Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

I hate politician Twitter. He also blames California's "radical socialist agenda" as the reason CA's population declined for once and not the cost of living from everyone wanting to live there.

To his credit, I think we can all agree that opening up didn't cause the good numbers. But the point stands that opening up when he did was not the disaster that an awful lot of people seemed to be predicting.

Meanwhile here in Ohio I had to look at today's numbers twice to make sure I wasn't looking at a typo. The number of confirmed cases reported today (517) is the smallest number reported since June 21 of last year. My pessimistic estimate of the odds of any given Ohioan being infected is now up to 1:400.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Are you suggesting we just ignore intent? That's not really working out.

Not really. At face value, Abbott's tweet is not entirely wrong. The conclusion he might want to imply might be. I'm declining to read that much into it. I do that with a lot of things; I find I spare myself a lot of irrational anger that way.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Abbott was a darling of the far right before COVID. He was far more of a moderate than they wanted to believe and had allies in the state legislature that did his dirty work for him so he didn’t have to veto anything he didn’t like. When he acted unilaterally in taking measures to slow down COVID, the right turned on him and decided he was a liberal. Since January, he’s been chasing after their admiration again ahead of primary challengers next spring: pushing election reform to fix a fraud problem that doesn’t exist, agreeing to sign a law legalizing carrying handguns without a license (after the legislature kept it at bay for years), and opening the state back up to distract everyone from the power grid problems during the statewide winter storm. He’s pandering. That’s his only intent.

The CDC is still having a hard time figuring out the way to communicate. They went from the Trump administration telling them STFU to this weird over-compensation strategy that's doing more harm than good. See: why the 10% outdoor transmission thing is wrong.

Brain dump follows:

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Dave's personal statkeeping always inspires me.

Here's the latest from the Ohio Coronavirus site:

I'm not going to argue acceptable risk or anything like that - we've all already decided a long time ago. But as this starts to wind down, it IS interesting to reflect. This is where you learn.

The 50-59 demo is where the deaths start ramping up. Kind of the over/under for "I had the sniffles" or "I died." Not sure where to do the cutoff so I'm gonna do it as both "under 50" and "under 60"

Ohio mortality rates:

Under 50: 0.06% (421 deaths, 670,508 cases)
Over 50: 4.59% (19,005 deaths 413,814 cases)

Broken down this way, those over 50 accounted for 38% of cases and over 97% of deaths. Those under 50 made up 62% of cases and 2.1% of deaths.

If we cut it off at 60, it looks like this:

Under 60: 0.17% (1433 deaths, 833,947 cases)
Over 60: 7.18% (17,993 deaths, 250,375 cases)

In Ohio, those over 60 have been 40x more likely to die once contracting COVID than those under 60.

I find this all very interesting. I do think the details matter.

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Also, L.A. County expected to hit COVID-19 herd immunity by end of July

Experts had previously expressed concern that waning demand for the COVID-19 vaccines and uneven vaccination rates could make it hard to reach that goal.

“At the rate we’re going, we expect that we can reach this level somewhere in mid- to late July, and that assumes that we continue to have at least 400,000 people vaccinated each week that will include both first doses that people need, as well as their second doses,” Ferrer said.

The prediction comes amid growing signs COVID-19 is fading in California. The state recorded its lowest hospitalization rate since the first few weeks of the pandemic, according to data reviewed by The Times.

California is now close to the bottom of the nation when it comes to coronavirus case rates over the past week. Los Angeles and San Francisco counties last week progressed into the least-restrictive tier of California’s color-coded closure system.

Officials in some parts of the Bay Area said they could soon reach herd immunity soon as well.

L.A. County’s goal of getting 80% of adults and the older teens vaccinated doesn’t account for vaccinating adolescents 12 to 15 — who on Monday became eligible to be vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine — nor younger children.

After all, while children do get sick from COVID-19 and can transmit the virus, “children tend to be not as efficient spreaders as older teens and as adults are,” Ferrer said. “The more and more people that get vaccinated, the less and less there’s going to be community transmission.”

