outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

FL's plateau has lasted almost a month. Theory is BA.5 is pushing out BA.2 and thus prolonging the wave.

Wonder if that is the case in NYC.

Exhausting

Yeah, I don't see our national averages dropping until well into August before school starts. Everyone's traveling, and I can't blame them.

leeeeeroy jenkins

LACC and Fire Marshall is no longer letting anyone in #AX #AnimeExpo pic.twitter.com/3sLP6z3Jb6

— Anime News Network (@Anime) July 1, 2022

The vaccines in trial against all coronaviruses are exciting (if they work) - gimme that never have another cold shot right in the arm.

Cases at my hospital dropped to around 15, back up to 24, and thus weekend definitely won’t help.

xpost yeah really hoping Moderna and Pfizers excitement about their bivalent pills aren't a lot of smoke. they are really needed. i don't care how many times I have to get stabbed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2ou-WIxfLY

Just home-tested again after flying 2x and being in a few shops & restaurants in a rural area where no one was masking at all. Back in NYC now and still negative! Riding the wave (of never having had covid).

A compendium of anecdotes:

My older daughter caught covid the last week of school in May, presumably at prom. She missed her last three days of high school ever and, despite minimal symptoms for a day or so, kept testing positive for well over a week.

That makes my wife the last of us to have never tested positive for covid. But - and this is a big but - she started seriously losing her hair in January, which would have been right after her booster. Could that have sparked an autoimmune response resulting in her alopecia? She wouldn't be the first one, anecdotally; apparently serious hair loss is a relatively common side effect of covid, though dunno about the vaccine.

Somehow virtually none of our close family friends have caught covid, but the dad in one of the more cautious families finally caught a (mild) case. And the son in a family of five good friends just caught it, the first of his family to ever test positive (despite a mom that travels a ton for work); they had to cancel a trip that, ironically/sadly, was meant to be a family reunion remembering the passing of a couple people that died during (but not of) covid. Most dramatically I learned a friend of mine who finally caught covid in May ended up having something of an anxiety-induced breakdown and can no longer even drive, let alone fly. He's been on disability leave from a big tech company here because even working 4 day weeks his productivity had apparently dropped down to 60%. He can barely leave the house.

We just got back from a trip to Los Angeles, where we met up with the Aussie side of the family, for whom this was the first trip since covid hit (none of us got or are sick, so far). All four of them caught covid for the first time back in the spring, as did my sister and her family in England. It finally seems to be catching up with folks that avoided it for years. And yet the one person I know that has perpetually been most at risk, given his job is closely tied to both concerts and restaurants, has never tested positive, even when his entire family tested positive. Compare that to my kid's new piano teacher, a family of six that all had it at once. No rhyme or reason.

My parents caught it two weeks ago; Dad most likely brought it home from work. Mom suffered severe sore throat, runny nose, hacking cough, but no fever. Dad, not feeling well on Father's Day weekend, only realized he had it five days after symptom onset; that's how mild his symptoms were (both are jabbed and boosted). He tested PCR-negative last Wednesday, Mom yesterday. That's the closest it's come to me.

Can't recall if I mentioned that another person we know, their daughter tested positive the day after running a marathon. Which means she literally ran a marathon with covid.

Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 838
The die is now cast: BA.5 is destined to be our dominant virus.
In today’s 🧵I discuss the implications on the course of the pandemic, and how to think about responding.
(I use “BA.5” & not “BA.4/5” since BA.5 is poised to outrun BA.4.). (1/25)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) July 4, 2022

Great thread, I always love Wachter. My only quibble (and it's not just him saying this) is this part:

But since we’re missing ~80% of cases due to home tests, today’s true case-rate isn't far from Jan’s.(6/25)

Because that pre-supposes that we weren't undercounting in January, when all tests (home or lab) were difficult to obtain. But that is just a minor gripe.

