Virus thread, the political one.

[guido]

The EU will bar American travelers because of US coronavirus spread - Vox

"The European Union will reportedly block most Americans from traveling to the bloc even as those countries reopen to other travelers, a policy that reflects the United States’s failure to fully control the coronavirus pandemic.

The European Union restricted nonessential travel to most of its member-states under rules in effect until at least June 30. But starting July 1, European countries are loosening some of those measures and allowing travel again from more than a dozen countries — including China (if Beijing allows EU travelers too) — that meet certain criteria, including their ability to contain the coronavirus.

Right now, the United States doesn’t make the cut. "

[Chik]

Well, folks over here in Europe (including the UK) have been upping the idiocy level as if we have suddenly decided to one-up the Americans:
Parties and raves across Europe spark fears of Covid-19 surge | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian

[Chik]

There must be something in the water over in Florida...

[Matthew Strongin]

There must be something in the water over in Florida...

Oh yeah, we’re special here.

[Chik]

[claritycycler]

There must be something in the water over in Florida...

Yikes!!

[vertical_doug]

Whether by design or default, the US is targeting herd immunity. It's just not advertising that as a policy. The earliest date for a vaccine which is Oxford/AstraZeneca collaboration is end of September. Just take a steady run rate now for infections, and we are well north of 10mm cases in US by then. If that vaccine fails, then you are looking end of year or later. Then you are at 25-28mm cases. but if there is any validity to the CDC saying real infections are 10x the diagnosed, well we are approaching some sort of herd immunity... We just unfortunately have 1mm + deaths.

As Caitlin Jenner says to Mr. Garrison in Southpark. 'Buckle up buckaroo'

[Scott G.]

There must be something in the water over in Florida]...

Remember, Gummint is totally incapable of doing anything, except managing vast globe spanning conspiracies.

I must tell the Illumantis to dial back the Florida ChemTrail treatments.

[j44ke]

Not sure if this is political because it is based on numbers and analysis and it came from Harvard. PDF link.

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.ed...-19-Survey.pdf

[j44ke]

Whether by design or default, the US is targeting herd immunity. It's just not advertising that as a policy. The earliest date for a vaccine which is Oxford/AstraZeneca collaboration is end of September. Just take a steady run rate now for infections, and we are well north of 10mm cases in US by then. If that vaccine fails, then you are looking end of year or later. Then you are at 25-28mm cases. but if there is any validity to the CDC saying real infections are 10x the diagnosed, well we are approaching some sort of herd immunity... We just unfortunately have 1mm + deaths.

As Caitlin Jenner says to Mr. Garrison in Southpark. 'Buckle up buckaroo'

Only if there actually is an accrued immunity that persists for any length of time. The T-cell research seems to suggest that in some cases, ability to fight reinfection is actually reduced due to T-cell "exhaustion" and may require a drug cocktail to manage ala HIV infections.

Reduction and Functional Exhaustion of T Cells in Patients With Coronavirus Disease 219 (COVID-19)

How the Coronavirus Short-Circuits the Immune System - The New York Times

You May Have Antibodies After Coronavirus Infection. But Not for Long. - The New York Times

[guido]

A good site on the C19 reproduction number. Useful to keep track of when to push on the panic button...

Rt: Effective Reproduction Number

[guido]

The Tragedy of the New Coronavirus Spikes | The New Yorker

"Since the coronavirus first took hold in this country, Donald Trump has heedlessly promoted the idea that it can be treated solely as a political, or even a cultural, problem. Part of the tragedy of the pandemic is that, until now, many people in less affected areas of the United States believed him. In a speech last week to thousands of mostly maskless young supporters in a megachurch in Phoenix, Trump claimed that Democrats are “trying to do their best to keep the country shut down”—not to fight COVID-19 but to sabotage the economy, and thus his electoral prospects. They’re also trying to “rig” the election by means of “the China virus.” He called the disease other names, including the more blatantly racist Kung Flu (it’s not a flu), and professed to find its real name “odd”: “I said, ‘What’s the nineteen?’ ” (The virus was identified in 2019, but the notion that there were eighteen previous Covids figures in certain conspiracy theories.) Most fantastically, Trump spoke of the pandemic as if it were a thing of the past, even as the number of new cases rose, last week, to horrific levels, particularly in Texas, Florida, California, and Arizona. Last Friday alone, the U.S. saw more than forty thousand new cases.

