Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

No one could have predicted…

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: November 8, 2023

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: November 8, 2023

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: November 8, 2023

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: November 8, 2023 2
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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: November 8, 2023 6
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Reader Interactions

37Comments

  1. 1.

    BruceFromOhio

    Committed to the Kelce Treatment tomorrow morning (flu & COVID vax together) and leaving the rest of the day open to see what effects the chip programming has on the corpus immaculatum. Pulled out the dozen N95’s still in the package from the manufacturer, and put them by the front door with the coats and hats. I’m seeing more masks out in the wild, and if the numbers kick up we’ll be ready.
    My parents have indicated they intend to effectively quarantine this winter, no traveling and no events except for Christmas at their house. I’m a little concerned about them being cooped up and resisting socializing for months, and am scheming of ways to keep them engaged that doesn’t challenge their risk appetite.​
     

    Gaia and Darwin still scrubbing the gene pool, one unvaxed Redditor at a time.

  2. 2.

    Matt McIrvin

    The Boris Johnson quotes really get to the heart of something that’s fascinated and horrified me since the early pandemic: the phenomenon of people with “counterintuitive” hot takes about how mass COVID infection is good, actually, and we should encourage it to get it all over with.

    Almost all of these people were on or adjacent to the political right. So I think there’s more going on here than just bad folk beliefs about how the immune system works–it’s some kind of politically shaded complex of ideas about moralized “toughness” and the need to be able to make cruel decisions. To a considerable chunk of the population, it makes immediate sense that the right way to deal with a pandemic is to encourage people to get sick and shrug off a lot of them dying. Anything less is some kind of softness.

    Donald Trump, of course, embraced this, with all his talk of “letting it wash over us” and people getting back in church by Easter, and how he wanted to do a Superman act after getting out of the hospital.

  3. 3.

    Erin

    Tweets seem to longer be embedding for me, they don’t resolve to the full tweet. Been going on for a few days now, and I’m still unfortunately logged in to Twitter. Is there a setting somewhere? I love these updates but they’re much less useful if I can’t see the whole tweet. Thanks!

  5. 5.

    NeenerNeener

    Monroe County, NY:

    25 new cases on 10/29/23
    49 new cases on 10/30/23
    43 new cases on 10/31/23
    49 new cases on 11/01/23
    43 new cases on 11/02/23
    31 new cases on 11/03/23
    25 new cases on 11/04/23

    2356 deaths as of 11/06/23, up 3 from last week

    Last week’s COVID vaccination was just as hard on me as the first 5. I was a headache-y,
    shivering mess for 36 hours. It doesn’t matter which brand either; Pfizer hits me as hard as
    Moderna.

  6. 6.

    Yarrow

    @Matt McIrvin:

    the phenomenon of people with “counterintuitive” hot takes about how mass COVID infection is good, actually, and we should encourage it to get it all over with.

    That’s how Sweden handled the first phase of the pandemic. Retrospective looks at how that worked for them that are being done now show it didn’t work well. Sweden has had a much poorer outcome than countries that locked down more.

  7. 7.

    hrprogressive

    Having had 5 mRNA injections so far, I’m glad to see the headline data that they provide robust memory responses against the disease.

    Of course, then I read things like “Australia’s 8th wave”, and you know, I spent all of 2022 calling this a #PermanentPandemic and I have to wonder if the rollercoaster ever fucking stops.
    It’s exhausting to say the least.​

  8. 8.

    MattF

    @Matt McIrvin: Maybe it’s a version of the magic of the marketplace— ‘creative destruction’ of anyone with a weak immune system. And getting sick is due, as everyone knows, to moral weakness.

  9. 9.

    Yarrow

    NZ must prepare for Long Covid implications.

    Maybe NZ does this sort of thing better than other countries but for the most part anyone with a chronic debilitating disease gets poor support and society doesn’t want to know much about them.

  10. 10.

    EarthWindFire

    If all those unvaccinated folks are worried about vaccines being shed on them, they should just stay home.

  11. 11.

    KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))

    Sigh. I went for my booster yesterday (I wanted at least 2 full weeks before being inundated at Thanksgiving). Then in the afternoon my younger son texted to ask if he could nap in his old room. Seems he was feeling terrible, and couldn’t face driving home in rush hour. Sure! I said. By dinnertime he was feeling bad enough that he thought he’d better see a doctor, so my husband took him. Sure enough, it’s covid. At least they both wore their masks the whole time they were around each other, & my husband had his booster a little over a week ago.

