COVID-19: Chapter 9 - OMGicron

media saturation works because it’s saturation, not because of who is saying it

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yeah this is exactly my point. the top management at the CDC needs to be fucking yeeted into the sun

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Probably so. But at this point it really seems that the battle lines have been drawn and if you haven’t yet been convinced that getting COVID is a bad idea another study chock full of compelling data isn’t going to move the needle. Can’t see anything other than mandates or antivax taxes helping at this point.

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Turns out this cracked article did not age well:

image

Turns out, they do indeed tend to fuck around.

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This problem exists across a lot of institutions in the US (and other places like Canada). Messaging is considered to be crass “retail marketing” work that is beneath the Deep Thinkers running institutions. Nobody gets a PhD so they can later deal with the hoi polloi.

It’s the job of politicians to do the messaging.

OG SARS turned out to be relatively easy to deal with because symptoms correlated with infectiousness. So if you had symptoms and isolated, you cut off the spread.

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What could go wrong?

Not sure what additional CDC messaging you guys think is going to change anyone’s mind. Like, if Fauci comes out on TV with that chart, you think the Trumpalos are going to go out and get the vaccine?

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that too but reminding people that THEYRE FUKKEN WRONG is never a bad idea, just look what happened when we coddled a bunch of fragile white supremacists

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the point isn’t to change their mind, it’s to make an example out of them and remove even the thought that there’s a debate

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I dont think the charts will help, it just encourages debate. They’ll just respond with “whatabout this here OTHER chart that has 8 obvious misleading errors, huh?” And then you get in the spinning wheel to nowhere debunking every falsehood they can come up with. I think you need something like non-stop imagery of people on ventilators and dead old people combined with just saying VACCINES ARE SAFE AND EFFECTIVE. GET VAXXED OR YOU COULD BE NEXT! People believe complete bullshit all the time just because people say it over and over.

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Im over my head in the science on this. Some of the doomsdayers are doomsdaying over this, how concerning is this?

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1468001925496860677

How far out are we from getting an accurate gauge on mortality from Omicron from South Africa?

First UK case was 1/31/20, first death was 3/5. Im guessing we werent 100% at detecting things at that point, but Id say by Christmas we should start to have data.

The timing sucks because it is like the hardest time of year to take precautions, but if, whoopsie, we find out this is bad and we didnt its gonna be a true shitshow with holiday mixing and travel.

So hopefully severity news turns out good

FWIW, I’ve getting ads like this on TV and radio throughout the pandemic. There’s absolutely no way any public health org can compete against the 24/7 Facebook and Twitter onslaught of disinfo.

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https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1468001931289194496

These are pretty important caveats, especially the first. Antibodies may act against more than just the receptor binding domain, as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines give you the whole damn spike protein, not its fairly small receptor binding domain. It’s also very, very important to note that because these mutations are precisely in the receptor binding domain, they may well impact receptor binding in a negative fashion, which could result in lower overall fitness.

So, I mean, I’m not going to say this guy is wrong, but I don’t think there’s anything here that’s nearly conclusive enough to panic.

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Docs worldwide are a fair bit better at treating this now than 3/5/2020, so it could be longer still.

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Seems like all of these reports of falling antibody counts have been consistently too pessimistic throughout this pandemic.

Well, this is a computational prediction of antibody binding affinity for a small part of the spike protein, not a discussion of antibody amounts, but if you weren’t chiming in on the Bloom lab work, then I generally agree. Even if antibody levels in people fall, they can always make more in response to infection.