COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[GeneralMacArthur]

Transverse myelitis is much worse than COVID.  I wouldn't take the AstraZeneca vaccine in its current form, based only on these reports, and I would be skeptical of it even if it evolved.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So they voted 99-1 to not give me a check -- good to see.  Give it to someone who needs it.

Hopefully wealthy podcast hosts don't spitefully portray this as a massive betrayal by Biden.  Oh who am I kidding.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can we get a megathread 7 for "the sunset" or "everyone should get a vaccine"?  "Dawn of the Presidential Superspreader" is about as far from topical as it gets, and this thread is now well over 100 pages.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Dawn of the Presidential Superspreader

o geez what did biden do

[GeneralMacArthur]

I'm curious what the next step would even be for such a thing.  There's only six cases.  Are they just going to do a super-deep-dive on those six cases to determine what caused them?  Or are they going to call every single person who got J+J to make sure they didn't also get these symptoms, and then just say "1 in 300,000 risk of potentially fatal blood clots in women under the age of 65" based on the available evidence?

Anyone know how these things work?  If I was a vaccine developer I would be so frustrated and angry right now.  Sorry our massive trial study didn't catch a 1-in-a-million issue!

[GeneralMacArthur]

Two days from now, it will be 2 weeks since my second dose. I shouldn't have to be locked in my home wearing 2 masks after that. If some people refuse to get the vaccine (who are otherwise eligible), that is their choice, but it's not my problem. Why should I miss family events, personal milestones, or properly breathing the air inside Kroger because of others' choices? (I don't think our Kroger enforces masks, but still.)

I got the J+J vaccine.  It's 70% effective.  That's pretty good, but I still don't want to go around exposing myself to the virus and risk long-term lung damage.

If I'm hanging around other vaccinated people, I think we can all be reasonably confident that none of us is going to give the other the virus.  You got your second Moderna shot?  Take that mask down and cough all over me, I couldn't care less.

But if you didn't get vaccinated, in my eyes, you're still just as much a threat as before.

And the problem is, most of the people walking around without masks are the same people who are going to refuse to get vaccinated -- idiot Trump supporters.  I wish they'd all just hurry up and get the virus already so their decision to refuse the vaccine would become irrelevant.  But until then, if I see someone not wearing a mask, I'm just going to assume they're an idiot who watched Tucker every night, doesn't believe in COVID, doesn't believe in masks, doesn't believe in the vaccine, and probably won't change their mind until they actually get COVID and spread it around to everyone they can.

So if you want people to think you're that guy, go right on ahead.  But you can see why the rest of us want to avoid being around that guy.

The only way to create a world where we don't have to wear masks anymore is to require vaccine passports for entry into bars, restaurants, businesses, etc.  make the Tucker fangirls sit out in the tents we've already set up for them.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Fauci’s guidance, however, is also irresponsible, and I would expect more from him and the CDC.

If we want people to be vaccinated, we need to remove the recommended restrictions for vaccinated people.  The refusal to do so really does make it -appear- like public health officials have little confidence in the vaccines, despite all the evidence that they are stupendously effective.

He's playing it safe. He also knows the way many people in this country have been acting.

The CDC has already said it's fine for people that are vaccinated to congregate with others that are also vaccinated. I don't see the issue there. As for in public, everyone has to abide by the same regulations or the whole system breaks down. Wearing a mask and staying socially distant while at the grocery store is one of the easiest things you can do. If you're arguing for exemptions for those that are vaccinated, how exactly do you keep track of that? There's already a mass hysteria on the right over things like vaccine passports (because it's apparently necessary to keep a COVID vaccine top secret?).

I agree, it is very easy to do. Yet we've got folks in here practically saying "f*** the masks, I don't have to wear them anymore if I'm vaccinated".

Wearing a mask is generally only an inconvenience, but we still can't go to concerts or sporting events or pools or even many restaurants.  Why shouldn't these things be able to open up for vaccinated customers?

