7of7 posted:

There was also a listener who sent in this paper which I thought was interesting. In the paper they tested patients using lateral flow antigen tests like you'd get at a pharmacy (and which Biden is trying to make more available) as well as with PCR. They then tried to culture virus from the patient samples and it turned out the lateral flow tests were better at predicting the presence of infectious virus than PCR (90% vs 70%) since PCR is so sensitive it tends to be positive even when the patient doesn't have any infectious virus in their nose.

quote:

As shown in Table 1, the antigen test demonstrated a positive percentage agreement (PPA) of 96.4% (95% CI, 82.3%–99.4%) and negative percentage agreement (NPA) of 98.7% (95% CI, 96.1%–99.7%). The rt-PCR assay demonstrated a PPA and NPA of 100% (95% CI, 87.7%–100%) and 95.5% (95% CI, 91.1%–97.8%), respectively. Based on the study prevalence of 11.2%, as determined by SARS-CoV-2 TMPRSS2 culture positivity and a total specimen number of 251 (based on the total, evaluable specimen set utilized for the Veritor EUA study), the positive predictive value (PPV) for the antigen test was 90.0% (95% CI, 76.3%–97.6%), whereas the PPV for the rt-PCR assay was only 73.7% (95% CI, 60.8%–85.3%).

Gynovore posted:

What sorta stuff can you do?

7of7 posted:

I didn't see it posted so I wanted to link this week's episode of TWiV. They had on Shane Crotty who is an immunologist, vaccine researcher, and virologist. They had a really in depth but understandable discussion of the many different aspects of immunity and vaccination.

I thought it was a really good discussion of the various types of immunity you get from infection, immunization, and both combined with a reasonable discussion about the different sides of the booster discussion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEB4oxO9F1A

There was also a listener who sent in this paper which I thought was interesting. In the paper they tested patients using lateral flow antigen tests like you'd get at a pharmacy (and which Biden is trying to make more available) as well as with PCR. They then tried to culture virus from the patient samples and it turned out the lateral flow tests were better at predicting the presence of infectious virus than PCR (90% vs 70%) since PCR is so sensitive it tends to be positive even when the patient doesn't have any infectious virus in their nose.

I've been thinking the antigen tests are probably the best tests for testing vaccinated people since they detect the presence of actual viral proteins so probably correlate better with whether someone is capable of transmitting. Since PCR is so sensitive we might be getting a lot of positive tests from vaccinated people who aren't capable of actually spreading the virus.

As a side benefit if we defense production acted the antigen tests we could be giving them away like candy so you could test twice a day if you wanted and tell immediately if you had enough virus to transmit instead of testing with PCR and either isolating for 10 days from a positive despite not having transmissible virus or getting your results a week later after you've already infected a bunch of people.

covidforever posted:

Maybe this belongs in a different thread but how long and to what extent are people in this thread going to obsess over COVID for the foreseeable future?

I mean part of growing up for me was accepting we have zero control over the world around us. And no matter how much people on these forums rage about anything from universal healthcare, to high rent prices, to student loans, none of us have a single ounce of capacity to change any of those things and all that raging and discussion has made zero impact on changing anything at all for anyone anywhere at anytime.

COVID seems here to stay. If it is what are you going to do? My sister did not leave her house to even to go to a park for the first 12 months of the pandemic. She did not clean her house or maintain her yard. She lives in a rural area in the middle of nowhere. She became extremely paranoid about something that she had little chance of contracting in most cases if she had taken basic precautions. She became extremely depressed. She nearly killed herself worrying about something that while serious for many people did not inherently present any kind of massive danger for her.

There are people in the CSPAM thread and this thread who will continue to never leave their house. They will do it because some people will not vaccinate. They will do it because some people will not wear masks. Those people will never change. You have no power to change them. The only way to change those people would literally be to kill them, and even if society made the decision to do that it would not be because of anything you posted here.

Yet for some people on this forum you are going to let the decisions of those antivaxxers and antimaskers dictate every single piece of your very short lives. You will not go outside even to a park. You will not do anything you did previous to the pandemic. You will live in a state of paranoia over something that while being a very real threat to some of the population, is not going to go away anytime soon.

