That's suggestive there are far more than the 29 reported California cases - with cases generally remaining mild enough to earn no special attention over routine respiratory infections.
It's very hard to know what to do here, because that's also detecting contaminated milk dumped into the wastewater system, which is a massive signal but also not human.
why is contaminated milk being dumped into the wastewater system? and what is contaminated milk even have to do with H5N1? it's avain flu and last I checked birds don't have tiddies
H5N1 isn't exclusively avian flu, and the current receptors for the strain circulating in the U.S. have much more affinity for binding sites found in human eyes (hence conjunctivitis being one of the most common symptoms) and bovine mammary tissue.
"H5N1" is a crude description of a wide variety of strains, some more amenable to avian hosts, some not.
As for why milk is being dumped into the wastewater system? Because that's where it goes.
I agree there are likely cases not being detected, but there are lots of flying natural reservoirs who also poop in sewer watersheds (no one's keeping them sterile, after all). They may also be getting magnified by agricultural sources; California does a much better job of testing, but there are very likely positive farms that haven't been found yet.
Note: wild bird crap with H5N1 in it gets washed into storm drains, and in many communities this would wind up in wastewater and be detected, so this is probably not direct evidence of human H5N1 infections
I think it's important not to overstate what this means. Most likely, the kid had some other upper respiratory tract infection with the symptoms coming from that and the H5 may well have been an incidental finding, especially since they have likely already recovered based on the timeframe I'm aware of. One potential theory is exposure to wild bird droppings. Due to the circumstances of the case, we may never find out exactly what the child came in contact with.
Sick with bird flu, not sick from bird flu! In other words, we can blissfully ignore it and anybody who tells us otherwise is just trying to attack us!
But sure, it's a valid technical point. The problem is that it dovetails right into people's desire to rationalize why they themselves are unaffected.
Putting the "with not of" part aside, in this particular case the child is positive for other respiratory viruses. Given that there wasn't much H5 present and the CDC release says as much, the other respiratory virus(es) found would be a more likely explanation for their illness than H5.
This doesn't say anything about the virulence or likelihood of serious illness in H5 generally, just here. We really don't know overall yet.
General information I found (after a -casual- search, not rigorous):
"current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT), and "less than 100 Americans in 2024 known to be infected", "bird to human (not human to human yet) transmission"
> current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT)
I’ve not only found online articles that emphasize one focus over the other (low current rate of serious illness in US vs high long-window mortality rate worldwide), I’ve found articles that say both things a few paragraphs apart and don’t give the reader any lifeline for resolving the tension (strains/substrains, access to care, effective interventions, etc).
It’s a reasonable mistake, but when reasonable people see it I hope we’re reaching out to the publishers and asking them to clarify. Better comms improve trust and we’re still suffering from poor if reasonable comms in early 2020.
It probably never did. Owing to the very limited testing then and even now, we have certainly missed a lot of cases.
That said, when they do end up in the hospital, they usually tend to be seriously ill. But that tells us little about the frequency of such high acuity cases. Still, severe influenza A subtypes are no joke.
One of the other things is the very high fatality rate from H5N1 generally has come, previous to this current strain, from primary cases with very intensive exposure to the avian-adapted strain, which is much more fond of receptors in the lower respiratory tract.
Those types of cases for many infectious diseases (i.e. MERS) are much more lethal than subsequent human-to-human infections.
If (and I emphasise IF) H5N1 led to a severe pandemic in humans, the assumption that it would play out like covid is a dangerous one.
Covid (pre-vaccine) posed an extremely low risk to children, little risk to young adults, a bit of a risk to the middle-aged, and a lot of risk to the elderly.
The 1918 flu pandemic, by contrast, killed people across the age range, disproportionately including young adults.
Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
> Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
I'd like to think that, but I also think history is rife with countless examples of people literally dying on the hill of their own beliefs.
> I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
I think the anti-vaxx crowd will fight back much harder against vaccines in any future event, at least at first. They made it through Covid fine, the ones that are alive, why not the next plandemic?
I was just thinking today what a total shit show Covid was between shortages of masks and vaccines, the misinformation online, and the chaotic messaging from the government. It was a circus. I really don't want to go through that again.
My first thought: imagine this child growing up and deciding to google this event in their life and finding dozens of strangers speculating, arguing, and joking about the situation
As opposed to todays algorithmically generated SEO spam? I find the AI generated SEO spam at least comprehensible. By and large the useful information retrieval age ended 10 years ago.
Way worse. The public perception in my community is that the response to covid was hyper-exaggerated. Unless people they knew in real life were dying, they would basically never go through the masking and quarantine again.
As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast.
The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't.
The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic.
... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?
How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking legions of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
For an objective/scientific reasoning behind this, I once read somewhere (no citations handy, sorry) that humans can't really "associate" at a personal level with more than a few hundred people or so at once.
This means that beyond the family, friends, co-workers and other professional relations, and "the village/church" so to speak it actually doesn't matter at the individual level what happens to those outside of that circle.
But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
Or, “these people were going to die anyways”. I know someone whose father died and rather than admit that he exposed his own dad to something that may have killed him, he took this really odd position.
Friends 85 year old mother didn't get the covid vax because as she said I never go anywhere. The loony ex sister in law visited her when she had a 'cold'. A week later my friends mom is found unconscious on the floor with covid. She probably already had the beginnings of dementia but it's a lot worse and she has to live in a nursing home.
That's my definition of better. Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone.
If anything, it highlighted the mental health crisis going on from the lack of actual community due to a lack of family and religious connections that have decimated by no longer being just down the street and now require a 15+ minute drive, thanks to the isolating nature of the car.
And on top of that, thanks to the mobile phone, there's no spontaneous visits from what community is left.
> Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone
This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)
Public perception of healthcare is far worse, so far fewer people would attempt to limit transmission and protect vulnerable populations. On the other hand, we now have experience in handling respiratory disease pandemics and would likely fare better at actually medically supporting patients (avoid early intubation, etc.). So overall, probably much worse since population dynamics would flood our healthcare system, even if it has improved.
Yea the general public learned nothing from COVID (more like learned negative from it), but the medical system learned a lot. We could be prepared to handle the next global pandemic, our institutions are probably better prepared. But we won’t because the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant, so overall we’re going to fuck it up even worse next time.
All indications are we are on the verge of systematically dismantling the last 74 years of public health institutional capability in the United States. So, perhaps, not even that.
You’re absolutely right. We are heading for scary waters. We’ve basically voted to dismantle every pubic institution and we will likely lose a lot of that institutional knowledge.
