outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

what I reject is the idea that these antigen tests can't get Omicron, as I see a lot of my friends suggesting today via gossip. my friend almost certainly has Omicron, and it detected it easily. the issue isn't that it won't detect Omicron - it's that it won't detect it 'early enough', is my understanding.

hence the throat swab

This is fairly standard in UK

Here is a how-to video

*In US it is NOT FDA authorized to do a throat swab

Does likely improve sensitivity. May potentially cause a slightly greater number of false positives. Don’t drink or eat for 30 mins beforehttps://t.co/D6lAYpwbJo

— Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) December 27, 2021

here's the UK guidance. the tests on sale in the US are not approved for this method. ymmv.

i'm not doing this, but i can see why you might.

good news for parents of under 5s after the pfizer fuck up (they reduced the dose so much they saw almost no response in the 2-5 group, it kind of worked in under 2s, they're now trialing a third dose):

https://www.wsaw.com/2021/12/30/moderna-vaccine-trial-young-children-nears-finish-line/

A lot of the LFTs in the UK are specifically nasal only and nobody I know who tested +ve (which is a lot of people!) needed a throat swab to do so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

8 w Covid in our house. We are all fine now (yay science! Thanks vaccines!!), but wanted to share our testing results in case it helps decision making. 🧵

TL;DR: antigen and PCR tests were both unreliable making it very difficult to know whom to quarantine from whom.

— Anne Carpenter, PhD (@DrAnneCarpenter) January 4, 2022

:shrug: what a mess.

Good op-ed from David Leonhardt about how kids continue to bear the heaviest burdens of COVID restrictions despite having the least health risk:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/briefing/american-children-crisis-pandemic.html

i got unironically emotional watching the queer eye episode about a school prom under covid last night. (i have never seen this show. is it always like this?)

xxxpost I think people's mindset is less "antigen tests can't detect Omicron" but "antigen tests might not pick them up on the first few days of infectiousness", which....has kinda always been the case? I was told during all prior variants that a negative antigen didn't *necessarily* mean I wasn't infected, and almost all of the at-home tests here (other than On/Go I think) suggest re-testing in 24-36 hours to re-confirm (and to confirm positive results with PCRs).

the problem is, and continues to be, misuse of the results. If you are all rapid testing before a family gathering, the understanding should be "it looks like we're all not sick, but there is a non-zero risk that we are. We are accepting that risk by gathering". People instead are using it to say "WE are not at risk, now let's have a big household orgy".

Likewise, people WITH Omicron-like symptoms are testing once via antigen, getting a negative, and not re-testing (either because they CAN'T due to no appointments/at-home tests, or think they're in the clear), and they go out and think they're in the clear and test positive a few days later and scream B-B-BUT I JUST HUNG OUT WITH 30 PEOPLE.

when in reality, you should be isolating if you have those symptoms until you've had a second negative. these antigens reduce risk, they don't eliminate it, but perfect is always the enemy of good with the "elimination" folk.

It's just like the people who scream during hurricane season about the changing forecast over several days, but whose city has been in the cone of uncertainty for 3 days. They already gave you the warning that you might be hit - they gave you time to prepare! They didn't tell you to wait until they could give you GPS coordinates of where the hurricane would hit.

(with that being said - I swabbed my throat today and I see no issue if people want to do it to catch the infection earlier - there are good reasons why someone exposed but not symptomatic might want to do that if wanting to avoid exposing others).

i'm gonna say don't make up your own testing procedure because of anecdata but that's just me

@caek It's become a very touching show. Pretty much every episode gets to me.

xp that's my take.

my uk boy's whatsapp chat is now forwarding videos about how to use australian and american tests and saying they should do it like that and i'm like jfc just follow the instructions on *your* test.

Lol yes I was about to say that it’s often really emotional

Fwiw I have been doing both throat and nose since reading that is the best way to go.

xp i had to watch one of those F1 episodes to calm down!

xxxxxxpost I think this throat swab thing has the backing of prominent doctors/scientists at this point versus just internet randos, it's gotten mainstream. (https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/throat-swab-rapid-testing-omicron-effective.html, especially with Mina backing it).

but this is the fundamental problem with social media/Twitter. the news now moves too slowly, people want updates on things like hurricane forecasts, which sports players are injured/likely to start, the pandemic. so they go to Twitter/social media to get this "intermediate" data, which they get from a variety of people unqualified/qualified to give it, and entire new strategies get adopted by big pockets of people. often dispensed by cult-like personalities who attack the mainstream experts and implore you to adopt their strategy instead!

it's why people flock to this complete amateur asshole named Mike who lives in Oldsmar, FL, and runs Mike's Weather Pages. Thousands of people flock to him INSTEAD of the NHC to get HIS take on where the hurricane is REALLY going to go and insist that HE'S made the right call EVERY TIME and we should listen to him INSTEAD of the experts.

(btw, still seconding my thanks to kate for this tip - even if we don't all adopt it, it's good to hear about these suggestions. i'd rather get a false positive than false negative at this point)

The way I've seen lateral flow/antigen flow tests explained is to think of them as red or yellow lights. If you get a positive, definitely isolate until better or you're consistently getting negative tests. But a negative test isn't a green light for going out and doing whatever, it just means you're not likely to be infectious at that minute, and could change within hours.

That doesn't seem super hard to understand?

one would think, buuuuuut....

