Coronavirus, Monkeypox, and Other Contagious Diseases

[LFC]

The more I read the more I see this entire situation being ripe for conjecture and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately I have nearly zero hope that we'll ever know what happened because the Chinese gov't are dug in like ticks. Josh Marshall wrote On Secrecy, COVID, and the PRC about this. He's been putting up reader analyses (some or all are not paywalled so you can get to them) and some seem to say the very same thing. Not acknowledging fault via sketchy research, lab leak, or natural source appears to be baked into Xi's DNA.

[LFC]

This TPM reader explains the Chinese wholesale market system and why it could have allowed the virus to spread extremely quickly. The bush meat markets aren't really necessary to play the role if a virus is acquired elsewhere.

When I was in grad school I spent two years doing field research on design and business strategy in Chinese businesses. As part of this I researched China’s wholesale market system, and, as fate would have it, did ethnographic research on consumer electronics wholesale markets in and around Wuhan as well as other sites across China.

Chinese wholesale markets exist in networks of dozens of primary, secondary and tertiary markets, with the size roughly corresponding with the size of the cities they are in. A large city like Wuhan will have very large wholesale markets, and they’ll sell to wholesalers in smaller markets in nearby cities, as well as to retail outlets and individual consumers. Wholesalers in those smaller cities will sell to even smaller wholesalers in even smaller cities, and so on down the line. Sales people from manufacturers will go to primary wholesale markets in a territory that could encompass several provinces. Which is to say that markets are sites, but are also networks with tens of thousands of people circulating through, a good number of whom are going back and forth between wholesale food markets and restaurants.

Because of this, the fact that one of the earliest identified outbreaks was in a wholesale food market is easily misleading. Sure, maybe that means the source of the outbreak was nearby, or that the market itself was the origin point of the virus. But it could also mean that someone with Covid walked into a restaurant hundreds of miles away and infected the chef who went on to infect people in the market when he bought vegetables. Considering how good restaurants are at spreading Covid, the fact that infections showed up in market networks connected to the restaurant industry early on is not surprising at all.

They also have a take on China's "think skin." The near pathological inability to admit fault makes getting the truth out of them impossible. As so many pieces have stated this could probably be cleared up by China in short order but Xi and the nationalist sensitivities would never allow it.

Also, I would disagree with JF’s assertion that XI Jinping is trying to style himself as an emperor. Comparing Chinese leadership to emperors or China to an empire is generally lazy and orientalist. A better historical frame of reference for understanding the CCP’s secrecy around this is not pre-modern empires but China’s encounter with modernity in the context of colonial subjugation. There’s a whole discourse of national humiliation surrounding the internal weakness that led China to go from being a major power during the height of the Qing dynasty to being invaded by Western imperial powers. In founding the CCP Mao said “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.” The CCP has framed it’s legitimacy in terms of restoring China as an economic and military power.

The centrality of that humiliation narrative to Chinese nationalism leads the Chinese state to have ridiculously thin skin. Just search the phrase “Hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” in any news database for examples, it is a common line in official statements reacting to things most countries would ignore. It is also why the CCP is going to be secretive about anything which could potentially embarrass China on the world stage. It’s not at the same scale, but in 2008 it was discovered that a major dairy producer was selling milk that was tainted with melamine. This was right before the Beijing Olympics and the Chinese state suppressed news of it until the Olympics were over to avoid embarrassing China during a politically sensitive moment. During the Olympics they did nothing to stop the contaminated milk from entering the food supply because they didn’t want it to leak.

If they refused to handle something as basic as food contamination because it would be embarrassing then what can we expect when they're the origin point for a virus that has killed nearly 4 million people worldwide?

[LFC]

Vaccinating most of the world would pay massive dividends but in our capitalist societies if we can't collect direct return on investment then it's not worthwhile doing it.

TPM Reader JL flags an interesting article in The Economist about the costs of a global vaccination program. The article is paywalled. But the key passage is tweeted here: “To get 70% of the planet’s population inoculated by April, the IMF calculates, would cost just $50 billion. The cumulative economic benefit by 2025, in terms of increased global output, would be $9 trillion, to say nothing of the many lives that would be saved.”

