Hoosier

Just kinda tired of the arguments about masks and herd immunity. One of the anti-mask talking points is that 'well, Dr. Fauci said in March...'. Let's say you were told not to expect much of a refund on your income taxes, but then it turns out that you are getting $5,000. Will you accept it or turn it down because of what you were told earlier? As far as herd immunity, it doesn't take an epidemiologist to understand how that is not really an option. Some assumptions still need to be made about this particular virus due to its relatively short existence, but it seems plausible that immunity wears off after a period of months. That would more or less be in line with other coronaviruses. It does not appear to be like the chickenpox where if you get it once, you are just about guaranteed to not get it again (do have a risk of developing shingles later in life though). In order to try to execute a herd immunity strategy for covid-19, you'd have to get a tremendous number of people sick within a relatively short period of time before the immunity starts to wear off. Doing so would overwhelm hospitals, because non-trivial numbers of people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s need hospital care, even though they are very, very unlikely to die. Also, the more people that have the virus, the more likely it will inevitably spread to older/more vulnerable people no matter how hard you try to protect them. This has already been observed in the summer wave in the US, when the cases started out biased toward young people but then crept into the more vulnerable. So unless we are ok with needing widespread field hospitals (never mind the extra staff that would be required for that) and a large amount of needless deaths, herd immunity is not a sound strategy.

It was a larger statement on some of the tired arguments we have had to endure for months.

2300+ cases reported in Indiana today, which is a new record.

Sometimes, you just can't fix stupid.

Thanksgiving, and especially the post-Thanksgiving period, is a looming disaster if people don't get creative with how to celebrate it or outright cancel plans. Particularly concerned about rural areas as they don't have as many medical resources to deal with outbreaks, and the advantage of being rural gets lost when gathering in groups. Some people will cancel the big gatherings with extended family, but I have a feeling that it will be replaced by a lot of 5-10 person gatherings. These are not as bad as larger ones in that you can't get 20+ people sick all at once, but the smaller gatherings are plenty capable of causing spread.

Italy rising very dramatically as well.

A big 4k spot in Illinois cases today.

I wonder how bad the Spanish flu fatigue was back then. I'm sure it existed, but I feel like people as a whole are more impatient now. Of course there were things going on with the Spanish flu that would've really been frightening, like having so many young/healthy people dying. Plus it was hard to keep up with the amount of deaths... there were literally bodies piling up in some instances. My great grandma -- who I don't even think was 30 at the time -- and her baby died and were buried in the same casket.

Statewide, we will be at April level hospitalizations/ICU numbers soon at the rate we are going. Right now it is at mid-May levels.

It's too bad that the calendar isn't different and that there's not like 6 more months to work on vaccines/better treatments before fall/winter.

A couple of the trials were paused over safety concerns. Vaccine may come out before the end of the year, but that's not going to really help us through the rest of 2020. The antibody therapies, even if they get approved for emergency use sometime soon, probably won't be widely available enough early on to really put a big dent in things.

A couple months from now we may be looking back on October as the good old days. The projections farther out in time should be used with caution, but the IHME has the US at 2000+ deaths per day again by the time we get to late December. Honestly, given the current situation, descent farther into fall/winter and a series of events which will present opportunities for more spread (halloween, in-person voting, Thanksgiving, etc) the IHME doesn't seem too unrealistic.

Indeed. The official global death toll is currently around 1.1 million. There has probably been significant undercounting, with some countries severely undercounting. Even if the current toll is 2 million or 3 million, that is a long way from Spanish flu levels.

Didn't Spanish flu have a fatality rate of 2.5% or something like that? Covid-19 is probably more like 0.5% when you try to account for the large amount of undocumented cases.

Indiana's health commissioner, who has been a fixture at the news briefings, has tested positive. She is asymptomatic as of now but her daughter and infant grandson have symptoms. https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/indiana-health-commissioner-contracts-coronavirus-mask-mandate-extended-to-nov-14/

Do you mean per day? Because we were getting 200,000 to about 400,000 confirmed cases per week in the summer. Widespread herd immunity seems like it would be really hard to pull off with covid-19, especially with it becoming more clear that reinfections can happen some months after getting it. It would sort of be like a hamster running on the wheel. You'd have to get so many people sick so fast (before the immunity starts to wear off), which the hospitals wouldn't be able to handle. Trying to keep it contained to younger people isn't a bad idea on paper, but it inevitably ends up spreading to older/more vulnerable as time goes by.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine trial and the Eli Lilly antibody trial are both paused due to unexplained illness in participants. Hopefully just a minor blip.

From March through July... 1,336,561 people died in the US. The expected number (which is typically remarkably stable, outside of a freak occurrence like a pandemic of course) is 1,111,031, which is 225,000 more than expected. Not all of the excess is directly because of the virus, but many are. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3948

Yeah, the stats support more blacks dying per capita. More white people have died in total, but not when adjusted for population.

Someone died after getting reinfected. This is the first such documented instance. She had leukemia, but it was treatable, so the cause of death is being attributed to covid-19. https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/13/covid-patient-becomes-first-in-world-to-die-after-being-reinfected-13414646/

Last year I started this thread on October 19. I didn't necessarily expect to be starting this one even earlier, but here we are. Extended looks to feature some bouts of unseasonable chill, with perhaps a synoptic snow system or two between now and the end of the month. At the very least, the lake effect snow machine should fire up.

Might as well not have a policy like that if it's not going to be enforced. Unless they are hoping that a mere announcement would dissuade some people from coming in. There would have to be all kinds of exemptions anyway. What about people who live in Indiana and work in Chicago?

Good chance I won't be able to freely travel to Chicago soon. https://fox59.com/news/coronavirus/chicago-residents-urged-not-to-travel-to-indiana-amid-surge-in-coronavirus-cases/amp/ Could be a bigger problem for me if it becomes a statewide policy because I cross the border into Illinois somewhat regularly.

Was reading about a documented reinfection in Israel. Someone had it in April and then again in August. Obviously we are learning in real time, but the issue of immunity seems like a complex thing that depends on many factors, such as a person's overall immune health to severity of the first infection to how much virus that a person is exposed to, among other things. There is probably a good chance that most people who have had it are essentially protected for a while, but what is "a while?" I think there are considerably more reinfections out there that haven't been able to be documented, partly because so many cases were missed earlier on.

I know that kids were being tested before being allowed on campuses in August, but I wonder if there is any plan to test them right before they go home for the holidays. Or if the attitude will be "who cares, not our problem anymore"