Thursday Throughput: Leaving on a Superluminal Jet Edition
The Centaurus A galaxy.
[ThTh1] You may remember the Event Horizon Telescope from its spectacular image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M 87. This week, they released their latest result, an image of the black hole at the center of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A. The hope is to obtain some insight into the formation of jets.
Almost all galaxies appear to have massive black holes at their cores. Many of those black holes — like the one in the center of our Galaxy — are quiet. Others are busy gobbling up unthinkable amount of material, feeding on hot swirling disks of gas. These accretion disks can become extremely hot and bright — millions of degrees and able to outshine entire galaxies.
Our understanding of these disks is still a work in progress, however. And one thing we do not understand is why some of them have spectacular jets — long streams of material being blasted out perpendicular to the disk. These jets are so powerful that, from some angles, the material in them can give the illusion of moving faster than the speed of light.
A mosaic zooming in on the Centaurus A galaxy, combing optical, radio and X-ray light.
This week, the EHT released new images of the core of Centaurus A, including spectacular images of the inner parts of the jet. While the mystery of jet formation is still not solved, this provides some critical insights into how they function and lays the groundwork for further investigation that will test the various theories that have been bounding around for decades. At minimum, it’s suggesting that the mechanism that powers the monster black holes like those in the core of M87 is not terribly different from the one that power smaller ones like Centaurus A.
We are in a golden age of astronomy, with capabilities exceeding anything we’ve ever had before. And we’ve just gotten another glimpse into the universe these new powerful instruments are revealing to us.
[ThTh2] A podcast takes a deep look at BMI, the Body Mass Index that has become the completely arbitrary and unscientific method of obesity.
[ThTh3] In the realm of scientific speculation: people once thought there might be life on Saturn’s rings.
[ThTh4 Is opposition to vaccines new? Nope. People have a long history of opposing vaccines. There’s probably a book to be written about why.
[ThTh5] Accurate:
Among Us pic.twitter.com/FaE62QO5cU
— PHD Comics (@PHDcomics) July 27, 2021
[ThTh6] A eulogy for one of cosmology’s big figures.
[ThTh7] Ask and ye shall receive. Here us a more detailed look at what we’re learning from Insight.
As it was correctly pointed out by @Hal_RTFLC, the Mars wavefield movie was missing a soundtrack that suits the color scheme.
Also, it was not @NASAInSight-branded.
Both fixed now. pic.twitter.com/QXgqZ9Q9mh
— Simon Stähler (@exoseismologist) July 23, 2021
[ThTh8] Nate Silver casts doubt on the claim that vaccinated people have similar viral to unvaccinated people. A massive UK study is showing this is not the case.
Figuring out what’s going on with Delta is …well, frustrating. Because there are all kinds of biases built in and it’s hard to correct for them. We do seem to be converging, however, on a vaccine efficacy of 60-80% in preventing infection and much much higher in preventing hospitalization and death. We are converging on Delta being far more infectious than the original version1. And we are converging on the reality that vaccinated people can spread the disease but not as effectively as unvaccinated people.
In the end, the bottom line is unchanged. Get vaccinated. If you’ve had your first shot, schedule your second. Wear masks indoors, even if you are vaccinated. Look out for each other.
A year and a half ago, I said this was a war. What I meant by that was that there would be sacrifices, there would be casualties and it would take a long time before it was over. That remains true. And we still need everyone in the fight.
Opposition to dengue vaccine?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/719037789/botched-vaccine-launch-has-deadly-repercussions
Apparently Americans are significantly less compliant, in general, than Malaysians.Report
Filed under “Yes, and …”Report
Malaysians?Report
https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/pdf/2020-09_08-Science-Update_FINAL_public-v2.pdf
Repeating advice to stay out of elevators.
Staying outdoors and avoiding close contact with people you don’t live with, is also good.
You are not superman, do not act like wearing a mask will make you Superman.
Also: Shouldn’t you be a little worried about how much you know, when the CDC isn’t even publicizing “How Covid19 Spreads”?
There’s substantial evidence of spreading via a fecal-airborne route. “Do not touch” toilets are a known vector that spread fecal matter into the air, much worse than old-school toilets.Report
Rather difficult to “wear a mask to protect others” if your contamination is coming out your ass, isn’t it?
I’ll repeat, go look at the date above. That’s September of last year.
CDC’s had plenty of time to explain to you why masks are not going to work as advertised.
