YES, kids should go back to school in person next month, with temporary exceptions during serious outbreaks. The risks of infection are far lower than the risk of yet another year of remote "learning."
YES, kids should wear masks in school. Some extra caution is a good idea.
YES, vaccinations should be mandated for all health professionals who work with the public. This is really a no-brainer.
YES, we should accept help from wherever we can get it. If Alex Jones is willing to hype vaccinations by inventing a story that liberals have been secretly promoting vaccine fear in order to kill off conservatives, that's fine. Whatever.
YES, vaccination mandates should be as widespread as possible. Corporations should put them in place for their own workers; businesses should put them in place for customers; and states should put them in place for everyone. They are legal, constitutional, and sensible. Enforce them via tax credits available only to those who have been vaccinated.
NO, mask mandates shouldn't include most outdoor areas. The point here is not to put in place the maximum possible regime. It's to put in place a regime that truly provides the most bang for the buck.
Good rule set.
Agree 100%. Prudent, but not extreme.
Except we're faced with an extreme situation.
If we can get there....
Moderna is getting EUA in the EU for kids down to 12, not sure if FDA will follow soon. With teachers and teenagers vaccinated, then schools (with masks) certainly is a no-brainer, and long as community spread is low. The sad thing is AR is over 60 new cases/day/100K, higher in hot spots, and I'm guessing they'd have no problem re-opening schools right now, everywhere, no masks. They being the state gov't and some loud covid-deniers.
Masks for outdoor events? Actually, yes--to a point. Mask up going through ticketing and at concession stands, no masks when you're back with your party. Delta in not your ordinary Covid.
As for vaccine mandates--proof of vaccination or get weekly testing and wear a mask has been enough of an incentive to push people to get vaccinated. Now some state laws might block that, but....Also, vaccine access still an issue in poor areas. I would hope to see a mobile vaccination clinic at every church, every Sunday in areas with low vaccination rates.
Right now: 69% of adults have at least 1 dose, 60% fully vaccinated. Looks like we'll hit 70% by Aug 4th--only a month off. Looks like vaccinations are picking up a little with this current wave of infections (and school/college/work vaccine requirements?) After a slow start, Canada is beating us.
Pfizer is already available down to age 12 in the US--while having both would be helpful, getting most high schoolers vaccinated is already feasible.
One thing I do not get is the magic cutoff. At 16 (earlier and for many ) or 12 for phizer now, the establishment idea is that vaccines are ok for use and more even strongly encouraged . And if you do not get them , you are a bad horrible evil vaccine resistor who deserves anything bad. But magically below that age, even by one day, the vaccine is too dangerous to allow to be taken even voluntarily.
Something has to be wrong on one side of that age range or a little on both.
Seems there logically should be some age range in the middle where, at youngest age, the vaccine is somewhat recommended against but still allowed voluntarily, and maybe would be a good idea in some situations ( a child whose only parent has medical conditions putting them at big risk of dying?) And at upper range, the vaccine is encouraged but acknowledge that the decision is unclear enough to question someone's personal decision.
My guess is that the science is such that they should be able to allow a vaccination under 12 down to a lower age voluntarily and that up to at least maybe 18 or 20 ( and maybe higher) it should be admitted that the choice of whether or is worth it is not as absolutely clear.
So dumb. Lines have to be drawn somewhere, that's why we have ages. It's not like alcohol is deadly to you at 17.364 and suddenly OK at 18.000 or 21 if you prefer.
The vaccine has only been approved for 12+ because that is the only age group for which the clinical trials have been completed and the results reviewed. That's how science works.
Here’s a link to a Twitter thread by UCSF Dr. Bob Wachter that I think you will find very interesting (link courtesy of felinecannonball):
https://mobile.twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1419515389893959683
thanks for the link
This works for me.
[Since Kevin doesn't seem to be doing the Daily Death updates, I don't have a better place else to put this.]
This is a follow-up from Saturday, regarding why vaccine-induces false positives don't exist.
@rational_thought:
The fact that the vaccines target the spike protein has been well covered in the popular press, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. The mechanism of action of the various tests tends to be buried in technical documentation, so that's what we'll look at here.
Here, from the FDA, are the instructions for use of the Abbott PCR test (which is, I believe, the most commonly used PCR test in the US; I don't know about elsewhere): https://www.fda.gov/media/136258/download
Scroll down to the last sentence in the second paragraph of the "Amplification" section on the second page:
SARS-CoV-2 RdRp is the virus's RNA-dependent RNA-polymerase gene. (Don't worry too much about what that means; suffice to say that it is important to the virus.)