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Personally, we head back to Miami tomorrow. I'm MUCH less apprehensive than I was last August. It's funny because heading into that trip and putting a kid in college in Miami at that time seemed more than a little iffy. But the reality was never as bad as what I had built up in my mind...even if I did die...twice.

Myself, the wife and the boy are all easily two weeks past two shots. My daughter got her first Pfizer last week, less than 24 hours after stepping off the airplane from France.

So much more info about the risk (or lack thereof) on airplanes this time (and between the four of us we have been on 12 different flights since the pandemic stared). Couple that with vaccinations in general and what I now understand as pretty low risk for all 4 of us and the worst part of this trip is...well, it's still Miami. But whattaya gonna do?

Man, I forgot about your two deaths. That sucks. I died once, but that was after my 2nd Moderna shot a week and a half ago. I'd forgotten what it was like to be sick this last year and a half, but the side effects reminded me, tenfold. I was praying for a second and even a third death, but I felt better after a couple days.

Actual footage of Vater from April 30th:

DeWine announced today that all health orders in Ohio (other than those related to nursing homes and assisted living faciliites) will be lifted Jun 3. Businesses are free to impose their own restrictions.

Last Thursday, 2 week indidence rate was 140.2/100k residents. Midweek update today (updates are provided on Thurs each week) was 123/100k. So state didn't reach his 50/100k benchmark. Not sure its expected we would by June 3rd. But he pivoted.

Not only that, but every kid aged 12 - 17 that has at least one vax will be entered into a lottery to win a full 4-year scholarship to any Ohio school, and every adult will be in the same lottery to win $1 million...drawing every Wednesday.

Ohio threw in the towel today. And I’m gonna win one of the $1M

Dry humping and doorknob licking here I come!*

*peer review if you’re into that.

I didn't win the Cedar Point ticket of a lifetime so I am overdue for the $1 million.

The infection rate in Ohio is cratering. Yesterday, I got a bit of a chuckle out of my daily risk assessment in which the pessimistic active case count (70% undercount) dropped to 1:405 In other words in a group of 405 people...
1: Has COVID-19
404: Virus not found

Today's estimate is up to 1:457, with an estimated active case count that is the lowest it has been since June 25, 2020..that is to say, as we were approaching our second peak after the State began opening back up.

I've not been able to track cases against the Governor's stated target of 50/100k because I can't figure out what denominator he's using. The calculation I'm running based on the first week after he announced it has run inconsistently high against the official numbers. Our 7-day case average, though, has been falling for 31 days and yesterday was down to 795. For comparison purposes, our 7-day case average peaked on December 4 at 10,207, and most recently peaked on April 11 at 2,093.

I wonder if Cedar Point [Shores] and Soak City will end their reservation requirements after June 2...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Disney is apparently dropping the face shield requirement for ride operators. That seemed like overkill in the first place, unless they were worried about people spitting in their faces.

Got to Miami today.

Have to admit, the looser restrictions are pretty nice. Not seeing anything really unreasonable so far. Just nice to see faces again and have the chance to drop the mask.

Three more weeks and I can finally live like this at home again (minus the oppressive air, weird smell and awful water).

Also, just saw this story:

Wealthy nations once lauded as successes lag in vaccinations

There was a thing about Japan the other day because they're hosting the Olympics, and only have 2% vaccinated, and I was like, WTF are they doing? How did they get that far behind? Once these other nations do ramp up, it will be interesting to see how deep their vaccination percentages go. I suspect they'll beat us in the long run.

We talked way back at the beginning of this journey about certain cultures, forms of government, etc being better/worse equiped to handle the pandemic. Same is true with vaccinations. Certain countries in Europe struggled with vaccines. Japan, from what I have read, including the LG article, only trusts doctors and nurses to administer vaccines. Pharmacists giving vaccines (my wife is a former pharmacist (who gave scores of them) says she could teach anyone to give vaccines in 10-15 mins) are unthinkable in Japan. Mine wre given by Ohio Reservists from what I could tell (military members in any event). They don't have enough people to administer vaccines in Japan.

I would expect in the long run, other countries will do better than the US in terms of vaccination rates. 'Merica Freedum kinda thing.