Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

I don't know how you draw that conclusion if that's what the article is saying. Obviously I don't dispute that things are getting better. We're going to Disneyland. I feel a hell of a lot safer. We're doing all kinds of crap we wouldn't dare do even a month ago because "Hey, community transmission is at an all time low."

But what the article is saying is that for some reason, those who are not vaccinated (i.e. my kids) are NOT actually safer than they were in January (aka freak out and lock everything down), despite the cratering numbers for community transmission. No amount of analogies, generalizations, broad strokes, or reassurances change that for an individual if it is what's actually going on.

Are we as a country doing better? Obviously, categorically, and in every measurable dimension. Does that help the unvaccinated individual in any meaningful way? Apparently not.

But your kids were safe in January. That was my point at the end. You can't lump all unvaccinated individuals into the same safety bucket.

Cargo Shorts mentioned it before I did. What is circulating now in some places is the variant that is a lot more contagious...it sounds like, to a degree, strong enough to counteract the positive impact that a percentage of vaccinated people would have.

And keep what is said in the article in mind. In some places this appears to be true. Which makes perfect sense. Hotspots of cases amongst the unvaccinated are likely to pop up for years to come because of mutations, etc. That's all this is.

In some places.

I didn't see this coming, but the mask guidelines actually may have encouraged vaccinations: Covid Hope Over Fear https://nyti.ms/2SKO5v4

Is hope now a strategy?

ApolloAndy said:

I understand it to be saying they are high relative to any time in the pandemic. Which is bonkers to me.

It is possible that this is because the more infectious variants are making the rounds of the US more broadly. Michigan's case rate spiked in the spring in large part because we had the B.1.117 variant earlier than most other places in the US.

So, it's possible that the higher virulence of the new strain(s) makes up for the reduced chance of interacting with someone that's infected. And now that travel is picking up, geographic distance from e.g. Michigan's pool of B.1.117 means a lot less than it used to. You're welcome.

If that's the case, then countries who aren't as vaccinated as we are are "totally borked"(tm). Unless it's the relaxing of restrictions which is doing more of the damage than the virulence of the variants. It's almost certainly a bit of both, but I wonder which factor contributes more.

I suspect that the variants explain at least part of what was going on in India, for example.

That Washington Post article is kind of bonkers. I mean, yeah, if you are immunized, your chances of getting infected are reduced by about 99.993%. That means that the percentage of infections happening among people who are not immunized is around 99.993%. Basically all of them. So if you remove the immunized people from the population, so you are only measuring the actual risk pool, then you're going to see that the infection rate among non-immunized people is actually climbing, especially as that population gets smaller as people get their shots. That's the way numbers work, and I'm not sure what they're trying to prove with this 'study'.

If you want to scare people that's a logic that's somewhat easy to follow. But it ignores what's really happening because the population is mixed. The overall infection rate is falling, and the only thing that matters is how likely you are to encounter an infected person. Today in Ohio, that likelihood is down to, at worst, about 1:906. The odds of that one person in 906 actually meeting someone he might be able to infect are about 3:5, and the odds of being able to actually cause an infection are further reduced by whatever precautions people are taking, primarily limiting the duration of close contact. Ohio's 7-day average of new confirmed and probable cases today is 304 cases/day (down from 10,155 cases/day back in December).

Now the number that bothers me is that today, Ohio reported 212 confirmed cases and 91 hospital admissions. Now hospital admissions lag infections by about a week, and a week ago we were seeing 500 cases per day. But I think it a little disconcerting that as the case counts are falling, the hospitalizations as a percentage of cases seem to be rising a bit. Are we only counting the most serious cases now? Or does this mean the outlook for the unimmunized is getting worse?

And is that observation enough to convince anyone to remove himself from the risk pool?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Or are we hospitalizing people now who would have been sent home earlier on because we have more space available and can be looser with the criteria for who needs to be hospitalized?