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the National Institutes of Health, said that trends this summer will produce a “baseline” for determining how severe a second wave may be in the fall and winter, and whether the country can rely on containment measures or will have to resort to another round of widespread closures of businesses and schools. The shifting of the epicenter of the pandemic from Northeastern, Midwestern, and urban areas that are largely governed by Democrats to states in the South and the West, many of them red or purple, along with blue California, is a reminder of a point that Dr. Ashish Jha, a Harvard public-health expert, has been making since March: the coronavirus doesn’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Nationally, the number of deaths has fallen, thanks in part to new insights about treatments. But the rising ­numbers of cases, coupled with the listlessness of the Administration, suggest that the respite may be brief, and that we are squandering whatever advantage was gained by the ebb in the states first affected.

The political leaders in New York, the worst-hit state, unquestionably made mistakes. But the political geography of the pandemic’s early course seems to have lured some Republican politicians into complacency, as if a MAGA cap could be a protective talisman, or as if, when it comes to COVID-19, bad things could happen only to subway-riding city dwellers. Some even acted as if the virus’s depredations could be tolerated as long as they fell most heavily on low-income, elderly, or marginalized people. Those tendencies have served their states badly, and the country, too. Senator Mitch McConnell’s statement, in April, putting coronavirus-relief packages in the category of “blue-state bailouts” provided one milestone in the G.O.P. response; the recent effort of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, to downplay his state’s staggering number of new cases—nearly nine thousand on a single day last week—by pointing to infections among “overwhelmingly Hispanic workers and day laborers” was another.

Community leaders in Florida reacted to DeSantis’s remarks with anger, particularly since the Governor had not answered calls for protections for agricultural workers. His rationales for pushing ahead with the state’s reopening, which had already been rushed, have been growing frantic. DeSantis had until recently persisted in arguing that the high numbers are a statistical illusion produced by more testing. Trump is still making that claim. At his now infamous rally in Tulsa, he said that he’d told his team to cut back on testing; he and a spokesperson disagree about whether that was a joke. In truth, while there has been an expansion in testing, it is not nearly enough to account for the recent spikes. People in Arizona, Florida, and Texas have been waiting for hours at testing stations that cannot keep up with the demand; meanwhile, the Administration has announced that it will end federal funding for thirteen such sites across five states."

[j44ke]

A good site on the C19 reproduction number. Useful to keep track of when to push on the panic button...

Rt: Effective Reproduction Number

This give some county by county info.

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count - The New York Times

Looks like some counties surrounding NYC and then Adirondack area counties are upticking a bit.

More than half the states in the country are increasing.

Florida seems like a wreck. We are starting to see retired people who went to Florida over the winter and stayed there when things got bad in NY during the last several months now returning to their homes in Columbia County. We were considering having our landlord's cleaning lady come do some cleaning in our rental, but I overheard her say her brother's family came up from Florida to stay with them. She assured our landlady that they were quarantining. Our landlady said "But they are living in your house, right?" "Yes but they are not going out to the grocery or anything." People just don't get it. Like they listen to 1/3 of everything they are told.

[vertical_doug]

Only if there actually is an accrued immunity that persists for any length of time. The T-cell research seems to suggest that in some cases, ability to fight reinfection is actually reduced due to T-cell "exhaustion" and may require a drug cocktail to manage ala HIV infections.

Reduction and Functional Exhaustion of T Cells in Patients With Coronavirus Disease 219 (COVID-19)


How the Coronavirus Short-Circuits the Immune System - The New York Times

You May Have Antibodies After Coronavirus Infection. But Not for Long. - The New York Times

I thought reduced T-cell counts were common to many severe viral infections so not unique to COVID19.

