StrangeSox

TWiV had Daniel Griffin on again for a clinical update. They discussed two of his cases with potential reinfection. It may also have been the same infection the whole time, it just went dormant/below detectable levels for a couple of months before coming roaring back. Wouldn't be able to tell for sure without being able to genetically sample the original March/April samples and the July samples from the same person. Not great either way, though. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-638/ However, my understanding is that vaccine-induced protective immunity (the kind that prevents you from getting sick in the first place) can be completely different from natural viral infection-induced responses. So even if the natural immunity is relatively short-lived, a vaccine could still very well work with a completely different biological mechanism and be longer-lasting. But, yeah, it's still a possibility that natural immunity doesn't prevent reinfection at a later date. Plenty of real-world viruses to look at for examples. Or it could never go away completely. Some of those, too (think HIV). This is from the EU's CDC equivalent: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/latest-evidence/immune-responses The short answer on a whole lot of COVID, especially medium- and long-term stuff, is "we don't know; it hasn't been long enough to know." But this has gotta be the largest collective medical/research endeavor in human history. So many medical labs around the globe stopped all research except COVID-19. The experts and researchers remain pretty optimistic that there will be some sort of vaccine, hopefully within a year.

I think this is what he legitimately believes at this point. Pure magical thinking. The cases exist because we test for them. If we never tested for them and didn't know about them, they wouldn't exist.

LA, San Diego announce full remote learning this fall. Meanwhile, in OC:

Probably not possible: Nobody wants people from The Plague States coming over Anti-science, anti-academic, anti-critical thinking predates Trump. It laid the groundwork for him. Blame him, sure, but blame the decades of intellectual rot that gave us him as well. Thoughts on Illinois/Chicago. Murphy is the guy WGN has on every morning and has been on top of this since the start. Illinois is going to be in the "third wave" of states with exploding cases. Doesn't help that every state around us is trending worse even more rapidly. But hey, Chicago bars have to close at midnight instead of 2am! and here's what the natural herd immunity path will lead us to: Let's say that the severe-but-not-dead complications are only half as bad as listed. That's still 30m+ hospitalized with permanent organ damage.

(it's not just trump) now extrapolate this to schools and

Retail workers in stores with strict mask policies are taking tons of abuse from assholes. My friend who works at an outdoor recreation retail store gets yelled at at least once a day. The best was the person who wore a mask but took it off to cough e: it's not about "freedom of choice," it's about selfish refusal to consider anyone else at any point. That same logic could apply to drunk driving with no change.

Right, just stating the likely consequences and the unknowns. Don't worry, our federal leadership is busy attacking public health experts, so we're definitely going to get this back under control. Realistically we're looking at severe and long-term economic damage with COVID becoming endemic in the US. Our country will remain a pariah state that we won't even be able to flee from.

Naturally achieved herd immunity will result in probably millions dead, tens of millions hospitalized, tens of millions permanently affected, and a smoking creator of an economy for years to come. We don't know how long naturally-acquired immune responses remain protective against reinfection. We don't really know what the long-term impacts of even mild cases are.

I'm not sure the point of education is grades and tests, ultimately. But we can set educational philosophy differences aside. Hopefully your kids make the most out of whatever mix they are offered over the coming year. Having a dedicated parent the clearly values education puts them in the best position to succeed in a tough situation. I get that it sucks and you're not getting what you planned and hoped for your kids. I'm not either. That doesn't change the reality we face. The virus doesn't care. Countless leadership failures gave us the only choices we have right now: online education or likely unsafe in person.

My work is for people so maybe! Some online is okay, some isn't. But we should just be supplementing or paying everyone's salaries to start home if they can't safely work. PPP was supposed to do that, but it is ending eventually and didn't work all that well. Toss it on the "massive federal failure making everything worse for us all" puke, I guess.

So we can't safely open schools and shouldn't have rushed to open everything else. That's why we are where we are right now. Systemic failures.

I'm not sure the point of vindictive action against teachers. E: but we should absolutely be paying everyone to stay home if they can and can't work from home. Online education offers at least something, even if it isn't as good as in person though.

I'm sorry that the country as a whole was far too irresponsible and that our federal leadership was far too incompetent and incapable to get this thing to a manageable level to the point we could safely reopen schools, but that's where we are. Other countries have managed it and are able to safely hold in person schools. We failed to make that a priority and instead rushed to reopen unnecessary social activities like drinking in bars. And you're right that most of not all schools are unprepared for what's very likely to happen, which is outbreaks causing shutdowns of districts or individual schools. It sucks and it's shitty for everyone. Be very, very angry at the people in charge who have completely failed us. They put school administration in an impossible situation. With things the way they are now, growing ppe shortages and not nearly enough testing capacity to regularly test staff and students along with robust contact tracing, there isn't really a safe way to open up the schools. Many will anyway, but I'd be shocked if we made it to October without a bunch of shutdowns. What is this chart going to look like in mid August? What are we doing to stop and control the spread this time?

