Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Republicans don’t trust women.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023

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What juddering from epidemic to endemic looks like:

… At least 7,109 admissions of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were reported for the week of July 15 nationwide, the CDC said late Monday, up from 6,444 during the week before.

Another important hospital metric has also been trending up in recent weeks: an average of 0.73% of the past week’s emergency room visits had COVID-19 as of July 21, up from 0.49% through June 21.

The new figures come after months of largely slowing COVID-19 trends nationwide since the last wave of infections over the winter.

“U.S. COVID-19 rates are still near historic lows after 7 months of steady declines.  Early indicators of COVID-19 activity (emergency department visits, test positivity and wastewater levels) preceded an increase in hospitalizations seen this past week,” CDC spokesperson Kathleen Conley said in a statement.

Conley said virtually all counties are at “low” COVID-19 hospital admission levels, below the thresholds at which the CDC recommends additional precautions to curb the virus.

Only one part of the country did not record more hospitalizations last week compared to the week prior: the Midwestern region spanning Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin…

Unlike previous waves, no single variant has yet emerged this summer to dominate infections nationwide.

Instead, the CDC’s current projections estimate that a mix of descendants from the XBB variant that first drove infections last winter are now competing around the country…

… [T]he CDC says current supplies of shots will still be shipped until September for “exceptional” situations.

“While many individuals may wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine until the updated version is released, as it is expected to provide more robust protection against currently circulating variants, certain individuals may need or desire a COVID-19 vaccine prior to the anticipated release of the updated vaccine in the fall,” the agency said.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 10
David Quammen is always worth reading. “The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin”: (Unpaywalled ‘gift’ link):

Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China. A third school, more moderate than the second but also implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by way of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W.I.V.), a research complex on the eastern side of the city, maybe after well-meaning but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.

If you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions — or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it — be assured that you aren’t the only one.

Some contrarians say that it doesn’t matter, the source of the virus. What matters, they say, is how we cope with the catastrophe it has brought, the illness and death it continues to cause. Those contrarians are wrong. It does matter. Research priorities, pandemic preparedness around the world, health policies and public opinion toward science itself will be lastingly affected by the answer to the origin question — if we ever get a definitive answer.

But much of the evidence that might provide that answer has either been lost or is still unavailable — lost because of failures to gather relevant material promptly; unavailable because of intransigence and concealment, particularly on the part of Chinese officialdom at several levels…

When the first known cases of an “atypical pneumonia” began turning up at Wuhan hospitals in late 2019, and then exploded into a coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, the location itself seemed to fit, in different ways, the priors that might incline one toward either a natural-origin explanation or a lab-leak explanation. The potential lab-leak connection was easiest to note: The city contained a research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with a well-known laboratory devoted to coronavirus research. On the other hand, Wuhan was also a major nexus for the significant national trade in wild animals for food, fur and traditional medicines (estimated at more than $70 billion annually), where such creatures, and the viruses they carry, were sold at many crowded markets — one of which, Huanan, lay at or near the center of the spatial pattern of earliest known cases.

So, starting from simply those circumstances, was a lab accident more “likely” than a natural spillover? And under either of those scenarios, how much did Chinese-government pressure and obscurantism constrain the availability of evidence for assessing one or the other? Because there exists no definitive account — yet — of the particular events that delivered SARS-CoV-2 into the human population, even experts are forced to frame their views as probabilities, based on data and circumstance, influenced variously by prior beliefs as to how the world works.

In assessing the probabilities for yourself, you might want to step back from the noise, anger, vitriol and politicization that have clouded the controversy and focus on the evidence we do have. To that end, it may help to note some events in the order they occurred…

So, what’s tilting the scales of popular opinion toward lab leak? The answer to that is not embedded deeply in the arcane data I’ve been skimming through here. What’s tilting the scales, it seems to me, is cynicism and narrative appeal.

I asked about this in conversation with David Relman, the biosecurity expert who was also an author of the “Investigate” letter with Jesse Bloom. To some extent, Relman agreed. “When you sow the seeds of distrust, or suggest that you haven’t been transparent with what you knew,” he told me, “you’re setting yourself up for a persistent, insidious, continuing distrust.” That inclines people to assume that “there was something deliberate, or deliberately concealed.”…

Yes, it’s quite a long article, but still: When you have some spare time, read the whole thing!

