Vaccine/Antibody updates

[Warriors4ever]

I thought everyone in Florida was getting monoclonal antibodies. 

[MU82]

Agree that nobody should be put on a ventilator if they specifically express their stance on it beforehand. I'm not certain that was the case with these Fla. mouth-breathers, though. A person saying her or his spouse wouldn't have wanted to be on a ventilator is not the same thing.

[ZiggysFryBoy]

Agree that nobody should be put on a ventilator if they specifically express their stance on it beforehand. I'm not certain that was the case with these Fla. mouth-breathers, though. A person saying her or his spouse wouldn't have wanted to be on a ventilator is not the same thing.

An end of life directive and/or durable power of attorney would give the spouse the ability to make that decision.

IANAL

[Warriors4ever]

Those would come into play if the patient couldn’t make the decision.

[MU82]

Two Charlotte-area cops died this week from COVID-19.

That police officers and firefighters are two groups so vax-resistent is one of the ongoing tragedies of this virus. Unnecessary deaths hitting the misinformed, the stubborn and/or the partisan.

[MU82]

Example #9,452 ... refusing to get vaccinated is NOT just a "personal choice" that affects only those who make it ...

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article254580002.html

This family is devastated because their otherwise healthy 20-year-old son made the personal choice to not get vaccinated.

"I cannot explain the depth of the pain I felt as I watched the life drain from my baby’s body over those five days. It was the hideous nightmare no mother should ever have to endure," said his mother. "Our family is devastated. There is a Tyler-sized hole in our hearts that can never be filled. Tyler’s death was totally avoidable if he had been vaccinated. I am begging those who are unvaccinated to please act now. No family should ever have to go through this."

[pbiflyer]

We can take comfort in knowing they all died doing what they loved....their own research.

[Jockey]

Example #9,452 ... refusing to get vaccinated is NOT just a "personal choice" that affects only those who make it ...

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article254580002.html

This family is devastated because their otherwise healthy 20-year-old son made the personal choice to not get vaccinated.

"I cannot explain the depth of the pain I felt as I watched the life drain from my baby’s body over those five days. It was the hideous nightmare no mother should ever have to endure," said his mother. "Our family is devastated. There is a Tyler-sized hole in our hearts that can never be filled. Tyler’s death was totally avoidable if he had been vaccinated. I am begging those who are unvaccinated to please act now. No family should ever have to go through this."

I can't imagine the heartbreak of losing  a child at that age. But, a parent's #1 job is to keep their family safe. These parents failed at that job.

My wife and I had serious discussions with our kids, their spouses, and their kids to make sure they were vaccinated as soon as it was available for their age groups. A couple were initially a little resistant (with DiL very resistant), but they all ended up getting it when available.

There is so much that, as parents, we can't protect our family from. As a country, we need to quit letting our kids die from parental neglect.

[Warriors4ever]

I think that's being awfully harsh on the parents, who now have to wonder for the rest of the their lives if there was anything more they could have done. 

[Jockey]

I think that's being awfully harsh on the parents, who now have to wonder for the rest of the their lives if there was anything more they could have done.

Maybe so, but people are getting such bad info that everything possible needs to be done. I certainly remember feeling pretty invincible at 20 years old. There's a good chance I would have needed someone to tell me in no uncertain terms to get the vaccine.

[jficke13]

Two Charlotte-area cops died this week from COVID-19.

That police officers and firefighters are two groups so vax-resistent is one of the ongoing tragedies of this virus. Unnecessary deaths hitting the misinformed, the stubborn and/or the partisan.

COVID is *BY FAR* the biggest cop killer of 2020/2021. Doesn't sell as many thin blue line fascist-sympathy flags if they acknowledge that a virus is the enemy and not people tho.

[Jockey]

COVID is *BY FAR* the biggest cop killer of 2020/2021. Doesn't sell as many thin blue line fascist-sympathy flags if they acknowledge that a virus is the enemy and not people tho.

They could change the name to ‘BLM virus’ to make the thin blue line flag wavers happy.

[tower912]

If it became known that the virus had brown skin, heaven and earth would have been moved to stop it.

[Billy Hoyle]

I remember people on Twitter like Rex Chapman recoiling in horror at the pictures of college football crowds. Some reporters posting they were literally in tears over such sites, predicting mass deaths from those gatherings.  Well, even the NY Times is now saying they overreacted. Interesting choice of words that they lack of a surge is "unsatisfying."

From the NY Times "The Morning" email:

The September swoon
In the final weeks of this summer, with Covid-19 cases soaring and the rituals of autumn about to resume, many people assumed that the pandemic was on the verge of getting even worse.

Children were returning to classrooms five days a week. Broadway was reopening, and movie fans were heading to theaters again. In football stadiums across the country, fans were crowding together, usually unmasked, to cheer, sing and drink.

