Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Twdft]

Both counties' school districts plan on requiring masks, regardless, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and are exploring legal action.

In a country as litigious (sp?) as the USA I'd think everyone responsible for other people should go with mask mandates etc even if only to cover your ass when someone inevitably dies.

[bladeXcrasher]

Calling it now, anti-vaxxers going to start getting bit by venomous snakes.

https://www.reuters.com/business/hea...ws-2021-08-31/

[Machismo]

Calling it now, anti-vaxxers going to start getting bit by venomous snakes.

https://www.reuters.com/business/hea...ws-2021-08-31/

It's time for me to buy some stock of venomous snake importers.

[Rasulis]

Updated San Francisco Covid numbers from my previous post on 08/22. Data from previous post in shown in parentheses.

• San Francisco is one of the highest vaccinated cities in the world with over 80% (78%) of the eligible population fully vaccinated, so breakthrough cases are expected.
• 7-Day Rolling Average of Case Rate: 18.1 (20.5) per 100,000 SF residents
• 7-Day Rolling Average of Case Rate- Not Fully Vaccinated: 34.8 (36.2) per 100,000 SF residents who are not fully vaccinated
• 7-Day Rolling Average of Case Rate- Fully Vaccinated: 11.2 (13.8) per 100,000 SF residents who are fully vaccinated
• Case-based Hospitalization Rate- Not Fully Vaccinated: 79.2 (79.3) per 1,000 cases
• Case-based Hospitalization Rate- Fully Vaccinated: 13.4 (10.9) per 1,000 cases
• 63 (45) clinically validated fully vaccinated San Franciscans who have ever been hospitalized due to COVID-19.
• There have been 2 (2) deaths of fully vaccinated people that are due to complications from COVID-19. Both over 90 and had substantial co-morbidities.

San Francisco Total Hospitalized Covid cases. It has been hovering at around 100 since 07/31. Which is odd. Turned out almost 40% of Covid hospitalization in San Francisco is from other counties. Mainly Fresno, Sacramento, Modesto, Del Norte, etc. Between the poor air quality from the fire and Covid, hospitals in those counties are swamped. California Air Ambulance system has been taxed transporting emergency patients.

Case in point - Nineteen of the 21 crew members aboard a cargo ship anchored in U.S. San Francisco Bay have tested positive for the coronavirus, and six have been transported to hospitals, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday.

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California does have its red headed step child counties also.

In Fresno and Tulare counties, doctors and health officials are getting local reports of people using a veterinary medication called Ivermectin, generally used to treat worms and parasites in horses and other livestock, to treat their own symptoms of COVID-19.

Over the past weekend in Fresno County, more than 400 people were being treated in hospitals for confirmed and suspected COVID-19 infections, including almost 90 critically ill patients in intensive-care units. Valleywide, hospitals in Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties were treating 725 coronavirus patients, of whom more than 130 were in ICU beds.

Much lower vaccination rates than the Bay Area 9 counties, San Diego and Imperial counties.

In Fresno County and neighboring Valley counties, however, people have been slower to accept the vaccines. Almost 494,000 residents in Fresno County, or 47.8%, have not received even one shot and are completely unvaccinated, compared to just under 452,000 or 43.8% who are fully vaccinated.

In other Valley counties, vaccination rates are:

— Kings: 30.7% fully vaccinated (47,963 people), 62.6% unvaccinated (97,976 people).

— Madera: 39.3% fully vaccinated (62,939 people), 53.0% unvaccinated (84,780 people).

— Mariposa: 31.7% fully vaccinated (5,649 people), 51.4% unvaccinated (9,145 people).

— Merced: 34.5% fully vaccinated (99,223 people), 53.3% unvaccinated (153,322 people).

— Tulare: 37.3% fully vaccinated (180,820 people), 55.4% unvaccinated (268,405 people).

Ron DeSantis Faces Lawsuit to Make Florida COVID Data Public Amid Delta Surge

A lawsuit has been filed in Florida by a Democratic lawmaker and a non-profit group that is accusing the state's Department of Health (FDOH) of violating public-records laws by refusing to offer daily data reports on the COVID pandemic.

[Edge-]

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florid...-vaccinations/

Starting September 16, being a responsible school or private business will cost an additional $5,000 in Florida. Because that's when they'll start fining businesses, schools, or any part of the state government for requiring vaccines.

