outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Oh yeah, that reminds me. Someone has put infowars stickers all over the stop signs in my neighborhood. What would be the best stickers to cover them up with?

― peace, man, Monday, November 15, 2021 5:31 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are you sure they don't mean "stop infowars?"

haha

"they're saying boo-urns"

When I find conspiracy nutjob / white nationalist stickers around I leave them where they were but deface them, hoping that the person who put them there sees that they were not accidentally covered or removed but destroyed.

Probably naive but makes me feel better for some reason.

Are you sure they don't mean "stop infowars?"

― DJI, Monday, November 15, 2021 1:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, they're on the reverse side. lol

the latest narrative that I see emerging amongst actually grown-ass adults is "why is the south doing so well against COVID now when they were the least restrictive states in terms of COVID mitigation?"

Idk, maybe the hundreds of thousands of people that died and more that went into the hospital could answer that for you? it's like saying a fireman put out a fire by just watching it burn until there was no house left.

even saw a columnist from NYT ask this but that's par for the course w/ a lot of them.

there probably just aren't enough people who haven't already had it or been vaccinated left for the virus to spread to in some of these places

that's exactly it and it should be obvious to these fuckin' liars

the latest narrative that I see emerging amongst actually grown-ass adults is "why is the south doing so well against COVID now when they were the least restrictive states in terms of COVID mitigation?"

what the actual fuck, can they not look at the charts and see "the south was less restrictive and had a bigger wave earlier instead of a smaller wave later like the interior west"

one would think and yet

The top 10 states in deaths per capita include two states where the disease spread rapidly in March 2020 before we had any idea how to suppress it or treat it (New York and New Jersey), the South, Arizona, and Oklahoma.

I mean if the governors of those states wanted to say "the deaths here were actually not THAT far above the national average and our kids went to school in person for a whole semester yours didn't, plus bars were never closed," let them say that! There are costs and benefits, say what they are and let people do their own accounting!

The wholesale collapse of Covid cases in Tokyo is crazy. 7 cases yesterday. pic.twitter.com/QZTp7sHhdu

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) November 16, 2021

When I find conspiracy nutjob / white nationalist stickers around I leave them where they were but deface them, hoping that the person who put them there sees that they were not accidentally covered or removed but destroyed.

I would do this but knowing my luck the local vicar would catch me in the act and think that I was putting up the original nutjob stickers, making my next visit to church service super awkward.

that classic feel

Just imagine him in a tutu and deface those fashy stickers, Ste

Cuba's vaccination campaign is insane. Look at the massive jumps after they get needles donated from Mexico/Nicaragua that the blockade was preventing access to. pic.twitter.com/b7a7tnWjkZ

— Fidel Cashflow/ read Wretched of the Earth🇯🇲 (@donfromyaad) November 15, 2021

Not to be That Guy but I maintain a healthy skepticism about government statistics from both Cuba and the UAE

Portugal's on the level, though, you go, Lusitanians

The UAE rate is plausible. They have extensive vaccine mandates and loss of employment generally means loss of visa status - a lot fewer children too.

xp you should think about not being That Guy

I'm as skeptical about Cuba's claims as I am about Florida's #bothsides

tbh i'm more skeptical about florida's numbers.

portugal is wild. did not see that coming a couple of months ago.

We beat em but are sadly unreported

Why do this?

https://detroit.chalkbeat.org/2021/11/17/22788007/detroit-public-schools-remote-learning-friday-december-covid-spread

Spread is not going to be materially affected by 3 off-days, "deep cleaning" is not going to do anything about COVID -- why give up three days of in-person instruction? I don't get it.

My gut says it's a way for them to spin staff shortages into something else. Chicago Public Schools suddenly announced a "vaccine awareness" day, during which they did absolutely nothing to help get more kids vaccinated (less than 2% of the students in the district did get vaccinated that day). It later came out that they didn't have enough teachers and subs to open that day.

Apparently Seattle did the same thing with a Friday off, but they were at least upfront about staff issues being the reason.

Well, that makes sense, there's a very notable sub shortage in my (well-resourced relative to Detroit) school district too.

That's a thing that i think goes under-reported - it's largely subs and aides that are desperately needed and of course, underpaid. In my district they don't even get health insurance.