Given all of this — and the Delta variant — public discussion had a decidedly grim tone as the summer wound down. “It may only get worse,” read a Politico headline. “The new school year is already a disaster,” Business Insider reported.

The Washington Post cited an estimate that daily caseloads in the U.S. could reach 300,000 in August, higher than ever before. An expert quoted in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette suggested the number could be higher yet. In The New York Times, an epidemiologist predicted that cases would rise in September because children were going back to school.

And what actually happened? Cases plunged.

The best measure of U.S. cases (a seven-day average, adjusted for holiday anomalies) peaked around 166,000 on Sept. 1 — the very day that seemed to augur a new surge. The number of new daily cases has since fallen almost 40 percent. Hospitalizations are down about 30 percent. Deaths, which typically change direction a few weeks after cases, have declined 13 percent since Sept. 20.

To be fair, forecasting a pandemic is inherently difficult. Virtually all of us, expert and not, have at times been surprised by Covid and incorrect about what was likely to happen next. It’s unavoidable.

But there is a pattern to some of the recent mistakes, and understanding it can help us avoid repeating them.

Clutch chokers
Let’s start by recalling a near-universal human trait: People are attracted to stories with heroes and villains. In these stories, the character flaws of the villains bring them down, allowing the decency of the heroes to triumph. The stories create a clear relationship between cause and effect. They make sense.

Books, television shows and movies are full of such stories. But for the purposes of understanding Covid, another form of mass entertainment — sports — is more useful.

Unlike novels or movies, sporting events involve true uncertainty. They are not part of a fictional world, with an author’s predetermined ending. And as is the case with more important subjects, like a pandemic, sports are subject to a lot of predictions. For these reasons, social scientists, including Nobel laureates, sometimes study sports to learn lessons about the human mind.

If you turn on almost any sporting event, you will hear tales of heroes and villains. Sports broadcasters often use moralistic language — with concepts like “clutch” and “choke” — to explain outcomes. The broadcasters turn games into “referenda on character,” as Joe Sheehan, who writes an excellent baseball newsletter, has put it. The athletes with strong character win, and the weak lose.

But anybody who watches sports for long enough will notice that these morality plays do not age well. Many athletes or coaches whom broadcasters long described as chokers (Clayton Kershaw, Andy Reid, Phil Mickelson, Alex Rodriguez, John Elway, Jana Novotná, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dan Jansen and many more) eventually won championships with clutch performances.

They did not have character flaws that prevented them from winning. They had been unlucky, or they had run into better competition. Until they didn’t.

The real world often does not lend itself to moralistic fables.


A security guard at Walter Kerr Theater in New York City.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times
Vaccines and humility
In the case of Covid, the fable we tell ourselves is that our day-to-day behavior dictates the course of the pandemic. When we are good — by staying socially distant and wearing our masks — cases are supposed to fall. When we are bad — by eating in restaurants, hanging out with friends and going to a theater or football game — cases are supposed to rise.

The idea is especially alluring to anybody making an effort to be careful and feeling frustrated that so many other Americans seem blasé. After all, the Covid fable does have an some truth to it. Social distancing and masking do reduce the spread of the virus. They just are not as powerful as people often imagine.

The main determinants of Covid’s spread (other than vaccines, which are extremely effective) remain mysterious. Some activities that seem dangerous, like in-person school or crowded outdoor gatherings, may not always be. As unsatisfying as it is, we do not know why cases have recently plunged. The decline is consistent with the fact that Covid surges often last for about two months before receding, but that’s merely a description of the data, not a causal explanation.

“We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, has told me.

In coming weeks and months, it is possible that the virus will surge again, maybe because of a new variant or because vaccine immunity will wane. It is also possible that the population has built up enough immunity — from both vaccines and previous infections — that Delta will have been the last major wave.

We don’t know, and we do not have to pretend otherwise. We do not have to treat Covid as a facile referendum on virtue.

[pacearrow02]

I remember people on Twitter like Rex Chapman recoiling in horror at the pictures of college football crowds. Some reporters posting they were literally in tears over such sites, predicting mass deaths from those gatherings.  Well, even the NY Times is now saying they overreacted. Interesting choice of words that they lack of a surge is "unsatisfying."

From the NY Times "The Morning" email:

The September swoon
In the final weeks of this summer, with Covid-19 cases soaring and the rituals of autumn about to resume, many people assumed that the pandemic was on the verge of getting even worse.

Children were returning to classrooms five days a week. Broadway was reopening, and movie fans were heading to theaters again. In football stadiums across the country, fans were crowding together, usually unmasked, to cheer, sing and drink.