Yes, I'm pretty sure about that. The difference in case handling protocols at the start compared to later in the pandemic was pretty staggering. Medical politics is a different beast.
That subreddit is pretty shocking, honestly. People who are still utterly terrified of COVID getting together to share and affirm their irrational fears with each other. Even with all the precautions, all of them have certainly been exposed to COVID many times and they are all still acting like it is a death disease that they must spend tremendous effort warding off.
You do realize that the whole brain/heart/kidney damage thing only happened to people who got severe cases of COVID and were hospitalized? The chance of that hospitalization alone happening in people who are otherwise healthy (ie not immunocompromised or severely obese) is vanishingly small, let alone the chances of organ damage. Your chances of brain damage in a car accident (even as a pedestrian) are far higher.
Only myocarditis seems to have been possible with just "long COVID," and that is still unclear in cases without hospitalization. It's also possible that it might be a side effect of the vaccine, too - the science on all of this is very messy and needless to say it's a political hot potato.
So yes, modifying your behavior because you think you might get brain damage from COVID is an irrational fear.
> the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant
If the response to COVID was more appropriate we wouldn't be in this situation.
Which - by the way - was predicted countless times early on in the pandemic. That, if the public health response was too overboard, people will just ignore it the next time around. Crying wolf and all that.
What was too strict, wearing masks in public? Not being able to eat in restaurants for a couple weeks? Pathetic. People could barely be bothered to do the bare minimum.
In the 2020 I experienced, it was over 6 months of literally everything in a major city being shut down except absolute necessities, and people being told to stay in their homes and away from any contact with other humans unless absolutely necessary. I'm not sure if we live in the same reality if you think that is the "bare minimum."
The 2020 I saw (small town USA) were people out ignoring stay-at-home (because it was utterly unenforced), horsing around, buying their Khakis, eating at their restaurants… and protesting, ridiculing, and belittling the people actually trying to help. The “COVID restrictions” everyone complained about were largely ignored, to the entire population’s detriment.
The things I think of as peak irrationality were not being able to hike alone on a trail. not being about to swim outdoors at a beach. making it a crime to drive in my own car to go to my partners house for a romantic evening. My mother had a stroke and I wasnt able to visit her bedside.
IMO, a new lockdown isn't possible but also would not be necessary if people were willing to behave rationally (I know, I know...). We know influenza viruses far better than we know covid. Masks would be extremely efficient at limiting droplet transmission.
I think we learned the first time around that relying on individuals to take coordinated, collective, cooperative action is pointless. Too many selfish people will choose “defect” in the Prisoners Dilemma.
The biggest fuckup last time was people's general confusion and lack of preparation.
Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around.
What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).
The biggest fuckup last time was relying on the general public to voluntarily do the right thing. It felt like we were in a leaky boat at sea with half the population trying to plug the leaks as fast as they can while the other half were deliberately drilling more holes.
Clear, correct, and unbiased information is what is needed. The CDC failed when they said it wasn’t airborne despite the evidence, they failed when they said masks were not needed initially, because they were afraid of panic buying.
The FDA screwed the pooch with testing. Many institutions could do tests, but the FDA wanted to maintain control and there process was flawed.
Operation Warp speed got a vaccine, but it went from Sterilizing vaccine, to lessen symptoms and hospitalization.
They failed to explain the difference between vaccine side effects and disease effects. Myocarditis? Could be a side effect of either. Perhaps they should have developed a test to determine which?
They let an idiot spout nonsense on TV and no one on stage correct him or clarified, letting the issue become political.
And have they really clarified what we are dealing with. A supposed respiratory virus that causes, myocarditis, neurological issues, stroke , blood clots , and multiple organ failures - is that really a respiratory virus.
Then we’ve declared victory too soon. And everything has left a bad taste in our mouths, such that no one will accept a lockdown again unless the disease has a 20% mortality rate. Ebola could break out and some people would compare the bleeding to lots of paper cuts.
Let us not forget the success of Sweden's approach.
With a more broadly lethal virus, they would have fared badly, but with what happened, it appears correct.
"...the Danish and Norwegian agencies were opposed to closing borders and schools, but political considerations trumped their concerns. Even in Britain, where the popular perception is that the government eventually agreed to a lockdown because scientific advisers called for it, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s powerful political adviser Dominic Cummings pressed the government’s independent scientific advisers to recommend faster and broader lockdown measures."
We should also not forget that the public messaging is important.
"Polls in March and April 2020 showed that more than 70 percent of Swedes trusted the public health agency and in January 2022, 68 percent did."
"By early July 2020, Sweden had not suffered the 82,000 deaths that the models had assumed, but 5,455—less than 7 percent of what was predicted."
On the other hand:
"By July 1, 2020, Sweden had experienced 517 COVID-19 deaths per million people, which was lower than Italy and Spain but as much as 5 to 10 times higher than its geographically and culturally closest neighbors, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. This made Sweden’s approach to COVID-19 look like a fiasco."
However:
"Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland."
"After all was said and done, astonishingly, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries, and less than half that of the United States."
"The world economy was 2.9 percent smaller after 2021 than it would have been according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecast before the pandemic; the Eurozone 2.1 was percent smaller, and the U.S. economy 1.2 percent smaller. The Swedish economy was 0.4 percent bigger. This is even more exceptional since the Swedish government introduced much less fiscal stimulus than most other countries."
More importantly, general vaccine hesitance was averted:
"In 2020 the Swedish childhood vaccination rate was 97.2—up by a tenth of a percentage point from the year before."
"Sweden’s alternative model was to rely more on recommendations, have faith in voluntary adaptations to the pandemic, and try to keep as much of society up and running as possible. Based on what we now know, this laissez faire approach seems to have paid off."
You’re right of course, but despite these many failures, our public health institutions are still more trustworthy and reliable than Cletus the high school dropout and Cathy the essential oils lady, whose cohort are back in charge for another four years. We are not going to get clear, correct information out of these guys.
Fantastic! Except you can't know in advance. So, the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with. Otherwise, by the time you decide it's dangerous enough to do something, you've already got an uncontrollable spread on your hands.
> the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with
Right. Which the general public figured out - accurately - about a month into the lockdowns.
People will self-isolate for a week or two the next time around, but it's going to have to be a very different disease before we permit ridiculous extended lockdowns again.
Being prudent doesn't mean stopping the economy in its tracks. It means appropriate planning and monitoring, with intervention as necessary. For some reason, people don't consider the cost of an unchecked epidemy, which is just as real as that of a controlled one. Except people have nothing to complain about, since they don't feel under pressure from anyone. They just feel sick...
