A predictable and predicted disaster. Half a million motorcycle riders converged on Sturgis, maskless, went home, got sick, had no quarantine or contact tracing, infected others, and people died and are dying who should have lived. @britsham @bylenasun https://t.co/cH2R6xqiA5
— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth) October 18, 2020
… In many ways, Sturgis is an object lesson in the patchwork U.S. response to a virus that has proved remarkably adept at exploiting such gaps to become resurgent. While some states and localities banned even relatively small groups of people, others, like South Dakota, imposed no restrictions — in this case allowing the largest gathering of people in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world amid the pandemic and creating huge vulnerabilities as tens of thousands of attendees traveled back home to every state in the nation…
Despite the concerns expressed by health experts ahead of the event, efforts to urge returnees to self-quarantine lacked enforcement clout and were largely unsuccessful, and the work by state and local officials to identify chains of transmission and stop them was inconsistent and uncoordinated.
Those efforts became further complicated when some suspected of having the virus refused to be tested, said Kris Ehresmann, director of infectious-disease epidemiology at the Minnesota Department of Health…
The Aug. 7-16 gathering has drawn intense interest from scientists and health officials, and will likely be studied for years to come because of its singularity. It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it. And in contrast with participants in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many Sturgis attendees spent time clustered indoors at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, where experts say the virus is most likely to spread, especially among those without masks…
======
Pursuing a policy of driving to #Covid19 herd immunity would come at a huge costs in terms of lives lost & potentially long-term health consequences for some of the infected, writes John Barry, author of the quintessential history of the 1918 Spanish flu. https://t.co/61ik0depbs
— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) October 19, 2020
… First, it makes no mention of harm to infected people in low-risk groups, yet many people recover very slowly. More serious, a significant number, including those with no symptoms, suffer damage to their heart and lungs. One recent study of 100 recovered adults found that 78 of them showed signs of heart damage. We have no idea whether this damage will cut years from their lives or affect their quality of life.
Second, it says little about how to protect the vulnerable. One can keep a child from visiting a grandparent in another city easily enough, but what happens when the child and grandparent live in the same household? And how do you protect a 25-year-old diabetic, or cancer survivor, or obese person, or anyone else with a comorbidity who needs to go to work every day? Upon closer examination, the “focused protection” that the declaration urges devolves into a kind of three-card monte; one can’t pin it down.
Third, the declaration omits mention of how many people the policy would kill. It’s a lot…
======
Scott Atlas, a Fox News neuroradiologist whom other task force doctors regard as ill-informed, manipulative and dishonest, has consolidated power over WH coronavirus response, which is plagued by distrust and lethargy. https://t.co/yqfLtV09Ab
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) October 19, 2020
… Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.
Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
Atlas’s ascendancy was apparent during a recent Oval Office meeting. After Trump left the room, Atlas startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president’s personal space to keep the meeting going, according to one senior administration official. Atlas called this account “false and laughable.”…
The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end…
One thing to remember about Atlas is that, in addition to being an expert on MRIs rather than an infectious disease, he’s also yet another Hoover Institution hack doing his bit to disgrace Stanford. https://t.co/MPo8Absxhm https://t.co/TAGBN12JjY
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) October 19, 2020
======
Pictographs, because twitter is a visual medium (and Bloomberg has a ferocious paywall… )
Before he had Covid-19, Brendan Delaney, the 57-year-old chair of medical informatics and decision making at Imperial College, could cycle 150 miles in a day.
Covid changed that, but not because he had a severe case of the disease https://t.co/LlPhm11VQW
— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) October 17, 2020
He can’t imagine getting back on a bike and says that if he pushes himself too hard, he ends up in bed with a fever for a couple of days.
He considers himself lucky that he’s able to work. Many other long Covid sufferers cannot https://t.co/LlPhm11VQW pic.twitter.com/3QV8aeSdzs
— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) October 17, 2020
So far, we've focused largely on minimizing deaths and hospitalizations.
But most long Covid patients weren’t hospitalized and didn’t have pre-existing conditions. This should throw some cold water on the idea of herd immunity https://t.co/LlPhm11VQW pic.twitter.com/F0jsVB3GKg
— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) October 17, 2020
“We need to control this virus not because of the risk that Granny may catch it and die, or your uncle may end up in ICU, but because fit, healthy people without any comorbid conditions who are young can end up having their lives wrecked,” Delaney says https://t.co/LlPhm11VQW pic.twitter.com/zId1W7Ehsr
— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) October 17, 2020
======
Celebrity, in its way:
Warning for COVID scientists: An impostor is asking scientists for an interview using the email [email protected] (not mine) and signature “Atul Gawande, Staff Writer, The New Yorker.”
These are fake. Do not respond. I use a https://t.co/KzImGxPZmJ address for work. 1/4
— Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) October 17, 2020
They also accessed Twitter and other social media accounts.
They have possession of the scientist's financial account details.
And most disturbing, they tried to get into the person’s home security alarm system. 3/4
— Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) October 17, 2020
placing my bets now: this is going to link back to the Guo Wengui-Bannon stuff https://t.co/8kNJu9FBjo
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) October 17, 2020
======
Happy Birthday, Kamala!
germy
SFAW
I hope that someone sees the Atlas story, wherein he acts as if he’s Trump, and tells the Murderer-in-Chief, who then fires Atlas in a fit of pique (for taking attention of himself).