You can go on and on about how evil capitalism is, and sure it's evil. But you can only shut down everything for so long, even in a socialist society. Commerce and activity are not inherently capitalism. They had stores in Soviet Russia and Hotels too. They had vacations and music concerts and movies. Not everything you do in your day to day life is attributed to capitalism.

I'm not saying COVID can't be controlled. It can be controlled. I'm not saying that our political model does not allow it to be controlled. There are dictatorships that have controlled COVID. There are Democracies that have controlled COVID. There are Communist and Socialist nations that have controlled COVID. There are Capitalist nations that have controlled COVID.

But what allows a nation to control COVID comes down to culture and the US does not have a culture that will let us control COVID. Culture can not be changed overnight. I would argue it in fact would take many generations to bring the US to a place where we had a culture that allowed us to control COVID.

I am not saying we can't decrease personal risk, or collective risk, or make smart or bad decisions. But how long will you let the constant fear of something like COVID dictate everything in your life. How long would you be willing to never ever travel anywhere again? How long would be willing to not leave your house? Or never ever say go to a concert (if that is something you enjoy) Or go to a bar, or a restaurant?

And I agree with many views in this thread COVID may mutate at any point in time to a much deadlier form that can overcome the vaccine. I have no doubt about that. Wouldn't the smart thing be to try and live some of your life before that does happen? Life is very short. We can all die for any moment at any time. It could be COVID, it could be a million other things.

COVID will continue spreading whether you decide to try to go back and do some of the things you did before COVID or not. There is nothing anyone in this thread or on this forums or in the entire world can do to stop this fact. The antivaxx and antimask sentiment are too strong. Like I said, barr killing those people there is nothing that we can do to stop people from not vaccinating and continuing to spread COVID and further mutating the virus to new forms that are much more dangerous.

Even if you had the power and capability to kill all the antivaxxers that would likely generate a situation that would increase the spread of COVID further (a civil war or world war).

You have many options in life. But if this is year 2 of a 15 year pandemic, and you are in your 30s, you are more likely to die than live in a pandemic free world afterwards. So why would you be limiting yourself now when the people you hate and despise and are causing the pandemic won't? Your single action is not going to stop the pandemic nor be enough to significantly impact spread whether you like it or not. You are not a God. You are not that important. We will all die. Some sooner than others. After 30 your life is all downhill and you are hurtling towards death the only question is when. So why live the rest of your very short and unimportant existence in constant anguish and fear of something you truly have zero control over? You have been vaccinated. You wear a mask. Try to buy life insurance. Try to stay safe. But don't the actions of others dictate your own decisions with the little life you have left. We don't have 15 years left of comfortable existence left on this earth in the first place given global warming.

I was hospitalized with COVID last year and I nearly died. I have lived in fear and not going out and being afraid of meeting with people for more than a year. I don't know if that is something I can do for 13 more years.

Platystemon posted:

It seems to me that they’re using a nonuseful metric to successfully draw attention.

Letting an extra thirty-two people in one thousand people out of isolation early is totally not worth accidentally letting out thirteen certifiably infectous individuals.

n = 38 is also deeply problematic for the small effect they’re trying to show

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

I apologize if this has been answered but I couldn’t find the specific language:

Is the mandate for vaccines/testing for companies that have more than 100 employees overall or more than 100 employees per location?

Reason I ask: a supermarket chain could have thousands of employees across the nation but less than 100 at any given store. This is how big companies still got PPP loans.

enki42 posted:

While covidforever sounds like he was on the extreme end of open 'er up, I do think there's a tendency to assume an extreme version of everyone's position in regards to risk acceptance, and replace what they're actually saying with a stereotype.

Everyone saying that seeing friends outdoors is an acceptable level of risk for them has their argument replaced with "I go to packed bars constantly and lick the faces of everyone there on my way to a lockdown protest"

Everyone advocating for more risk avoidance is automatically a basement shut in who hasn't seen the sun since March 2020, and quarantines their groceries for 3 days.

