…you took my quote out of context. The “nonsense statement” I was responding too wasn’t the “lack of masks in the stores.” It was “Man, they really must have thought they were fully out of the woods.” Nobody here thinks we are out of the woods. Being able to go back into Level 3 in under 24 hours, bringing back home schooling, injecting billions of cash into the economy to keep people employed, all within a very short time frame shows that the government was prepared and ready in the event of a new outbreak.
As for the “its just another sign of how well the government was prepared” statement, you snipped out everything else that I said, which completely changed the context of my reply. I can only suggest you go back and read my original response. The lack of masks in stores is understandable, considering the circumstances. Explaining those circumstances, that the free market exists, that masks weren’t selling so grocery stores didn’t stock up on them, answered SayTwo’s question.
That lack of masks wasn’t a problem though because the government released millions of masks from the stockpile. Thats independent to the original answer I just gave. “How well the government is prepared” should be seen in that context.
That…on one hand that doesn’t sound great, but on the other it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve used poisons to treat disease. Belladonna (Donnatal) was used for migraines and arsenic to treat heartworm, for two examples.
Well although we have the weekend effect, the fact is that during this second wave all the numbers are somewhat lower than I’d expect.
Even when you allow for improved interventions, when you look at the data for other nations with similar healthcare systems there seems to be some undershoot - however US numbers are so out of line to most everywhere else it is not easy to evaluate - you can’t just scale up what is happening in one country that has only a tiny fraction of the numbers or you get large rounding errors.
I’m not a fan of basketball, but this makes me a fan of the NBA (and Yale).
The related research was funded by the NBA, National Basketball Players Association, and a Fast Grant from the Emergent Ventures at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University.
Don’t worry. This is old news being reported as if it’s a new development. The mutation isn’t new. We’ve known about it since clear back in January, when specialists in Chicago saw it. The variant may explain why COVID spread so quickly, not a harbinger of worse to come. From a July 2nd WaPo article:
“The epidemiological study and our data together really explain why the [G variant’s] spread in Europe and the U.S. was really fast,” said Hyeryun Choe, a virologist at Scripps Research and lead author of an unpublished study on the G variant’s enhanced infectiousness in laboratory cell cultures. “This is not just accidental.”
But there may be other explanations for the G variant’s dominance: biases in where genetic data are being collected, quirks of timing that gave the mutated virus an early foothold in susceptible populations.
“The bottom line is, we haven’t seen anything definitive yet,” said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Yes. Here in Dallas, we had a 5000 case bump yesterday. They acted like it should reassure us that these cases were “really” from July, but that just makes me wonder what else they missed, and what’s being missed now.
Yes, apparently the “new” variety has been the dominant strain in the US and Europe since at least the beginning of July. Like Nelliebly’s cite, this one from CNN was also dated July 2.
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.
…another update from NZ on testing: 100,000 tests done over the last 5 days, with the benchmark to get results back in 48 hours, but most results are back in 24 hours. That’s 2% of the population.
13 new cases today: 1 of those cases is not linked to the current cluster. Its a maintenance worker at one of the Managed Isolation facilities, there is a match to the genome sequence with a guest who had tested positive. CCTV and swipe card records indicate that the two had zero contact or interaction, which goes to show that the Coronavirus is a nasty horrible sneaky virus.
Also at the latest briefing it appears the Americold outbreak is not linked to other Americold facilities, so it is very unlikely to have come in through frozen meat.