Coronavirus

[apl68]

Still no news back on my final COVID test.  Looks like I'll probably have to call them Monday to see if I can get an answer.  Here I'd hoped that between increased lab capacity and reduced rates of infection the delay wouldn't be that bad.

I know within reason that all I had was a stomach bug with symptoms that happened to overlap with COVID.  But I'm trying to follow the rules to set a good example, and to reassure staff members who worry a lot.  Introvert though I am, this isolation is getting to be a bit much!

[Caracal]

Still no news back on my final COVID test.  Looks like I'll probably have to call them Monday to see if I can get an answer.  Here I'd hoped that between increased lab capacity and reduced rates of infection the delay wouldn't be that bad.

I know within reason that all I had was a stomach bug with symptoms that happened to overlap with COVID.  But I'm trying to follow the rules to set a good example, and to reassure staff members who worry a lot.  Introvert though I am, this isolation is getting to be a bit much!

I've been told that when you have symptoms that are fairly unlikely to be COVID, a rapid test can be a good option. The logic is that people with symptoms are more likely to test positive if they actually have it, and while they aren't as accurate as the other tests, a person with symptoms that aren't particularly indicative of COVID who tests negative is quite unlikely to be infected. The rapid tests are a lot less useful if you have symptoms that make Covid more likely because you wouldn't really be able to put too much stock in a negative test in that case.

[apl68]

The full test results finally came back.  Clean bill of health!  Now I can open my office doors again and handle library items without worrying everybody.  Still masking around others, of course.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

The full test results finally came back.  Clean bill of health!  Now I can open my office doors again and handle library items without worrying everybody.  Still masking around others, of course.

Good news!

[hmaria1609]

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced an expansion for the vaccine and relaxing some restrictions:
https://wtop.com/dc/2021/03/dc-coronavirus-update-march-15/
Posted on WTOP Radio online (3/15/21) There are some ad breaks so scroll past them to read the full article.

[clean]

Quote from: apl68 on Today at 07:22:23 AM
The full test results finally came back.  Clean bill of health!  Now I can open my office doors again and handle library items without worrying everybody.  Still masking around others, of course.

Good news!

Did you have surgery today?  (successful I hope?)

[Stockmann]

The full test results finally came back.  Clean bill of health!  Now I can open my office doors again and handle library items without worrying everybody.  Still masking around others, of course.

Good news!

+1!

*unrelated*

Something that's interesting to me is that if you draw up a list of the places that, excluding vaccination, handled Covid exceptionally well (Vietnam, Taiwan, etc) and those that have been world-beating in their vaccination schemes (Israel, UAE, etc) there is zero overlap. It doesn't hold the other way around, as plenty of countries have managed to botch both.
In many places, this pandemic has been the deadliest event in decades - in the US, surely the deadliest event since the Spanish flu, and apart from Spanish flu probably the deadliest since the Civil War. So the State's performance really doesn't get more life-and-death than in how the pandemic is handled (esp. as botched pandemic responses also have had gargantuan economic costs). So if voters are at all rational, in principle democracies should punish bad performance and reward effective responses. In some democracies it's indeed been the case, like rewarding the incumbent in NZ, and Brazil's catastrophic performance contributing to a political crisis for Bolsonaro is also rational. On the other hand, Mexico has fared even worse than Brazil and it hasn't dented the incumbent's popularity, and the Dutch re-elected the incumbent despite a pandemic response, excluding vaccination, that can at best be described as mediocre and thoroughly botching vaccination. An interesting case to watch will be France, where Macron seems more interested in owning les rosbifs than in saving French lives.

[Caracal]

The full test results finally came back.  Clean bill of health!  Now I can open my office doors again and handle library items without worrying everybody.  Still masking around others, of course.

Good news!

+1!

