I heard something on the radio about a million+ Moderna doses being recalled in Japan due to steel particle contamination.
~Max
I went looking and found:
Two more tourists arrested for using fake vaccination cards, a couple from Georgia. That makes seven total so arrested. Makes me wonder how many actually get away with it.
219,975,001 total cases
4,557,307 dead
196,632,018 recovered
In the US:
40,513,018 total cases
662,853 dead
31,199,835 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Today every state is in the red again on the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus site, meaning that the seven day average reported covid cases are on the rise in all of them. Florida is actually not, but their stats are literally unbelievable, and they seem to be updating only once a week. And Puerto Rico isn’t (although technically, they’re not a state. But that’s a quibble.)
New daily record highs are reported for
Georgia (12942)
South Carolina (7973)
North Carolina (9877)
Tennessee (10712)
Kentucky (6198)
Texas (technically no, but their number is 22777 as of yesterday, just shy of the record high of 23195, so I’ll give it to them)
Alaska (827)
Mississippi (3968)
Two states just retreated from new record highs a couple of days ago
Hawaii
Alabama
Other states have reported case numbers awfully close to previous record highs, with extremely rapid rises, which portends new record highs being hit in the next few days
Oklahoma
Virginia
West Virginia
Wyoming
Indiana
Idaho
Yes, Florida is only reporting weekly.
Idaho:
Pretty sad when juxtaposed with the behavior of the Lt. Governor (who, surprise surprise, is challenging the governor in the next election).
For the public, [Gov. Brad] Little said one way to help would be getting a COVID-19 vaccine. “It is our ticket out of the pandemic,” Little said.
Just minutes after Little made his plea, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin called his suggestion “shameful.”
Personal anecdote from this area (well, not Boise…but further north): Someone I know, with covid, had a 5 hour wait in an ER filled with other sick covid people (was there because they fell and was too weak to get off the floor). That person was looked at briefly and sent back home. It’s sad.
And weakly.
Initially, possibly only Pfizer recipients will be able to get boosters.
The link is for a non-paywalled Washington Post coronavirus update. The boosters story is currently the second one, but not sure if it will remain in the same place using that link.
This link is directly to the story, but might be paywalled:
Yeah, and I say f*ck the FDA and CDC brass for their egotistical attitudes. I understand that they don’t like Biden’s attempts to push along booster because their specific agencies haven’t had enough time to implement the usual procedures to collect data. What these morons at FDA and CDC don’t understand - maybe don’t want to admit b/c it has their fingerprints on it - is that their usual best practices aren’t gonna cut it in a pandemic, a time in which we need real-time data collection.
FDA Commissioner Woodcock: let’s get this straight - you just recently approved vaccines that were long-ago proven efficacious. And you still haven’t approved the vaccine for even a single use for children under the age of 12, where the vaccine is spreading like wildfire and inflicting damage. So maybe just shut the hell up.
And Dr. Walensky, let’s be even clearer: the CDC under your watch decided that COVID was mostly done and your agency, under your watch, decided that it didn’t need to collect data on breakthrough infections. That was an unmitigated disaster. Worse, your agency, under your watch, issued very misleading guidance on masking that, to this day, give a majority of Americans a false sense of security, to the point where even though we have the absolute worst numbers of the entire pandemic, many Americans are behaving as though the pandemic is behind us. Dr. Walensky, you should resign. You, of all people, should not be having an ego trip over the fact that any idiot in the Biden administration can just look at the data from Israel and England and conclude that the CDC isn’t keeping up. And President Biden, if Dr. Walensky doesn’t resign, then it’s on you to fire her. And if you don’t, then you will own the political repercussions of the delta wave.
Biden needs to be prepared to clean house.
220,644,410 total cases
4,567,352 dead
197,141,184 recovered
In the US:
40,703,674 total cases
664,935 dead
31,265,847 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Something simple and cheap that doesn’t require being poked with a needle. And it works!
…
This week, a group of scientists from Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other institutions published the final results of a randomized study of community-wide masking behavior in Bangladesh. The study encompassed roughly 350,000 people in 600 villages. The researchers randomly selected certain villages for an intervention that included giving out free masks, paying villagers to remind people to cover their face, and having village leaders and religious figures such as imams emphasize the importance of masks. The researchers also paid villagers to count properly worn masks in public places, including markets and mosques. To gather data on coronavirus transmission, the team asked about symptoms and conducted blood tests to determine who came down with COVID-19 over the course of the study.Their conclusion? Masks work, period. Surgical masks are particularly effective at preventing coronavirus transmission. And community-wide mask wearing is excellent at protecting older people, who are at much higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.
…
But the Bangladesh study is still perhaps the most important research done during the pandemic outside of the vaccine clinical trials, because it gives us randomized-trial data to bolster the flimsier assumptions and conclusions of observational research. We finally have a sense of not just whether masks work but how much universal masking could reduce transmission. The answer is: quite a lot.
…
My bold.
This doesn’t belong in the breaking news thread. Please post this kind of rant in one of the many other covid threads. Or start a new one if you don’t find one that feels right.
But please keep this thread on-topic, and don’t disrupt it with rants, political comments, etc.
Hawaii’s governor is literally begging people not to gather in large groups this holiday weekend. A tall order, seeing how popular large holiday beach get-togethers are over here. Still, new measures implemented recently limit outdoor gathering to 25 people and indoor gatherings to 10. Police patrols are being stepped up through Monday, and I expect a lot of citations will be handed out.
My home county has reinstated indoor masking in public buildings.