13
votes
Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of August 16
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
Just got news that an extended family member was hospitalized with COVID. They were fully vaccinated. We weren’t close at all so it isn’t really hitting me emotionally, but it has really accelerated my worries about Delta and breakthrough infections. Things seem to be getting worse.
To help you put things in perspective: the main difference with Delta isn't the potential for breakthrough infections, but simply how infectious it is. And when something spreads so easily, the potential for a breakthrough infection is higher. And when there's more of those, that subsequently means there's more people in hospitals even if vaccinated.
Basically the ratio of vaccinated people that get severely ill hasn't changed. It's just that there's more infections, so all the numbers are higher.
I find it interesting that you say things seem to be getting worse though. Do you feel that way? Here in Europe the sentiment is that things are finally easing back to normal. Vaccination campaigns are ending in some countries, we are setting up a vaccination pass for various purposes, and we are moving on. There are talks of booster shots, and that's it.
I know a lot of people here in real life who were freaked out about the virus, constantly, feeling like life is getting out of their hands. All of them with zero exception are no longer feeling that way. Keep an eye on your media consumption and make sure your worries are rational, not a product of constantly hearing "you should be freaking out".
Sorry if this is misplaced - I hope it helps. My DMs are always open as well if you want to chat about this with more privacy.
I don't know where kfwyre is located, but I think they are in the US like me. My state is in the middle of a Delta surge that has new cases per day almost as high as our pre-vaccine peak in January, and our hospitalization rates are so high that we apparently have a negative number of ICU beds (which means that all designated ICU beds are full and hospitals are having to place ICU patients in ER beds or other parts of the hospital). School just started back here in the last 1-2 weeks, and many schools are not even requiring masks. I'm not incredibly concerned about breakthroughs, but I'm a little worried, and I'm more worried for my unvaccinated kids. It's incredibly frustrating to have done everything we were supposed to do over the last 1.5 years, including pulling the kids out of most of the extracurricular activities they were involved in, and them missing a lot of birthday parties and time with friends, only to have the ignorant morons in this region snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like this.
In case you're not aware of how it's going in many states in the US, I'll use mine (Florida) as an example. Our vaccination rates have stalled at around 50% (even less in my county). We recently had the highest case numbers of any time in the pandemic, and we're still experiencing record numbers of hospitalizations and ICU patients every day. People are being sent to hospitals in other cities or stated because we're running out of beds/staff. School boards are being threatened with loss of funding for requiring masks, so many simply aren't. Local governments are no longer allowed to mandate masks. People are lining up for hours in the heat to get tested, while others lie on the floor in makeshift monoclonal antibody clinics put in libraries.
I always appreciate your levelheadedness, Adys!
I don’t think I’m doomscrolling, but of course it's hard to know from an outside perspective.
Things in the US were actually quite good for a while. We got vaccinated early and watched cases plummet. My husband and I started meeting up with friends and family in-person again. It was a huge relief after the last year, and I’m glad Europe is feeling that too!
Currently though, I feel worse relative to COVID than I have in a while. It's definitely not nearly as bad as the prolonged terror and uncertainty of last year, but definitely more than I've felt through the detente of the past couple months.
It looks like the US is entering another wave. Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all up. This is a bit misleading at face value given that this is an aggregate of the entire country, and this spike seems to be hitting certain areas far worse than others. A lot of our southern states are being absolutely ravaged by Delta right now, and they’re the primary drivers of our national numbers.
That said, it's misleading to think it's only those states that should be worried. Even when we look at things at an individual state level, cases are rising in all but three. I think it’s a testament to how infectious Delta really is, and I shudder to think what things would look like if it had hit us and we didn’t have vaccines.
The other big concern is that American schools are reopening, and kids under 12 remain fully unvaccinated. Meanwhile, the heavy-handed precautions that many schools took last year are essentially nowhere in sight. Many (most?) schools are reopening in-person fully, which is a huge relief to parents who had to manage work and childcare last year with highly irregular and variable schedules. Unfortunately, doing this means distancing isn't possible, and masks remain an unfortunate partisan culture war for our country. Many of the states hardest hit by COVID right now have also banned mask mandates for schools, for example. In schools that have already reopened, we're already seeing some horror stories.