Given all of this — and the Delta variant — public discussion had a decidedly grim tone as the summer wound down. “It may only get worse,” read a Politico headline. “The new school year is already a disaster,” Business Insider reported.

The Washington Post cited an estimate that daily caseloads in the U.S. could reach 300,000 in August, higher than ever before. An expert quoted in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette suggested the number could be higher yet. In The New York Times, an epidemiologist predicted that cases would rise in September because children were going back to school.

And what actually happened? Cases plunged.

The best measure of U.S. cases (a seven-day average, adjusted for holiday anomalies) peaked around 166,000 on Sept. 1 — the very day that seemed to augur a new surge. The number of new daily cases has since fallen almost 40 percent. Hospitalizations are down about 30 percent. Deaths, which typically change direction a few weeks after cases, have declined 13 percent since Sept. 20.

To be fair, forecasting a pandemic is inherently difficult. Virtually all of us, expert and not, have at times been surprised by Covid and incorrect about what was likely to happen next. It’s unavoidable.

But there is a pattern to some of the recent mistakes, and understanding it can help us avoid repeating them.

Clutch chokers
Let’s start by recalling a near-universal human trait: People are attracted to stories with heroes and villains. In these stories, the character flaws of the villains bring them down, allowing the decency of the heroes to triumph. The stories create a clear relationship between cause and effect. They make sense.

Books, television shows and movies are full of such stories. But for the purposes of understanding Covid, another form of mass entertainment — sports — is more useful.

Unlike novels or movies, sporting events involve true uncertainty. They are not part of a fictional world, with an author’s predetermined ending. And as is the case with more important subjects, like a pandemic, sports are subject to a lot of predictions. For these reasons, social scientists, including Nobel laureates, sometimes study sports to learn lessons about the human mind.

If you turn on almost any sporting event, you will hear tales of heroes and villains. Sports broadcasters often use moralistic language — with concepts like “clutch” and “choke” — to explain outcomes. The broadcasters turn games into “referenda on character,” as Joe Sheehan, who writes an excellent baseball newsletter, has put it. The athletes with strong character win, and the weak lose.

But anybody who watches sports for long enough will notice that these morality plays do not age well. Many athletes or coaches whom broadcasters long described as chokers (Clayton Kershaw, Andy Reid, Phil Mickelson, Alex Rodriguez, John Elway, Jana Novotná, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dan Jansen and many more) eventually won championships with clutch performances.

They did not have character flaws that prevented them from winning. They had been unlucky, or they had run into better competition. Until they didn’t.

The real world often does not lend itself to moralistic fables.


A security guard at Walter Kerr Theater in New York City.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times
Vaccines and humility
In the case of Covid, the fable we tell ourselves is that our day-to-day behavior dictates the course of the pandemic. When we are good — by staying socially distant and wearing our masks — cases are supposed to fall. When we are bad — by eating in restaurants, hanging out with friends and going to a theater or football game — cases are supposed to rise.

The idea is especially alluring to anybody making an effort to be careful and feeling frustrated that so many other Americans seem blasé. After all, the Covid fable does have an some truth to it. Social distancing and masking do reduce the spread of the virus. They just are not as powerful as people often imagine.

The main determinants of Covid’s spread (other than vaccines, which are extremely effective) remain mysterious. Some activities that seem dangerous, like in-person school or crowded outdoor gatherings, may not always be. As unsatisfying as it is, we do not know why cases have recently plunged. The decline is consistent with the fact that Covid surges often last for about two months before receding, but that’s merely a description of the data, not a causal explanation.

“We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, has told me.

In coming weeks and months, it is possible that the virus will surge again, maybe because of a new variant or because vaccine immunity will wane. It is also possible that the population has built up enough immunity — from both vaccines and previous infections — that Delta will have been the last major wave.

We don’t know, and we do not have to pretend otherwise. We do not have to treat Covid as a facile referendum on virtue.

This is what stood out to me most, the acknowledgment that even the experts are now admitting they don’t know what the hell is going on more often then not but God forbid anyone questions the insane measures put in place over the last 18 months and if you do question them it can only be rooted in your racism, your stupidity, political beliefs, etc.  You either follow suit with what you’re told or you are a Covid denier and want to see people die. 


“We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, has told me.

In coming weeks and months, it is possible that the virus will surge again, maybe because of a new variant or because vaccine immunity will wane. It is also possible that the population has built up enough immunity — from both vaccines and previous infections — that Delta will have been the last major wave.

We don’t know, and we do not have to pretend otherwise. We do not have to treat Covid as a facile referendum on virtue.[/b]

[pacearrow02]

https://mobile.twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1446446619734519811

And then there is this.  As I posted a few days ago, it took 20 years before Wisconsin required the polio vaccine for school attendance.  I’m guessing they will never require the C19 vaccine much like they don’t require the annual flu shot.  Recommend sure but I’d be shocked if it’s ever a requirement.

