Covid 19 CRISIS

https://www.statnews.com/feature/coronavirus/the-road-ahead-the-next-12-months-and-beyond/

A great writeup on Stat about how the future might pan out. It's, as usual, very US-centric and at some points a bit too literaric in its prose for my taste, but it still brings across the most important points - including a belief that mass vaccination in the US will start between April and June, with a return to "normalcy" in the second half of the year:
“We will have to, as societies around the world, learn to live with this infection,” said Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust. “Manage it. Reduce its impact through vaccination, treatment, and diagnostics as we do with other infections.”
[...]
That is not a message people will want to hear. But the important thing to remember, Fauci said, is that the crisis “will end.” [...] The pandemic will have lasting impacts, on everything from people postponing having children to urban landscapes to harms to global health. But “we will come through on the other side and we will go back to our lives,” said Howard Markel, a historian of medicine at the University of Michigan. “There have been epidemics for millennia, and those who survive move on with their lives and they go on.”

Perhaps by the holidays in December 2021, life will feel safe enough that memories of the anxiety and fear of spring 2020 start to blur. After all, Markel said, the typical final act of health emergencies is “global amnesia,” when people forget the lessons of what they just lived through.
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This of course is a bad thing because covid has unveiled how vastly unprepared for a pandemic western societies were, as well as how truly fucked the US are as a society - and forgetting this without learning any lessons would be a tragedy.

I believe that in Europe - if one of the three frontrunner vaccines turns out to work and if we can keep our approval process untainted by US politics, mass vaccination may be able to start a bit earlier, maybe in March. At least two countries (Italy and Austria) have already announced they will try to vaccinate frontline medical workers in January if possible.
 
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Life in Missouri has continued like nothing has happened (or more correctly is happening). Infection rate was up to 2000 new cases yesterday, most people don't wear masks, there's not a statewide mask order (some municipalities have mask orders, but most have lapsed) and of course, there's many that think it's still a hoax or "If I die, I die".
 
CraigB said:
Life in Missouri has continued like nothing has happened (or more correctly is happening). Infection rate was up to 2000 new cases yesterday, most people don't wear masks, there's not a statewide mask order (some municipalities have mask orders, but most have lapsed) and of course, there's many that think it's still a hoax or "If I die, I die".
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:(
 
The province of Quebec is now pretty much officially in the second wave with approximately 500 new cases per day.

We now use colour code to describe the situation, and while the first wave was concentrated in Montreal, we now have 3 regions considered "Orange" (second highest level).

INSPQ_daily_20200922.png
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"Missouri Governor Mike Parson, who has refused to take basic steps to fight the coronavirus pandemic, has tested positive for COVID-19. His wife has tested positive, too.

The governor has been mismanaging the state since long before the beginning of the pandemic, but since March he’s made it clear that he’s completely not up to the job, defiantly rejecting pleas for a statewide mask mandate. And now his total inability to be an effective and protective leader has literally hit home."

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/new...itive-for-covid-19-joining-117000-missourians

Hang on here... I'm looking... I'm sure I have one left... nope, I'm all out of fucks to give.
 
He's not running for reelection, he's running for election, remember he was appointed Gov after the piece of shit Greitens was forced to resign for being a piece of shit. What's sad is that he'll probably win too, because Missouri is a red hellhole by and large, this despite him putting more time and energy into protecting bunny & clud that everyone else in the state who isn't a rich white asshole.
 
Fauci fires back at Sen. Paul

 
CDC Director's Office Ordered Softening Of Coronavirus Safety Protocols For Meat Plant

 
Punisher Bass said:
He's not running for reelection, he's running for election, remember he was appointed Gov after the piece of shit Greitens was forced to resign for being a piece of shit. What's sad is that he'll probably win too, because Missouri is a red hellhole by and large, this despite him putting more time and energy into protecting bunny & clud that everyone else in the state who isn't a rich white asshole.
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Sort of slipped my mind, but you are correct, he wasn't elected and he's not someone I would want to see continue to be in power.
 
jack_christie said:
CDC Director's Office Ordered Softening Of Coronavirus Safety Protocols For Meat Plant

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ive been trying to buy other non-Smithfield branded meats but know that’s probably a lost cause.
 
It seems like Sweden's softer-touch covid strategy might be paying off. They avoided excessive measures in both directions (never went into lockdown, never imposed a mask mandate, but also never lifted the 50 people limit for gatherings - basically they are sticking to the same set of rules since April), while managing to keep their hospitals from going over capacity at the same time. Now they are the almost only EU country with a stable downward trajectory in terms of new infections.

Yes, they got four times as many deaths as Germany (adjusted for population, actually they got half on 1/8th of the populace). But with vaccination for high-risk groups two to three months and mass vaccination half a year away, the rest of the EU sadly has some time left to catch up.

Sometime in April or May Christian Drosten said something along the lines of Germany's strategy hinging on experimental treatments or vaccines for those at risk being available come September... we'll see how well we'll do without them in the months to come.

EDIT: Technology Review has a dire piece on a city in Brazil reaching herd immunity - with the virus gone, but one in 500 (.2%) of the population dead. So "good" news is no, we won't have to live with the pandemic forever - even with vanishing antibodies, the virus will probably become another common cold after another two or three waves. But bad news is based on this data, half a million people would die in the continental US alone - and even tiny Sweden would see another 15K die. So let's hope a vaccine checks out soon.

EDIT 2: Thinking back to my statistics class in college I notice the huge spread of population percentage needed for herd immunity between the two sources above - The Danish researchers quoted put the threshold as low as 40%, while the Brazilians go with 66% - a 25% difference. I think there's two things at play here. Firstly, the city in Brazil had the pandemic completely die down, while Sweden still is at 25 infections per 100K people.
Secondly, with Sweden's low population density and almost half the people living in single person households, the virus probably runs out of hosts much quicker than in a densely-populated city in Brazil.
 
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you'd expect a pandamic to solve the overpopulation...but it hasn't even made a dent...
 
Utah is now in the "fall surge" We've averaged over 800 new cases per day for over a week, the positive test rate is up over 5 points but overall testing is down - leading experts to believe there are a lot of undiagnosed cases walking around. Not surprisingly, the biggest areas of increase are the very right-wing counties that still have population centers.
 
Remarkable how well NY is doing, Cuomo still the best at getting the message across -

Governor Cuomo Holds Briefing and Delivers Update on COVID-19
Sep 24, 2020
 
What's realllllly fucked up is that if he doesn't survive this, he could still win the election anyway. It's happened in MO before, remember when John Ashcroft lost to Mel Carnahan?
 
Another "Sweden" update. According to the teaser of a paywalled article in the Conservative paper, the Danish government is starting to get flak for "not having done Sweden". This is because "doing better than the Swedes" is a matter of national pride in Denmark, and they had a jolly good summer pointing fingers at how bad the Swedes are doing - but now Sweden looks a lot better suddenly...
 
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