outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

NEW YORK (AP) — Omicron is now most common coronavirus variant in U.S., accounting for nearly three-quarters of COVID-19 cases, CDC says.

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) December 20, 2021

that was fast

the booster gave me my least mild symptoms of the 3, but i definitely took half of the next day off work anyway, because it's rare to have such a ready-made excuse for using sick hours just dropped into your lap.

xpost that is fucking crazy. there are literally opinion pieces less than a week old wondering if Omicron would dominate or kind of share with Delta, and now it's already done. scary as hell.

what remains to be seen now is whether Delta gets fully displaced or if it continues to hang around in large numbers even as the minority. originally I thought this was a preferable scenario since our boosters do better against Delta, but Trevor Bedford explained that it'd actually be worse, especially since immunity to one doesn't necessarily crosspollinate. that while obviously it would be better for Omicron to not exist at all, that it's better for cases to be only Omicron than 20% Delta/80% Omicron.

I knew Florida had to be mostly Omicron because the case increase has been vertical the last week or so

(the framing of that tweet, specifically, seemed to be “let’s leap to hope while I acknowledge that it is a leap at this point and might be struck down tomorrow!!!” - it just rankled a bit.)

I can understand that, but this is also a Tweeter who is pretty quick to frame all of their findings as preliminary and they tend to be more conservative than reckless in forming conclusions.

Good.

The Biden admin says it's focusing on hospital support and vaccination capacity:

1,000 military doctors, medics and nurses will be deployed to overburdened hospitals in Jan. and Feb.

FEMA will set up pop-up vaccine clinics nationwide and deploy hundreds of federal vaccinators.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 21, 2021

....but they're already overburdened. Why can't it be "now and January"?

It is:

https://wtaq.com/2021/12/21/390810/

Whew.

Great news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-21/fda-expected-to-authorize-pfizer-merck-covid-pills-this-week

annnnnnddd....

NEW: President Biden to announce 500 million free instant tests will be sent to Americans.

— Andy Slavitt 🇺🇸💉 (@ASlavitt) December 21, 2021

that "three-quarters Omicron" headline is almost certainly not true:

https://theprepared.com/blog/73-of-covid-cases-arent-omicron-yet/

sampling bias is what Trevor Bedford said yesterday.

wait...what? they're FINALLY going to do something about testing?

now that we have an extra $2 trillion over the next 10 years, there's plenty of money I guess

wonder if this would have happened without Psaki being incredibly dumb on the issue last week

The tests will be shipped by USPS and thanks to DeJoy, we should have them well after the wave has peaked!

it's just...WTF? why only now? out of nowhere? what happened to the covid white house team, formerly starring mike pence and jared kushner? don't they now have people giving them advice that are world-renowned experts? did none of them ever bring up the whole "testing" thing and recommend it? did it just come up months ago and they figured the idea was rejected then so it was just impossible?

WTF?

maybe there's a manufacturing backlog? I know CVS/Walgreens are running out of them everywhere.

everybody's scrambling to prevent their families from dying this christmas, and meanwhile crypto investo teens are making like 10348723104 trillion dollars trading turds. just nationalize turdcoin and save some fucking lives

Allegedly Abbott laid off a bunch of staff and effectively slowed production of tests to a near standstill in the summer, before Delta surged, and have been trying to play catch up ever since.

we're fucked

xp The 15 minutes is because of anaphylactic shock--they always have epinephrine on hand in case it happens.

anaphylactic shock can kill you and even if the odds are waaay against it, with doses being given out in the hundreds of millions you don't want to be killing anyone at all when it's so unnecessary.

Seems promising.

What does it mean in lay terms: Omicron's ability to (in part) bypass its host's immune recognition likely came at a cost in terms of replication ability and pathogenicity.
2/

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 21, 2021

it's just...WTF? why only now? out of nowhere? what happened to the covid white house team, formerly starring mike pence and jared kushner? don't they now have people giving them advice that are world-renowned experts? did none of them ever bring up the whole "testing" thing and recommend it? did it just come up months ago and they figured the idea was rejected then so it was just impossible?

WTF?

― Karl Malone, Tuesday, December 21, 2021 4:51 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

3 words, open class war

"starting next month, private insurance will cover at-home tests..."

Great comfort to the millions of Americans with no insurance whatsoever

seriously! like the vaccine, trucks should be pulling up at every intersection and throwing those things at us.

please sir, i want some more

Very, very true

I think what frustrates me most about vaccines is that we've chosen to vilify individuals rather than trying to figure out why massive amounts of people distrust our healthcare system.

— ☭Communism was just a red herring (@Tamchanted) December 20, 2021

god yes

seriously! like the vaccine, trucks should be pulling up at every intersection and throwing those things at us.

We do literally have trucks in our town handing out rapid test kits. Have done for months.

