Hoosier

I put some advice below, but you have to click to see it.

At least this would be happening in the context of a spring that has not been too bad overall from a temperature perspective.

Apparently Michigan did another one of their reviews of past deaths. Takes a little extra work to sort out the more recent deaths.

In some ways I think there is too much obsession over the term herd immunity. Not to say we shouldn't have as many vaccinated as possible, but I am pretty sure "herd immunity" for covid is not going to look like it does for polio, measles, or other diseases that are almost non-existent (especially in the United States). I think our best case is sort of a watered down, poor man's version of it.

The flu vaccine is generally less effective than the covid vaccines though. Let's see some data on how much the protection wanes from the covid vaccine instead of only hearing from a CEO.

I wonder how much immunity is left in the original trial participants. Some of them would've been vaccinated a year or so ago. What is the criteria going to be for deciding when a booster is needed? What level of efficacy is no longer considered acceptable? Also will be interesting to see how long this vaccine is free for all Americans.

You had to go and post the 81% in May again? I'm gonna hope for the best that it won't lead to a repeat of what happened last time.

This is true. I think there's still incentive to get more physical activity and lose weight though. Besides the overall health benefits, there's at least some reason to think that the vaccine won't work as effectively in people who are very overweight. So in particular for someone who is carrying a lot of extra pounds and is putting off getting the vaccine... maybe try to lose some weight in the meantime.

Something has gone wrong if we're not trending down in cases/hospitalizations by then.

Would be pretty unusual but not unheard of to have it twice in 5 months. I know at least some of the variants seem to be able to reinfect people who already had covid more easily. Curious to see if he really does have it again. Let us know.

This map represents weekly cases per 100k people. 0 is the best and 3 is the highest level. Lots of 2s in the northern part of the state. It is interesting to note that every county in the northern row except for one is at least at 2 with a couple at 3. I know this was alluded to, but I wonder if there is beginning to be some spillover effect happening from Michigan. The county I live in and the county directly to my east technically do not border Michigan, but since the Indiana portion of Lake Michigan is not extremely wide, it's still not far away from Michigan. I can be there in 45 minutes and most people in the northern row of counties could get there even faster.

Deleted over 50 posts in here. A friendly reminder... please try to stay on topic as much as possible and keep it civil.

I wonder if the decision to not send additional vaccine to Michigan would have been made anyway or if one of the reasons is because they knew this pause of J&J was coming. Hopefully there's enough supply of the other 2 to accommodate everybody who already had an appointment scheduled.

Per worldometers, Michigan is 41 in cases per million and 22 in tests per million, so it's not like they have run an unusually low amount of tests there. Sorted by cases per million: Sorted by tests per million:

They may have a higher amount of variant spread than other states, and the variants do seem to be more contagious. There's also speculation that there are greater numbers of people there who hadn't been exposed to covid (MI cases per million are on the lower end, and their testing rates have not been super low compared to other states).

It did say the 72 were fully vaccinated. But yeah, could it be that some of them developed covid a few days after receiving dose #2 and didn't require hospital care until 2 weeks had gone by? Who knows.

I linked a story here recently that mentioned a guy who had the first dose, developed covid and died before getting the 2nd dose. Some other reports of vaccinated people dying in Michigan which are being investigated. We are talking about small numbers though.

One thing missing from the story is how many covid cases were there among those 2.5 million fully vaccinated? 72 hospitalized out of how many cases?

I do expect the vaccine pace to slow down some in the next month or two. Obviously the timing on that will be important. At this point, I don't think we'll actually see 80% of the 16+ crowd get vaccinated, unless a significant number of people were lying in the public opinion polls. Never know I guess.

There was a recent story out of Washington state that mentioned that some fully vaccinated people were hospitalized with covid. It was a very small number though... I think 8 people or something.

As someone who is living in a state that dropped the statewide mask mandate earlier this week (despite our case and hospital metrics going back up), I can say that so far I have seen no noticeable difference in the amount of mask wearing in public places. Everyone is still wearing one, at least in stores and other businesses. Granted, a lot of those places still require masks, but I have not seen anyone fighting it "because my governor says I don't have to wear one." Maybe the thinking will change as more get vaccinated and the numbers drop again, but for now, my experience is that people are playing nicely.

I really think the "frankencorn"/farming practices/land use is stacking the deck against the extreme summer maxes in the Midwest. It's not always going to work (see 2012 for example) and there may come a day when other signals take over, but it helps to get drought conditions kicking in by late spring and get that to feed back and take out some of the crops to reduce the amount of evapotranspiration. Warming maxes in the Midwest in winter would get my antenna up as far as cutting into snowfall as you can only afford so much warming in that category. At the end of the day, the warming mins are interesting to note and to be able to pick out the UHI influence in some areas. But for me that almost falls into the "who cares" category, particularly for winter months when warmer mins are probably welcomed by most people outside of low temperature nerds.

Yeah, just from a total snowfall perspective, I am not that concerned. I think it would take a lot more warming to really knock that down significantly, and I'd be particularly concerned with warming max temps. Not that there won't be clunker seasons, but they should largely be made up for by the good snowfall seasons. If you look at the 30 year averages by decade (by that I mean 1961-1990, 1971-2000, 1981-2010, 1991-2020), there's some bouncing around or perhaps a little downward trend in snowfall depending where you look. For Chicago, I think 1971-2000 averaged like 38-39", 1981-2010 was 36.3" and now 1991-2020 will be 38.4"

At least it's snowing more.

Hopefully the mask mandates can go away in the next few months. By then, you should have been able to get a vaccine if you want one, at least if you're 16+. Would not doubt that masking will still be a thing in schools this fall, since many kids are not going to have a chance to be vaccinated in time for Aug/Sep.