outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

It was the same thing!

Everything is fucked!

Well, Chicago's test positivity is 15.4%, average daily new covid cases are literally higher than ever,* and covid hospitalizations haven't been this bad since last December.

*Actual cases may have been higher in wave one--testing was far worse then. https://t.co/KbwF92903H pic.twitter.com/kdVDJWsJDY

— Matthew Borus (@MatthewBorus) December 28, 2021

it's telling that they cut it from ten days to five plus five days of "strict mask use." they've seen how people wear masks. gotta give people the freedom and liberty to do it themselves i guess. i mean, lol:
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-business-health-rochelle-walensky-d7d609c9c01e200d250df7ca7282c9d6

A lot of people get tested when they first feel symptoms, but many Americans get tested for others reasons, like to see if they can visit family or for work. That means a positive test result may not reveal exactly when a person was infected or give a clear picture of when they are most contagious, experts say.

When people get infected, the risk of spread drops substantially after five days, but it does not disappear for everyone, said Dr. Aaron Glatt, a New York physician who is a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

“If you decrease it to five days, you’re still going to have a small but significant number of people who are contagious,” he said.

That’s why wearing masks is a critical part of the CDC guidance, Walensky said.

now *that* is just a bunk decision

just going to leave this here

https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation

i read that last week! and yes.

i read that last night! i think i found it somewhere else map posted it! :) and yes.

https://i.imgur.com/1eMiYJh.jpg

just going to leave this here

https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation

― Nedlene Grendel as Basenji Holmo (map), Monday, December 27, 2021 3:59 PM

the death drive is sick shit, i love reading about it

as expected, the 73% stat re: Omicron's prevalence in the US was incorrect.

but it is still expected to be the dominant variant now - this just means it has more room to infect people (almost would have been better if it had been 73% a week ago)

CDC estimates of circulating variants including week of 12/25. Notably week of 12/18 estimate of Omicron revised from ~73% to 22.5% (just a tad different!).

Now saying 58.6% of variants are Omicron nationwide. 1/ pic.twitter.com/duYpLSEXQm

— Jason Gallagher (@JGPharmD) December 28, 2021

agree w/ Angie here. no idea why "two negative tests" is not a requirement for returning to the world. the 10-day isolation period was an arbitrary timeframe established last summer at a time where tests were much scarcer than they are even now, and before we had a lot of scientific data on how long people are contagious. a system that allows you to 'test out' sooner than 10 days, like the one the UK adopted, is reasonable.

not a system that allows you to basically just return to society without a negative test 5 days later, even if masked. people are already misinterpreting the asymptomatic part and think they can just go back to clubbing even with sniffles 5 days later as long as they wear a mask.

Once again, @CDCgov outdoes itself by taking what might be a reasonable policy (test to leave isolation) and removing the part that makes it reasonable (the testing part). This is reckless and, frankly, stupid. https://t.co/K2UyP3dKxB

— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) December 28, 2021

(Angie, btw, is one of the people quoted in the article from Wu suggesting the 10 day isolation period was outdated, so the fact that she's angry about this speaks volumes - she was always adamant that a TEST has to confirm you're negative, not a calendar).

oh it’s ‘angie’ now

CDC’s new guidance to drop isolation of positives to 5 days without a negative test is reckless

Some ppl stay infectious 3 days,Some 12

I absolutely don’t want to sit next to someone who turned Pos 5 days ago and hasnt tested Neg

Test Neg to leave isolation early is just smart

— Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) December 27, 2021

That death drive article is really interesting -- well-written and forceful, but it just feels like fiction to me, a vivid description of a situation that doesn't feel at all like what I actually see around me.

(Which I guess is what some people would say about Freudian analysis generally, but I'm pretty sympathetic to that framework, though in a one-frame-among-many way, not in a this-supreme-frame-explains-everything way.)

wapo, 30 mins ago:

Health officials’ recommendation this week to shorten the isolation period for people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections to five days was driven largely by the concern that essential services might be hobbled amid one of the worst infection surges of the pandemic, said senior officials familiar with the discussions.

will be cool to see whether halving the isolation period has any effect on essential services or the infection surge imo

The decision to cut the recommended isolation time in half, which was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts, reflects the increasingly tough decisions health officials navigate as they seek to strike the right balance between vigilance and normalcy as the nation heads into the pandemic’s third year.

rly feel for them

Fauci goes into detail in this interview with Chris Hayes (mid-thread excerpted here):

@chrislhayes: "You are talking about a policy judgment in a context of tradeoffs between different consequences."

