The Never Ending Story, Part III
October 23, 2020 5:35 PM   Subscribe

Daily new infections with COVID-19 virus hit a new peak in the United States as a third surge takes place shortly before the election.
posted by dances_with_sneetches (148 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Historically the second or third winter is usually the worst with a pandemic, so this is unfortunately following the expected trends.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:43 PM on October 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


And since this was posted we’ve now reached a new record of more than 83,000 cases in a day....

I am so, so over all of this winning.
posted by rambling wanderlust at 5:52 PM on October 23, 2020 [5 favorites]


Um...USian here and even for me, do we have to do this? WORLDWIDE cases went over 475K yesterday. Can we re-focus this?
posted by sexyrobot at 6:00 PM on October 23, 2020 [12 favorites]


This is so scary to me. I'm so afraid the hospitals are going to crash. It's very difficult to get along day to day because I keep running worst-case scenarios. The feeling that *if* I do everything perfectly *and* nothing big goes wrong we *may* not get sick is also very bad.
posted by Frowner at 6:01 PM on October 23, 2020 [11 favorites]


sexyrobot: there's a good non-US thread, where the rest of us are hanging out.
posted by Pink Frost at 6:04 PM on October 23, 2020 [10 favorites]


Kootenai County in the Idaho Panhandle (Coeur d'Alene is in that county) had their hospitals at 99% capacity from COVID and other needs yesterday, the same day the county rescinded their masking mandate.

I truly do not understand how that makes sense, but I'm not in charge there, so okay.
posted by hippybear at 6:05 PM on October 23, 2020 [23 favorites]


Thanks, I guess I'll head over there, but I will say this:
Maybe it wouldn't be blowing the fuck up over here if we weren't completely ignoring the lessons of the rest of the world.
posted by sexyrobot at 6:09 PM on October 23, 2020 [15 favorites]


Here in NYC most people wear masks and we still don't congregate indoors. The rate has stayed below 2% as far as I know. It ain't a lot of fun but it's kinda working. Maybe other states should give that a try for a while.
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:09 PM on October 23, 2020 [50 favorites]


Illinois's absolutely amazing director of the IL Department of Public Health, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, who has been spectacular throughout the crisis, began crying at the podium today at the regular press conference (full official state stream of the event). Her voice starts to catch around 9 minutes; if you jump ahead to about 10:00, she starts crying about 30 seconds in, and cries on and off for the rest of the press conference, occasionally so overcome that she has to stop. (And then she does it all again in Spanish!) Block Club Chicago's story.

Not going to lie, she's been such a steadying and calming hand with clear information and well-considered plans throughout the pandemic, that seeing her break down in tears freaked me out more than a little bit.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:46 PM on October 23, 2020 [57 favorites]


Illinois has made me sad for a week...

NOT GOOD.
posted by Windopaene at 6:58 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Iowa's "let nature take its course" strategy seems to be working out predictably for us. I honestly can't even talk about it or I get ragey. And living here is extremely surreal. On the one hand, I work with 18-22-year-olds, so I know probably 25 people who have had it and recovered and claim to be fine. On the other hand, I know two people who have had parents die of COVID and a couple of more people who have lost grandparents to it. And I have resigned myself to the fact that I will pretty much never be leaving the house, pretty much indefinitely. There's also the fact that 50% of the Iowans who have died of COVID were living in nursing homes, and the whole situation has revealed a completely shocking degree of ableism and just blanket contempt for the lives and worth of severely disabled people.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:05 PM on October 23, 2020 [56 favorites]


Thank you for making a new US thread, dances_with_sneetches.

HHS Secretary Azar said a vaccine should be ready for 'most vulnerable' late this year, and widely available by spring (USA Today, Oct. 21): “We expect that we would have by end of this year enough vaccine that is FDA-authorized to be able to vaccinate the most vulnerable individuals,” he said. “Then, by end of January, we’d expect we’d have enough to vaccinate all seniors, as well as our health care workers and first responders.[...] And by the end of March to early April, enough for all Americans who would want to take a vaccine.”

Same conference, via Reuters: The U.S. government is “cautiously optimistic” that one or two vaccines, likely from Pfizer Inc or Moderna Inc, will be available by the end of the year and can begin to be distributed to Americans, officials said during a news conference.

AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are going to resume their COVID-19 vaccine trials (CBS, Oct. 23). W/r/t AstraZeneca: The FDA didn't find the vaccine responsible for the two cases of a potential neurological side effect that prompted the clinical hold, but couldn't rule out a link to the shot, either. The agency will now ask researchers to inform trial participants about those cases and monitor patients for any related neurological events.(FiercePharma biopharma news, Oct. 23). China's vaccine treatment (two injections of CoronaVac made by SinoVac, otherwise known as Beijing Kexing Bioproducts) still hasn’t passed final (Stage 3) clinical trials but is already being offered to the public on a first come, first served basis. (Time, Oct. 22)

The FDA approved the first treatment for COVID-19, Gilead Sciences' antiviral drug Veklury (a.k.a. remdesivir) (fda.gov, Oct. 22); Just last week, though, a large trial from the World Health Organization (WHO) cast doubts on the med’s efficacy. (The study.)

Fauci: Trump has not attended a White House coronavirus task force meeting in 'several months' (USA Today, Oct. 23) - In his defense, Trump was personally spearheading virus-related efforts, unlike some task force members he could name.
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:15 PM on October 23, 2020 [10 favorites]


I just wanted to say that since we had a non-US coronavirus thread, I thought there should be a US thread. The infections in the US is a significant issue, even without the extra focus the US receives worldwide and in these threads.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:19 PM on October 23, 2020 [15 favorites]


I am shaking my head at even the wise places, like some counties in California that are starting to allow indoor dining, as if low infection rates in the continuing absence of a vaccine mean it's now OK to congregate indoors. It makes me think of RBG's comment opposing abandonment of the Voting Rights Act, which she said was "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
posted by PhineasGage at 7:24 PM on October 23, 2020 [35 favorites]


Someone on my twitter said that it's like being on a diet and reaching your target weight and saying "okay, I don't have to watch what I eat or exercise anymore". Over and over and over.
posted by hippybear at 7:37 PM on October 23, 2020 [39 favorites]


I knew most people don’t grok the behavior of exponential growth, but I’m amazed at just how repeatedly we can be surprised by it.

I suppose the credit card companies already knew.
posted by clew at 7:42 PM on October 23, 2020 [8 favorites]


Um...USian here and even for me, do we have to do this? WORLDWIDE cases went over 475K yesterday. Can we re-focus this?

I just wanted to say that since we had a non-US coronavirus thread, I thought there should be a US thread. The infections in the US is a significant issue, even without the extra focus the US receives worldwide and in these threads.

I set up the non-US thread. I think there needs to be a US thread and a non-US thread. We all need our space to speak. To reflect the enormity of what is happening and the demographics of this site. Maybe we even need a non-US, non-EU thread.

However it falls I think we need a space to share and reflect together. Stay safe, mask up, forget the illusion of a superior response.
posted by roolya_boolya at 7:58 PM on October 23, 2020 [29 favorites]


*sigh* Yes, you're right...I'm just super-crabby today after watching our xenophobe-in-chief crap on the world again last night (and I think we might have shot ourselves in the collective foot by doing the whole 'mute button' thing. I think it just gave him a chance to look 'reasonable' or at least 'reasonable'-esque. Grar. By forcing him to be civil we just basically handed him a fuckton more votes.)
OK, let's take India as an example. Look at $(american media) (and I'm pretty sure this applies to $(european media) as well) and you will see about ZERO mention of the country at all, let alone about the success they are having: they have about 1/5 of our infection rate per capita and 1/10 the death rate (both of which have been declining steadily since peaking in early september), using what I am sure is around 1/25 our healthcare budget...scratch that I looked it up. 2016 values: US $9536, India $63 per capita, or 1/155 (!!!!!!!!!!!!) of our budget and...and...and I am just so damn exhausted.

forget the illusion of a superior response.
(on preview) No. No I will not. India's response is NOT an illusion.
posted by sexyrobot at 8:19 PM on October 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


Belgium, Czechia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, France, the UK, all have more than twice the daily new infections per capita of the US, and are all rising rapidly.

Since it's abundantly clear what the US is, and will continue doing wrong at least until Jan 20th, I'm more interested in how Europe managed to look at our example and decide not to mask or social distance either and the other factors that have led to this spike.

Anyway, I have been preparing for this winter since at least June; the writing has been on the wall. I still don't feel well enough prepared.
posted by joeyh at 8:20 PM on October 23, 2020 [14 favorites]


I knew most people don’t grok the behavior of exponential growth, but I’m amazed at just how repeatedly we can be surprised by it.

I am seeing this every day in the comments on news stories: “x hundred new cases out of y million population? Why are we closing things?” And no matter how many times people explain exponential growth and r-nought and k, it is all forgotten a day or two later. It’s like shovelling water.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:25 PM on October 23, 2020 [13 favorites]


It's eleven days to the election and COVID case growth is going vertical. I'm concerned about awareness of the rapidly increasing danger suppressing the vote. People who do vote will be risking their lives, especially in areas where Republicans have reduced polling locations to increase crowding and create long lines.

And fuck the Supreme Court Republicans who have done their part to back up the Republican Party on their efforts to eliminate drop boxes, voting by mail and drive up voting. They are monsters.
posted by JackFlash at 8:33 PM on October 23, 2020 [14 favorites]


Belgium, Czechia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, France, the UK, all have more than twice the daily new infections per capita of the US, and are all rising rapidly.
UK and Spain haven't quite been double (at least in checking the past two days), but otherwise, you're right. By focusing on the United States, I am not trying to play to exceptionalism, even if it is exceptionally incompetent. The U.S. is by far the most populous among the countries with out-of-control growth. Right now the US is eclipsing India in new cases in spite of having 1/4 the population.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 8:45 PM on October 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


Can we stop fighting please?
posted by Melismata at 9:01 PM on October 23, 2020 [17 favorites]


Maybe it wouldn't be blowing the fuck up over here if we weren't completely ignoring the lessons of the rest of the world

If there is one thing I’ve learned from conservatives in my adulthood, it’s that we (the US) have nothing to learn from the rest of the world because the world should be learning from us. They picked a helluva time to prove their thesis.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:17 PM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


"I am shaking my head at even the wise places, like some counties in California that are starting to allow indoor dining, as if low infection rates in the continuing absence of a vaccine mean it's now OK to congregate indoors."

Right. Just because it's going down for that second doesn't mean that it's not going to go RIGHT BACK UP BECAUSE you opened again. Numbers going down doesn't mean it's safe, it just meant you limited how many people could get exposed to each other. The second you stop doing that, guess what happens? Constant closing and reopening and having to close again isn't doing much good either.

But we have to reopen! Because quarantine fatigue and WE NEED MONEY!!!1111!!!!

I give big cheers to Gavin Newsom for straight up refusing to reopen the theme parks in CA until rates are extremely low (especially seeing how mask wearing is going at Disneyworld), though the theme parks are throwing such shit fits that that probably won't last.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:27 PM on October 23, 2020 [8 favorites]


. It makes me think of RBG's comment opposing abandonment of the Voting Rights Act, which she said was "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

Mongols!
posted by Mitheral at 9:52 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


I have a friend here in NZ who is working remotely for a US company. Their relations with their co-workers are breaking down as our countries appear to be on such divergent paths. Got to rein in the cheer and the tales of the weekend when people have family members dying and in hospital and live in fear.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:59 PM on October 23, 2020 [14 favorites]


Right. Just because it's going down for that second doesn't mean that it's not going to go RIGHT BACK UP BECAUSE you opened again

Intervening enough to keep cases low - low enough to employ outbreak tracing and containment strategies, even - doesn’t seem absurd on the face of it. I wouldn’t say the execution most places lives up to that, though, and people don’t seem to do well with the idea that opening is contingent.
posted by atoxyl at 10:05 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


But we have to reopen! Because quarantine fatigue and WE NEED MONEY!!!1111!!!!

