Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

ApolloAndy said:

...but I'd expect to see the death rate plummet to basically zero if we're already vaccinating 40 year olds.

This has to happen in the near future otherwise all of the death rate statistics from the past year are wrong. Or the vaccines don't work. It doesn't make sense that if "all" of the elderly are vaccinated that the deaths don't dramatically go down.

Vaccination rate stats:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations

I guess if 35% of the 65+ crowd hasn't/won't get vaccinated, there's still lots of potential victims.

UK variant (becoming more common in the US) is also more deadly.

https://nationalpost.com/news/study-finds-further-evidence-covid-u-...o-creep-up

This is a very long read but very interesting: How the West Lost Covid. I think there were outlines of this posted a long while back here.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/how-the-west-lost-covid-19.html

Thanks for that link Andy. 66% of 65+ having at least their 1st dose is not good. Number needs to be higher than that. At this point it seems like it will be hard pressed to get to 70%. And I imagine that the <65 population is going to be even less than that.

I looked at Kroger, Walgreens, etc, for appointments and I don’t see any and the Ohio vaccine site still says you need to meet a strict criteria?

Wearing face masks is now without question a virtue signal to a lot of people on the left. I had a “discussion” with a friend who thought that because she could smell someone’s cigarette smoke from 300 feet away in a park that we should all be wearing masks outside at all times. No exceptions. That’s so far from reality that there’s no coming back.

Certainly some shock value in the 55% more deadly headline, but

The absolute risk of death remained low, increasing, for example, from 0.6 to 0.9 per cent, for 55- to 69-year-old males.

“We don’t want this 55 per cent number to scare people into thinking ‘this is a big risk for me,’” unless people are elderly or otherwise very sick, said lead author Nicholas Davies, an epidemiologist with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

So even with it being more deadly, the overall death rate has to start going down as the elderly get vaccinated. And it would be really helpful if we can get to something much higher than a 70% vaccine rate, especially in that age group.

eightdotthree said:

I had a “discussion” with a friend who thought that because she could smell someone’s cigarette smoke from 300 feet away in a park that we should all be wearing masks outside at all times. No exceptions. That’s so far from reality that there’s no coming back.

I still have two or three acquaintances on social media that are just as passionate about condemning anyone who has dared enter society for any reason at all outside of the most essential necessities. I have a volunteer at work that hasn't been in since March 2020 and even though he is 6 weeks out of his second vaccine he will not come back in and refuses to leave his house other than outdoor walks and a once a week trip to the grocery store, telling all of us "the virus doesn't care if you feel safe with the precautions you take". Again, 6 weeks out of the second dose of the vaccine and still living as he was a year ago.

Expect it will get higher. Didn't most states start with people over 80? 65 year olds in Ohio have been eligible since first week of February. Biden last week said that "well over" 70% of people 75+ have had at least one dose. Also said that 65% of people 65+ have had at least one dose. Presumably those numbers continue to climb though at decreasing rates.

Just talked to the kid in France. They're implementing some new restrictions. Looks like they're in another wave. This article details a lot of it. Currently they're at a 446 per 100k infection rate. Ugh.

She said they're actually seeing kids at the high school where she's teaching testing positive in decent numbers, where up to now, that hadn't been much of a thing.

It's one anecdotal data point, but her take on how France has handled the pandemic has consistently been annoyingly horrified for the most part.

No real point. Just sharing. It's interesting that our conversation here (regardless of where you stand) has largely moved to discussing the end game and a feeling of starting to look back while she's calling me complaining of more lockdowns and a still a general laissez-faire attitude from the French people - who are staring in the face of another wave of infections.

Are the vaccines in France rolling out at a slower rate than here? I'm not sure why, but I was under the impression that they started sooner than us.

Sucks.

The "third way" of dealing with the virus does not seem to be the way.

Europe was slower to approve vaccines (by a couple weeks). Also slower to enter into contracts with vaccine makers (by a couple months). At one point the EU has spent about $3.2 billion on vaccines while the US had spent abouot $18 billion. Several EU countries have halted using Astra-Zeneca vaccine. US recently announced we are giving some of our AZ vaccines to Mexico and Canada because we have a surplus. US signed contracts with multiple manufacturers with contractual options to buy more going forward.

And from what I have seen, the process has been more bureacratic in some European countries (France required a pre-vaccine consultation). And they have had production problems and supply chain issues. All of that combined for some vaccine hesitancy with some countries already having significant numbers of anti-vax people pre-Covid.

