WhitinsvilleWX

PTSD. A lot of people will still wear them because they are afraid or conditioning. I don’t care if they want to wear one forever. Just stop telling me to do it.

Yes. Very encouraging there. Correlates with the positives being mostly in the below 40, unvaccinated crowd.

I have my doubts, but I really hope you’re right.

No way. Not here at least. You want that, go south. My money is on mask mandates in the northeast at least through this year and most likely into 2022. As long as guys like Ashish Jha and the rest of the Boston Globe are breathing down Charlie’s neck, there’s no way he drops the mandate.

I honestly think people would deal with some reduced capacity and even a few other restrictions. But the mask thing is the most divisive. The CDCs own publication looking at meta analysis says it’s only a 1.5% difference in transmission over 120 days. “Out of an abundance of caution, we’re lowering the speed limit to 30 mph on all interstates. If it will save one life, it’s worth it”. see how silly this can get?

Makes more sense at a LTC facility. Those are the poor devils who died during all this. It’s your average dude/gal at the airport bar waiting on a flight to Kalamazoo that’s mostly useless.

You make it to Florida?

Stein

Damage

Yes

Lots of pure theater at this point. We went out to dinner last night with another couple we hang out with. Restaurant was semi fine dining, family owned. It was about half full with a few at the bar. We walked in with no mask, ate, was in there for 2 hours, walked out with no mask. Was a pretty refreshing experience.

I know your post was in the context of vaccines, but, from my sources, at least in Massachusetts, a lot of those in the hospital for Covid are there because they need the care once they get finished with oxygen therapy. They are still in the hospital because the step down care isn’t available. The LTC facilities won’t take them if they are still positive. People who actually have a nice urban/suburban single family home to go to are discharged home. For those who live in multigenerational tenement type housing, the family may not want them home if they are still infectious. So they stay on the hospital census until they can move them to a facility to finish recovery. For the 700 or so in Massachusetts’ hospitals, I’d estimate half don't need hospital level care if what I’m hearing from my hospital based MD and social worker friends are correct.

Bout the same here. 51, damp, raw.

The anecdotal evidence I’ve seen with the vaccines are that those with underlying conditions or are generally susceptible to being sick have tougher reactions. My dad is 83 and is in great health. Never gets sick. Had almost no reaction to both doses. Same with my father in law. My dads brother has rheumatoid arthritis and was down for 4 days. My mother is 84 and has lupus. She was down 5 days. Other anecdotes seem close to the same idea. And my mother had tough reaction to the shingles vaccine. My dad had no issue.

mRNA therapy has a lot of use in rare diseases like metabolic disorders where there’s a particular protein missing. Moderna was founded to focus on these rare diseases, really. Vaccines were somewhat secondary for their business model. But this has shown to work really well. The key here is the formulation to get the mRNA into the cell.

1) The PCR test cutoff is still a touch high. It was lowered to between 34-35. Did you notice the big drop off that started around January 10th in almost every state and nationally? Ding ding ding. I still think it needs to be around 30. Better still, scrap the thing. It’s never been truly validated. The antigen test like they use for flu is much better. Shows active infections, which are what are contagious anyway. 2) The huge, “40% of us are asymptomatic and we spread it when we’re not sick” narrative is gone. Good riddance. It was bullshit a year ago and it still is. 3) You need to focus on age of people who are sick, not totals. Younger people account for 60% of the cases. They haven’t been vaccinated yet. Once they get vaccinated the umbers will go down. 4) The numbers of dead are going down even though cases are up or flat.That correlates with younger people are responsible for the new cases. 5) The vaccines work, but there’s still only 20% of the population vaccinated. And breakthrough infections will happen. Too much virus still circulating. 6) We really won’t see a big improvement till late summer. See #5. 7) Have no idea what’s up with Michigan. 8) Covid is never going away. It’s going to be endemic. Get used to it. At some point we’ll decide everything is fine and we’ll live with some death. That’s the way it is.

Imodium?

One of those days. I'm in Cambridge and its 54 with a breeze. It's nearly 70 at my casa in Worcester county.

Stein fail, we hope. I don't mind rain in April. April showers and all. Water's in my Lesco and greens my grass.

Just pull a Toobin. That will self sabotage pretty well.

How you feeling? I get my second in 13 days

I'm actually not worried in the least about mRNA effects. You have hundreds of strands of mRNA at any given time in almost every cell in your body coding for all manner of proteins most people cant even begin to pronounce. mRNA is pretty short lived. They get gobbled up pretty fast once they code for whatever protein they are designed to make.

Nobody likes it. I've not talked to one person who says "gee I love these little desks they've put me in with no walls". I'm senior enough i have my own office with a door. That'll come to a screeching halt when they remodel my floor. There's 40 seats on my floor that include single/double private offices and cubes. When they are finished with the remodel, there will be 82 seats in the same space.

My company has been doing remodel on all the locations. They are going to open concept. Even the VPs are out with the hoi polloi. They claim it's to "promote collaboration", but the real reason is they can stuff twice as many into the same square footage. We've been hot desking since the pandemic. Everyone stored their stuff in boxes. We have "green" desks and "red" desks. Green you can book with the booking tool, red you cant book (distancing issues). I got my folks exempted. I moved them to desks that are sufficiently distanced. We do image analysis using AI tools in addition to lab work and need the big huge monitors. That doesn't work to well if someone who pushes papers all day books your desk with a two 32" monitors.

Doesn't really have anything to do with infections. A lot of companies will go to a hybrid model of work, mine included, because people got used to it. But I don't think they want the majority remote like they are now. Where I work, on any given day, campus census across 5 locations MIGHT be 10-12% of normal,