I'd love it if we could have businesses like swimming pools where you have to show your vaccination card to get in, with fraudulent vaccination cards being a felony.

Unfortunately, everyone who's too stupid to get a vaccination is going to be against that, and even some people who got the vaccine still want to go swimming with the unvaccinated and risk getting the virus (albeit a much lower risk).

So, we're just going to have to wait until all the anti-vaxx people reach herd immunity... that or they all die.

Hopefully this all serves to magnify the damage that scientific disinformation, championed by the anti-vaxx community, is doing to America.  And hopefully it spurs the passing of more punitive discriminatory laws against these imbeciles.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I'm vaccinated, but I still wear a mask because other people don't know that I'm vaccinated.

And if I see someone walking around on the street without a mask, I don't know if they're vaccinated, so I just assume they're a dick who doesn't care about other people.

If we had some way of signaling who's vaccinated and who's not, that would be great.  Unfortunately, no matter what it is, conservatives would say it's exactly the same as Hitler's stars/wristbands, and dumb yokels on the internet would buy that argument.  And unvaccinated people would try to lie/cheat/steal their way into pretending to be vaccinated.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Girlfriend got Pfizer II yesterday morning, had a mild fever in the evening but slept it off and was fine.

I got J+J last week, had a moderate fever and night chills so I couldn't sleep, but was fine by mid-morning.

Just get your shot in the morning, drink a lot of water throughout the day, and pop a tylenol before bed.

[GeneralMacArthur]

A couple thoughts on the last few pages:

A:  I don't really know what Nate Silver's point is (something I find myself saying disappointingly often these days).  Yes, COVID would have been easier to handle if we'd done something besides lockdowns.  But can anyone tell me a strategy other than lockdowns that's viable for preventing spread of a virus transmitted by human contact?  You have to stop the human contact.  Saying "it would have been easier if we didn't have to stop the human contact" is basically just saying "COVID would have been easier to handle if it wasn't COVID."

B:  I don't see why it matters whether it's a lab leak or not w.r.t. domestic policy.  If it was a leak from some Chinese lab and the Chinese Communist Party lied to the world about it, I would celebrate that as it's just more evidence of their awfulness and might lead to a few more countries standing up to China.  Hey maybe we could even pass that TPP.  But the origins of the virus ultimately don't matter as far as how we handled it and what the consequences were.

C:  If it was indeed a lab leak, Trump and the Republicans don't get credit for "knowing all along."  Nobody "knew all along" we're discovering new information.  Trump and the Republicans threw a bunch of darts at the wall with ridiculous conspiracies about the origin of the virus.  The purpose of these conspiracies was to give them a reason to declare the entire virus a hoax, so they could encourage people to behave recklessly and dangerously for political purposes.  If one random conspiracy turns out to be partially true (in the most mundane way) that doesn't validate Trump randomly spreading a dozen different conspiracies, and it doesn't prove his point with those conspiracies since the virus was very much not a hoax.

D:  If Fauci had given credibility to the "lab leak" idea in 2020 it would have just encouraged everyone to think the virus was a man-made bioweapon by Bill Gates and George Soros, or a complete hoax that they didn't need to take seriously at all.  Like am I the only one who remembers the kinds of stupid s--t people were buying into back then?  I still have plenty of texts on my family groupchat from the deep south idiots who laughed at the rest of us for taking the virus seriously (and still refuse to get vaccinated).  The best thing society could do was to completely shut down any conspiracy talk because people just don't know when to draw the line.  OK maybe they were studying the virus in a lab and it leaked out.  So what?  That doesn't mean China created it as a bioweapon.  That doesn't mean Bill Gates invented COVID.  That doesn't mean Fauci himself invented COVID.  That doesn't mean COVID is fake and all the news about it is fake.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I'm here in Seattle, which is 80%+ vaccinated, and life is almost completely back to normal here.

