It’s not that she’s less likely to be contagious, it’s that as a citizen, the country is willing to assume a little more risk for her. They don’t have a reason to take on extra risk for the average non-citizen.
Today in Austria, almost all remaining domestic lockdown measures have been lifted:
- It’s no longer required to wear face coverings except on public transit.
- Contact sports are allowed again (though it is required to maintain an attendance list for contact tracing purposes).
- Bars, restaurants, and cafés are back to fully normal service. In brief, this means that they are no longer restricted to table service (i.e., buffets are now allowed, and it’s permitted to order food and drinks at the bar), and wait staff no longer need to wear masks.
- As I reported a few days ago, prostitution is now allowed again.
I think the only major restrictions still in place are the ones concerning public events. These are generally restricted to 250 attendees for indoor events and 500 for outdoor events. So there are no big festivals or arena concerts taking place, but smaller performance venues, including most cinemas, are back in business.
As of today, Austrian residents can freely travel to or from 32 countries, including most EU countries, without the need for coronavirus tests or self-isolation on arrival. However, some countries (including Austria and Greece) now require incoming travellers to fill out an arrival card for virus tracking purposes.
It’s also a numbers game. All of Covid and any pandemic is a numbers game.
There are probably tens of thousands of people who would like to go to Britain, but cannot right now. Allowing a few hundred, OTOH, does not pose nearly the same risk.
So, if out of all the people that want to go, a few percent are given permission for specific or even arbitrary reasons, it’s not going to have the same kind of impact as not restricting travel would.
Oh, and back on 27 February I posted:
A quick update: one of these Italian events (the one I was co-organizing a track at) was postponed for one year. The conference chair is eagerly holding on to everyone’s paid registrations in order to ensure their much-delayed attendance in 2021. 
The second conference got delayed by three months in order to allow the organizers enough time to convert it into an online-only event. I delivered my talk last week to the online audience. I found this to be somewhat unsettling. The videoconferencing system didn’t allow me to see the audience while speaking my two screens being fully taken up by my slides and my speaking notes) and I didn’t get any applause afterwards. At the time I had no idea whether this was because everyone was on mute or because they weren’t used to applauding in a videoconference or because they hated the talk.
Interesting article, I thought:
Coronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs and 42 hearts
by late May and June, the first large batch of reports — from patients who died at a half-dozen different institutions — were published in quick succession. The investigations have confirmed some of our early hunches of the disease, refuted others — and opened up new mysteries about the novel pathogen that has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide.
Among the most important findings, consistent across several studies, is confirmation the virus appears to attack the lungs the most ferociously. They also found the pathogen in parts of the brain, kidneys, liver, gastrointestinal tract, spleen and in the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, as some had previously suspected. Researchers also found widespread clotting in many organs.
[ . . .]
But the brain and heart yielded surprises.
As someone who is (or was) part of the production staff for conferences, trade shows and the like, I found this very interesting; thanks for posting it.
A new record for the U.S. today: More than 50,000 new cases.
New record for Texas too: 8240 cases.
Fauci said that he would not be surprised to see more:
I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around and so I am very concerned,"
What do people think the odds are of 100,000 cases per day in the US at any time in the future?
I’d say 100% and prolly around the middle of August.
10,805,108 total cases
518,968 dead
6,028,299 recovered
In the US:
2,779,953 total cases
130,798 dead
1,164,680 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
A record day for the world with over 196,000 new cases and, as noted above, a record day for the US with over 51,000 new cases.
I had the impression that the world in general was doing relatively well with the virus, and that most of the growth was from the significant hotspots like the US. But if this was a record world day, I might have to rethink that.
Missed the edit window: I think my impression is from all the news stories of “NZ is reopening! Europe is reopening (except Sweden, which never closed)! America is fucked!”, which is all true, but fostered an idea in my mind that the world with the exception of a few countries were looking at those few countries and shaking their heads in pity.
Which might be true, granted, but that doesn’t mean my impression is too.
The world-record-setting-day yesterday was made up of half cases from USA + Brazil, and half the rest of the world.
Central and South America are still having a surge. Mexico, Ecuador, Chile and Peru are all in trouble, in particular
Spam reported.
Welcome to the community, umerghani25!
Last week in July, if this weekend brings out sufficient idiots who ignore safe practices.
About G.D. time!
So this from the CNN website:
New form of coronavirus spreads faster, but doesn’t make people sicker, new study says
A global study has found clear evidence that a new form of the coronavirus has spread from Europe to the US. The new mutation makes the virus more infectious but does not seem to make people any sicker, an international team of researchers reported Thursday.
The mutation affects the spike protein — the structure the virus uses to get into the cells it infects. Now the researchers are checking to see if this affects whether the virus can be controlled by a vaccine. Current vaccines being tested mostly target the spike protein.
The study, published in the journal Cell, confirms earlier work suggesting the mutation had made the new variant of virus more common. The researchers call the new mutation G614, and they show that it has almost completely replaced the first version to spread in Europe and the US, one called D614.
Questions: how does one virus variant “replace” another? Eat it? OK, kidding, but I am confused about the replacing bit.
Also confused about this part:
This could be good news, said Lawrence Young, a professor of medical oncology at the UK’s University of Warwick, who was not involved in the study. “The current work suggests that while the G614 variant may be more infectious, it is not more pathogenic. There is a hope that as SARS-CoV-2 infection spreads, the virus might become less pathogenic[.]"
How does spread cause a virus to become less pathogenic? And does this variant, just as dangerous as the original, reenforce that hope?
Virus strain B replaces Virus Strain A by being more effectively communicable. This could be from how it generates symptoms - makes people sneeze a bit more frequently - or feel less sick, so more likely to feel fine and go out into crowds, or last 1% longer when it sits on door-knobs.
Do that a million times a day and the relative improvement in transmissibiity will soon result in B spreading to more new cases than A.
Understood. But if I am infected with B, then am I ‘immune’ from being infected with A?