Like 80% of COVID deaths were over age 65. For young people with no comorbidities, COVID was mostly benign. Magnitude aside, that's more or less a normal disease.
Polio was paralyzing thousands of healthy children every year with no end in sight. People freak out way more about something like that.
It might be that visible and permanent disability from polio was actually scarier than abstract death, simply because the former is a lot easier to visualize and generates a larger set of hypothetical "what would I do next" challenges.
Absolutely worse if RFK Jr.'s nomination makes it through Congress. I know career staff can take their time making changes the CDC head wants, but they can only be so slow in the face of pressure from the agency director and president.
Marty Makary is neither anti-vaccine nor a conspiracy theorist. He's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, author of the paper that turned into the "checklist manifesto", as well as multiple NY Times best-selling books on medicine. Please stop.
Oz was a professor at the columbia university medical school until like 2015 and he was by all accounts an incredible cardiac surgeon before swerving into being a professional crackpot. He's still a crackpot though, and for quite a long time was both a crackpot and a professor at a prestigious medical school.
I'm not sure how "was a professor at Columbia" is supposed to be a rebuttal, and "crackpot" is just a slur. He's currently a professor at Johns Hopkins, and in fact, right now has a book at #10 on the New York Times best seller list [1]. He's a completely mainstream doctor who happens to (I assume) disagree with you about something.
Except he plainly isn't anti-vaccine, nor a conspiracy theorist. It's a lazy slur, and it's discouraging to see people repeating it.
He was against a Covid vaccine mandate, which is not "anti-vaccine", except in the heads of people who have replaced logic and scientific knowledge with politics.
He’s a contrarian, not a conspiracy theorist, but that led him astray when he became the goto guy for reporters looking for a real doctor (well, surgeon) to represent the anti-vaccine mandate side. That still puts him ahead of the solid anti-vax side but suggests that he’s likely to make the same choice again in the future – it’s addictive to think you’re on to something everyone else missed – and I would imagine it’s especially a risk if that means getting on the bad side of a famously vindictive boss.
I think there’s almost no chance we’d lock down like we did before, so the health impact would be a bit worse, but the economic and social impacts would be much less bad (almost nonexistent).
Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.
Citation needed, but of course you can’t provide those numbers. Did the republicans also have higher birth rates, and managed to grow a new batch in time to win the 2024 election?
In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
Perhaps related is that the voting age population (vap) only increased ~30% of what would be predicted by the curve fit up to that point. Could be that some people died out of the vap early.
Compounded with that, the voting eligible population (vep) increased exactly as predicted. Which means for each early demose of someone in the vap, someone else already in the vap became eligible when they hadn't been previously. Perhaps some states changed their laws about who was eligible?
This statement is not true, the 2020 election had both a higher absolute total turnout and a higher number of absolute votes for the winning candidate.
Regardless, the cleaner way to compare election years is by % VEP or %VAP - otherwise you're effectively comparing population between the years by accident. From this perspective I disagree with GP, 2024 was still a great year for turnout... just not as good as 2020. 2024 sits 2nd in VEP and 7th VAP (out of the last 24 elections).
> more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.
That fact falls into a whole class of "new records" which sound impressive but are usually meaningless, because it's closer to the default outcome.
In this case, the voting-age population was (yet again) going to increase, so each "new record" in votes cast becomes boringly-normal rather than unusually interesting. The same also happens with certain dollar-amount records, which are not adjusted for inflation or overall economy growth.
A similar phenomenon to https://xkcd.com/1138/ , except it has to do with trends over time rather than geographically.
You're probably referring to the Strategic National Stockpile. There are approximately 55 million doses of Tamiflu on hand as of earlier this year, though the ASPR generally keeps this number under its hat. In the meantime, there is an H5N1 candidate vaccine, and it would probably be able to get to market fairly quickly (compare with the H1N1 vaccine rollout in 2009).
My understanding is that there is also some stockpiled H5 vaccine from years ago. Supposedly it's not a perfect match for the current strain going around in cattle but it's pretty good.
Yeah the government has been heavily ramping up production of influenza antigen that should be effective against this strain the past year of so and funding more targeted mrna type vaccine research for h5n1
we won't be as blindsided or unprepared as we were by covid for this one
Nah, no money in that. It's more likely the Executive Trumposphere will try to put itself in no-oversight charge of where the supplies flow... so that they can allocate them as partisan rewards and punishments to different states.
Much worse. The incoming health person is a vaccine denier. Which could put the US in the spot where we will not develop vaccines and lots of people could die.
I need you to know how sick and callous that "it will be good if they die" attitude is to me. I know you think it's just, but as an outsider who isn't as politically inflamed as you are, it looks truly sick.
I struggled with similar feelings to the parent commentator during the pandemic. This is me processing it, because your comment reminded me of that feeling.
I realized I wasn’t hoping death on the people who gleefully refused to comply with basic pandemic presentation measures. That was a sort of sick dark humor to help with the fact they were exhibiting anti-social behavior but we live in a a non-just world and so they would go unpunished. The only punishment coming their way was from nature, and I didn’t celebrate it so much as not find it in myself to care.
On reflection I was just angry they were violating the social compact and wished somehow not to have them in my tribe. I think that’s very human, we don’t tolerate society members that endanger the society especially in extreme moments. We were at war, I was sacrificing to fight, and they were effectively treasonous in that fight.
The biggest help was realizing they lived in effectively an alternative world with alternative fake facts.
I’ve mostly overcome that anger now that I’m not actively in a pandemic but it’s really hard to feel good about people that willingly endangered my grandma. I don’t know how society would fare in a more serious pandemic and that scares me. My trust in society has been permanently broken.
I don’t find it sick at all. Do you know how grateful people in bubonic plague times would be for a solution? And they would damn sure take it. I’m done reasoning with unreasonable people or being upset or worrying about what will happen to them. Nature doesn’t respect alternate facts.
Saying that it’s okay for bonafide anti-intellectuals to meet the fate they’ve crafted for themselves despite all evidence is no sign of political inflammation. Be serious.
But that's what it looks and feels like. Partisan neener neener.
We don't withhold mercy because someone doesn't believe in receiving help, or because they play for the opposite "team". We do our best to help anyway.
A doctor doesn't withhold treatment because a patient believes God is responsible for healing them. We don't stop trying to eradicate Polio because people distrust vaccines. It can be a thankless uphill battle, but that's the human condition, and it's important to retain human empathy.