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023
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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 1
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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 2

… The ministry collects information from all of the country’s medical institutions on COVID in-patients including those seriously ill on ventilators.

But different circumstances at the institutions make it hard to obtain a detailed picture of the overall situation.

Starting in late September, the ministry will receive reports from about 500 designated medical institutions and release the figures every Friday.

A similar system is currently used to monitor the spread of seasonal influenza.

The ministry says it will use the system together with the reports on the average number of patients per medical institution to monitor the spread of coronavirus infections more accurately.

Italy:

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 3
(link)

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Encouraging news:

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 4
(link)

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 9
(link)

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 5
(link)

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 6

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 8
(link)

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: July 26, 2023 7
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Reader Interactions

50Comments

  1. 1.

    Matt McIrvin

    There’s definitely been a sort of COVID mini-wave going on in the Boston area wastewater counts, but it’s at a low level that would have counted as a lull even last summer. And it looks to my eyes like it’s peaking now, not continuing to exponentiate.

    The situation with the “lab leak” story continues to disturb me, not so much concerning what the public believes–the public will believe any number of ridiculous things–but the way that the scientific consensus and the intelligence/security/law-enforcement consensus seem to be converging on entirely different pictures of reality. That’s not healthy at all. That’s a sign of a society with an epistemological problem that infects people with access to force. I guess we know we have plenty of those already.

  2. 2.

    JR

    A couple of things on this; the support (such as it were) of a lab leak scenario has grown in expert circles too, although far from a majority opinion. Some of this is due to personality conflicts. Some of the animal origin researchers (e.g. Kristian Andersen) behaved pretty arrogantly about their hypothesis, and that turned a lot of people against them. This only grew when Republicans leaked their correspondences that showed, to be honest, a reasonable amount of scientific skepticism and open-mindedness about a lab leak hypothesis.

    Scientifically it would be next to impossible to pinpoint an origin for COVID-19 transmission. Hard proof would have to come from investigation and the subjects were never going to be all that cooperative. One thing that struck me about the opposition of lab leak and animal origin hypotheses is that they are not opposing. Simply to study a virus requires some form of containment (e.g. a laboratory) and a failure there means you have a lab leak. There is also history of this kind of thing, like with the Marburg virus outbreak in 1967.

    Republicans have had great success blurring the lines between a laboratory leak and other possibilities such as genetic manipulation or weaponization, all of which are different things. And that’s where things get fucked.

  3. 3.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JR: That’s the thing: start even talking about a lab-escape hypothesis and the stories gravitate toward the crazy RFK Jr. shit about the virus being engineered to infect white people and spare Asians and Jews, etc.

    But the thing about the scientifically plausible lab-escape scenarios is that they don’t seem to be converging on a consistent story of what happened. There are all these things that could have happened and the leads just peter out, though if it was that type of thing, you’d think it would become clearer with time. That suggests to me that there’s nothing there. With a natural animal origin the murkiness is easier to explain.

  4. 4.

    New Deal democrat

    BIobot’s latest update several days ago shows a slight increase in particles from 250 to 257 per mL, vs. their low last month of 165 per mL. This is the highest since early April, but for context it remains lower than at any time in the previous 18 months except for mid-February through mid-April 2022.

    Hospitalizations have also increased from 6300 in the last week of June to 7100. If they follow the same trajectory as cases, they will rise to about 10,000 in a couple of weeks. This would still be below any time before this April except for 2 weeks in April 2022.

    Deaths as of the last week in June (the most recent updated report) were 531. If that were to rise to 750-800, it would still be below any time during the entire pandemic prior to this May.

    The latest variant data released last Friday shows XBB thrashing around spawning about 12 subvariants, trying to get an advantage, with none particularly breaking out.

    Our annual 4th of July family get-together wavelet is here. Biobot shows cases already declining again in the West and Midwest, so it may be close to peak already.

    My souvenir from the 4th of July wasn’t COVID, but a wild summer cold featuring laryngitis and the first earaches I’ve had since age 12. So I’m back to wearing masks indoors in public, to protect everybody else.