(Your airflow “through” a mask is through the holes along the sides of it, assuming you aren’t wearing a properly fitted n95 mask).Report
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7862259/
Masks lead to riskier behaviors, although I could just cite the above OP.
Stay away from others, six feet at a minimum.
Stay outdoors if you must expose yourself to someone else.
Get plenty of sunshine.Report
Seat belts lead to riskier driving.Report
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42956203
Facts not proven.
People who are generally risk adverse stop perceived “risky behaviors”, and those tend to cluster.
What’s idiotic is that perceived “risk adverse” people think that “going to the grocery store” is not a high risk activity, despite having been told that by the CDC.
Going indoors with others is a high risk activity (using a public restroom is an EXTREMELY high risk activity).
Do not do it simply because you have a (probably ineffective) mask.
Do not do it simply because you’re a boomer and can’t imagine death killing you at a grocery store.
I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who still washes hands for 2 minutes after touching the mail, or handling my front door (that some jerk might have licked).
Y’all are walking disease vectors, and I’m stayin’ the hell away from you.Report
Lazy man’s solution is to buy a better mask. Brick of 10 N95s was something like $18 on Amazon.Report
Lazy is exactly right.
Properly fitted n95 masks are what’s needed, if you want them to be effective.
“Surgical masks are designed to provide barrier protection against droplets, however they are not regulated for particulate filtration efficiency and they do not form an adequate seal to the wearer’s face to be relied upon for respiratory protection. Without an adequate seal, air and small particles leak around the edges of the respirator and into the wearer’s breathing zone.”
https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2020/03/16/n95-preparedness/
We know this is an airborne virus. That means that surgical masks are ineffective. If you are not creating/ingesting droplets, wearing a surgical mask isn’t gonna do much.Report
“proper fit” isn’t actually hard with N95s unless you have facial hair. Then you won’t get a good seal no matter what.Report
Instructions at link.Report
I spent the first half of may career as a lab scientists, fitted annually for far more complicated respirators. And every time I was told my facial hair would – except in negative pressure settings – keep me from a perfect seal. There’s nothing there that dissuades me from that understanding.Report
Wasn’t disagreeing.
Simply providing information.
Haven’t ever been fitted for an N-95, but I do hear that facial hair is a bugaboo.
(And, yes, an N-95 is a relatively porous respirator.
I have clean-room grade air filters at home —
not the high end kind, the $1000 buck kind.
Run them at high, and they will /probably/ clear the room of original COVID-19 before you catch it.)Report
You’re not wrong, but that just means we’ll have to shave.
Now it’d be nice if the powers that be were suggesting that, and for that matter it’s weird that we don’t have the medical authorities suggesting N95s.Report
Facial hair was forbidden at the refinery I used to work with for just that reason. In case of emergency (fires, leaks, etc.), they needed to wear an air-pack with a tightly-sealed mask.Report
Big part of the justification for it in the Navy, especially in engineering spaces. Fighting a fire in a ship means everyone is wearing respirators.Report
First thing my father did when he retired was grow a goatee.
Same reason — he needed to get a good seal with emergency equipment because he worked at a refinery.
he’s had it ever since, so I guess he likes the look.
That being said, he did manage a mustache for a number of years anyways, but apparently that allowed for a seal, although there were some rigorous rules on length and whatnot and regular testing to ensure he could get a seal.Report
So we’re both wrong?Report
The compensating behavior theory has been, at least for seat belt usage, pretty thoroughly falsified, has it not?Report
Maybe so, but that goes against the “masks encourage risky behavior” theory too.Report
Which is why I cited both “masks encourage risky behavior” and “seat belts do not encourage risky behavior.Report
Stay outdoors if you must expose yourself to someone else.
Someone owes me a new keyboard.Report
If only Jeffery Toobin had headed that advice…Report
“But I was in my backyard!”Report
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-vaccine-tuberculosis-older-people-covid-.html
“Have you had your mandatory vaccination yet?”
“I got TB vaccinated.”
(Yes, I realize there’s different supply chains for the two vaccines — but if they’re ameliorating the “old/fat/diabetic” die of this, why not consider it?)Report
ThTh8: This is exceptionally frustrating. I know that expecting 100% from a vaccine is not *ENTIRELY* rational (though, golly, the polio and smallpox thing worked well, didn’t it?) and having a vaccine that protects a mere 80% instead of 95% shouldn’t get someone to say “the vaccine doesn’t work!”
It does work. It’s just not, you know, perfect.
