COVID-19: Chapter 8 - Ongoing source of viral information, and a little fun

I was fooled. :rage: Reading too much Daily Mail I guess.

Ugghhh mid winter? What happened to October?

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Yeah, this was pretty disappointing news in the spidercrab household tonight. Our youngest is entering 6th grade and isn’t eligible until next summer. And the superintendent has already said that masks will not be required this year, even for unvaccinated individuals, although “they are welcome”.

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Yep I was really hoping to have a fully vaxxed house this school year. Two of my 3 kids wear glasses and those plus masks were a tough ask last year.

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I agree with most of this, but framing in bolded is misleading.

I mean if you said “skeptical that a drug that is effective against a protozoan parasite would just happen to be effective against lupus”, it would sound equally ridiculous…except for the fact that it is commonly used in patients with lupus.

The reason why it works in lupus is because it has some immunosuppressive properties. If COVID does damage by inducing a very robust inflammatory response, then it would seem plausible that something like hydroxychloroquine might be helpful.

EDIT: Above should not be seen as an endorsement of the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID. I’m just saying that the thought of using it was not that unreasonable prior to the studies being done. It has since been proven ineffective.

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That’s nonsense. The fact that there’s more than 1 medicine that was found to work in unexpected ways doesn’t outweigh the near infinite medicines that didn’t work in some unexpected way.

LOL, obviously.

That has nothing to with my point, which was very specifically related to one part of Wookie’s post.

I even bolded it for you. And I said I agreed with most of Wookie’s post.

Try reading better.

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:+1:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-16/biontech-shot-produces-10-times-sinovac-antibodies-study-finds

Even heavily vaccinated Vermont is seeing a noticeable uptick in cases.

Our 7DMA has nearly tripled in the past week.

Granted, it did start from a pretty low point (4 in the state per day a week ago), but that number is at 11 now.

Yeah, this is not good. One of the charts I periodically look at is: what % of large counties are experiencing low/moderate/high case rates? This gives me a high-level view of the pervasiveness of new cases across the country, which is something I don’t think is captured by just looking at the aggregate rate of new cases.

Large counties are population above 100,000.
Low case rates: Weekly cases (trailing 7 days) less than 50 per 100,000 population
Moderate case rates: Weekly cases between 50-100 per 100,000
High case rates: Weekly cases >100 per 100,000
[I think these definitions have changed over time, but I’m sticking with these numbers.]

I tried to label it to make it a little more clear.

Basically, things were looking great, as we had gone from ~100% of counties experiencing a high rate of new cases in January, to approximately 0% of counties having a high rate in June. But now that number has jumped back up to about 10% of counties experiencing a high rate.

Obviously (because these have to sum to 100%), you get the same story looking at the low rate. Basically no counties were experiencing a low rate of new cases through the winter, but the “low rate” counties skyrocketed to close to 90% by June as vaccinations started ramping up. But over the last month or so, the “low rate” counties have dropped from 90% to just over 60%.

Not good

https://twitter.com/mikegalsworthy/status/1412485346357612544

https://twitter.com/mikegalsworthy/status/1415995344895287300

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Ugh

Natalya Murakhver, a New York City parent, said that her two children, ages 7 and 11, have been adversely affected by the city’s mask requirement.

“They’re so dehydrated, and on hot days, they come out sweaty and exhausted, and they have headaches,” she said. “They have become more claustrophobic, and my 7-year-old started mumbling. Prior to the mask, she was speaking beautifully, but after the mask, we couldn’t understand what she was saying.”

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Czech Republic is gonna let it ride. For months, the courts have ruled that the way the rules have been applied are unconstitutional. Basically they’re suggestions now.

There’s enough social pressure to get people to follow some of them. But they can’t be properly enforced due to the court’s rulings here.

Bulgaria has already seemed to do that. I actually forgot my mask where I was staying and assumed that I’d basically be cool going anywhere with it. When I walked into a supermarket and briefly went shopping, I was right.

Maybe Bulgarian blood holds the secret to defending against covid.

EDIT: In positive news, numbers are slightly down this week in the CR. Reproduction rate dropped quite a bit too in the last week.

Trump supporting something is ipso facto very strong evidence it is nonsense.

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Looks like the CDC just announced this identical pattern at the county level:
https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/1416056227805736960

This is a more-suitable format for the data than my line graph, but the message is obviously the same:

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Meh, if Trump just came out and said “my position on everything is the opposite of whatever the Democratic party’s position is,” which is basically what his actual positions are, he’d have plenty of positions that are reasonable or even good. For the wrong reasons, obv, but still reasonable.

Hell, he could have staked out a position like “I think the opposite of whatever the CDC says” and still would have gotten masks right at the very beginning of the pandemic.

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I often wonder what would have happened if Trump had won the election and, quickly thereafter, announced that vaccines were available on an extremely accelerated schedule. There’s no way I would have felt comfortable taking one, and I wonder if the vaccination heat maps would have been entirely inverted.

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