I don't know what to think about the <12s yet and I don't think I can address that part of your worry. But I can address the statistical part of it :)
As you said yourself, looking at the USA in aggregate is misleading. But it's also very easy to see the rising infections and think "Damn, we're as screwed as before", forgetting that infections in and of themselves are not problematic.
I'll summarize a bit, but you can find the maths behind it all here. In short, the number of current cases is driven by how contagious the virus is. Delta is a lot more contagious than what we dealt with before, which is why you're seeing the numbers spike up again: Delta is becoming the dominant variant in the US, which means all the numbers that you had before are re-adjusting to the new base rate.
Concretely, what has changed? Well, not much actually. It's just that now, things will go a lot faster. Bigger numbers, faster than before. It's not a problem in and of itself (and in fact I'd argue it can be better this way than with a "long winter"), as long as there is infrastructure in place to deal with the quicker and bigger bursts.
These bigger numbers are why you're hearing about breakthrough cases for example. Here's how this works. Let's imagine you have a vaccine that is 99% symptomatically effective, and reduces the chance to catch the virus by 75%.
What this means is that for every sick person, 1 in 400 vaccinated people will get visibly sick (versus however many covid normally gets, which is somewhere between 80-30% of symptomatic infections, so let's say 1 in 2). But! If you're greatly increasing the chances that someone catches the virus in the first place, 1 in 400 catches up quickly!
Note that these aren't actual numbers, they're an example of how the reductions and breakthroughs work. This page has some good explanations and breakdowns of possible scenarios etc. The point is, vaccines work, and they work really well, but nothing is 100% and I think everyone is discovering that even "one in ten thousand" is actually a really high chance of occurence at scale.
Furthermore I invite you to remember that the world has spent a year and half dealing with this and has become a LOT better at it. We have protocols in place, we know how to treat it, the most vulnerable are vaccinated, hospitals are far better equipped and ready to take in severe cases, etc. Despite Delta, things are a lot less bleak than before (except for australia…).
So what does it mean? It means things are going to look like a new wave. For a little bit. Then they'll taper down. More slowly for you than for us in Belgium because the US vax rate is lower, but I don't believe it will cause serious issues we didn't encounter here. This is why I'm pushing you to ask yourself whether you're worried for a good cause. And also, are you more worried about your state, your country, the economy, other people, your family, yourself? There's wildly different risks to all those :)
There isn’t. In the southern US we’re hearing about hospitals calling other hospitals to find where to send patients because they’re already overflowing and there are no hospitals that can take them within a 500 mile radius. Hospitals in Alabama were sending patients to Colorado last week. (And of course this means that if you have any non-COVID emergency you’re screwed.)
Great rundown, and I agree we're definitely in a better place than we were. I also don't want you (or anyone) to think that I'm doubting vaccine efficacy. Quite the opposite -- vaccines are one of the literal saving graces right now. I can't imagine how bad things would be without them. Delta would be unstoppable.
My primary worry used to be me and my husband, and while that hasn't fully gone away, my main concern is kids at this point, especially young ones. They've had a long, tough go of things, and I hate that things still aren't better for them. Even if COVID itself is not that big of a threat to them (though I feel that's also unclear at the moment), the secondary effects of COVID are definitely hurting them.
Really though, I think if I'm being honest with myself, it's more that for the past year and a half I've been using COVID metrics as heuristics for suffering -- indicators of both direct COVID suffering and secondary suffering (e.g. anxiety, fear, loss, sorrow, etc.). The higher the COVID numbers, the worse things are for greater numbers of people. The lower the numbers, the better things are. I basically look at those charts and see "suffering is going up", which I think is the root of my concern. I don't want more suffering for anyone.
Increasingly we're hearing from experts that most people will be exposed eventually. Getting through it quicker might not seem so bad individually since the likelihood of serious illness is low for the vaccinated.
But from a "don't overwhelm the hospitals" perspective, which has been a problem since the beginning of the pandemic, slower is better. To a point, anyway.