I think it would be useful for people to both be clear about what they're advocating for when they talk about accepting risk / avoiding risk. Like with the blowup a few pages earlier, the argument was largely about whether being unmasked outdoors on a patio with fully vaccinated people was OK, which there's definitely not 100% agreement on in here, but it's a far cry from abandoning all precautions.

Puppy Galaxy posted:

pretty much everyone I know IRL who isn't an anti-vaxxer is relatively comfortable in spaces, indoor or out, where they know everyone is vaccinated. I'm in an area of New England which was never hit hard, so I think people are more relaxed here in general, but I don't know anyone who has gone back to what they were doing in mid-2020. not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, just echoing the disconnect I see between here and elsewhere.

dwarf74 posted:

I'm not sure if this is helpful for a new OP, being a few months out of date, but here's Total Deaths, All Causes, US, Weekly from a CDC/NCHS dataset I grabbed earlier this year. I put this together to respond to claims about how (a) covid isn't actually killing people, (b) it's not actually that deadly, or (c) deaths are being mislabeled as covid for nefarious reasons.

It's no-frills, but I tried to make it as simple and self-explanatory as possible.

dwarf74 posted:

I'm not sure if this is helpful for a new OP, being a few months out of date, but here's Total Deaths, All Causes, US, Weekly from a CDC/NCHS dataset I grabbed earlier this year. I put this together to respond to claims about how (a) covid isn't actually killing people, (b) it's not actually that deadly, or (c) deaths are being mislabeled as covid for nefarious reasons.

It's no-frills, but I tried to make it as simple and self-explanatory as possible.

snip

dwarf74 posted:

I'm not sure if this is helpful for a new OP, being a few months out of date, but here's Total Deaths, All Causes, US, Weekly from a CDC/NCHS dataset I grabbed earlier this year. I put this together to respond to claims about how (a) covid isn't actually killing people, (b) it's not actually that deadly, or (c) deaths are being mislabeled as covid for nefarious reasons.

It's no-frills, but I tried to make it as simple and self-explanatory as possible.

dwarf74 posted:

I'm not sure if this is helpful for a new OP, being a few months out of date, but here's Total Deaths, All Causes, US, Weekly from a CDC/NCHS dataset I grabbed earlier this year. I put this together to respond to claims about how (a) covid isn't actually killing people, (b) it's not actually that deadly, or (c) deaths are being mislabeled as covid for nefarious reasons.

It's no-frills, but I tried to make it as simple and self-explanatory as possible.

Stickman posted:

That's very nice! I was going to suggest coloring the portion of the bottom curve that's 2021 a slightly different shade that 2020 to make it obvious which section is which year, but it tracks the all-cause mortality so closely it's pretty obvious already and might actually detract from readability to change it. If it's possible in your graphing software, I'd try to remove the line segment going from week 4 to week 6 since it's just an artifact.

E: Is the year with the extra mortality in January-February 2018? That was a brutal flu season with almost double the typical deaths.

Tayter Swift posted:

Not sure if there’s room for good news but it looks like Sacramento County is getting over its spike.

Medullah posted:

I'm trying to at least see where his POV is coming from. This stems from being against the vaccine mandate, his position being "I'm vaccinated, I want people to get vaccinated but this is worrying me because of government overreach. Every study I've read showed people who have had the virus have more antibodies than those vaccinated, so why should they be forced to vaccinate? The government refuses to even STUDY natural immunity".

There's a number of logical fallacies there but I'm just trying to find something from a reputable source that goes into the topic.

Tayter Swift posted:

Anywhere I can donate to help get shots in the arms in developing countries? Friend of mine is selling Joe Rogan charity tix and I told her I'd donate if she burns the tickets.

Professor Beetus posted:

Well, it's not a certainty I can, but at this point in the name of good moderation I am asking for forgiveness rather than permission. So pretty much anything is on the table as far as I am concerned. Archives, Plat, PMs, Av/Title Change. Probably not someone else's title change, we're trying to be nice in here. So yeah, folks who got quoted can just let me know. I know a lot of cert stuff I've heard rumblings will just be free features down the line, if that affects your decision at all. I will do the best I can to make sure we have admins who can follow through; after all we had a land speed record double perma in the thread already.