But we do need money. There hasn’t been any serious attempt at an extension of federal aid for months, and it seems unlikely that anything can happen prior to the new Congress and administration. That’s another three months. People have already burned through their life savings. It sucks.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:08 PM on October 23, 2020 [44 favorites]


I had to reread this like 4 times just to wrap my head around this:
Trump and first lady Melania Trump, both recently recovered from their coronavirus infections, will be greeting trick-or-treaters Sunday at a Halloween party on the White House grounds. Extra precautions are being put into place to prevent this from turning into a "superspreader event" like the Rose Garden party last month to introduce Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Hey kids, want to see something scary? That old crazy guy that lives in that old manor house behind that really big fence is giving out candy. So what if we know he got covid and it is still likely rampant with staffers? I dare you to ring the doorbell. (Kids, be safe... bring a Lysol wipe for the doorbell).

Also are they really going to send kids there? or just dress adults up like kids for the photo op? Unrelated question, will Rudy Giuliani be there?
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:27 PM on October 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


The UK is doing masking and social distancing. I know people who are sticking to that. It's also sending kids back to school, and, more problematically, students back to university. Go look at the graph on the front page of the Grauniad for some idea about who rapidly that all started up since the start of October when universities opened.

I have a foot in both worlds. In the US, the problem would appear to be you can't talk about the country's response because it's actually the county's interpretation of the state response and no two of us are living it the same way. There, everyone gets roughly the same experience - with provisos, granted - and that experience changes daily because the govt is having too much fun changing out the rules for other equally bad ones.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 10:31 PM on October 23, 2020 [5 favorites]


The case count is obscene, of course, but it's worth pointing out that we're slowly learning how to make the disease less fatal. (Even as we're also learning about the debilitating long term effects of even mild cases.)

CNN: The US just reported its highest number of Covid-19 infections in one day since the pandemic's start
Friday's case count of at least 80,005 surpasses the country's previous one-day high of 77,362, reported July 16, according to Johns Hopkins University.

US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams cautioned earlier Friday that hospitalizations are starting to go up in 75% of the jurisdictions across the country, and officials are concerned that in a few weeks, deaths will also start to increase.

The good news, Adams said, is that the country's Covid-19 mortality rate has decreased by about 85% thanks to multiple factors, including the use of remdesivir, steroids and better management of patients.
posted by monospace at 10:47 PM on October 23, 2020 [16 favorites]


So I keep hearing herd immunity and let things take their course... and it kills me on the inside every time I hear it, because... holy fuck would it be disturbing and the estimates people give thus far are way way underselling the impact. Let me say, I'm not an expert. Maybe there's some level of firewalling that occurs that isn't entirely captured in what people say, but ... let's just run with the 80% infection rate for Herd immunity. What does that look like for a death rate? because people keep saying something about 2 million people dead ... and holy hell - it would be way over that based on some very quick back of napkin calculations.

For starters - not everybody is average aged, but we can probably say that you would need 80% infection in each cohort for immunity in that cohort so... we need to know what the population is in the US by age cohort, and the death rate by infection by cohort.

GOOD NEWS! The 2019 population estimates exist, and I dug through the old data in MA to grab the infection to death rate by cohort in Massachusetts because - we used to keep that stat back in July. It isn't perfect, because it slightly undersells the death rate. Current reporting now only gives a two week run so it really masks the real data because you now can't tell whether the person dying is from this week's two week infection pool, or if they died as a long hauler... so... its a hellofa lot more useless.

Alright so let's line up the data.
Age Cohort POP ESTIMATE2019
< 19......81,625,416
20-29...45,141,956
30-39...44,168,826
40-49...40,319,374
59-59...42,354,542
60-69...38,026,147
70-79...23,681,097
80+.......12,922,165
Total..328,239,523

Let's go over some MA numbers.
Age Cohort..Infections..Deaths..Rate
< 19.............7,665............1..........0.01%
20-29.........18,091.........18...........0.10%
30-39.........18,588.........35...........0.19%
40-49.........17,201.........93...........0.54%
59-59.........19,104.......314...........1.64%
60-69.........15,275.......897...........5.87%
70-79...........9,971....1,898.........19.04%
80+............15,548....5,496.........35.35%

Alright, so raise your hand if you're a little concerned that the death rate in MA for folks over 80 is 35%... because... yeah... don't invite grandma to Thanksgiving.
so... we can take the population, multiply it by the herd immunity percentage, and that gives us the infection rate necessary to achieve immunity... then... multiply by the death rate and blammo! we have a reasonable number of people dead... um.... we have a better estimate of dead people ... hmmm... how about we call it a Trumpload of dead loved ones.

So... how big is a Trumpload?
Age Cohort..Final Deathtoll
< 19..............8,519
20-2...........35,932
30-39.........66,534
40-49.......174,395
59-59.......556,923
60-69....1,786,420
70-79....3,606,196
80+.......3,654,243
Totat.....9,889,162

So... while a Trumpload may not be the biggest number, I think we can all agree that 9.9 Million dead and the absolute decimation of people over 70 has not been properly factored into the herd immunity conversation. I will add, this potentially does fix Social Security and Medicare debts. This *may* in fact be a solid way for Trump to claim that he will fix those two programs... Arguably, after this one time cost of medical bills, this has potential to lower the cost of insurance premiums. Hell - Promises made promises kept! It only costs a Trumpload of lives.
posted by Nanukthedog at 11:15 PM on October 23, 2020 [21 favorites]


I get a daily update (free from The Washington Post, links to any/all of their coverage every day, it's been great for me) and today I got a dark laugh out of Biden's response to our fearless leader in this excerpt:
Trump continued to downplay the pandemic. Trump said the current surge in cases “will soon be gone,” and that “we’re learning to live with it” — “it” being a pandemic that has killed at least 222,000 people in the United States.

No, said Biden: “People are learning to die with it.” It was among the former vice president's harshest comments levied against Trump and his coronavirus response. “We’re about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan,” Biden said.


Trump isn't a mass murderer on the scale of Cheney, of either Bush, of Johnson, of Nixon and Kissinger. But you've just got to know he'd love to sit at the big table with the real killers.

~~~~~

I live in Austin. An educated town, a town with a good rep as being thoughtful, a purple spot in a sea of red. I ride my bicycle daily, a routine I've got and enjoy, a spin around the hike/bike trail in the heart of the city. I very often ride late at night, or early in the morning, for a couple of reasons: One: When I'm out at 3 AM it is my city, I own it, it's a beautiful town and nice to have it all for myself. Reason Two: When the educated, thoughtful populace is out and about, running or biking or walking, it is at best 1 person in 25 who is wearing a mask.

It's the largest collection of stupidity that I know of. It is -- still -- astounding to me. This is not rocket science. This is not difficult. This has no cost associated with doing the correct thing, there is a potentially huge cost for acting like a petulant child. These people do not care at all about themselves and they damn sure do not care for me or for you.

If I allowed myself to be infuriated at the people willing to shoot dice with my life I'd be in an outraged state all the time. So I stay away. When I am at a physicians office (yesterday) and a woman and her children walk next to me, you can bet your boots that they're going to hear about it, loud and clear, loud enough and clear enough that they'll move back fast. When I am at the grocery store, and some idiot finds it more important to "move up in line" than to give me my six goddamn feet, you can bet your boots that they are going to hear about it.

I especially love people who are working in a grocery store wearing their mask below their nose. I always make sure to let them know of my special love for them. I truly do not understand why the grocer does not fire these people. In a better world, they'd be both fined and fired and black-balled for any future work; it wouldn't take but one person for that to happen to and that store would be on track.

So there's all of that. And on top of all of that I'm cut off from my friends. My buddy Gene, he's this great artist, I love to just stop over and say "Hey, ya trashy old slut -- What the hells going on?" but I can't do it now. I drove right past his place yesterday afternoon, any other day I'd like as not stop in. But not now. Gene's 71 and not in the best of health; I'm 65 and in great health but still, those markers are real. I'm cut off from everyone, really, and travel would be dangerous also, so that's out.

~~~~~

This isn't really all that bad, nowhere near what it could be without an internet connection, a nice place to live, without a cell phone, without books and movies, without a few bucks set back. Point I'm trying to make here is that I know it could be oh so much worse. All of my siblings are safe and living safely as is possible, my friends the same.