So I think it makes sense to be cautious when rates are increasing (as they are now) and relax a bit when they are declining.
There are some signs this wave might top out soon, but turning points are hard to predict.
Update:
My family member went through several cycles of remdesivir and seems to be improving. They are able to walk again. Things were really tense the past couple of days, as it was unclear whether or not things were getting better, but the current outlook is good.
There was an article (here) about long Covid and vaccinations - the gist of it is that we still don't know at what rate vaccinated people are developing long term symptoms (and the CDC not tracking all breakthrough cases probably is not helping get an accurate view).
As a fully vaccinated person who lives in an area with a pretty high uptake of the vaccine, my worry for myself, family, and friends is no longer about hospitalization or death, but about long term health issues. It's certainly something I've been watching closely over the past few months.
I'm increasingly frustrated with the lack of information about the real-world success of the JnJ vaccine compared to the others, and the fact that it's not even being discussed in the context of booster shots.
For example, a third shot was recently approved for people who are immunocompromised, but nothing in the approval (that I saw) mentioned what JnJ recipients can or should do.
A study was released from Mayo recently, giving some data on the impact of Delta on efficacy on the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but it explicitly said that they did not study the impact on the JnJ vaccine.
I'm really starting to feel like the general approach to those of us who followed the guidance to get what we could as soon as we could and ended up receiving the JnJ shot is "too bad, not enough of them, so we just don't care"... (I didn't know what I was going to get until I was signing the papers, and decided to just take it because at the time it looked like my alternative was to wait multiple months longer)
I got the J&J vaccine too, and I feel the same way. I’m not sure what to think or how at risk I really am. Hopefully we get more clarity soon.
Some new news this morning on booster shots, and they include a mention of the J&J shot: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/16/1028345074/covid-booster-shots-eight-months-biden
...
Found this relevant article:
'Naked in the world of COVID': Some J&J vaccine recipients feel unprotected against delta and want mRNA shots
Any parents of under-12s worried about Delta this year? The number of children hospitalized seems to be growing.
My kid is starting daycare in the fall and we're slightly concerned about the whole thing but we don't have a lot of alternative options at the moment.
Yes, our younger daughter is still in daycare, but my son just moved from that daycare to a pre-school this month that goes all the way to 5th grade. We worry every day whether we are making the right decision sending him to school given the transmission data and headlines. We don't really have another option though. We've lost his spot in the old daycare, and we won a lottery just to get into this new school.
The school didn't implement a COVID policy until the last 24 hours... at the beginning of week 3. This was after a month of me shaming them about it since before the open house. It angers me so much that they opened a brand new school without a single consideration given to the fact we're still in the middle of a global pandemic. They are a public charter school (partially funded through public grants), so they tend to default to the guidance from the state government and local county school board (i.e. science-denying Republicans).
That said, I feel much much better about our daughter in daycare. She's <1 year old, the class sizes are tiny (3-7 kids in a room max depending on what day of the week), the whole daycare operation is much smaller compared to a typical school, all staff members are vaccinated, masking is strictly enforced for staff plus parents during drop off/pickup, and there's no mixing of age groups allowed.
Yea having school age kids must be tough right now. Our daycare is also a lot more small scale than a school although I'm unsure about the vaccination status of the staff there. I think we'll probably ask them even if its a somewhat personal question.
Of course all this is compounded by the fact my partner is a teacher so that's an additional vector for us. We still have a few weeks to go before she is back at work and can probably delay a few weeks with some grandparent support but we really don't want to be in a position where we feel like we're playing Russian roulette with our children but it seems inevitable.
I sympathize with your wife having to go through this pandemic as a teacher. It can't be easy. I just called my son's principal about keeping him out of school due to the rising case numbers, and they basically deferred to the existing unexcused absence/truancy policy, which requires a doctor's note. A dozen unexcused absences and he could lose his enrollment. The principal said, verbatim, "we are doing everything we can to keep the children safe." No the fuck you're not. Not when the COVID policy comes out week 3 of the school year after we've been in a global pandemic for almost 18 months.
My five-year-old niece tested positive. I don’t have details but according to my brother she is doing okay.
