StrangeSox

hooray

In the ground or cremated, presumably. Lot more dead Swedes per capita than their neighbors, and for no economic gain anyway. Turns out the obviously dumb plan was dumb.

what in the world was this

It was part of the IDPH's requirements for Illinois to move to Phase 4, but it was completely ignored. Chicago is maybe going to get around to hiring a fraction of the contact tracers they originally planned. Part of the problem is when caseloads are as high as they are, contact tracing becomes exponentially more difficult. So, like so much else, everyone in charge shrugged their shoulders, gave up, and opened everything up instead.

That hit on his knee looked nasty

It's a U of I prof talking about the effectiveness and wisdom of the decisions and plans made that were within the control of the University. Should U of I gone ahead with their reopening plan if they knew 10%+ of the student body would become infected?

FWIW

This isn't surprising but it's confirmation of what seemed pretty obvious. The President has said publicly for months that he wants less testing, so his appointees have pushed these once highly regarded agencies to comply.

We fully remodeled our basement this past spring/summer It immediately became an 800 sqft playroom rather than something cool

There are a few new platforms. The TWiV episode I just posted goes into depth on them first with Dr. Griffin at the start and then with the conference call review starting 1 hour in. If I remember correctly, mRNA is the platform that's never been successfully deployed in humans but would be a big breakthrough for future rapid development. The problem with mRNA is that it's fragile and requires -70C storage temps for most of the distribution chain. Probably ok in most of the US, but it's more expensive, and it's a non-starter in poorer countries. The other platform that's worked for horse vaccinations (again, IIRC), but not for people yet was a simple DNA-based one. The huge upside to that is that it can survive at room temp for a year. For SARS-Cov2-2/Covid-19, we should be hoping that multiple early leading candidates hit because the production capacity is going to be a huge, huge bottleneck.

I also recapped a recent TWiV that had a detailed review of a recent call with 8 of the top 9 vaccine candidates. Another good TWiV https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-663/ Daniel Griffin's clinical update right out of the gate provides information on: -big spike in younger people after schools open (duh) --dying teachers --young people can become infected and transmit (duh) including rates of hospitalization, long-term care, and death for young people -Testing and false positives; how to handle, how to reduce (retest!) --Developing an online calculator to see outcomes from # of tests, how many people, specificity, frequency, etc. to prevent X number of infections --Rapid test centers opening up --NY state covering screening testing for COVID for the individual still -Vaccines --Reviews typical vaccine study length before licensure (1-4 years) and the potential risks of EUA'ing any of the potential candidates (let's be real, nobody is waiting around until late 2022 when the full Phase 3 trial studies are completed) --Thorough primer on the various vaccine platforms out there --Statistical significance/power for the trials will need ~30k people and 200 infections --Vaccine risk assessment, and balancing the risk of COVID-19 and what the vaccine side effects might be -Long-haulers --This isn't a short-term illness for a decent minority of people --More people developing migraine-like headaches Alan Dove goes deep on a media conference call with 8 of the 9 leading vaccine candidate companies, recapping where they're at, what they're doing, what they're looking for, when we can expect preliminary information and what some end results might be. AstraZeneca was the only one not present and Alan speculates that it's because they didn't want to get asked a whole bunch of questions about their paused trial that they couldn't answer and would take the majority of the time of the call. -Not out-right stated, but seems like there's at least some behind-the-scenes collaboration -All 8 are running "neck-and-neck" and following similar standards -Big, important one: their primary endpoint is prevention or mitigation of disease, not infection --Threshold is 80% effective at prevention/mitigation of disease --We could very well end up like the annual flu vaccine, that only works 30% of the time to prevent infection, but is 80% effective in reducing disease impact --That means there will still be a whole lotta spread going on out there, even after many or even most of us are vaccinated. Adjust our expectations accordingly. A vaccinated healthcare worker may now just be assymptomatic and spread to patients. We will still need massive testing. --Wasn't covered on call/TWiV of what counts as "serious" disease but it should be available in the trial info online -Distribution chains --Everyone is expecting EUA at some point as they go for final approval, which likely won't come until 2022. --Possible EUA by end of year, maybe --Some of these (especially mRNA) do need -70C or -20C in the distribution chain up to the final distributor to the pharmacy/clinic, where it would then be fridge-stable for a day or two at least. ----These are conservative estimates from manufacturers, hope to test and prove that they're ok at higher temps, regular refridge ----Protein-based ones are all refridge-grade (like flu) ----Innovio has a platform they're trying for COVID on that can be stored at 37C for two months and 25C for a year (fantastic for poorer countries), but we haven't gotten DNA vaccines to work for people yet (boo) --Almost all of these expect 2 doses, 3-4 weeks apart --Many of the manufacturers are ramping up to produce 100M doses a year. That means 50M vaccinated a year per manufacturer. One of them that already does flu is targeting 1B/year. --Multi-dose vials will be initial shipments, which means you need a trained immunizer to mix and dose properly (problem in poorer countries) --No cross-testing of the various vaccine candidates right now (what happens if I get more than one vaccine?) --Our vaccine database/tracking sucks horribly -Enrollments --Pfizer at 25k enrolled already (updated: they've gotten 30k and now plan to expand to 44k) --Moderna at 21k already, but slowing down to hit demographic targets --Efficacy clock starts 10 days after second dose That's just the first 1.5 hours or so, skipping over the let's say standard liberal critiques of the GOP being an anti-science party and the damage that can do to our society. also lol at the two of them that have "gamer" chairs instead of actual good office chairs

