WhitinsvilleWX

If I remember right, the one we had wasn't supposed to do much but ended up dumping on us.

in Massachusetts

Yup. along with the old anafrontal. Although I seem to remember during the February snow blitz in 15 that most got a foot plus from an anafrotnal. But that year, any one of the frauds came through.

My day lilies are starting to sprout as well as the cats mint. The ground isn’t frozen at all. Fire up lawn thread.

You got that right! Cold and dry is no way to go through life, son.

If we don’t see a flake or 2 soon, DIT just needs to fire up the lawn thread. I had new sod put down in September. Still almost as green as the day it was put in.

If I don’t see some snow soon I may melt. I’d settle for some mood snow at this point.

Wow! 5 point difference and Mahomes is out But Tyreek Hill is a beast

I hope so. But KC is a much better team.

God no. He lives alone on the beach in Wilmington NC. Just finished contracting his own house and plumbed it himself. He’s a retired building contractor, plumber by trade. Had both knees replaced in the last 4 years, travels in his motor home. He’s healthy and strong as an ox. Hope to keep it that way. His wife died 2 years ago with dementia. She was 78. NC has all their facilities done and moved on to 75 and above.

My 82 yo father got his first dose of Pfizer today. So far so good.

Incompetency. Someone at the NIH should be all over this. And...testing asymptomatic people on a routine basis with an overly sensitive PCR test is bad medicine. You could get 1000 random heathy, asymptomatic people off the street in Boston, do a nose swab and find any number of virus RNA's/DNA's if you had the right primer and probes. You probably come into contact with the measles once in awhile. You don't get it because you're vaccinated. But if you happen to do a PCR test when you are exposed, it'll pop positive. Are we testing healthy, asymptomatic people everyday for flu, mumps, polio, measles, etc by PCR? NOOOOOO. So why are we testing asymptomatic, healthy people for covid? Because people have been told that healthy, asymptomatic people are spreading a respiratory virus around infecting others. Maybe this is the first respiratory virus known to man that infects humans, replicates in your respiratory tract with a high enough viral load to infect others at an R0 of 2 or higher, and you are healthy enough to run a marathon and not know you're sick. I doubt it. The PCR test is the worst thing that was conceived for this whole mess.

J&J's isn't as easy to manufacture as the mRNA vaccines. Don't be too hard on them. Drug manufacturing is difficult. When a new drug is anticipated to be approved, there are months to years to get the manufacturing up to speed when its finally approved. There's a lot of QA/QC involved. This "warp speed" science does have limits. It wasn't a "lie", it was a best guess and sometimes they get it wrong.

The congressman wasn't sick. No symptoms, felt fine. Had the second shot I believe.

They didn't validate shit. It's all still EUA. Any validation done so far says Ct values >32-33 aren't infectious. Nothing's standardized. The rapid tests false negative rate is being compared to the PCR tests that are called positive at anything less than 40. Total BS. IMO, if you're negative off the rapid test, you're not infectious. That needs to be validated against viral replication assays, badly, and not PCR.

I read that. He said he wasn’t sick and felt fine. Im telling you it’s that GD, foul PCR test. I’d like to see the cycle number where he tested positive. I’d bet a months pay it fell into the range of “non moribund , non infectious”. His immune system took care of it and all that’s left are a few viral particles or strands of RNA left that are meaningless. Until that PCR goes away or is modified with respect to interpretation, we’ll have these meaningless “positive” forever. Makes me so angry they can’t get this right.

Massachusetts hasn’t done well with getting the vaccine distributed at all. Hard to imagine given the health care system we have here. Frickin West Virginia is doing really well. Go figure.

That’s hard to say really. This idea of a more contagious strain is based only on computer models. Granted there’s been work on sequencing in the population and found that it’s the predominant form in certain areas. Computer models spit out “70% more contagious”. It was run again and it came out to 56%. Some estimated potentially 20%. I think we all know about models and how accurate they can be. The reality is there’s been no wet laboratory experiments done to determine if this is actually more contagious or not. It could be, but so far it’s all based on a computer model. A cynical person might be led to conclude that maybe the idea of a more contagious strain is out there to explain why mitigation measures don’t seem to really work.