*unrelated*

Something that's interesting to me is that if you draw up a list of the places that, excluding vaccination, handled Covid exceptionally well (Vietnam, Taiwan, etc) and those that have been world-beating in their vaccination schemes (Israel, UAE, etc) there is zero overlap. It doesn't hold the other way around, as plenty of countries have managed to botch both.
In many places, this pandemic has been the deadliest event in decades - in the US, surely the deadliest event since the Spanish flu, and apart from Spanish flu probably the deadliest since the Civil War. So the State's performance really doesn't get more life-and-death than in how the pandemic is handled (esp. as botched pandemic responses also have had gargantuan economic costs). So if voters are at all rational, in principle democracies should punish bad performance and reward effective responses. In some democracies it's indeed been the case, like rewarding the incumbent in NZ, and Brazil's catastrophic performance contributing to a political crisis for Bolsonaro is also rational. On the other hand, Mexico has fared even worse than Brazil and it hasn't dented the incumbent's popularity, and the Dutch re-elected the incumbent despite a pandemic response, excluding vaccination, that can at best be described as mediocre and thoroughly botching vaccination. An interesting case to watch will be France, where Macron seems more interested in owning les rosbifs than in saving French lives.

In some of these cases, I'd be inclined to argue that they were so successful at keeping virus cases to a very low level, that there's not any huge hurry on the vaccines. I wonder, for example, what percentage of the population New Zealand would have to vaccinate before they would relax the controls and response they've had to the rare cluster outside of travelers in isolation? It would probably have to be very high right? In other cases, its hard to blame countries just for not being really wealthy and being able to secure access to vaccines. I'd also say its probably a bit early to decide who is doing a particularly bad job with vaccines, beyond the EU, where the comparison to the US seems reasonably fair. Most countries really haven't vaccinate many people, which suggests that there are just logistical and supply problems.

[Stockmann]

In some of these cases, I'd be inclined to argue that they were so successful at keeping virus cases to a very low level, that there's not any huge hurry on the vaccines.

I agree, they don't have nearly as much of an incentive to vaccinate quickly as badly affected countries. But it does surprise me a bit that there's exactly zero overlap between countries successful at containing the pandemic pre-vaccinations and countries with successful vaccination programs.

In other cases, its hard to blame countries just for not being really wealthy and being able to secure access to vaccines...

This is true for very poor countries (although some, like Tanzania, aren't even trying), but when it comes to middle income and rich countries there is remarkably little correlation with wealth. Chile is ahead of many EU countries. Switzerland is richer than Israel, yet Israel is light years ahead. The gap between the UK and any continental European country is massive. Serbia is ahead of many wealthier European countries. Even when it comes to vaccine development, wealth matters significantly less than one might've though - Russia, which is roughly as poor as Mexico, beat a lot of much wealthier countries, and in the Americas smallish, impoverished Cuba seems set to finish second in the race to develop vaccines. American and British successes are clearly not down to money alone.

[spork]

The full test results finally came back.  Clean bill of health!  Now I can open my office doors again and handle library items without worrying everybody.  Still masking around others, of course.

Good news!

+1!

*unrelated*

Something that's interesting to me is that if you draw up a list of the places that, excluding vaccination, handled Covid exceptionally well (Vietnam, Taiwan, etc) and those that have been world-beating in their vaccination schemes (Israel, UAE, etc) there is zero overlap. It doesn't hold the other way around, as plenty of countries have managed to botch both.
In many places, this pandemic has been the deadliest event in decades - in the US, surely the deadliest event since the Spanish flu, and apart from Spanish flu probably the deadliest since the Civil War. So the State's performance really doesn't get more life-and-death than in how the pandemic is handled (esp. as botched pandemic responses also have had gargantuan economic costs). So if voters are at all rational, in principle democracies should punish bad performance and reward effective responses. In some democracies it's indeed been the case, like rewarding the incumbent in NZ, and Brazil's catastrophic performance contributing to a political crisis for Bolsonaro is also rational. On the other hand, Mexico has fared even worse than Brazil and it hasn't dented the incumbent's popularity, and the Dutch re-elected the incumbent despite a pandemic response, excluding vaccination, that can at best be described as mediocre and thoroughly botching vaccination. An interesting case to watch will be France, where Macron seems more interested in owning les rosbifs than in saving French lives.