Contrasts stopping spread of Covid-19 vs having a water treatment facility have its technicians all out sick for 10 days.

Fauci nods yes and responds: "Correct."

— David Lim (@davidalim) December 29, 2021

(Says there would be "a lot more devil advocates yelling" if the U.S. was "shut down."

damn them!

Interview:

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-explains-new-cdc-isolation-guidelines-129732165818

Anti-vaxxer neighbor ("read both sides"/"I have a strong immune system") just revealed that she just had Covid for 3 weeks. Sourced Ivermectin from a Wisconsin doctor because she couldn't get it in Minnesota (?). Says she may get the Novavax vaccine if it becomes available but fears that Biden won't allow because he wants Pfizer to profit.

Novavax vaccine is fine but a) no data for how it performs against Omicron and b) no better than any of them already available. what a knob.

do you ever just look your neighbor in the eye and say "you have no idea what you're talking about?"

it feels great and plus you never have to talk to them again

hard to lose a good cat-sitter.

haha, that's real :)

Says she may get the Novavax vaccine if it becomes available but fears that Biden won't allow because he wants Pfizer to profit.

The pathology of this, where they will take literally anything recommended by literally anyone as long as it's not actual medicine recommended by actual doctors is just mindblowing. It takes real effort to be that actively dumb.

onethread

One would have to step back and think about it that way. You can't step back when you're stuck inside a hole you've dug for yourself. Their only motivation for doing anything at all is based on how much they think someone on the left will be frustrated by it.

I can't believe anyone still believes in this fake pseudoscience but people really do still become economistshttps://t.co/syjFkc7gxw

— Bedford Falls High-Speed Rail (@BudrykZack) December 30, 2021

Some twat had stuck another QR code on top of the NHS test and trace one at the motorway service station we visited today. Potentially quite an effective form of sabotage, as the app only lets you use the QR code as far as I can see - there’s no option for manual entry. Luckily, their sticker peeled right off without damaging what was underneath.

i never even thought of that. pretty easy bit of sabotage.

the US has now green-lit boosters for 12-15s. that age group is just now getting its second shot in the UK. so another 4+ months to wait for kids’ boosters to happen over here, and seemingly no plans at all to vaccinate u12s. feels…… complacent.

Hope this guy is right:

My latest tweets have mostly been bad news, which saddens me, particularly during holiday season.
Today I’ll take you to my Happy Place, with some thoughts on why we could be in good shape – and maybe even great shape – in 6-8 weeks.

A 🧵(1/24)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) December 29, 2021

thanks for that.

lost in my holiday reading is a story that apparently a decision in the UK on 5-11s is expected soon
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/14/covid-jabs-for-younger-children-in-uk-could-get-green-light-before-christmas

Wachter's a good resource. and after Ashish has become Capn' Save a CDC, the one I look for the most now.

(btw, if y'all do wade into the cesspool of science twitter, be very careful who you read - there are a lot of 'alternative' messages out there from cranks that have wide followings, some who minimize COVID ridiculously, and some who greatly catastrophize it)

Ach theres no need sher wont it all be posted here within a nanosecond

I liked visiting Bob Wachter's Happy Place for a few minutes. His analysis of the trend was more convincing than his accelerated timeline, but the analysis alone was a bit heartening. The early speculations about the potential upside of omicron appear to be solidifying rather than fading.

Still, it's a sad shame that omicron will do so much harvesting among the unvaccinated, ivermectin-gobbling, research-loving millions. Our healthcare workers have seen too much easily preventable death and misery already.

xpost hey if you wanna keep up with your gatekeeper schtick, have at it

i've posted two whopping tweets in the last week (yes, I've counted) after several people basically said they were unwelcome, some t'aint me

*so

Some ILXors seem to regard posts like a cat when confronted by a spilled bag of cat food: you can't not eat every bite until you barf.