  5. 5.

    NeenerNeener

    Monroe County, NY:

    8 new cases on 07/19/23.
    12 new cases on 07/20/23.
    9 new cases on 07/21/23.
    13 new cases on 07/22/23.
    12 new cases on 07/23/23.
    8 new cases on 07/24/23.
    6 new cases on 07/25/23.

    Deaths still at 2291.

  6. 6.

    bleh

    A nation of deliberately obtuse panicky children in adults’ bodies?  How ever could it have elected someone like TFG as president?  ‘Tis a mystery.

    As usual, I don’t care if they kill themselves or their descendants off; the problem is the people around them with respiratory conditions, immune dysfunction, etc. whom they put at risk.

  7. 7.

    Matt McIrvin

    @bleh: You’d think that an inclination toward panic would drive people to be more careful rather than less, but that’s not how it shook out. What struck me was that there was always such a big dose of performative masculinity/badassery–the whole idea that taking precautions made you a pussy (and therefore politically suspect) seemed to be very powerful.

  8. 8.

    NorthLeft

    I know some guys (yes, they are all men) who suddenly became loudly anti-science during the pandemic. I think/knew they always were, but they really let it all hang out over the last few years.
    I believe Nate Silver is part of that group of people.

    My unscientific opinion is that the combination of COVID and climate change has completely destroyed whatever little faith they had in the medical and scientific communities to keep humanity in “control” of the world.

    Not sure that they will ever come back to relative sanity.

  11. 11.

    MazeDancer

    Going to go less places than the nowhere I already go. Because I’m immuno-compromised, and the world is crazy.

    It’s time for my booster. But been trying to find out when the new formulation will be ready. Apparently, Sept-October. So, knocking wood until then.

    Thanks, as ever, Anne Laurie.

  12. 12.

    Matt McIrvin

    @New Deal democrat: There was something that gave us both congested ears and throats for just a couple of days last week. Didn’t feel like COVID, might have just been poor air quality. I was going around masked to avoid spreading it if it was a virus.

  13. 13.

    Cameron

    @Matt McIrvin: And that’s pretty much the whole reason for this hysterical nonsense about the origin of the virus: if COVID originated in a lab, it’s PROOF that PRC was developing a BIOLOGICAL WEAPON!!!!!!  Never mind that an uncontrollable, highly infectious virus would be the very last sort of bioweapon anybody would consider developing.  Well, anybody except a Q knucklewalker.

  14. 14.

    Matt McIrvin

    @NorthLeft: Back when Silver was still a wunderkind in the press, he put out a book about various aspects of numerical models, that, if I recall correctly, gave way too much credence to climate-change denialists who skated on a broad skepticism of modeling. Maybe it was a warning sign.

  15. 15.

    Searcher

    It’s really frustrating to me that over the last six months the narrative of the lab leak proponents has become:

    1. Repeat the same 5-6 coincidences we’ve known about for three years.

    2. Complain they were unfairly persecuted and censored.

    3. Declare they have been vindicated, and we were all fools to have doubted them.

    There’s no new evidence, but people got tired of talking to them so now they believe a new consensus has arisen.

  16. 16.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Cameron: There’s another element, which is the Anthony Fauci angle. Because Fauci became a liberal/nerd hero during the pandemic, and Trump hated him for taking attention away from Trump, there’s a motivation to find some reason to claim that Fauci is the villain who actually CAUSED the pandemic, and some of the lab-leak scenarios blame him for funding or enabling the Chinese.

  17. 17.

    Eyeroller

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     “A scientist was arrogant so I have to disagree with him” sounds like pretty weak tea to me. Scientists? Arrogant? Never!

    Also it disturbs me a bit that the author writing on the origins of Covid refers to “schools of thought.” This is not a philosophical or theological argument. The data are not as clean as we’d like but they rarely are, certainly in the first years or even decades, but they point pretty clearly to natural origin.

    I’m sure it’s also just a coincidence that the “lab leak” hypothesis plays to xenophobia and racism.