The lengthy plateau he mentioned is what has me worried - we're in the midst of a month long plateau at very high levels in FL. There's been little respite. We had maybe a month of low cases after BA.1 before things started to rise again.

People keep saying "the pandemic will end, they all do", but if new scarier variants occur that cause mass reinfection, I don't see how it ends, other than "just giving up", which seems our current M.O. Endemicity seems so far away still.

Another good hot off the presses article:

Finally out after peer-review @NatureMedicine:
Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron lineages BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa. In this publication, we describe the origins, evolution and impact of BA.4 & BA.5, which emerged in SA and now dominate most of the global COVID infections. 1/x

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 27, 2022

Wachter clearly knows what he's talking about, but honestly I've had trouble with him ever since he seriously overreacted over his (vaxxed, mild symptoms, 28-year old) son not answering the phone and essentially freaked out. Then again, anyone fully immersed in the shifting dangers of this disease is probably prone to freaking out now and then, as we've all discovered.

I’m going to start masking at my basically outdoor bar job— getting paranoid about getting it again.

At least two of my friends have had their second Cron :(

Stay safe tabes.

I ordered new N95s that fit comfortably over my big-assed nose

Well, these latest tidbits at least make me feel less like a crazy forest hermit… I reckon I’ve been applying just about the right level of restraint/caution.

But lord do I hate this

Congrats humanity on making sure this is an endemic pandemic. Reports about B4/B5 feel pretty bleak.

It also feels like the fear mongering over the last week is increasingly difficult to separate from the reasonable warnings and data sharing. Saw a couple threads just yesterday getting shared widely on Twitter that start out as wise and apt data sharing and warnings, but quickly devolve into essentially saying masks should be worn at all times, even outside and that outdoor transmission is possible even if you pass by someone with 4/5. I've also seen a lot of unverified doctor's tweets getting widely shared with anecdotal data that these variants appear to be leading to much more severe hospitalization among even vaxxed and boosted younger folks. It's all just seems even harder to sort the signal from the noise lately.

Don't get me wrong, numbers are trending in a bad direction and I think it's important to alert and warn to see if we can shift any behavior now that mask wearing has been abandoned by so many, but I wonder at what point the hysteria starts to do more harm than good.

If "essentially saying masks should be worn at all times, even outside and that outdoor transmission is possible even if you pass by someone with 4/5" is an accurate depiction of events, would you still classify it as "hysteria"? I'm not being disingenuous, I can't fully unpack every tweet either, but I'm still wearing N95s into places and on transit, and it seems like a good and easy thing I can do when the covid+ rate is supposedly 25% in NYC (one figure I've seen).

Oh I am still wearing a N95 on transit, in buildings and if I (rarely) happen to be in a large crowd outside, but these tweets are suggesting that we should be masked everywhere outside, which does seem to me over the top based on what we've learned over the last two years.

Maybe I shouldn't have focused on that specific item, there's just an over the top tone to a lot of threads that scan as fear mongering. Can't find it quickly now, but saw one that said "if you leave your house without a mask on, you will be killing someone with your choice". Which, maybe? But that feels... extreme and not helpful.

Liiiiiike...telling people what their assessed risks are and what they can do to protect themselves and others, when you just acknowledged that numbers are trending and infection counts are rising, and more people are getting more seriously ill...obviously no one is HAPPY about this reality! But just reporting on it isn't fearmongering.

But I'm talking about the threads that start out as reporting, but devolve into unsourced speculation - the latter is my concern, not the former.

I 100% agree that we should be ringing alarm bells right now.

I guess the “everywhere outside” thought is driven by epidemiologists saying this is by some distance the most contagious variant yet.

So the risk level of specific behaviors may no longer be at the baseline to which we have been accustomed.

I’ve added “when close to other people outdoors” to my times-to-mask. Maybe overcautious, we’ll see.