The Economist titles the article “The West is passing up the opportunity of the century” and looks primarily at economic impact. What occurs to me is more geopolitical impact. President Biden recently pledged 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. China meanwhile is shipping abroad large allotments of its two vaccines. Until very recently most of the effort to vaccinate the world’s poorer countries has been done by China. But the two main vaccines produced in China appear to be significantly less effective than the two mRNA vaccines widely used in the US. There is also less robust data available on them from clinical trials.

In any case, relative to the scale of the spending the US is now doing and the vast price of the COVID catastrophe purely in economic terms – let along human suffering – the price tag for vaccinating the globe is quite low. We get hung up on intellectual property rights. But given how intractable those debates are my preference would to simply buy the vaccines under the current intellectual property regime and vaccinate everyone. It seems basically certain that it will pay for itself many times over purely in terms of US economic growth and the public diplomacy impact is almost incalculable.

If only the vaccines had to be delivered and administered with tanks, ships, and jets. Then there'd be all KINDS of support for worldwide "vaccination."

[LFC]

I don't know that most of these people are Trumpies but if I had to bet twenty bucks...

A federal judge over the weekend dismissed a lawsuit brought by 117 employees of a Houston-based hospital system, who, among other things, claimed that the hospital’s requirement that staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 was akin to medical atrocities carried out by Nazis.

US District Judge Lynn Hughes called that argument “reprehensible” and issued sweeping rejections of their other claims that the mandate violates state and federal laws. In the five-page ruling filed Saturday, Judge Hughes wrote that the lawsuit by the 117 employees—led by coronavirus-unit nurse Jennifer Bridges—contained false statements, misconstrued legal provisions, wrongly claimed coercion, and made otherwise invalid arguments.

Houston Methodist Hospital system issued a mandate April 1 that all staff must be vaccinated against the pandemic coronavirus. Though the vast majority of the hospital system’s nearly 26,000 employees readily complied, 178 did not meet the June 7 deadline and were suspended for two unpaid weeks. If they fail to get fully vaccinated in that window, they face termination.

Prior to the deadline, Bridges and 116 of her colleagues had filed their lawsuit. Bridges, a nurse at the hospital for over six years who worked in the coronavirus unit during the pandemic, was a vocal leader of the vaccination holdouts and one of those suspended beginning June 8. In an interview in May, she said she was “not anti-vaccine. I’ve had every vaccine known to man, except this one.” But, she added, “as nurses and medical staff, everybody feels like you should have a right to choose what you put in your body.”

A central argument in their legal claim was that the COVID-19 vaccines currently in use are not fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration—the regulator issued emergency use authorizations, instead. Bridges and her like-minded colleagues argued that it is against federal law to mandate “unapproved” medicines and that, thus, she and her colleagues were forced to be “human subjects” in a clinical trial. Judge Hughes noted that the federal provision they referenced applies to governments, not private employers, and that their claims “misrepresented the facts.” Judge Hughes noted that “the hospital’s employees are not participants in a human trial.”

In the most eyebrow-raising claim, the hospital staff argued that the mandate violates the Nuremberg Code, which is a set of 10 principles for conducting human experimentation ethically. The principles were written in response to atrocities carried out by Nazis during World War II.

“Equating the injection requirement to medical experimentation in concentration camps is reprehensible,” the judge wrote. “Nazi doctors conducted medical experiments on victims that caused pain, mutilation, permanent disability, and in many cases death.”

[Bact PhD]

Jun 14, 2021 16:03:49 GMT goldenvalley said:

Wow. This stuff would make for a gripping suspense novel, but the real life devastating effects of this virus makes it simply a horror story. Will we ever uncover the truth about all this?

I doubt it. As LFC expands:

Jun 14, 2021 18:55:24 GMT LFC said:

The more I read the more I see this entire situation being ripe for conjecture and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately I have nearly zero hope that we'll ever know what happened because the Chinese gov't are dug in like ticks... Not acknowledging fault via sketchy research, lab leak, or natural source appears to be baked into Xi's DNA.

Yup, it’s too easy to connect dots A, B, and F to get Theory One, dots A, C, and E to come up with Theory Two, and so on…

[LFC]

Jun 14, 2021 22:00:41 GMT Bact PhD said:

Yup, it’s too easy to connect dots A, B, and F to get Theory One, dots A, C, and E to come up with Theory Two, and so on…

Meanwhile the Chinese won't ever let the world know about the 20,000 dots corresponding to their alphabet. (Well, their regularly used alphabet.) Their secrecy about these things scares me more than the diseases themselves. Just like this one we don't have a fighting chance when the disease gets a 4-6 month head start.