Have a preschooler and newborn. Terrified. Especially since masks are basically nonexistant anymore. You can tell the parents because they're far more likely to still be wearing masks.
But preschooler has already been defacto locked in a house for a year with the rest of us. Craves and needs social interaction with peers. The preschool had zero outbreaks last year so hoping the same holds now.
Otherwise prepping for another long, hard winter. Get your peanut butter, mac and cheese, and hotdogs now.
Wish I could give some advice, but we're also flying blind by the seat of our pants.
At this point, me and my family are so burnt out from trying that there will actually be substantial relief if we catch COVID and get through it alive. It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that barring some significant changes in policy it's not a matter of "if" anymore, it's a "when".
So in this weird, perverse, dark thoughts kinda way, I hope my family catches COVID before the hospitalizations start ramping up to critical levels again circa November.
Found out today my second shot was pushed forward from mid-October to September 2. Seems like Norway's vaccine program is really picking up steam.
Last week I got my second Moderna shot. That's my fourth overall after my third one last month.
Hit me pretty hard. Despite taking a preventative 500mg paracetamol the evening of, and another 1g the next day, I got quite seriously tired and high fever.
Aside from that I'm happy to report that Belgium's vaccination campaign is going great. Flanders has over 90% of adults with a shot in the arm, and their vaccination campaign is coming to an end.
Had the same with my second Pfizer jab. Felt nothing from the first dose aside from a sore arm the next day, but this one damn near wiped me out.
Why have you had 4 shots instead of just two? Were you not able to prove that you had had the first two shots & had to repeat the process to get the documentation (had a family member that had to do that earlier this year to prove to their job they had been vaxxed)?
Sorry, hadn't read your earlier post. It's cool you were able to participate in that clinical trial- wish it had been more successful so you wouldn't have to be repeatedly jabbed. Hope you feel better soon
Yep like you saw it was the clinical trial, but I've also seen people have to do this when they got vaxxed out of the country with non-EMA-approved vaccines such as Sputnik (especially eastern europeans). It kinda sucks.
I made the mistake of searching for some COVID info about my province on Twitter last night (there are some people that post nice graphs I was trying to find), and I noticed a whole bunch of people spreading a conspiracy theory like "Alberta, Canada was forced to lift their coronavirus restrictions because they were unable to prove in court that COVID-19 even exists!"
Here's a good explanation of the source of that: Is Alberta ending coronavirus restrictions because of failing to provide evidence of SARS-COV2 virus existence in court?
Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
This article talks about Simpson’s paradox and how it apples to an Israeli study of vaccine effectiveness. The paradox is this:
For all ages, they found the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness against severe disease to be 67%. For people who are less than 50, it’s 92%. For people 50 or older, 85%. How can that be? Which numbers are right?
This happens because more older people are vaccinated than younger people, but they are also more likely to be hospitalized. When you take an overall percentage, there are different demographics in the numerator and denominator. So, in this case, the numbers that are broken down by age are what you want to look at.
They then break down the data even more by age at the end of the article.
The City of Orlando is asking residents to reduce water consumption due to COVID-19
We got our 12 year old his first shot yesterday. No side effects so far for him whatsoever, in fact he didn't even remember that he'd had the shot until we dropped him off at school. I'm sure he was bummed because yesterday we had raised the possibility of him staying home if he didn't feel well.
Maker of Popular Covid Test Told Factory to Destroy Inventory (NY Times)
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
My work moved our return to office plans back from mid-September to sometime in January 2022. At this point, I am expecting them to delay the return again. I'm really hoping they will realize nearly two years of remote work is long enough to prove that some of us can actually be 100% remote. Even when the return to office is finalized, my team is only required to come into the office once a week. As my apartment lease is ending in April 2022, I can't help but wonder what even is the point of it all. Do I continue to try to pay exorbitant rental prices to be close to work, move further away and accept a long commute once a week, or risk my job and tell my boss it is remote work or bust?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tests positive for COVID-19
Child Covid-19 cases are steadily increasing. But with US schools opening, expert warns this is just the beginning.
Australia: AstraZeneca stockpile grows to millions as Pfizer stock set to arrive
[…]