The Death Cult is particularly pernicious in its pursuit of a the highest body count they can get.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ns/5684533001/

Speaking of Florida, apparently chiropractors are infectious disease/respiratory specialists now? A single chiropractor in a Florida school district is responsible for around 1/3 of the 500 medical exemption forms submitted.

I mean, I guess it fits with the types of folks that think you can't breathe with a mask on. Having a back that's outta alignment has nothing to do with wearing a mask. Fuck these dishonest piece of shit, and fuck them for placing adherence to the Death Cult over protecting their kids.

[Rasulis]

In a country as litigious (sp?) as the USA I'd think everyone responsible for other people should go with mask mandates etc even if only to cover your ass when someone inevitably dies.

I do have a story associated with that.

Ramona Unified School District rescinds mask-optional decision but will vet possibility of parental waiver

The school district is located in one of the last GOP stronghold in San Diego County. It is Darrell Issa's district. They had voted before to go mask optional despite the State of California mask mandate requirement for all schools. At the very last minute, they changed their mind. No reasons were given.

My friend is a board member. He/she told me that the School District's insurance carrier called to let them know that if they decided to go mask optional, they need to find another carrier. So they changed their mind.

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Millions Of People Are Missing From CDC COVID Data As States Fail To Report Cases

A better title would be "Why the US can't have nice things."

Colorful maps on the new online Health Equity Tracker reveal how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected different races and age groups across the United States, but you can tell something is not quite right.

A handful of states are grayed out, and that's not because they've escaped the pandemic.

"There's no data coming out of Texas," points out software engineer Josh Zarrabi of Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine, which recently rolled out the tracking portal. "A lot of Americans should be unhappy about that. And they should say, like, 'Wow, like, we need the data, right, because we're missing a huge piece of the puzzle here.' "

And it's not just a search for jigsaw pieces from Texas.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tallied over 39 million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., but if you want to know more detailed information, such as where patients live, whether patients were hospitalized or died, demographic details like race, gender and age, that information is gathered separately.

In that more detailed CDC data set, about 1 in 5 known cases — or 7 million people — are completely missing, an NPR analysis found. On top of that, about two-thirds of the data present aren't usable, as health care providers marked fields as "unknown" or simply left them blank.

Most states have voluntarily sent up whatever records they have, but a handful have not. Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, West Virginia and Wyoming have each submitted less than one-tenth of their total cases. Another handful of states, including Florida, Michigan and Kentucky, have smaller but still significant gaps in their data, each completely missing over 30% of their known cases.

Over 3 million Texans have had COVID-19, but just 81,000 are in the data set. That's not even 3%.

"That is ludicrous. It is shameful. It is wrong," says Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University. "You need good data to do proper planning, to understand what the risk is, how the risk is changing. And you need that to be real data that are publicly available and accessible."

The standardized details that states feed into this data set help the CDC track COVID-19's spread, evaluate demographic trends and develop health guidance for at-risk groups and the country as a whole. However, the completeness of these records varies widely.

Just 1% of the records present are missing the patient's age or sex, while 36% of them have race/ethnicity marked as "unknown" or left blank. The CDC asked states to indicate whether patients experienced any of 15 symptoms, including fever, chills or muscle aches, but states largely have not. Health departments may update these details as they conclude case investigations, but for more than 90% of patients, most of these fields are currently blank or marked "unknown."

At the CDC, Paula Yoon directs the surveillance of about 120 infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Her epidemiologists use field studies and lab reports to fill in the blanks the best they can. However, Yoon agrees their job would be simpler if they just had all that data.

"Yes, we would be in a much better place," Yoon says. "It's not because the states are not sharing those data with us. It's because the states don't have those data themselves."

Why states aren't submitting data
There are plenty of reasons why some states haven't submitted their data. Chief among them is the fact that public health has been underfunded for years. This has created a county-by-county patchwork of outdated disease-tracking solutions linking hospitals and labs to public health departments.

Many counties have their own local tracking systems that can't automatically transfer records to the state and then up to the CDC.

At the Jackson County Health Department near Kansas City, Mo., communicable disease division manager Chip Cohlmia jokes that public health is keeping fax machines alive. In his county and many others, hospitals fax records to county health departments, and workers manually enter data.