[LFC]

COVID cases are up a little but deaths continue to drop. And then there's this. Color coding mine.

At least eight states are recording rising 7-day averages for infection rates over the past 2 weeks, including Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Missouri, Nevada, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Of those states, only Hawaii has a vaccination rate of 43% or more, which matches the average across the country.

The slight increase in virus activity comes as most states are reopening fully, and many states are now choosing to report new cases less frequently than they did 1 year ago.

At least 24 states have scaled back how often they report COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, NPR reports. Some states have stopped reporting data over the weekends, while Florida and Oklahoma are reporting data only once a week. Public health experts worry that cutting back on daily reporting could leave states in the dark about new outbreaks.

[LFC]

China wasn't the only gov't involved in misinformation. Trump and Pompeo tried to pressure China in more transparency by spewing bullshit. Of course since they were already blaming China for an unproven lab leak they had no incentive to be truthful. What a hamfisted way of handling the situation but it's pretty typical of Pompeo who seems to have no diplomatic skills whatsoever, just bullying. China is secretive enough. This could have drive them even deeper into their bunker.

Senior Trump administration officials decided in the spring of 2020 to strongly imply that Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab, even though intelligence officials investigating the pandemic’s origins did not have conclusive evidence supporting that hypothesis.

The messaging campaign began as a concerted effort to push back against China, which was attempting to blame the United States for the spread of the virus. In documents and cables newly obtained by POLITICO, officials shared talking points emphasizing that even Beijing’s own communications acknowledged the outbreak began in China’s Wuhan Province.

But some officials at the White House, the National Security Council and the State Department urged the U.S. to go further. They wanted to blame China for covering up the pandemic’s origins and to allege that it came from a research facility in Wuhan that specialized in the study of dangerous bat pathogens — a move they described as going on the diplomatic offensive. The goal, officials said, was in part to pressure China to allow the U.S. and the international community access to Wuhan to investigate.

On several occasions, former President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo embraced the controversial lab-leak theory in public remarks, going well beyond the official talking points hashed out between agencies.

At a press conference on April 30, 2020, Trump said the administration had evidence showing Covid-19 came from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although he declined to provide specifics. “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,” Trump said.

Days later, on May 3, Pompeo told ABC’s “This Week” that there was “enormous evidence” that Covid-19 came from the lab.

Five former Trump administration officials — including three who were directly involved in the administration’s origins probe — said the evidence the government had gathered did not conclusively support those claims. At that point, the officials had reviewed and obtained documents, reports, and other intelligence that suggested the virus might have originated in the Wuhan lab but they could not prove it. Those officials also said they were still considering evidence supporting a natural origin at the time Trump and Pompeo made their statements claiming a lab leak, and that ultimately they never found a smoking gun for either a lab or natural origin.

“I really wasn’t sure exactly what [evidence] they were talking about,” one former senior national security official said of Trump and Pompeo. “We were just trying to keep our heads down and do the work and look at the evidence as it came.”

The descriptions of the Trump administration’s internal conversations about the virus' origin in spring 2020, including the NSC-led campaign described in the cables and documents, highlight the extent to which top officials pushed the lab-leak theory despite a lack of consensus among those charged with investigating the issue. Senior officials disagreed on the weight and meaning of the evidence they reviewed, particularly the circumstantial evidence for the lab-leak theory.

Yet the group of officials inside the White House, National Security Council and State Department determined at the time that the U.S. had gathered enough circumstantial evidence to point to the lab as the origin of the virus in public statements, regardless of the inconclusive state of the investigation.

“The prevailing assumption was that [the virus] accidentally escaped a lab in Wuhan,” a former Trump official with knowledge of the messaging campaign said. “Part of it too is testing your theory, especially if you’re confident in it ... to see how China reacts to it.”

[LFC]

DeSantis continues his assault on the cruise industry for his own personal political gain. If they could limit their passengers to those who are vaccinated they could likely spin back up to normalcy pretty quickly. One COVID outbreak and it will set them back. Multiple outbreaks and they're f***ed.

