Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

SARS-COV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the virus. You can be SARS-COV-2 positive but not experience the disease that is COVID-19. Similar to how being HIV-positive does not immediately give you AIDS.

 

Understood. I bolded that part of the quote because I suspect that most people think that getting immunized against Covid will protect them from infection.

 

What that chart shows is that spikes don't last forever, at least. It's going to be a fucking horror show of a holiday season, but at least the US is in the final stretch.

Between now and mid-January, ~10% of the population should be fully through the two-step vaccination process. And we're picking up new infections at a rate of at least 1% of the population per week (personally, I think it's closer to 2%).

So even if we don't change our behavior at all, two months from now transmission rates should be 20% lower than they are now. Which, according to RT.live, is enough to bring it below 1 and introduce exponential decay in almost every state.

There's going to be a perverse phenomenon where the US actually gets to fully re-open sooner than all the responsible countries as the vaccines roll out slowly through the globe because 1) We made sure we were first in line for some of them and 2) We'll have managed to get a third of our people infected before it got here.

 

“Drumpf” will claim victory.

 

All true I hope.

But this next couple months. Oof.

Hospitals Know What’s Coming

 

Fox News on-air pundits: We need Americans to go back to the office!

Fox News corporate: You’re working from home until April.

Fox Corporation Delays Employees' Return to Office Until April - Variety

 

It is crazy that people will die in the next two months, when help is on the way, and we all know it!

Hold Christmas in July, my friends!

A turkey is not worth losing your life for!

 

They might, but I don't think it actually matters much. Lots of bugs enter your system. If your immune system can get control of it fast enough to stop it from hurting you, it doesn't matter much. There are 10s of millions of Americans walking around who got H1N1 and never knew it.

I'm struggling with the right way to put this. The whole "what if the vaccine can stop you from getting sick but can't stop you from being infected and infecting others" thing is ... not literally untrue but it's pretty misleading.

There are degrees to it. The reason you aren't getting symptoms is because the immune system is able to prevent the virus from quickly multiplying in your system and threatening systemic failure, and it's able to do so without resorting to more extreme measures like raising your body temperature or producing shit-tons of snot. Or eventually going scorched earth and possibly killing you itself in a desperate last-ditch attempt.

You will still technically be "infected" and even the presence of a single virion could theoretically infect someone else, but the odds are way way lower because there's just not as much of the virus in you.

 

Pfizer said it expects to be given its emergency approval in the US on Dec. 12, which lines up with some of the public meetings and such.

Once they have that approval, they should be able to get the first jabs going into people's arms within a matter of days. With the second booster dose coming 28 days later, that would mean we should start having a noticeable effect by mid-January (although even the first dose should give you some protection, we're just not sure how much).

It feels like we've decided to focus the first wave of vaccinations on the vulnerable population and HCW, which I think is the right play. Another angle would be to try to go after the people most likely to transmit, but given how asymmetric the deaths are by age, I think it's easier to just start vaccinating old people. 65 or older makes up 15% of the US population and 80% of the US Covid deaths (COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics).

If you focus the first two months of vaccination on that 15% of the population, you can drastically reduce deaths very quickly.

It may end up being overly optimistic, but I don't think a normal MLB Opening Day is out of the question.

 

Possible, but even in your optimistic scenario, I think a Memorial Day start is more likely.

 

Again, only about 20 percent of the people I know plan to get the vaccine and not until probably next fall. They simply don't trust that a safe vaccine will be available that soon.