If the antibodies don't persist for long, then young people may have the right idea and we all need to get infected as quickly as possible to remove hosts and burn the virus out.

This cluster at Horace Greely High School in Chappaqua linked to a student returning from Florida last week probably just hastens Gov. Cuomo's plan to try to restrict visitors from Florida.

[Tom]

We're up in Lake Placid this weekend and there's a significant number of people on the street without masks on, at least they are being enforced indoors. Lots of young people, especially, seem to be in groups without but it's not all young people that go without, you'll see groups that take it very seriously too. I can see that there could be an issue up here if people don't tighten up a little.

[vertical_doug]

Technically, PRIDE was cancelled, but it morphed into a BLM/PRIDE walk...





Crossing Canal going uptown on 6th Ave

Not 100% masks, but probably 99%.

It's that last 1%

[j44ke]

I thought reduced T-cell counts were common to many severe viral infections so not unique to COVID19.

If the antibodies don't persist for long, then young people may have the right idea and we all need to get infected as quickly as possible to remove hosts and burn the virus out.

This cluster at Horace Greely High School in Chappaqua linked to a student returning from Florida last week probably just hastens Gov. Cuomo's plan to try to restrict visitors from Florida.

Yes, that's correct. But in this situation - if I am interpreting things correctly - the immune response's "call" to produce T-cells doesn't stand down after the T-cell making mechanism responds. The switch gets stuck in the on-position and exhausts the T-cell production mechanism so the body not only runs out but can no longer make enough T-cells for future viral events. Thus the conjecture that a cocktail of drugs, as in HIV treatment, might be required for some patients in order to make up for the auto-immune deficiencies. Not clear to me whether this means some patients will never be cured of covid19 and instead must take medication as daily maintenance to suppress it or if this is an approach for treatment during the infection only.

[ides1056]

I am planning to meet three friends from the Bay Area in Bishop, CA on the 24th of August. We are going to hike a portion of the Sierra High Route, and then I will continue solo up the East side for the next three weeks. I am turning my 2003 Golf into a camper. Bring food and water for several weeks, sleep in the car, stop only for gas. Bishop is 41 hours from my town. Doable.

I watch the numbers climb in the country and consider the wisdom of this course.

[jclay]

Podcast of interview with Florida's former Covid19 data dashboard GIS expert, Rebehka Jones: Florida Scientist Says She Was Fired For Not Manipulating COVID-19 Data : NPR

When Gov DeSantis was elected he made one or two noises that sounded, on the face of it, reasonable, in a sorta progressive way. My wife was hopeful but I didn't buy the blather for a second. No surprise to me but what we actually have is a gov who's comportment is polished, who's vastly more well spoken than Trump but otherwise a GOP culture warrior in the mold of Barr, and a dedicated Trump lacky. It's a very dangerous combination. He or Tom Cotton as prez would be a disaster.

Functionally he's blocked the will of the majority to restore voting rights to most felons who have served their term of incarceration (gee, I wonder why). The notion that he would ever take even the baby steps necessary to start addressing environmental pollution/degredation was absurd and that's been born out by his inaction. And now he's cooking the Covid19 books after ignoring what world class epidemiologists tell us is the bare minimum of what's necessary. What a guy!

So what's new?

[vertical_doug]

I am planning to meet three friends from the Bay Area in Bishop, CA on the 24th of August. We are going to hike a portion of the Sierra High Route, and then I will continue solo up the East side for the next three weeks. I am turning my 2003 Golf into a camper. Bring food and water for several weeks, sleep in the car, stop only for gas. Bishop is 41 hours from my town. Doable.

I watch the numbers climb in the country and consider the wisdom of this course.

Except, if you get pulled over by the police enroute, the only plausible explanation is you are antifa from liberal Mass coming out to cause problems... We know how you operate....
(I am only half making this up as my daughter and her friend were stopped by the highway patrol in Maryland. The officer wanted both licenses. One was from NY, one was from Ca. The officer had a hard time accepting an explanation for why a 25 year old from NY is in a car with a 25 yr old from Ca in Maryland. Sounds like Antifa)