It's not wrong to have hope I don't think. And hope is six months more and we'll be on a track out of this thing. One thing we absolutely have to be grateful about: Without this illness it's possible that Trump would be presiding over this thing another four years. I really, truly look askance at The Average US Citizen now, knowing that living inside of him or her could be a brain-dead, hate-filled, bigoted, worthless bag of pus. The world has seen for years who we are, perhaps it's been good that we've been forced to see us as they do, as we are...

~~~~~

Time to stop, get on that bicycle. It's a bit chill here, 55F and a 12MPH wind out of the north; last night I poured sweat, not tonight though. It's clear, the city -- my home -- it's ever so pretty on a really clear night. I'll smile as I think of you all tonight -- I promise! A big honkin' MetaFilter Smile! -- I'll smile thinking of you as I ride my city, a big smile thinking of this online gang of people that are so great.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:16 PM on October 23, 2020 [40 favorites]


I'm not stressed because this is right before the election. I'm stressed about the election separately, of course. But with Covid it's the fact this is happening right before cold weather. There's some reason to think cool to cold weather makes the virus transmit more easily, and every reason to think people will get more reckless with indoor meetings.

Stay safe and stay sane. It's going to be tough.
posted by mark k at 11:56 PM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


recovering from covid does not seem to confer immunity of any significant duration. my sources are TWiV, most recently, episode 673, noting increasing (though still sparse: griffin & racaniello* chuckle about the n of 4, though including 2 with cases more severe the second time) evidence of reinfection, some recent cnn op-ed by a person who recovered in april writing about their most recent antibody test showing -- when doublechecked on negative result -- antibodies present but below the threshold for positive result, and anecdote from doctors of loved-ones who discouraged antibody test to confirm suspected mild cases from last march on grounds that antibodies likely wouldn't remain at detectable levels (with one such test conducted and having detected no antibodies). (but see)

this just to suggest that, however monstrous the numbers of aspiring to herd immunity may be, they are worse if there is no, or brief, or unreliable immunity to be had.

* they also discuss an approx. 10-day half-life of (some) monoclonal antibodies (that is, waning immunity) and the likelihood that early administration may prevent endemic immune reaction; and their hope that immunity spurred by inoculation by eventual safe and effective vaccine may be more robust and durable -- though on previous episodes have also discussed at length the difference between infection immunity ("sterilizing") and replication immunity and uncertainty as to which a hypothetical vaccine may confer.

TWiV also pointed to this NEJM "final report" on remdesivir (somewhat decreasing length of hospital stay of hospitalized patients v. placebo) and this study of hydroxychloroquine (noting no lower incidence of death at 28 days in hospitalized patients v. "usual care").
posted by 20 year lurk at 12:04 AM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza...
posted by pee tape at 12:20 AM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


It's eleven days to the election and COVID case growth is going vertical. I'm concerned about awareness of the rapidly increasing danger suppressing the vote. People who do vote will be risking their lives, especially in areas where Republicans have reduced polling locations to increase crowding and create long lines.

Apparently early voters are historically more likely to be D than R. I know we're supposed to be "all voting is good voting" and all that, but there's someone in a Democratic campaign office sat looking at these stats and thinking "...good."
posted by regularfry at 12:21 AM on October 24, 2020


But with Covid it's the fact this is happening right before cold weather. There's some reason to think cool to cold weather makes the virus transmit more easily, and every reason to think people will get more reckless with indoor meetings.

The UK may do a public information campaign about the importance of ventilation in suppressing spread indoors, after a new Sage report. It's about indoor aerosol (airborne) virus particles that can carry further than 2m, as opposed to direct droplet transmission that is reduced by social distance, masks etc.

“Under steady state well-mixed conditions for the same duration, models suggest that exposure to aerosols approximately halves when the ventilation rate is doubled."

Of course in the UK air conditioning is rare outside large offices, so in many cases that means leaving the windows open or meeting outside. As we go into winter.

That was one part of our re-opening measures for my school; in my case, a 4 person office in a much larger campus. We're sat 2m apart, and use masks when we need to get closer (showing something on a PC etc), sanitising hands and surfaces, and are trying to keep at least one window open all day. As the weather worsens though, it's getting goddamn cold in there even with the heating full on; we're already at jumpers, and sometimes coats, and in a sustained cold snap we may have to close the last (large) window just so we don't freeze. Thankfully we're in a rural low-case area, but if one of us gets it, the risk of it spreading to the rest of the team - and potentially everyone we interact with - will rise significantly. Repeat in barbers, pubs, sit-down restaurants etc etc and I think it's going to get much worse. And plenty of places get worse winters than the UK.

So I keep hearing herd immunity and let things take their course... and it kills me on the inside every time I hear it

Evidence is growing that immunity if you catch it and survive lasts only a few months at best (though repeat infections may normally have reduced severity). Which means herd immunity cannot work anyway, as it will just keep circulating. That means even the eyewatering death rates from that approach won't be the worst case. Plus 'long covid', which is also looking to be a very serious long-term public health problem. Our only hope is suppression, aided by a population-wide vaccine - which will help, but not solve the problem (no vaccine is 100% effective, if we get a 75% one we'll be very lucky, and distribution and anti-vaxxers are huge problems as well). We're years away from beating it, even in the best case scenarios, and we're very much not in those in the US and UK right now.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 1:31 AM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


The case count is obscene, of course, but it's worth pointing out that we're slowly learning how to make the disease less fatal. (Even as we're also learning about the debilitating long term effects of even mild cases.)

Since it's the US, another factor is how people who get sick are going to pay for their life-saving treatments, especially now when so many jobs have been lost and even fewer people have insurance. And since it's the US, another factor is all the people working the kinds of jobs that are happy to fire them if they miss a few weeks due to being sick.

It's kind of an externality for the US's covid policy. If the country had to pay for every hospitalization, would it still be acting this way?

(What's the math been like for the insurance companies? Is the pandemic working out well for them overall, or badly?)
posted by trig at 1:47 AM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


Insurance company profits are through the roof, which probably has to do with so much non-COVID care being canceled.
posted by Not A Thing at 5:17 AM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


Related to the herd immunity question, have you ever heard of the Russian Flu Epidemic of 1889?

This ties into the bizarre W-shaped mortality curve of the 1918 flu pandemic, where age 28 was the average age of death at the peak of that W.

One of the theories (and theory being just that because we can’t prove it with certainty) is that specific age group had already been exposed to a relative of the 1918 Flu in 1889. When the flu came around again, their earlier mild experience created a cytokine storm in 1918, prompting an overreaction of their immune system and killing them in greater numbers.

Point is, if we go for herd immunity and another coronavirus appears in the next few decades, science simply doesn’t know if the same immune response would happen. It’s not impossible, though.

Wear a damn mask.
posted by glaucon at 5:18 AM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


Months ago I despairingly opined that the only thing that would slow things down in this country is a Biden administration, and how very sad that was. And that's where we're at. Nothing will change for the better for at least 3 more months, and – hopefully – not beyond that. It's disgusting and disturbing.

Colorado is headlong into this third surge. We had a decent summer, relatively speaking, but things just ratcheted up and have been continuing to do so for the past several weeks. Our Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has been pushing the "well, people just need to be more responsible" line while taking months to lay down a mask mandate because - per him - it wouldn't have mattered anyway. It's a frustrating abdication of power. It's like, yeah, do a mandate and then enforce it! This isn't a time to be timid. The trade-off is, well, knocking on the door of 2,000 cases a day here when we were closing in on double-digits just three months ago.

Everyone is done, everyone is tired, and we've got months to go on this.
posted by hijinx at 6:31 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


*years

Locally (Cleveland) I’ve had a few friends where their work has shared not to expect returning until 2022.

With infection rates as high as they are, there is a very long runway ahead of us.
posted by glaucon at 6:56 AM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


*years

Something I learned recently (likely from a link in one of these threads?) is that the 1918 influenza epidemic never ended, the family of organisms (Influenza A, especially H1N1 sub-types) just adapted to be less lethal, and now we have "flu season" every year where ~300K-650K die globally, instead of millions, and this is why the WHO deciding on which flu vaccine to use each year is a very big deal, because if we didn't have any flu vaccine we'd be heading right back toward 1918-19 levels of infection and illness, and far higher mortality annually.

So our current pandemic will likely never end, at least not in our lifetimes, but will become contained through some combination of viral adaptation and human medical science and become more livable. But I never realized that 'flu season' is something that only started existing a hundred years ago, and is the legacy from the previous, overwhelming, global viral pandemic. This has helped me to realize what a truly epochal cultural period we're living through, one of the big inflection points in human history, because not only is nothing the same now, it will never be the same ever again. That kind of helps me when I'm frustrated about all the isolation and being stuck at home: I stay grateful for what I have (like a home) and remember that I'M HELPING TO MAKE HISTORY!
posted by LooseFilter at 7:56 AM on October 24, 2020 [47 favorites]


With infection rates as high as they are, there is a very long runway ahead of us.

Also, not to abuse edit, forget to add: yeah, I'm starting to think I may not be able to teach in person next Fall, either (we're already all-online through summer 2021).
posted by LooseFilter at 7:57 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Utah is in a similar rise. Daily positivity is around 15%. Major city ICUs are at capacity and they're making work to open the expo center as a field hospital. We have the SLC mayor holding press conferences with crying, exhausted ICU nurses, the state epidemiologist is exasperated in conferences, and on the other side we have moms on Facebook telling each other not to get tested lest their school be threatened with a shut down.

The most telling graphic I think I have to illustrate our priorities is on our own state response's "scoreboard" site. It has two major metrics with a meter up top: deaths and unemployment. The "green zone" for deaths is about double that of the unemployment rate meter, and right now we could increase deaths by 40% before we reach the yellow warning zone, whereas the unemployment rate ticked up from 4.5% to 5% last month and put us into the yellow. It's asinine. I don't know why they can't seem to realize that the unemployment rate is fed directly by their COVID response.

I hate it here and am essentially committing myself to the realization that I will be masked and inside my house for the next unknown number of months, aside from being forced to go into work since I can't escape that responsibility.
posted by msbutah at 8:11 AM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


Ok the math is simplified, but straightforward on herd immunity. You need to reach about a 70% infection rate to have herd immunity. Right now, only 8 million Americans have had COVID-19, about 2.5% of the country. Three are 330 million Americans so if we increase our infection count to 70% of that (by a factor of 28x), the death toll will increase by the same amount, from 210,000 to nearly 6 million.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:20 AM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


8 million is the number of Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19. The number who were infected is guaranteed to be much higher, since testing was extremely limited in the US during the start of the epidemic. Serosurveys and other studies showed that testing only caught about 10% of infections during the first wave. That got better as test capacity grew, but it’ll never be 100%.

The total number people who have been infected in the US may be around 50 million, or about 15% of the population. If you plug that into your calculation, then you end up with “only” 1 million eventual deaths instead of 6 million.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:40 AM on October 24, 2020 [12 favorites]


My workplace has been doing the right thing, pretty much, in letting everyone go remote. But many people are tired and impatient. And then there are the assholes, like the sales guy at one office who not only felt bad/ was fevery but came in anyway, (exposing about 15 coworkers) but also went on a fucking face to face client visit.

Yeah, he was positive.

Now we have had to tell one of our clients that we exposed them. Great job, sales dude.

Of course, it was dumb of our client to allow a face-to-face. And dumb of us to ask.

In the end, I blame capitalism. Everyone involved has justified their gathering as necessary to make sales. And because this virus isn't instantly/100% lethal, capitalistic thinking will always be in favor of more risk if it means more money right now.
posted by emjaybee at 9:32 AM on October 24, 2020 [33 favorites]


Thankfully my job has been pretty good about pushing the "work from home until this is over" line but like many businesses I don't expect that their version of "over" is the same as its employees. I do not feel comfortable in an office now. I doubt I'll be comfortable in a office in six months. But I could easily imagine a scenario where they decide everything's fine and expect people to come in. And I don't know what to do in that scenario. Between my health and my job my health takes priority. If I don't feel safe I may have to quit. I'm already trying to build up an emergency fund to provide me with at least a few months of cushion if I have to find another work from home job. But if my employer is going back to an office I expect most other businesses will be and there will be less work from home opportunities and I may be out of work longer. It's an awful situation all around but I'm not going to sacrifice my health for a job. And I doubt I'm the only one. Trying to open up as normal is going to make a lot of people question whether its safe to do so and may refuse to go along with it. Labor has leverage in this situation. Either ensure our safety or we don't go to work.
posted by downtohisturtles at 9:58 AM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


People do need to make money to pay for food and shelter, so I'd rather blame the Republicans instead of capitalism per se. Interest rates are basically at 0%, so the federal government should be borrowing, oh, 2 or 3 or 4 trillion dollars and give everyone enough money to STAY HOME. I know it's a fantasy, but I try to break my doom scrolling with moments of imagining that Biden-Harris win, the Democrats take the Senate, and early next year they pass temporary "Patriotic Pandemic Payments," essentially a UBI that works so well it eventually becomes permanent.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:59 AM on October 24, 2020 [12 favorites]