SARS-CoV-2 N is the virus's nucleocapsid gene, the one that I mentioned on Saturday. (Again, it's important to the virus.)
IC is an internal positive control, completely unrelated to the virus itself, added to the sample before processing. It's there to ensure that the PCR process didn't completely screw up (which is something that does happen; PCR can be fickle). If the IC doesn't show up in the results, it means that the test failed in some way and has to be redone.
So, why does the test target those particular regions? It does so because those regions of the genome are highly conserved, meaning that their rates of mutation are very low, which in turn means that the test will continue to recognize them as the virus evolves. And why are they highly conserved? Because they are crucial to the virus's operation; a mutation is more likely than not to be lethal (where "lethal" is being used a little loosely here, since viruses are not technically living organisms, but you get what I mean).
Here's a nice picture showing where the various genes are located on the virus's genome: https://biosearch-cdn.azureedge.net/assetsv6/SARS-CoV-2_variants_b.png
So, is it possible to devise a PCR test that looks for the spike protein? Absolutely. That's how labs can determine which strain you've been infected with. But that degree of specificity is precisely why you don't want to target the spike protein in your COVID screening test. Imagine a COVID test that targets the many variants. Along comes a new variant. Because it's specific to the existing variants, it completely misses the new one. Not good.
As for the antigen tests, I don't know which one(s) are most commonly used, but here's some info on the Roche test: https://diagnostics.roche.com/global/en/products/params/sars-cov-2-rapid-antigen-test.html#productSpecs
Note that under antigen, it lists "N"; i.e., the nucleocapsid protein.
Why is it that you can proofread something a dozen times, and as soon as you hit Print, a typo jumps out at you?
"vaccine-induces false positives" should be "vaccine-induced false positives"
"Why is it that you can proofread something a dozen times, and as soon as you hit Print, a typo jumps out at you?"
Oh, I don't know. Could it be the pale orange typeface that is displayed when you are writing your comment?
And although you can "step outside" of your comment to see the tentative post in black, the slightest slip of your finger can post it without a correction or maybe even delete it
Why can't suggestions be directed to WordPress?
>> Kevin doesn't seem to be doing the Daily Death updates<<
At this point I’m guessing he isn’t bothering with the weekends. For the US, and I think other countries, there is very little reporting of numbers in any event and it catches up on Tuesday.
The weekend data is getting so spotty with more states and counties not reporting at all that it might be less useful right now.
Since it is a 7 day average, any state not consistently reporting on the weekends would not be a real issue ( as just a zero replacing a zero in the average). So only a slight bias to delaying seeing part of the trend until later.
But in last month or so, more states and counties seem to be dropping out weekends. And, in the one week where they initially drop out, that can cause a significant distortion.
And, honestly, I will not miss Kevin's post itself much. You can actually see all that sort of data as well or better at places like worldometers and covidactnow ( and worldometers by redistributing big data backups, gets it better than what kevin has relied on). But the posts also served as a sort of " covid open thread " for some good discussions.
As long as Kevin has some covid post each day to serve as a covid open thread, I am happy enough. Especially since it appears it was a lot of work for kevin to maintain and maybe not doing it will allow him to spend time to post other more unique thinking.
Thanks.
That helps explain it a bit more. Still not sure if I understand it well enough ( or ever will) to be able to implicitly trust this as the correct explanation, especially since the published articles I saw before had a completely different explanation. But what you are saying and linked, and the way you explained it , has more of the ring of truth to me. There is so much bad reporting on these issues, and on both sides of any question, that you just cannot be sure of what you are told anymore.
But what I do know and can determine just by making an easy logical analysis from what we do know, is that the facts are very inconsistent with the idea that vaccine caused false positives are a major issue. Because, if they were, we would have seen them be more common when vaccinations were at a peak back in April than today. Seems to me if vaccine false positives were a large part of the very large number of positive tests we see today, with a lower number of vaccinations, then the implied number that would have occurred in April would have to be more than the actual number ( so impossible) .
If someone wants to contend, like spades, that vaccine false positives are what is causing this big increase in positive cases, they have to somehow account for the pattern we actually see. For example, if you could explain why a vaccination would only cause a false positive after a 3 month delay.
It does not seem we will be hearing back from spades with such an explanation.
Another thing to note is that if vaccine-caused false positives were a thing, you'd expect to see at least some news coverage of it, and it's just not out there.
You think false positives are bad? Try going with false negatives instead. Which is almost always what you are doing when you try to cut the false positive rate. Check out the wiki for this intro to sensitivity vs specificity that I slack out to students who aren't up to speed yet.