A singer and pianist who makes her living performing on cruise ships is pleading with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to reverse his controversial policy barring cruises from requiring guests to show proof that they've been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

Writing in the Washington Post, Alissa Musto argues that the cruise industry will "never get back to normal" unless ships are allowed to ask for proof of vaccinations.

"I fear that this policy will drag down an industry that's already been treading water for 15 months," she writes. "Everyone who works on a cruise ship -- and, I'd bet, most passengers, too -- want to know that the people onboard with us don't pose an unnecessary risk to our health and safety. If cruise lines can't protect the safety of passengers and crew and make people feel confident about booking their vacations, we'll never get back to normal."

Musto then argues that cruise ships are already allowed to put their own employees through medical evaluations that include mandatory vaccinations as conditions of employment, which is why it seems a stretch to believe they cannot require the same of their guests.

"I just hope Florida's new policies won't stand in the way of my colleagues and me getting back to work -- and the lives we've had to put on hold for the past 15 months," she concludes.

[Bact PhD]

Jun 16, 2021 20:31:36 GMT LFC said:

DeSantis continues his assault on the cruise industry for his own personal political gain. If they could limit their passengers to those who are vaccinated they could likely spin back up to normalcy pretty quickly. One COVID outbreak and it will set them back. Multiple outbreaks and they're f***ed.

A singer and pianist who makes her living performing on cruise ships is pleading with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to reverse his controversial policy barring cruises from requiring guests to show proof that they've been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

Writing in the Washington Post, Alissa Musto argues that the cruise industry will "never get back to normal" unless ships are allowed to ask for proof of vaccinations.

"I fear that this policy will drag down an industry that's already been treading water for 15 months," she writes. "Everyone who works on a cruise ship -- and, I'd bet, most passengers, too -- want to know that the people onboard with us don't pose an unnecessary risk to our health and safety. If cruise lines can't protect the safety of passengers and crew and make people feel confident about booking their vacations, we'll never get back to normal."

Musto then argues that cruise ships are already allowed to put their own employees through medical evaluations that include mandatory vaccinations as conditions of employment, which is why it seems a stretch to believe they cannot require the same of their guests.

"I just hope Florida's new policies won't stand in the way of my colleagues and me getting back to work -- and the lives we've had to put on hold for the past 15 months," she concludes.

From media reports here, the major cruise lines have been working on forms of "Plan B" that would have them simply bypassing Flori-DUH if the court challenges don't work. What's that old saw about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face---??

Yes, DeSantis IS an idiot, but one who is likely to win re-election next year.

[pnwguy]

Jun 16, 2021 20:37:09 GMT Bact PhD said:

Yes, DeSantis IS an idiot, but one who is likely to win re-election next year.

That's the key to GOP MAGAt political success!

[andydp]

Jun 16, 2021 20:37:09 GMT Bact PhD said:

Jun 16, 2021 20:31:36 GMT LFC said:

DeSantis continues his assault on the cruise industry for his own personal political gain. If they could limit their passengers to those who are vaccinated they could likely spin back up to normalcy pretty quickly. One COVID outbreak and it will set them back. Multiple outbreaks and they're f***ed.

From media reports here, the major cruise lines have been working on forms of "Plan B" that would have them simply bypassing Flori-DUH if the court challenges don't work. What's that old saw about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face---??

Yes, DeSantis IS an idiot, but one who is likely to win re-election next year.

I bet if they asked New York, Boston, MD, VA and even NJ if they would like hundreds of cruise ships departing their ports every year, the answer would not just be "yes" but F*&^ YES !!

[LFC]

OK, even I didn't have this one on my Trump Bingo card.

Then-President Donald Trump offered a horrifying solution to the burgeoning COVID-19 infections among American tourists returning to the country in February last year, according to the Washington Post.

“Don’t we have an island that we own? What about Guantanamo?” Trump reportedly asked during a meeting in the Situation Room.

“We import goods. We are not going to import a virus,” he continued.

Trump reportedly made the suggestion a second time before his staffers shut down the idea due to concerns over political backlash.

This one we knew about. He wasn't exactly subtle in his reactions to testing.