But echoes of pre-vaccine talking points keep showing up and that’s disheartening.Report
The thing to keep in mind is that with Polio & Smallpox, there was a worldwide, practically heroic effort to wipe those diseases out, and each one still took decades to do.
https://scibabe.com/daily-mos-the-eradication-of-smallpox-part-i/
https://scibabe.com/daily-mos-the-eradication-of-smallpox-part-ii/Report
During which we withdrew multiple vaccines, due to safety concerns.
(I approve of vaccines. They’re a clever use of our own immune system. That is not to say they come without risks, or to say that this particular “non-sterilizing” vaccine should not be responsibly evaluated).
The FDA’s own EUA talks about Antibody Dependent Enhancement (and how it was not tested for during the studies that greenlit the EUA). We cannot accurately tell if it is occurring without solid reporting — and when someone within 10 days of being double-jabbed is reported as “Died of COVID-19” — and hence not reported as a ADE vaccine casualty, it concerns me.
This may be an indication that our data is being improperly reported, because of improper training in “What Could be a Side Effect of the Vaccine?”Report
Considering that you have medical examiners in Missouri on the record as not listing COVID as a cause of death to make loved ones feel better, I’d say there’s a lot of improper reporting going around.Report
https://www.icelandreview.com/ask-ir/whats-the-status-of-covid-19-in-iceland
(More vaccinated people than unvaccinated people catching the virus. — this is at American levels of vaccination. 60% total, 70% one jab.)
Israel is publishing a 39% efficacy of Pfizer’s vaccine.Report
Israel revisited that study and the vaccine is much more effective than 39%. They were fooled by a base-rate bias.Report
The original covid vaccine worked as well as the small-pox or polio vaccines against the original covid virus.
That’s for 2 shots of polio, take that to three shots and it goes to 99%… but that might be true for Covid’s too.
In theory the US could go to three shots and presumably that would help. Save some American lives although the bulk of the current problem is the people who have zero shots.
It would be stupid-selfish for us to do that since the world has only about 15% of the population vaccinated.Report
You are being incredibly inaccurate.
Please come prepared to talk about the differences between a sterilizing and a non-sterilizing polio vaccine, and why the later was withdrawn as soon as we had the former.
I am unsure where this idea that we have a “current problem” comes from.
We have people dying, sure, but we always have people dying.
A “problem state” is where we have more people dying because our medical system cannot handle the number of people.
Considering that we are actively giving monoclonal antibodies to the vaccinated as a COVID-19 treatment, what does that tell you about our current level of antibody matching?Report
What percentage of COVID patients are getting monoclonal treatment? because last I heard its considered too expensive for the masses.
That aside, we as a nation are now over 600K EXCESS deaths due to COVID. we also – for a third time in the pandemic – have hospitals reliably reports capacity and staffing strains due to COVID. Most Americans – the ones with their heads not firmly in Trump’s backside – interpret that as a problem state.Report
I’m not going to give you confidential information.
Seems more likely from what I read, that it’s still in “research” stages, and that means “research hospitals are enrolling patients as fast as they can.” (again, this is not confidential information).
Yes? 4 times a bad influenza year. That’s not bad for a novel virus.
“Capacity and staffing strains” are not what I’m hearing locally.
And I want to hear “We are letting Grandma Die because we can’t afford the ventilator” before I am saying “Okay, we got a big problem.”
(Low key, this was happening in Italy. That was a Bad Time.)
I will also accept “Doctors are ringing other states to learn how to use a ventilator, because All The Nurses Are Gone” (what, you thought a doctor could do manual labor?)
Hospitals who fire half their nurses and want cheaper ones can complain about staffing strains. This doesn’t mean it’s caused by covid19 and not dumb bean counters.Report
the bigger of the three hospitals in Baton Rouge now has a Public Health Service Disaster Medical Assistance Team on board for 30 days to augment staff resources for treating COVID. Again most people look at that as a BIG PROBLEM.
As to the monoclonal treatments – you may not want to give out “confidential” information, but NBC has good reporting:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-authorizes-covid-antibody-treatment-preventive-after-exposure-n1275737
Report
So if you have AIDS or an organ transplant and effectively don’t have an immune system, you can take “monoclonal antibodies” and that might help.
Everyone else should depend on the vaccine. For that matter even people with seriously damaged immune systems should take the vaccine even if they’re going to take monoclonal antibodies if they’re exposed.Report
That’s how I read it. It doesn’t read as a general treatment.Report
Or if you’re morbidly obese.