There was concern that the PCR tests will give a false positive since some common colds are also corona viruses. And there's always fear of cross-contamination--though outside the kits initially prepared by the CDC, that does not seem to be a major problem.
For the most part, we're not sequencing the PCR results to see what is being amplified, so variant tracking is a bit scatter shot.
Other tests have their own foibles too, PCR is still the best; though others better for quick screening.
My understanding is that false positives from other coronaviruses is still a possible issue.
But that is different from false positives from vaccines which is what spares initially brought up, and I felt did not fit the facts. And Steve then helped explain why.
I would assume that other coronaviruses might produce a capsid protein similar enough to trigger the test, but not the vaccine if it does not produce capsid protein anyway.
And I think one reason why false positives from coronavirus colds has not been a big problem is that other coronaviruses have been just destroyed in the last year. By either restrictions or covid pushing it out. So not enough other coronaviruses around to cause many false positives.
Interestingly it appears rhinoviriuses stayed around and caused most colds in last year.
Yes, there are many sources for false positives, although it seems that the greatest likelihood of false positives is from mishandling.
What I was addressing here is the notion that being vaccinated would by itself lead to false positives, and there is neither any evidence of that, nor any mechanism by which it could be expected to occur.
Support your point re false positives due to mishandling being a major source of them. This never seems to be mentioned and is the one thing we can realistically limit.
I would classify false positives into a few groups
A) true false positives where the test reacts to absolutely nothing.
B) similar false positives where the test reacts to something that is similar to the virus but not actually caused by it. False positives due to other coronaviruses and vaccines would be this category.
C) uninfected false positives where the test reacts to actual virus in that test but it was not enough to infect the person. All of this by now, whether you got covid or not, have breathed in some covid viruses. But our innate immune system normally kicks out a few viruses before they can establish themselves. If the test happens to get that one or two real viruses and the pcr test magnifies literally over 1 trillion times, going to get some positives. It is an accurate positive for virus but not for an infection.
D) a delayed confirmation of infection. Where someone was infected, never got tested and maybe had no idea, totally recovered and no longer infectious, and then got tested and false positive a month later when still had some dead virus fragments in their system. This false positive is true for detecting an infection, just found it after it no longer was.
E) the human screwups. This includes mishandling and cross contamination. But also the tester just losing the test or spoiling it and covering up their mistake by lying and saying positive.
Category a is clearly incredibly rare. We know that because of the extremely low positive testing rate places like new Zealand has had at times .
Category b also pretty rare for same reason. Although partially because so few coronavirus cold infections now. Might have been a bigger issue spring 2020
I suspect category c is getting a bit more significant, but will be an issue relative to amount of virus in environment.
Category d my guess is more of an issue, but not for our cumulative case count. It does bias our perception of how much is spreading at the time. In april, when current counts were low but counts from three months ago high, a decent percentage of positives might have been detecting old infections. By today, when current case counts much higher but cases from past few months low, should be a negligible issue.
Which would make it look like the R was higher than it really was in April but the true r today would be higher than it appears.
And category e. Never underestimate the ability of humans to mess up.
Somebody should ask Trump if he's going to donate his brain to science when he dies, 'like Einstein did.'
Here’s what it will look like when the scientists open the box housing Trump’s brain:
https://youtu.be/FfQWz4gVcP8
You can feel the love in the room, the powerful, powerful love.
Actually, a matchbox should be sufficient.
Bet he is a believer in cryopreservation.
omg, you're right.
And they could take it on tour and sell tickets to view President Popsicle.
Nice little side hustle for the kids.
And he's not dead, he's waiting until the right moment to rise again!
Don't do Ted Williams like that.
Vaccination passports.
I shudder at sending my unvaccinated 4 year old to school. 4 year olds are going to not wear masks properly for very long without constant reminders.
Yea, if Kevin actually had kids I wonder if Rule #1 might be a little more nuanced.
While most school districts are adopting a "the pandemic is over" mindset and debating if they should mask at all, Delta is about to tear through schools in a way we've never seen before. The American Academy of Pediatrics made it pretty clear that the existing distancing and masking rules used by most schools just won't cut it.
I'm extremely uneasy about this fall.
I guess also it appears to spread much better outside though so I think we need more research on that.
Schools, especially high schools, should run hybrid classes, with some students present in person and some attending the same class electronically. Some kids do just fine with "learn from home" and some do not. The learn from homes should only be permitted to continue learning from home as long as their grades remain satisfactory. If their grades slip, then they clearly need in classroom teaching.
