StrangeSox

Good news/bad news day again. Hospitalizations continue to rise, and younger people are leading the way this time.

It'll probably still be a little hard to find an appointment in metro areas through the month, but it's getting easier and easier.

People freely doing what they please without concern for others is what's given us 500K+ deaths and a whole lot of suffering. What individuals choose to do impacts their communities around them. Nothing, including the vaccines, is 100% effective. Vaccines seem to help stop transmission a whole hell of a lot. Masks help. Staying far apart from other people helps. It's all probability continuums. What masks and social distancing and vaccines will do is help us get the spread under control, especially as tens of millions are still unvaccinated (and tens of millions of children won't be eligible for many months to come). Outdoor baseball is not the most significant thing right now. It was funny juxtaposition highlighting public policies that are leading to rising spread. I don't think anyone was talking about stadiums in general aside from the tweet I found amusing. Hospitalizations in Illinois are rising again, fwiw. We also don't fully understand the long-term impacts in both young and old people.

Oh, sure. It was just funny juxtaposition. Take "people at ballgames" and "people at bars" as indicative of the general problem leading to rising cases rather than the specific or exclusive causes. We have what are basically miraculously efficacious vaccines that are going into arms at the rate of three million per day now. It's deeply unfortunate that we don't have the political will or public support to sit tight for another month or two to really stamp down on community spread.

There was probably some spread at the park, sure. Outdoors and masked is at least some mitigation. Would probably depend on if/how many highly infectious people happened to be there. Crowded Wrigleyville area moreso.

seems like lines 1 and 3 answer line 2!

16+ only for Pfizer fwiw. Moderna and J&J ran their trials 18+. People still need to be treating this seriously even if they're vaccinated, imo

Sure, but mRNA is a brand-new technology to figure out and build out. I would have to imagine that they'd have an easier time building the more traditional adenovirus-based vaccines like J&J. I'm 100% behind all "intellectual property" for these vaccines and treatments being public domain globally. Jonas Salk is the model we should be following.

It'll be hard to manufacture and especially distribute the mRNA vaccines in a lot of countries. Hopefully J&J can be more widely manufacturered since it's so much easier to distribute even to places without electricity. They have the SARS-CoV-2 sequence but not the mRNA platform being used to give you the spike protein. Anyway time to head out for my second Pfizer shot!

Here's a "trick" to schedule Walgreens appointments. Part of the problem is that they go so incredibly fast sometimes that by the time you answer the questionnaire, someone else already got it. So if you use this trick, you have your questionnaire pre-filled. Use the Walgreens trick to secure newly cancelled appointments in real time. 1. Sign up for an account if you don't have one already 2. Have the app downloaded and be signed in, looking for available appointments using your preferred zip (which will look for 25mi around the zip) 3. Also be signed in to the website on a desktop browser 4. In the app, hit the arrow button to Search every 2-5 seconds 5. In the browser, hit the Search button to search every 2-5 seconds 6. When you first see "Appointments Available" you'll always have to fill out a short questionnaire, this part can be skipped later under certain conditions 7. Fill it out and more than likely the appointment will be gone by the time you get to the Schedule Dose 1 screen 8. Stay on that screen, either in the app or the web browser, and keep hitting the search button, even when no results come up 9. Also in either the app or the web browser, keep searching for appointments back on the Location Finder screen 10. Eventually doing this is going to cause you to see some available in the browser or the app first, which will let you immediately go to the Dose 1 screen that you kept open and then when you search there, you'll see the open appointment 11. Try to grab whatever times are available if you aren't picky, very very high chance you'll secure this appointment since you're bypassing the questionnaire Congrats, you got it!

You could always try booking an appointment now through the various sites for a date on or after 4/12. That way you'd still be within the official rules but not fighting the same massive rush of a bunch of new people trying to sign up on 4/12. Several of the variants are "variants of concern" for the CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/variant-surveillance/variant-info.html There's pretty decent real-world efficacy data on B.1.17 "UK" variant now, and that it's more transmissible and deadly but the vaccines work just as well against it. The problem is that so many places are opening up wide while we still have many tens of millions of adults and children unvaccinated. We have what are essentially miraculously efficacious vaccines but we just couldn't wait another couple of months for bars/restaurants/concerts/etc, or keep schools hybrid/remote through the end of the year to avoid another wave of sickness and death.

Pretty incredible how effective these vaccines are.

Mariano's seems to update and release their upcoming appointments around 3:30-3:45. They go quick!

Active streaks of teams not having a 4,000-yard passer: Buffalo, Indianapolis, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles Chargers, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, Green Bay, Minnesota, Detroit, Seattle - 0 New England, Dallas, Philadelphia, Los Angeles Rams - 1 Pittsburgh, New York Giants - 2 Washington, New Orleans - 3 Baltimore, Cincinnati, Arizona - 4 Miami, Jacksonville - 5 Denver - 6 Carolina - 9 San Francisco - 20 Tennessee - 29 Cleveland - 40 New York Jets - 53 Chicago - 101

why does it become less likely to re-dislocate as you get older?

Yeah, they're doing a fantastic job of undermining public confidence. Absolutely insane how badly they've fucked up nearly every single step of this.

AZ's large-scale, not-a-complete-disaster US trial found ~80% efficacy in preventing symptoms and 100% efficacy in preventing deaths and hospitalizations. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/astrazeneca-us-trial-data-shows-vaccine-79-effective-76600407 LONDON -- AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine provided strong protection against disease and complete protection against hospitalization and death across all age groups in a late-stage U.S. study, the company announced Monday. AstraZeneca said its experts also identified no safety concerns related to the vaccine, including a rare blood clot that was identified in Europe. Scientists found no increased risk of clots among the more than 20,000 people who got at least one dose of the AstraZeneca shot. Although AstraZeneca's vaccine has been authorized in more than 50 countries, it has not yet been given the green light in the U.S. The U.S. study comprised more than 30,000 volunteers, of whom two-thirds were given the vaccine while the rest got dummy shots. In a statement, AstraZeneca said its COVID-19 vaccine had a 79% efficacy rate at preventing symptomatic COVID and was 100% effective in stopping severe disease and hospitalization. Investigators said the vaccine was effective across all ages, including older people — which previous studies in other countries had failed to establish.

Ancient legacy tech undergirding tons and tons of absolutely critical systems in public and private sectors that are increasingly unservicable because nobody knows how to work on them anymore is a big looming issue. Similar things on the physical skills side in the nuclear industry where much of the workforce is rapidly approaching retirement age and nobody young is joining because it's a dying industry!

Thinking about the initial ACA federal marketplace rollout, for no particular reason

AZ efficacy against b.1.351 ("south african" variant that has the e484k mutation that's popping up independently in a lot of places) is barely better than placebo, fwiw.