    He wanted to go home & isolate alone (his GF is caring for nephews this week), but he’s pretty sick so we don’t feel comfortable  with that. We brought in snacks & Gatorade and he’ll hang out in an upstairs room where we can get to him quickly if he takes a turn for the much worse.

  12. 12.

    New Deal democrat

    According to Biobot, which has (thankfully!) started updating its data again, Covid particles per mL increased from 376 two weeks ago to 424 this week. The high at the end of August was 648. The low in June was 165. There were increases in all Census regions except for the Northeast.

    We are probably about to begin whatever will be our winter wave, so this is probably going to be the low for a few months.

    The CDC reported that hospitalizations were virtually unchanged last week at 15,750, vs. the early September high of 20,700 and the June low of 6,300. Deaths as of the first week of October declined from 1,370 (their recent peak) to 1,260. The low in early July was 485.

    The good news is that the paradigm that wastewater levels (a proxy for infections) lead hospitalizations by several weeks, which in turn lead deaths by a few more weeks remains intact. And that the number of hospitalizations and deaths all this year have run consistently below their numbers at any time during the 2020-22 periods, except for a couple of months. In other words, the virulence of the pandemic continues to decline. But older people should absolutely get their booster shots, and continue to mask indoors in crowded settings, because seniors are still the large majority of hospitalizations and deaths.

  14. 14.

    New Deal democrat

    @hrprogressive: In re:

    I have to wonder if the rollercoaster ever fucking stops.

    It won’t stop, but just like a roller coaster, it will keep having lower and lower peaks.

    Hope that helps.

  15. 15.

    lowtechcyclist

    @MattF:

    Maybe it’s a version of the magic of the marketplace— ‘creative destruction’ of anyone with a weak immune system. And getting sick is due, as everyone knows, to moral weakness.

    I think of it as ‘antisocial Darwinism.’

  16. 16.

    Soprano2

    @Yarrow: Try having chronic pain, it’s the same thing. I’ve learned how to manage it on my own, because honestly the  medical field doesn’t have many answers. There is a treatment for the nerve in my spine that could help, but since I have osteopenia the doctor wants to wait until after my next bone scan to see if I can have it or not, because she’s afraid if my bones aren’t strong enough it will shatter my vertebra, which would be bad.

    We had our latest Covid shot on Sunday. I still have a sore arm, even though the shot itself didn’t hurt at all!  I also think the general “blah” feeling I had on Monday probably came from it.

    I will always wonder if having Covid in December 2020 had a bad effect on my husband’s brain and hastened the dementia. The first time I thought anything was wrong was in August 2021, but it’s possible there were other more subtle signs I missed.

  17. 17.

    Soprano2

    @New Deal democrat: Our local numbers for both plants are trending down for this week. I hate that they changed their methodology for the testing, because that makes it impossible to compare to earlier periods. It looks like Covid overall is higher than it used to be, but I have no idea if that is true or not.

  19. 19.

    Yarrow

    @Soprano2: I’m sorry you’re struggling with pain. It’s all awful. People don’t get much support if they’re not sick with something that’s easy to fix.

    I’m sorry you’re stuck wondering if Covid affected your husband’s brain. That’s tough. It may have, just based on current research findings. Another reason to avoid it if at all possible.

  21. 21.

    The Other Steve

    See the latest COVID-19 information on X

    Yeah, that doesn’t work…   And I’m not sure I’d want it to work.

  22. 22.

    JaneE

    I got my booster (annual?) Covid shot a couple of weeks ago.  That’s #5.  So far as I know, I have not had the disease itself, but with my allergies I might not have noticed a mild case.   On Medicare with my health provider it was still free.

  23. 23.

    hrprogressive

    @New Deal democrat: ​
     

    No, it really doesn’t.

    At a bare minimum, I need us to get to COVID behaving like flu in the sense that it gets low enough that it fucking vanishes for 9 months out of the year.

    And/or, we need to speed “next gen vaccines” that stop the damn thing in its tracks.