Xposts sorry

I follow a lot of disabled & chronically ill ppl on my media and yes, the messaging from some people in that area is more intense, because their lives are pretty intense already and it sounds like they're living in a different reality than people who don't identify as "high-risk" or compromised or w/e. I don't always know how to receive that message because practically speaking most people seem to be at 0% working empathy reserves and Idk what can be done about that.

xxxpost I'm always skeptical of "oh shit, it can be transmitted even with fleeting contact" reports because they said this during Delta and this was all based on one anecdotal story of someone who passed an infected person in an airport and there was zero attempt to actually ascertain whether this person had possibly been around other infected people that day or other days. eventually this anecdote DID get called into question in a few studies but naturally it didn't circulate as well as the original story. and also, the 'fleeting contact' depends on what happened during that contact. if someone coughed on or near you, maskless, it really doesn't matter at all how long you were in their presence.

as far as I can tell, there's nothing to suggest that outdoor transmission for BA.4 and BA.5 is more likely other than the fact that it's just inherently the most transmissible of all of the variants. i wouldn't begrudge anybody for masking outdoors, but I have seen no reputed source actually suggest it's necessary. and there are a LOT of amateur cranks on Twitter who have spread a lot of misinformation.

and I'm hardly a "COVID minimizer" in saying that, though Twitter would say otherwise. these are the same people who were screaming OMG EBOLA IS AIRBORNE during the Ebola epidemic of 2014 even though, no, it was not airborne. a lot of the people circulating rumors aren't even experts in their field, but it gets picked up as they're a blue check for another reason. so I am sympathetic to what jon says - fearmongering and unsourced information don't help anybody.

this isn't me saying 'these things are false', but people jump from "suspicion" to "100% confirmed truth" very fast.

the empathy reserves thing is very true. the "OMG WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE US DO, LOCKDOWN FOREVER" reactionary crew seems to jump on any Tweet that suggests BA.4 and BA.5 might be a bad thing. it's all strawman, strawman, strawman with them. wondering how bad it will get here. South Africa didn't have much of a BA.2 wave.

impossible to tell this week because the 4th of July fucked up reporting royally.

I have a chronic autoimmune condition (crohns) and tbh I’ve never found a solid accounting of how that elevates my risk level or not. My wife has hypothyroid and diabetes and those definitely elevate risk.

I would give anything to be doing the things I was doing last July tbh… anything other than getting covid and drawing the short straw re severity lol

my partner has crohns and i believe the elevation of risk is mainly dependent on the medication you take and whether it is an immunosuppressant or not (or at least this is what her specialist told her). she finally caught Covid a few weeks ago and had it realtvely mildly - mainly some weird pains.

jvc & Neando - maybe our media feeds are just different. I haven't noticed a preponderance of the kind of tone I think you're describing. I definitely see perspectives on things that I don't know what do to about, but the fault in that is not on the person who's just explaining what's happening. I am troubled by the BA 4/5 stats and I'm heading back into NYC today for a large outdoor event tomorrow. Sigh.

I haven't noticed a preponderance of the kind of tone I think you're describing

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXJccxNUYAAK_va?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

I saw an article on CNN last week that quoted fucking Feigl-Ding and I damn near threw my phone across the room.

Is Topol bad? Every highlighted part of that article seems reasonable to me.

July 4 reporting is messed up but fwiw north east wastewater doesn’t suggest we’re about to have a huge wave.

I saw an article on CNN last week that quoted fucking Feigl-Ding and I damn near threw my phone across the room.

xxxxpost Josh, I wouldn't put Eric Topol (who wrote the article above) in the crank category. he does have a tendency to jump on pre-prints without vetting them, but he's right more than he is wrong. he's just upset at how our country has mishandled the pandemic from the beginning.

in orbit I don't venture into *that part* of Twitter anymore because it's toxic, but there is definitely an entire wing of Twitter that spreads mass misinformation under the guise of "the truth you're not being told", who actually sic their followers on actual experts they feel aren't 'taking things seriously enough' (Dr Angela Rasmussen gets a LOT of this flack, much of which is misogynist). I had to stop as it was affecting my mental health, as even when I read twitter feeds I liked, these people would invade.

