cutlew

Heart of the death band still yet to hit downtown but visibility still was only 1-2 blocks ahead of me for my drive home just now

They were picturing the outbound Eisenhower on a good day and then adding inch/hr snow and near blizzard conditions during peak commute and hoped the words “storm warning” would get more people to work from home?

^little late for a watch considering I just got emergency alert on my phone for tornado warning over the city

He uses the phrase "intellectual rape" at one point on his website to describe how his research/patent was supposedly stolen from him, so he definitely has an axe to grind. At the time of this invention that was taken from him in 1988 he was a master's degree student. Having just finished my own PhD thesis in drug discovery this year, I would be very wary of anyone making as bold a claim of "I invented a whole new type of treatment" from research they did as a student. Intellectual property-wise, it would be his supervisor's and the university's invention. He certainly wasn't running the show and coming up with the ideas on his own. Most of his peer-reviewed, Pubmed articles are actually about inserting DNA, not RNA, into mammalian cells, and basically all of those are from the 1990s. He pops back up on Pubmed around the time of Zika virus and now again with COVID, but his actual peer-reviewed articles from the past year are about using acid reflux medication (famotidine) to treat COVID. He is a modestly productive researcher (~50 published articles isn't nothing but also isn't overly impressive for a research scientist) clearly with some experience, but I wouldn't consider him any sort of authority on the COVID vaccines being used today given how far the field has progressed and given that he's 20 years removed from any nucleic acid work and 30 years removed from any mRNA work.

As they tell medical students from the first day, when you hear hoof beats behind you, don't expect to turn around and see a zebra

Mostly the second imo. Variants especially get a lot of attention for the scare factor but luckily, despite being perhaps slightly more transmissible, none has noticeably changed the course of the pandemic (vaccine still works, fatality rate similar, etc). From a biological standpoint, the mutation rate is probably no different among the coronaviruses given that they have similar genome size and share a proofreading enzyme. One big caveat though - the increased transmissibility of covid would give it exponentially more opportunities to have those mutations occur vs. less infectious coronaviruses that affect fewer people and therefore reproduce fewer times. And it really is a matter of time and random chance that a variant might emerge that would be of more consequence.

MD student here - I think based on the data we have so far and what we know about related vaccines (e.g. influenza, for which very few people wear masks to avoid infection) that the vaccinated individual in your scenario would still receive some degree of protection. I think it’s a fair analogy to picture the vaccine as having a net effect of reducing the exposed viral load - i.e. even if immune cells ultimately can’t fully neutralize a high exposure they should still be able to clear a certain amount of the virus. So if we can assume that exposed viral load corresponds to eventual severity of disease (obvi not a perfect assumption but seems pretty well-supported by existing data), then of course vaccine+mask is more protective than vaccine alone, but even vaccine alone should be more protective than no vaccination at all. This is probably the reason why - even as capacity limits, etc are being lifted - wearing a mask in general settings where you don’t know who is/isn’t immune will continue to be recommended while COVID is still circulating. Because as you mentioned, all of this very promising data is in the context of mask-wearing and other precautions, and the vaccines might appear to be less effective in the absence of those other actions.

Seems like this NHL player should be exhibit A against that argument. https://www.buffalohockeybeat.com/sabres-rasmus-ristolainen-reveals-difficult-battle-with-covid-19/ Whether your chance of dying or falling severely ill is 50% or 0.5% to start with, it blows my mind that a couple hours of headache and arm soreness wouldn’t be worth reducing that chance by 95%. Or isn’t worth the additional 95% protection to your grandmother who has COPD, or your co-worker who has diabetes, or your grocery store clerk who has an immune condition.

That MDW value has to be near/in the top 5 all-time no? By my personal tally the city proper has received more than 40” of snow in the last 22 days; official ORD total is a smidge over 36” for that time frame.

Enjoying the bright blue sun and -5 wind chills but gotta imagine that lake band will slide down and push the immediate lakefront over 20" total later today

That lake effect band did not disappoint, 8" after 10 pm last night (per measurement pic on my car after I cleaned it off) to bring it to ~15" storm total here. Who would've imagined after the first 1-footer in 6 years that we'd get another one two weeks later

Sitting just a few miles east of the Alek-MDW death band, “only” up to ~6” total as of 8 pm. Still inch per hour since 5. Looking out my window, traffic on the Stevenson is the 20 mph, driving with flashers-on type of scenario right now

Yeah it looked like the second band might keep coming but it sagged south of me even, oh well it'll be back soon I hope!

Back to SN here in the secondary "band" overspreading the south side, plus can already see KLOT radar filling in from the south, gonna be a good day

At 3" as of 10 AM here, 1.8" in about 75 minutes of the LES band that pushed through

All three HRW's at 12Z are over 15" for the city proper, pretty nuts

Not often you see the LES band perfectly curl as it comes onshore to cover the entire geographical area of the city of Chicago

The view down Halsted right now, went from flurries to SN/SN+ in 20 minutes

And leaves us in between in the city to fight for the scraps /s would happily lock in 12”

@RCNYILWX and the other Mets who contribute to this forum

It really did, could’ve sworn it was 10 degrees colder and just a much crisper feel to the air once the sun came out vs. a few hours earlier

Based on last two weeks you could probably go from Kankakee to the Keewenaw without seeing anything but blinding white. Maybe Milwaukee but tonight will take care of that

Skilling posted this last night, duration of this snow depth definitely getting impressive. Top 5 is in the bag, would be neat to have every day in February in double digits though

Yeah even I94 getting coated, would estimate about an inch on my car in the last hour I had it parked downtown

Top notch snowflake size