We shouldn't gloat when someone dies from Covid, just like we shouldn't gloat when someone dies from HIV AIDS. We're all in the human experience together, sharing this infinitesimal overlapping moment within the lightcone. It'll be easier to push together instead of treating everything as a tug of war. Sometimes that means being nice to people you disagree with.
The incoming administration notwithstanding, I'd expect it to go faster than the COVID vaccine.
First, mRNA technology has now been proven for multiple vaccine types, and I think hundreds of millions of people have gotten the COVID mRNA vaccine, so the general safety profile of mRNA is fairly well understood.
Second, Moderna has already done a Phase 3 trial of a combination COVID/Flu mRNA vaccine, with supposedly positive results, although I don't think they have been formally published yet. For other types of flu vaccines, the FDA does not require a new clinical trial for the antigen update for the circulating strain.
Third, the infrastructure for producing mRNA vaccines at scale exists now, which it didn't in 2020.
For a typical recombinant subunit vaccine, you'd need to splice any new changes into whatever's churning out your proteins (bacteria, yeast, etc.) and then go get those proteins after growing them -- assuming all goes well. For an mRNA vaccine, you can skip the entire protein translation and production step.
I doubt people are willing to be bullied into shutting down their businesses and fully putting their lives and children's educations on hold because white coat wearing talking heads on TV told them it would only take two weeks.
Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."
> specifically which experts
Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.
You’ll find Trump and his appointed Surgeon General (who is also the ONLY person in authority who said concretely “masks don’t work” instead of “we don’t know if masks work,” which was true)
> Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."
Your timeline makes no sense. Fauci or anyone would not have been talking about boosters for _years_ after lockdowns started. Booster of what? No vaccine existed.
In no uncertain terms, your obtuse dismissal of history that most of us here literally witnessed with our own eyes is appalling.
Everyone in a position of power, including Trump and Fauci, fucked up because everyone wanted to use covid for political ends. Noone is going to trust the government, Trump or otherwise, the next time and for good reason.
Those undercut the claim, not support it: there’s no promise that it’ll be over, only a request to slow the rate of spread. Moreover, that was not a promise from medical experts but from a presidential candidate running for re-election arguing that the economy was doing so well that it made up for the other problems with his administration.
First, the task force never said what you’re claiming – slowing the rate of growth is not the same as over – but also, surely you’re not under the impression that he somehow outranked the president on that task force?
For Trump it was chiefly about winning re-election in the face of absolute adversity.
For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.
Covid should not have been politicized, regardless where you are on the spectrum.
> For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.
This is an enormous claim to toss out without support. You’d need to start by establishing what you’re even referring to since, for example, speech was not regulated and it’s unclear why people who wanted to get rid of Trump would have given him “unprecedented” power so you’d want to explain that theory a bit more.
As we can see in the video, the experts knew from the get-go that 15 days wouldn't be enough. But they named the policy/slogan that way anyway in the hope that it would improve cooperation "oh it's just 15 days, we can all do it!".
I think it's fair to say that the population shouldn't take such slogan as being absolute during an evolving unprecedented situation. But it's also fair to say that the experts (or at least the politicians) were being deliberately misleading and, rightly or wrongly, some people felt duped/lied to once they realized that.
Calling them dumb for feeling duped by an official slogan isn't helping anyone. Let's agree that things could/should have been communicated better and let's all learn from it so that history doesn't repeat itself.
We will ignore the obvious solution. End the dairy industry altogether. There’s very little animal milk offers to humans anyways other than whatever the U.S. govt has drummed up through marketing to sell otherwise unsellable oversupply.
It’s an ecological disaster, a GHG disaster, a health disaster, an allergen disaster, a biohazard, and a complete and utter moral and ethical disaster.
There’s nothing animal milk offers that we don’t have a dozen alternatives for already.
Wastewater detection is showing H5 bird flu all over California: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/wwd-h5.html
That's suggestive there are far more than the 29 reported California cases - with cases generally remaining mild enough to earn no special attention over routine respiratory infections.
Wastewater surveys pick up animal-to-animal or animal-to-human transmission strains too.
It's very hard to know what to do here, because that's also detecting contaminated milk dumped into the wastewater system, which is a massive signal but also not human.
why is contaminated milk being dumped into the wastewater system? and what is contaminated milk even have to do with H5N1? it's avain flu and last I checked birds don't have tiddies
https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
H5N1 isn't exclusively avian flu, and the current receptors for the strain circulating in the U.S. have much more affinity for binding sites found in human eyes (hence conjunctivitis being one of the most common symptoms) and bovine mammary tissue.
"H5N1" is a crude description of a wide variety of strains, some more amenable to avian hosts, some not.
As for why milk is being dumped into the wastewater system? Because that's where it goes.
I agree there are likely cases not being detected, but there are lots of flying natural reservoirs who also poop in sewer watersheds (no one's keeping them sterile, after all). They may also be getting magnified by agricultural sources; California does a much better job of testing, but there are very likely positive farms that haven't been found yet.
Note: wild bird crap with H5N1 in it gets washed into storm drains, and in many communities this would wind up in wastewater and be detected, so this is probably not direct evidence of human H5N1 infections
Would that happen without rain? and I am not sure there has been recent rain in Los Angeles?
I think it's important not to overstate what this means. Most likely, the kid had some other upper respiratory tract infection with the symptoms coming from that and the H5 may well have been an incidental finding, especially since they have likely already recovered based on the timeframe I'm aware of. One potential theory is exposure to wild bird droppings. Due to the circumstances of the case, we may never find out exactly what the child came in contact with.
Alameda county's original PR: https://health.alamedacountyca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/1...
Sick with bird flu, not sick from bird flu! In other words, we can blissfully ignore it and anybody who tells us otherwise is just trying to attack us!
But sure, it's a valid technical point. The problem is that it dovetails right into people's desire to rationalize why they themselves are unaffected.
Putting the "with not of" part aside, in this particular case the child is positive for other respiratory viruses. Given that there wasn't much H5 present and the CDC release says as much, the other respiratory virus(es) found would be a more likely explanation for their illness than H5.
This doesn't say anything about the virulence or likelihood of serious illness in H5 generally, just here. We really don't know overall yet.
General information I found (after a -casual- search, not rigorous):
"current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT), and "less than 100 Americans in 2024 known to be infected", "bird to human (not human to human yet) transmission"
- https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html ('situation' report)
- https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/prevention/index.html (prevention)
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-fl... (mortality - need more detail e.g. healthcare access)
> current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT)
I’ve not only found online articles that emphasize one focus over the other (low current rate of serious illness in US vs high long-window mortality rate worldwide), I’ve found articles that say both things a few paragraphs apart and don’t give the reader any lifeline for resolving the tension (strains/substrains, access to care, effective interventions, etc).