“compromised immune system” goes with diabetes and being very very fat.
That’s why the under 18 who die of covid19 aren’t ever pictured in the papers.Report
Yeah, I assume a lot of the people under the age of 18 have something pretty seriously wrong. Diabetes, cancer, organ trans, aids, something else.
Having said that, it could also just be got REALLY unlucky. Initial exposure was to a family member for a very long time and they got slapped with an extremely large initial dose of the virus.
Even if you’re young, not getting vacinated is taking a stupid risk. It’s a negative lottery, you can’t “win(lose)” if you don’t play.Report
If your ACE2 receptors don’t accept spike proteins, you aren’t going to get viral replication.
That said, you can still have your entire immune system run amok, theoretically, if you are inundated with viral load (of course, the same can be said for being inundated with spike protein).Report
You’re citing monoclonal antibodies for prophylactic use.
My reporting was on using monoclonal antibodies for outpatient therapy after diagnosis of COVID19 (older reporting had use of them inpatient, but I didn’t catch them mentioning the vaccinated).
https://inside.upmc.com/two-pittsburghers-receive-sotrovimab/?_ga=2.164115903.1252836163.1628191007-310173421.1569352438
Unlike for prophylactic use, this is not being given only to those with severe medical conditions, seemingly (at least the article doesn’t say so).Report
“Public Health Service Disaster Medical Assistance Team” sounds fascinating.
What level of governance is that from?
When did it get started?
Why didn’t NYC get one of those?
Is Baton Rouge’s hospital a solo operation? I know larger outfits were able to shift nurses around during crunch times…Report
https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/responders/ndms/ndms-teams/Pages/dmat.aspx
DMATs are a federal level response. There are also in Texas at the moment – https://www.newsweek.com/federal-disaster-medical-teams-deployed-texas-coronavirus-cases-surge-1516892
No idea if NYC has had any . . .
There are three separate hospitals in BTR – two are independent and one is part of a larger system in south Louisiana and Mississippi.Report
Earlier reporting from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-monoclonal-antibody-covid-therapies-have-not-lived-up-to-expectations/
Monoclonal antibodies have been greenlit as a TREATMENT for a while, now.Report
They had the same EUA the vaccines now have, until the final authorization I noted above. That article also notes the use case approved by the FDA was restricted as was the potential targets. And the article notes that:
Which, like the full approval article I linked to, means that this is not a “get out of jail free card” from most unvaccinated people, and that it’s not likely to be used for vaccinated people since so few of them get to moderate cases likely to progress to severe cases. It also nots that overwhelmed hospitals have problems administering the drug cocktail.
And none of that points to widespread use, much less widespread applicability. We MAY get there, but until then the non-sterilizing vaccine you don’t like and the mask you want us to ignore are still a better bet for the general population.Report
“I’m not going to give you confidential information.”
Translation: “I am lying and fabricating the reality I wish existed. Please do not call me on this”Report
https://inside.upmc.com/two-pittsburghers-receive-sotrovimab/?_ga=2.164115903.1252836163.1628191007-310173421.1569352438
… you were saying?
REMAP has been using monoclonal antibodies as one of its many treatments (I believe it was doing HCQ for a while as well). Go ahead and look it up.Report
The original Covid-vac had a 95% effective rate.
A ten second google search for polio and small-pox end up with similar rates (although with polio we have the 2 shots vs 3 shots thing).
It’s been enough decades that I assume it’s a resolved matter. If you want to claim the original polio vaccine wasn’t the best I won’t argue the point.
It does seem like you’re trying to bury me in details when I’m taking a 10,000 foot level appoach.
Part of it is I’m moving to a Florida hot spot which is making the news on the hospitals being slammed and their covid graphs are going past their previous highs.
Another part is it’s looking like the vaccines are less good against Delta (less good isn’t the same as “not very useful”).
I suspect the that number of people getting “monoclonal antibodies” rounds to zero and that we’re trying all sorts of stuff to see if it works and how well. Right after that the mainstream media turns it into click bait.Report
Can I just cite the polio vaccine when I make the case that this COVID-19 vaccine (all of the non-sterilizing ones) ought to be withdrawn, and that we ought to go with a sterilizing vaccine instead? (We did withdraw the Salk vaccine because it was non-sterilizing).
Non-sterilizing vaccines have a horrible track record, and shouldn’t be given to everyone, as they turn everyone into breeding pits for worse diseases.
