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Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of December 20
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!
White House to buy, ship 500 million rapid tests for free beginning in January
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neat system we have set up where cyberbullying the White House Press Secretary is the only way to get the federal government to do something.
my thoughts and prayers are with the workers at US Digital Service (or maybe some federal contractor) who just had "your holidays are cancelled, we need a website and we need it by early January" dropped in their laps. especially when the usefulness of a federal "enter address, get covid tests delivered" website has been apparent for months. there's no reason this needed to be a "I know it's the week of christmas but drop everything" project.
Have you read somewhere about how the Biden administration made this decision?
The Biden Administration Rejected an October Proposal for “Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays” (Vanity Fair)
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I'm guessing someone didn't keep Jen Psaki in the loop on that one : https://twitter.com/mkarolian/status/1467959999645298697
Omicron is now the dominant COVID strain in the U.S., making up 73% of new infections
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It seems to be reported on this page with bar graphs on the middle left. At the bottom there is a table showing how many sequences they’re getting from each state.
It seems this number was badly wrong. Revised from 73% to 22%.
Now it’s 59% but should we trust it?
CDC sharply drops estimate of Omicron prevalence in U.S.
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That's still a very wide range. The graph should probably show it.
US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say
Finishing Phase 1 is actually not very far through the approval process, so it seems like it will be a while?
Fully Vaccinated is about to mean something else, a discussion on vaccine messaging and health narratives.