RideMan said:

So if you remove the immunized people from the population, so you are only measuring the actual risk pool, then you're going to see that the infection rate among non-immunized people is actually climbing, especially as that population gets smaller as people get their shots. That's the way numbers work, and I'm not sure what they're trying to prove with this 'study'.

I don't follow. Because of all the stuff you said about community transmission rates cratering, why would you expect the infection rate among non-immunized people to climb. Why wouldn't it decline along with transmission rates if there's no one to spread the virus around to the non-immunized in the first place?

First, you have to consider a number of factors:

1) At this point (not counting our kids 12 and under), the unvaccinated population is more likely to have engaged and continue to engage in behaviors that, by their very nature, increase their risk of getting Covid. No masks, gatherings, etc. They are more likely to think it's no big deal since day one.

Unvaccinated people are getting the wrong message, experts said.

“They think it’s safe to take off the mask. It’s not,” said Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

No, Lynn, A big percentage of the unvaccinated have always just assumed masks aren't necessary to begin with. They aren't getting the wrong message, they never got it in the first place.

2) The undoing of mandated restrictions has probably only increased said behavior.

3) Those more-contagious variants.

But aside from that, there is just the math. In Washington, for example, they are comparing the rate back in January (26/100,000?) and now selectively excluding the vaccinated and saying..."look! It's really just as bad!" (when it's not). It's only just as bad on that date for the unvaccinated. Given the points above, I don't see how that is remotely surprising.

The entire point of the article falls apart when you look at the national graph they posted instead of the cherry-picked hot-spots. For both the vaxxed and unvaxxed (nationally) the rates are falling. But of course that isn't the headline.

This article asks some good questions and was an interesting read

https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22456544/covid-19-mask-mand...e-evidence

I think the big point in that article is this:

Once the US lost control of the virus, mitigation was the only realistic path forward; fully eradicating Covid-19 was out of the question. According to the available research and interviews with experts, one policy, the requirement to wear masks indoors, appears to have successfully slowed transmission. But others, namely school closures, don’t appear to have had nearly as much of an effect on case rates.

But beyond that, I think the questions and squishy answers are still pretty satisfying. Masks mattered, and blowing them off in places where people spent more time indoors (non-hot climates) clearly were impacted by rejecting masks. I think it's valid, however disappointing, about the conclusion that culturally the US never had any real shot of containment early on, the way we saw it occur in Australia or New Zealand.

The idea that school closures did not have a strong impact makes sense. Most schools that reopened before the fall/winter spike remained open and didn't seem to be a cause of spread, at least among kids. It ran pretty rampant amongst faculty and staff at my wife's school, but made it to very few kids.

Not sure we did enough testing to really know what sources of spread were. Seems as likely that kids just didn't get visibly sick (at least beyond sniffles, coughs, etc that kids often have during the year) than adults in schools got Covid but kids didn't. Not clear we wanted to find evidence of spread (lots of issues including education/development, economy, etc). And I know of several schools where the CDC guidance (mask wearing and distancing) were not followed (kids didn't wear them and enforcement was spotty and physical plant limitations don't allow for distancing).

True about the testing, though in the case of community spread in my school district, if there was any substantial spread, I think we'd see multiple infections in the same communities. One infection per month (student or staff) implies there wasn't a lot, if any, there. It's really hard to generalize though, because districts were largely left to their own devices and the expertise was uneven at best.

How does COVID-19 end in the US? Likely with a death rate Americans are willing to 'accept'

While it's easy to be annoyed or angry or feel like we all didn't do enough to eliminate COVID, this was probably the most likely realistic outcome the whole time.

No, what I'm angry about is that USA Today thinks it's valuable enough to paywall content.

Haha! Really?

I don't think I've ever gotten a paywall to their stuff.

Jeff said:

No, what I'm angry about is that USA Today thinks it's valuable enough to paywall content.

Not as bad as the other day when I wanted to read a single story in the Chagrin Valley Times from 2017 and the only way to do so was to purchase a $47 year long subscription.