They could, with some amount of care, have been given to the people at most risk for this disease. As those are the elderly and extremely fat, we’d have run a much smaller risk of a Thalidomide situation.Report
Only if you can show that the current vaccines were proven to work only with 1930’s standards. A trial of a few dozen people, and ignoring serious experts in the field deeply concerned by it at the time.
I hadn’t heard about this “non-sterilising vs sterilising” issue before but with a few minutes of looking into it I found sterilising is the ideal, and hard, and rare. I’d post a quote saying most vaccines are non-sterilising but this is the wrong computer.
Mass media says Pfizer’s vac will be fully approved by the FDA in a month.Report
The polio vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine. Everybody that gets the vaccine gets infected, nobody gets polio.
The Salk vaccine was not withdrawn because it was non-sterilizing, but because of an error in manufacturing a batch that caused live virus to be given to children, giving some polio. Something impossible with an MRNA vaccine.
You are peddling nonsense.Report
The phrase “non-sterilizing vaccine” as well as his previous contention about “it’s a blood infection not a respiratory one” didn’t clue you in? (As noted, quite a few common vaccinations aren’t sterilizing. But he doesn’t seem to grasp that. Or he thinks the difference is vitally important to COVID for some word salad reason)
He’s basically cherry picking sciency sounding phrases from various articles dating back to the very beginning of this plague and forcing them to fit into whatever he wants reality to be.
It’s sovereign citizening of virology.
No more sense arguing with him than arguing the law with a man screaming about gold fringed flags.Report
Kids still get polio vaccines. It is a four dose regiment:
·A dose at 2 months
·A dose at 4 months
·A dose at 6-18 months
·A booster dose at 4-6 years
I was just talking about this with my family yesterday because I was sharing a memory of going to the doctor when I was btw/ 11-15 and getting my vaccination record certified. It turned out that I had not gotten the last dose of the polio vaccine. At this point, it might be important to know my dad got polio a couple of years before the vaccine was publicly available. I remember looking at my mom to see if she would say anything, and she told the doctor that she did not know if it mattered, but my dad had polio. The doctor said it was not hereditary, wrote something on the paper and gave it back to her.
I’ve always wondered what he signed, but my mom didn’t remember any of it.Report
So if we go to 4 shots, we might get something that gives full immunity to Covid?Report
Who said every few weeks? Polio is 4 total. Every 6 months is fine, maybe even retooling it to target the “new” varients.
In the meantime, you’re at “get a shot every 6 months” at $20+ a pop for Pfizer.
$40 * 330 million people is $1.3 Billion.
In the context of a pandemic, that’s free.
The gov will pay for it because the amount of economic destruction if it doesn’t is VASTLY greater.
Not only can we do that one year but we can do that every year.Report
Dropped a zero. It’s $13 Billion.
Still Free.Report
I believe the polio vaccines have a neutralizing antibody response (blocks some virus from infecting cells and replicating), but the main impact is that memory B and T cells prevent infected cells from causing disease. Is that “full immunity”? I think the main point is that a vaccine can be very effective even if does not completely block infections before they occur.Report
In the news: Report: FDA to Unveil Booster Dose Strategy by Early September
As Jabberwocky and others have pointed out, the vaccine is struggling against some variants and/or in some populations.
The FDA (and other medical powers that be) seems to be leaning towards a third shot. I assume the gov will continue to pay for it because Economics and Politics.
And yes, the poor world which has been squeaking about “equity” will no doubt squeak harder about it since the First World would be “diverting” something like a Billion doses back towards our use.
On a side note, yes, I fully expect if we need a 4th shot then that’s what will happen. Ditto a 5th, etc. We’re years away from fixing this and vaccination continues to be the big magic bullet.
https://gizmodo.com/report-fda-to-unveil-booster-dose-strategy-by-early-se-1847436397/ampReport
I am a Delta denialist. My alphabet goes right to epsilon, it’s more efficient that way.
I think the FDA is hearing from doctors who want to give a third dose to certain immunocompromised individuals. The vaccine is still effective for this group (lowest CDC reports is 59% effective against COVID-19 hospitalization), but not as high as those without immune compromise (91% in the same study).
But don’t assume that these various studies are very rigorous in terms of analyzing all of the different ways our body’s immune systems protect us from viruses. The easiest studies appear to be measuring antibodies following infection/vaccination, but antibodies are supposed to decline. The immune system has a lot of pathogens to take care of. The memory cells are for longer term. Do studies you look at try to measure them?Report
I think the FDA is hearing from doctors who want to give a third dose to certain immunocompromised individuals.
