I fear that the Olympics are going to be a Super Spreader event. Of course I thought that about the Super Bowl and turned out to be wrong, fortunately, but the delta variant is a different, more dangerous beast.
Today marks the third day in a row that Hawaii has reported triple-digit new cases. 100-something each day from Thursday. We had thought those days over.
The very low numbers in Australia mean that we have no local information of the effect of mass vaccination on mass epidemic. But that it is possible to individually track the conditions for infection.
Unfortunately, the ‘delta’ variant means that both the information on mass vaccination (from the UK) and the information on infection risk (from Sydney and Melbourne) is out of date and irrelevant. But — Melbourne and Sydney are in the middle of small, trackable, ‘delta’ outbreaks. This is giving good information on the kind of behavior that leads to infection, and, I’m told, should make it’s way into models in the next week.
Unfortunately, our Australian government and Australian medical system aren’t going to publicly discuss what they see in the disease models (it doesn’t work that way here), but I expect that the model will be shared internationally with other researchers.
I’m obviously not there, but it seems like Oz is facing what much of what Europe and N America encountered in the spring of 2020, except that it’s dealing with a much more aggressive variant. With earlier COVID, most people who had COVID didn’t spread it; the spread came from a handful of super spreaders who, for reasons that aren’t clear, had high viral loads and may have also been asymptomatic in a lot of cases.
With the delta variant, anyone who has it - anyone - is a spreader, and the disease replicates itself very quickly within the individual. If a person gets it on a Monday, if he goes to work the next day, he’s probably going to spread it to anyone who comes into contact with him/her unless they have a vaccine. It’s a dangerous position to be in.
People who are over the age of 50 (males particularly) and who are not vaccinated are in extreme risk.
One difference here remains the very high social support for lockdown, personal behaviour with masks etc, and continued restrictions. If anything, the majority view is to urge our governments to go harder and more quickly with lockdowns, precisely because we have seen what took place in Europe and the USA.
Even with that, the significant differences with Delta have meant that it just shoots holes through peoples’ ‘normal’ covid behaviour and case numbers rise quickly without even more stringent control. It has been really great living somewhere where we routinely had zero cases per day in the community, let alone any deaths, for weeks and months at a time, and short constrained shut downs where there were breaches. That does not seem to be sufficient for Delta any more.
(bolding mine)
Working at a hotel, I’ve spoken to a lot of people cancelling due to the latest lockdown, and I’d say the majority are like that.
Heck, just having a lockdown in Melbourne and Sydney, our two largest cities, covers better than a third of the population of Australia! There’s been some grumbling, and even a couple of protests, but the majority seem… OK? Resigned? Somewhere in between the two. It’s seen as unpleasant but necessary.
There’s also a lot of annoyance with the Federal government, and the vaccination rollout. I suspect ScoMo is not looking forward to the next Federal election. I’d say more but:
A) I’d start swearing
B) I’m probably heading toward too political for this thread, if not over the line.
South Korea is seeing a large increase in new cases:
Have they decided to drop requirements for measles vaccines, too?
Uh, what? Schools have vaccine requirements. The have had them for a long time.
“Your governor tries to kill your children” should be posted basically everywhere. Seriously, why are there so few attempts to do this? Use the same fearmongering techniques that are work to get them to be scared of vaccines. Make them have to say “we don’t care if your children or their parents/grandparents die.”
Are there no child endangerment laws in Arizona? No workplace restrictions on children? Can Arizona children own guns, drive cars and drink alcohol?
I don’t know, I’m not from anywhere near there.
Los Angeles county has declared a mask mandate due to the upsurge in cases throughout the county. The county sheriff says he won’t enforce the mandate because the decision “is not backed by science.”
When did he become an immunologist?
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/rise-covid-cases-la-sheriffs-office-enforcing-indoor/story
Those were rhetorical, dude. Of course Arizona has all kinds of laws that restrict a parent’s ability to endanger their child, no matter if it is thru neglect or malicious action. Part of the State’s job is to protect its vulnerable citizens, after all.
This is such an issue. The pandemic should never have become a political issue and now its so intertwined that its almost impossible to separate.
@ puzzlegal because I haven’t figured out the multi-quote thing “Have they decided to drop requirements for measles vaccines, too?” Oh yes, they did that years ago. Childhood vaccines are just a suggestion. We have measles outbreaks on a regular basis and chicken pox is fairly common as well. Why should COVID be any different?
Not in Arizona. All you have to say is that vaccinating your child/ren is against your beliefs and its all OK. The TANF requirement that children’s vaccinations be up to date is also easily bypassed the same way.
Well, I’m sure it has nothing to do with this recent story in the LA Times:
190,794,652 total cases
4,099,072 dead
173,847,537 recovered
In the US:
34,953,937 total cases
624,715 dead
29,369,181 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Whatever happened to the maxim that you should follow the law even if you disagree with it, and challenge it only after the fact in court? That’s what law enforcement said all the time. But I guess they don’t practice what they preach.
Honestly, there are lots of laws that aren’t enforced. You can’t really have a law that’s not widely supported by the public for this reason. I’d say more, but my thoughts on the matter really aren’t appropriate for the breaking news thread, or even the quarantine zone.
But I think I can gripe here that the CDC has done a really bad job messaging, from start to now, and it makes it harder for us to control the pandemic.
Looks like three breakthrough cases out of a group of at least 65 democrats who went to Washington - the group was also probably larger than that, though, if you factor in entourages. Obviously a lot of other potential factors involved but definitely an interesting development.
Three Texas Democrats who fled to Washington, D.C. test positive for coronavirus | Fox News.