Actually my experience is that anti vax sentiments transcends "this"^ You see it regardless of "That which cant be discussed".

There’s plenty of head room actually, at least in Massachusetts. Boston hospitals only have 15-20% of total capacity that consist of Covid patients. Some outlying hospitals have upwards of 30%. But there’s plenty of room. Back during April, there were 4500 in the hospital. LA outnumbered is another story. I had no idea there were 10 million people in that one county. Dear god, that’s the population of Massachusetts, RI and Connecticut combined.

Some of the decrease, at least in Massachusetts, is more people are being moved to other facilities and obviously going home. One thing you really don’t see reported is WHY there are 2200 in the hospital. Make no mistake, there are some really sick people in the hospital. However, most are in there for 1-3 days getting some oxygen, steroids, and/or Remdesivier and they can go home. However, a lot can’t go home for several reasons. Some live with extended family and they don’t want them back home until they are not contagious, some live alone and need a little care but not hospital level etc etc. But, LTC facilities (think Spaulding) won’t take them. Sometimes it takes several days or even a week plus to find a place that will take them. Matter of fact, that’s who is in the DCU center or the Lowell field hospitals. I have MD buddies and social workers telling me these things that go on at a lot of area hospitals. So the increase isn’t necessarily because people are stacking up really sick in the hospital for days and days, but because they can’t be transported to a recovery facility. I know of one hospital down in southern Mass that calls other facilities daily to get people moved. They’re sending them as far away as the cape to rehab facilities to free up hospital capacity.

Yes, that’s correct. A second shot is imperative, but it can be pushed off a little and as long as the manufacturing chain holds up, there’s no reason to hold it back. We need about a million or 1.5 mill a day to get this done by late summer.

I don’t know, honestly. Most vaccines have a booster much later than 21 or 28 days. Hell, childhood vaccines generally go a year plus between primary and booster. The big unknown is....do these vaccines need a booster within a month or 2 to maintain a durable response. I think it’s pretty clear that one shot gives a great response but how soon does that second one need to be given. Normally different schedules would be investigated but this one really only looked at one schedule since time was of the essence. My feeling is the second shot could be pushed off several weeks or a couple months beyond and it probably wouldn’t make much difference. The good thing about the mRNA vaccines are that they are fast to make. All that said, they can’t even get the doses they have given out (even holding back the second dose) much less more. I’m not sure even if they did release more it could be distributed faster. If I had to make the decision, I’d probably release it all if I could make sure the manufacturing process would stay on track.

It needs to speed up. It’s still too slow. I signed up to get my 83 yo father vaccinated today. He lives in NC. The first round of vaccine they got ran out before he could get through on the phone. I finally got someone on the phone last week at the county health department. She said they only had 3000 doses available and they filled up the appointment schedule in an hour. I got on a text alert system that would text me when the next batch was available. It went off this morning at 11 am. I called immediately and it took me 17 tries before I got through. I was on hold 38 minutes. I got him an appointment Friday. By 2:20 pm I received another text that said they ran out of appointments. So in ~3.5 hours they were done. There’s got to be a better system here. At this rate we’ll still be in masks this time in 2025.

This^ People shouldn't freak out about this. A friend of mine who is a med tech in a hospital lab took the Pfizer vaccine about 3 weeks ago. She did a Covid antibody titer on herself a couple days ago. Her titer was higher than the top end on the test. The test is based on total Covid antibodies and is expressed as an index. Her draw before the vaccine tested at 0. Three weeks later it was >10 and the scale is 0-10. She's 70 years old. Who knows what the duration of the response is, but it looks like these mRNA vaccines produce really high titers from some similar anecdotal evidence I've heard.