Gynovore posted:

Can you change my name to "Covid Cures Stupid"?









Yeah I'm kidding about that, but seriously an av change would be great, this one isn't even correct anymore.

Tayter Swift posted:

Anywhere I can donate to help get shots in the arms in developing countries? Friend of mine is selling Joe Rogan charity tix and I told her I'd donate if she burns the tickets.

Gavi posted:

In addition to our core work, Gavi launched the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) in June 2020. It’s the financing instrument that will enable people in 92 lower-income economies to access safe and effective donor-funded COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX Facility at the same time as 98 higher-income, self-financing countries receive their doses. The more funds Gavi receives, the more people will be protected against the virus.

https://www.gavi.org/donate

WHO posted:

WHO has launched an appeal for US$ 1.96 billion to fulfil the requirements of the 2021 Strategic Preparedness and Response plan (SPRP2021).

The work in 2021 builds on the progress achieved in 2020, continues to support the response in countries towards suppressing transmission, reducing exposure, countering misinformation and disinformation, protecting the vulnerable, reducing mortality and morbidity rates and increasing equitable access of diagnostics and vaccines for all.

Donations received through the fund will go towards activities such as:

Suppress transmission through public health and social measures, including detecting and testing cases, tracing and quarantining contacts, shielding high-risk groups
Managing the infodemic and fighting disinformation and misinformation
Protect the most vulnerable by building vaccine acceptance, ensurance vaccine deployment in all countries and carrying out vaccination campaigns
Reduce mortality and morbidity and save lives by ensuring quality care, training of health workforce and access to essential commodities
Accelerate equitable access to new COVID-19 tools, including vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics in all countries

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/donate

Objective Action posted:

Given the mechanism of action for half mask valves it should be on par with the disposables they tested for droplet blocking but may not be sufficient for aerosols. If true would mean it would've likely been enough to cut transmission on OG covid but maybe not sufficient for Delta; won't know for sure till the studies finish and we get data.

SubG posted:

Professor Beetus posted:

I know that the US is leading the world in awful responses to covid, particularly given the means and resources the country should have at it's disposal, but I wouldn't mind getting some contributions from folks outside the US in order to get a slightly more global perspective in the final version of the OP.

Puppy Galaxy posted:

pretty much everyone I know IRL who isn't an anti-vaxxer is relatively comfortable in spaces, indoor or out, where they know everyone is vaccinated. I'm in an area of New England which was never hit hard, so I think people are more relaxed here in general, but I don't know anyone who has gone back to what they were doing in mid-2020. not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, just echoing the disconnect I see between here and elsewhere.

Cabbages and Kings posted:

I get depressed about all this pretty regularly, but we are at present in a better situation than most people including the entire rest of my immediate family, so, not much to do except keep trudging on with the occaisional muttered "gently caress Plague World!"

Kaal posted:

Here's more information about the Covax program: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-africa-europe-coronavirus-pandemic-5e57879c6cb22d96b942cbc973b9296c

Weatherman posted:

I'm in NZ. What would you like to hear?

quote:

The USA now has 100,000 daily hospitalizations for covid-19. Why is Biden having a hard time keeping this pandemic under control and what can he do differently to fix the problem?

Every day in the US, about 800 Republicans are dying from Covid-19, and about 160 Democrats. This means that every 4 to 6 months, the equivalent of the winning margin in a medium-sized state carried by Republicans disappears.

It is not obvious to me that Biden has a problem. Republicans are driving themselves to extinction by sheer refusal to do what qualified doctors tell them to do. In addition, everyone in the world can see just how stupid Republicans are—including US voters that might have been on the fence. The Republican party has for all practical purposes allied themselves with the virus against humanity.

The US has a bigger public health issue than any other developed country, but politically, that enormous problem is working in Biden’s favour.

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” - Napoleon