COVID-19 Outbreak Information Updates (Reboot) [over 150.000,000 US cases (est.), 6,422,520 US hospitilizations, 1,148,691 US deaths.] (6 Viewers)

The mRNA vaccines are supposed to help protect from asymptomatic infection and transmission. It does not eliminate all infections however, and does not prevent all transmission.
I read an article today discussing this. They say that asymptomatic and mandatory tested without symptom vaccinated people shouldn't even be counted as breakthrough because the vaccine did it's job. The test is picking up dead virus residue which tried to infect them but didn't make it.


"I think we are misusing the term breakthrough," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "If someone who is fully vaccinated is subsequently hospitalized or killed by the virus, that's a breakthrough case." He said he wouldn't call an "asymptomatic or relatively mild case" a "breakthrough case."

What matters, he said, is "the vaccine is still doing what it is designed to do — keep people out of the hospital and out of the morgue."
In fact, the CDC doesn't even recommend routine testing of asymptomatic vaccinated people for the coronavirus. As Gandhi of UC San Francisco explains, positive tests might just be picking up "dead viral particles in your nose," she said. "Vaccinated people may get it in their nose, but they're going to kill it — that's actually what the immune system does."
 
If what this doctor is saying is true, then at least it seems like we will see things break down more in the coming months along lines of who is, versus who isnt , vaccinated…. Which seems a little more fair and just, though we obviously dont live in a fair and just world.


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Great read.

Though his use of the word "variants" had me all "for all time".
 
Was vaccinated on April 1, today was the first day that the injection site REALLY started acting up. Swelling, tenderness, soreness. That's highly unusual, isn't it? Over three months later, having a reaction? Now, I just started bike riding for the past few days and may have burned some fat. Maybe some of the vaccine was released due to fat loss. I don't know but this seems weird to me. Don't get me wrong, I had injection site soreness for about 3 days initially but it faded. This is just...again, weird.
Have you been riding a bike near a 5g tower?
 
The fact that we're about to return to school with zero meaningful strategy in place is nothing short of terrifying to me. This is going to be worse than last year by several orders of magnitude.
If you want a peek into the future, you can just take a look at England. Up until the 8th March we were in a lockdown, which had successfully brought the autumn/winter wave (which included the Alpha variant) under control.

We reopened schools on the 8th March, with some measures (mostly just testing and isolation, classroom 'bubbles', and mask wearing (but not in primary / junior)). At that point, Delta wasn't around, and we still had the other lockdown measures in place outside schools as well. Opening schools at that point appeared to have just a slight impact which you can see in the cases heatmap (from here):

heatmap1.png

Following reopening schools in early March, there was a slight rise in cases in school age children and the rate of decline in cases slowed for their parents age groups, but that didn't persist. (I'll add that at this point in terms of vaccination, we'd just started vaccinating 50-54 year olds, so the only vaccinated people in those younger adult groups would have been the extremely vulnerable and healthcare workers). So at that point, so far, so good, schools open, and the lockdown measures continuing to keep Covid suppressed.

So we continued opening up, with some outdoor activities resuming on 29th March, and non-essential retail and indoor leisure reopening, and bars and restaurants providing outdoor service on 12th April, and that was basically OK too (the rate of decline in cases stopped, but they didn't start climbing back up again). Meanwhile, the vaccine rollout was continuing, being extended to people in their 40s through April.

But.

Around the start of May, we started getting Delta cases. By mid-May, we were starting to see this translate into a slight rise in overall cases, with Delta rapidly reaching half of the genotyped cases.

So, on 17th May, we responded by... stopping requiring masks in secondary schools and colleges, and reopening indoor hospitality. At this point, the main remaining measures in place generally were masking, social distancing (and the venue capacity limits that requires), and nightclubs still being closed.

That didn't go really well, and by the time we reached 21st June, which is when the remaining limits were supposed to be lifted, the heatmap looked like this:

heatmap2.png

OK, not so good, especially in that 20-24 age range. But at that point, the vaccination rollout had only just reached 25 year olds. So our government responded by pushing back that last step in the lifting of restrictions to the 19th July. Notably, and bizarrely IMO, they did not, and still have not, reinstated mask wearing in schools, despite under 18s not being vaccinated here. So, to (finally!) get to the point, how has that gone?


heatmap3.png

Well. That's not ideal. So what have we done?

