trapped in a corner. Life finds a way, usually.
I see what you are getting at but I’m less optimistic that we’ve cornered the virus on mutations that can be harmful. Gonna get over my skis quickly, but havent seen a good reason why some of the mechanisms that viral experts have hypothesized made Delta more severe couldnt pop out as part of the Omicron line or, if we start coming up with effective Omicron boosters or other immune pressure, why we couldnt move back to a Delta lineage or a whole “new” lineage.
Do think its possible that the current path is a somewhat less harmful one, but going to depend heavily on how bad repeated infections are. If long COVID effects are limited or curable we should be able to cruise along in a new normal for the 80 and under crowd that looks a lot like 2019. Living beyond 80 looks pretty dicey until we get better vax or therapeutics though.