TBF, the only reason that you'd do something like that is that you want to contain the pandemic, to make the numbers go down. Our leaders clearly have a different perspective on things.

I think that tweet is BS. The people who are declining to get vaccinated don't distrust our health care system in general. They use the health care system and expect it to serve their needs for everything else. They distrust one particular initiative of our health care system because the political elites they trust find it useful, for their own purposes, to spread the idea that Fauci is Mengele and the vaccine signup site at Walgreens is the New World Order.

They use the health care system and expect it to serve their needs for everything else.

That's probably the majority. There is also a percentage of the vaccine refusers who are new-age types who actively distrust the health care system and seek all their care from alternative providers. But they just as actively publicize their 'reasons' for this, so all anyone has to do to find out what they think is to read their polemics. It's nothing mysterious or hidden.

Their reasons are almost entirely based in over-generalizing events from personal experience, anecdotal evidence peddled by their compatriots, and a strong wishful-thinking desire to exert a magical control over their lives. That, and the fact that capitalism applied ferociously to for-profit health care sucks ass.

The people who are declining to get vaccinated don't distrust our health care system in general.

The best predictor of vax status is insured status IIRC.

Honestly I tried to get a flu shot at the same time as my booster and was rudely reminded that flu shots are only covered by insurance or else you have to pay. Reader: I wasn't sure I had $25 (or however much it is) in my bank account so I did not get a flu shot.

xp you recall incorrectly

https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/importance-of-partisanship-predicting-vaccination-status/

Perhaps there's great overlap with uninsured people and Republican voters, but the uninsured remain the demographic with the lowest vax rates - from the data used in that article

https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-october-2021/

The difference is that the uninsured are less likely to be steadfastly refusing - they just aren't 'taking advantage' of our healthcare system, which is the thing eephus said isn't happening.

What am I missing from the page you linked? The uninsured do not "remain the demographic with the lowest vax rates." 18% of uninsured people say they will definitely not get vaccinated in contrast to 31% of Republicans who say they will definitely not get vaccinated. Uninsured Americans as a group are also less than a third the size of Republican voters, to say nothing of right-leaning non-voters and right leaning "independent" voters, so I don't see how the raw number of uninsured people refusing vaccines can surpass the number of Republicans refusing vaccines.

Additionally, there is no "great overlap with uninsured people and Republican voters." Rates of uninsured Republicans only just surpassed that of uninsured Democrats in the Trump era, and the margin between them is not large and is possibly owing to partisanship, in that Republicans vote for politicians who haven't expanded Medicare.

https://slate.com/business/2018/05/why-the-uninsured-rate-is-rising-and-only-for-republicans.amp

You said the best predictor of vax status is insured status. This is incorrect. The best predictor of vax status is political affiliation.

The uninsured do not "remain the demographic with the lowest vax rates."

Correct, I forgot rural residents. The uninsured are the second-lowest vaccinated population (59% to 58%).

18% of uninsured people say they will definitely not get vaccinated in contrast to 31% of Republicans

"The difference is that the uninsured are less likely to be steadfastly refusing - they just aren't 'taking advantage' of our healthcare system, which is the thing eephus said isn't happening."

All of which proves the point of the tweet about access - people who don't regularly have access to are (correctly) suspicious of our healthcare system. They're also more likely to be low-income workers, which makes finances/time off part of the equation. I'm doing okay financially and I delayed my second dose multiple times because I couldn't budget 24 hours to deal with potential (and as it turned out actual) side effects - the same with my booster.

It might be comforting to believe that the unvaccinated are all just a bunch of 1/6 reenactors waiting to get in on the game for round 2, but reality is more complicated.

Your statement that insurance status was the biggest predictor of vax status was wrong and you're trying to rationalize your words into you somehow being not wrong. The most annoying part is that I know you know how to read a chart and interpret data reasonably and you pretend not to know.

It's true that education, insurance status, and hours worked affect vaccination status. It's trivial and uncontroversial to say so. It also doesn't change the fact that partisanship and partisan misinformation have clearly, demonstrably, numerically verifiably played a larger part in vaccination status for a 10 month old free vaccine than insurance status or income level.

I won't read your reply because you're a clown and it's useless to talk to you.

Your statement that insurance status was the biggest predictor of vax status was wrong and you're trying to rationalize your words into you somehow being not wrong.

The article you posted is about who makes up the most unvaccinated people, which is a different question. On an individual level, rural residents and the uninsured are both more likely to be unvaccinated than "Republicans."

Oh my god move ON

sounds like we should vilify individuals then

only if they don't wear a fucking mask

I "get" vaccine reluctance even though I may not agree with it, but a lot of people defending its adherents itt are ignoring that a lot of these fucks won't wear a mask either

signed, guy who just yelled at some massless asshole I n the 7-11

lol "maskless"