    I might not be quite as consumed by panic about it as I was in 2020-2021, but I absolutely would like to avoid getting it – more or less at all costs, still – because I don’t really wish to be dead via a heart attack or stroke before or not long after I turn 40, which is still a few years away.

    I can make peace with the idea it’s never going away, but, this idea of semi-quarterly or quarterly waves is fucking ridiculous, and should not be an acceptable status quo for anyone.

  24. 24.

    Matt McIrvin

    @hrprogressive: COVID’s simply not “seasonal” in that sense–I was confused by the medical discourse on this for a while, but “seasonal” seems to be a specific term of art not referring to just any periodic behavior, but meaning, as you said, “it fucking vanishes for 9 months”.

    Coronaviruses don’t work that way, apparently. It is seasonal in the sense that there’s a bad wave every winter. But there’s this low continuous background during the rest of the year and there can be smaller waves at other times.

    One thing we are seeing is way less immediate impact. The early-fall wave that’s receding now, in terms of the amount of virus around, was as bad as the first wave in 2020 here in Massachusetts. But that first wave had a gigantic butcher’s bill and this one is killing very few people. The virus actually got way more contagious, but humans also got more resistance one way or another.

  26. 26.

    Matt McIrvin

    (I also find that it’s very hard to tell “how bad things are right now” from, say, doctors’ statements on social media. Wastewater counts give a much better idea, but the disruption from the CDC switching from Biobot to Google’s thing really threw a monkey wrench into any effort to get continuous data.)

  27. 27.

    StringOnAStick

    @Matt McIrvin: At the beginning of the pandemic here in the US, the poor and POC were disproportionately infected and dying at higher rates; that right there is why the Right was fine with letting it wash over us and “kill the weak”.  As the pandemic deepened, there was less of this difference in who was infected, but the initial impressions stuck.  Remember the rat fornicators who tried to get a young woman to accuse Dr Fauci of sexual harassment?  They told her she would be doing the world a favor by taking him down; I’m sure they were hoping to kill more POC and D voters in general.  I guess that’s why I take an evil pleasure in seeing it kill more R’s than D’s, because if you still think the vaccines are a deep state plot (or worse), the planet is better off without you on it.  EF Goldman was right.

  28. 28.

    StringOnAStick

    @NeenerNeener: All the vaccines I had before I got Covid left me feeling crappy for a day or two.  I’ve had one dose since I had Covid and I didn’t feel it at all.  It’s all so new so who knows.

  29. 29.

    StringOnAStick

    @hrprogressive: Well, typical colds and even the flu don’t entirely vanish for 9 months of the year; we’ve all had “summer colds” and even flu shows up but at a low level and mostly impacts people in congregate care settings.

    Putting the entire country in the same category for discussion of seasonality doesn’t make sense because we are such a large country with so many different seasonal variations.  In all but the summer, most people in FL are outside but when it gets too hot, they are inside with the AC going and that’s when their Covid numbers go up.  It’s the opposite in the northern tier states.  We do a weekly music thing, and all summer we can keep the doors open and have great air flow, but last night it was damned cold in there so no open doors.  I’m thinking about building the HEPA filter box fan setup and bringing it to the performance space every week.

  30. 30.

    MountainBoy

    Just recovering from my first case of Covid that manifested during a two week road trip from Colorado to the Central and Southern coast of California.

    My wife and I are both 62, active, fit and healthy. We had all of the vaccinations (4 or 5?), except the current one-which we were unable to schedule prior to the trip. We departed CO on Thursday 10/19 driving, camping and mtn biking along the way.

    We did not take any masking precautions along the way.

    Our trip was mostly spent outdoors (camper van) with a few exceptions: a wine tasting at a vineyard, a few meals at indoor restaurants with a family member and one musical event in a large indoor venue where we avoided the crowd upfront (10/27).

    The symptoms came on very quickly (Monday 10/30), beginning with a persistent dry cough during the night, then fever, sore throat, malaise, headache, muscle pain, and congestion by mid-morning.
    I could barely get out of the van at our campground on the coast to look out at the ocean. My wife went out and bought some rapid tests:
    I tested positive around noon.
    My wife tested negative.

    We packed up the van immediately and started the drive home. We both masked up for the trip home, stopping in UT for about 8 hours, she in a hotel room and me sleeping in the van.
    We got home the next evening (Wednesday) and continued to mask and “isolate” from each other.

