outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

From the Yong article:

Though previous immunity has been dialed down a few notches, since BA.5 showed up, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. “We’re seeing that new infections are disproportionately people who haven’t been infected before,” Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the U.K. Health Security Agency, told me. About 70 percent of those who currently have COVID in England are first-timers, even though they account for just 15 percent of the country’s population. This clearly shows that although reinfections are a serious problem, the population still has some protection against catching even BA.5.

This is somewhat reassuring, especially coming from Yong, who I've never found hyperbolic but certainly doesn't sugarcoat things.

I don't think BA5 changes my current risk calculus (mask inside, don't eat in except for short visits to airy cafes, don't wear a mask outside unless there's a big crowd). My toddler caught covid last week and seems to be recovering, so if anything I hope I can worry about her less for a bit.

yeah and he cited Kall, who I like a lot too.

Hang on, so only 15% of England has not had Covid before? Official total cases is 19m, but I know they are loads of community survey studies going on - guess I hadn't realised the comparative figures.

As I read it, 15% of people are first-timers, so there's still another percentage who are zero-timers (i.e. have never caught it and still don't have it)

I'm actually not sure what that's trying to say. Obviously everyone isn't going to have COVID at the same time -- are they saying 15% of the entire population of England has COVID for the first time right this minute?

from the study
https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/blog/latest-real-time-tracking-of-covid-19-5/

Our estimates for the attack rate, that is the proportion of the regional populations who have ever been infected, is up to 84.8% nationwide, and now exceeds 80% in all regions. However, the estimated total number of infections to date (67.7m) far exceeds the size of the population of England.

So yes, they're saying 84.8% of people have had an infection at some point

15% have never been infected, but of the people currently infected (presumably chipping away at that 15%) 70% of them are first-timers

15% have never been infected, but of the people currently infected (presumably chipping away at that 15%) 70% of them are first-timers

Yeah, I got that (not being sarky) - just thought 15% was a small number of people! Thanks for the details. It certainly seems anecdotally and locally that people who have avoided it until now are now getting it. <looks around nervously> I'll go and read the full article now :)

I mean, it varies by region but we are talking about Britain, the covid island

In other "COVID is over because we say so" news, my place of employment picked this week of all weeks to quietly kill off our tracking dashboard and remove all quick links to our COVID informational pages.

The directive also came down that all COVID signage is to be taken down.

I cannot possibly imagine why we continue to get new variants.

https://st.depositphotos.com/1760261/1345/i/450/depositphotos_13450038-stock-photo-denial.jpg

oops, screwed up my tags there

handy looking evushield guide, similar to the paxlovid guide i shared a while back

https://covidsafe.fyi/evusheld/guide/

Being a shoegazer rather than a death metaller finally pays off

scene immunity not herd immunity

― avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Wednesday, 3 June 2020 23:39 (two years ago)

Genuinely think about this blessed joke about once a week, thanking u

This sure looks like massive underreporting:

https://preview.redd.it/tj1xgicpofc91.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=549ccec87e48be8a84ba807f5c066d5934ddc687

The lack of funding for testing like what was in place before is really rotten. I count myself lucky I can do multiple PCR tests monthly per my employer but that’s a small slice of people in the city, to put it mildly.

my area's wastewater report is pretty on point, but the reporting line is... zero, due to non-reporting

I reported my own case to the county health department website but I have no clue where that number went

that said, this is here, and the curve seems relatively flattened, if bubbling
https://i.imgur.com/Ajgg67e.jpg

I've heard anecdotal conjecture in an article that says wastewater isn't collected/measured the same way at all locations and that is why sometimes it's hard for laypeople like me to interpret

Florida for instance always seems to look like it's seesawing

Yeah, the company the local farms out to is biobot, and this is their protocol: https://biobot.io/covid19-report-notes/

their calibration to determine concentration of human waste seems decent tbh, but I have no idea how many companies are doing comparable testing or how they calibrate

the newest thing I've heard, from a friend and her coworker who both tested positive in this last week and both took paxlovid:
friend is lethargic and got both the metallic taste and some nausea from paxlovid. she recently flew to a conference in Portland, Oregon and picked it up somewhere along the way
her coworker did not attend a conference and probably got it locally. took paxlovid for two days but it was giving her mega-nausea and she stopped taking it

I feel like if you're in a higher-risk group due to age, disease, or any other risk group it's worth it but I don't really regret not looking for antivirals tbh

That SF wastewater thing seems unlike anything in the rest of the US.

I have to say that science people I know are skeptical that you can clearly infer what's going on from the wastewater numbers, which are affected by a lot of things (that said, now that testing is rare, it's not clear there IS a way to clearly infer what's going on)

It's still remarkable that home tests don't come with a QR code that would make it easy to log a positive result.

they do in the UK

I think some US ones do.

however, there's a place nearby me that is free with insurance and does rapid PCR testing using a high quality rapid PCR (Accula system), and gets results within hours and reports to FL DOH, so I try to use them instead of home tests where possible so my results are counted.

if I ever test positive on a home test, I will definitely go there to get an official one logged.

btw, on my dad's saga (annoying):

so my brother (who had COVID recently, who knows if it was BA.2, BA.5, etc) went to check on Dad yesterday, using PPE as required, and he said they're saying now they think the roommate might be a false positive, but here is their (stupid) reasoning for that:

1) "hE DoEsN't hAvE aNy sYmPtOms!" - seriously, healthcare professionals saying this in 2022
2) "hE aLrEadY hAd COVID!" - ......seriously?!

so yeah, that plus the fact that I heard roommate cough the day before his positive test = I'm not assuming shit and testing myself regularly.

dad tested negative yesterday, they test him again on Thursday. mom is worried about getting it due to her recent lung surgery, though her oxygen levels are back to above 95 with no oxygen therapy, so at least she's not in the immediate aftermath of the surgery.