A possible intervening variable: obesity.

[Caracal]

In some of these cases, I'd be inclined to argue that they were so successful at keeping virus cases to a very low level, that there's not any huge hurry on the vaccines.

I agree, they don't have nearly as much of an incentive to vaccinate quickly as badly affected countries. But it does surprise me a bit that there's exactly zero overlap between countries successful at containing the pandemic pre-vaccinations and countries with successful vaccination programs.

In other cases, its hard to blame countries just for not being really wealthy and being able to secure access to vaccines...

This is true for very poor countries (although some, like Tanzania, aren't even trying), but when it comes to middle income and rich countries there is remarkably little correlation with wealth. Chile is ahead of many EU countries. Switzerland is richer than Israel, yet Israel is light years ahead. The gap between the UK and any continental European country is massive. Serbia is ahead of many wealthier European countries. Even when it comes to vaccine development, wealth matters significantly less than one might've though - Russia, which is roughly as poor as Mexico, beat a lot of much wealthier countries, and in the Americas smallish, impoverished Cuba seems set to finish second in the race to develop vaccines. American and British successes are clearly not down to money alone.

Part of it is just about what deals countries worked out. Apparently, Israel paid a premium for the Pfizer vaccine and also offered the vaccine makers access to their centralized health data. I'm assuming this is the sort of deal a larger country wouldn't have been able to pull off. Pfizer could give Israel 9 million doses or whatever relatively easily because they made it worthwhile for them to do so. Probably they couldn't have found the supply to give somebody 30 million on the same terms.

It seems like Chile took a very different approach and got vaccines from all over the place, including China. The US has a lot of doses because they were very involved in the process from the beginning and secured commitments in return. Obviously speed is important, but in the longer term, it could be that countries with slower rollouts achieve fuller vaccine coverage. I worry about the US, not just because of vaccine hesitancy, but also because of the larger inequities that are showing up in vaccine distribution. It seems likely that there's going to be a need for vaccine boosters, both to keep immunity from going away, but also to deal with variants. That might be hard to manage with our health care system.

[science.expat]

Are vaccinations free in the US? They are - or will be when there's more roll out - here in Australia.

[Caracal]

Are vaccinations free in the US? They are - or will be when there's more roll out - here in Australia.

Yes, they are.

[spork]

Really interesting presentation of data here:

https://www.thesmileproject.global/post/un-masking-children-part-2-of-4-understanding-relative-risk.

Age is definitely a proxy for comorbidities in the USA, as is race.

[Caracal]

Really interesting presentation of data here:

https://www.thesmileproject.global/post/un-masking-children-part-2-of-4-understanding-relative-risk.

Age is definitely a proxy for comorbidities in the USA, as is race.

Some of the points are completely valid, especially on the actual risk of death or serious illness to children. However, the presentation as a whole can't be trusted.

For reasons I don't fully understand, questions of children and Covid have become incredibly contentious. Lots of people, including some with credentials who should know better, seem to start with an extreme belief about children and COVID and then cherrypick the evidence to support that view and never change their views no matter what additional evidence suggests. With things like mask use or vaccination this attitude is much more common and pronounced among anti-covid prevention trump supporting types, but with kids, the bad faith has a pretty even distribution.

The problem with epi and medical studies is that there are lots of things you can't actually test with a control group. So, you get all these studies that aren't definitive and involve confounding from various sources. The preferred way of handling this, even among plenty of people with relevant degrees seems to be to assume the ones that support your argument must be correct and then find the problems with the other ones, or you can make it simpler and just ignore the results you don't like. Seems like this is basically what's going on here. I'm quite convinced there is a pretty low actual risk to kids from COVID, and that includes rare things like the post covid syndrome. It also seems pretty clear that kids don't play the same outsized role in transmitting Covid that they do in flu transmission. After that the whole thing gets really murky. In general, I've pretty much decided that anyone who has some strident view they are convinced is right about it isn't to be trusted.