"It's like having an old car, and you're needing to push the car to like 100 miles an hour," Cohlmia says. "But, you know, you haven't changed the oil. You haven't checked the tires. The check-engine light's been on."

Across the state in Columbia, Public Health Planning Supervisor Rebecca Roesslet says they still need to manually transfer 12,000 records — over half of the county's COVID-19 cases so far. It's a painstaking process of copy-and-pasting data points, field by field.

"That's not our priority. Right now, our priority is in contacting people who have tested positive for COVID and providing them with the education they need and identifying their close contacts," Roesslet says.

In Texas, the state health department launched a new COVID-19 tracking system in May 2020, but most large counties had already developed their own systems by then. This only added more patches onto public health's quilt of tracking systems that don't automatically communicate with each other.

Austin Public Health's chief epidemiologist, Janet Pichette, says they wanted to collect more data than the state was gathering. They also didn't want to rely on an outside system that might go down unexpectedly.

"Once you are a person who works in data and epidemiology, you become very territorial. You want to have control of your own data, right?" Pichette says.

Just like the CDC can't mandate what state health departments must do, states can't always tell counties or cities what to do.

"I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole," says Diana Cervantes. She currently teaches epidemiology at the University of North Texas, but she supervised a 49-county region with the state health department until 2018.

"We basically prefer this hands-off approach. We don't want to start getting in power struggles with the locals," Cervantes says. "The very last thing they're going to worry about is the state because they're not accountable to them."

Local health officials report to their county leaders — people like Ellis County Judge Todd Little near Dallas. He had a full-time staffer working to reconcile county data with what he called "unreliable" state data, but they gave up in June.

"We've done a successful job in mitigating a suburban county's spread. And at this point, we're ready to move on with our lives and, and experience the freedom that all Texans get to experience on a daily basis. We're ready to move on," Little says.

Can the data holes be patched?
Even in an imaginary world with all the right technology and plenty of workers, filling in missing data isn't always easy. Patients might not fit neatly into the CDC's standard race or sex boxes, or they might not want to reveal personal details.

"It can be loud, angry, violent screaming and those kinds of things," Colhmia says, describing his case investigation calls with COVID-19 patients in the Kansas City area. "There have been death threats on our office. There have been protests outside."

Several states told NPR the pandemic outstripped their technical capabilities and overwhelmed their limited staff, but some promise that fixes are on the horizon.

Spokesperson Lisa Cox from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services says the department is looking for a way to remove duplicate records before they send data to the CDC. She expects that by late September.

A Texas health department spokesperson says the department expects to transfer case data from various counties into the CDC's system by October. She blames Texas' decentralized public health system for the delay.

No state has perfect COVID-19 data. But most, including two dozen other states with decentralized public health systems, have figured out how to send what they do have to the CDC. This allows researchers, nonprofit organizations or any interested citizen to check the data and make fair comparisons across state lines of who's most affected by COVID-19.

"We should have these data at this point," says Krieger, the Harvard epidemiologist. "The answer to having not-good-enough data is to make it really public that it's not good enough and to figure out, how do you make it better?"

Last fall, California's public health director resigned because a data glitch with the state's tracking system meant thousands of records were missing. California paid a tech firm $15 million for a new system that could keep up. Within a few months, California's COVID-19 cases were flowing back into the CDC data set.

This summer, the CDC awarded $200 million in COVID-19 relief funds to states to modernize data systems. Yoon, the CDC's surveillance director, says that this money has helped thousands of hospitals add electronic reporting, but there's a long way to go. It'll take sustained funding, a skilled workforce and cooperation from states and counties to keep going.

"We can't go it alone," Yoon says. "It's not a one-and-done situation where you modernize it and then you're done and you can walk away."

But Texas alone now has over 3 million cases to submit, and Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi and a handful of other states each have hundreds of thousands to work through.

As the delta variant continues its surge, their to-do lists will just keep growing.

Not surprisingly, in general the states with the worst Covid cases are the states with the worst percentage of missing records.

[Thepersona]

So my mother got a booster shot (the pfizer one) a few days ago, and my father got the AstraZeneca one some days before that. Only my father got some side effects (flu-like symptoms for some days).

An interesting note about that is that a highschool acquiantance of mine that is now a medical doctor told me that he's seen a lot of people going into EC units because of blood clots, after said AZ booster shots, which didnt happen with either the first or second dose.