Good op-ed from David Leonhardt about how kids continue to bear the heaviest burdens of COVID restrictions despite having the least health risk:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/briefing/american-children-crisis-pandemic.html

― o. nate, Tuesday, January 4, 2022 12:04 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I liked this. One thing he also leaves out is that child obesity is way, way up, which has a lot of its own long-term health consequences.

the suicide stat in that story is motivated reasoning and reductive bs (see thread)

The problem with this story is that the graph from the MMWR clearly shows suicidality DECLINED during the lockdowns and rose during the SUMMER of 2020, and has risen the most in 2021 when most kids are back in school! https://t.co/dZVI3cSCj3

— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) January 4, 2022

(i am sympathetic to the rest of it btw, but that one is dangerously dishonest)

Yeah it seems like at a minimum more research is needed on why suicide rates actually rose

Although one caveat to that is that there were a number of large urban school districts that did not go back in person until Fall 2021. He looks at "state-level" change in suicides vs share of students in school "in the state" which won't necessarily fully capture that. It would probably be more telling to look at whether suicides were up in places like Chicago.

Even then obviously you're not going to be able to disaggregate all causes, as he points out - for example the large urban districts most likely to be closed are also likely to have been hit with numerous other COVID-related stresses -- death, illness, job loss, etc.

well yeah it's extremely complicated, which is why dropping a stat with the clear implication (as understood by the many people replying to the author of that piece on twitter) that closing schools caused children to commit suicide in the paper of record is not actually ideal.

Yeah that's horrid

...child obesity...has a lot of its own long-term health consequences.

holy shit why has no ever mentioned this thank u dr. alive

This is what it comes down to for me: if you're willing to potentially sacrifice me and/or any number of my immunocompromised adult friends so that little Billy doesn't have to wear a mask and can swap sandwiches with other kids at lunch, then you can quite literally fuck off to the next galaxy over.

i don't think it's so much about wearing the masks, as getting them out of the house so the parents can go to work in many cases. also a reason many people are quitting and not going back to work at all, for good or ill

Then the issue isn't the way that *WE* treat children but the way that the needs of capital steamroll the ability of many adults to teach and supervise their children adequately. Yet somehow that isn't talked about, and instead it's always, "fuck those teachers and people who are immunocompromised"

I think its more about realizing that covid isn't going away, ever. It's going to be endemic. People who wanted to be vaccinated have had ample time to do so. So once this current Omicron wave recedes the question is going to be what are we waiting for to reopen everything?

once this current Omicron wave recedes

When we know what that looks like we might be able to answer your question: what are we waiting for to reopen everything?

A preliminary guess might still be that health care systems everywhere are so near to breaking, and so many serious non-covid needs are going unmet or being postponed, that just saying "fuck it, we'll just let the chips fall where they may" could result in a much worse situation for society than if we continue to manage covid for harm reduction.

Everything has reopened.

in which states have restaurants, gyms, bars, etc. remained closed?

Leonhardt is right in much of what he says but I get tired of his "at last, I am the one who dares to say [commonplace stance that has been driving public policy in most places since late 2020 and everywhere since fall 2021, and which has never not been a standard part of the public discussion about COVID]" schtick

I mean "right in much of what he says" just to mean, yes, there are real and big costs of having school be online, and those costs, like the costs of COVID itself, fall most heavily on low-income people. But it's madness for him to pretend nobody was allowed to mention those costs or take them into account before yesterday!

Everything has reopened.

In Florida, yes. In France, no.

But the tone of o. nate's question suggests that what he's thinking about is the US or UK removing all restrictions and mandates, such as mandatory tests, masks, or proof of vax. The flaw here is that simply declaring victory and retreating won't lead to everyone acting like things are open or normal. I sure wouldn't pretend the pandemic suddenly disappeared just because half the people at the grocery aren't wearing a mask! It would just make me hunker down more determinedly.

I thought it was understood I referred only to the United States.

And there is irritating goalpost shifting in that series of tweets -- "maybe in spring 2020 it was a good idea," he says, but NOW, he goes on, the availability of vaccines to everyone should raise the ethical question of whether children should bear the cost in order to protect unvaccinated adults.

OK but there are TWO OTHER SEMESTERS you are not mentioning here. If he thinks that in fall 2020, schools should have been fully open, even though there were no available vaccines at that time, and that children shouldn't suffer that harm for old peoples' sake, he should say so! There's a case to be made! But you gotta actually do it!

So I'm just irritated because *I too* basically think that IN SPRING 2021 schools should be in-person, and I think they almost entirely will be, and gets my goat that people are presenting this as if it's some kind of brave contrarian stance which was obviously right all along under all the many conditions that have so far obtained.

hate to break it to you, but it's 2022

no we just started 2021 over

fuuuuuuckkk

child obesity is way, way up, which has a lot of its own long-term health consequences.

pretty sure not being able to exercise for 2 years is going to have health consequences for ppl the exact age as me too tbh

i've been put on two new medications and developed two new ailments and gained about 20 pounds myself

Btw if you're seeing scaremongering about a new French variant, it's tabloid bullshit

Lots of chat about B.1.640.2 in the last few days - just a few points to keep in mind:
- B.1.640.2 actually predates Omicron
- in all that time there are exactly... 20 sequences (compared to the >120k Omis in less time)
Def not one worth worrying about too much at the mo...

— Tom Peacock (@PeacockFlu) January 3, 2022

Really? I heard that one does serious damage to your Système D.

Not til now! xp