Lord Gonchar said:

It's interesting that our conversation here (regardless of where you stand) has largely moved to discussing the end game and a feeling of starting to look back while she's calling me complaining of more lockdowns and a still a general laissez-faire attitude from the French people - who are staring in the face of another wave of infections.

But for the stay at home warriors I mentioned in my last post, I can't imagine us 'Mericans going for another wave of restrictions or stay at home orders even if the numbers warranted it. Things are definitely better here, but at this point I feel like even if things took a bad turn there's no putting the toothpaste back in the "we're getting back to normal in the USA" tube.

I know a couple who snowbirds in rural-ish, deep central Florida every winter. COVID-19 showed up last year while they were in the middle of their stay. They are smart ladies and since then, (thru last year’s stay, then back to Ohio, then back to Florida,) have followed all safety precautions. Outings have included trips to the grocery, wildlife preserves, and the occasional patio restaurant where distancing is observed. This month each had both of their vaccines.
Another thing they’ve always been is regular blood donors, which they did a couple of months ago. Some time after one of the ladies got a letter from the Red Cross thanking her for her donation and to notify her that since she tested positive for covid anti-bodies her blood would be used in recuperative therapy, and thanks again. Well, they were shocked. She’s never been sick a day, her wife got no such letter, and they’ve not knowingly been around anyone infected. In fact, they’ve barely been around anyone at all.
It’s weird that stuff like this happens, and I’ll be interested in the research on a-symptomatic covid “victims”. Although I’ve never been tested, I have a sneaky feeling that me and my partner just might fall into that group. I predict there are many more than we imagine.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve quit smoking and drinking since Covid came to town. In fact, my smoke-free one year anniversary comes up on the 22nd of this month. That was a result of the fear of dying. The drinking was merely because for me it’s a strong trigger for smoking. Anyway, and knock on wood, I’ve been free of any kind of cold or flu. I’ve had mornings when I thought the sniffles were on the way, but turned out no.

The vaccination site at the OCCC just went to 40+, skipping 50. Our ICU's are still at 89%.

Some states have quickly reversed case counts. Michigan is up 84% in two weeks. Minnesota and New Jersey are also going the wrong way.

Ohio is experiencing an uptick today as well.

OhioStater said:

Are the vaccines in France rolling out at a slower rate than here? I'm not sure why, but I was under the impression that they started sooner than us.

GoBucks nailed it in his second paragraph...at least as far as my kid's take - which is very similar. She cites:

1. General ****ty French attitudes towards everything (it's a stereotype for a reason)
2. Bureacratic inefficiency - it takes forever to make things happen
3. A general anti-medicine (especially anti-vax) attitude in the country.

I also found this article - but it doesn't really say anything much different.

Unlike France to surrender to a major threat to their way of life. Weird.

Ohio isn’t really showing an uptick. Today was the worst reported number of confirmed cases (1,434) since February 25 (1,748). But that’s reported data. In those same 22 days, Ohio has reported less than 1,000 confirmed cases on 11 of those days including four of the last seven days.
Meanwhile if you look at the onset-adjusted data, there have actually been a grand total of *four* days with under 1000 new confirmed or probable cases* since September 27, 2020, all of them this week, and all likely to exceed 1,000 cases by this time next week.

What we are seeing in the onset adjusted data is this—

The data show a distinct day-of-week effect with the new case numbers on Saturday and Sunday dramatically lower than the rest of the week. As the numbers decline, this day-of-week effect is becoming much smaller as the weekday numbers are approaching the weekend numbers.

The 7-day trailing average of new cases has been dropping continuously for the last 59 days (since January 20). Through February that decline was almost linear, but in March that curve is flattening. On January 20, the 7-day average for Ohio was 5,928 cases per day. Yesterday that average was down to 1,081. Where that average had been declining by more than 100 cases per day, it’s now declining by closer to 25 cases per day.

Do you remember last year how auto-correct kept changing “asymptomatic” to “asymptotic”? Well, these graphs are what “asymptotic” looks like. Which is to be expected but I was hoping this curve would flatten at a much lower level. I’m showing a 7-day average because it turns out that a multiple of 7 days yields the smoothest curve, and the 7-day average sticks closest to the actual data.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

*Yes, they are slightly different data sets. That’s because I have been collecting the confirmed case data since last March, but the data set available for download is the onset adjusted data including probable cases.

—DCAjr

kpjb said:

Unlike France to surrender to a major threat to their way of life. Weird.

That is the Americanized history version. The real version is that France saved the world.

The French probably don't help themselves either doing the whole onomatopoeia thing... like adding 'pfft' at the end of each sentence.