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Searcher: What it reminds me very much of is the recent rash of UFO stories, which all have the angle of “there have been surges of interest before, but THIS time feels different–this time, people with official clout are saying this is real!” And you look into it in any detail and, no, it’s not different, it’s basically the same kind of conspiracy shit and weird reports from fighter pilots that we’ve been hearing since 1947.

  20. 20.

    Eyeroller

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     You recall correctly. I am not a statistician so I could be misunderstanding here, but my impression is that he thinks he is more of a statistician than he is, and he also has zero understanding of “pure” statistics versus statistical methodologies with an underlying scientific model.

  21. 21.

    WereBear

    I’ve found great understanding in the book I could finally stand to read, Authoritarian Nightmare, by John Dean and Dr. Robert Altemeyer. They explain the MAGAs, and why we should be very afraid.

    It IS what I always suspected. An adult has brain gears which mesh to functionally drive other things. But an Authoritarian compartmentalizes their brain. Their gears tend to mismatch and grab the wrong thing and they handle cognitive dissonance with denial and ego-expansion.

  22. 22.

    Soprano2

    That Eric Topol is surprised that wastewater monitoring is the primary way to see rising or falling covid levels only tells me that he had no idea that wastewater monitoring was done at all. It’s been done for drugs and other diseases for years and years. I knew almost immediately that it would be a good way to monitor covid, because it catches cases whether or not people have symptoms and whether or not they get tested. I only hope communities continue to do it. We could also do this for things like the flu.

    That study showing higher mortality in Republican counties after vaccines were introduced won’t convince most of them. I’m glad they’re looking at stuff like this, but it will never convince them.

    It’s so sad to see what’s happened to Nate Silver, it’s like “I believe in the lab leak theory, why don’t all of you believe it too? If you don’t you’re conspiracy theorists and liars” is his default position about it now. That he thinks that in April of 2020 there was a conspiracy to cover up a lab leak, when scientists didn’t even know much about Covid at all, is so stupid.

  23. 23.

    Lapassionara

    Thank you, AL, for this very interesting and helpful, at least to me, information.

  24. 24.

    Soprano2

    @Cameron: Covid doesn’t kill enough people to be a biological weapon. Who would engineer a biological weapon that only killed 1% of the people it infected? That on its face makes that idea preposterous. You’d engineer something like the Black Death, which is estimated to have killed 50% of the people who were infected with it; even the 1918 flu was more fatal than Covid!

  25. 25.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: Biological weapons are selected to be controllable, to the degree that any disease can be controllable–ideally, you want it to be very lethal and kill or debilitate rapidly but not be super-contagious or have a long incubation period. Anthrax is like that. COVID is the opposite of that.

  26. 26.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: …Of course, in conspiracist reasoning, the old “that’s exactly what they want you to think” response can nullify any counterargument whatsoever.

  27. 27.

    lee

    The thing is it is still going on. It is happening in every state. The red areas of blue states see higher excess deaths than the blue areas. The blue areas which have a higher population density.

    I wonder if this is part of the GQP push to overturn our democracy. They knew their base was getting smaller and older prior to the pandemic, but once they realized the destruction covid was having on their base they decided it was time for our test run of democracy to be over. I also remember they were fine with letting the pandemic just run its course when it was mostly the blue areas of the country getting sick and dying.

  28. 28.

    WereBear

    @lee: In mayhem they see opportunity. Essentially, no matter who they are, they have the criminal mind.

    Which works only one way. Exploiting every conceivable advantage by any means possible.

  29. 29.

    JR

    Re: general antivax trends.

    One thing to keep in mind is that one of the diseases covered by MMR is rubella. It is passed practically asymptomatically among folks after they are born but is absolutely devastating to a developing fetus. If we see widespread vaccine refusal there will be an accompanying uptick in developmental disorders.

  30. 30.

    Yarrow

    What qualifies as Long Covid? How long after infection if one still has symptoms does it veer into Long Covid territory? Two weeks? A month? Two months? Six months? Is there any consensus on this?

  31. 31.

