[News] Coronavirus

A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.

polypusher wrote:

Whats up with Georgia? Im not familiar with the terrain. Is that populated areas doing surprisingly well or just no-man's-land I'm ignorant of?

The one time I drove from Alabama to Savannah, Georgia, everything was pretty "normal" until the stretch between Macon and Savannah. That was a borderline Desert-Bus-like experience, except less desert, more grass and an exit roughly every 15 miles with a lone Stuckey's near the on ramp.

quote is not edit, something something

"AOC" continuum? Come on Trump toadies tracking COVID...

A record 196K new cases, a record 100K hospitalized (up 10K in a week), and 2,733 deaths (the second highest daily deaths reported, just behind the 2,769 reported on May 7th).

This is with wonky post-Thanksgiving numbers and partial reports from some states.

And speaking of Thanksgiving, we'll start to see how many idiots chose to infect their friends and family members for overcooked turkey next week.

NYTimes: True Pandemic Toll in the U.S. Reaches 345,000

Deaths in every state of the country are higher than they would be in a normal year, according to an analysis of estimates from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The data show how the coronavirus pandemic, which is peaking in many states, is bringing with it unusual patterns of death, higher than the official totals of deaths that have been directly linked to the virus.

Deaths nationwide were 19 percent higher than normal from March 15 to Nov. 14. Altogether, the analysis shows that 345,000 more people than normal have died in the United States during that period, a number that may be an undercount since recent death statistics are still being updated.

Well the numbers on Google's daily change by state seem to have shot up faster than I though they would. I was thinking we had until at least next week before a large scale bump.

Stealthpizza wrote:

Well the numbers on Google's daily change by state seem to have shot up faster than I though they would. I was thinking we had until at least next week before a large scale bump.

Covid Tracking Project wrote:

Based on what we’ve seen over the last eight months of state-reported COVID-19 data, we think two big, potentially misleading things are about to happen to the testing, case, and death numbers that allow us to track the pandemic in the United States.

First, by Thanksgiving Day and perhaps as early as Wednesday, all three metrics will flatten out or drop, probably for several days. This decrease will make it look like things are getting better at the national level. Then, in the week following the holiday, our test, case, and death numbers will spike, which will look like a confirmation that Thanksgiving is causing outbreaks to worsen. But neither of these expected movements in the data will necessarily mean anything about the state of the pandemic itself. Holidays, like weekends, cause testing and reporting to go down and then, a few days later, to "catch up." So the data we see early next week will reflect not only actual increases in cases, test, and deaths, but also the potentially very large backlog from the holiday.

What we're seeing this week is the catch up in reported testing and deaths caused by the Thanksgiving and the long holiday weekend last week.

Next week is when we'll start to see the spike in new cases from Thanksgiving.

It’s cool, we’ll just have some parties while we watch the numbers increase.

Washington (CNN)Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has invited hundreds of guests to the State Department for holiday receptions in the coming weeks despite warnings from health experts that Americans should avoid large gatherings amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, according to two State Department officials familiar with the planning
The invitations for one of the events in mid-December went out to 900 people and the invite for another went to the 180 foreign ambassadors in the US, the sources said. The Washington Post was first to report that more than 900 invites were sent out by the department.

Yeah this week's spike is people who couldn't or wouldn't get tested Thurs-Fri, and labs that had people on vacation or were closed, etc.

Just abnormal work week catch up.

I was expecting a bump from testing for holidays but not a 3x bump.

Over here in the UK, the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine has beenapproved for use by our Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

They've done this by effectively monitoring all the submissions from the clinical trials as the trials were being performed to expedite the process. Roll out to our NHS staff and care home personnel is expected to start as early as next week. Then it it'll go to those at extreme clinical risk, then the rest of us probably by Spring next year.

First steps. I'm not worried about the expedited process that much (for context, my job involved being inspected by the MHRA, I know the calibre of people involved and if they say it's safe then I'm pretty damn certain it's safe) but there will have been an enormous amount of political pressure put on them. We came out of our official second national lockdown yesterday, although most of the country is now in a "tiered" set of restrictions which means we're still more or less in lockdown, it's just the shops are open and we can meet friends outdoors again. Pubs, Restaurants and cafe's still restricted to takeaways/delivers only though (at least in our area) and we can't visit people in their own homes. We are getting a week off at Christmas though so we can visit family, because clearly the virus will know it's Christmas and give us all a break as it's the season of good will and all that.

Sorbicol wrote:

We are getting a week off at Christmas though so we can visit family, because clearly the virus will know it's Christmas and give us all a break as it's the season of good will and all that.