I avoided a party on Saturday out of caution and lol looks like it may not matter.

I filed complaints with the state health care association about how this was handled. they still haven't called us with updates - we had to call 5 times yesterday and visit in person to ask (ok, take me out of the equation, I didn't do anything because I was dealing with trying to work and dealing with the Medicaid nightmare).

are they continuing to test the roommate?

and is it PCR or antigen? it’s extremely rare for the latter to be a false positive as i’m sure you know.

if your dad is negative they should get him tf out of there no?

supposedly they don't test every day, though we requested them test OUR father every day. I'm not operating under the assumption that it's a false positive, because that seems like something the nurses say just to make it sound like we were overreacting. I have seen it happen with friends, but it's usually accurate.

as far as moving him out of there, apparently they don't have any spare individual rooms available, which is what they told mom (they called mom back while I was in a meeting to address the complaint we filed). I would just say 'bring dad home and we can wear masks and gloves while assisting him' but mom is extra nervous having just completed lung surgery and doesn't want to get it. but I feel like it'd be easier for us to deal with infection if we were all here than him there and us here.

it's hard to know what to do. I'm just mad at myself for not trying harder to force us to bring dad home after his hospital stay. Mom would literally shout, exasperated "I can't take care of him right now, and neither can you!", and get visibly upset, even when I tried to suggest "mom, we were originally planning for me to do everything myself while you recovered, it's time to let me try". and mom is the authorized decisionmaker and not me.

that isn't to say I blame her for making said decision, we did want him to get physical therapy. what doesn't help is my brother is trying to pressure mom into going in to see dad for a few minutes, I'm like - stop demanding mom expose herself to potential infection. at least with you, you had it recently enough to where you may be at less risk and you're not around us all the time to expose us.

like it's not that we don't want to see Dad, I feel terrible not going.

alright, i'm done, I'm not going to monopolize 70 threads about my folks....sorry :/

but thanks TH, believe me I'm with you on this. oi.....

dad's still testing negative, as are we, but too soon to be out of woods.

Florida wastewater, per Biobot's update this week, seems to be flat or mildly decreasing in most counties (except the one I live in, ho ho ho).

but I've noticed sometimes it looks like that one week, only to show an increase the next.

so exhausted by how high the transmission has been here. We've been at a plateau in FL for about 6-7 weeks now, at a very high level of transmission, never experiencing a decline like other states that got BA.2 outbreaks earlier.

I really hope the Omicron boosters are game-changers, starting to fear they might just be 'kicking the problem down the road a bit'.

and now what's the latest on BA2.75? is thata going to take over shortly after BA.5 did?

We've been at a plateau in FL for about 6-7 weeks now, at a very high level of transmission, never experiencing a decline like other states that got BA.2 outbreaks earlier.

Tourism.

there's that, but I think it's also due to timing. some states like NY that got BA.2 earlier than we did experienced a decrease before things plateaued due to BA.5, but I think by the time we were due to hit our drop, BA.5 had offset the BA.2 decrease to where we didn't experience one.

as of yesterday, reported cases (ha!) were actually 7% lower than the week before, but curious to see today's numbers. positivity rate hasn't really declined noticably.

Same here in MDC.

It looks like we got BA.5 instead of the earlier variants, no? We had a rather long lull b/w Jan and late April.

Anecdotally, it's all around me. Three coworkers out with it right now and I haven't had a conversation with anyone in the last two weeks that hasn't involved someone coming up positive.

More than slightly annoyed at the coworker that decided to come into the office (KN95 masked at least, thankfully) Monday and Tuesday, despite their spouse having been positive. In the least surprising development ever, they tested positive on Wednesday.

I got boosted with Moderna yesterday. I had previously had two jabs of J&J and just a few weeks ago Maryland finally opened up mRNA booster shots to us.

Australia set a new daily record for COVID deaths today. (Previous record was set yesterday.)

Boosters are still free regardless of insurance status! Got my 2nd today. Not really changing anything tho, still wearing a mask into stores most of the time. Still covid-free somehow.

Probably due to the mask! Hope the luck keeps up.

By the time my third booster wears off I hope we have the noo-boosters

Me too! I've been careful-ish but not EXTREMELY careful. Plenty of people have done more and still gotten infected. Who really knows.

Yep. Plenty of people I know who were like "I have fucking idea how I got this, I didn't leave the house this week"

I know a half dozen people (all fully vaxxed + boostered, in a region that is generally highly-vaxxed) who are in some stage of COVID infection atm. And a couple more who just got past it. One of these people is a critical care pulmonologist who has been working in a severely undervaxxed community throughout the pandemic and has had a ton of previous exposure without getting infected. I hardly even know more than a half dozen people so this shit is NUTS.

Just tested positive. With the fun twist that three weeks ago I got bitten by a dog and they put me on antibiotics and the antibiotics destroyed my gut flora and today I also tested positive for c.diff. So this will be an interesting medical situation to navigate. Not crazy about the way this summer is going, tbh.

Aw shit :(. I'm sorry Lily

Thanks, Neanderthal!

"C. diff summer"

Hang in there, Lily.

Good luck Lily, that's no fun at all.

Oof sorry.