The book also lays out the ex-president’s fits of rage over the idea of a federal COVID-19 testing program, which he reportedly feared would damage him politically as he sought to falsely downplay the severity of the virus.

“Testing is killing me! I’m going to lose the election because of testing!” Trump shouted at then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar during a call on March 18, according to Abutaleb and Paletta. “What idiot had the federal government do testing?”

Azar then reportedly reminded Trump that Jared Kushner, his own son-in-law who had taken over the White House’s testing efforts, was that idiot.

[LFC]

The right-wing domestic terrorists have been threatening America's medical researchers at a horrifying pace. This is today's GOP. It's not enough to just deny reality.  You also have to attack those that trade in reality. Of course anybody who harms or kills these people are "mentally ill" rather than a right-wing terrorist. I'd go further and say anybody in the GOP today is mentally ill but that doesn't absolve them of their lies, incitement, and violence.

Being a scientist was not exactly fun during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in America. But somehow, even as cases and deaths are way down in the United States, the attacks on us are worse than ever.

Take Anthony Fauci, a punching bag for the far right since the earliest days of the outbreak. The “Fire Fauci Act,” a twisted piece of legislation first introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in April, gained additional Republican support this past week, now reaching at least a dozen House members.

That leaders of the GOP would go out of their way to reduce Dr. Fauci’s salary to zero and ultimately force his retirement must be examined for what it really is. This is no simple beef with someone who was frequently targeted by the administration and its allies under Donald Trump. It is, instead, a piece of a much larger and systematic anti-science project on the far right, one that is increasingly hard to separate from the Stop the Steal myth powering the right-wing fringe.

The attacks accelerated in the first half of 2020, when the Trump White House embarked on a deliberate anti-science disinformation campaign. The explicit language both from the president and his staff members: COVID-19 was a hoax, or else the death toll was a result of causes other than the virus. Hospital admissions reflected a catch-up in elective surgeries, and social distancing was discouraged in favor of promoting ridiculously low benchmarks for herd immunity. In response, many red-state governors prematurely relaxed social distancing and mask measures, stoking terrible waves of COVID-19 across southern states in the summer and the Midwest in the fall of 2020. Thousands lost their lives.

Also in the mix was the outrageous White House conspiracy that the Chinese Communist Party ignited the epidemic in the U.S, possibly by sending infected people into our country. Trump suggested he would fire Fauci—who he said disagreed with his Chinese travel ban—after the election, unleashing a steady stream of similar calls.

But it did not stop there. Dr. Peter Daszak, just to take one example—the head of the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance—has been routinely hounded by right-wing media as part of their fixation on the (still unresolved) Wuhan Lab Leak hypothesis. GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher has outrageously gone so far as to suggest Daszak may have conspired to block a fair probe of what happened. Scripps Research Institute virologist Kristian Andersen has had to deactivate his Twitter account due to similar aggression.

I’m also personally threatened by emails, phone calls, and on social media for my views on vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccinations. They mostly have far-right and even white nationalist leanings, telling me about impending attacks from “patriots,” some imbued with Nazi imagery. As one colleague eloquently said to me recently in a text: “It’s like a slow moving train coming right for us. We have more lethally armed extremists in the U.S. than anywhere, and GOP members of Congress are whipping them up right now.”

I agree with Dr. Fauci when he says that these personal attacks represent an assault on American science. But this targeting has even greater implications.

[LFC]

Trump's COVID denial allowed 900 Secret Service agents to become infected. I wonder how many will suffer life-long health issues because of Il Douche.

Between March 1, 2020 and March 9, 2021, 881 Secret Service members tested positive for COVID-19, according to government records obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The majority were either Special Agents or in the Uniformed Division. During the first year of the pandemic, then-President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence went against public health guidelines at the time, holding large-scale rallies and multiple trips with Secret Service protection. When the number of cases was surging in December, Pence took a ski trip to Vail, putting at least 48 agents at risk, according to CREW.

An inquiry by staff to investigate COVID policies within the Secret Service was reportedly blocked by DHS Inspector General, Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee. CREW states that because of the Inspector General’s unwillingness to look into the matter, it’s impossible to know how many agents contracted COVID-19 because of the Trump administration’s refusal to follow guidelines. However, it appears that the number of positive cases was far higher than the government previously reported.

