Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus & H5N1 Updates: October 2, 2024

COVID-19 Coronavirus & H5N1 Updates: October 2, 2024

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    19Comments

    1. 1.

      Lapassionara

      Thank you, AL. I feel like COVID fatigue has taken over, and that is too bad, as it is very much with us, I appreciate your keeping us informed.

      Reply
    2. 2.

      lowtechcyclist

      I ordered and received my new Covid tests from the USPS, and it turns out they’re not very new. They expire in December, and that’s the extended expiration date; the original expiration was in 2023.

      Reply
    4. 4.

      eclare

      I have an appointment to get my flu and covid vaccines on Thursday.

      I wonder how many people DeSantis and Ladapo will kill this year?  It’s disgusting. And breathtaking that a government actively wants to kill its citizens.

      Reply
    6. 6.

      Bruce K in ATH-GR

      It’s still out there.

      My mom caught it a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully it wasn’t a severe case, because she’s elderly, and even more thankfully, she didn’t pass it to my dad, who’s also elderly. I’m masking every day, I got a pile of self-tests (not free, but less than one euro apiece), and I plan to take advantage of my eligibility for a free JN.1 shot at the end of October so it’ll hopefully be fully in effect by Christmas.

      I would like to invite both DeSantis and his Surgeon General to use a cheese knife and a corkscrew to overcome the anatomical obstacles to autosodomy.

      Reply
    7. 7.

      Matt McIrvin

      The MWRA finally dumped a bunch of Biobot data a few days ago that shows that Boston’s modest late-summer/early-fall wave hit some kind of crescendo and then apparently ended. I have no illusions we won’t have the usual winter wave come the holidays of course. My wife got some COVID tests at the drug store to diagnose some sniffles she got that were apparently not COVID; anecdotally there seems to be some non-COVID mild respiratory infection going around right now. She didn’t know about the renewal of the government test offer (but it wouldn’t have been fast enough to help her anyway). I guess I should get some more from them.

      Reply
    8. 8.

      TBone

      The co-owner of a Chicago COVID-19 testing laboratory has pleaded guilty to a $14 million fraud scheme in which his company provided fake negative results to people who had been tested and billed the federal government for the tests.

      https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/zishan-alvi-guilty-plea-covid-19-testing-fraud/

      I know this is one lab, but how many were infected and spread Covid as a result?

      LabElite offered both PCR and rapid COVID-19 tests to consumers at storefronts locations beginning in late 2020.

      In a plea deal with federal prosecutors, Alvi admitted that between February 2021 and February 2022, his company billed the federal government $14 million for more than 85,000 COVID-19 tests that were never processed.

      Reply
    9. 9.

      MattF

      Got my free COVID test kits, the mailer contains two small boxes, each with two kits. Expiration at the end of this year.

      ETA: Just astonishing that Ladapo and DeSantis get away with their bullshit.

      Reply
    10. 10.

      New Deal democrat

      Some relatively good news as both Biobot (which has resumed updating) and the CDC show a marked ebbing of the summer wave. The CDC’s update shows particles down 35% from their August peak, about 40% back to their springtime lows.

      In further good news, the KP.x summer variants remain near saturation at about 85% of all cases. Two new recombinant hybrids of KP.x and this spring’s JN.x variants, dubbed XEC, are rapidly increasing in share. Because the population was recently exposed to both strains, this should not create a new spike.

      Deaths probably made a short term peak of 1,239 during the week of August 31. Preliminary death counts have backed off about 25% as of the week of September 21.

      Hopefully the situation will continue to abate until the inevitable Thanksgiving through New Year winter wave.

      The bird flu news is ominous. All flu variants for the past 100 years have been descendants of the WW1 era Spanish flu. A wholly new strain circulating in the human population will likely have a pandemic type death toll.

      Reply
    11. 11.

      Matt McIrvin

      @New Deal democrat: The bright side is that flu vaccines are a mature technology and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything preventing a vaccine for this from being effective. Of course it won’t work if people don’t get it, and the politicization of COVID has produced a huge cohort of antivaxxers. But I also wonder if the CDC is on the ball here.

      Reply
    12. 12.

      hrprogressive

      Yeah I’d really like to know more about that Bird Flu situation.

      Not to dismiss COVID, but an H1N5 pandemic is way more frightening to me at this point.

      Hopefully we’re not on the cusp of that and this still remains an outlier.

      Reply
    15. 15.

      Kristine

      Flu/spikevax shot this past Saturday—arm stayed pretty sore for a couple of days and the site is still tender but no other side effects. Also received the test kits. I should check the dates of the older stash to see if any have been extended.

      Hope they’re working on bird flu vaccines is all I can say. I haven’t had a case of the flu since I started getting flu vax regularly almost thirty years ago and they’re sometimes only 40-50% effective.

      Adding my thanks to everyone else’s AL

      Reply
    17. 17.

      StringOnAStick

      @Matt McIrvin: The downside about flu vaccine is it takes a long time to ramp up production because it’s grown in chicken eggs, so see where the ordinary bottleneck is and then add mass culling of chickens to the mix and where will the vaccine come from?  I’ve seen hints of a flu vaccine being developed from the same technology as the Covid vaccines, and I sincerely hope this is very far along because it might be extremely as it might be the fastest way to get enough flu vaccine made.  Flu mutates very quickly, just like Covid does.

      Reply
    18. 18.

      Bill Arnold

      @Matt McIrvin:

      The bright side is that flu vaccines are a mature technology and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything preventing a vaccine for this from being effective.

      Also, non-pharmaceutical interventions like masks, improved ventilation, isolation when infected, work much better against influenzas, which historically have had an R0 below 2 even for very novel strains. This is clear from influenza statistics maintained by various governments including CDC; for much of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, seasonal influenza cases essentially disappeared. Testing for influenza was being done.

      Reply

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