    Yarrow

    I watched the Peter Hotez video. The news anchor asked him what advice he had for people whose last booster was in 2022. He said, “It becomes a little complicated. If you’re over the age of 65 or immune compromised you are eligible for a second bivalent booster.” But what he didn’t say is if you’re not in that group then you’re out of luck. You can’t get another booster. If you followed all the recommendations and got the boosters when they came out, but you’re not in that group, you’re stuck. You just get to be at a higher risk for getting Covid and higher risk for Long Covid.

    I do not understand this at all. I understand there needs to be a certain amount of time between boosters but really, any adult who wants to get a booster after that time should be able to get it. Many adults who were responsible about getting Covid boosters got their last booster in September/October 2022. It’s getting close to a year. We should have been eligible to get another booster in the spring. But no. Get Covid instead. It’s maddening.

  32. 32.

    Old School

    @Yarrow:

    From the CDC:

    Most people with COVID-19 get better within a few days to a few weeks after infection, so at least four weeks after infection is the start of when Long COVID could first be identified.

  33. 33.

    Yarrow

    @Old School:  “A few weeks” is somehow translated to “at least four weeks”???  “At least” is also doing a lot of heavy lifting. What is that? Six weeks? Eight weeks? 30 weeks? Who knows! And “could be identified.” But maybe it won’t be! Who knows!

    It’s so frustrating. But thanks for the link.

  34. 34.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Yarrow: Bothers me too, always has.

    I’m a complete non-expert, so maybe there’s something I’m missing, but I think there’s a kind of bureaucratic/clinical inertia here–they’re making decisions based on outdated notions of the need to ration the vaccine stocks and the relative risk of vaccination vs. disease. There’s still a little bit of a bias toward non-intervention.

  35. 35.

    Matt McIrvin

    @lee: Ever since the Republican Party went all-in on becoming the party of white racists, they’ve been on some level anti-democratic. It was more subdued during the 1980s when they could win huge popular-vote margins in a fair election. But the demographics of the electorate are increasingly a problem for them. COVID only impacts this on the margins since it’s not that lethal.

  37. 37.

    Yarrow

    @Jay:  In the US, if you got the bivalent booster when they came out, that was September 2022. If you aren’t over 65 or immunocompromised you cannot get another one. I think once the new ones come out this fall you can get one of those. So, a year or longer since the last one. No one knows when the new ones will come out.

    Meanwhile, Covid cases are increasing. Great.

  38. 38.

    TF79

    It seems like the combination of:

    1. Related virus lab in vicinity of first outbreak

    2. The inability to pinpoint the exact transmission source (as opposed to SARS 1 and MERS which were identified fairly quickly)

    will sustain some variant of the lab-leak hypotheses (either the oopsie Marburg version or the much stupider sinister version) indefinitely.

  39. 39.

    Bill Arnold

    @JR:

    Simply to study a virus requires some form of containment (e.g. a laboratory) and a failure there means you have a lab leak.

    No. Prior to 2020, a failure meant that you had a “lab escape”. That was the term of art, until American propagandists decided that a new term that alliterated was desirable, for propaganda reasons.
    Given a key prior, that the 2002 SARS1 was found to be spillover from a wet market,
    which is more likely:
    – Escape of a virus from a large chaotic wet market?
    – Escape of a virus from a BLS4 (3?) lab?
    Or re-worded, which is more likely:
    – Leak of a virus from a large chaotic wet market?
    – Leak of a virus from a BLS4(3?) lab?

    Change “escape” to “leak” and peoples opinions shift, because the word changed. Each had a bunch of conceptual and emotional overloading.

  40. 40.

    sab

    My dad’s floor in his assisted living had a covid outbreak this month. Nobody very sick, but half a dozen residents tested positive. Got a call and he has tested positive too, a month short of his 99th birthday. So far no symptoms. Hurray for vaccinations.

  41. 41.

    JR

    @Bill Arnold: I guess I’m not as interested in semantic arguments as everyone else, because it’s clear that the existing method of describing things was not very firmly established, otherwise the terms wouldn’t have shifted so easily.

  42. 42.

    Tenar Arha

    @Yarrow: I did. I’ve had a total of 6 shots. The 2 original, & 4 boosters which included 2 bivalent shots. AFAICT pharmacies don’t generally request details on health status.