Positivity rates don't tell you what shape you're in, just if you're testing enough to capture the full extent. Our case counts are high and climbing again. Sitting at 1k+ cases a day, we're primed for things to get out of control quickly again. We have decent but degrading numbers. Do you expect things to look better or worse in six weeks, given that we're doing less to mitigate and control the spread? From Johns Hopkins on positivity rates: If a positivity rate is too high, that may indicate that the state is only testing the sickest patients who seek medical attention, and is not casting a wide enough net to know how much of the virus is spreading within its communities. A low rate of positivity in testing data can be seen as a sign that a state has sufficient testing capacity for the size of their outbreak and is testing enough of its population to make informed decisions about reopening

You should be furious at the people who have completely failed to prepare us to safely reopen schools in the fall, not the teachers who want safe environments.

They have no plan to control this and keep us safe, and they don't care if you or your children die.

Illinois wrestling camps were all cancelled this summer So instead the parents took the kids to Indiana, where they had full spectators and nobody wearing masks.

The high percentage told you that you weren't capturing nearly the whole scope. The lower positivity tells you that you are testing enough. But testing enough isn't the only thing that matters. Testing doesn't stop the spread directly. You need to get results to people quickly enough, and you need rapids contact tracing in place to smother the spread. So raw totals are still very, very important. The more cases you have, the harder it is to contain any individual cluster even if you have low positivity rates. Let's say we tested 1m per day in Illinois, but our results weren't rapidly available and we weren't sufficiently contact tracing. Our positivity would be well below 1% even if we had 10k and growing new cases every single day. The raw count still tells you if you're primed for this to spiral out of control exponentially. That's where Illinois is sitting today.

Your discussion of positive test rate is flat out wrong. It tells you if your testing capacity is overwhelmed or not. It doesn't tell you where you're likely heading. We could be testing 2M per day with super low positive test rate, but if we're not tracing and isolating it's pretty meaningless. If you're sitting at 1000k cases per day, you're primed to lose control very quickly. Our positive rate is trending back up, anyway. The federal government leaving states to fend for themselves is a massive failure of the federal government and the White House specifically as the feds have a lot of tools, including public persuasion, that states don't. Especially monetary/budget. Unfortunately the President has completely politicized the response every step of the way.

Shut down everything indoors indefinitely. You need the federal government to step in to mitigate the massive economic damage that this virus is causing. And that damage is going to be there whether we're stupidly enabling unchecked spread to the point everyone is too scared to go out anyway, or we proactively shut down to prevent the economic and health damage from unchecked pandemic.

We should all be furious at the political leadership that has failed us nearly every step of the way. There's no reason we couldn't look like Germany right now. We could be talking about a few thousand cases per day across the country, and the potential for having to do temporary shutdowns of schools on district or county basis if there's an outbreak. Instead, we have an out-of-control pandemic raging across nearly the entire country. We could attempt to just open schools up, 5-days-a-week in-person instruction as if it were last February, but I think we all know that can't possibly last. How long until multiple teachers in a single school all get Covid and have to isolate for 14+ days? Oh and most districts in Illinois have been struggling to find subs in normal times for years. Now you've got decimated budgets and unsafe conditions and probably lots of positions to staff with subs in schools across the region. I get where you're coming from. My kid's only 3 so we're not concerned about the education yet, but we're starting to worry about the socialization aspect. She hasn't been around other children (aside from her infant brother) since March. It's extremely frustrating to be unable to plan ahead, to have any sense of what things will look like in a month or two or three. Online education *is* a joke compared to in-person instruction.

Positive test ratio lets you know if you're testing enough, but it doesn't tell you overall what shape you're in. What are we doing to stop the growth of new cases? Have we implemented robust contact tracing? How do we make sure that 500 daily cases doesn't turn into 1000 daily cases (oops) doesn't turn into 5k+ daily cases? And how much of that is largely outside of Illinois' control thanks to policy failures in other states and especially at the federal level? Oh and by the way, we're running out of PPE again. How, exactly, are we going to safely staff schools with no PPE available? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/health/coronavirus-masks-ppe-doc.html We've wasted the last several months. Complete and utter failure by our federal government. And now they're cutting back federal testing sites in areas that need it most. Shameful.

Complete failure at the federal level, including both the executive and Congress, who just decided to take yet another vacation after doing nothing, is the key to all of this. Federalism didn't mean we were domed; Germany is a federal system and they've done pretty well. But when our federal government completely failed to form coherent plans and strategies and to financially support the appropriate measures, we were doomed.

Yeah I was being sarcastic. Positive test rate lets you know when you're doing enough tests, something like 5% or below. But if you're still seeing hundreds or now over a thousand cases a day and climbing, it doesn't tell you too much. We've been increasing the 3- and 7-day average case count for over two weeks now. What is Illinois doing to contain the spread, right now, today? Because the metrics all lag by at best 7-14 days from the actual situation. If we wait to do anything to slow down the spread until we are hitting a couple thousand cases a day or more, we'll have guaranteed ourselves weeks of continuingly increasing counts after that point.