Corona Virus: It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

[Zaxxon]

Bam!

[Freyland]

Yup, you're a Little late.

[Daehawk]

Republican Governors oy!

Georgia Gov. Kemp signs order banning school mask mandates

Under the new order, schools and school districts cannot utilize Gov. Kemp's renewed public health state of emergency authority to require workers or students to wear face coverings while on school campuses.

[Smoove_B]

I'm more confident than ever that the next pandemic will deliver a killing blow to America. We are completely and totally incapable of dealing with this as a society.

[Zaxxon]

I'm more confident than ever that we are completely and totally incapable of dealing with society.

FTFY.

[gbasden]

I'm more confident than ever that we are completely and totally incapable of dealing with society reality.

FTFY.

FTFY.

[Smoove_B]

As predicted, the burden is shifting:

"I am deeply concerned by the number of hospitalized adolescents and saddened to see the number of adolescents who required treatment in intensive care units or mechanical ventilation," CDC director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement that accompanied a new study on teen hospitalizations.

...

In the first three months of the year, CDC researchers found that nearly one-third of adolescents hospitalized with Covid-19 required admission into an intensive care unit and 5 percent needed invasive mechanical ventilation.

No teenagers in the U.S. died of Covid-19 from Jan. 1 to March 31, according to data compiled by the CDC.

"Much of this suffering can be prevented," Walensky said in the statement.

I'm still seeing so many people that continue to perpetuate the idea that "kids don't get COVID" and "COVID doesn't affect kids" right now - pushing for the full removal of mask mandates at the schools and for kids regardless of vaccination status. I totally get that kids aren't dying of COVID. But we still have no idea of the long term consequences for some that recover from an infection.

[malchior]

Florida

State police raided the home of a former Department of Health data scientist who is accusing Florida officials of wrongfully firing her for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 statistics.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement served the search warrant at Rebekah Jones’ Tallahassee home Monday morning in connection with an investigation into who hacked the state’s internal notification system with a message urging state employees to come forward with information about Florida’s handling of the pandemic.

The alert read: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”

Jones, a vocal critic of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic, tweeted a video of agents entering her home Monday morning with guns drawn.

As a follow up to this post - this tweet is unavailable because she was banned by Twitter this morning. A little over a week ago the Miami Herald published a piece about the some of the ongoing matters involving her. A Florida state IG granted her official whistleblower status and several journalists started calling on DeSantis to explain his police state shit. This led to her being bombarded with hate tweets all weekend. She kept responding with the link to the Miami Herald article. People were warning her that it was a TOS violation for spam and Twitter permanently banned her about 30 minutes ago.

[Isgrimnur]

Surely that will calm things down.

[malchior]

Surely that will calm things down.

As expected the right-wing demons are saying it is justified because she is a liar, whore, etc. The ghoulish, misogyny that makes the Internet a wonderful place.

It's absolutely sickening.

[Alefroth]

Florida

State police raided the home of a former Department of Health data scientist who is accusing Florida officials of wrongfully firing her for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 statistics.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement served the search warrant at Rebekah Jones’ Tallahassee home Monday morning in connection with an investigation into who hacked the state’s internal notification system with a message urging state employees to come forward with information about Florida’s handling of the pandemic.

The alert read: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”

Jones, a vocal critic of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic, tweeted a video of agents entering her home Monday morning with guns drawn.

As a follow up to this post - this tweet is unavailable because she was banned by Twitter this morning. A little over a week ago the Miami Herald published a piece about the some of the ongoing matters involving her. A Florida state IG granted her official whistleblower status and several journalists started calling on DeSantis to explain his police state shit. This led to her being bombarded with hate tweets all weekend. She kept responding with the link to the Miami Herald article. People were warning her that it was a TOS violation for spam and Twitter permanently banned her about 30 minutes ago.

We'll see how willing De Santis is to use his new legislation to fine social media that interferes with free speech.

