StrangeSox

Thank you Donald Trump for grifting off tens of millions in donations for these races and also for pushing the $2k checks that Dems were able to absolutely hammer the GOP with over the final push in these races.

Lol deep blue Georgia, two Senate seats and the presidential race. What a world.

They're slightly less confident in Ossof but we're probably looking at a D Senate here. Insanity.

Pretty much all the numbers guys are saying it's over for the race. E: meaning Warnock will win

Trump is a symptom of decades of rot, not the cause, part 1,023,235

Oberweis is demanding that the House overturn his loss and install him for IL-14's seat https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20210104/oberweis-asks-us-house-to-overturn-underwood-victory There are a lot of conservatives out there who fully believe the conspiracy theories Trump has consumed and repeated. This won't go away, not tomorrow, not on the 20th.

Speaking of monoclonal antibody treatment, it's currently being severely underutilized. It needs to be given within the first week or so of symptoms to be effected, but if you manage to catch an infection right as you become symptomatic, see if you can get it. https://www.covid19.lilly.com/bamlanivimab/getting-started

They got monoclonal antibodies which were artificially created versions of what your body's B cells would naturally create in response, but engineered specifically to target SARS-CoV-2 in a certain way. In a natural infection, your body generates polyclonal antibodies so it can "attack" a virus in various ways, especially a novel one. Your body might make different polyclonal antibodies in response to a natural infection versus vaccination, but that's still the basics of it. The whole goal of the vaccine is to train your immune system how to produce these polyclonal antibodies in a way that can effectively neutralize the virus. This particular preprint looked at convalescent plasma containing polyclonal antibodies from someone who had previously been infected and subjected that plasma to the new SA variant in a lab. So if it has polyclonal antibody escape for naturally-induced immunity, we'll see reinfection rates climb drastically. If it's mutated enough in the right way that the vaccine-induced spike protein target that your body would begin producing, it could lower or remove the vaccine's ability to give you immunity. They could probably tweak the current spike protein target in the mRNA vaccines, but that would mean anyone who's already been vaccinated and the tens of millions of doses already produced wouldn't provide as much protection against this new variant. BBC has a decent quick summary of the concerns: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55534727 Given how little we sequence here, there's a good chance it's in the US as well. And it appears to have the same enhanced spread mutations of the B.1.1.7 variant in the UK.

re: sequencing, lol https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/12/23/us-leads-world-coronavirus-cases-ranks-43rd-sequencing-check-variants/ The vaccine-resistant strain may already be here with the South African variant. It's just a preprint, but they found polyclonal antibody escape: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.28.424451v1 UK's Matt Hannock, equivalent to HHS Secretary here, has been sounding the alarm on this variant over the past few days. There's a lot of frantic efforts right now to determine if these initial findings are accurate and how much it might impact efficacy. Getting multiple highly efficacious vaccines only to get a vaccine-resistant strain that also spreads at an accelerated pace a few weeks later would be a real gut punch.

The US does pretty minimal sequencing. It's popped up on CO, NY, CA, FL and maybe others in community spread. Safe to assume it's everywhere or will be soon.

Some possible mechanisms for why the B.1.1.7 variant spreads so quickly. And some thoughts on doing the delayed dosing or half-dosing. B.1.1.7 and any other potential variant that spreads as fast or faster has put public health officials in a very, very difficult position. Maybe we shouldn't have let this spread to nearly every corner of the planet unchecked??? The UK is taking this very seriously.

Another study out of the UK finds that children and schools are, in fact, major transmission vectors. This should surprise absolutely no one. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tfc-children-and-transmission-update-paper-17-december-2020 Some commentary:

Tune in next weekend to nickelodeon (??) for the bears game

Draft someone at some point when your have the pick up do it. He's not going to be The Guy.

Good on Roy

I'll enjoy watching next week, but if a one and done playoff appearance means they resign Mitch and keep pace around, it's a huge net negative over the long term.

Worst possible outcome imo. Back into the playoffs despite a humiliating loss to the Packers yet again. It'll be enough to bring everyone back when they should be cleaning house.

Throw everyone who even entertained this coup attempt in prison, imo

I'm not sure why anyone is even talking about how we can stretch out our supply right now by delaying the second dose

Here's some napkin math illustrating why a big jump in transmissibility is so scary. You go from a baseline of 129 deaths to 978 with the new variant from just a month's worth of infections starting with 10k cases.

NIH scientists developed the spike protein in the Moderna vaccine. The federal rollout of the vaccines, just like with testing and ppe, has been a huge disaster with no clear end in sight. But sure, yeah, they've done a bang up job.

Yeah he's a propagandist who isn't worth taking in good faith

Another report out on the UK variant finding increased R0 of +0.4-.7 That's a substantial difference in how fast/easily it can spread. No known biological mechanism at this point, thankfully no apparent increased mortality. More transmissible is worse than more deadly with all other things being equal, though. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-42-sars-cov-2-variant/ The South African variant spreading nearly as fast but having existing immunity evasion is more troubling but reports are still early on that one.

The supreme court has also fully endorsed partisan gerrymandering, so entrenched political minorities are that much harder to remove.