It goes under-reported because fixing it would cost money and it's much easier to say "critical race theory is what's holding our schools back and we can solve it by flushing the wrong kind of books out of the library"

God, don't remind me. We were just talking about shoring up a policy in preparation for the kinds of book burning attacks that have been happening the past two years.

Well, there's also the whole, "we fund our public schools in way that is completely insane and unjustifiable" issue, which isn't talked about *at all*.

There we go. FDA clears Moderna and Pfizer's Covid vaccine booster shots for ALL U.S. adults. Just like that. https://t.co/i3o2juKoPs

— Chise 🧬🧫🦠💉🔜 MFF (@sailorrooscout) November 19, 2021

we've got another 'covid winter' comin' up. i'm glad I sneaked in getting some minor medical needs attended to between July and October.

Let's hope it's a spike (which I expect) and not a surge. Looks like Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Michigan are doing worst.

Illinois isn't quite as bad as those states yet, but not quite as high yet. It's not surprising, given other countries, but still frustrating. Just glad my son's sequence has started and my wife and I will both be boosted by Monday. All we can do at this point.

What do you guys reference for nationwide metrics? I’ve been

*only checking nyc figures on gothamist for awhile

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-18/covid-delta-sub-variant-is-spreading-fast-in-u-k-survey-shows

That represents a 2.8% daily growth rate for sub-variant AY.4.2 over the course of the REACT survey, from Oct. 19 to Nov. 5, the researchers said. Still, the new sub-variant seemed less likely to cause symptomatic Covid.

iiiiinteresting

Whoa. Get boosted.

Slides for ACIP meeting are up. Pfizer's 3 dose vs. 2 dose study is up: https://t.co/A2UABg1QSz pic.twitter.com/rL3hDkPdWp

— Edward Nirenberg (@ENirenberg) November 19, 2021

xpost of course the news bytes regarding delta sub-variant is the 'more contagious', people neglecting quotes like the following

Christina Pagel, director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at University College London, told CNBC there’s no reason to be concerned over the variant yet.

“Delta compared to alpha was around 60% more transmissible, it was doubling every week,” she said. “This is going up by a percent or two a week — it’s much, much slower. So in that sense, it’s not a big disaster like delta was. It will probably gradually replace delta over the next few months. But there’s no sign it’s more vaccine resistant, (so) at the moment I wouldn’t be panicking about it.”

or the possibility that it's making people less sick (which admittedly they say it's too early to say for certain)

The "boosters approved for all adults" thing is funny to me, in my world every adult has already gotten the booster because nobody at Walgreens cares whether you're formally "eligible" and I just can't see the slightest moral issue with "taking somebody else's spot" at this point, it's easy as heck to get these appointments.

the vast majority of people who have got the booster already were in fact eligible but many didn't know it because of the CDC's inscrutable recommendations that recommended boosters for like 90% of the population using incomprehensible language.

it's easy as heck to get these appointments.

not in my neck of the woods

What do you guys reference for nationwide metrics?

I bounce around, but I look at covidactnow.org pretty much daily.

http://www.covidactnow.org sorry

not in my neck of the woods

Same here. To be clear, it wasn't as difficult as it was back in March and April or anything, but I was really surprised by how difficult it was compared to what I'd heard. It took me a week of searching, on and off, to find one that didn't require a 20-30 minute drive and time off of work. Even then the first appointment I could get was a week out (this Sunday, finally). The Walgreen's within a 10 mile radius had nothing open until the week after Thanksgiving and our local health system had nothing until after Christmas! I think my timing landed right when it opened up for the 5-11 crowed, which was good news and certainly explained some of the difficulty, but it took much more patience and hunting than I expected.

another source for nationwide metrics, recommended to me by a statistics professor:

https://globalepidemics.org/key-metrics-for-covid-suppression/

Also, jumping back to yesterday's discussion about school shortages. We JUST NOW got an email that our district has to abruptly cancel school Monday and Tuesday of next week (we were already off Wednesday) due to staff shortages.

So, uh, yeah. There are definitely bigger problems and more important things in the world right now, but struggling to find childcare for two days on a Friday afternoon (along with every single parent in the entire city) is not something I needed to add to the pile.