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https://www.tampabay.com/news/florid...-vaccinations/

Starting September 16, being a responsible school or private business will cost an additional $5,000 in Florida. Because that's when they'll start fining businesses, schools, or any part of the state government for requiring vaccines.

The Death Cult is particularly pernicious in its pursuit of a the highest body count they can get.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ns/5684533001/

Speaking of Florida, apparently chiropractors are infectious disease/respiratory specialists now? A single chiropractor in a Florida school district is responsible for around 1/3 of the 500 medical exemption forms submitted.

I mean, I guess it fits with the types of folks that think you can't breathe with a mask on. Having a back that's outta alignment has nothing to do with wearing a mask. Fuck these dishonest piece of shit, and fuck them for placing adherence to the Death Cult over protecting their kids.

DeSantis is an Asshole.

[Forogil]

So my mother got a booster shot (the pfizer one) a few days ago, and my father got the AstraZeneca one some days before that. Only my father got some side effects (flu-like symptoms for some days).

An interesting note about that is that a highschool acquiantance of mine that is now a medical doctor told me that he's seen a lot of people going into EC units because of blood clots, after said AZ booster shots, which didnt happen with either the first or second dose.

Interesting - especially as it seemed that there weren't as many blood clots after second dose; https://www.irishtimes.com/news/heal...lots-1.4632552 (the ones that got blood clots after the first were normally not given a 2nd dose of that vaccine as I understand it).

It could be that the even longer interval changed things, could be the expected problem with repeated use of viral-vector, or just that people are more observant of the side-effect due to the publicity.

[Thepersona]

Interesting - especially as it seemed that there weren't as many blood clots after second dose; https://www.irishtimes.com/news/heal...lots-1.4632552 (the ones that got blood clots after the first were normally not given a 2nd dose of that vaccine as I understand it).

It could be that the even longer interval changed things, could be the expected problem with repeated use of viral-vector, or just that people are more observant of the side-effect due to the publicity.

Here in chile the ones eligible to get a booster shot are people that were initially vaccinated with the SinoVac vaccine, so maybe that's why we were not seeing that many clots?

[Forogil]

Here in chile the ones eligible to get a booster shot are people that were initially vaccinated with the SinoVac vaccine, so maybe that's why we were not seeing that many clots?

Likely - as I understand the SinoVac vaccine is a bit less effective (especially against Delta), but I haven't seen any reports of severe side-effects from that vaccine.

In Europe some countries that used AstraZeneca will give them a Pfizer booster shot instead; likely due to a combination of side-effects, getting better effect by mixing, that the EU haven't renewed the AstraZeneca contract, and possibly more.

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I was looking at reported deaths and noticed something interesting about the US compared to other countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers...SA~DEU~GBR~ISR

Spring 2020 the US and the uk were competing of most deaths per capita.
Summer and Autumn the US and Israel were competing of most deaths per capita.
Winter all were about even, but then Israel and the uk declined faster leaving the US and Germany about even until July.
And then the US and the uk began rising, followed by the US and Israel.

The only constant is that the US is always in the lead or close to it.

[PhaelixWW]

NYTimes: Breakthrough infections are less likely to lead to long Covid, a study suggests

People who experience breakthrough infections of the coronavirus after being fully vaccinated are about 50 percent less likely to experience long Covid than are unvaccinated people who catch the virus, researchers said in a large new report on British adults.

The study, which was published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, also provides more evidence that the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines offer powerful protection against symptomatic and severe disease.

“This is really, I think, the first study showing that long Covid is reduced by double vaccination, and it’s reduced significantly,” said Dr. Claire Steves, a geriatrician at King’s College London and the study’s lead author.

Although many people with Covid recover within a few weeks, some experience long-term symptoms, which can be debilitating. This constellation of lingering aftereffects that have become known as long Covid may include fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, heart palpitations and other symptoms. But much about the condition remains mysterious.

“We don’t have a treatment yet for long Covid,” Dr. Steves said. Getting vaccinated, she said, “is a prevention strategy that everybody can engage in.”

The findings add to a growing pile of research on so-called breakthrough infections among vaccinated people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that the highly contagious Delta variant is causing more of these breakthroughs than other versions of the virus, although infections in fully vaccinated people still tend to be mild.

