Headline: “74 percent of Americans say their lives have returned to ‘normal’”
A full 70 percent of unvaccinated Americans, for instance — the people who continue to account for nearly all COVID hospitalizations and deaths — describe their own lives as normal, and about a quarter of them say their lives are “very normal” (25 percent) or “never stopped” being normal to begin with (27 percent). That’s more than the number of vaccinated Americans who say the same (19 percent and 8 percent, respectively).
Likewise, nearly two-thirds of unvaccinated Americans (65 percent) now say that COVID poses either a “small” threat (31 percent) or “no” threat (34 percent) to them personally, and just 42 percent of unvaccinated Americans — compared to 63 percent of fully vaccinated Americans — say they wear a mask in public always or most of the time.
This suggests that in many cases, the people with the least protection against COVID are also the ones being the least careful about it — a dynamic that could make the coming winter wave more difficult and deadly than it needs to be.
It’s peak Boomer shit to sail through this pandemic without a care in the world while their children are stressed out about their health for two or more years.
More good ivermectin discussion from a legitimate expert in evaluating medical studies.
Fourth , the comment on my biases. I am happy to own up to most of these. For example, yes, I am (slightly) biased against high effect size studies. See this article on Impossibly Hungry Judges for where I’m getting my intuitions on this. If you claim a very large effect size, it should be really obvious. If some studies show medium-low effect sizes and others medium-high, that’s within the range of normal variability and methodological disagreement and so on. If some studies show it cures literally everyone, and others show it does nothing whatsoever, then something has gone terribly wrong: maybe one group is making up data. If it’s a random sketchy guy who has a history of having made up data before (eg Carvallo) vs. huge trials run by legions of prestigious scientists, I’m going to assume it’s the first guy. This is especially true in the context of a few good ivermectin studies (eg Mahmud), which show that it has decent effect size like every other drug, but doesn’t cure literally everyone. Mahmud disagrees with the ones that find no effect, but it equally disagrees with the ones that find it’s a 100% perfect cure.
I am happy to own up to being biased against certain countries. I am not sure that the Egyptian scientific community has as strong an anti-fraud mechanism as some other places, given their history of fraudulent papers. I feel bad for innocent Egyptian scientists who might have a harder time getting people to take them seriously as a result, but not so bad that if an Egyptian paper comes up with results much better than everyone else, I’m not going to be suspicious.
I’ve been thinking about this in the context about how ivmmeta does better and clearer science communication than everyone else. As the saying goes, “for every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong”. The establishment takes a pile of garbage studies, throws lots of kludges and human judgment at it, and comes up with a result it’s not great at justifying but which is occasionally right. Ivmmeta is taking the same pile, doing a bunch of simple common-sense stuff to it, presenting it all in a natural and elegant manner, and is doomed to fail. We like to pretend that the scientific method and statistics and so on are objective, but right now the kludges and human judgment are doing most of the work, and when you take them out the whole thing collapses.
Tested negative twice this week. I lost my voice completely over the weekend and have a bunch of phlegm coming up but no covid, just some kind of respiratory infection or bronchitis I guess. Never had my voice just disappear like this, I can barely talk in a quiet room and in a loud setting it’s hopeless.
Another record for the Czech Republic. A country of a bit over 10 million gets 26,000 new cases in a day. Our three worst days have occurred in the last week. And it should be noted that there are limited hours for testing on weekends.
Still not as bad as Austria, Slovenia, and Slovakia I guess. But mandatory vaccines will become a thing soon.
Hard to get students to submit their work on time if they’re all getting COVID. Throws everything into chaos.
Traveled from LA to North Carolina to visit family for Thanksgiving. In the Raleigh/Durham area, I’ve found masking is at least as common as it is in LA, which is a big surprise to me. But yesterday we went about 60 miles West into more of the interior of the state and went to a few places where we looked like space aliens with our masks.
I’ve also recently had some situations where refusing to shake hands is basically impossible. My wife had a meeting with a new boss/client and he wanted to say hello to me. Just no way I can be like “ha, no thanks bro” when he offers his hand. Really wish we could collectively agree to stop shaking hands, but I’m sure that will just be another great part of America the libs are trying to ruin, like Christmas.
Wife and I said we weren’t coming down without a negative test from both of them. Called last night and they apparently weren’t feeling good enough to go out and get tested. So, yeah, not happening.
Not terribly disappointed. Will be nice to have a relaxing 4 day weekend.
Some clay is genuinely antibacterial. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told, I’m am bracing myself for an acerbic correction from @CaffeineNeeded lol.
I read on the internet that vaccinated people shed toe injury viruses around infecting unvaccinated people with perfectly health toes. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!
