Coronavirus

[BottenFieldofDreams]

Thanks everyone. We (wife, daughter, other son, myself ) are in line for testing. My daughter in law came to her senses last night and she and my two grandsons were tested earlier this morning. That will tell us if the one year old is infected. We'll see!

Thank God she came on board. Don't hear much of that kind of behavior these days. I hope it all plays out smoothly.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Thanks everyone. We (wife, daughter, other son, myself ) are in line for testing. My daughter in law came to her senses last night and she and my two grandsons were tested earlier this morning. That will tell us if the one year old is infected. We'll see!

Thank God she came on board. Don't hear much of that kind of behavior these days. I hope it all plays out smoothly.

And one final twist. Our tests are all negative - including my son that tested positive yesterday! False alarm, I guess. These tests are what - 80 - 90% accurate? He also just got vaccinated last month - maybe that had something to do with it? Whatever - good news!

[GeddyWrox]

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Glad to hear yall are good, Joe, regardless of it was a false positive or your son just cleared the infection quickly.

Also, don't know if anyone has been paying attention, but one thing from an epidemiological (sp?) standpoint, and the fact I don't even know how to spell it should tell you all you need to know about my expertise on this topic, it's been interesting to watch case numbers. A few, mostly southern and/or lower vaxxed states, had large outbreaks in August. Which, obviously, led to concern as schools started back up, and in many cases with state law prohibiting schools require masking (though in most cases that was overturned).

My concern, and I was not alone, was that large circulation of the virus in the population would be exacerbated with the reopening of schools and the congregation of students. But, that by and large has not happened. States like Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, etc that were at their absolute peak a month or so ago are seeing precipitous declines in daily new cases. The new cases remain higher than you'd like, that's not the argument.

It's a shame the outbreaks caused so many deaths, and continue to do so. But, good to see the fear school openings would cause expeditious gains in new cases has not come to fruition.

[Radbird]

I got 2 pokes yesterday. COVID booster in left arm, flu shot in right. Sore and achy today but glad I did it.

[AdmiralKird]

My friends wife in ofallon got a booster two days ago at a walgreens, and my friend went yesterday and they were out.

[heyzeus]

Some promising news - an antiviral medication that has really promising results is going to be fasttracked for an EUA. It appears to greatly cut down severe covid, and could be a gamechanger for the unvaccinated as well as the high-risk vaccinated.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/202 ... 938807001/

Of the participants who received molnupiravir, 28 or 7.3% were hospitalized during the month-long trial. In the placebo group, 53 people – or 14% –were hospitalized and 8 of them died.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Some promising news - an antiviral medication that has really promising results is going to be fasttracked for an EUA. It appears to greatly cut down severe covid, and could be a gamechanger for the unvaccinated as well as the high-risk vaccinated.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/202 ... 938807001/

Of the participants who received molnupiravir, 28 or 7.3% were hospitalized during the month-long trial. In the placebo group, 53 people – or 14% –were hospitalized and 8 of them died.

Sweet! Glad to see a trial done in the early phases of the virus and show promising results.

[heyzeus]

Molnupiravir really is a hilariously stupid and unpronounceable name, though.

[Arthur Dent]

My concern, and I was not alone, was that large circulation of the virus in the population would be exacerbated with the reopening of schools and the congregation of students.

I don’t think it was ever very credible that schools by themselves were a major source of overall circulation. It’s just not a high enough fraction of total contacts. You saw this very early with these epidemic models, that were at the time being used to argue that school closure was not enough on its own, but what really happened is exactly that. Add to that, COVID is both (vastly) less dangerous to kids and (not as dramatically) less transmissible by them. I understand why people might want to shut them anyway, but I don’t think on an overall epidemiological level, it helped much. The bigger danger is to teachers than kids, and my understanding is that for schools that remained open in person, teachers were infected at basically the same rate as the overall population. The main benefit of virtual schooling was that it allowed teachers to join their white collar peers with the option to really hide out, which I don’t know, but I just find the class based unequal risk sharing dimension of this thing really dark.