Yeah, I know that’s as likely as me waking with a full head of hair tomorrow.
Kay
We have two staff members at the school tested positive this week. One just today. So 5 students, 2 staff.
I think our positives are high for such a small district, but I don’t think anyone knows since no one is collecting national stats on schools.
HumboldtBlue
Let’s talk about what Toobin did. A TRIGGERING AND TERRIBLE THREAD.
WaterGirl
@HumboldtBlue: Let’s not talk about what Toobin did. I am over it.
oldster
Anyone who talks about “herd immunity” for a disease that currently lacks a vaccine is talking about mass murder.
Given the current rates of death, an attempt to reach herd immunity in the US would cause a conservative 1 million deaths, and probably more like 2-3 million deaths (as the entire health care system ground to a dysfunctional halt).
These people are murderers. They committed murder first by abdicating their responsibilities, throwing out the plans that Obama and Biden had put into place, and pretending that nothing was wrong.
Now they want to double down and murder more people.
The murderers are in the White House.
As always, we have to ask: if Trump were a Russian asset, would he be doing anything different?
BR
Here’s something I’m baffled by: after getting COVID, how is he out there doing two rallies a day, rambling on for over an hour at each? Something is up. Every case I’ve heard of involves a multi-week recovery even for young and healthy people.
Just One More Canuck
@WaterGirl: Agreed – what purpose would it serve?
indycat32
@BR: Drugs, lots of drugs.
Roger Moore
This, of course, is the key thing. If Atlas didn’t believe what Trump wanted to be true, he wouldn’t be on the committee. In a functional government, the committee would be led by top experts and the president would let his policy be guided by their advice. Instead, we have Trump deciding on policy and a disfunctional committee whose purpose is to make it look like his ideas have scientific support.
BR
@indycat32:
I guess so. Gotta be some side effects though, right? I can’t imagine that it’s healthy.
Baud
@BR:
Besides the drugs, the fact is that this disease affects everyone differently.
Kent
@Kay:
Teacher here. So far we are still 100% virtual in our county (Vancouver WA area) except for some special services like special ed which are doing some limited in-person services. And our Covid numbers are way way below any national averages but creeping up slowly.
The lack of any sort of progress is what is wearing me out. I expect nothing will improve until we have a widespread vaccine.
trnc
It isn’t even the right term for the current situation. Herd immunity means we take precautions to protect others. We don’t go out to get the flu – we get vaccinated. That’s how we protect people who are allergic to vaccines. Masking and social distancing are what we have instead of a vaccine for now, so that’s the only way we can do anything approaching the concept of herd immunity.
patrick Il
I’m waiting for the largest superspreader event in history where millions of republicans, encouraged by their leader to vote in person, gather maskless to vote on Nov 3.
I manually turned in my ballot today to avoid the rush.
Kay
@Kent:
I’ve been getting texts all morning on the 2nd staff member positive. The issues at the school are all anyone talks about. Our remote learning was a disaster- the district is 50% free and reduced lunch and about a quarter of them don’t have internet.
One of our staff here is actually out- she’s off quarantine tomorrow. Her son was exposed on the school bus.
WereBear
@BR: He’s got a new drug. Dexamethasone.
mrmoshpotato
@SFAW:
Well, if you go to bed tonight wearing a wig…
Kay
Ha. Georgia tied. Who would have thought.
Eric S.
Anecdata. I had to visit my Dr. yesterday. His office is in a local hospital. I walked in to the lobby and there was a woman working at a table. She waved me over. She handed me a name tag sticker that read “Screened”. She told me “You’ve had your temperature taken and go on in.”
My temperature wasn’t taken. I didn’t even see a thermometer on the table.
Jeffro
@Roger Moore: “Potemkin Pandemic Reponse: how may I direct your call?”
(call is then disconnected, every time)
Ruckus
@BR:
Healthy?
When has shitforbrains ever done anything heathy? He’s a barely walking/standing perfect example of an idiot who thinks he knows everything, because his brain is full. It would be a lot better if it wasn’t full of shit, but that dumpster has overflowed.
zhena gogolia
@BR:
He never had it.
Miss me with your “Johns Hopkins pulmonologist.” Everyone around him lies.
It was a device to distract from taxes, bad debate, Melania saying fuck Christmas.
Mary G
Matt McIrvin
@BR: I know people who almost certainly got it and were OK within about a week. There are such cases, aside from the people who are entirely asymptomatic and never even know they had it. Not everyone is a long-hauler, just far too many.
That said, in Trump’s case I’m guessing he’s still on the steroids. And, hell, for all I know that antibody cocktail he was touting like a snake-oil pitchman actually did a world of good for him.
Roger Moore
@trnc:
“Herd immunity” as Trump, Atlas, and company use it is another way of saying it will go away by itself if we ignore it.
West of the Rockies
Privileged pigs… Enough disposable income for over-priced Harleys (hey, thanks for the gross noise pollution!), to travel hundreds or thousands of miles, go maskless (the better to see your ugly, fat faces and neck beards!), and then you spread a deadly virus.
But, hey, they had a good time, right, so I guess that’s cool.
Kent
We’re an affluent district so things are better. The local MAGA parents are doing car parades to protest virtual school (apparently they don’t have the courage to do an actual group protest) and are riling people up on Facebook.