I agree with one small caveat. I think kids should be able to prove they are vaccinated in order to not wear a mask. Obviously this wouldn't matter for elementary school since they're all younger than 12.
Here in FL (at least in my county) school starts in two weeks. Kids are not required to wear masks. I fully supported this about a month ago but with the delta variant I think it makes sense to require masks again for those that aren't vaccinated. I don't think that will happen, but it would make sense. We had in-person school all of last year (which I fully supported) and it was great. Virtually no one contracted covid in schools. (Plenty of kids and teachers got covid but it was outside of school. They would have gotten it even if schools were all e-learning.) But now with the delta variant and and no one wearing masks I predict a lot of quarantining. Since most kids don't have bad symptoms it's more of a hassle than anything else, but an avoidable one.
Are you going to apologize to Ron de Santis for vomiting this into the aether?
In the late 70s and early 80s there was this fad of idiots taking their vehicles out on the frozen Mississippi river in the dead of night after the bars closed in the dead of winter and zooming around.
It took maybe a dozen of them crashing through over the course of eight or nine years to sufficiently deplete the population of personalities who were going to do this to finally stop it.
I would guess everyone of those guys would be anti-vaxxers today and the same pattern will have to play out.
Sounds like the La Crosse, WI, Closing Time Killer used to have a different M.O.
The Delta variant seems more transmissible, to the point of outdoor transmission between people who didn’t speak to each other. (Case studies in Australia, from when numbers were low and contact tracing was strong.)
"YES, vaccination mandates should be as widespread as possible."
Agree. I do think full FDA approval will help expedite this step, or we're going to lose precious time fighting for this in courts and debating it in the media.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that a lot of people are not yet vaxxed because they don't yet have to be. The risk of being unvaxxed might not seem so great to people who've made it 17 months so far without getting the virus. The social pressure to remain unvaxxed may be stronger at a local level. But if there is a mandate with consequences (inability to work or travel or participate in normal life), many people will go along and get the shot. Some will grumble, some will complain loudly, but a lot of people will just be glad to be forced to do what they've been putting off for too long.
A big factor in people not getting vaccinated because they " do not have to be" are those who already had covid an know it almost for sure, either because of a positive test ( though could be false positives) or because they had fairly clear symptoms indicating covid like loss of taste and smell.
If they had covid fairly recently- maybe up to a year ago or so- they probably have substantial natural immunity already and do not really " need" the vaccine as much. I do think that the vaccine on top of natural immunity increases your immunity ( have heard some reports of being super immune with like 90-95% effectiveness) , but clearly not near as big a boost as going from no immunity to just vaccine immunity. Note that, I hope and expect that getting covid after getting vaccinated has same effect, boosting vaccine immunity to super immunity. If so, all of the vaccinated catching covid asymptimatically are boosting us closer to here immunity.
Personally I have not really felt it was worthwhile trying to convince those who got covid in the big winter wave to get vaccinated. Not likely that big a deal if they did or not. In fact through April, I discouraged it because better if they saved the shots for those who needed it more.
It seems somewhat that maybe natural immunity starts to wane seriously after a year or so . Thus I have urged some who got covid in the summer that now is the time to get vaccinated ( so far struck out convincing any of that group).
And, for those who feel they do not need a vaccine because they have not caught covid after 17 months, that can have some validity. Especially if they have been taking zero precautions and partying, possible that maybe they have inherent immunity. But honestly more likely that they actually did get covid asymptomatically and had no idea and this more valid reason they have less need for vaccine is that they have some natural immunity.
But funny story there is my young nephew. Through april, just completely ignored any precautions. Partied with friends like normal, including sharing drinks, etc. And never got sick whole year. And did not listen to me ( told him I will be very upset if he gives covid to my sister). And he wanted to hug me when he came for a visit in the fall ( sorry we can visit walking outside with masks if you want to be such a risk).
Well finally after a year he gets his first vaccine in april ( and I mostly talked him into that). I had always felt the way he behaved he had probably caught covid and did not know. Well he tests positive for covid a week after getting his first shot so unlikely he ever had it before. Random freaking chance.
I also have a friend who got covid in december but it sceptical somewhat and scared of vaccine. But also petrified of getting covid again as he had a rough three weeks ( ok now). So he is going to get an antibody test ( which he pays for) every two months and only get vaccinated when his antibodies go down a lot. Not a bad strategy if you want to pay for tested every two months. His late June test still.showee very high antibodies.