[TSmith34, Inc.]

I remember people on Twitter like Rex Chapman recoiling in horror at the pictures of college football crowds. Some reporters posting they were literally in tears over such sites, predicting mass deaths from those gatherings.  Well, even the NY Times is now saying they overreacted. Interesting choice of words that they lack of a surge is "unsatisfying."

No, they did not say that the lack of a surge in cases is unsatisfying. They said it was unsatisfying to say we don't know why cases recently plunged.


"As unsatisfying as it is, we do not know why cases have recently plunged."

[jesmu84]

I remember folks saying that covid was a cold/flu and it would be over with in a short time.

What's your unnatural carnal knowledgeing point?

Christ.

Stop worrying about who was right and who was wrong in the middle of the spread of an unknown disease. Focus on taking care of yourself - and others, if you're able.

[jficke13]

I remember folks saying that covid was a cold/flu and it would be over with in a short time.

What's your unnatural carnal knowledgeing point?

Christ.

Stop worrying about who was right and who was wrong in the middle of the spread of an unknown disease. Focus on taking care of yourself - and others, if you're able.

The point, as always, is trolling.

[tower912]

Probably running out of potential hosts.   Vaccines are up.   So many people had it recently that they probably won't get reinfected in the near term.

It will be a wonderful day when I know longer am doing CPR on patients with active COVID.

[Pakuni]

The point, as always, is trolling.

Despite a safe, effective and free vaccine available since spring, nearly 75,000 people died last month because of COVID. But they think they're dunking on people because ... it wasn't even worse?

[pacearrow02]

I remember folks saying that covid was a cold/flu and it would be over with in a short time.

What's your unnatural carnal knowledgeing point?

Christ.

Stop worrying about who was right and who was wrong in the middle of the spread of an unknown disease. Focus on taking care of yourself - and others, if you're able.

Well there in lie’s the problem. 

People haven’t been allowed to do what they feel is best for themselves.  Mandatory masking, stay at home orders, vaccine mandates, social distancing, business and religious gatherings shut down, work from home, schools shut down, contact tracing that led to home isolation, cancelled elective surgeries, cancer screenings missed, domestic/international travel shutdown,  friggin yellow police tape keeping kids off public playgrounds last fall/summer etc etc.  You want to go trick or treating in 2020, not unless you want to kill grandma you little spoiled brat!!

It’s pretty rich for you to say quit looking in the rear view to find fault with what we were forced to go through without evidence or input to now say just worry about yourself and do what you feel keeps you and others safe.  With all due respect, pound sand buddy.

[jficke13]

Well there in lie’s the problem. 

People haven’t been allowed to do what they feel is best for themselves.  Mandatory masking, stay at home orders, vaccine mandates, social distancing, business and religious gatherings shut down, work from home, schools shut down, contact tracing that led to home isolation, cancelled elective surgeries, cancer screenings missed, domestic/international travel shutdown,  friggin yellow police tape keeping kids off public playgrounds last fall/summer etc etc.  You want to go trick or treating in 2020, not unless you want to kill grandma you little spoiled brat!!

It’s pretty rich for you to say quit looking in the rear view to find fault with what we were forced to go through without evidence or input to now say just worry about yourself and do what you feel keeps you and others safe.  With all due respect, pound sand buddy.

There are only two possible ways to interpret your every post on this topic since the beginning.

1. You're trolling. You don't actually mean any of the stuff you're saying. You're just saying it to 'own' someone.

2. You do believe the things that you are saying. If this is true, then the sole motivating philosophy of your life is that you ought to be able to do what you please, other people's interests be damned. That's certainly a choice, and you wouldn't be alone in espousing such a profoundly selfish philosophy in the country today. But don't pretend that you're some champion of higher principals. You just want to do what you want to do and not be interfered with by anything or anyone for any reason.

You'll forgive me if I find neither to reflect particularly well on you.

[pacearrow02]

I remember folks saying that covid was a cold/flu and it would be over with in a short time.

What's your unnatural carnal knowledgeing point?

Christ.

Stop worrying about who was right and who was wrong in the middle of the spread of an unknown disease. Focus on taking care of yourself - and others, if you're able.

And your example of people comparing it to the flu…..I remember a very reasonable/mature reaction to that with people saying ahhhh shucks who cares what those people say or think.  All we need to worry about is doing what we feel keeps us and our loved ones safe.  That’s exactly how it went.

[TSmith34, Inc.]

And your example of people comparing it to the flu…..I remember a very reasonable/mature reaction to that with people saying ahhhh shucks who cares what those people say or think.  All we need to worry about is doing what we feel keeps us and our loved ones safe.  That’s exactly how it went.