I’ve got a 9th grader and a 12 grader. The 12th grader is cruising along. She’s a loner intellectual by nature anyway and likes virtual school because she can be streaming anime on one screen while half paying attention to her teacher on zoom on another screen while still getting As.
The 9th grader is more social so I organized a learning pod and 3 of her friends come over every day for virtual school around our big dining room table. Working well so far. They tend to keep each other on track and having a regular schedule means she gets out of bed and doesn’t procrastinate. But she is having a rougher time keeping up with assignments. It’s tougher as a parent to monitor virtual school because there are never any paper assignments to look at. If she says she is done I have no real way to verify when it is all online. There is no paper workbook I can open and see that she hasn’t finished some of it.
We are in a pretty good situation considering. Big house, responsive community, all the tech resources you can imagine, decent income, and I’m still just completely worn out with this. I can’t imagine what it is like for those with real financial or educational or health stresses.
WaterGirl
@Eric S.: I would raise a fuss about that.
Ruckus
@Kent:
It will only get better in one or two ways. A vaccine, or complete shutdown. As a complete shutdown is impossible, masks and as much shutdown as possible to slow/restrict transmission would/could take it below 1% reinfection. Which means no growth in infection. Good luck with that.
Delk
Let’s hope Atlas is ready to take the blame for trump losing. The key is in the ignition of the bus ready to roll. <-insert Nelson laugh.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
It seems to me that the best response to some kids not having internet is to have in-person instruction for them and remote instruction for the rest of the class. I assume this is one part of the goal of districts that let parents choose between at-home and in-person instruction: families that really need in-person instruction (no internet, parents have to work, etc.) can opt for in-person instruction without obvious social stigma from having to argue why they need it.
patrick Il
@Roger Moore:
–
And the hallmark of Trump’s policies is that they must be easy. It would take so much effort to manage a national program that included PPE, testing, contact tracing, educating the public about how to avoid spreading the virus, conflict with big business owners etc. Perhaps even educating himself a little. None of which he is up to.
So, herd immunity here we come. It’s not very difficult for him at all. Just do nothing. There is still time for golf and Fox in the morning
germy
CBN Founder Pat Robertson believes God has shown him that Donald Trump will win reelection, and that will be followed by a series of historic events that will fulfill End Times prophecy.
So a vote for Trump is the same as a vote for the Sweet Meteor of Death?
Jeffro
@Ruckus: What if we elect Jacinda Ardern president? Might that do it? =)
The Moar You Know
@BR: He never had it. I am utterly convinced of that now.
Brachiator
This makes sense, but you have to look at Sturgis in the context of people moving into social spaces. You can compare this to Disney World, which seems to be doing well with respect to the virus, and schools and colleges, some of which are doing well and some of which are problematic. And the behavior of many of the people amplified the problem. However, as the story notes, follow-up to Sturgis has been spotty and inconsistent, so people need to be careful about drawing conclusions from this event. We don’t know how much community spread later contributed to people getting the virus.
It’s kinda apples and oranges horseshit to compare BLM protests. I have not seen stories about cellphone tracking or other follow-up studies. And the assertion that the virus is always most likely to spread at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, without regard to social behavior and the set-up of these establishments is too broad a statement to mean a damn thing.
Flanders Other Neighbor
The comment in the Sturgis story about the 60+ couple deciding that they must cross it off their bucket list in the middle of a pandemic was ironic. But she’d “have gone stir-crazy nuts and divorced” staying home, so justified. Or something.
Sab
@Eric S.: Where do you live ( approximately)?
The Moar You Know
@Eric S.: It’s done with IR video at most hospitals now. You won’t even be able to get through the door if you are over normal.
Punchy
Atlas Mugged.
(then won all the TV airtime)
JeffH
Scott Atlas is the modern version of Rasputin.
The Moar You Know
@germy: given Robertson’s track record, we may as well swear Biden in now.
zzyzx
Meanwhile Melina still feels awful and is canceling her rallies. So so so close to getting the right one.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/politics/melania-trump-campaign-rally/index.html
White & Gold Purgatorian
@Matt McIrvin:
Just heard that Melania canceled her scheduled campaign appearance because she is not feeling well after having Covid-19. Would be something if she turns out to be a long hauler, although that might at least get more media attention to the long term consequences of this disease. When Trump was at Walter Reed getting experimental drugs there was never any mention of her condition or treatment. It sounds cruel, but perhaps her pre-nup did not specify a gold plated health plan — and of course Trump is, in fact, cruel.
The Moar You Know
@zhena gogolia: Exactly.
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: Here is what I would guess happened. He had a mild case but when he felt some symptoms he panicked and of course the WH medical staff said, “okay, you need to go to the hospital.” At which point, with all that TLC and great drugs, he improved. Too many other people in the WH have tested positive for me to question whether he was really positive.
Jay C
@germy:
Well, “yes”, it is, in a way: but probably not the way Pat Buchanan thinks….
(Whose track record on this, BTW, is pretty less-than-stellar: hasn’t the old crank been predicting “The End Times” for every election since – Ike’s probably….?)
patrick Il
@Brachiator:
I would copy a link to a Sturgis cellphone tracing news story, but I’m on my phone. They exist though and cases went up where attendees returned home in numbers.
