Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Free baseball tickets if you get vaccinated while you're there?

(Actually, I think the idea is that you get vaccinated one day and they give you tickets for another day, although the article isn't 100% clear. Now I want to get unvaccinated so I can go back and get the free stuff.)

Also, "get vaccinated and sit in a completely crowded section, or don't and sit in a section with 1/3 the crowd" is not a pitch that would motivate me.

Broadway to reopen September 14 at 100%

SteveWoA said...

Life rolls on as usual and at some point I will stroll in CVS and get stabbed.

If you are going to thank STEVE shouldn't Steel Vengeance at least be in the picture???

I'll show my ignorance - who is Steve?

The guy he quoted.

Yep. I missed that.

Focus group on how people overcame vaccine hesitancy. Approaches/factors varied. Makes it tougher to overcome than it would be if there was a silver bullet. Gotta try though.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/993205279/a-new-focus-group-investig...-hesitancy

‘Turning the Corner’: U.S. Covid Outlook Reaches Most Hopeful Point Yet

I'm not an expert at all but there is a bit of a trend I'm seeing with the Florida data that is a little disturbing. While the overall positivity rate is dropping a bit (though the actual number is questionable since Florida measures this differently than every other state), but number of people being hospitalized each day seems to be ticking up...or at minimum not dropping in proportion to the positive case decrease.

That is certainly an indicator of more potent strains of the virus...and may be bad for young people who are still reluctant to get the vaccine. If most seniors are vaccinated...who is going into the hospital? I had heard a couple of weeks ago that Michigan, Indiana and Illinois were seeing many more young people in the hospitals so this seems like a pretty good argument for young people to go get the vaccine.

Yeah, Orange County hospitalizations are up, positive tests are up, cases are down a little, but leveling out still in the hundreds per day. What I found surprising is that OC has 22 new cases per day per 100k, whereas OC California has 3 per day per 100k. We're only at 28% fully vaccinated as well, which is way behind the national average.

The other disturbing thing about that is that hospitalizations tend to be a *trailing* indicator. So if case rates are down, why would hospitalization rates be rising? Unless you're not as far from the recent peak as you thought.

In Ohio, the case data is date-adjusted from the reporting date back to the date of symptom onset, or of positive test if there are no symptoms. The result is that the data is always changing even several weeks back in the chart. If you have been following this thread, then you have seen this chart before:

Assuming you're seeing this in early May (I keep updating the file), you should notice a valley that bottoms out around March 6. The peak that follows that valley is Easter Monday, April 5. When we were living through it, what I noticed was that the curve had gone totally flat in the month of March. From early March until the first week of April, the chart was totally flat, and then started rising again. That demonstrated just how long some of the reporting delays can be, because while the State was reporting 1,100-1,800 cases per day many of those cases were actually back-filling the chart and changing it from that March plateau into that surprisingly smooth curve with the peak in the first week of April.

Here, we are seeing hospitalization run as a more typical lagging indicator: while new cases last peaked on April 5, hospitalizations in that wave peaked on April 12, one week later.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

It could be that hospitals are now actually accepting younger people rather than telling them to wait it out at home because they aren’t as full as they were?

That is possible, but I think it is more likely that these variants (Florida is reported to have something like 10,000 variants) are more potent. I was speaking to a Cleveland Clinic executive this morning. He wasn't being alarmist but he did say he would not be surprised if we see another spike here in Florida this summer.

While the rest of nation will go outside for fresh air (and a healthier environment) Floridians will be fleeing the heat and humidity and heading back indoors. If our vaccination rate doesn't improve he cautions that it might be a shock to many people who think it is over.

Wait, you're trying to drive public policy by talking to experts?

Perhaps with these recent cases, the average person’s initial viral load/ exposure is greater now with all the relaxed restrictions and general pandemic fatigue. Some experts suggested mask wearing/ distancing may have helped reduce severity (on top of overall spread) because of reduced load

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4763

If that’s the case, we could see overall case counts down because of vaccinations, but expect more severe disease if the unvaccinated are all out dry humping for hours.

I'll 'Vote Up' any post that uses the term dry humping. I'm a sucker.

Well. Today is the day that I decided it was probably ok to eat inside a restaurant. It’s a huge space with a high ceiling... but it’s a restaurant inside. Lol.

We did that this week, because it was too damn hot to sit outside. But when you're vaccinated, **** it, it doesn't even matter.

Interesting. I think it was sometime last May that I ate in a restaurant for the first time during the pandemic. I think I may have uttered the phrase, "As God is my witness I shall never eat take-out again!" (with certain exceptions. It's amazing what damage ten minutes in a paper bag can do to a good meal.)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Some things just aren't the same once they've been stuffed in a bag. I really like Steak and Shake but wrapping it and putting it in a bag instead of on a plate just does something to it. Maybe it's the ride home because my kid stops on the way home for it I don't know but it just isn't the same.