Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Good luck to you. Something of a Hunger Games situation which is unfortunate.

DeWine said yesterday that there are no further new groups that will become eligible in the short term because the state is working through the 3.2 million people in Phases 1A and B. About 28% of that group has received one dose and 7% have received both doses.

Still a long way to go. Additional vaccines should help.

GoBucks89 said:

Still a long way to go. Additional vaccines should help.

New Administration will help further.

To me I will take 100 million J&J vaccines by the end of June over the new old guy in the White House.

So with all the lack of enforcement in Florida, why aren’t we seeing worse numbers there? Like, California has fairly strict regulations and doesn’t seem to have clearly and obviously better outcomes. Is it just “people will be people” regardless of regulation? Is there some other missing variable? Are they actually approximately the same or am I reading the chart wrong?

I suspect a part of it is just that you can do "outside stuff" more in Florida, all year.

It's easy to get frustrated at the vaccine rollout, but I look at it this way. If they held back shipments until now, we'd all be estatic that so many people were able to get vaccinated so quickly. Perspective.

We have officially already vaccinated more people than the number of people that have been infected.

In reagrds to different or unexpected outcomes, I'm sure we'll all find an answer that fits our individual takes on things in general. I suspect we still have some blindspots in understanding the whole thing in regards to actual risk and asymptomatic infection. I think we still don't test in an effective way to collect enough (or correct) data. I think Jeff is on to something with different lifestyles in different places. Lots of stuff like that.

If you misunderstand enough variables by a little, you misundersatand the overall equation by a lot.

Yeah, I mean pockets of Florida clearly have the same silly political leanings as South Dakota, making masks a political issue instead of one of public health, but SD is a colder climate where people are inside a whole lot more. It shouldn't be surprising that something like 1 in 700 people are dead there.

Places like New York City or LA may be doing the right things to mitigate spread, but population density has a dramatic effect on outcomes. You need to go to a place like Kauai, which is an island, mostly not densely populated and motivated to comply to what the science says, to see great outcomes. I'd totally live there if it didn't mean having to work from 2 to 11 a.m.

ApolloAndy said:
So with all the lack of enforcement in Florida, why aren’t we seeing worse numbers there? Like, California has fairly strict regulations and doesn’t seem to have clearly and obviously better outcomes.

My goto source is covidactnow.org. At the moment California's per 100k and infection rates are lower than Florida's. If you look at ICU usage, Florida's has never been in the green, California was green most of the summer. From what I understand California's latino community was disproportionally affected by the holiday spike. Demographically they are more likely to be living with extended family and more likely to be working "front-line" jobs.

Brief look at the mutations and evolution the virus is experiencing:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/signs-that-sars-cov-2-is-ev...responses/

NFL stadiums are all being offered as vaccination sites:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/02/05/964548535/

And that's neat and all, but it seems to me that the availability of the vaccine is the issue, not where to give them.

Yeah, I think I rather prefer the approach Ohio is trying to take of having lots of places where you can get vaccinated rather than bringing everybody to a single huge site. But either way it doesn't matter if you don't have the doses, and right now...we don't have the doses. I haven't been tracking in great detail, but it feels like the gap between total cases and vaccine starts is getting smaller when it should be getting larger!

With regard to the possible 2-timer mentioned above (Maynard James Keenan), I think there are two major questions to be asked...the first is whether he ever completely got over it the first time, the second is whether he was shedding virus the second time around. The more I see, the more it appears that SARS-CoV2 infection itself may not produce symptoms, but COVID-19 is in fact an immune response to the SARS-CoV2 infection. Which means that the presence of symptoms and the presence of virus may be more coincidental than one might logically expect. In fact, to my mind that's really the only thing that can explain asymptomatic spread: if the infection itself does not produce symptoms. Otherwise no symptoms would mean no spread...and we know that isn't true because infectious people apparently shed the most virus several days *before* symptoms start, and stop shedding virus roughly 12 days later. Anyway, my theory here is that the disconnect between viral infection and COVID-19 symptoms may suggest that experiencing a second bout of COVID-19 may or may not suggest a second infection.

ObDisc: What do I know? I hated biology in school. I know a lot more about inorganic things.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

By way of comparison, anyone been to Puerto Rico in the past year? I was there one night/day in April and was told not to leave the hotel, period. All I could do for exercise was walk tiny laps around the enclosed outdoor courtyard. Streets were empty, it was a ghost town.

I was there again sometime in December and strict rules were in place. Mask usage required 100% of the time outdoors, police and *armed* US Army soldiers stationed randomly around. $100 fine if caught without a mask. All I did was walk half a mile to a CVS to buy many bags of Alto Grande and Yaucono coffee. You are required to sanitize your hands before entering any building and they take your temperature too.

But take a look at their case rates. Insanely low compared to any of the 50 states. And we're talking about a country with poorer infrastructure, larger families, smaller living areas spaced closer together.

My point is, a true quarantine and strict enforcement seems to work for PR. It's just that there's no way the government can do that here, nor would the citizens put up with it. I'm not even saying that I endorse it, just making an observation.

I'll be back in PR for a day next week and can report back if anyone cares.

It's not a country, it's a US territory, with a governor. The people living there are American citizens.

Jeff said:

I'd totally live there if it didn't mean having to work from 2 to 11 a.m.

But you could be on the beach by noon!

It seems like the best way to mitigate transmission is by living on an island, so let's get working on that.

If moving to the Caymans is what it takes to stay safe, then I will reluctantly abide.

Jeff said:

NFL stadiums are all being offered as vaccination sites:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/02/05/964548535/

And that's neat and all, but it seems to me that the availability of the vaccine is the issue, not where to give them.

I don't get the mass vaccination thing, either.

My wife got hers at one of the hospitals that her employer runs. My mom got hers at a local pharmacy.

Why create the bottleneck of a huge site like that? I'd rather have 500 places around town with 1000 doses each than one place giving out half-a-million of them.

Add to that, when my local pharmacy is distributing the vaccine, there's money going back to a small local business. Not sure who's benefiting from the mass vax sites, but I'm sure it's not the people who need it most.

Well, there’s obviously lots of overhead with having that many sites, especially given the temperature requirements, but I also assume you’d run into other logistical problems like not having enough doses at one site and having too many at another. Of course, the flip side is making sure vaccines are distributed equitably (stadiums don’t tend to be near low income neighborhoods, for instance.)

In PA, you need to schedule an appointment to get the shots so there's not any issue with having not enough or too many. They're all accounted for as soon as they confirm that they'll have delivery.

kpjb said:

Add to that, when my local pharmacy is distributing the vaccine, there's money going back to a small local business. Not sure who's benefiting from the mass vax sites, but I'm sure it's not the people who need it most.

Very true. My wife got a 10% off coupon with her shot at Jewel-Osco. She bought some groceries after her shot. We almost never shop at Jewel.