It’s a reasonable mistake, but when reasonable people see it I hope we’re reaching out to the publishers and asking them to clarify. Better comms improve trust and we’re still suffering from poor if reasonable comms in early 2020.
The current strain definitely does not have a 50% mortality rate.
It probably never did. Owing to the very limited testing then and even now, we have certainly missed a lot of cases.
That said, when they do end up in the hospital, they usually tend to be seriously ill. But that tells us little about the frequency of such high acuity cases. Still, severe influenza A subtypes are no joke.
One of the other things is the very high fatality rate from H5N1 generally has come, previous to this current strain, from primary cases with very intensive exposure to the avian-adapted strain, which is much more fond of receptors in the lower respiratory tract.
Those types of cases for many infectious diseases (i.e. MERS) are much more lethal than subsequent human-to-human infections.
Tx - updated.
I can see the lines forming at Costco for toilet paper and water already.
If (and I emphasise IF) H5N1 led to a severe pandemic in humans, the assumption that it would play out like covid is a dangerous one.
Covid (pre-vaccine) posed an extremely low risk to children, little risk to young adults, a bit of a risk to the middle-aged, and a lot of risk to the elderly.
The 1918 flu pandemic, by contrast, killed people across the age range, disproportionately including young adults.
Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
> Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
I'd like to think that, but I also think history is rife with countless examples of people literally dying on the hill of their own beliefs.
> I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
I think the anti-vaxx crowd will fight back much harder against vaccines in any future event, at least at first. They made it through Covid fine, the ones that are alive, why not the next plandemic?
I was just thinking today what a total shit show Covid was between shortages of masks and vaccines, the misinformation online, and the chaotic messaging from the government. It was a circus. I really don't want to go through that again.
My first thought: imagine this child growing up and deciding to google this event in their life and finding dozens of strangers speculating, arguing, and joking about the situation
I wouldn't worry. By that point nobody will be able to find any actual history over the roar of AI-generated SEO spam.
Whatever happens, they'll find a suitably comforting and/or enraging retelling of history that reinforces contemporaneous power structures.
As opposed to todays algorithmically generated SEO spam? I find the AI generated SEO spam at least comprehensible. By and large the useful information retrieval age ended 10 years ago.
I'm well aware, and tomorrow it will be even more advanced. That only reinforces my point.
"Ah shit, here we go again..."
But seriously, if we did have another similar viral outbreak as COVID-19, what do you think will go better than last time, or worse?
Way worse. The public perception in my community is that the response to covid was hyper-exaggerated. Unless people they knew in real life were dying, they would basically never go through the masking and quarantine again.
As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast.
The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't.
The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic.
... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?
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Your partner is the one with the biased view, not the general public.
Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.
How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking legions of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
>How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
Deaths of Immediate family or a few close friends. Most people didn't think they would die and the overwhelming majority didn't.
For a lot of people, I think their intuitive reaction works out pretty close to chance of death vs years lost due to quarantine.
For an objective/scientific reasoning behind this, I once read somewhere (no citations handy, sorry) that humans can't really "associate" at a personal level with more than a few hundred people or so at once.
This means that beyond the family, friends, co-workers and other professional relations, and "the village/church" so to speak it actually doesn't matter at the individual level what happens to those outside of that circle.
But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
> Unless people they knew in real life were dying
Many of them still don't blame not getting the vaccine.
The fault is instead with hospitals not prescribing hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
Or, “these people were going to die anyways”. I know someone whose father died and rather than admit that he exposed his own dad to something that may have killed him, he took this really odd position.
Friends 85 year old mother didn't get the covid vax because as she said I never go anywhere. The loony ex sister in law visited her when she had a 'cold'. A week later my friends mom is found unconscious on the floor with covid. She probably already had the beginnings of dementia but it's a lot worse and she has to live in a nursing home.
This is for want of a nail stuff.
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Christ, please bring back universal masking and distancing. That two years without so much as a sniffle in our house was magical.
That's my definition of better. Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone.
If anything, it highlighted the mental health crisis going on from the lack of actual community due to a lack of family and religious connections that have decimated by no longer being just down the street and now require a 15+ minute drive, thanks to the isolating nature of the car.
And on top of that, thanks to the mobile phone, there's no spontaneous visits from what community is left.
> Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone
This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)
Public perception of healthcare is far worse, so far fewer people would attempt to limit transmission and protect vulnerable populations. On the other hand, we now have experience in handling respiratory disease pandemics and would likely fare better at actually medically supporting patients (avoid early intubation, etc.). So overall, probably much worse since population dynamics would flood our healthcare system, even if it has improved.
We should not forget that we drove several problematic viruses extinct during the pandemic (B/Yamagata), and this was useful.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-024-01010-y
Yea the general public learned nothing from COVID (more like learned negative from it), but the medical system learned a lot. We could be prepared to handle the next global pandemic, our institutions are probably better prepared. But we won’t because the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant, so overall we’re going to fuck it up even worse next time.
All indications are we are on the verge of systematically dismantling the last 74 years of public health institutional capability in the United States. So, perhaps, not even that.
You’re absolutely right. We are heading for scary waters. We’ve basically voted to dismantle every pubic institution and we will likely lose a lot of that institutional knowledge.
> the medical system learned a lot.
You sure about that?
Seems more like "the anti-maskers are inside the house." https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1gsgjdz...
Yes, I'm pretty sure about that. The difference in case handling protocols at the start compared to later in the pandemic was pretty staggering. Medical politics is a different beast.
Point is, right now we've regressed compared to "later in the pandemic."
When the CDC Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee is recommending against N95s for respiratory illness, that's not a great sign.
There's politics, and there's what happens in the trenches. But I agree that it's a bad sign.
That subreddit is pretty shocking, honestly. People who are still utterly terrified of COVID getting together to share and affirm their irrational fears with each other. Even with all the precautions, all of them have certainly been exposed to COVID many times and they are all still acting like it is a death disease that they must spend tremendous effort warding off.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1gxpkqn...
Seems pretty sad.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm
shows ~5% of the somewhat young population with long covid, 1% with significant impairment. It's not a death sentence but it's definitely bad.
Wearing a mask every once in a while seems like a very reasonable price to pay for avoiding COVID-related brain damage.
Every once in a while? Under what circumstances, exactly?
It’s not even a “price to pay.” Oh my god, a piece of cloth. What a burden!