Kent
Yes of course. A Vaccine is the only thing that will bring us back to any semblance of normal. It won’t even have to be anywhere near universal as long as it pushed the R value well below 1.0 and people at risk have the option of protecting themselves.
I have sort of a “low hanging fruit” theory of the pandemic. I think you can assign everyone in the population a risk rating between 1 and 100 for how likely they are to catch and spread Covid. MAGA Sturgis folks are up near 100. Hermits who never come close to other humans would be a 1. I think when we have a big wave like in NYC the majority of people who catch it first are the people in the 75-100 range who’s behavior and physical susceptibility are the highest. Then when the next wave comes the virus has to spread through a less vulnerable and more well behaved population which makes it tougher. That’s why the NYC second wave is so much smaller at least so far. There is less “low hanging fruit” for the virus to attack.
Blue states are doing a better job of controlling the virus simply because they are leaving less how hanging fruit out there for the virus. So far I haven’t seen any examples of a state that had a bad first wave get a worse second wave. And even if there are such cases, you would have to drill down and see if it was really two waves, or separate regional waves, like in Louisiana where they had a first wave in New Orleans and then a second wave in the rural white parts of the state that looks like two waves on the state graphs, but are really only consecutive waves by region.
Booger
Re Sturgis: These are largely the Harley and Harley-adjacent folks who stop at the state line to take off their helmets when leaving states with mandatory helmet laws. Being stupid, negligent and self-destructive is a feature, not a bug.
Riding in jeans, sneakers, tee-shirts and mandatory leather vests, v. the sport bike riders and sport tourers who are fully geared-up…the sport biker riders I’ve seen recently take off their helmets and put on masks when they stop somewhere. ATGATT means ‘all the gear, all the time.’
trollhattan
@West of the Rockies:
To the required budget add $75k turbodiesel pickup and trailer to bring it within 50 miles of Sturgis, so they can attach their flags and ride there the final hour. “I took my Harley to Trailer Week” tshirts are popular among folks who actually tour on their bikes.
Robert Sneddon
@Barbara: President Trump could well have had a mild case of COVID-19 but given his general health he may have responded not very well initially. After rest and supplemental oxygen (and a medically-imposed healthy diet) he got better. That’s my internet diagnosis anyway.
Kent
@zzyzx:
Who knows. She probably never wanted to do them in the first place. A little sniffle might be the perfect excuse to stay home. She’s not a political wife like Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton. I think she hates the MAGA bullshit. She always looks sour when doing them.
The Moar You Know
@oldster: This is what “herd immunity” looks like:
Before vaccination (mid 1700s) humanity had herd immunity to smallpox, polio, mumps, measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough and a slew of other diseases. Europeans even developed herd immunity to the Black Death rather quickly. The world population has “herd immunity” to HIV.
What “herd immunity” means is that the majority of the population doesn’t have the disease at the same time. That’s it. The diseases kill about 5-15% of the population per year. Most people are dead from some sort of infectious disease by their forties. THAT is “herd immunity”. You’ll get it someday. Just probably not before you manage to breed.
We can do better. But we aren’t.
mrmoshpotato
@Delk:
As a wise man frequently said, Fuck ’em!
Spanky
@The Moar You Know: I’m still carrying a grudge that God didn’t “call him home.”
Roger Moore
@patrick Il:
Which is really strange. It’s not as if he’s the one who’s going to be implementing them. He should just appoint a bunch of smart people to do the job and then leave them alone. When it’s time to take credit, he would introduce them and let them talk about what’s happening. It should be perfect for him. Someone else does the work and is in perfect position to take the blame if something goes wrong, but he can take a big share of the credit if they get it right. The only thing that gets in the way is his pathological need to hog the spotlight. To him it’s not enough that the people working for him did something good and for that to reflect well on him as the boss; he has to take personal credit for everything good that happens.
Baud
@The Moar You Know:
I’ve long believed the Rapture to be a win-win for both sides.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think it would have flown. They offered remote and only about 10% took them up on it- people really, really wanted them back in school. The nice thing about the school system is it’s genuinely diverse as far as income. There’s 50% lower income but there’s also 10% who are high income. That works out well for the lower income kids because the higher income households all support the school system- will pay for it, in other words, and they insist on things like AP courses and music which benefit anyone who goes there. It’s fairly well resourced. But they’re demanding. They show up and weigh in and they’re listened to. That’s just the political reality for the school.
Public schools are reflections of places. They operate the same way the community operates. THIS system generally works for lower income kids. The benefits of the higher income group also flow to them.
germy
Barbara
@The Moar You Know: It’s questionable whether you can even refer to European populations as having herd immunity to the plague and what not. Herd immunity as an ongoing phenomenon is only possible because of continuous vaccination of new herd members who have not been previously exposed. There is no disease that we have herd immunity to that has not been the result of vaccination. Were smallpox to reemerge, many people would die because so few had been immunized.