It's time to move up from basic cloth masks to N95 or KF94 masks.
I have a slightly different take on vaccine mandates. People must opt out if they do not want the vaccine, but doing so means that they lose access to free treatment if they get sick. And yes, this means that I would have the federal gov't guarantee free treatment for anyone who is vaccinated and gets a breakthrough infection, including paid federal sick leave. If you opt out of vaccines, you're 100% on your own, regardless of Medicaid or Medicare coverage.
This would only work in an ideal world that is nothing like the one we live in.
First, you would see lots of fraudulent claims submitted in which the diagnosis was changed from covid-19 to something else to try to evade this policy.
But more important, a hospitalization for covid-19 is the financial equivalent of falling into a black hole for anyone who isn't a billionaire. And the unvaccinated are, I believe, less well off financially than average. They will be bankrupted and the bills will be settled for pennies on the dollar. The hospitals will charge this bad debt off and the end result will be a subsequent rise in reimbursements, first from Medicare and Medicaid, and ultimately from private insurers as well, to offset these losses. Those things in turn will be passed on to the rest of us through taxes and higher insurance premiums.
The only people who would benefit from this arrangement in our real world are the bankruptcy lawyers.
At the time of hospitalization, the only means to avoid a COVID-19 diagnosis is to demand that a COVID-19 test not be administered. If they suspect you* have COVID, they'll treat you* as though you* have COVID nonetheless. At that point, your* illness is coded into the system and billed accordingly. Your* insurer will review the billing and reject it if they think you* tried to hide your COVID infection.
If you* opt out of a free vaccine, you* explicitly and knowingly took on the risk. This is supposed to bankrupt you*.
If you* told me that you* were going to drive drunk, I wouldn't insure you*. Likewise, if you're* not going to take a free vaccine, I'm not going to pay for you* when you get sick from COVID. The vaccine is the mitigation I need to keep costs down and protect against accidents as opposed to recklessness.
* -- Not you specifically, but you know, someone.
Sorry but this is just complete crap. Referring to what you linked and quoted, not your own comments.
In that same article in the same q&a answer, it was stated that delta is "about a thousand times as contagious " as original covid.
Well no that is just flat not true and either a ridiculous exaggeration or a flat out lie. And no way a second of exposure with delta is as contagious as 15 minutes with original.
There are plenty of studies based on scientific methods that have tried to estimate how much more contagious delta is and I think consensus is somewhere between two and three times. Now they might be wrong and I am beginning to suspect higher but cannot be a thousand times higher. If it was, the epidemic would be over by now as one case of delta would have exploded uncontrollably into around 27 billion in less than a month ( but of course it would run out of people).
And obvious that just lying to try to scare people into doing the things they want like masking etc. by deliberately lying. But not even intelligently.
If delta was 1000 times contagious as original, that would be an overwhelming reason to not mask, because it would be totally pointless anyhow. In fact, I think a level of 3 times as infectious as original is enough to call into doubt that restrictions make any sense.
This is the type of nonsense that has largely caused the problem if vaccine resistance. Because it destroyed trust in the " experts" .
I'm pretty sure the 1000x was hyperbole.
I'm the one who pointed out to you that it was 2-3x more contagious, did you already forget?
I remembered the discussion. Did not remember it was you. There, you seemed to be taking it as me disputing three times when I just wanted to know where you got that ( 2.5 or 3 times makes a big difference). I am suspecting now it might be more than that given that the uk seems to have reached herd immunity so quick.
That 1000 times comment sure does not read as if it was intended to just be hyberpole in full context. Read it. Note that it was said right before the comment about one second being equal to 15 minutes, which is just as ridiculous.
And note that it was you who quoted the one second comment as if you were making a point. Clearly you were not taking that as an exaggeration. Even if it did not hit you how nutty that comment was on its face, maybe the fact that it was right below the same person saying 1000 × should have given you a clue?
And you cannot excuse an official making such stupid comments as an exaggeration. Because people will either take it as a factual statement ( like you did with one second comment) or just see it as evidence they cannot trust any experts.
And, if it really was somehow 1000 times more contagious, there would be no reason to have any sort of restrictions like masks.
Your plan is a way to penalize the healthcare providers since there's no such thing as an unpaid bill.
What to do with the hesitant… Take their guns and bibles first. Then shoot them.
So, never thought Justin would be the one to suggest death-squads for the Bitter Clingers.
Got one already.
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2021/07/23/alabama-family-urges-vaccine-after-28-year-old-dies-covid-brytney-cobia-grandview-hospital/7995947002/