[malchior]

Answer already found. Remember she has whistle-blower protection which apparently means fuckall. Not a surprising statement from a Trumpist/fascist scumbag.



By the by - came across this. This is why DeSantis is acting all aggro-evil. He got caught lying and now there are tons of bots spreading disinformation. What's interesting from a meta analysis is the volume right now - bots on bots on bots is happening right now.

[LawBeefaroni]

So many politicians are reluctant to go out of their way to protect whistle blowers because they know the chilling effect letting them hang has and they know there's always someone out there who could potentially whistle blow their own skeletons.

"There but for the grace of suppression and intimidation go I."

[malchior]

Yup Obama's DOJ was ruthless hunting down leaks and whistleblowers. A practice the Trump DOJ ratcheted up. Supposedly Biden's DOJ won't do it but I don't believe it. They just haven't had anything worth protecting happen yet.

[Isgrimnur]

Yahoo

A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced the Wisconsin pharmacist, who destroyed 500 Covid-19 vaccine doses "during a national public health emergency" tothree years in prison.

Back in January, Steven Brandenburg agreed to plead guilty to two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products with reckless disregard.
...
After completing his 36-month sentence, Brandenburg will face another three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $83,000 in restitution.

[malchior]

It was worth it to briefly feel the power of Trump's love.

[Smoove_B]

That amount of good that Ed Yong has done during this pandemic cannot be emphasized enough:

During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. No field should understand that more deeply than public health, a discipline distinct from medicine. Whereas doctors and nurses treat sick individuals in front of them, public-health practitioners work to prevent sickness in entire populations. They are expected to think big. They know that infectious diseases are always collective problems because they are infectious. An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and continents; one sick person can seed a hemisphere’s worth of cases. In turn, each person’s odds of falling ill depend on the choices of everyone around them—and on societal factors, such as poverty and discrimination, that lie beyond their control.

...

Framing one’s health as a matter of personal choice “is fundamentally against the very notion of public health,” Aparna Nair, a historian and anthropologist of public health at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “For that to come from one of the most powerful voices in public health today … I was taken aback.” (The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.) It was especially surprising coming from a new administration. Donald Trump was a manifestation of America’s id—an unempathetic narcissist who talked about dominating the virus through personal strength while leaving states and citizens to fend for themselves. Joe Biden, by contrast, took COVID-19 seriously from the off, committed to ensuring an equitable pandemic response, and promised to invest $7.4 billion in strengthening America’s chronically underfunded public-health workforce. And yet, the same peal of individualism that rang in his predecessor’s words still echoes in his. “The rule is very simple: Get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do,” Biden said after the CDC announced its new guidance. “The choice is yours.”

[Smoove_B]

I don't know if you are all aware, but there's a pandemic still going on - even in Miami:

Some of the 12,000 attendees who flew into Miami last weekend for the biggest bitcoin event in history have started testing positive for Covid.

Bitcoin 2021 drew crypto enthusiasts from around the world to the Mana Wynwood convention center in Miami’s arts and entertainment district. For three days, conference goers packed into crowded auditoriums, glad-handed and hugged. It was the first major conference since the pandemic started, and many attendees said they were relieved to be out among colleagues trading news and updates.

There was no mask mandate and no proof of vaccination requirement to attend. Covid was only a talking point in the context of how thrilled everyone was to have arrived at the other side of the pandemic.

Scope? Too early to tell - I guess we'll see.

It is unclear how many people have been affected and whether the city of Miami had a contingency plan in place for this kind of outcome. The mayor’s office and conference organizers did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

[Zaxxon]

Because of course it would be Bitcoin bros.

[Smoove_B]

I know, right?