The total number people who have been infected in the US may be around 50 million, or about 15% of the population. If you plug that into your calculation, then you end up with “only” 1 million eventual deaths instead of 6 million.

I'm not projecting how many will die with our current infection. I'm projecting how many will die at an 80% infection rate.... so 80% of the population. I'm projecting what herd immunity means.

I'll agree that not everybody gets tested... so sure... we can lop off a few of the young, and drive down their positivity rate - but Massachusetts literally tests every old folks home and assisted living facility. They are at census levels of testing for the senior population. so 35% of 80+ year olds dying? That's a real number. That's a real 3.6 million. Maybe you can drop the 70-79 number down slightly - but the final number is still a Trumpload of dead bodies. You are still going to see the greatest number of deaths. You won't believe how great that number of deaths is going to be. This will be a number of deaths that will put to shame former historical benchmarks of death like the civil war. This will be the biggliest number of deaths imaginable.

To be clear about where Boston is from an estimation perspective... check the waste water. Boston is testing wastewater which had been below 50 ... whatevers (they're sampling the RNA signal). At peak infection it was over 400. The two most recent samples listed on this chart show... ~200, and if you're in the know... next week's posting should show the end of this week at the 300s... We are in a spike resembling the early part of the year because of complacency and because people who think 'well it isn't going to kill me' are ignoring that them spreading the infection is going to kill somebody, either your grandparents or your friend's grandparents.

To be clear: you don't get to have the same kind of funeral with a Covid funeral. You don't get to interact with your loved ones and their loved ones the same way. The interactions are limited, you count that 'brother X' gets to go, but 'brother Y' doesn't because of social distancing requirements.

And, let's throw caution to the wind and say that someone has a traditional funeral anyway. Make sure you hug all those elderly people there and say, I'm sorry that this event will kill 1/3 of you, but at least we can consider this me saying goodbye to you. Funerals, like weddings, have all the potential to turn families into superspreading clusters.
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:06 AM on October 24, 2020 [9 favorites]


a UBI that works so well it eventually becomes permanent.

That's less fanciful than one might think, I expect we'll be surprised by how quickly some significant cultural changes happen in the next couple of years--when a failing society gets objectively whacked this hard, the undeniable brokenness that's made plain often leads to unprecedented, foundational change. (I just hope it's the good kind of change.)
posted by LooseFilter at 10:13 AM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


I'll just chime in with my fellow doomers to say that it's very likely that we see another different respiratory virus in the next 20 years which could have an even worse mortality profile. Even if SARS-CoV-2 has a vaccine, there will still be lags of at least a year between a new virus emerging and vaccines being deployed even with large amounts of government resources prepping. It is not a bad idea to remain cautious, and sane governments should be doing pressure testing for the next pandemic periodically.
posted by benzenedream at 10:18 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


The whole argument about how many are infected doesn't really matter much if the healthcare-capacity can't handle it. If people can go to the hospital when they need it, things are getting a lot better, we are learning how to deal with it, fewer are dying. But if the capacity isn't there, all hell is loose. You can't educate a specialist doctor in ten weeks, it takes more like ten years. Overwhelming the healthcare systems is what happened in Northern Italy at the beginning of the pandemic, and it's still happening all over the world right now. People are dying because the ressources aren't there.
Countries where this is understood are more succesfull than countries where politicians, specialists and ordinary people understand the virus as a problem for the individual.

In the US, where there isn't a universal healthcare system, things were bound to go wrong, because you can't really plan and the quality of healthcare is wildly disparate across the nation (but the virus doesn't care about that). I really can't wholly imagine how anyone would think that the US was prepared for a pandemic. But I'm guessing it is part of the general scourge on our age of imagining that a simple economic perspective can explain everything. I'm sure that in a worksheet, the US looked tremendously prepared for a health catastrophe. There are hospitals! There are doctors! There is research!
posted by mumimor at 10:37 AM on October 24, 2020 [9 favorites]


For starters - not everybody is average aged, but we can probably say that you would need 80% infection in each cohort for immunity in that cohort so... we need to know what the population is in the US by age cohort, and the death rate by infection by cohort.

Pretty sure “herd immunity” talk is premised on the idea that widespread immunity among younger cohorts will protect older cohorts. If that seems dubious - you’re right! But I don’t think anybody is saying 80 percent of 80-year-olds should get it because the grim implications of that are too obvious to handwave past.
posted by atoxyl at 1:21 PM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


recovering from covid does not seem to confer immunity of any significant duration

The rest of your comment does unpack this a little but as I understand that’s a stronger statement than the evidence supports.

Does not guarantee, yes.
posted by atoxyl at 1:25 PM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


recovering from covid does not seem to confer immunity of any significant duration. my sources are TWiV, most recently, episode 673, noting increasing (though still sparse: griffin & racaniello* chuckle about the n of 4, though including 2 with cases more severe the second time) evidence of reinfection, some recent cnn op-ed by a person who recovered in april writing about their most recent antibody test showing -- when doublechecked on negative result -- antibodies present but below the threshold for positive result, and anecdote from doctors of loved-ones who discouraged antibody test to confirm suspected mild cases from last march on grounds that antibodies likely wouldn't remain at detectable levels (with one such test conducted and having detected no antibodies). (but see)

I enjoyed TWIV, but they're mostly virologists, not immunologists. They do have an immunologist who sometimes contributes, but she doesn't talk enough. Honestly, the atmosphere of the Podcast has gotten a bit too aggro and "political talk radio" adjacent for my tastes lately. The host had to apologize for it recently.

Here is an editorial from actual immunologists: Review of immune response to existing human circulating coronaviruses and other respiratory diseases

The scale of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has thrust immunology into the public spotlight in unprecedented ways. In this article, which is part opinion piece and part review, we argue that the normal cadence by which we discuss science with our colleagues failed to properly convey likelihoods of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 to the public and the media. As a result, biologically implausible outcomes were given equal weight as the principles set by decades of viral immunology. Unsurprisingly, questionable results and alarmist news media articles have filled the void. We suggest an emphasis on setting expectations based on prior findings while avoiding the overused approach of assuming nothing. After reviewing Ab-mediated immunity after coronavirus and other acute viral infections, we posit that, with few exceptions, the development of protective humoral immunity of more than a year is the norm. Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is likely to follow the same pattern.


I see it often repeated, but I guess it bears repeating again: Anecdote really isn't the plural of data. Why TWIV is ignoring this is during the discussions with Dr. Griffin, I have no idea.

This was a preprint that surfaced earlier in the year. I'm not sure if it was published yet. The researchers later revised the paper to confirm the reinfections with PCR testing, so if anything this draft is an overestimate:

Reinfection study

We found evidence for reinfections using epidemiological criteria, but this evidence cannot be conclusive unless it is confirmed with sequencing analysis of the paired viral samples. It is
possible that some of the identified reinfections may not have been true reinfections. The
possibility of a false positive swab cannot be excluded. It is also possible that some of the cases
may just be poorly-controlled primary infections, long-term virus carriers, or persons shedding
non-viable viral fragments for a prolonged time. The sensitivity analyses accounting for such
limitations suggested that we may have overestimated the already low risk of reinfection.
In conclusion, SARS-CoV-2 reinfection appears to be a rare phenomenon. This suggests that
immunity develops after the primary infection and lasts for at least a few months, and that
immunity protects against reinfection.


Science works through skepticism by constantly questioning established theories. For example, there recently was a large experiment using TV transmission towers in Japan to confirm relativity. However, if that experiment found an anomalous result, the first step would be to look for experimental error rather chucking out decades of evidence supporting standard physics models. The same is true of immunological theories guiding our expectations for the human immune response to SARS-COV 2.

Is it surprising that there are a few cases of reinfection popping up? Absolutely not. Would it be surprising that immunity starts to wear off after a year or two for a few more people? Not exactly. Still, that is a far cry from the idea that everyone is going to suddenly lose immunity to the disease after a year or two. It's not even close.

If anything, this seems like an example of the Availability Heuristic in action. Media reports of reinfection are causing human actors to judge the likelihood and frequency of reinfection to be more likely and frequent than it actually is and that we should expect based on prior knowledge.

That's not to downplay the severity of the situation. Past evidence also shows the respiratory diseases tend to become more prevalent and severe in the winter months. Right now it seems like the disease is spreading quickest in areas where it didn't spread as much during the Spring and Summer waves unless you happen to live in one of the lucky countries that managed to get the disease under control. That doesn't mean the disease is gone from hard hit places like the US mid-Atlantic, unfortunately, but it does mean rural areas in the US that weren't as hard hit in the spring are starting to get slammed now. Considering the difference is testing availability between now and the Spring, its best to look at hospitalization rates instead of raw case numbers. If you do that, its easy to see that rural areas in the US are getting slammed. Still, its also important to keep in mind that hospitalizations and deaths might lag case increases if the virus circulates in younger populations before spreading to older people and those in nursing homes.
posted by eagles123 at 1:59 PM on October 24, 2020 [12 favorites]


I firmly believe that the "kids back to school" crowd are going to be proven catastrophically wrong. The current science is that kids carry just as much virus and are thus probably just as infectious. Knowing this, the lag from undetected asymptomatic child infections to detected and reported cases in adults is probably about 5-8 weeks. Most of the deaths in the vulnerable elderly should show up in the stats around 11 weeks as the virus spreads though peoples living family trees. The horror will be that by the time this is widely realized there will be at least 11 more weeks of deadly consequences to ride out before any late measures can even start to turn it around. This is going to be the most epic and tragic of scientific expert own goals in history and probably become a textbook example of motivated cognition error for epidemiologists in the future. And most of this error is not a Trump or Republican error. This unfortunately is a bipartisan and scientific community error.

I would be very happy to be wrong about this.
posted by srboisvert at 2:58 PM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


I've put out another weekly analysis of U.S. state COVID-19 cases, as usual for the previous week (ending October 17).
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:05 PM on October 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


I firmly believe that the "kids back to school" crowd are going to be proven catastrophically wrong. The current science is that kids carry just as much virus and are thus probably just as infectious.

I don’t think this is nearly that clear where young children are concerned?

College students, on the other hand...
posted by atoxyl at 3:16 PM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Still, that is a far cry from the idea that everyone is going to suddenly lose immunity to the disease after a year or two. It's not even close

There are several coronaviruses endemic to humans - some cause the symptoms of the common cold. When one was tested on volunteers, several were reinfected by the same strain after a year; enough to shed the virus, but didn't develop cold symptoms. The subjects who resisted infection the first time were all successfully infected a year later.

It's simply too soon to tell how long immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will last, whether a mild first infection generates enough of an immune response to provide effective adaptive immunity, if those who are re-infected may still shed significant live viral particles even if not otherwise showing symptoms, or what the impact of future new strains will be.

One man in Hong Kong was confirmed infected again with a different strain after only four months. Is he an outlier? Hopefully.

Long-term adaptive immunity to covid is a pre-requisite to herd immunity working, but the disease simply hasn't been around long enough to know, which is why the WHO is not a fan of 'antibody passports'.

Many of the people who want to persue herd immunity do not have the public heath in mind but more base reasons, and we should be wary of being swayed by our own understandable desire to see some sort of quick turnaround. Previous pandemics have lasted for years; as pointed out above, the 1918 flu hasn't really gone away, we're just living with a milder version and a yearly vaccine for the vulnerable so the death toll is 'acceptable'. We still have no vaccine for HIV, and we've been trying to make one for over 20 years. We've had an effective polio vaccine for what, 60 years, and it's still not quite gone.

A successful vaccine will save many lives, but it will not magically make it all end quickly. And certain governments aren't even treating covid-19 like a serious problem...
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:50 PM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


There are several coronaviruses endemic to humans - some cause the symptoms of the common cold. When one was tested on volunteers, several were reinfected by the same strain after a year; enough to shed the virus, but didn't develop cold symptoms. The subjects who resisted infection the first time were all successfully infected a year later.

I'm well aware of that, as I'm sure are the immunologists who published the editorial/review I cited considering they discussed such studies of common cold causing coronaviruses in detail. In short, there are a lot of issues with extrapolating from challenge studies examining immunity to the common cold to predict immunity to SARS-COV 2.

In fact, the study you cite is discussed at length in the article because, as the authors note, it is widely cited in the media as evidence immunity to all coronaviruses, let alone highly pathogenic ones like SARS-COV-2, is short lived:

"A widely cited study followed these early experiments in which Ab titers were followed after experimental challenge of human volunteers, demonstrating that Ab production returns to near-prechallenge levels after only 1 y (69). This observation has widely been interpreted as evidence that immunity to coronaviruses is intrinsically transient. Yet, this interpretation should be tempered for several reasons. First, upon a second challenge 1 y after the first, none of the subjects developed symptomatic disease, and viral shedding was transient and minimal. Second, the pre-existing baseline titers against 229E were high for all experimental groups prior to the challenge. In the productively infected subjects, Ab kinetics rose and fell quickly before returning to slightly above this baseline, consistent with the expectation of memory B cell responses. Importantly, the group of subjects that could not be productively infected maintained very high Ab titers that did not change before or after attempted infection, suggesting very durable protective humoral immunity. Finally, as with all challenge experiments, the experimental inoculum was likely higher than that which occurs in natural exposures. Together, these findings imply that immunity to homologous common coronaviruses lasts for longer than the single year that is often stated in review articles and in the media."

Again, these people aren't arguing for "herd immunity" as a strategy or anything like that but rather that it's important to be truthful about the science. At best, loose statements that don't authentically convey the state of the scientific knowledge reduce public confidence in science as an institution. At worst, excessive alarmism might very well cause people to resist taking vaccines once they become available, which will certainly cost additional lives by prolonging the pandemic.
posted by eagles123 at 4:25 PM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


Old joke:

Immunologist: the immune system is a marvel of the universe

virologist: yeah but we still get sick
posted by benzenedream at 6:25 PM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Pretty sure “herd immunity” talk is premised on the idea that widespread immunity among younger cohorts will protect older cohorts. If that seems dubious - you’re right! But I don’t think anybody is saying 80 percent of 80-year-olds should get it because the grim implications of that are too obvious to handwave past.

Alright, last bite for me.

What's an acceptable infection rate for a population with a 35% mortality rate? Because... There are a surprising number of old people and if we still have to achieve that 80% threshold overall - we need to sacrifice infect significantly more young than I initially expected. We have to be prepared for their long term permanent health side effects of COPD-like symptoms, permanent lung damage, permanent brain damage, random organ failure - I mean... there's so many options for it to chose - that permanent cost is going to go to someone. I assure you, the death panels agree - its cheaper to kill grandpa. I mean, let's consider... we're literally infecting more young for the old. We're literally sacrificing young people on the altar of our elders. Meanwhile, our elders have to board up and wall off their community in some sort of Cocoon meets World War Z crossover that noone ever expected - because someone *not* infected with Covid will be the rarity and that 28 Days Later drop of blood spreads through the old folks home like an STD on widow(er)'s night resulting in every other room in the old folks home becoming a single. I mean, Grandma used her Buick like a Battering ram back in the 80s... now every grocery trip has to be treated like Mad Max Fury Road because everyone can kill her.

My point - my clear point is - herd immunity is staggeringly ludicrous. If there is no quasi-permanent immunity or perfect treatment that arises out of vaccines and improvements in medicine - we are finally subject to the biblical prophecy Mathew 5:5 that the meek shall inherit the earth. Sadly, the meek is Covid.
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:41 PM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Donald Trump today: "That's all I hear about now. Turn on TV, 'Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.' A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don't talk about it. 'Covid Covid Covid Covid'."

What, you didn't hear about the plane crash killing 500 people? Q.E.D. sheeple. Q..E..D.
posted by JackFlash at 7:09 PM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Surely herd immunity is ludicrous without a vaccine. What virus have we ever contained, have we ever achieved 80+% immunity to, without a vaccine? I genuinely do not understand how this can work.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:07 PM on October 24, 2020


Herd immunity is like people saying it will evolve to become less virulent. It's something people have heard of so they talk about it. It's not a strategy. The fact that health officials talk about it--Sweden, obviously, but I've seen it in my county level--has been disillusioning. A definite reminder that there's a lot of areas of expertise in the world and for example even competent "public health" training doesn't automatically include training in "managing an epidemic."

What virus have we ever contained, have we ever achieved 80+% immunity to, without a vaccine?

So the way this look is the history of disease before modern medicine. Things like the bubonic plague, various mosquito borne diseases like yellow fever, and so on. You get enough people infected that it stops spreading. For a while. And then flares up. It doesn't go away.

That's actually imprecise for yellow fever. What happened with yellow fever was actually a lot like what might happen with Covid. It's not that bad if you get it as a child, and then you get partial immunity. In the Caribbean during the colonial period it meant native-born populations were generally in pretty good shape but Europeans born in Europe and arrived--as a member of an army or to seek their fortune--had brutal mortality rates. Good book on this.
posted by mark k at 9:11 PM on October 24, 2020 [12 favorites]


I walked by all the barber shops in my area a few days ago, and noticed lack of masking in all of them. And people waiting inside instead of outside. So, my 8 year old daughter is now my barber. I warned her that my hair grows back slowly, and so the more she cuts, the sooner the fun comes to and end, and she only cut where the hair was unruly.

We'll be seeing some changes in fashion I expect.
posted by ocschwar at 10:19 PM on October 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


Surely herd immunity is ludicrous without a vaccine. What virus have we ever contained, have we ever achieved 80+% immunity to, without a vaccine? I genuinely do not understand how this can work.

First you'd have to precise regarding what you mean by heard immunity. This Lancet article gives a good overview of the history behind the usage the term: Lancet Article

Herd immunity took on fresh prominence in the 1950s and 1960s as new vaccines raised crucial questions for public health policy. What share of a population had to be vaccinated to control or eradicate a disease? The idea surged again after 1990 as public health officials worked to achieve sufficient levels of vaccine coverage.

So I guess going by its most modern usage then you'd really need a vaccine because the modern concept of herd immunity was developed to determine what percentage of a population you'd need to inoculate to eradicate a disease. That isn't how the concept originated though, and it isn't the same as saying that a pandemic disease will never end or become dramatically less lethal to a population. Indeed, we fail to eradicate many diseases we widely vaccinate for because of poverty, lack of effort, and sometimes public refusal to take the vaccines. Nevertheless, we still vaccinate enough people to make it impossible for the diseases to become pandemic.

According to the article the original concept of herd immunity as applied to humans was closer to what mark k described. Basically, over time a population gets exposed enough to a disease to develop enough immunity so that the disease is no longer epidemic nor lethal. Human infecting coronaviruses like SARS COV 2 seem like perfect candidates to follow this route sans vaccination because they are generally nonlethal, particularly amongst children, and can spread easily amongst people. If immunity does indeed wane after a few years, to me that seems the most likely scenario.

Again though, waning immunity doesn't mean everyone suddenly becomes vulnerable again to infection at the same time just like when the disease was first introduced to a naïve population. Far more likely most people would experience only mild or asymptomatic disease, a few at a time, as immunity and exposure waxes and wanes throughout the population. The common cold challenge study showed exactly that: the reinfections were brief and the the reinfected subjects didn't shed much virus, so they were less transmissible than if they'd never been exposed. That maps well with the idea that humans are often first exposed to such coronaviruses as children, when the virus generally causes mild disease, and therefore remain resistant to serious infection until old age when all infectious diseases are serious.

Really, to survive without an independent reservoir like mosquitoes with maleria or rats with y.pestis (the plauge) in any animal population, including humans, an infectious agent must thread a needle so that it isn't so infectious that it wipes out the host, triggers a behavioral response that causes it to be eradicated, or triggers an immune response that is so strong and durable that the host develops sterilizing immunity. One of the TWIV hosts referred to this as "equilibrium", which I kind of like. It seems like human circulating coronaviruses accomplish this by causing generally mild disease in children and young adults. Whether SAR-COV 2 is able to make this jump remains to be seen. If it does, it won't mean we will be seeing outbreaks such as we've experienced since January and are going to experience this coming winter and spring forever.

All that being said, from what I've read it seems like the vaccines and existing human immune responses seem to be working pretty well. The fact that we are able to build off existing vaccination for SARS MERS really seems to have given us a head start. People actually have to take the vaccines, though.

Two last points: First, after the original SARS, genetic investigation of existing circulating human coronaviruses revealed that one may have crossed over at the same time as the 1890 Russian Flu pandemic. Thus, it is suggested that the "Russian Flu" may actually have been a novel coronavirus crossing over to humans from an animal population (cows). We'd have to did up someone who died of the Russian flu and recover a sample of the virus to confirm, but its an interesting idea that shows how SARS-COV 2 might evolve in the human population to a commonly circulating disease that generally escapes our notice sans vaccination.

The other point is simply that we really have no way of knowing how many diseases appear and disappear from the population. For example, there are around 200 or so different virus types known to cause symptoms associated with the common cold. We don't have widespread testing and surveillance to track every one of them. Germ theory didn't even become completely accepted until the end of the 19th century, largely as a result of evidence gathered from tracking the spread of the Russian flu. Even then, we didn't develop the technology to reliably detect viruses until the middle part of the 20th century. During the Spanish Flu pandemic it was widely thought the disease was caused by a bacteria. Indeed, I often wonder how long it would have taken to identify SARS COV 2, develop tests for it, and develop a vaccine if this pandemic occurred as recently as the last two decades of the twentieth century.
posted by eagles123 at 10:43 PM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


The "herd immunity threshold" isn't the percent of the population infected at which people suddenly stop getting it – it's the percent at which the average infected person infects fewer than one other person, so the infection rate starts to taper off – the inflection point in an S-shaped logistic curve. The infection rate at the time you reach the immunity threshold determines how far past the threshold you overshoot. That's why, even if unvaccinated herd immunity were our only possible outcome, controlling the infection rate rather than rushing for it headlong would still save lives.
posted by nicwolff at 10:44 PM on October 24, 2020 [13 favorites]


>The "herd immunity threshold" isn't the percent of the population infected at which people suddenly stop getting it – it's the percent at which the average infected person infects fewer than one other person, so the infection rate starts to taper off

That definition of herd immunity makes it clear that the exact number is context dependent - a society where people routinely behave in a way that minimises the disease spread will require a lower degree of vaccination to achieve an R value below 1. Vaccines are just another tool to cause the disease to taper out, and if they are seen as essential it is only because other tools, like compulsory mask wearing, are seen as infeasible or too costly.
posted by Ktm1 at 11:20 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


if they are seen as essential it is only because other tools, like compulsory mask wearing, are seen as infeasible or too costly.

Well, or because vaccines are seen as potentially the most effective. Maybe different ways of saying the same thing in a way but, I mean, vaccination is the gold standard tool for this purpose for a reason.
posted by atoxyl at 1:54 AM on October 25, 2020


But, but, I'm gonna repeat myself again: the main issue is that we need to not overwhelm the healthcare systems. Herd immunity is not really relevant from this point of view. Since March, a lot of hospitals have been upgrading, but still, no one has dozens of ICUs. They are expensive to set up and very expensive to man, if you can even find the staff. In my region, before COVID-19, most ICUs were always in use. Just three extra patients a week was a burden, thirty would shut down the system entirely. I can't understand how responsible politicians can ignore this and I can't understand why it isn't repeated every day.
In Sweden they are consciously and deliberately letting some people, mostly elderly, stay home and die.
In Italy when it was worst, they had to let some people die because they didn't have the space or the staff to save them. Maybe the same thing happened in New York when it was worst?
I imagine that when the virus seriously hits the more rural parts of the US, where the hospitals are fewer and further apart, this will get tough in a whole new way. Places with universal healthcare can do centralized planning and move resources in ways that don't seem to work right now in the US, maybe because of politics, maybe because of rabid capitalism.
posted by mumimor at 8:02 AM on October 25, 2020 [8 favorites]


Places with universal healthcare can do centralized planning and move resources in ways that don't seem to work right now in the US, maybe because of politics, maybe because of rabid capitalism.

Yes, because of that, and also because of a clearly discernible collective indifference to, well, ourselves collectively. We don't care about us.

Culturally, American individualism and exceptionalism needs to die. A rising tide lifts all boats, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as you do to the least among us so you do unto me: only when Americans and American society can reorient to truly care for and value every person, without precondition, will we move beyond our current, awful greed and selfishness. We have the means to do better; therefore, we must do better.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:55 AM on October 25, 2020 [12 favorites]


Health Agency Halts Coronavirus Ad Campaign, Leaving Santa Claus in the Cold (The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 25, 2020) The $250 million federally funded effort had aimed to ‘defeat despair, inspire hope’ on pandemic.

Gizmodo summary: A new report in the Wall Street Journal, which honestly could be a Netflix drama, goes into detail on a purported $250 million public service coronavirus advertising campaign with a Santa component. The Santa deal was whipped up by Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. According to the Journal, the campaign featured a quid pro quo arrangement for Santa Claus performers: Help us promote the benefits of covid-19 vaccination and you’ll get early access to the vaccine.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:25 PM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