    When I went to the supermarket pharmacy they did check against a state database (in MA)  what number the shot I was getting, but they really didn’t give me a hard time except for forgetting my vaccine card. Maybe because I waited until it’d been 6 plus months?

    Anyway I’ve now had bivalent boosters in September 2022, & May 2023. I strongly suspect that even in states in the northeast, there’s too many people just not getting boosters, so there’s plenty of shots in stock and enough to go around for people who think getting one is a good idea, especially since I waited a couple months past March. Again YMMV where you live.

     

    ETA 6 plus months

  43. 43.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tenar Arha: Interesting. Around the same time you got your second bivalent booster, I heard a lot of reports of people trying the same thing and getting denied on the grounds that there was no recommendation for a second bivalent booster for most people. It probably depends on how pedantic the pharmacist is. I didn’t try it myself.

  44. 44.

    steve g

    Research priorities, pandemic preparedness around the world, health policies and public opinion toward science itself will be lastingly affected by the answer to the origin question — if we ever get a definitive answer.

    Lots of people keep saying this, that the answer is somehow crucial, but it is just is not so. Both scenarios are possible, and we should prepare for both in the future. Research priorities? Study both. Pandemic preparedness? Get ready for either. Health policies? Take both into account. Take more preventive measures? Yes, try to shut down live animal markets. Yes make lab protocols stricter.

    The fact is that pinning down the origin is not that important, once you have established the main possibilities. Sure, we might learn something new by studying it more. But as far as public health is concerned, we can do just fine with what we know now.

  46. 46.

    Yarrow

    @Tenar Arha:  I’m glad you were able to get it. No such luck here.

    @Matt McIrvin: Yep. I guess one could go from pharmacy to pharmacy to try but not everyone has that time. Also, one of them said that insurance would only cover one vaccine per year. So if you got a bivalent booster in May then you couldn’t get the updated one this fall.

    They’d rather everyone get Covid.

  47. 47.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Bill Arnold:

    Prior to 2020, a failure meant that you had a “lab escape”. That was the term of art, until American propagandists decided that a new term that alliterated was desirable, for propaganda reasons.

    Because, sure, everyone properly uses scientific terms of art almost everywhere and everywhen.

    Seriously, ‘lab escape’ versus ‘lab leak’?  Of course, given a choice, people not versed in the terms of art of that particular branch of science were going to use the latter.

    Language does stuff like that, especially ours: there’s no authoritative body that reigns over the proper usage of American English, and ultimately the language does what people do with it.

  48. 48.

    Gretchen

    I think that it’s significant that the lab leak enthusiasts are usually also at least somewhat antivax. They’re not trying to figure out the right answers. They’re chaos agents.

  49. 49.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Yarrow: I would personally interpret “immunocompromised” very broadly. I had my seventh dose on Monday, along with the shingles vaccine. I probably take too many risks with exposure (going to the cop bar in Old Town Alexandria) so I’m happier having plenty of shots.

  50. 50.

    bcw

    I really disliked the NY Times article by Quamman because by introducing his three stories as equivalent and equally likely he encourages people to just go with their guts when the scientific evidence says none of that is true. Quamman, with literary degree seems to find the scientific evidence too hard for him to evaluate so he just treats all claims are equally valid.  Somehow, it would never be accepted to have a classical music critic with no understanding of music and no ear but a guy that knows no science writing about science is completely OK.   The bioweapon claim is just nonsense, no one studies respiratory illness as a weapon because one criteria is the ability to target your disease at particular people. Anthrax, for instance is only transmitted by air until it settles to the ground and is not easily transmitted between people. The argument against a lab leak is one of probability- in the wet markets, you have thousands of animals that would never come in contact in the wild crammed together where a virus can leap from species to species, picking up mutations until it can jump to humans. The wet market is conducting thousands of experiments at once. The Wuhan lab is ten miles from the wet market and all the early cases were near the wet market. (There was some tracking confusion early on which has since been shown to be wrong.) An early paper saying some of the mutations where rare which have since been shown to be quite common, including in things like the common cold. The lab leak idea assumes a failure with an already fully functioning human transmitted disease, possible but then where did it start? By omitting any real scientific information,  Quamman misinforms.

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