Lifted the remaining rules on mask wearing and distancing and reopened nightclubs anyway, as of three days ago. We've also changed guidance for schools, but not in the direction you might think; where previously cases would result in the school telling the class bubbles to isolate, that's shifting to individual testing and tracing, carried out by a poorly performing national service. So at this point, all we have is basically guidance that we should keep wearing masks even though we don't have to, and testing, tracing, and isolation. Vaccination is available to the entire adult population now, and nearly 70% of adults have had two doses, but uptake is substantially slowing down now.

So the good thing is vaccination is proving very effective in preventing deaths. But with cases running wild (the UK has more daily cases than the entire USA right now) and rapidly approaching our previous peak in January, it's still having serious impacts. Outbreaks in educational settings are very high (945 recorded by Public Health England over the four weeks up to 4th July, compared with 297 in workplaces, 256 in care homes, and 11 in hospitals). Over a million children were absent from school last week due to Covid (some with it, many isolating), and the sheer number of cases is causing hundreds of thousands of people to have to isolate (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57929162). That's causing staff shortages and business closures. The response to that seems to be try to limit the requirement to isolate (as with the class bubbles), by exempting some key workers from isolating unless and until they actually test positive, and, in some serious mixed messaging from the government, suggesting that isolating when notified through the NHS app could be ignored. But that will inevitably accelerate the rise in cases even more though, as some of those no longer isolating will turn out to infectious.

And of course, even with high levels of vaccination, with that rate of cases we're still seeing hospitalisations rising. Deaths are, as I said, much lower than previously thanks to vaccination, but also rising. And I do think there's an increasing tendency to become glib about that; less death is great, and a lower risk of death is highly desirable, but even a low risk of a high consequence is still something to be taken seriously, and death is about as high as consequences go.

That said, we're also largely disregarding other consequences entirely. Long Covid rates will also inevitably rise, and while there are indications vaccines help against this, both by reducing the risk of infection and, as at least some data indicates, reducing the risk of Long Covid if infection does occur (this work, from epidemiology at King's College London, indicates that, as well as a reduction in chance of getting infected by around 85%, "vaccines also decrease the likelihood, if someone does get infected, of developing Long Covid by up to 30 per cent,"), it remains the case that if you have an extremely high number of cases, you'll still have a high number of cases of Long Covid, since even a smaller proportion of a very large number can still, in itself, be a large number.

OK, this was a longer post than intended. But if you want to see what Delta does in a population relying on an incomplete vaccination rollout and little else, keep watching England.
 
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OK, this was a longer post than intended. But if you want to see what Delta does in a population relying on an incomplete vaccination rollout and little else, keep watching England.
great post. I believe we can keep watching MS. ALA. MO. And LA here in the states
 
Was vaccinated on April 1, today was the first day that the injection site REALLY started acting up. Swelling, tenderness, soreness. That's highly unusual, isn't it? Over three months later, having a reaction? Now, I just started bike riding for the past few days and may have burned some fat. Maybe some of the vaccine was released due to fat loss. I don't know but this seems weird to me. Don't get me wrong, I had injection site soreness for about 3 days initially but it faded. This is just...again, weird.
You did choose to get vaccinated on April Fool’s Day. Who knows what they shot you up with...

Glad to hear the soreness is subsiding
 
At Oschner in Cov for daughter shot....place is absolutely packed.

Guess Delta woke folks up
I know you know this,but keep her practicing social distancing and mask wearing. It takes up to two weeks for the body to build suffecient anti-bodies. Same for the 2nd dose. Two weeks after the 2nd dose,she will be good to go

I'm also glad to hear the hospital was packed. We still need a lot more vaccinated
 
I know you know this,but keep her practicing social distancing and mask wearing.
While we're here ...

Faceman, what's the lay of the land in Ocean Springs? Me and the family (all fully vaxxed) are headed there tomorrow for a three-day weekend. We have a rental with a full kitchen, and will probably only eat out for two lunches (at outdoor-seating places) over the weekend.

I'm assuming that for any grocery-shopping and retail we visit ... we'll be the only masked people? Absolutely zero masking on the Gulf Coast, or just a low level?
 

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