Bars and restaurants are all reopened.  Some of my favorites are still trying to hire people to get back on their feet, but nothing is closed up anymore.  The mayor is trying to encourage new businesses to open up.  I went to Trader Joe's the other day and nobody was even wearing a mask -- when they first stopped requiring masks, everyone was still wearing them, but now people are more comfortable going unmasked.

We're down to under 20 new cases per day in the entire city.  The only things that are still closed are the dance clubs, which are also the only thing I would probably still avoid.

[GeneralMacArthur]

At this point, Donald Trump is one day less than six months away from "still being President", and the Delta mutation of COVID-19/SARS-2 is giving an unwelcome resurgence to a horrid disease. I suggest starting a new thread to this effect and closing this one, with the caveat that the infection and death counts be allowed to migrate to (COVID-19 Megathread 7.

Yes.  It's insane that this thread is now over 200 pages long.  I'd have to imagine it's by far the longest thread on this site and the name is just utter nonsense.  I really don't understand the mods' stubbornness on this.

COVID-19 Megathread 7:  Delta takes over

It's really that simple.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The gaslighting about early in the pandemic is so intense right now that it's rare for me to run into someone who actually does have an accurate recollection of how things went down.

I'm an election nerd and watched the daily White House press briefings, Andrew Cuomo's daily briefings, and anything Fauci said, so I remember it all very vividly and thoroughly.  I started lifting a lot more during lockdown and would just run the tape of these briefings every day while I did my workouts.

Like do you really think "public health officials" (who?) made any promises about when we'll be back to normal?  At the time they were criticized, often to their faces by Trump on live television, for being very pessimistic about the timeline.  Trump was promising it would miraculously disappear, and that we'd have a vaccine "very very soon", meanwhile Fauci was saying there was basically no end in sight.  Which turned out to be accurate.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I personally think we should make anti-vaxxers pay the hospital bills of the vaccinated.

If you're vaccinated and you come down with COVID, your coverage for COVID, as well as any long-term side effects, is free for life.  Create a new fund for this, and pay for it by raising taxes on the unvaccinated.

At the end of every year, calculate how much was spent on those bills, calculate the tax rate required of the unvaccinated population in order to pay that off, add that as a new tax, but add an equivalent tax break if you can prove that you are vaccinated.  The Supreme Court already said this is legal based on the individual mandate precedent.

If you do get vaccinated, then you leave the pool.  That makes the pool smaller, so in future cycles, the holdouts will have to pay more.

You want freedom to harm your fellow Americans?  This is the price of it.

Honestly wish we could charge anti-vaxxers with manslaughter as well, every time someone who's vaccinated gets the virus and dies, but the contact tracing is too hard to prove.

[GeneralMacArthur]

As someone who got J+J, to my understanding the most popular vaccine worldwide, it annoys me to no end to be left out of these booster studies.

With Pfizer now widely available, what would happen if I got Pfizer as well?  What if I got just the Pfizer booster?  What about a J+J booster?

I'm less-protected than everyone else and I'd like to fix that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Man I am so sick of the gaslighting about "here's what the left said."

Like this wasn't even a year ago.  At least wait a few years if you're going to lie to my face about events I still remember vividly.

You know what doesn't get talked about enough?  What the right was saying.
"COVID is a hoax."
"Fauci should be in prison."
"COVID will go away on its own and we don't need to do anything."
"The Democrats are exaggerating the COVID threat."
"Wearing a mask means you're a bitch."
"We're not shutting anything down."
"Old people are going to die anyway."
"It's ok for everyone to get COVID, 2% isn't really that many deaths."
"Hydroxychloroquine cures COVID."
"Drinking bleach cures COVID."
"Eating dog poop cures COVID but the science cabal is hiding it from you."
etc.

Like we're still seeing this today.  Right-wingers still refuse to wear masks.  Right-wingers are still attacking Fauci.  Right-wingers are still refusing to get vaccinated and relying on hoax miracle cures.  Right-wing politicians are still refusing to take COVID seriously and encouraging dangerous behavior.  Right-wingers are still trying to downplay COVID and pretend all the death and misery is actually ok, as justification for their other atrocious COVID behavior.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/ErinBurnett/status/1422707825265020928
Start chilling the champagne.