when the virus seriously hits the more rural parts of the US,

We're already there: COVID-19 Surges In Rural Communities, Overwhelming Some Local Hospitals. From 4 days ago.
posted by soundguy99 at 4:53 AM on October 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


Culturally, American individualism and exceptionalism needs to die. A rising tide lifts all boats, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as you do to the least among us so you do unto me: only when Americans and American society can reorient to truly care for and value every person, without precondition, will we move beyond our current, awful greed and selfishness.

This is American culture. For this to die, America itself will have to have become something totally unrecognizable, i.e. there will no longer be an "America".
posted by adamdschneider at 6:37 AM on October 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


For this to die, America itself will have to have become something totally unrecognizable

You mean, change--yes, that's what I'm saying. The character of American culture must fundamentally change to something better and more collectively oriented. That doesn't mean that there will be no America, it just means that "America" must mean something different going forward, and Americans are going to need to focus on some different core values.

This is not a nihilistic proposal, it's an observation that this--however unlikely or difficult--is the change required to avoid nihilism. It's also not a claim that Americans become something that we are not: there are already plenty of Americans, and large portions of our cultural activity, that have a collectivist perspective, and the rest of us must be persuaded to get on board. I recognize that this is a big ask, a tall order, an unlikely outcome, an improbable course; nevertheless, it is not impossible, and it's the best path forward into a world worth living in, and so that's the path we should aim to take.

Things are horrible all over, in multiple ways, but if we're going to have any version of a conversation about how to move forward through this mess, identifying the status quo as somehow utterly immutable only quashes any semblance of hope or optimism, and (however unintentionally) stops any progress before it's even nascent, and that as surely as anything guarantees that we will not rise to the challenge of our time, but instead entices us to slink away in cowardice and fear, utterly daunted by the enormous nature of the problems we face.

I'm still angry as hell, and sad, and crying more often than I want to about things that matter and things that don't, and am really scared about the pandemic and this election and its aftermath....but if I'm going to spend any energy at all looking forward, toward how we're going to get through this and move past it, I want to look at how we can be better and make sure that some of this never happens again, to use an equilibrium-shattering set of events to create (positive) paradigm-shifting changes in its wake. We may fail, but it certainly is a better use of our time and energy than sitting around saying what's not possible and what we can't do.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:34 AM on October 26, 2020 [6 favorites]


When I lived in the US as a single parent, I realized that I needed to be part of a religious community in order to have the same social support system that I was used to from Denmark. It was problematic, because I am not religious. I was reminded of this the other day when a Danish commentator tried to explain Amy Barrett on national radio -- paraphrasing -- she probably genuinely doesn't understand why people need a stronger government support system because she has grown up in a church community that in every way works like a Western European society (perhaps except England and Wales), they pay taxes (tithe), they educate (I know, I know), they help the vulnerable, they support young parents and the elderly. And they think everyone should be like them. In a church.
All humans need to be part of a community, it's how we are made to be. Because of history, we do it differently in different regions, and we all have our myths. Studies have shown that the "American Dream" is easier to achieve in other Western countries where the society as a whole provides the support rather than segregated communities. This makes sense. When the church lady helps you, who are supposed to pay back in kind when you are able. You can't just move on and do something different. I've had students who struggled with this, because we still have some strong religious communities here, but then it has been my job to tell them to let go of those feelings. We all pay for their education through our taxes, we all need them to be succesfull. When health and education are basic rights, there is no payback, you are free to do your own, individual thing.
Some places in the US are more like Europe and Canada and New Zealand (not to speak of East Asia which is another beast again). Others are more like the Middle East, where people also depend on the religious organisations for basic social support.
It's not strange if you are more fearful when you depend on a smaller community than when society as a whole is the supporting structure. It is obvious that a smaller tribe is more vulnerable than a whole society, for many reasons. You can't have people marrying out and loosing their connection. Homosexuality is a threat because the traditional family is where the values of the tribe are passed on. The neighboring tribes are scary because you don't know them and they may bring heresies or tempt the "vulnerable" with alternative values. People with no religion or religious affiliation are even scarier because they are completely incomprehensible. People who migrate are scary for all of the above reasons, and the heated imagination of the fearful thinks they might bring diseases or be robbers, exactly like Trump says.
The American individualism and exceptionalism is a myth, but all societies have their foundational myths. I don't think the myth is the problem, but I do think it is a challenge to interpret it according to the issues at hand. FDR took on that challenge and created a great society with his reinterpretation of the myth. I think Obama tried, but was stymied both by the increasing radicalization of the Republican Party, and by the chokehold of the narrow-minded economists on all of the world's governments at the time of his election, even in the face of the huge failure of the financial system.
posted by mumimor at 3:51 PM on October 26, 2020 [20 favorites]


We're already there: COVID-19 Surges In Rural Communities, Overwhelming Some Local Hospitals. From 4 days ago.
Exactly. I just compared the numbers. Denmark is not doing bad right now compared to other European countries and the testing and tracking is comprehensive, but the very rural county next to mine has 310 cases/100.000 inhabitants. We will have new nationwide restrictions from Thursday. North Dakota is only at 106/100.000 according to The Washington Post, but there is no indication that they are doing anything relevant to stop the infection rate. Imagine when they are at 310/100.000, or at levels like in The Netherlands which I think are over 1000/100.000, where they no longer have enough hospital beds and are sending people to Germany.

Today our "Dr. Fauci" was on TV asking himself rhetorically "what is the difference between this and the common flu?", "well, the common flu doesn't close down entire national healthcare systems".
posted by mumimor at 4:52 PM on October 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


> "North Dakota is only at 106/100.000 according to The Washington Post ..."

That's per day, compared to about 12/100,000 cases per day in Denmark and 51/100,000 in the Netherlands.

If my math is right, total active cases in North Dakota appears to be about 900/100,000 and total cases overall (active, recovered, and dead) are around 5,000/100,000. Compared to 146/100,000 active and 714/100,000 overall in Denmark, and 1,760/100,000 overall in the Netherlands (I can't find the active case info for the Netherlands).
posted by kyrademon at 10:10 PM on October 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


"[North Dakota] is battling through a shortage of available hospital beds ... There are 25 available intensive care beds and 268 regular, inpatient beds in the whole state, according to the state's latest figures. The situation is especially urgent in Bismarck, where the two hospitals have just one available ICU bed and six inpatient beds between them."
posted by kyrademon at 10:19 PM on October 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


Oh dear.
posted by mumimor at 5:09 AM on October 27, 2020 [3 favorites]


Understanding COVID-19 vaccine efficacy, Science, Marc Lipsitch & Natalie E. Dean, 21 Oct 2020:
The elderly and people with comorbidities are at greatest risk of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A safe and effective vaccine could help to protect these groups in two distinct ways: direct protection, where high-risk groups are vaccinated to prevent disease, and indirect protection, where those in contact with high-risk individuals are vaccinated to reduce transmission. Influenza vaccine campaigns initially targeted the elderly, in an effort at direct protection, but more recently have focused on the general population, in part to enhance indirect protection. Because influenza vaccines induce weaker, shorter-lived immune responses in the elderly than in young adults, increasing indirect protection may be a more effective strategy. It is unknown whether the same is true for COVID-19 vaccines.

For COVID-19, age-structured mathematical models with realistic contact patterns are being used to explore different vaccination plans (1, 2), with the recognition that vaccine doses may be limited at first and so should be deployed strategically. But as supplies grow large enough to contemplate an indirect protection strategy, the recommendations of these models depend on the details of how, and how well, these vaccines work and in which groups of people. How can the evidence needed to inform strategic decisions be generated for COVID-19 vaccines?...
Assuming that effective vaccines become available, who (on global, national, and local levels) decides who gets immunized and when? To put it mildly, I don’t see a lot of unified anti-COVID-19 effort between countries and states now: what happens when life-saving vaccines become available, but in short or slow supply?
posted by cenoxo at 5:39 AM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I performed some analyses of homicide statistics for the different states and, during one year in the 1990s, North Dakota had one homicide for the entire state. I don't know why I think that's relevant.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:02 AM on October 27, 2020


The elderly and people with comorbidities are at greatest risk of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A safe and effective vaccine could help to protect these groups in two distinct ways: direct protection, where high-risk groups are vaccinated to prevent disease, and indirect protection, where those in contact with high-risk individuals are vaccinated to reduce transmission.

They should start with nursing home workers. These are minimum wage or temp contract/gig workers who work at two or more facilities to make ends meet. Phone contract tracing shows that the average nursing home is connected to seven other nursing homes through shared workers.

Long term wages need to be raised so that these nursing home workers don't need to work two or three jobs.
posted by JackFlash at 9:30 AM on October 27, 2020 [4 favorites]


Long term wages need to be raised so that these nursing home workers don't need to work two or three jobs.

Often it's not just wages themselves, but the whole, "let's keep everyone as part time because it gives us more power over the workersflexibility". Both need to be fixed.
posted by bcd at 9:38 AM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


In Canada both Ontario and B.C. issued emergency orders back in April banning nursing home workers workers from working at two facilities

In Ontario nursing home workers received a pandemic bonus of $4 per hour plus an additional bonus of $250 a month . So about $900 a month
posted by yyz at 10:36 AM on October 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


The elderly and people with comorbidities are at greatest risk of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A safe and effective vaccine could help to protect these groups in two distinct ways: direct protection, where high-risk groups are vaccinated to prevent disease, and indirect protection, where those in contact with high-risk individuals are vaccinated to reduce transmission.

The states are working on these. Minnesota has been working with the UMN Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. I saw but cannot now find a tiered system for distributing vaccines which prioritizes healthcare workers and frontline workers, then the elderly and people with significant comorbilities, then the middle-aged.

Unfortunately, a lot will probably depend on two things - the quality of each state's public health system and the amount of money the state has available. Minnesota has a great public health system, for the United States anyway, but we don't have a ton of COVID funds left. So we'll see.
posted by Frowner at 10:43 AM on October 27, 2020


States need billions to prepare for Covid-19 vaccines. The federal government isn’t helping. Experts say local and state governments need more time and resources to scale up vaccination efforts., Vox, Katherine Harmon Courage, 10/27/2020.

Having a safe, working vaccine (or more likely, vaccines) is one thing, but distributing it/them is quite another. Trump will probably take premature credit for any announced vaccines, then pass the responsibility of vaccination onto individual states. It’s not likely either will occur before the election.
posted by cenoxo at 12:59 PM on October 27, 2020


Before the election? That's in a week. Before the inauguration, hopefully.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:39 PM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


Right, but The Donald is looking for any COVID-19 headline-generating announcements he can take credit for before the election. If there’s any such news that will make him look good, he will cherry pick and exaggerate it irregardless of the facts.

In reality, Production of Covid-19 vaccine could top 16 billion doses, but delivery is still a challenge, South China Morning Post, Simone McCarthy, 10/28/2020:
• Manufacturing limits, a nation’s health care system and intellectual property rights could all affect which countries receive vaccines and how quickly
• Of 16 billion doses manufacturers expect to make next year, over 8 billion have already been committed to countries

Covid-19 vaccine candidates have advanced into final-stage trials faster than any in history, and projections for how many total doses could roll off assembly lines next year now top 16 billion, according to one recent calculation. But failures and setbacks are standard in the vaccine industry, and such projections could be cut by more than half, according to another estimate made last month.

Which experimental vaccines do eventually make it past approval and off assembly lines at scale will have a profound impact on who gets vaccinated and when, as large amounts of some companies’ supplies have already been claimed by rich economies, or have been pledged to lower and middle income economies.

Meanwhile, a global plan to equitably distribute doses is still in the process of securing shipments and funding. Some countries say intellectual property rules will hinder them from using their own manufacturers to make up for any shortfalls. Others do not have the infrastructure to deliver certain vaccines, even if they arrive next year. All this sets up the potential for a wide disparity in early access to vaccines for the global population, and health experts around the world are concerned....
Money talks, and perhaps US$$ talk loudest, but caveat emptor.
posted by cenoxo at 6:39 PM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


White House science office takes credit for 'ending' pandemic as infections mount, Politico, Brianna Ehley, 10/27/2020:
The White House’s science policy office on Tuesday ranked “ending the Covid-19 pandemic” atop the list of President Donald Trump’s top first-term accomplishments, even as the country registers record amounts of infections and hospitals fill up again.

The list, included in a press release from the Office of Science and Technology Policy credits the administration for taking “decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.”...
It’s a bold, brilliant Gordian plan that only Trump could think of: simply declare victory and open up all the things.
