Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Woods not out of yet.

 

This piece indicates that the variants have been mating.

 

The people who were big on “Wuhan flu” will be downright giddy to call it “California covid.”

 

RickStain stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. That guy TV quoted seems to have been doomsdaying everything for the past month.

Of course I’m sure I would’ve been just as flippant on 2/23/20, so who knows.

 

Feigl-Ding, whose specialty is nutrition, has been repeatedly shredded by experts closer to the subject for distorting the truth in order to make terrifying tweets that get him lots of clicks and retweets. Then he buries all the "actually, it's not as bad as it sounds" caveats in the 27th post in the chain that he knows nobody will read. It's a formula that has made him very popular on Twitter and torched his reputation in the epidemiology community.

I'm not qualified to tell you he's full of shit. But a lot of people who are qualified to tell you he is full of shit will tell you that he's full of shit.

Here's a good article where a lot of them will tell you he's full of shit:

“Whoa!” “I’m crying!” “Worrisome!” “Buckle up!” The swift, complicated rise of Eric Feigl-Ding and his Covid tweet threads

What his TERRIFYING tweet doesn't say is that:

1) The California variant shows significantly less immunity evasion than, for example, the SA variant, which we already know the mRNA and Johnson and Johnson vaccines do pretty well against.

2) It's been around for half a year and already represents 50% of the cases in California. So whatever influence it's going to have on the course of the pandemic there, it's already had most of it. It could have contributed to the big winter wave, sure.

 

I basically tune out Feigl-Doom's tweets at this point.

 

@TigerVols is no “glass half full” guy himself.

 

Still kinda meh drops today. I'm inclined to continue calling it backlog clearing from the snowstorm for a few more days, especially since California is still dropping as normal. But I can't rule out it being the beginning of a plateau.

 

It seems hospitalizations and deaths will be the metrics to watch as the vulnerable are vaccinated.

 

Exponential growth gets steep ... exponential decline gets shallow.

 

Yes, but the size of the drops as a percentage is decreasing, not just in raw numbers. The exponent of decay is moving closer to 1, which is not ideal. Or at least it appears to be over a small sample.