VeniceRiley
Apparently NZ remains sane because they lack Murdoch media.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/19/why-new-zealand-rejected-populist-ideas-other-nations-have-embraced
Immanentize
Has anyone seen a regular picture of Scott Atlas? He looks short -+ like 5’7 ish. Trump definitely has 6+ inches on the guy. But he has a cartoonishly large head. Like a bobble head doll. I suspect he has some bad Napoleon/pretender syndrome crap driving his megalomania
mrmoshpotato
@zzyzx: What was the gold-digging birther bitch going to tell the Soviet shitpile mobster conman’s disease vectors – “Everyone! Be best! Thank you, and God bless our daddy Vladdy!” *walks off
Steeplejack (phone)
@zhena gogolia:
I think Trump got a mild case but got the deluxe treatment because he’s the president and he’s a germophobic hypochondriac.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I think it’s a mistake to treat people as if their chances of catching and spreading are fixed. People can and do change their behavior to protect themselves. My impression is that a big reason New York has not had a big second wave is because everyone there had a chance to see how bad COVID could be up close and personal, and that scared them into taking precautions like mask wearing more seriously than people in other places who didn’t have the same experience.
Brachiator
I was just watching a YouTube video where some dope in a store was claiming that he did not need to wear a mask. The commentor of the video noted that some of these people assert a constitutional right to “liberty and to make decisions about their own health and bodily integrity.”
Makes me wonder why so many of these people are anti-choice and oppose a woman’s right to make decisions about her own health and bodily integrity.
JoyceH
@Barbara:
I agree that he had it. He is too arrogant and too certain that illness equals weakness to have faked it. Remember, whatever that health scare he had back in 2019 was reimagined as ‘routine physical’.
But I think he’s still on something. He’s always acted crazy at rallies, but I can’t recall a time before his trip to Walter Reed when he’d dance on stage and talk about kissing everyone. He’s on something.
Also – dang, it’s so freakin’ discouraging that here we are in the fall and the pandemic looks like it’s going into its worse phase ever, and we still have to have season THREE of homemade videos of hollow-eyed, heart-broken emergency room workers pleading with people to wear a mask and assuring them that yes, the virus is REAL. What’s it going to take? What the eff is it going to TAKE?
catclub
@oldster:
There was also even a 2019 Trump admin plan that they also threw out. It was worked out during an exercise for a new virus from China, in 2019.
I learned that recently. so it even goes beyond the usual Obama derangement syndrome.
patrick Il
@Roger Moore:
Not just the spotlight, his insecurites demand that he be the smartest guy, That stops him from learning the complexities of any new task, it would mean he didn’t already know and may not be smarter than all of those people with advanced degrees. So the easy way for our stable genius it must be.
I sometimes think that if Melania had just told him how impossibly hot he looked in a mask, like the Love Ranger but with bigger guns, things might have worked out differently
Barbara
@Immanentize: I have met many doctors who assume that medical school education and/or training subsumed many other “lesser” callings, in his case, apparently, epidemiology and biostatistics. Give it a Stanford pedigree, and apparently, there is no field he doesn’t excel in. Seriously, the crap coming out of Stanford during the pandemic makes me question its status as an elite institution. More like, super well funded with donors demanding research results to suit their specifications.
Kay
Trump must be mad the R House candidates are polling, but I’m glad they are!
LongHairedWeirdo
I’ll call out one thing I haven’t seen in the tweets/etc. above.
We have 0 evidence – none, whatsoever – that immunity to Covid-19 lasts even a year. This is vacuously true, because it hasn’t *existed* for a year. But we do know there have been re-infections, and more serious re-infections (meaning the immunity is hardly bulletproof in all people).
So the fans of herd immunity are not only willing to throw away likely hundreds of thousands of lives, they’re doing it based upon the worst crime against the truth, “wishful thinking”, combined with the worst crime against humanity, profound indifference.
Yeah, I know, people think that hatred is the big bad, but someone could hate me all they wanted, if they realized they wouldn’t harm me, or even let me come to harm if safe action on their part could prevent it, all that hatred does is prove the old adage that hating is like taking poison, and waiting for the other person to die.
It’s when people just don’t care. It’s when a cop thinks kneeling on a guy’s neck for nearly 10 minutes is an okay idea; it’s when attacking protestors who are standing in the way of a pure-D photo op seems reasonable; it’s when people dying just doesn’t register because you don’t have to watch them die.
It’s a messed up world that Republicans inhabit, where it’s *horrible* if a woman aborts a pregnancy, even at a very early stage, but it’s perfectly okay if people suffer and die from a preventable disease.
Kay
@JoyceH:
What it took here was an increase in this town. I have heard more about Covid from people here in the last 2 weeks than I have since March. They need a text from the school saying they have another positive student, or they need an employee quarantined.
Old School
@Spanky: That was Oral Roberts who needed $8 million or God would call him home.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
It’s way past time for Stanford to cut the Hoover Institution loose.
Delk
@Immanentize: Louis DeJoy is rather short as well.
catclub
and a zillion dollars worth of extraordinary first rate care and medications that are generally unavailable to the average person.
mad citizen
ElectProject has added another million early votes in the last couple of hours–now over 35 million. I like the rate of one million votes every two hours! 35,188,719 to be exact.
Immanentize
@Kay: Isn’t it standard practice for house and senate candidates to also ask a presidential preference question in their internals? It allows the parties more granular polling in more places. I’m glad Trump is losing.
patrick Il
@Old School:
Didn’t work over the long term.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
Here’s something I’m baffled by: after getting COVID, how is he out there doing two rallies a day, rambling on for over an hour at each? Something is up. Every case I’ve heard of involves a multi-week recovery even for young and healthy people.
