Dammit Chile.
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isn’t the immune system at the crux of some experimental cancer treatments? my understanding was that this was in the works, except the mRNA technique being novel.
eta: read your followup. i couldn’t remember the immunomodulation term.
Something for everybody. Basically says as case density gets high, school transmission increases. Not a big surprise. Fits with the general concept of making decisions to keep community spread down and keep schools safely open. But when the community is effed the schools make it even worse and need to be limited until the community spread is low.
I’m sure this will somehow be controversial. But wth.
https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1341791713187287042?s=21
This caveat is important. What was “high” case density when this study was done is well below where we are now.
https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1341792326700691462?s=21
Suggest reading the whole twitter thread as well.
The variant has been causing mounting concern in South Africa, where health minister Zweli Mkhize warned that “young, previously healthy people are now becoming very sick”.
He said the country “cannot go through what we went through in the early days of the Aids pandemic”.
https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970259332325383?s=20
https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970261903433731?s=20
https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970587104522240?s=20
I mean, I haven’t. Way less tbh.
Are you in South Africa monitoring the new strain? Which is already in France and the UK.
I’ll take the findings of the Health Minister in SA for the time being and see what the UK government conclude
Czech Republic back over 10,000 new cases/day. Over 30% positive cases per day again as well.
Schools might be in full shutdown mode when I get back.
Christian Drosten who is the most public face of the German Covid response was quoted on the radio that he expects that the new variant is already all over Europe and it is only a matter of time before it is detected.
Edited to add: He is not yet concerned about the new variant because there are still multiple possible explanations why it spreads this rapidly.
Yes, though any particular provider may only have one or the other. Some providers (Walgreens? CVS? not sure) have already said they’ll be buying from both Pfizer and Moderna, plus whatever else comes along. So yes, you will be able to decide which one you want if you care about that.
Interesting. This is a case where I don’t want the choice. I don’t have any knowledge at all about these vaccines, and I don’t want the stress of trying to determine whether one is better for me than the other. Just shoot me up and kick me out the door without even telling me which one you gave me.
That’s what I tell my dealer, too.
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yeah I can’t really imagine preferring one over the other given that I don’t know anything about the specifics of either of them, I’m just going to get the jab wherever I can get it first and I’ll take whatever they have.
Met the mother in law halfway for our COVID masked outside Christmas exchange in the Panera parking lot. Went surprisingly well actually… she cried when we left but my wife held it together like a champ.
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The AstraZeneca results were just wonky enough that I’d prefer Pfizer or Moderna all else being equal, but there’s not much of a difference in the effectiveness data between the latter two.
TPWKY has a very good new episode on COVID vaccines:
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Those won’t protect others very well due to the valves unless you cover the valves with surgical masks also
Just use a 3-layer cloth mask and be done with it. That’s fine for store trips, etc.
Cloth when I’m working hard gets soaked and I’ll go through half a dozen in a day. Not as bad now that its winter and the buildings are cold and I’m not working as hard. But yeah those don’t work to well with some of the things I have to do.
Stores I use my N95 though.
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I’m a little confused by what this paper is saying. Do I have this correct?
- They did a regression analysis to estimate the parameters for a model where the impact of school format is dependent on the square of the existing case rate.
- The model was not significantly predictive on their data. (I.e., cannot reject the null that parameters are equal to zero)
- However, if you assume that there is a relationship and that the model parameters equal their point estimates, the model would predict a significant difference at largely out-of-sample values of case rates with very high confidence.
Is that a correct understanding? If not, what am I missing?
I think it’s relative rate of increase giving a positive slope to schools.
Cases low: a 10% community increase is a 10% increase in schools (give or take)
Cases are high a 10% comm increase is more than a 10% school increase
Then the last point, what was high in the paper is considered low now, my a multiplier. So basically with today’s case load the community impact on schools is extreme.
I think of it this way
When case loads are below some threshold there may not even by contagious people in the school or at least not in every classroom. At some point of community spread the certainty of most if not all rooms having one or multiple positives becomes a near certainty. And with long exposure times of sitting in the same place with the same infecteds for hours really challenges the effectiveness of mitigation measures.
It would likely have a curve shape similar to michaelis-menton kinetics used to describe enzymatic reactions.
Michaelis–Menten kinetics - Wikipedia except we’d my doing the reciprocals mathematically.