Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Not really a surprise with Covid:

About 70% of breakthrough cases resulting in hospitalization were among adults 65 and older and about 87% of breakthrough cases resulting in death were among adults 65 and older, the CDC data suggests.

Among vaccinated adults with breakthrough cases that put them into the hospital, the median age was 73 and about 71% had three or more underlying conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune conditions and others.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/08/health/severe-breakthrough-cases-cdc...index.html

And Florida school districts don't have to worry about instituting mask mandates (at least for now).

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/08/us/florida-mask-mandate-schools/index.html

DeSantis is working hard to take the biggest loser title from Trump.

And unfortunately, I think that's on purpose. If he's supposedly going to try and be the 2024 Republican nominee, he's going to continue down that path because that's what still resonates with those voters. It seems a race to the bottom is actually a race to the top for them. And actively making masks political and then himself wondering why masks have become politicized is right out of that playbook.

It's totally his intention. The aggrieved old white guy thing really resonates with the MAGA crowd. You just throw stuff at the wall and hope something sticks, but it's not governance, it's just noise to show you're one of them.

Is he aiming for the VP, assuming that the rumblings of Trump running in 2024 are true?

He could be, but I think he's also realistic that there's a decent chance that Trump won't be physically and/or mentally able to even pretend to be a candidate by the time 2024 rolls around. And I think DeSantis is actually more dangerous, because he's just savvy and well spoken enough to seem like he knows what he's doing.

If Trump is the 2024 nominee, the United States will have failed.

You guys are great at explaining stuff, so is it 1 in 20 (95%) or 1 in 1,000 or 5,000 that may get covid after vaccination? I'm hearing both, or I'm confused.

The 1 in 20, the way I understand it, is if you lick a petri dish full of the virus. In the 1 case, your body fails to fully attack the virus and you become infected. I'm sure that's oversimplifying it, or my test case is silly, or both. The larger numbers are more about the aggregate risk moving about the world in average ways with average rates of infection around you. It will vary based on community spread and vaccination rates of those around you.

The derivation of the 95% effectiveness (which was for Alpha in the original phase 3 trials) was that of the people in the trial who got sick, 95% had a placebo and 5% had the actual vaccine. So presumably, in a given situation where there's some likelihood of getting sick, it's reduced by 95% with a vaccine. This doesn't really speak to how likely you are to get sick in the first place. Just the relative likelihood compared to a non-vaccinated person.

Thanks guys. So, the average (according to the NY times article) seems 1 in 1,000 or more? I just happened to be friends with someone who was that one in 1,000 or whatever.

Something like that.

The things that determine whether or not you are going to get sick include...

1. Your time of exposure to the virus
2. The amount of virus you are exposed to
3. How effectively your body can fight off the virus once you are exposed

Selfishly, the vaccine improves item 3.In doing so, it reduces your odds of becoming infected, all other things being equal, by about 95%. In addition, if you should become infected, it also reduces your odds of becoming sick enough to require hospitalization by about 99%. Note that doesn't mean you have a 99% lower risk of being hospitalized than the uninoculated...it means you have a 99% lower risk of being hospitalized than an uninoculated person who also gets sick.

These variables all play against each other. Today, based on the usual caveats you can find elsewhere in this thread, your odds of meeting an infected Ohioan are roughly 1:81. But your odds of meeting an immunized Ohioan are closer to 1:2. Which means if you have 81 Ohioans in a room, one has COVID-19, but 40 are immunized. Of those 40, perhaps two are unlucky enough to be infectable in spite of their immunizations. That still leaves only 42 viable targets for the virus to spread to, even though that one carrier is theoretically capable of infecting four people...the comparable scarcity of viable targets will tend to reduce the number of successful infections.

These numbers are the worst they have been since last Winter. But even at that the numbers are small enough...and I can reduce my odds even more if I avoid contact with young children...that further reduces the number of un-immunized people I come into contact with. From a risk management perspective, as an immunized person, I think my odds of not getting seriously ill are pretty good, even through the current surge.

--Dave Althoff, Jr

The weird thing about the 1 in 5,000 statistic is, it's 1 in 5,000 per day. So if you're planning to live two days, it's 1 in 2,500? In six months it's about 1 in 25? (Disclaimer: never took a class in probabilities.)

RideMan said:

Which means if you have 81 Ohioans in a room, one has COVID-19, but 40 are immunized. Of those 40, perhaps two are unlucky enough to be infectable in spite of their immunizations.

And they would probably have to have been near the infected person for some period or had a conversation with them (time and dose). This study shows that the too young to get vaccinated kids in the front and center were most likely to be infected by their unmasked and unvaccinated teacher. I am assuming that sitting with one another over the course of two school days also contributed.

Odds like that are not additive. The odds of rolling a 1 on six dice is not 100%. The article seems to treat them as additive, though, which is part of why I'm not especially sure of what's even being reported here. If you really wanted to work out the probabilities it's much easier to calculate the odds of not being infected and then subtract that from one. So essentially 1 - (1/5000)^d where d is the number of days.

To me it's just such a strange way to talk about the effectiveness of vaccines in the context of a given community transmission. Personal behavior matters so much that even a ball park average seems "not very useful."

This is why, for as long as I have been tracking the Ohio stats, I've been trying to come up with a ballpark number of "active" cases based on the testing data, multiply to get a number of "silent" cases, and calculate the probability of encountering one of those silently contagious people (on the assumption that someone with a positive test will have the good sense to remove himself from society for a few days). I figure coming up with some kind of probability that any given person I meet might present a COVID hazard would be the simplest and most useful way to come up with some data that might be useful for personal risk management purposes.

Factoring in my lifestyle, which precludes long-duration contact with anybody, I've generally considered myself to be low risk of infection even back when cases peaked in early December and vaccines were still a distant hope...now my personal risk has dropped to the point where the numbers game is little more than an academic exercise. But I still think that 1:81 statistic is still a useful starting place, just for putting the real risk level into perspective.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

This little nugget gets into the politics of death rates. Not surprisingly, more people died per capita in red states. America is a special kind of stupid.

The tragic irony is that conservative leaders of all kinds (not just politicians, but the irony is even richer there) that embrace and spout the anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-common sense rhetoric to the roar of a crowd...which at times I'm never certain if they themselves personally buy into...are potentially helping to cull the numbers of their own voting populace at a faster rate than those who would not affiliate themselves with that side of the aisle. And this in an era when many elections in "close" states and areas are won by not-so-big margins.

You would think someone would to try to pump the brakes just a bit.

Oh, somebody surely has taken the time to do the plus/minus on that…. Right?

God, I wish I could vote that up 10 times.