Three in a row again is it xp

sorry, off ... whatever the current topic is ... but man, reading this thread from very late February/early March 2020 is a trip

In honor of alpine static's backward glance, I bring you all the best reason for taking the same trip across those two months of posts:

We have no yard, and he must pee

Man Ellison just isn't trying anymore.

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Tuesday, March 3, 2020

So France is requiring masks outdoors now too? That’s going to go over really well here when we can’t get half the population to wear then indoors.

Worth copying and pasting here from behind WaPo paywall:

‘Crazy’ omicron surge could peak soon, but the virus is unpredictable as the pandemic enters its third year

Columbia University researchers estimate infections could top out during the week of Jan. 9
—————————————

By Joel Achenbach
December 30, 2021 at 7:03 PM ET

The rapid surge of omicron infections in the United States may be relatively brief, measured in weeks rather than months, according to infectious-disease experts who have been astonished by the speed of the coronavirus variant’s spread — and who are hoping this wave ebbs just as quickly.

The idea of a rapid peak and swift decline has a precedent in South Africa, the country that revealed the presence of omicron in late November. Cases there spiked quickly and then dropped with unexpected speed after only a modest rise in hospitalizations. An especially transmissible virus tends to run out of human fuel — the susceptible portion of the population — quickly.

Some forecasts suggest coronavirus infections could peak by mid-January.
“Omicron will likely be quick. It won’t be easy, but it will be quick. Come the early spring, a lot of people will have experienced covid,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an email Thursday.

But this has always been an unpredictable virus, going back to when it first appeared two years ago, on Dec. 31, 2019. The virus had probably been spreading for a month or more, but that was the day infectious-disease experts around the world began hearing by email and text about an outbreak of a mysterious pathogen causing pneumonia-like respiratory infections in Wuhan, China.

No one on that day could have known that this pathogen, initially called the “novel coronavirus” and later named SARS-CoV-2, would trigger the most brutal pandemic in a century. And no one today knows when it will be over.


Forecasts of how the pandemic will play out have repeatedly been incorrect, to the point that some modelers have stopped trying to make caseload projections four weeks out, instead limiting their forecasts to one week ahead.

Because beyond a week, who knows?

Forecasts of the current winter wave, in which omicron has come riding in atop an existing delta wave, are somewhat more plausible. Columbia University researchers have a model that projects a peak in cases during the week beginning Jan. 9, with about 2.5 million confirmed infections in that seven-day period — and potentially as many as 5 million.

Columbia epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman said the infection numbers reported in recent days are already at the high-end of projections, and the peak could come sooner. Omicron is setting new daily records for infections with the virus. The seven-day average of new, officially confirmed daily cases soared to more than 300,000 Wednesday. Then came the eye-popping Thursday numbers from state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — 562,000 new cases, pushing the seven-day average to 343,000.

The official number captures only a fraction of the true number of infections. People who use rapid tests at home may not report positive results. Many others never get tested when sick. And some people are infected but asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.

Shaman estimates the number of infections is four to five times the official count. Given that people remain infected for many days, that translates to many millions of active infections across the United States.

“We’re talking somewhere up to maybe 10 million people,” Shaman said. “Maybe not all of them are contagious yet. Crazy numbers. Crazy, crazy numbers.”

When infections begin to drop, hospitalizations could still rise for a period as the disease progresses among those most vulnerable to a severe outcome. Forecasts posted Monday by the CDC show national hospitalization rates rising steadily in the weeks ahead, with daily new hospital admissions topping 15,000 by mid-January — although the projections from different research teams varied widely.

The predictions of a short omicron surge are reflected in hopes expressed at the highest level of the federal medical bureaucracy.

“My hope is that we get a sharp peak with omicron, and it goes down to a very, very low level, and it just sort of stays there, and we don’t have any more really problematic variants,” Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

But Fauci and other experts have consistently been surprised by the mutability of the virus. Some scientists did not think a variant with the number of mutations evident in omicron could be an effective transmitter.

“We are dealing with a virus that has a completely unanticipated level of transmissibility,” Fauci said. “We thought delta was very transmissible. This thing is like something we’ve never seen before.”

In the United States, vaccinations — including boosters — have blunted much of the impact of the latest wave of infections from the omicron variant, which appears to be innately less capable of generating severe disease.