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/health/covid-moderna-vaccine.html?smid=tw-share Moderna Shares the Blueprint for Its Coronavirus Vaccine Trial edit: I have no idea why this is nesting the quotes but they're all from the same article. Short story: Moderna will likely have initial efficacy results in late December. Don't expect everyone to be able to get a vaccine until late summer 2021 if everything goes well.

This is of young people who were hospitalized, but still not good

They also gave up what should have been a very easy game-winning TD that the Lions RB just dropped.

Seems bad The long term damage to the CDC and FDA and the public's trust in those institutions is going to be really, really bad.

UIUC had a bad opening, but their testing and contain seems to have quickly improved things?

Surface sanitization doesn't seem to be the primary risk factor, though. It's been in an indoor space for longer periods of time, especially if people aren't wearing masks and if they're talking. That is what makes restaurants and bars so bad. Long periods in the same indoor space with your mask off and probably lots of talking. For sure. The states can't just print money like the federal government can. I get why a lot of state and local governments are caving on these measures; they need the tax revenues and the businesses need the cash. Ultimately the failure lies at the feet of the federal government, which seems content to let everything collapse ever since the DOW went back up.

"willing to dine indoors during a pandemic" is going to correlate strongly with other high-risk behaviors, but still, this has been painfully obvious since before Illinois rushed to Phase 4 to get bars and restaurants opened up (and then yelling at everyone in their 20's for going out)

seems bad, imo

I remember having a similar discussion re: Woodward back when his first Trump book was coming out. Dude's been covering for those in power for decades. More infuriating news about how badly the White House has politicized our national response to a public health emergency. A Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to prevent Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, from speaking about the risks that coronavirus poses to children. Emails obtained by POLITICO show Paul Alexander — a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs — instructing press officers and others at the National Institutes of Health about what Fauci should say during media interviews. The Trump adviser weighed in on Fauci’s planned responses to outlets including Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and the science journal Cell. Alexander’s lengthy messages, some sent as recently as this week, are couched as scientific arguments. But they often contradict mainstream science while promoting political positions taken by the Trump administration on hot-button issues ranging from the use of convalescent plasma to school reopening. The emails add to evidence that the White House, and Trump appointees within HHS, are pushing health agencies to promote a political message instead of a scientific one. “I continue to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner…and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently,” Alexander wrote in one Aug. 27 email, responding to a press-office summary of what Fauci intended to tell a Bloomberg reporter. And on Tuesday, Alexander told Fauci’s press team that the scientist should not promote mask-wearing by children during an MSNBC interview. “Can you ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children,” Alexander wrote. “There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero,” he continued — adding without evidence that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus. In a statement attributed to Caputo, HHS said that Fauci is an important voice during the pandemic and that Alexander specializes in analyzing the work of other scientists.

When Woodward spoke to Trump on February 7, two days after he was acquitted on impeachment charges by the Senate, Woodward expected a lengthy conversation about the trial. He was surprised, however, by the President's focus on the virus. At the same time that Trump and his public health officials were saying the virus was "low risk," Trump divulged to Woodward that the night before he'd spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about the virus. Woodward quotes Trump as saying, "We've got a little bit of an interesting setback with the virus going in China." "It goes through the air," Trump said. "That's always tougher than the touch. You don't have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus." But Trump spent most of the next month saying that the virus was "very much under control" and that cases in the US would "disappear." Trump said on his trip to India on February 25 that it was "a problem that's going to go away," and the next day he predicted the number of US cases "within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero." By March 19, when Trump told Woodward he was purposely downplaying the dangers to avoid creating a panic, he also acknowledged the threat to young people. "Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people," Trump said. Publicly, however, Trump has continued to insist just the opposite, saying as recently as August 5 that children were "almost immune." Even into April, when the US became the country with the most confirmed cases in the world, Trump's public statements contradicted his acknowledgements to Woodward. At an April 3 coronavirus task force briefing, Trump was still downplaying the virus and stating that it would go away. "I said it's going away and it is going away," he said. Yet two days later on April 5, Trump again told Woodward, "It's a horrible thing. It's unbelievable," and on April 13, he said, "It's so easily transmissible, you wouldn't even believe it." Good Lord edit: kinda wanna say "What the hell, Woodward??" for sitting on this tape for months as hundreds of thousands of Americans died and millions more became infected.

heck of a stretch there