[Traveler]

Daszak had a huge conflict of interest when he categorically and completely dismissed any possibility of a leak from a lab he was funding. That said, the evidence for either natural or lab origins is still totally unavailable. This was a good piece in FP that cast doubts on the lab leak.  A weakness to me, in that it is based on China supposedly not knowing till late December.   When the US intel briefing that the dump ignored came out the second week of November IIRC. 

I tend to doubt any firm conclusions these days as to the origin.   Regardless of origin, the fact remains that China knowingly let it loose.  Charitably, that was due to ineptitude of their vaunted "meritocracy", not intentional.  But the Chinese have a huge inferiority complex from the centuries of humiliation, and cannot admit being mortal.   

[LFC]

Jun 23, 2021 14:28:12 GMT Traveler said:

Regardless of origin, the fact remains that China knowingly let it loose.  Charitably, that was due to ineptitude of their vaunted "meritocracy", not intentional.  But the Chinese have a huge inferiority complex from the centuries of humiliation, and cannot admit being mortal.   

I always thought the concept of "face" was a general and long-standing cultural norm in China. I had no idea until this past few weeks that much of it is a direct backlash at the European (and I suspect Japanese) imperialism of days gone by.

[andydp]

Jun 23, 2021 18:40:25 GMT LFC said:

Jun 23, 2021 14:28:12 GMT Traveler said:

Regardless of origin, the fact remains that China knowingly let it loose.  Charitably, that was due to ineptitude of their vaunted "meritocracy", not intentional.  But the Chinese have a huge inferiority complex from the centuries of humiliation, and cannot admit being mortal.   

I always thought the concept of "face" was a general and long-standing cultural norm in China. I had no idea until this past few weeks that much of it is a direct backlash at the European (and I suspect Japanese) imperialism of days gone by.

You don't have to go too far into the past to figure out why the Chinese are extremely sensitive about ANY kid of foreign interference, be it via media or by sanctions.  

[LFC]

TPM looks at Israel to make a prediction about our COVID future.

Two stories emerged out of Israel this week which give us a view into the remaining months of 2021 in the United States. There’s nothing special or significant to the stories emerging in Israel. It is simply the most aggressively vaccinated country, using the most effective class (mRNA) of vaccines. Recently Israel had its first week with no COVID fatalities at all since the beginning of the epidemic. In most respects the pandemic is or was truly over in the country. No new fatalities, only a tiny positivity rate in tests, basically all mitigation mandates lifted over the last two weeks. But then starting several days ago there was a new outbreak tied to a group of schools in the north of the country.

Now to be clear, this is an ‘outbreak’ at a much, much smaller magnitude than anything we had seen during the pandemic. It also doesn’t seem to be evading the immunity provided by the Pfizer vaccine any more than expected. But it’s still highly significant and the country is on the verge of bringing back some of the mandates like indoor masking.

The key is the Delta Variant (which first emerged in India). It’s much more contagious than the original virus and hospitalizes a lot more people. It seems to have gotten traction with school children who as a class are not vaccinated. As in the United States no one under age 12 can get the vaccines. But Israel has been more cautious about vaccinating 12 to 16 year olds as well. They’re now rushing to vaccinate as many 12 to 16 year olds as possible before their current supply of vaccines expires in July.

Let me emphasize again that the absolute number of cases is quite low. On Monday there were 125 new cases in the country. But that’s up from recent daily totals in the single digits. Clearly they don’t want to take any chances that it could spread out of control again. But the Delta Variant seems much more virulent and there are still lots of unvaccinated people.

The Delta Variant is already spreading in the US. And there are, as we know, still lots and lots of people who are not vaccinated. Just under half the population nationwide is vaccinated. But that coverage is very unevenly distributed. In the fives states of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming and Louisiana less than one-third of the population is vaccinated. Another twelve states have less than 40% of their population vaccinated. Missouri is currently leading the country in new cases and a hospital in Joplin just reopened its COVID ward after closing it down in March. But even in highly vaccinated regions in the Northeast and West Coast at least a third of the population remains unvaccinated in every case.

[LFC]

COVID in America is quickly becoming a disease which afflicts mostly the stupid.

Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren’t vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day — now down to under 300 — could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine.

An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows that “breakthrough” infections in fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations. That’s about 0.1%.