I don’t know. Wouldn’t the doctors who said he had tested positive be putting their careers at risk by lying for Trump?
Of course, they put their careers at risk by dealing with him in any way. It’s not always a good thing to be associated with Trump at all.
And Trump may be taking drugs that help him fake being alert and energetic.
There is a lot of variation here. And even though many people Trump’s age are at risk for becoming seriously ill due to the virus, a lot of people have relatively mild symptoms or come through OK. And we are just learning about the long term after effects of the disease.
Immanentize
@Delk: a pattern? Does Trump hire for shorter?
gwangung
@Barbara:
Ehhh….Hoover is housed on the Stanford campus, but the rest of us don’t consider it a part of the University.
VOR
@trollhattan: There is a guy on Youtube with a series of videos titled “All Gas No Brakes”. He has been successful in interviewing people at various events. His strategy is to just let them talk. Here is a link to his segment on Sturgis, which has to be seen to be believed: https://youtu.be/UK2FBEpmlUo
The Flat Earth conference is pretty amazing too.
artem1s
There is a lot of speculation about why the second wave of the Spanish flu was so deadly for young and apparently otherwise healthy people. No one knows how second, third and fourth waves of this flu will affect people because so many people who were infected and asymptomatic or who had only mild infections were never tested. We won’t know until we resume mass testing, start real tracing programs, and collecting good data again. We have the ability to do this, especially in the age of the internet. That we have failed to do so is the equivalent of the US sitting at home while the Japanese took over the entire Pacific rim after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Or telling people to go to the mall after a terrorist attack. How can an entire party be so consistently bad at disaster management?
Immanentize
@gwangung: Clearly the people at Hoover do.
zhena gogolia
@The Moar You Know:
Me too.
chopper
@The Moar You Know:
guess “reelecting the antichrist” is prob the sort of thing that’ll lead to the end times, he’s got that right.
zhena gogolia
@zzyzx:
She just doesn’t want to get off her ass. You heard her on the tape.
zhena gogolia
@Barbara:
They all seem to be up and bouncing around and going to Supreme Court hearings. They didn’t have it either.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Kay: I think that’s Justin Amash’s district.
catclub
I disagree. People in the new world faced a 95% mortality rate from smallpox, while it was endemic in Europe, the mortality rate was no longer 95% there. I am pretty sure there was no immunization in the 1600s
PsiFighter37
The whole Sturgis thing is crazy. I was out in South Dakota last year in July, a couple weeks before the motorcycle rally, in that part of the state…Sturgis is a tiny town. Holding that bike festival was a surefire way to get people infected during a pandemic…just incredibly stupid to have held it.
Roger Moore
@LongHairedWeirdo:
I wouldn’t reason too much from a handful of people getting reinfected. Consider all the healthcare professionals who were infected, recovered, and went back to work with infectious patients. That there aren’t lots of cases of them getting reinfected suggests that the vast majority people who recover from the virus have immunity that lasts at least a fair while. I don’t want to reason beyond what the evidence shows, but it does show that reinfection within 6 months or so is extremely rare.
Fair Economist
@Kay: My district is doing half days, which means children don’t have to eat together, which is one of the big drvers of spread.
Just Chuck
“Herd Immunity” says it all. They see us as a herd to be culled.
Kent
Of course. Your risk is a combination of your own personal immune system and your behavior. I assume some people have greater natural immunity than others. And some people engage in more risky behavior that others. Your risk of catching covid is the combination of the two.
There are probably outliers who can engage in every risky behavior and not ever catch it because they have a lot of natural resistance and a robust immune system. And there are probably others who are so vulnerable that even if they do everything right, a bit of airborne virus from far away might infect them.
But even in NYC, if the worst MAGA assholes mostly got it while bar hopping during the first wave, there are hopefully less of them around to catch it and pass it around in the second wave.
yellowdog
@White & Gold Purgatorian: Or maybe Melania just wanted an excuse to avoid making an appearance.
Barbara
@Roger Moore: I was specifically referring to an earlier study funded by the president of JetBlue and hyped relentlessly by the Stanford faculty who did the research as justification for ending or not initiating lockdowns. Link.
I am sure there are many wonderful people at Stanford, but this was Stanford, not Hoover.
Barbara
@catclub: But people still died in large numbers, even if it wasn’t a 95% mortality rate.
Kent
Not true. There was no herd immunity from smallpox. It was less deadly in Europe than the Americas, but that was due to evolution of the population over many centuries, not herd immunity. Different phenomena.
According to wikipedia, Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred a year. It was not controlled and eradicated until a massive worldwide vaccine effort over decades.
chopper
@catclub:
the mortality rate dropped due to some inherited immunity, but that immunity never rose to the level of herd immunity for the disease.
smallpox didn’t wipe itself out with herd immunity. we wiped it out via vaccination.
Fair Economist
Delk
@Immanentize: making the most of his lifts.
Eric S.
@Sab: Chicago. Lakeview neighborhood.
Kent
There was no inherited immunity at all. What happened is that the European population evolved over thousands of years so that people were more likely to survive the disease. But that has nothing to do with immunity and immune response. Evolution and immunity are two separate biological phenomenon. Europeans caught smallpox just as much, it just wasn’t as deadly for them due to evolved traits.