a few times in this thread I've actually made a list of whom to avoid, before I just gave up reading Twitter altogether. one of these guys, whose name I've thankfully forgotten, claimed to be the "sole expert on the pandemic", started a substack with a decent number of followers, and has zero experience in any field even five clicks removed from virology or epidemiology.

that's a very different category than, say, Dr Eric Topol, Scott Gottlieb, Tulio Olivera et al saying "hey, this one is worse than we've seen and here's what you should know", which I agree is helpful, even if the message isn't what we want to hear.

stay safe!!! just ordered more N95s myself.

Is Topol bad? Every highlighted part of that article seems reasonable to me.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Friday, July 8, 2022 11:06 AM bookmarkflaglink

no Topol's good. humorously, he gets flack both from people saying he's not taking the pandemic seriously enough, and also from people who say he's a scaremonger.

He had an open about monkeypox in the Washington post yesterday!!!

jfc! Since successfully finding the right combo of terms to block him completely from my Twitter feed, I has lived a few blissful months without hearing anything from him.

Yep, topped up on our supply of N95s as well. I'm one of the last two people in our building still wearing one every day. Not sure it actually helps, but I also have an air purifier running at my desk.

humorously re: wastewater, I had one friend who was posting the latest data for FL, and another friend genuinely asked why the increase in wastewater was a concern (as this was when 'wastewater data' had just started to become mainstream), and another friend hopped in to say (not even jokingly) 'because there's always a risk kids will get into the septic system and possibly drink the water', and OP said "uh, no, that isn't it at all".

Your Local Epidemiologist (Katelyn Jetelina) is also a very very good substack to follow. She just posted a state-of-things update yesterday

in orbit I don't venture into *that part* of Twitter anymore because it's toxic, but there is definitely an entire wing of Twitter that spreads mass misinformation under the guise of "the truth you're not being told"

Yes I'm aware there are covid cranks on the internet. What I'm asking is that we not equate them with people who have a reasonable message that one just doesn't like the content of.

I mean I think we're on the same page!

absolutely!

Yeah I don't think any of us are disagreeing. My whole point was that I've seen a few new (to me) Twitter experts that really ride the line between reasonable messaging and OTT spec content - folks that share legit data and science but also spin off into what is clearly their own speculation and interpretation about some of the finer points. That's what I meant by finding it harder lately to separate the wheat from the chaff. Like threads that start out with a general warning (good!), then several tweets linking to studies and data (good!) but then swing to unsourced speculation (less good!).

on another note, I hate living in FL because the entire pandemic has been politicized. DeSantis didn't order any extra vaccine after vaccinations were approved for under-5 (they can still get them, especially since nobody in FL wants to get vaccinated anymore, but he didn't order any because he had his own Department of Health recommend against having under-5s get them). His Department of Health has also recommended against gender reassignment surgery based on very specious science, as a very clear dog whistle for transphobia.

and he appointed a Surgeon General who is basically not far removed from "COVID is a hoax". we're truly on our own here.

DeSantis getting to the national level is a scary disaster I worry about. dude is Trump on even scarier crazy pills, without the drama and distractions derailing his momentum like the former.

Jon not Jon, thanks for the suggestion for Jetelina, I've read a few of her posts and they're clear and easy to follow. and I don't have to venture onto Twitter! woohoo

Just like...what does it say about the state of the world that, in seeking accurate news about an ongoing pandemic, laypeople are left trying to discern which Twitter users are and are not full of shit. It's insane.

I'm just trying to come to terms with the notion of wearing a mask pretty much everywhere but my home for the next several years at least. It seems like that's all that I as an individual can do at this point (aside from getting boosted regularly).

Jetelina talked about BA5 being more transmissible in her last few emails, but seems to be a bit less EVERYBODY PANIC about it