    By the next morning (Thursday) she was symptomatic and tested positive.

    I have gradually improved some each day, but am far from healthy yet (maybe 60% after 8 days). I however tested negative on Monday and again yesterday (Tuesday).
    My wife was just starting to feel a little better yesterday afternoon but still tested positive(Tuesday). Seems that she is 2-3 days behind me in all aspects.

    We just cancelled our plans to visit with her aging parents in NJ for Thanksgiving.

    I share this first hand experience here as it seems that reporting on the current “wave” of covid appears to be muted.

    Surprisingly, my state/county’s health dept. is no longer accepting or keeping tallies of infections except those generated by the health care industry and that from the limited wastewater studies (seems to be the norm for most states now)?!?

    I hope this contemporary first hand account may offer insights to those of you who also become infected or inform others as you make your own decisions about risk of exposure, masking, holiday visits, etc.

    From what we have researched-over the last week (and that is a LOT of info), we are both experiencing “mild” covid.
    I cannot imagine what moderate or severe covid is like.

    In hindsight, I wish that I had tried harder to get the new covid (and flu) vaccine before this trip as we had intended.
    1-2 days of vaccine side effect suffering would be nothing compared to all of the impacts we have now experienced!

    Try to stay healthy out there everyone!

  31. 31.

    Bill Arnold

    @EarthWindFire:

    If all those unvaccinated folks are worried about vaccines being shed on them, they should just stay home.

    Surely they realize that the (uhm) shed vaccine particles cannot harm them unless they are inhaled, and that they should wear high-effectiveness masks when in danger of breathing the exhalations of the vaxxed?

  32. 32.

    Bill Arnold

    @hrprogressive:

    At a bare minimum, I need us to get to COVID behaving like flu in the sense that it gets low enough that it fucking vanishes for 9 months out of the year.

    Not gonna happen. The currently-circulating strains have an R0 of like 8.
    That gets knocked down by any sterilizing immune response, which can happen with a low-dose exposure, or with NPIs like masks or varying levels of social isolation.
    But not below 1.
    Even a brand new strain of influenza, with limited immunity in the population, has an R0 of like 1.6, so NPIs can easily knock it below 1, like happened to influenza in 2q2020 and all of 2021.
    Normal influenza is more like 1.2-1.4.

  34. 34.

    Matt McIrvin

    @StringOnAStick: I know that in the early days, spring 2020, much of the country saw this as a problem exclusive to crowded coastal Democratic-voting cities. There was speculation about how we needed to get rid of dense cities to control pandemics. Jared Kushner’s buddy task force actually came up with a list of possible COVID interventions and the Trump administration rejected all of them because COVID was just a political problem for blue-state governments.

    The problem flipped from being worse for Democrats to being worse for Republicans right around the time Biden entered office. In fact, I think the reason much of the country doesn’t blame Trump for mishandling COVID is that when Trump was in office, COVID simply wasn’t a big problem for them yet. It was a problem for us here in the urban Northeast.

  35. 35.

    OGLiberal

    Since getting COVID my son (the entire family got it, of course) had a Crohn’s flare up (he was diagnosed well before the pandemic but hadn’t had a flare-up 6+ years), has lost 3/4 of his hair (he had a minor bout with Alopecia a few years ago but this is way worse and way more aggressive – he’s been seeing a dermatologist for almost year and nothing, so far, has worked), and recently developed two styes in his eye that won’t go away.  We are fully vaxxed and boosted, rarely go to public places, and always – always – wear masks when we do.  Kids are homeschooled so no risk of exposure there. (I have to say, we didn’t miss a beat when the pandemic started re: our kids education – one benefit this atheist,  liberal homeschooling dad really appreciated.)

    Unrelated?  Maybe.  But none of this crap was happening before he got COVID.

    He’s lost 3/4 of his hair.  He’s 17 and he is absolutely miserable about it.  We got COVID from a downstairs cop neighbor who knew she had COVID and was still gallavanting around with no mask.  Fuckers.

  36. 36.

    currawong

    I think these two statements may be linked:

    • Most Western governments face a demographic timebomb as Boomers retire and there is not a large enough workforce in place to support their retirement/medical needs.
    • COVID-19 kills mainly old people.

    I believethey are completely underestimating the accumulating damage the virus is causing to the younger generations including children.

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