Not sure if this will make the news, but a bunch of scientists believe they have found evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in NYC in January and February of 2020, ahead of the first documented case in March of 2020:

Numerous reports document the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but there is limited information on its introduction before the identification of a local case. This may lead to incorrect assumptions when modeling viral origins and transmission. Here, we utilize a sample pooling strategy to screen for previously undetected SARS-CoV-2 in de-identified, respiratory pathogen-negative nasopharyngeal specimens from 3,040 patients across the Mount SinaiHealth System in New York. The patients had been previously evaluated for respiratory symptoms or influenza-like illness during the first 10 weeks of 2020. We identify SARS-CoV-2 RNA from specimens collected as early as 25 January 2020, and complete SARS-CoV-2genome sequences from multiple pools of samples collected between late February and early March, documenting an increase prior to the later surge. Our results provide evidence of sporadic SARS-CoV-2 infections a full month before both the first officially documented case and emergence of New York as a COVID-19 epicenter in March 2020.

This really is the kind of stuff that amazes me - when insanely smart people start putting the pieces together.

[Zaxxon]

Hey, remember that Ed Yong guy? The one with all the awesome pieces for The Atlantic over the course of the pandemic?

He just won a Pulitzer.

Thread...

[Smoove_B]

Not surprised at all; it's well-deserved.

Unrelated, but providing a stark reality to the multiple points of failure we've had for this pandemic -- information on our public health contract tracing effort:

"Contact tracing had suboptimal impact on #SARSCoV2 transmission. Largely because 2 of 3 cases were either not reached for interview or named no contacts when interviewed."

I've mentioned it before, but the single largest outbreak I worked on was in a correctional facility and I think I had 100% contact tracing. Amazingly inmates were super excited to hang out with me in a room and tell me about what they'd been eating for the last week.

Anyway, it's a critical element of public health and there are lessons to be learned here. While I don't doubt that the phone interviews didn't help, I'm also confident the political element influenced it as well.

The conclusions, regardless are still valid:

Scaling up COVID-19 contact tracing capacity during the pandemic has put enormous strain on every HD in the US. If a HD does not have the capacity to interview the majority of its new cases, then suspending or scaling down contact tracing activities could enable these public health resources to be reallocated for mass vaccination and other mitigation strategies.9 When COVID-19 vaccination coverage increases and disease incidence decreases to manageable numbers, HDs will be better positioned to successfully reach and interview every person in the community with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result. To end the epidemic, multiple strategies, including contact tracing, universal masking, physical distancing, and COVID-19 vaccination, should be harmonized to reduce global incidence of this disease.

[wonderpug]

Any idea how well the contact tracing cell phone apps worked in other countries that implemented them much sooner in the timeline?

[Smoove_B]

I haven't seen anything on that yet, specifically, no. I'm not really sure what they'll reveal to be honest but I am curious. I'll be watching!

[Kraken]

I'm not surprised that contact tracing broke down when the virus was raging out of control. It's a tool for the early stages, to prevent that from happening, or the late stages, to prevent it from taking off again.

[Smoove_B]

Sure, when it was raging out of control. But early on the CT systems in place were inadequate and when they finally had it up and running people refused to cooperate. I don't know if my state will ever publicly release the data but at one point it was barely worth calling people anymore because they'd hang up or refuse to answer any questions. So before it became pointless, it was a problem.

In other news, some interesting data on how the variants have changed over time and after moving through people:

"The fact it has happened twice in 18 months, two lineages (Alpha and then Delta) each 50% more transmissible is a phenomenal amount of change"—

NOTE: Nothing about this suggests artificial creation; it's a numbers game

[Smoove_B]

More on the Delta variant:

It's a long thread (which I hate), but if you just want the summary: Winter is coming.

[malchior]

Since I'm pretty much at the point where I only care about big picture stuff now here is a plausible worst case - not necessarily the way it'll go but useful to predict the outlines of the inevitable political consequences. The fall/winter might be bad due to delta or some even more infectious variant. If it is bad, it'll more likely be in Trump-dominated areas. Maybe the high infectious rate overcomes the rural advantage? (I don't know if this is a thing but just speculating).