Barbara
@Barbara: Just to add, small pox was obviously still a serious enough threat by the end of the 18th century that Edward Jenner was able to get people to accept vaccination against it. If we had “evolved” herd immunity we would not still have been vaccinated against it all the way up until the 1970s, when it became one of the only diseases that has been successfully eradicated via vaccine. The woman who caught it after being exposed to one of the few remaining laboratory specimens died.
Kay
@Fair Economist:
That’s interesting. We didn’t even consider that. The band director was trying to explain some kind of guidance she got from the state health department on what sounded like avoiding repeated clustering in smaller areas. The area in question is the enclosed walkway the band uses to go up and out to the football field. I didn’t really understand it but I was impressed she seemed to. Anyway- they don’t use that anymore.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Roger Moore: I’m reasoning precisely the correct amount – we know at least some people can get re-infected, so we can’t assume immunity is permanent, or even “a long time”.
You’re right – with millions of infections, there will be plenty of literal “one in a million” bad outcomes. Still, think of how many people could have been re-infected, asymptomatically, more than once. Think how many people who never had an antibody test (or who had one too late after infection) could conceivably get their second case tested and confirmed, without us knowing about the first.
My point isn’t that one should panic over reinfections, merely that any *competent* public health response would take note that we can’t count on long term immunity being a given, if only because we simply don’t have the information we’d need to make that determination, and the information we *do* have shows that immunity is imperfect, or short term, at least sometimes.
Barbara
@Fair Economist: Of course it is. It’s the only reason that NYC has been able to roll back the prevalence of the disease. New York State is now something like 20th in the nation for disease prevalence per million over the course of the pandemic.
Brachiator
@Kent:
There are a lot of right wingers who assert this kind of thing. And Trump likes to, well, trumpet, his excellent genetics and declares himself immune from the virus.
But the idea of “natural resistance” and “robust immune system” is closer to pseudoscience than anything real or measurable. Especially in relation to Covid-19.
Some of the stories about blood types and certain specific genes that may help identify some of those at risk are very tentative, but interesting.
But didn’t someone post up a chart a while back about the relative risks of various activities and catching the virus?
Here’s one.
gvg
@Roger Moore: yes but, poorer families are more likely to have a family member with health issues because that is one of the reasons people lose money. That person can’t earn, someone else forgoes opportunities so family gets care and then the bills.
In addition struggling families are more likely to have been depending on grandparent childcare or transport. they may be in the same household or just depended on. Covid is making this financial chain break.
My family isn’t poor, but paid child care had problems as my nephew grew up. Paid providers aren’t always reliable or they have their own lives that don’t stay the way they were for your needs. It ended up being the grandparents that transported my nephew and saw to his homework much of the time. And add in middle aged people who need to work to make a living? There are some no win situations here.
mrmoshpotato
@patrick Il: “You are so hot when I can’t see most of your disgusting orange face!”
MisterForkbeard
@The Moar You Know: So… how does he square this when Biden wins? God lied to him for a reason, I guess? Or maybe Trump wins a “moral” victory? Or maybe Trump Really Did Win And Liberals And Satan stole it?
Barbara
@Brachiator: The initial research on at risk blood types seems not to have held up over time. Certain blood types are more common in certain populations, so might simply have been coincidentally related to higher mortality early on in those places. Or at least that is what I have read.
oatler.
@JeffH:Lover of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra ra Rasputin
Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
MisterForkbeard
@Brachiator: No, no. Abortion and birth control are about protecting a “baby’s” life and the woman clearly made her decision when she had sex/was raped. That’s about keeping another human being safe.
Completely unlike masks, where there’s absolutely no impact on other people’s lives at all, right? /s
mad citizen
@VOR: I always appreciate new (to me) you tube videos/channels–watch a fair amount of them on my tv. Thanks for this link, I will watch (watched a minute or two now). The interviewer is like a neutral Daily Show reporter. I recall how documentarian Errol Morris said his technique was simply put people in front of the camera and let them talk to their heart’s content–the truth usually comes out.
MisterForkbeard
@Kent:
I think this is broadly true. Around my town people are really good about wearing masks indoors, but I also see a ton of “take your mask off when there’s no one with 10 feet of you”.
My own mantra is “If you’re out of the car, wear the mask”. Wish more people would do that.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kent:
The only time I’ve never seen her either look sour or acting like she was auditioning for a porn film was that time she was looking rapturously into Justin Trudeau’s eyes.
Brachiator
Some of the UK rules regarding people in various tiers are wild and a bit confusing. From a BBC story.
Here in California, state and local health authorities caution people about trying to restrict the number of people you meet with, but there have been ongoing problems with community spread when family members or friends mix together.
chopper
that’s what ‘inherited immunity’ means here, or at least how i’m using it. these people were more likely to survive because they inherited from survivors a better immune system when it came to smallpox.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
Those numbers are based on confirmed positive tests, so they should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The test rate was very low when New York was in the worst stage of its outbreak, so only a small fraction of the total infections resulted in a positive test. Antibody testing since then suggests something like 20% of the population of New York City was infected.
Obvious Russian Troll
@zhena gogolia:
I agree with the others that the most likely case is that he had a mild case and is heavily drugged up for his appearances. I think there’s still an outside chance he has some kind of a physical breakdown between now and the election.