When I first saw the headline, I thought they were talking about that third booster shot.  

All in all, a positive development, and a necessary step to eventually imposing a vaccine mandate nationally.  People would be more amenable to both the vaccine and a federal mandate if it had the imprimatur of the Food & Drug Administration on it.  

I wish they'd do redundancy tests.  It seems pretty clear at this point that Pfizer is the big winner in the vaccine war, and we can easily make enough to vaccinate everyone.  For people like me who got J+J, there's a lot of us who'd like to take Pfizer as well, not only because it's more effective but also because all the subsequent R+D is probably going to be using Pfizer as a baseline (booster shots, etc.) and I want in on that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Florida has had 1,819 deaths and 319,802 cases in the last 14 days.
The United States, total, has had 9,531 deaths and 1,856,115 cases in the same time period.

19% of deaths and 18% of cases are solely attributable to Florida, which has 6% of the U.S. population.

For comparison, my state of Washington had 161 deaths and 37,552 cases.  1/3 the population, 1/10 the COVID.

Where does Ron DeSantis go to return his apology?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Jacksonville Regeneron clinic photo ‘doesn’t convey ... pain' of COVID-19 patients

Louie Lopez showed up to the downtown Jacksonville Main Library Conference Center on Wednesday in the early afternoon for a Regeneron therapy appointment. His primary care doctor recommended it after Lopez tested positive for COVID-19 and was experiencing moderate to severe symptoms.

While waiting in line for his turn, two other people got in the line behind Lopez. Both of them, he says, sat down on the floor immediately. They eventually laid down “sick and moaning.” Lopez, 59, told the Times-Union the woman pictured in yellow was dragging herself on the floor as the line slowly moved forward.

Lopez took a photo and sent it to his wife.

Why won't Joe Biden take responsibility for this?  I don't want to hear any finger-pointing.  He's the president and the buck stops with him.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Is there any data on what % of new COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are breakthrough cases?

The only data I could find was from Virginia.

Between Jan. 17 and Aug. 14, 252,938 people developed COVID-19 symptoms or tested positive. Almost all of these were among unvaccinated people; only 10,712 infections have been reported during the same time among the 4.7 million Virginians who have been fully vaccinated. Unvaccinated people developed COVID-19 at a rate 12.5 times higher than fully vaccinated people.

Fully vaccinated people: 227
Partially vaccinated people: 1,147
Unvaccinated people: 2,836

If we could get nationwide numbers conclusively demonstrating that the current surge is almost entirely due to unvaccinated people, that would make the political case for vaccine mandates a lot more palatable.

[GeneralMacArthur]

maybe people should try losing a bit of weight, eating better in general, getting more sun, eating garlic or other stuff to boost their immune system to try preventing getting covid instead of stuff that's iffy at best like getting the [color=#ffffff]clot shot[/color] or wearing leather dog masks(cloth masks and n95s aren't enough, guys. its the cdc who makes the recommendations not me) or standing six feet apart

What does this even mean

look into the health risks of getting the covid-19 shot, especially the j&j one

Those are rare. I recommend against the J&J vaccine because it's not nearly as effective as the other ones, but literally any shot is more effective specifically against COVID than your generic health suggestions.

But I am increasingly of the belief that you are a troll, so maybe I shouldn't bother.

I was disappointed at having been given the J+J initially, but my family and I were high-fiving yesterday after NYT reported that J+J doesn't exhibit any decline in effectiveness over time.  So while all your Pfizer and Moderna shots are wearing off and you're gonna need annual boosters, my J+J seems like I'm set for life, although it also reported that a booster raises effectiveness by 800% so I'll be getting that as soon as it's approved as well.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am not opposed to indoor mask mandates.. like the one Pritzker just imposed..but I am worried of the slippery slope into more restrictions.

From my perspective, as someone who works with the public, I want to see businesses open (which they are) and people masked.