That has led to a shift in the Biden administration’s strategy, with a new emphasis on keeping the economy running and shying away from top-down restrictions. All the while, the administration continues to push the available tools for fighting the pandemic, including testing, indoor masking, vaccinations for those reluctant to get the shots and boosters for those eligible for another dose.

But a more spontaneous shutdown has been underway since just before Christmas.

Airlines have canceled thousands of flights because of staffing shortages. The Smithsonian closed a few of its smaller museums. Some college football teams decided not to attend their bowl games. Broadway shows have gone dark. Actor Hugh Jackman, mildly sick with covid-19, is not anticipated back onstage in “The Music Man” until Jan. 6.

This is a new phase of the pandemic, one with sweeping disruptions but probably not the same level of fear and anxiety as earlier periods. Omicron appears milder. For many vaccinated people, it appears to present itself more like a bad cold than something capable of crippling the world economy — although the ramifications of the phenomenon known as “long covid” remain not well understood.

Scientists don’t know precisely why omicron tends to cause less severe illnesses than delta or other variants of the coronavirus. It is likely that immunity plays a role, as so many people have been infected previously or have been vaccinated.

That appears to have been the case in South Africa, hard hit by the virus in advance of the omicron wave.

A study of more than 7,000 people, posted online but not yet peer-reviewed, reported high levels of antibodies to the coronavirus in South Africa before the omicron wave. Omicron spread faster than previous variants, but rates of hospitalizations and excess deaths “did not increase proportionately, remaining relatively low,” the study found.

Research on mice and hamsters suggests that omicron is innately less dangerous, apart from population immunity. Although omicron appears to grow especially well in the nose and upper airways, leading to much higher viral loads and easier transmission, it may not invade the lungs as well as earlier variants.

“The dam has broken with a milder variant. Most people who made the correct choice to get vaccinated are protected from severe disease,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Rubin predicts a swift recovery for much of the country in January but notes this is likely to vary geographically. The East Coast, including major cities along the Interstate 95 corridor, and the heavily populated states of Florida and Texas are seeing large spikes in cases, while parts of the country hit hard by delta, including the Upper Midwest, are already seeing improvements, he said.

“By the second week of January, we’re going to see the national declines, but there will be some areas struggling for sure,” Rubin said.

A model from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts the peak of this winter wave at Feb. 6, with 408,000 confirmed new daily infections.

Pandemic models are hampered by the difficulty of amassing reliable data. Testing is disrupted during the holidays. There are only rough estimates of how many people have already been infected.

The most urgent question is whether a spike in caseloads will lead to so many severe illnesses that hospitals are overwhelmed. Although some hospitals are stretched thin, the increase in hospitalizations has been modest so far compared with the rise in infections.

For now, the Biden administration is holding off on drastic measures to combat omicron, beyond common-sense efforts to get more tests in the hands of the public and to encourage vaccination. CDC has issued looser rather than tighter guidelines on the isolation time for people infected with the virus, reducing the recommendation from 10 days to five.
That covers people who are asymptomatic or are seeing their symptoms improve. The CDC’s guidance does not advise that people get a negative test before leaving isolation.

The virus has never been a static agent, nor is society a monolith, and so any forecast of what will happen in the coming weeks needs to be written with a pencil — not a pen.

Shaman, the Columbia epidemiologist, acknowledges that the model he and his colleagues have developed is based on incomplete data and must take into account a new variant that remains somewhat enigmatic.

And the virus itself may have new moves not yet anticipated.

“I’m not a betting person on this thing, ever,” Shaman said.

Jacqueline Dupree contributed to this report.

Whatever our sufferings now at least they will be alleviated in the next life! (as long as you are good)

Good morning!

Don’t worry, Omicron won’t be around for long.

As we speak, an immunosuppressed person with chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection (or perhaps an animal!) is brewing up the next weird and wonderful #COVID19 variant to emerge in the next few months.

Have a great day 🙃

— Meaghan Kall (@kallmemeg) January 3, 2022

Apologies in advance for not confining Yglesias hot takes to the designated thread:

I feel like at this point 99 percent of the population is either vaccinated and safe, under 5 and safe, or doesn’t care about Covid and it’s time for non-pharmaceutical interventions to basically go away. https://t.co/ilrfyV2sVY

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 3, 2022