And only about 150 of the more than 18,000 COVID-19 deaths in May were in fully vaccinated people. That translates to about 0.8%, or five deaths per day on average.

The AP analyzed figures provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.

Among them: Only about 45 states report breakthrough infections, and some are more aggressive than others in looking for such cases. So the data probably understates such infections, CDC officials said.

Still, the overall trend that emerges from the data echoes what many health care authorities are seeing around the country and what top experts are saying.

Earlier this month, Andy Slavitt, a former adviser to the Biden administration on COVID-19, suggested that 98% to 99% of the Americans dying of the coronavirus are unvaccinated.

And CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Tuesday that the vaccine is so effective that “nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable.” She called such deaths “particularly tragic.”

I worry how they might impact children with the new delta variant on its way to becoming the dominant strain but other than that, f*** 'em.

[goldenvalley]

A little inside story on Trump's encounter with Covid.  A longer version article is expected to be released next week. He's day-um lucky he was president when he caught it.

Two days after that, he flew to Cleveland for the first presidential debate against his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Trump was erratic that whole evening, and he seemed to deteriorate as the night went on. The pundits’ verdicts were brutal.

Almost 48 hours later, Trump became terribly ill. Hours after his tweet announcing he and first lady Melania Trump had coronavirus infections, the president began a rapid spiral downward. His fever spiked, and his blood oxygen level fell below 94 percent, at one point dipping into the 80s. Sean Conley, the White House physician, attended the president at his bedside. Trump was given oxygen in an effort to stabilize him.

The doctors gave Trump an eight-gram dose of two monoclonal antibodies through an intravenous tube. That experimental treatment was what had required the FDA’s sign-off. He was also given a first dose of the antiviral drug remdesivir, also by IV. That drug was authorized for use but still hard to get for many patients because it was in short supply.

Typically, doctors space out treatments to measure a patient’s response. Some drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies, are most effective if they’re administered early in the course of an infection. Others, such as remdesivir, are most effective when they’re given later, after a patient has become critically ill. But Trump’s doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once. His condition appeared to stabilize somewhat as the day wore on, but his doctors, still fearing he might need to go on a ventilator, decided to move him to the hospital. It was too risky at that point to stay at the White House.

[LFC]

Jun 25, 2021 1:11:09 GMT goldenvalley said:

A little inside story on Trump's encounter with Covid.  A longer version article is expected to be released next week. He's day-um lucky he was president when he caught it.

I don't like reading stories with unhappy endings.

[pnwguy]

Jun 25, 2021 1:32:45 GMT LFC said:

Jun 25, 2021 1:11:09 GMT goldenvalley said:

A little inside story on Trump's encounter with Covid.  A longer version article is expected to be released next week. He's day-um lucky he was president when he caught it.

I don't like reading stories with unhappy endings.

Had he kicked the bucket from Covid, there would have been no more fitting ending to the clown, and maybe the fever of RW disinformation could have broken.  The Fates failed us.  Or Beez's boss was pulling the strings to keep Dumpster alive, to torment the rest of humanity.

[Deleted]

On the other side of the ledger, Mike Pence would likely have been President. Mandatory church attendance on Sundays for everyone. Burkha and lashing. E Pluribus Unum would have become In Deo Speramus. Republicans would have unified control of all branches of the government.

[Traveler]

More background on the lab leak likelihood, and how China completely removed the SARS virus databases in September 2019.    Huh?.  Turns out that they were raising bats to study coronaviruses at the WIV, meanwhile outright denying it.  Plus, quite a few of those who signed Dazack's (sp?) March 2020 letter dismissing the lab leak hypothesis have now changed their minds.  Still don't know anything for sure, but that likelihood is much higher than it was back then.  The coverup by China is getting more and more untenable.  

Personally, I say fuck 'em.  Put their feet to the fire, and proclaim that until they release the withdrawn virus data and complete titers from early cases, including the miners in the cave, we will assume that Chinese are responsible for unleashing this pandemic.  Accidentally most likely.  But there is more than ample proof of incompetence, letting CNY travelers all over China, and holding mass events in Wuhan after they already knew human to human transmission.  I still think it's right hand/left hand incompetence, but it's time to put the heat on. I have no love for the Chinese, and it's about time they started to eat some crow.