The new findings are based on data from more than 1.2 million adults in the Covid Symptom Study, in which volunteers use a mobile app to log their symptoms, test results and vaccination records. The participants include those who received at least one dose of the Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccines between Dec. 8 and July 4, as well as a control group of unvaccinated people.

Of the nearly 1 million people who were fully vaccinated, 0.2 percent reported a breakthrough infection, the researchers found. Those who did get breakthrough infections were roughly twice as likely to be asymptomatic as were those who were infected and unvaccinated. The odds of being hospitalized were 73 percent lower in the breakthrough group than the infected, unvaccinated group.

The odds of having long-term symptoms — lasting at least four weeks after infection — were also 49 percent lower in the breakthrough group.

[Edge-]

NYTimes: Breakthrough infections are less likely to lead to long Covid, a study suggests

Man, with every passing day there's more and more good news for having the fuckin vaccine.

[Rasulis]

In the past seven days, on average, Florida has added 325 deaths and 19,902 cases each day, according to Herald calculations of CDC data. This is a record high for the death average. It was 242 on 08/26.

[PACOX]

[Deus Mortis]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-...042213983.html

The World Health Organization (WHO) is tracking a new COVID-19 variant that it says could have the ability to evade the immunity people get from vaccines and prior COVID-19 infections.

Called Mu, the B.1.621 variant was first detected in Colombia in January this year. It has since been detected in 39 countries and was added to the WHO's watchlist on August 30.

In the WHO's weekly bulletin, the organization said the variant "has a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape."

O joy another variant /s

Sucks that it is looking like this shit is going to continue for a long long time. At least I got used to wearing N100's when I did welding so face coverings don't bother me at all.

[PhaelixWW]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-...042213983.html

O joy another variant /s

It's not new. And it's a non-issue right now.

The only new thing about it is that it got a letter designation.

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Reposting this from 3+ weeks ago in another thread:

The variant in question is B.1.621 (along with B.1.621.1). It seems to be more serious than the previous variants, but like lambda, it's no match for delta.

You can check out the variant proportions on the CDC website, but it shows:

Dates:	B.1.621:	Delta:
4/25 - 5/8	0.6%	1.3%
5/9 - 5/22	1.1%	3.1%
5/23 - 6/5	2.7%	10.4%
6/6 - 6/19	4.3%	32.0%
6/20 - 7/3	3.4%	62.6%
7/4 - 7/17	2.4%	83.5%
7/18 - 7/31	1.7%	93.4%

So the B.1.621 variant was competitive against the field prior to the expansion of delta, but once delta reached the 50% threshold, it started crowding out the B.1.621 variant's expansion. Even looking just at region 4 (which includes Florida), B.1.621 topped out at about 6.1%. The most recent report has it at only 2.2%.

The CDC data is no longer showing B.1.621.1 and AY.3 (delta plus) sub-variants separately. Regardless, it doesn't change the overall observation.

Updated table:

Dates:	Mu:	Delta:
4/25 - 5/8 (2 wks)	0.6%	1.3%
5/9 - 5/22 (2 wks)	1.1%	3.1%
5/23 - 5/29	2.2%	7.5%
5/30 - 6/5	2.6%	14.6%
6/6 - 6/12	3.2%	27.1%
6/13 - 6/19	3.6%	38.0%
6/20 - 6/26	3.4%	54.6%
6/27 - 7/3	2.4%	70.4%
7/4 - 7/10	2.1%	82.8%
7/11 - 7/17	1.7%	88.1%
7/18 - 7/24	1.0%	94.6%
7/25 - 7/31	0.6%	96.4%
8/1 - 8/7	0.4%	96.7%
8/8 - 8/14	0.2%	98.7%
8/15 - 8/21	0.2%	99.0%
8/22 - 8/28	0.2%	99.4%

You can also check out the variant proportions of other countries at CoVariants.

[Poopymonster]

Dear Candice,



Love Poopymonster.

[bladeXcrasher]

She even went live to compare it to Jim Crow. I thought Candace said racism didn't exist?

[Ursus]

She even went live to compare it to Jim Crow. I thought Candace said racism didn't exist?

No, you misunderstood. She thinks racism does exist, but that she is literally the only person on the planet that it ever happens to.

[Gaidax]

Despite 3rd vaccination campaign, the numbers are still quite big, so I imagine some sort of lockdown will happen to hold it back.