posted by cenoxo at 7:33 PM on October 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


I've put up my weekly analysis of U.S. COVID cases.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:28 PM on October 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


What To Make Of That New Wisconsin Poll That Has Biden Way Ahead (FiveThirtyEight)
What might be going on here? Well, Biden has led in some of these states for a while, but it’s also possible that Trump could be losing support in the Midwest due to the recent spike in COVID-19 cases there. Much of Wisconsin is currently a hot spot; on Tuesday, the state reported more new cases (5,262) and deaths (64) than any other day of the pandemic. The same day, Iowa and Minnesota announced a record number of hospitalizations, and cases are on the rise in Michigan as well.
To understand the numbers, I compared to our local numbers from yesterday. Denmark's population is just a little bigger than Wisconsin's. Yesterday we had 1.017 new cases (6 deaths), and from today tighter restrictions are imposed, with warnings of more to come, because we are reaching the limit of hospital capacity, if not there yet. This in a country with universal healthcare, good sick leave for all workers and lots of improvements for contingency planning made since March.
This level of cases means that a large proportion of the population are affected. In my case, my mother's nursing home has been shut down because of a worker infected with COVID-19, and a friend and two colleagues have had the infection, as well as a third of my students after a super-spreader event. An infection-rate five times as high must be overwhelming for any society.
For Trump to claim he has won over the virus seems really, really absurd. One thing is that he is a con-man, but shouldn't there be someone on his campaign staff who could point out that this is a crazy strategy? Here, the mask-refusers exist, but they are a fringe, less than the 27% crazification factor (I'd guess about 20%, but they are LOUD).

A Maryland family battled covid-19 at the same time as Trump. It devastated them. (Wapo)
This is so heartbreaking, and also so full of layers: in one story, there is everything which is wrong about Trump's America.
posted by mumimor at 1:46 AM on October 29, 2020 [3 favorites]


Trump Attacks Voting By Mail Hours After Posing Beside Ivanka and Jared Holding Their Mail-In Ballots, Mediaite, Aidan McLaughlin, 10/26/2020:
PHOTO [aboard Air Force One, October 26, 2020].

...On Monday, Ivanka Trump posted a photo of herself and husband Jared Kushner brandishing absentee ballots alongside her boss and father, the president. The couple registered as Republicans for the first time earlier this year, after previously being registered Democrats in New York.

Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary in August, but cast his ballot in the general election in person on Saturday....
More details at The Daily Mail, 10/26/2020.
posted by cenoxo at 5:48 AM on October 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


Hey, dances_with_sneetches: just wanted to say thank you for keeping up with your weekly analyses. It’s so helpful to see a snapshot laid out clearly and regularly!
posted by functionequalsform at 7:42 AM on October 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


thanks. It's a time-intense vigil. I've come to know each state's story with intimacy.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:56 AM on October 29, 2020 [4 favorites]


White House admits report that listed 'ending' COVID pandemic as Trump accomplishment was 'poorly worded', Yahoo News, 10/28/2020
The White House acknowledged on Wednesday that a report touting the “ending of the COVID-19 pandemic” as one of the Trump administration’s accomplishments was “poorly worded.”

“I think that was poorly worded,” White House communications director Alyssa Farah said on Fox News. “The intent was to say that it is our goal to end the virus.”

On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published a 62-page report outlining what it called “highlights” in “Advancing America’s Global Leadership in Science & Technology” [PDF] over the past four years. The “ending of the COVID-19 pandemic” was among them.

The pandemic has not ended....
So glad they cleared that up.
posted by cenoxo at 10:17 AM on October 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


We have always been at war with COVID-19.
posted by benzenedream at 10:22 AM on October 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


Utah positivity rates are now hovering around 18%, and protesters showed up at the State Epidemiologist's house this morning to register their displeasure with being asked to consider other people. Gov. Herbert was as assertive as ever, muttering something about how those people could make better use of their time.

Utahns will spend the weekend having large gatherings, trunk-or-treating, driving poorly with or without the help of alcohol, being unconscionably stupid with their guns, and getting themselves stranded or injured in the great outdoors. So, ramping up every category of risk we can imagine, just in time for hospitals to start rationing care.

The statewide body count is now just under 600.
posted by armeowda at 12:29 PM on October 29, 2020 [3 favorites]


The Washington Post is reporting 91,231 new cases today, a new record high I believe. Yet I didn’t even get one of their little push notifications about it. My county also had its highest new case count ever today. And I just got an email from the school district superintendent that they’re welcoming 130 new hybrid students (who up to now had been fully remote) on Monday.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 2:31 PM on October 30, 2020


We bet our previous daily record by 15% today in Utah. So yay us. And then this happened:

*emergency alert noise on every phone in the state*
State of Utah: COVID-19 is spreading rapidly. Record cases. Almost every county is a high transmission area. Hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. By public health order, masks are required in high transmission areas. Social gatherings are limited to 10 or fewer. ... Be careful!
So - yeah - totally cool and normal Friday afternoon before Halloween and an election.

Per CNN: “Utah's appears to be the first time a Wireless Emergency Alert was sent to an entire state. Officials explained in a news statement that the "dire situation" there drove them to try the stark approach.
"Despite the ongoing pandemic, there are a number of people who are not aware of the dire situation we find ourselves in," state officials said. "As a result, the emergency alert was an effort to "make sure nearly everyone is aware of the serious nature of the pandemic."
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:42 PM on October 30, 2020 [3 favorites]


Just back from a local Whole Foods in the Bay Area, where I had to almost yell at the store manager for seemingly abandoning earlier limits on how many people are allowed in the store at one time. "It's 70 degrees out, and people can wait in a line outside in fresh, flowing air way more safely than in these crowded indoor lines for the cash registers."

As soon as I mentioned I do COVID Contact Tracing she got very solicitous and had the security guard stop letting people in until the aisles cleared. San Francisco and Santa Clara counties have the lowest Case rates of any major metro area in the United States because we more consistently observed proper precautions, and yet (or because of this) people are letting their guard down.
posted by PhineasGage at 4:04 PM on October 30, 2020 [7 favorites]


My 24 YO son lives in SC County. Keep up the good fight. Bless you...
posted by Windopaene at 4:36 PM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]


Businesses are also saying DGAF to having hand sanitizer nearby, I carry my own now since there are never kiosks near touch terminals. Stalwart Trader Joe's is still doing the best enforcement and sanitization out of all the businesses I regularly go to.
posted by benzenedream at 4:56 PM on October 30, 2020


Not my Tj's

They seem to have given up...
posted by Windopaene at 4:59 PM on October 30, 2020


a few days ago, following an extended family zoom call in which my sibling & family had impatiently, dismissively avoided discussing the disturbing uptick in covid cases, i texted sibling, requesting explanation. sibling, in strangely-depersonalized language stated "the concern here is that the numbers may be inflated because of $$," "it is now flu season [and] we think all illnesses that look like covid will be put in the covid bin." asked whether the concern is that diagnostic panels will not distinguish the two, said no: "just everything being called covid for funding," and that "some things are being exaggerated because of elections."

i offered that public health authorities could do and could have done much better and (sort of) agreed that things are certainly being exaggerated because of elections. i did not offer my understanding that case numbers are reported based on positive diagnostic testing, nor my (not particularly timely) understanding that medical reimbursements are based on CPT codes associated with testing and treatment: sibling is, among other things, a trained doctor who should already know this. nor did i probe who is doing the inflating or who is after which money. (pearls/swine). and, of course, my agreement as to exaggeration was not agreement as to who is exaggerating what; neither sibling nor self was very particular on that point. i feel i have a pretty good idea what sibling means & bet sibling has a pretty good idea what i mean. i see no value in arguing with sibling who could engage intellect and training of own volition at any time if so inclined.

sibling is, further, irritated our parents, local to me, and i, do not want sibling and brood to travel across the country to visit, now, when it is convenient to them; does not offer argument against parents sheltering-in-place until a vaccine is available, knowing, i think, that no argument avails, but appears to resent it anyway. my state has been doing pretty well as has sibling's, but both have been trending poorer, and almost all states in between are rated "active or imminent outbreak" by covidactnow.org.

anyway, i heard an excerpt from rally today in which the orange horror made the same assertion about miscoding for dollars. sad!

on preview: local grocery store cannot keep the disinfectant wipes for grocery carts available, but they seem to be trying. a few days ago at local early-voting site, they had hand sanitizer available. it was exceptionally runny & i spilled it all over, coming close to soaking my ballot. then my hands felt sort of burn-y for the rest of the day.
posted by 20 year lurk at 5:18 PM on October 30, 2020 [3 favorites]


The United States has become the first country in the world to record more than 100,000 new cases of the coronavirus in a single day, according to a tally by Reuters [...] with four days until the 2020 presidential election, the country is reporting more than one new case every second.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:28 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]


NPR, back in July: White House Strips CDC Of Data Collection Role For COVID-19 Hospitalizations The Trump Administration has mandated that hospitals sidestep the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send critical information about COVID-19 hospitalizations and equipment to a different federal database. From the start of the pandemic, the CDC has collected data on COVID-19 hospitalizations, availability of intensive care beds and personal protective equipment. But hospitals must now report that information to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.

Yesterday: Internal Documents Reveal COVID-19 Hospitalization Data The Government Keeps Hidden. NPR has obtained documents that give a snapshot of data the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services collects and analyzes daily. The documents — reports sent to agency staffers — highlight trends in hospitalizations and pinpoint cities nearing full hospital capacity and facilities under stress. They paint a granular picture of the strain on hospitals across the country that could help local citizens decide when to take extra precautions against COVID-19.

Withholding this information from the public and the research community is a missed opportunity to help prevent outbreaks and even save lives, say public health and data experts who reviewed the documents for NPR.
[...] The documents show that detailed information hospitals report to HHS every day is reviewed and analyzed — but circulation seems to be limited to a few dozen government staffers from HHS and its agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, according to distribution lists reviewed by NPR. Only one member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Adm. Brett Giroir, appears to receive the documents directly. [...] The daily reports show county, city and hospital-level details, as well as national analyses that HHS does not post online.

An example in the article from the Oct. 27 report, listing cities where hospitals are filling up: the metro areas of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore, where in-patient hospital beds are over 80% full. Also listed are specific hospitals reaching max capacity, including facilities that are at over 95% ICU capacity in Tampa, Birmingham and New York.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:58 PM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]


A war crimes tribunal wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for any HHS and White House official that helped hide this data from the public.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:20 PM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]


And in Utah continues to be fucked news......we just bet our previous highest daily case count by over 20%

Utah coronavirus cases, hospitalizations shatter records, with 2,807 new infections Thursday
posted by inflatablekiwi at 11:37 AM on November 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


"the concern here is that the numbers may be inflated because of $$," "it is now flu season [and] we think all illnesses that look like covid will be put in the covid bin."

I don't know how much this helps, because among other things the tables take at least a little data literacy, spreadsheet literacy, and patience, so they're not the most accessible.

But I've found the strongest argument to "COVID deaths are being overcounted" is to look at these tables of month-by-month, state-by-state death totals from the CDC. You can skip looking at deaths attributed to COVID, and instead just look at total deaths due to all causes and compare the numbers from 2017 to today. There's a noticeable jump starting in March 2020 and the gap between total deaths in 2020 - deaths due to any cause, not just deaths "put in the COVID bin" - and the totals for previous years just keeps getting bigger. The gap is also much higher than the estimates of deaths due to COVID that you hear in the news. The data shows that if anything, COVID deaths have been seriously undercounted.

I realize this is only about deaths rather than cases, but it might give a denier (at least, the kind of denier who is willing to actually look at data) some pause.
posted by trig at 1:54 PM on November 5, 2020


At this point the deniers will need mass graves, bodies in the streets, and mortality rates that ensure every single person knows someone who has died. North Dakota and South Dakota seem to be on track to this. Both have Trumpist governors who do whatever the Orange menace says.
posted by benzenedream at 5:48 PM on November 5, 2020


How Your Brain Tricks You Into Taking Risks During the Pandemic (ProPublica, Nov. 2, 2020) Experts who study the way we think and make decisions say that it can be more than politics driving our decision-making this year. The unprecedented nature of the pandemic undermines how we process information and assess risk. Need proof? Look around. (Starts with the power of social norms and personal experience, ends with poor decision-making during this crisis due to the absence of institutional leadership.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:13 PM on November 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


Same shit different day. New all time high daily cases, deaths, and hospitalizations in the Beehive state

COVID-19, Governor Herbert said in his statement, “is spreading rampantly and uncontrolled in our communities."
posted by inflatablekiwi at 2:51 PM on November 6, 2020


And what is going on in Illinois? They have been topping the charts for several days with a crazy number of new cases. Never see this explained/mentioned anywhere.
posted by Windopaene at 4:08 PM on November 6, 2020