Aleta
zzyzx
@mad citizen: that’s already 25% of the complete voting population of 2016! Increased turnout is usually our friend.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Immanentize: Short People?
mrmoshpotato
@Obvious Russian Troll:
To add to the mental breakdown that we’ve all been hostages of for the past 4 years?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Barbara: I’ve read a summary of a more recent study that seemed to confirm the blood type thing, but the thing is even the people with more protective blood types are still at plenty high risk.
I think what I read was that type O and B are something like 20 percent more resistant to infection, give or take, and maybe 20% less likely to have a severe case (again give or take roughly 10%). But that means those people are still pretty easily infected, and still have a much better than coin flip chance of a severe case relative to a more susceptible blood type.
Anyone with one of the more resistant blood types who thinks those studies are a license to just go on as normal is a moron when it comes to probability and statistics. The protective effect is not strong enough to give anyone enough certainty that they should assume the worst won’t happen.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I personally prefer this chart of COVID vs. non-COVID risk.
Suzanne
@BR:
I have had multiple friends/acquaintances/colleagues get it. Most of them got over it within a couple of days, if they were symptomatic at all. One of my former colleagues had it in July and she said that it mostly wasn’t a big deal, but that she still experiences fatigue. Her whole family got it, including her elderly parents, and everyone else cleared it quickly, but she has had a bit of a harder time with it. So it varies widely. And the Prez got allllllll the treatment.
trollhattan
@VOR:
Gimme a “yee”
Gimme a “haw”
“Yee-haw!”
“Look at what happened to the Jews.”
Oy vey
Calouste
@Kent: There was some immunity for people who got infected with cowpox (because that was what Jenner made into his vaccine) and especially in rural areas, that was a significant number of people, which slowed down the spread. Of course there were no cows in the Americas when the Europeans first showed up, so the people living there didn’t have that protection.
Kent
Yes, but we are talking past each other.
Immunity of the sort we are talking about with Covid is a specific antibody response in which the body develops antibodies against a specific virus and those antibodies persist in the immune system to prevent further reinfection by the same disease.
Europeans did not inherit any smallpox antibodies from their parents. They still caught smallpox. They just evolved the traits over time that made them more likely to survive the disease. Those traits might or might not have had anything to do with the actual immune system.
What you are saying would be like claiming that Whites have greater herd immunity to covid than Blacks, because Blacks die from the disease at a higher rate. Which is not true. Whites don’t have greater herd immunity. Blacks just have other issues unrelated to the immune system like more pre-existing conditions and poorer medical care that cause them to die at higher rates.
Fair Economist
A lot of the reason Native Americans had such astronomical rates of mortality to European diseases was that if everybody gets sick, there’s nobody to get food and water or provide care, so almost everybody dies. Measles, which is not particularly lethal, could wipe out a village that way. A fair number of diseases are less lethal if first caught as a child, like COVID, and that also magifies mortality in a completely naive population.
There is some evolved resistance to disease, but as a rule it’s secondary to social effects.
Cermet
@Barbara: And the scientist who caused her to be infected (and he also had infected himself) committed sucicide.
LongHairedWeirdo
Not just antibodies: memory T-cells. Those are how your body can say “oh, ho, we’ve seen *this* little SOV before, and we know how to deal with it!” Antibodies fade over time; the hope is that the T-cells will retain memory longer.
(SOV=Son Of a Virus, of course)
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@JeffH: I must disagree with that, sir. The man’s a lower order than Grigori and me.
“Goes off in a huff for more vodka”
chopper
@Kent:
the immune system is far more than merely antibodies; had i meant merely antibodies, i would have said antibodies.
here is an example; a mutation in immune cells made it harder for smallpox to infect people, and that mutation was more likely to be handed down.
chopper
@chopper:
another example are the natural killer cells in your innate (born with it) immune system. some have specificity towards certain infectious organisms, such as measles or influenza, that have been ‘earned’ in certain populations over the years. this gives the adaptive immune system a leg up during an infection.
some people are genetically more resistant to the shenanigans of certain infections, like influenza’s attempt to suppress production of interferons. etc. etc.
J R in WV
@Calouste:
We kept a milk cow on our farm, and milked her by hand, one squeeze at a time. Not long after she came fresh (had a calf and began producing milk for the first time) she got sores on her nose and udder. So I called a local vet to talk about that. He thought from my description that it was common cowpox, which made sense.
Of course, being born in 1950, I was vaccinated against small pox at a young age. Yet, milking Molly every day, suddenly I had small sores on my hands and forearms. Cowpox, even though I had a vaccination for smallpox 20 odd years before.
So… Immunity can be, well, odd…..
dnfree
@Eric S.: when we went to vote there was some kind of remote thermometer we couldn’t see, or at least so they told us. The person letting us in could supposedly see our temperature on a screen.
chopper
@J R in WV:
vaccinations don’t always last a long time. 20 years is a heavy lift for any shot.
Sally
@Kent: Yes! I was about to say something similar. Just as many African peoples developed a partial resistance to malaria with the sicle cell gene, Western Europeans evolved a resistance to small pox. Both diseases continue(d) to killed many.
The herd immunity idea is so misleading. Added to the issues of the on going and as yet largely unknown chronic health problems Covid causes, it’s batshit crazy from a public health and economic pov.