The thing about indoor mask mandates is that they don't actually cost anyone anything.  Almost all businesses can operate as normal with indoor mask mandates.  Here in Seattle most businesses have been requesting that you wear masks even when we didn't have a mandate.

The only ones that it won't work for are like comedy clubs and nightclubs and things like that where the point of the business is to talk or laugh or do something else where a mask doesn't work.

Shuttering businesses and going back to lockdowns obviously comes at a much higher cost.  People are much more willing to accept vaccine mandates than they are to accept a lockdown for Delta.  Especially because the point of the lockdowns was to wait until we had the virus under control, like we'd stay in lockdown until we saw the light at the end of the tunnel.  But now we have the vaccine.  We're at the end of the tunnel.  The virus could end tomorrow.  It only propagates because of idiot anti-vaxxers.  If we enter a lockdown because of the current situation then that lockdown will continue indefinitely until the anti-vaxxers get the vaccine.  And I for one am not willing to endure a lockdown just to coddle the anti-vaxxers.  I think all restrictions should be targeted at them and extremely punitive.  This is all their fault and they deserve society's wrath.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Man, the only blue states on that list are Hawai'i and Oregon (unless you want to call Georgia a blue state now).

It really is just Republicans killing themselves left and right.  At some point you have to wonder whether COVID will end up being enough to swing the FL gubernatorial election simply because DeSantis will have killed tens of thousands of his own voters.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Man, the only blue states on that list are Hawai'i and Oregon (unless you want to call Georgia a blue state now).

It really is just Republicans killing themselves left and right.  At some point you have to wonder whether COVID will end up being enough to swing the FL gubernatorial election simply because DeSantis will have killed tens of thousands of his own voters.

Florida has a higher vaccination rate than numerous blue states and even NYC, and is above the national avg in % of population vaccinated.

90%+ of deaths in florida are among the unvaccinated. I will NEVER blame a governor (no matter what party) for the death of someone who refused a life-saving vaccine.

Some of you need to learn the concept of personal responsibility.

If you die of covid because you didn't get the vaccine even though you could walk into any grocery store or pharmacy to get it as a same day walk in appointment, that's your fault, not your elected officials' fault.

BTW, numerous states north of the mason dixon line are top 5 right now for % growth in covid cases.

Florida is a unique case because they have a large elderly population and seniors in every state are 75%+ vaccinated.  But the governor has stood in the way of literally every single other public health and safety measure and done everything he can to kneecap the public health infrastructure while encouraging the population to engage in dangerous, disease-spreading behavior.

So while the folks who got vaccinated may be safe, the virus is absolutely ravaging the unvaccinated.  And if FL's vaccination rate was closer to the 40% of its sister red states, rather than 53%, the sheer volume of death and suffering would be even more staggering than it already is.


By the way -- since my comment was about the entire chart and not just Florida -- Florida is actually a big outlier in terms of vaccination rate.  At 53% it's the highest vaccination rate among red states.  Nebraska is the only other red state over 50%.  All the other red states are under 50% vaccinated.  On the other hand, Nevada (48%) is the only blue state below 50%.  There are five red states (ID, WY, MS, AL, WV) that haven't even hit 40% yet.  Meanwhile ten blue states are above 60% -- including New York.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care more about what "the party" or even "the public" feels than about what the facts and the evidence show. Sadly for you, that is not now, has not ever been, and never will be the case.

As I thought I made pretty clear, BOTH the raving right-wing lunatics who think horse dewormer is a magic cure AND the smug lefties who seem to think that masks are a magic cure are simply dead wrong. And I won't pretend otherwise no matter how convenient or not it is to any particular narrative.

Why do you constantly feel the need to strawman the left in your COVID posts?  It's very telling.

Nobody thinks masks are a "magic cure."  That is something you made up so you could dunk on us.
 But they are scientifically proven to reduce the risk of transmission.  And it's 100% common sense that they would function in this way since they reduce particles expelled forward from the mouth.