Let's assume rising cases, hospitalizations Oct/Nov across mostly red states with low vaccination rates. These people generally have resisted pubic health measures. Let's also assume this continues even if they finally are in the firing line. They will be subject to higher rates of infection and I would expect misinformation will drive them in the direction of blaming Biden. Dark money will pour from the same people who funneled cash into anti-lockdown and the capitol riot preparations. The message they'll be pushing might be something along the lines of, "Libs blamed Trump when people got sick so this is Biden's fault or Biden is working with the Chinese, etc."

In any case, any uptick of COVID-19 is going to weaponized against Biden. That seems logical. The facts don't matter - only what can be twisted into a half-compelling storyline.

[Smoove_B]

That's a reasonable projection, I think. Just based on what they're seeing in India and what's happening in the UK now, it seems pretty likely it's going to blast through the unvaccinated people here in the U.S. at some point, likely impacted by density (as noted). However, as the thread originator notes, the age demographics for the unvaccinated are very different now so when it happens, it will look different.

I think the bigger picture is how will it affect everything else going on here? Production? Retail sales? School? I was looking at data this morning and my county in NJ is just over 50% fully vaccinated. My neighboring sister county (same general demographics) is at 46%. Morris and Somerset Counties are 66% and trending higher (more people getting vaccinated) where as my county is stalled out. Similar to March of 2020, part of me finds this fascinating, while the other part is quite concerned.

[malchior]

Absolutely absurd.

[Isgrimnur]

[Smoove_B]

So good

Having 70% of people vaccinated is sort of like having 70% of people stop at red lights. It’s a lot safer than zero percent, but also not time to shrug and say we’ve done all we can.

[Zarathud]

So maybe the younger kiddo is getting vaccinated before her official birthday in August after all.

[YellowKing]

I know it's not time to shrug and say we've done all we can, but honestly that's what I feel like doing. Heck, we have 25% of healthcare workers in our city that refuse to get it, and these are people who get mandatory flu vaccine every year. At this point I don't know what it's going to take to convert the other 30%.

If 600,000 deaths couldn't do it, I sure as hell can't.

[Zaxxon]

At least have to wait until the vaccine is open to all the age groups. Everyone wants to forget the under-12 kids getting trampled at present.

[Kraken]

The moving average for new daily cases statewide is down to 79 and deaths are in low single digits. Positivity rate is 0.45%. Fully vaxxed is approaching 70%. Disease numbers are still falling despite the unmasking 2 weeks ago. Two weeks ago I didn't believe it, but for now this pandemic is really over for those smart enough to get the jabs.

The delta variant is going to run roughshod over the low-vax states next fall, but until then it's party time in my neck of the woods.

[Smoove_B]

More on the Delta variant that is gaining ground in the U.S.

Thanks @CDCgov Delta variant now classified as a Variant of Concern - 50% more infectious, likely more severe and less susceptible to monoclonal antibodies from L452R substitution. Incidence went from 2.7% to 10% in 2 weeks in US. Already dominant in UK

[Isgrimnur]

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday emphasized that the authorized vaccines are highly effective against the variant, however, and urged all Americans who have not yet been inoculated to get fully vaccinated as soon as possible.

[Smoove_B]

Yeah, sorry, should have added that.

The people that are intentionally skipping vaccinations or think because they had it they don't need to get vaccinated are a problem. In areas with lower community-levels of vaccination, I'd be concerned for kids under 12 and anyone that can't be medically vaccinated.

I don't know what else we can do to boost confidence in those that are hesitant, as well as continue to increase access to those that are having problems getting vaccinated (distinct and separate from those that are hesitant). I know I spoke a few weeks ago the number of employers (largely hourly-wage) that still aren't providing paid time off for people to get vaccinated or deal with any time off related to post-vaccination recovery. Everything is reinforcing the "for the economy" argument that pushed opening and unmasking.

[gbasden]

The State of California just launched a vaccine record validation service last night - myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov. It works pretty well, and I was able to pull up my vaccination dates and what vaccine I was given. It also brings up a QR code that can be used for a scanner. I'm quite glad there is something official beyond easily forgeable pieces of paper!