I find it intensely frustrating that government keep doing sh*t like this, because it invalidates all the other inconvenience. If you're gonna be wide open for a week because it's a popular idea, what the f*ck was the point of locking down in the first place?

The county I moved to just went to level purple, which is meaningless to anyone outside Ohio because we have zero national leadership. But suffice it to say sh*t got bad here.

But my old town (Waterloo, iA) is on the news nightly because of how bad it is there and how f*cked up the Tyson plant is.

So, how y’all going to tell your families that the holidays are off?

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

So, how y’all going to tell your families that the holidays are off?

I'm down in Hamilton County--on the fast track to purpledom--and we've already canceled our family Christmas.

Now I just have to worry about WTF my 83-year-old mother is going to do considering her ear, nose and throat doc just told her that the ear infection she's had for months wasn't really an ear infection, but cancer.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

The county I moved to just went to level purple, which is meaningless to anyone outside Ohio because we have zero national leadership. But suffice it to say sh*t got bad here.

But my old town (Waterloo, iA) is on the news nightly because of how bad it is there and how f*cked up the Tyson plant is.

So, how y’all going to tell your families that the holidays are off?

We told them we're having Xmas at home and then maybe we'll come sometime during the holiday if things are looking better.
Hint: They won't.
But frankly my parents understand pretty well.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

So, how y’all going to tell your families that the holidays are off?

I am lucky I guess because they all pretty much understand that it is off and are not shocked.

Sometimes I feel like I live in a bubble in Iowa City and I do but damm people that think the holidays should be going are equally in a bubble - one of ignoring facts.

iPad stations being prepared for virtual ICU end of life visits.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/JCqev2d.png)

My wife's family is committing to not seeing folks so we can see folks at Christmas. They've all taken it serious and my MIL is high risk so things may be semi normal but we are not able to see any friends this month. Not that it's a good time to see people.

Hobear wrote:

My wife's family is committing to not seeing folks so we can see folks at Christmas. They've all taken it serious and my MIL is high risk so things may be semi normal but we are not able to see any friends this month. Not that it's a good time to see people.

Yup, hard personal lockdown for the next few weeks, holding my breath on the way to the car, then semi normal christmas with the near family that also favors germ theory.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

So, how y’all going to tell your families that the holidays are off?

I didn't think we were going to visit anyway, but my mother (in FL) apparently did. She called me before Thanksgiving and said we probably shouldn't come down, so I'm happy to let it rest that it was her idea.

In normal circumstances I'd have really wanted to go because my dad died (not COVID) mid-October and it would be really nice for her to see everyone. My brother had moved in to help take care of my dad last year; he's still there so she's not alone. But, they've learned to tap-dance on each others' buttons, so they're not getting along well. They could both use a break from annoying each other.

Quebec just banned all get-togethers over christmas. The premier just posted the following:

"We thought the COVID-19 situation in the province would be under control and that with proper social distancing and isolation, two gatherings between the 24th and the 27th of december could be permitted. We were wrong. If you are in a red zone, there will be no gatherings permitted."

Gatineau (where I live) is in a red zone.

Also, it was noted this was a decision made by the government, not the Public Health Agency of Quebec.

OG_slinger wrote:

iPad stations being prepared for virtual ICU end of life visits.

That's enough internet for me tonight. That caption made me cry.

iPad stations being prepared for virtual ICU end of life visits.

f*ck me! That is downright iconic and depressing.
So relevant as a metaphor, WOW!

They even have the added touch of being stratified apparently. We can go down the rabbit hole of determination of who/what merits which screen size, model and product condition...

fangblackbone wrote:

We can go down the rabbit hole of determination of who/what merits which screen size, model and product condition...

Or...we could not.

article on how we got to mRNA vaccines:

Before messenger RNA was a multibillion-dollar idea, it was a scientific backwater. And for the Hungarian-born scientist behind a key mRNA discovery, it was a career dead-end.

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s collecting rejections. Her work, attempting to harness the power of mRNA to fight disease, was too far-fetched for government grants, corporate funding, and even support from her own colleagues.

By 1995, after six years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Karikó got demoted. She had been on the path to full professorship, but with no money coming in to support her work on mRNA, her bosses saw no point in pressing on.

“I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else,” Karikó said. “I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough. I tried to imagine: Everything is here, and I just have to do better experiments.”

In time, those better experiments came together. After a decade of trial and error, Karikó and her longtime collaborator at Penn — Drew Weissman, an immunologist with a medical degree and Ph.D. from Boston University — discovered a remedy for mRNA’s Achilles’ heel.