You do realize that the whole brain/heart/kidney damage thing only happened to people who got severe cases of COVID and were hospitalized? The chance of that hospitalization alone happening in people who are otherwise healthy (ie not immunocompromised or severely obese) is vanishingly small, let alone the chances of organ damage. Your chances of brain damage in a car accident (even as a pedestrian) are far higher.
Only myocarditis seems to have been possible with just "long COVID," and that is still unclear in cases without hospitalization. It's also possible that it might be a side effect of the vaccine, too - the science on all of this is very messy and needless to say it's a political hot potato.
So yes, modifying your behavior because you think you might get brain damage from COVID is an irrational fear.
Feel free to think what you like. I haven't been seriously sick since 2020 and it's been great.
> the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant
If the response to COVID was more appropriate we wouldn't be in this situation.
Which - by the way - was predicted countless times early on in the pandemic. That, if the public health response was too overboard, people will just ignore it the next time around. Crying wolf and all that.
So like, congratulations.
What was too strict, wearing masks in public? Not being able to eat in restaurants for a couple weeks? Pathetic. People could barely be bothered to do the bare minimum.
In the 2020 I experienced, it was over 6 months of literally everything in a major city being shut down except absolute necessities, and people being told to stay in their homes and away from any contact with other humans unless absolutely necessary. I'm not sure if we live in the same reality if you think that is the "bare minimum."
The 2020 I saw (small town USA) were people out ignoring stay-at-home (because it was utterly unenforced), horsing around, buying their Khakis, eating at their restaurants… and protesting, ridiculing, and belittling the people actually trying to help. The “COVID restrictions” everyone complained about were largely ignored, to the entire population’s detriment.
The things I think of as peak irrationality were not being able to hike alone on a trail. not being about to swim outdoors at a beach. making it a crime to drive in my own car to go to my partners house for a romantic evening. My mother had a stroke and I wasnt able to visit her bedside.
Closing schools for a year. Forcing people to say goodbye to dying loved ones over Zoom calls. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses failing.
You know, that sort of thing.
Closing schools for a year and a half?
None of those measures were necessary or even effective.
Yeah, I don't think people are going to tolerate going through the lockdowns, masking and everything else all over again.
People seem far more affected by the economic fallout, inflation, etc to do it all again.
IMO, a new lockdown isn't possible but also would not be necessary if people were willing to behave rationally (I know, I know...). We know influenza viruses far better than we know covid. Masks would be extremely efficient at limiting droplet transmission.
I think we learned the first time around that relying on individuals to take coordinated, collective, cooperative action is pointless. Too many selfish people will choose “defect” in the Prisoners Dilemma.
The biggest fuckup last time was people's general confusion and lack of preparation.
Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around.
What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).
The biggest fuckup last time was relying on the general public to voluntarily do the right thing. It felt like we were in a leaky boat at sea with half the population trying to plug the leaks as fast as they can while the other half were deliberately drilling more holes.
I think the biggest fuckup last time was the government taking a paternalistic controlling approach instead of an advisory one.
Clear, correct, and unbiased information is what is needed. The CDC failed when they said it wasn’t airborne despite the evidence, they failed when they said masks were not needed initially, because they were afraid of panic buying.
The FDA screwed the pooch with testing. Many institutions could do tests, but the FDA wanted to maintain control and there process was flawed.
Operation Warp speed got a vaccine, but it went from Sterilizing vaccine, to lessen symptoms and hospitalization.
They failed to explain the difference between vaccine side effects and disease effects. Myocarditis? Could be a side effect of either. Perhaps they should have developed a test to determine which?
They let an idiot spout nonsense on TV and no one on stage correct him or clarified, letting the issue become political.
And have they really clarified what we are dealing with. A supposed respiratory virus that causes, myocarditis, neurological issues, stroke , blood clots , and multiple organ failures - is that really a respiratory virus.
Then we’ve declared victory too soon. And everything has left a bad taste in our mouths, such that no one will accept a lockdown again unless the disease has a 20% mortality rate. Ebola could break out and some people would compare the bleeding to lots of paper cuts.
Let us not forget the success of Sweden's approach.
With a more broadly lethal virus, they would have fared badly, but with what happened, it appears correct.
"...the Danish and Norwegian agencies were opposed to closing borders and schools, but political considerations trumped their concerns. Even in Britain, where the popular perception is that the government eventually agreed to a lockdown because scientific advisers called for it, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s powerful political adviser Dominic Cummings pressed the government’s independent scientific advisers to recommend faster and broader lockdown measures."
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/sweden-during-pandemic#
We should also not forget that the public messaging is important.
"Polls in March and April 2020 showed that more than 70 percent of Swedes trusted the public health agency and in January 2022, 68 percent did."
"By early July 2020, Sweden had not suffered the 82,000 deaths that the models had assumed, but 5,455—less than 7 percent of what was predicted."
On the other hand:
"By July 1, 2020, Sweden had experienced 517 COVID-19 deaths per million people, which was lower than Italy and Spain but as much as 5 to 10 times higher than its geographically and culturally closest neighbors, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. This made Sweden’s approach to COVID-19 look like a fiasco."
However:
"Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland."
"After all was said and done, astonishingly, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries, and less than half that of the United States."
"The world economy was 2.9 percent smaller after 2021 than it would have been according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecast before the pandemic; the Eurozone 2.1 was percent smaller, and the U.S. economy 1.2 percent smaller. The Swedish economy was 0.4 percent bigger. This is even more exceptional since the Swedish government introduced much less fiscal stimulus than most other countries."
More importantly, general vaccine hesitance was averted:
"In 2020 the Swedish childhood vaccination rate was 97.2—up by a tenth of a percentage point from the year before."
"Sweden’s alternative model was to rely more on recommendations, have faith in voluntary adaptations to the pandemic, and try to keep as much of society up and running as possible. Based on what we now know, this laissez faire approach seems to have paid off."
You’re right of course, but despite these many failures, our public health institutions are still more trustworthy and reliable than Cletus the high school dropout and Cathy the essential oils lady, whose cohort are back in charge for another four years. We are not going to get clear, correct information out of these guys.
Cletus and Cathy can’t help us now, but Burks and Faucci were longtime ID specialists. Faucci lied, and Burks let herself be steamrolled.
We won't again permit the economy and life in general to grind to a halt for months on end unless it's as dangerous as polio or the black plague.
So that's better.
Fantastic! Except you can't know in advance. So, the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with. Otherwise, by the time you decide it's dangerous enough to do something, you've already got an uncontrollable spread on your hands.
> the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with
Right. Which the general public figured out - accurately - about a month into the lockdowns.