Fauci says working with Trump was ‘very stressful’ (WaPo, Nov. 11, 2020) “When you have public figures like [former chief strategist Stephen K.] Bannon calling for your beheading, that’s really kind of unusual,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Australian television program “The 7.30 Report.” Bannon suggested on his podcast last week that the heads of Fauci and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray should be put on pikes, prompting Twitter to permanently ban his account after he posted the clip.

“That’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re going through medical school to become a physician,” Fauci told the interviewer.

posted by Iris Gambol at 11:30 AM on November 11, 2020 [6 favorites]


Face masks also protect wearer from COVID-19, says CDC in updated guidance:
Studies demonstrate that cloth mask materials can also reduce wearers’ exposure to infectious droplets through filtration, including filtration of fine droplets and particles less than 10 microns. [...] Experimental and epidemiological data support community masking to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The prevention benefit of masking is derived from the combination of source control and personal protection for the mask wearer. The relationship between source control and personal protection is likely complementary and possibly synergistic, so that individual benefit increases with increasing community mask use.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:30 AM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


And Utah just bet its previously highest day by 33%. 3,919 cases today.......so yeah.......we continue to be screwed.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:52 AM on November 12, 2020


I've put up my new weekly analysis. The numbers are brutal, well-beyond the previous surges.

It's interesting that both Texas and California should pass the 1,000,000 cases mark tomorrow. Texas right now has 985,380 cases with 10,865 new cases reported yesterday. California had reported 984,682 total cases with 7424 new cases on Wednesday. Neither state has yet reported for today.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 11:38 AM on November 12, 2020 [3 favorites]


“When you have public figures like [former chief strategist Stephen K.] Bannon calling for your beheading, that’s really kind of unusual,”
“That’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re going through medical school to become a physician,” Fauci told the interviewer.


Master of the understatement, there.

In other news, we'd all literally rather die than be indefinitely separated from other people any longer, apparently.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:50 PM on November 12, 2020


Over 230 people have died from Covid-19 in Texas’s correctional facilities and in county jails, nearly 80 percent of them were in pretrial detention and hadn’t even been convicted of a crime
posted by Mitheral at 9:30 PM on November 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


^from the Vox link: "The 231 figure is likely to be a conservative count. As the researchers note, TDCJ and county jails update death reports after autopsies are conducted, sometimes months after the fact. Additionally, many people have “died without ever having been tested for COVID,” and others died due to a preexisting conditioned worsened by the virus and are not counted in this figure. This report only looked at state-operated prisons and county-operated jails, as researchers were focused on how Texas’s Covid-19 prison policies had fared."

The Marshall Project has been tracking coronavirus infections and deaths in prisons since March, "collect[ing] data from prison systems in all 50 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons," and I already knew the figures were artificially low but I now realize jails aren't included. A State-by-State Look at Coronavirus in Prisons (current through Nov. 12): "The Marshall Project is collecting data on COVID-19 infections in state and federal prisons. See how the virus has affected correctional facilities where you live." Since March, The Marshall Project has been tracking how many people are being sickened and killed by COVID-19 in prisons and how widely it has spread across the country and within each state. Here, we will regularly update these figures counting the number of people infected and killed nationwide and in each prison system until the crisis abates

(Reader can "Jump to: Prisoner cases / Prisoner deaths / Prisoner data by state / Staff cases and deaths / Staff data by state")

There have been at least 25,548 cases of coronavirus reported among prisoners in Texas.
There have been at least 166 deaths from coronavirus reported among prisoners in Texas.

US totals:
There have been at least 182,593 cases of coronavirus reported among prisoners.
There have been at least 1,412 deaths from coronavirus reported among prisoners.

There have been at least 41,927 cases of coronavirus reported among prison staff.
There have been at least 93 deaths from coronavirus reported among prison staff.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:04 AM on November 13, 2020 [2 favorites]




These are the numbers from the CDC as to "Cases in the Last 7 Days per 100K" which you would think would mean cases in the last 7 days per 100K.

The top two states, I imagine all of the numbers have the same systematic error.

North Dakota 175.5
South Dakota 144.2

North Dakota has 762,062 people (last official census estimate, 2019). Multiplying 175.5 by 7.62 comes out to be: 1337 cases. They had 1800 new cases yesterday alone.

North Dakota's reporting page kind of sucks. They are one of the few states (the only?) that do not present cumulative cases. They will tell you daily new cases. Here at the COVID Tracking Project are the cumulative cases for November 12 and November 5: 59173 and 49837, respectively. That works out to be 9300 new cases or 1329 per day.

South Dakota has 884,659 people (2019). Multiplying 144.2 by 8.847 comes out to be 1276. Yesterday, November 12 they had 2020 new cases. Their Department of Health webpage does give figures for cumulative cases. This screengrab dated 11/11 (date near the middle) says 55,705 total confirmed cases. A second screengrab, dated 11/04, says 47,653 cumulative cases. That's 8052 new cases in a week or 1150 per day.

I've come to the conclusion that the CDC is presenting daily new cases per 100K population as averaged over the past seven days and titling it "Cases in the Last 7 Days per 100K."
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:47 AM on November 13, 2020 [2 favorites]




Yeah, the CDC is reporting the daily cases, including a seven day moving average. It's exactly how the Post and Times do it, but they have better labeling.

CDC isn't the only one having trouble clearly presenting data. I struggled with this issue trying to get European numbers from random googling. Though of course you'd be justified in holding the CDC to a higher standard.
posted by mark k at 8:42 AM on November 13, 2020 [1 favorite]


Newly Representative-elect Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico on MSNBC's The Week with Joshua Johnson (you may remember Joshua Johnson as the host of NPR's 1A, though tonight María Teresa Kumar guest-hosted) a few minutes ago and said that at one of the freshman orientation classes people were protesting at wearing masks “because they cause bronchitis”. She specifically mentioned Georgia, and I thought she was talking about a Democratic rep saying this, but given how few non-incumbent Dem candidates there were I probably misunderstood.
posted by XMLicious at 6:50 PM on November 14, 2020


Scanned the Wikipedia. Two new Dem Georgia reps.

Bronchitis or Death?
posted by Windopaene at 10:10 PM on November 14, 2020


XMLiscious: The Georgia Rep she was talking about was almost definitely Republican Q-Anon Monster Marjorie Taylor Green who is absolutely the worst.

Our two new Democratic Reps are Nikema Williams, who was a state rep (and state Democratic Party chair) who got arrested last year in our capitol building for peacefully protesting, and Carolyn Bordeaux, who is a political science professor. They are both pro-mask.

(and that would have taken you two seconds of googling to figure out. I thought that the Georgia bashing was over now that we helped we the presidency and could still save the Senate.)
posted by hydropsyche at 4:08 AM on November 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


My apologies, but I really did think that was what Fernandez said, but looked up the Georgia U.S. House results and linked to them anyways and literally wrote “I probably misunderstood”. I don't think badly of Georgia, that's why I figure I misunderstood—I associate your state with Stacey Abrams.
posted by XMLicious at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2020


Angry Andrew Cuomo at Riverside Church
posted by mumimor at 10:23 AM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


I put up the hospitalization graphs for each state on my blog. Many have slopes that look like K2, some like Everest, about two or three states have graphs that look reasonable.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:51 PM on November 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


More promissing news:
Moderna Inc’s experimental vaccine was 94.5% effective in preventing COVID-19 based on interim data from a late-stage trial

...

A key advantage of Moderna’s vaccine is that it does not need ultra-cold storage like Pfizer’s, making it easier to distribute. Moderna expects it to be stable at normal fridge temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 48°F) for 30 days and it can be stored for up to 6 months at -20C.
posted by Mitheral at 6:53 AM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]


^ Moderna's vaccine, like Pfizer's, is a two-shot dose. From Mitheral's Reuters link:

- The data from Moderna’s trial involving 30,000 volunteers also showed the vaccine prevented cases of severe COVID-19, a question that still remains with the Pfizer vaccine. Of the 95 cases in Moderna’s trial, 11 were severe and all 11 occurred among volunteers who got the placebo

- The 95 cases of COVID-19 included several key groups who are at increased risk for severe disease, including 15 cases in adults aged 65 and older and 20 in participants from racially diverse groups

- Most side effects were mild to moderate. A significant proportion of volunteers, however, experienced more severe aches and pains after taking the second dose, including about 10% who had fatigue severe enough to interfere with daily activities while another 9% had severe body aches. Most of these complaints were generally short-lived, Moderna said. [phrasing, please]

NPR notes:

- In the Moderna study there were 30,000 volunteers. Half got two doses of the vaccine 28 days apart; half got two shots of a placebo on the same schedule [...]

- The Moderna and Pfizer studies were conducted using slightly different protocols. To be counted as a COVID-19 case, participants in the Moderna study had to have at least two symptoms of disease in addition to a positive test for the virus. The Pfizer study required only one symptom. Also, Moderna waited 14 days following the second injection to begin counting cases; Pfizer's study started counting at seven days.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:22 AM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


Inevitably: Rapid Testing Is Less Accurate Than the Government Wants to Admit (ProPublica, Nov. 16, 2020) Rapid antigen testing is a mess. The federal government pushed it out without a plan, and then spent weeks denying problems with false positives.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:48 PM on November 16, 2020


To be counted as a COVID-19 case, participants in the Moderna study had to have at least two symptoms of disease in addition to a positive test for the virus. The Pfizer study required only one symptom

Does anyone know why they're requiring symptoms? Unsymptomatic cases (that nonetheless spread the virus) are a huge percentage of total cases, aren't they?
posted by trig at 1:21 PM on November 16, 2020


The primary goal of these phase 3 trials in progress is to determine whether the vaccine reduces the risk of a person getting symptomatic COVID-19. To be counted as a COVID-19 case, trial participants must have a positive swab test, as well as a defined list of symptoms – which varies from one trial to another. These symptoms can range from a mild headache through to severe disease requiring intensive care.

Each trial uses their own definition of a positive case to estimate how many people are expected to get COVID-19 in the control group (those not receiving the experimental vaccine). For example, the Moderna vaccine clinical trial protocol works on the assumption that one out of 133 people will develop symptomatic COVID-19 over a six-month period. If the vaccine is 60% effective, then complex statistical analysis dictates that only 151 people out of 30,000 recruits need to become symptomatically infected for this degree of protection to be apparent.
(The Conversation, Oct. 21, 2020)
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:37 PM on November 16, 2020


Gov. Newsom announces sweeping actions to curb growth of COVID cases in California.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:01 PM on November 16, 2020


Yeah we just got a bunch of new restrictions (pdf) in Vermont basically geared at 1. keeping people from doing holiday shit 2. being able to keep schools open if possible. Some of the rules are a little odd. Bars are closed, but restaurants are still open (only til 10 pm), but you're only allowed to dine with people in your household. You're also no longer allowed to walk or exercise outside with people who are not in your household unless you are family members. Which, I will be honest, may be the first COVID rule that I will not abide with since getting to go on a masked socially distant dog walk with a local friend (who also lives alone) is a pretty necessary part of my COVID routine. I suspect it's a restriction more about gathering for informal sports stuff since one of the big outbreaks in Vermont was as the result of a hockey/broomball set of games and poor COVID hygiene surrounding that.
posted by jessamyn at 2:30 PM on November 16, 2020 [3 favorites]


Also today: Gov. Gavin Newsom apologizes for attending French Laundry party (Sacramento Bee) “I made a bad mistake,” Newsom said. “The spirit of what I’m preaching all the time was contradictory, and I’ve got to own that, so I’m going to apologize to you.” Newsom says when he arrived at his friend and political adviser Jason Kinney’s party at the famed French Laundry restaurant, the crowd at the table was bigger than he anticipated. He should have left then, he said, but instead he and his wife chose to stay.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:36 PM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


I've mostly approved of what Newsom has been doing, but the $#%$#@^ French Laundry thing puts me in almost as much of a rage as Dianne Feinstein hugging Lindsay Graham.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:13 PM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]


jessamyn, as your friend lives alone could you become a bubble? Search page for The Bubbles.

We've had this so ingrained, so many believe in the model that even an adversarial government would have trouble weaponising covid here.
posted by unearthed at 5:20 PM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who at 87 is the second oldest member of the Senate, said in a statement that he had been tested positive for the coronavirus. (CBS News, Nov. 17, 2020) Grassley, the most senior Republican member of the upper chamber, is third in the line of succession to the presidency as the president pro tempore of the Senate. He is also known for his near-perfect voting record, having not missed a vote on the Senate floor in a record 27 years. [...] Grassley's announcement comes after Alaska Congressman Don Young, who is also 87, tested positive for COVID-19 last week. Young is currently the longest-serving member of the House.

[July 6, 2020: Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday he will not attend the Republican National Convention next month in Florida due to coronavirus concerns. (NBC). It was the first time in 40 years Grassley skipped a convention.]
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:05 PM on November 17, 2020 [2 favorites]


(The fact that Grassley and Rick Scott are both in quarantine right now meant that the confirmation of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board has at least been delayed, since without them there aren't enough votes to pass it. Shelton's a hardcore Trumpist and believes, among other things, in going back to the the gold standard.)
posted by trig at 5:04 PM on November 17, 2020 [2 favorites]


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