“That was a key discovery,” said Norbert Pardi, an assistant professor of medicine at Penn and frequent collaborator. “Karikó and Weissman figured out that if you incorporate modified nucleosides into mRNA, you can kill two birds with one stone.”

That discovery, described in a series of scientific papers starting in 2005, largely flew under the radar at first, said Weissman, but it offered absolution to the mRNA researchers who had kept the faith during the technology’s lean years. And it was the starter pistol for the vaccine sprint to come.

And even though the studies by Karikó and Weissman went unnoticed by some, they caught the attention of two key scientists — one in the United States, another abroad — who would later help found Moderna and Pfizer’s future partner, BioNTech.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

article on how we got to mRNA vaccines:

Before messenger RNA was a multibillion-dollar idea, it was a scientific backwater. And for the Hungarian-born scientist behind a key mRNA discovery, it was a career dead-end.

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s collecting rejections. Her work, attempting to harness the power of mRNA to fight disease, was too far-fetched for government grants, corporate funding, and even support from her own colleagues.

By 1995, after six years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Karikó got demoted. She had been on the path to full professorship, but with no money coming in to support her work on mRNA, her bosses saw no point in pressing on.

“I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else,” Karikó said. “I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough. I tried to imagine: Everything is here, and I just have to do better experiments.”

In time, those better experiments came together. After a decade of trial and error, Karikó and her longtime collaborator at Penn — Drew Weissman, an immunologist with a medical degree and Ph.D. from Boston University — discovered a remedy for mRNA’s Achilles’ heel.

“That was a key discovery,” said Norbert Pardi, an assistant professor of medicine at Penn and frequent collaborator. “Karikó and Weissman figured out that if you incorporate modified nucleosides into mRNA, you can kill two birds with one stone.”

That discovery, described in a series of scientific papers starting in 2005, largely flew under the radar at first, said Weissman, but it offered absolution to the mRNA researchers who had kept the faith during the technology’s lean years. And it was the starter pistol for the vaccine sprint to come.

And even though the studies by Karikó and Weissman went unnoticed by some, they caught the attention of two key scientists — one in the United States, another abroad — who would later help found Moderna and Pfizer’s future partner, BioNTech.

This is why I remain a humanist.

It's all incredibly frustrating, in part because I think a number of well-meaning politicians and officials are introducing restrictions that are nothing more than performativity theater and do little to actually fight the spread of the virus but instead get people even more angry and worn down, leading them to flaunt or not take seriously any restrictions, even the good ones.

some more on how we got to where we are with the vaccines:

Moderna had worked with Graham and the NIH over the past few years on its quest to bring a whole new class of vaccines to market. Traditional vaccines are made from a weakened, dead, or small piece of a pathogen—a virus or bacteria—which prompts the body to fight off the invader and builds up immunity for when the real deal comes along. In contrast, Moderna’s vaccines contain an engineered strand of messenger RNA, which tells the body’s cells to produce a very specific part of a pathogen that will ignite an immune response. In other words, mRNA vaccines shift the site of vaccine production from the factory to the body itself.

Later that day, Bancel’s phone pinged with an email from Graham at the NIH. While he couldn’t yet identify it, Graham said, “If it’s a coronavirus, we know what to do and have proven mRNA is effective.”

The NIH’s confidence stemmed from Moderna’s early-stage human trial data from 2019. In fact, that data was so encouraging that Bancel was set to announce in a few days’ time that the company would be doubling down on its vaccine-development program in 2020, with hopes of getting the world’s first mRNA vaccine—and what would be Moderna’s first licensed product—onto the market in the next few years.

I couldn't believe so much got done so fast, I had to double check:

mRNA-1273 is an mRNA vaccine against the novel coronavirus encoding for the viral Spike (S) protein, which was selected by Moderna in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, the manufacture of which was funded by the Center for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI). The S protein complex is necessary for membrane fusion and host cell infection and has been the target of vaccines against the coronaviruses responsible for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). On January 13, the NIH and Moderna’s infectious disease research team finalized the sequence for the 2019-nCoV vaccine and Moderna mobilized toward clinical manufacture. The first clinical batch, including fill and finishing of vials, was completed on February 7. This mRNA vaccine was designed and manufactured in 25 days and is undergoing analytical testing prior to release to the NIH for use in their planned Phase 1 clinical trial in the U.S. Currently, there are no approved vaccines specific to 2019-nCoV.

emphasis mine. amazing.

So those weeks/month that Trump knew about and didn't pass along info about the pandemic hurt us even more it seems. And it hurt him because shedding off weeks of a vaccine announcement would have dated it before the election, giving Trump a boost.

if we could just get him to go out there and tell his followers to take the "mNRA vaccine" think of how many lives could be saved