People will self-isolate for a week or two the next time around, but it's going to have to be a very different disease before we permit ridiculous extended lockdowns again.
Usually, the rational thing to in situations where you have unknowns is to act as though those unknowns are unknown, and not alter your behavior.
We knew a few weeks in what the transmission rate and mortality numbers were, before it was even spreading widely in the US.
Yeah, but economic damage is still what many people and countries feel from the event and maybe for years to come.
Being prudent doesn't mean stopping the economy in its tracks. It means appropriate planning and monitoring, with intervention as necessary. For some reason, people don't consider the cost of an unchecked epidemy, which is just as real as that of a controlled one. Except people have nothing to complain about, since they don't feel under pressure from anyone. They just feel sick...
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In terms of mortality COVID-19 was way, way worse than polio ever was.
Mortality isn't the only measure of danger.
Like 80% of COVID deaths were over age 65. For young people with no comorbidities, COVID was mostly benign. Magnitude aside, that's more or less a normal disease.
Polio was paralyzing thousands of healthy children every year with no end in sight. People freak out way more about something like that.
It might be that visible and permanent disability from polio was actually scarier than abstract death, simply because the former is a lot easier to visualize and generates a larger set of hypothetical "what would I do next" challenges.
Absolutely worse if RFK Jr.'s nomination makes it through Congress. I know career staff can take their time making changes the CDC head wants, but they can only be so slow in the face of pressure from the agency director and president.
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Marty Makary is neither anti-vaccine nor a conspiracy theorist. He's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, author of the paper that turned into the "checklist manifesto", as well as multiple NY Times best-selling books on medicine. Please stop.
Oz was a professor at the columbia university medical school until like 2015 and he was by all accounts an incredible cardiac surgeon before swerving into being a professional crackpot. He's still a crackpot though, and for quite a long time was both a crackpot and a professor at a prestigious medical school.
I'm not sure how "was a professor at Columbia" is supposed to be a rebuttal, and "crackpot" is just a slur. He's currently a professor at Johns Hopkins, and in fact, right now has a book at #10 on the New York Times best seller list [1]. He's a completely mainstream doctor who happens to (I assume) disagree with you about something.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2024/10/06/hardco...
None of those are exclusive of being anti-vaccine or a conspiracy theorist.
But agreed he doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Best of luck to him surrounded by that team of experts!
Except he plainly isn't anti-vaccine, nor a conspiracy theorist. It's a lazy slur, and it's discouraging to see people repeating it.
He was against a Covid vaccine mandate, which is not "anti-vaccine", except in the heads of people who have replaced logic and scientific knowledge with politics.
I don’t know enough about him to say, my only comment was that “he is a NYT best-seller, invented the checklist manifesto” etc aren’t rebuttals.
This comment you made is much more substantial.
He’s a contrarian, not a conspiracy theorist, but that led him astray when he became the goto guy for reporters looking for a real doctor (well, surgeon) to represent the anti-vaccine mandate side. That still puts him ahead of the solid anti-vax side but suggests that he’s likely to make the same choice again in the future – it’s addictive to think you’re on to something everyone else missed – and I would imagine it’s especially a risk if that means getting on the bad side of a famously vindictive boss.
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I think there’s almost no chance we’d lock down like we did before, so the health impact would be a bit worse, but the economic and social impacts would be much less bad (almost nonexistent).
Ha.
Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.
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Citation needed, but of course you can’t provide those numbers. Did the republicans also have higher birth rates, and managed to grow a new batch in time to win the 2024 election?
Not op, but:
In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Perhaps related is that the voting age population (vap) only increased ~30% of what would be predicted by the curve fit up to that point. Could be that some people died out of the vap early.
Compounded with that, the voting eligible population (vep) increased exactly as predicted. Which means for each early demose of someone in the vap, someone else already in the vap became eligible when they hadn't been previously. Perhaps some states changed their laws about who was eligible?
What low turnout? Both presidential candidates received more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.
This statement is not true, the 2020 election had both a higher absolute total turnout and a higher number of absolute votes for the winning candidate.
Regardless, the cleaner way to compare election years is by % VEP or %VAP - otherwise you're effectively comparing population between the years by accident. From this perspective I disagree with GP, 2024 was still a great year for turnout... just not as good as 2020. 2024 sits 2nd in VEP and 7th VAP (out of the last 24 elections).
I was referring to the 2020 election.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. In that case apologies for my confusion - I fully agree with your question regarding the GP.
> more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.
That fact falls into a whole class of "new records" which sound impressive but are usually meaningless, because it's closer to the default outcome.
In this case, the voting-age population was (yet again) going to increase, so each "new record" in votes cast becomes boringly-normal rather than unusually interesting. The same also happens with certain dollar-amount records, which are not adjusted for inflation or overall economy growth.
A similar phenomenon to https://xkcd.com/1138/ , except it has to do with trends over time rather than geographically.
Mail in ballots were discarded by liberal Personal Representatives!!1!i!!
From the perspective of someone who works in public health: We are less prepared as a society, and have fewer tools at our disposal.
Don't we have a stockpile of flu antivirals?
You're probably referring to the Strategic National Stockpile. There are approximately 55 million doses of Tamiflu on hand as of earlier this year, though the ASPR generally keeps this number under its hat. In the meantime, there is an H5N1 candidate vaccine, and it would probably be able to get to market fairly quickly (compare with the H1N1 vaccine rollout in 2009).
My understanding is that there is also some stockpiled H5 vaccine from years ago. Supposedly it's not a perfect match for the current strain going around in cattle but it's pretty good.
Yeah the government has been heavily ramping up production of influenza antigen that should be effective against this strain the past year of so and funding more targeted mrna type vaccine research for h5n1
we won't be as blindsided or unprepared as we were by covid for this one
I meant things like Tamiflu, but good.
Uhm, I would not be surprised if Trump's administration outright bans vaccination and masking this time around.
Nah, no money in that. It's more likely the Executive Trumposphere will try to put itself in no-oversight charge of where the supplies flow... so that they can allocate them as partisan rewards and punishments to different states.
Much worse. The incoming health person is a vaccine denier. Which could put the US in the spot where we will not develop vaccines and lots of people could die.
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I need you to know how sick and callous that "it will be good if they die" attitude is to me. I know you think it's just, but as an outsider who isn't as politically inflamed as you are, it looks truly sick.
I struggled with similar feelings to the parent commentator during the pandemic. This is me processing it, because your comment reminded me of that feeling.
