Hoosier

If you were sick like a month ago and are in a highly vaccinated state, odds are it wasn't delta. For someone who has generally downplayed covid, it's a bit strange that Phin wants to attribute every illness to it. Seems a little obsessed about doing that and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's an attempt to say "see, that thing you had was covid and it was no big deal."

We got a glimpse of increased school transmission with alpha in Michigan this past spring, although it was unclear if it was the classroom or the extracurriculars. Delta is apparently even more contagious than alpha.

"Back to school" is going to be a bumpy ride. Lots of quarantines and at least temporary shifts back to virtual learning I think. I feel bad for parents with unvaccinated kids. Yeah, kids tend to get milder illness or even be asymptomatic, but nobody wants their kid to be the one who gets really sick. Something I was thinking about is that elementary school kids tend to be in one, maybe 2 classrooms all day, and nobody in that age group has been able to be vaccinated yet. If someone in the classroom is carrying the virus, that group of kids will have hours to be exposed, potentially taking in a huge viral load. Unlike middle/high school students who move around the school more and at least some of whom have been vaccinated. A counterargument may be that some schools were open in-person last time without having issues. Yes, but delta is a different animal. It's going to be harder to stop it in schools and there will be a lot more schools in-person this time, at least to start.

Smartass question but the honest answer is not very confident in not catching Delta at some point. I looked at my county's vaccine rate the other day and was very surprised to see it at only 41%, because I live in one of the few reliable Dem counties in IN. There is a significant black/brown population here (over 30%) which has to be playing a role, but not attributing it to only that.

Real world evidence for all to see that the vaccines are good at reducing severe illness/death. There's no hard threshold, but it seems like the farther north of 50% that a state is with vaccinations, that's when you really see the big decoupling of cases from hospitalizations/deaths.

This is interesting. Some limitations with the study but it does seem to poke a hole in the idea that "I already had covid so I don't need the vaccine", especially for people who had covid like a year ago. I think changes in someone's state of health over time are also worth considering. If an unvaccinated person had covid and got through it, but in the meantime has developed leukemia, do you wanna take a chance on remaining unvaccinated?

You may notice some severe thunderstorm warnings looking a little different https://www.weather.gov/lot/SevereThunderstormWarningsUpdate

No it doesn't, except in unusually bad years.

That seems like a decent estimate nationally. The wild card is schools reopening and remains to be seen if that could make the peak more flattish/prolonged instead of a quick plunge. Will be interesting to watch the case trends in the northern states though, because seasonality may want to start kicking in around the time that this wave would naturally be heading downward.

Nationwide hospitalizations are at a similar level as the peak of the summer 2020 surge. I would presume that the average age is younger this time.

Just curious, how did they come up with that 0.02% figure in the UK? Was everybody and their brother who flagged a positive PCR test included in the denominator?

Colored just seems outdated. I use African American or black. I don't think black is offensive at all, unless you refer to people as "the blacks" or something.

Agree. That post reminded me of my grandma, who passed away in her 90s ~10 years ago. She still used the word colored.

The 1950s say hi.

That was fast Texas Republican leader dies of COVID-19 five days after anti-vaccination post https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/566513-texas-republican-leader-dies-of-covid-19-five-days-after-anti

By the way, here is the link for anyone who is interested. I hear they are short on conservative posters. http://www.americanpol.com

lol

I'm not even really talking about catching it. I'm talking more about deaths. So many of them now and what's to come could've been avoided.

Tell me what you disagree with, Phin. I just find this particular increase/surge to be frustrating, because there is something out there now (vaccines) unlike previous times. But you can't drag people to go get it.

600 deaths so far today, and usually the higher death days come at the end of the week as anyone who has been following knows by now. 2 weeks ago, we were averaging about 40k cases per day. I am not saying that cases/hospitalizations/deaths track like how they used to, but anyone still want to argue that there won't be a significant jump in deaths in the coming weeks? Things are setting up for near/over 1000 per day eventually.

Oh, are you one of those people who thinks that a ton of covid deaths were mischaracterized? It'd be silly for me to argue that that never happens, but it's not enough to really alter things in a big way. There were something like 3.3 million total/all-cause deaths in the US in 2020, compared to about 2.8 million expected deaths. Hundreds of thousands of extra people died from something.

If you think that what is going on now is normally seen to this extent in the summer, then we'll have to agree to disagree.

If more and more data comes out supporting that delta has a mortality rate like the flu, then I'd have no problem with the media reporting that. What also has to be mentioned though is that delta is far more contagious than the flu (nobody really disputes that, right?) so it will invariably end up getting to more people. Hundreds of people are dying per day in the US. We don't normally see that with the flu during the summer months.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/health/covid-young-adults-sicker.html

You are mixed up. I was talking about Latvia and Lithuania.