I realized I wasn’t hoping death on the people who gleefully refused to comply with basic pandemic presentation measures. That was a sort of sick dark humor to help with the fact they were exhibiting anti-social behavior but we live in a a non-just world and so they would go unpunished. The only punishment coming their way was from nature, and I didn’t celebrate it so much as not find it in myself to care.
On reflection I was just angry they were violating the social compact and wished somehow not to have them in my tribe. I think that’s very human, we don’t tolerate society members that endanger the society especially in extreme moments. We were at war, I was sacrificing to fight, and they were effectively treasonous in that fight.
The biggest help was realizing they lived in effectively an alternative world with alternative fake facts.
I’ve mostly overcome that anger now that I’m not actively in a pandemic but it’s really hard to feel good about people that willingly endangered my grandma. I don’t know how society would fare in a more serious pandemic and that scares me. My trust in society has been permanently broken.
I don’t find it sick at all. Do you know how grateful people in bubonic plague times would be for a solution? And they would damn sure take it. I’m done reasoning with unreasonable people or being upset or worrying about what will happen to them. Nature doesn’t respect alternate facts.
>> who isn't as politically inflamed as you are
Saying that it’s okay for bonafide anti-intellectuals to meet the fate they’ve crafted for themselves despite all evidence is no sign of political inflammation. Be serious.
Tying it to swinging election results is political inflamation. That's so obvious that I think it's you who are not serious.
But that's what it looks and feels like. Partisan neener neener.
We don't withhold mercy because someone doesn't believe in receiving help, or because they play for the opposite "team". We do our best to help anyway.
A doctor doesn't withhold treatment because a patient believes God is responsible for healing them. We don't stop trying to eradicate Polio because people distrust vaccines. It can be a thankless uphill battle, but that's the human condition, and it's important to retain human empathy.
We shouldn't gloat when someone dies from Covid, just like we shouldn't gloat when someone dies from HIV AIDS. We're all in the human experience together, sharing this infinitesimal overlapping moment within the lightcone. It'll be easier to push together instead of treating everything as a tug of war. Sometimes that means being nice to people you disagree with.
Assuming anti-vax administrators allow us to take new mRNA vaccines, which is far from certain.
But yeah mRNA is a game changer for quick vaccine response. In theory after sequencing the virus a new vaccine could be in testing days later.
The incoming administration notwithstanding, I'd expect it to go faster than the COVID vaccine.
First, mRNA technology has now been proven for multiple vaccine types, and I think hundreds of millions of people have gotten the COVID mRNA vaccine, so the general safety profile of mRNA is fairly well understood.
Second, Moderna has already done a Phase 3 trial of a combination COVID/Flu mRNA vaccine, with supposedly positive results, although I don't think they have been formally published yet. For other types of flu vaccines, the FDA does not require a new clinical trial for the antigen update for the circulating strain.
Third, the infrastructure for producing mRNA vaccines at scale exists now, which it didn't in 2020.
Wasn't the COVID mRNA vaccine done in a remarkably short amount of time as well, and the vast majority of the development time was spent on testing?
You could travel to Canada or Mexico and get it there.
I may be able to, but the majority of Americans will not be able to do medical tourism.
Why wouldn’t the same speed of vaccine development be possible with protein vaccines?
For a typical recombinant subunit vaccine, you'd need to splice any new changes into whatever's churning out your proteins (bacteria, yeast, etc.) and then go get those proteins after growing them -- assuming all goes well. For an mRNA vaccine, you can skip the entire protein translation and production step.
I doubt people are willing to be bullied into shutting down their businesses and fully putting their lives and children's educations on hold because white coat wearing talking heads on TV told them it would only take two weeks.
Can you tell me specifically which experts said it would only take two weeks?
> Can you tell me
Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."
> specifically which experts
Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.
Surely you can find a quote of Fauci saying this?
Hint: You cannot.
You’ll find Trump and his appointed Surgeon General (who is also the ONLY person in authority who said concretely “masks don’t work” instead of “we don’t know if masks work,” which was true)
> Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."
Your timeline makes no sense. Fauci or anyone would not have been talking about boosters for _years_ after lockdowns started. Booster of what? No vaccine existed.
Here you go:
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s...
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/st...
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/30/822448199/how-15-days-became-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/covid-a-year-later-trumps-15...
In no uncertain terms, your obtuse dismissal of history that most of us here literally witnessed with our own eyes is appalling.
Everyone in a position of power, including Trump and Fauci, fucked up because everyone wanted to use covid for political ends. Noone is going to trust the government, Trump or otherwise, the next time and for good reason.
Those undercut the claim, not support it: there’s no promise that it’ll be over, only a request to slow the rate of spread. Moreover, that was not a promise from medical experts but from a presidential candidate running for re-election arguing that the economy was doing so well that it made up for the other problems with his administration.
>that was not a promise from medical experts
What part of Fauci (and many others) being a member of the Coronavirus Task Force do you not understand?
First, the task force never said what you’re claiming – slowing the rate of growth is not the same as over – but also, surely you’re not under the impression that he somehow outranked the president on that task force?
The part where Fauci didn’t say the things you claim he said?
What political ends?
For Trump it was chiefly about winning re-election in the face of absolute adversity.
For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.
Covid should not have been politicized, regardless where you are on the spectrum.
> For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.
This is an enormous claim to toss out without support. You’d need to start by establishing what you’re even referring to since, for example, speech was not regulated and it’s unclear why people who wanted to get rid of Trump would have given him “unprecedented” power so you’d want to explain that theory a bit more.
That specific duration, two weeks, was an official policy from the CDC and the White House https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s.... Here's the US Surgeon General talking about it: https://youtu.be/HK2ypT2xweA?t=129
As we can see in the video, the experts knew from the get-go that 15 days wouldn't be enough. But they named the policy/slogan that way anyway in the hope that it would improve cooperation "oh it's just 15 days, we can all do it!".
I think it's fair to say that the population shouldn't take such slogan as being absolute during an evolving unprecedented situation. But it's also fair to say that the experts (or at least the politicians) were being deliberately misleading and, rightly or wrongly, some people felt duped/lied to once they realized that.
Calling them dumb for feeling duped by an official slogan isn't helping anyone. Let's agree that things could/should have been communicated better and let's all learn from it so that history doesn't repeat itself.
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We will ignore the obvious solution. End the dairy industry altogether. There’s very little animal milk offers to humans anyways other than whatever the U.S. govt has drummed up through marketing to sell otherwise unsellable oversupply.
It’s an ecological disaster, a GHG disaster, a health disaster, an allergen disaster, a biohazard, and a complete and utter moral and ethical disaster.
There’s nothing animal milk offers that we don’t have a dozen alternatives for already.