As I understand the rules — which is quite possibly entirely wrong — as soon as the vaccine is fully licensed, doctors can recommend off-label uses, which would include a third dose. They can’t legally recommend off-label uses under an EUA.Report
I’m not sure of the rules either but Alex Tabarrok recently implied that the EUA allowed changes to be made that might include a boost. He quotes an HHS official about what can happen within the EUA process: “You can change the labeling. You can change the information. You can change the dosage. You can give it to populations for which [it] wasn’t approved.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/the-most-important-act-of-the-last-two-decades.html#comments
That certainly doesn’t sound like it allows off-label uses, but some regulatory action would need to take place for third doses that hasn’t taken place.Report
Colorado is a state that has legislation (theoretically) forbidding the requiring of ID for the vaccination.
I have been tempted by the thought of a 3rd dose of Moderna.Report
[ThTh2] Should we switch to ASCAP?Report
Nightmare Scenario from Original Covid-19 was more than just 20million dead.
That was 20million dead, first wave.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420306103%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Substantial reason to think that we might not be able to get a good, long-lasting adaptive immune response.
Now, the available vaccines may put us into a different nightmare scenario… but that’s the one where we’re ruled, officially and in public, by China.Report
Nate Silver has an interesting thread here. I don’t know about his percentages but his categories seem about right to me.
(I’m group B.)
Report
Most days I’m group B. when my introverted side is overloaded, I slide into group A.Report
I don’t belong in any group.
I am not worried about Delta or any scarients, so that suggests C, but I don’t think the pandemic is “over” and always expected cases to rise this summer upon reopening.
I am opposed to remote learning and lockdowns, think masks have utility in some situations, and mainly believe people should be wary of potential super-spreader events.
I support any vaccine mandate or passport requirement that can be implemented. I have absolutely no libertarian philosophical opposition to any of that. My strong pro-vax position leads me to dislike the same restrictions being imposed upon those vaxed and those not.
I give myself a B-minus / C-plus.Report
Do you think this routine convinces anyone? It isn’t principle, it’s narcissism and the attitude is why we’re still in this mess.Report
We don’t trust people with their own health. They are being told by surgeon generals in two administrations, the nation’s top infectious disease experts, state health officers, and their own doctors to mask up and get vaccinated, and they are instead running around yelling “YOU CAN”T MAKE ME” – right up until they get intubated because their lungs are shutting down. And along the way they are infecting and endangering untold numbers of their family members and neighbors.Report
People won’t stay home unless the government forces them to. And death rates among vaccinated people are nowhere near death rates of unvaccinated people. Hospitalization rates of vaccinated people are nowhere near hospitalization rates of unvaccinated people. the non-sterilizing vaccine is working.
And masks – worn correctly so as to cover nose and mouth – are effective at preventing an infected person from transmitting disease through exhalations.
People are still, however, largely not making good sound risk averse choices. Many because they don’t know how; others because they believe doing so means they will no longer be in their preferred in group.
I get that you don’t see masking or this vaccine as Gold standard care. As was already pointed out, most vaccines in use today aren’t at your gold standard but are highly effective. Which tells me the Bronze standard care we do have in place – when used properly – will buy us time to get an even better handle on this.
But again – people are not taking even the bronze standard for a variety of mostly bad reasons. They can’t be trusted to “do the right thing” no matter how much you or I or anyone else wants them to.Report
Count me as group C. I’m vaccinated and in a county where allegedly 80% have had at least one shot. All these boobs out in Arkansas and Missouri? Well that don’t confront me. And I see no reason to get in with the ongoing performances suggesting it should.Report
I confess in my darker moments I channel Kirk from Star Trek VI when it comes to the willfully unvaccinated* :
https://tenor.com/view/let-them-die-star-trek-gif-10833966
*exempting those who, for various medical reasons, can’t be vaccinated safely.Report
Yea I talk a big game but I’d wear a mask in a hospital or nursing home. I think the rest of this is self correcting. We’ll be at over 200 million vaccinated in the next few weeks. No need to back track in places with high rates of vaccinated people. And places without? Well they’ll figure it out soon enough.Report
As me mum likes to say “You can either learn or feel.”Report
Will I really have to? Because the government doing irrational things in contravention of empirical evidence is completely consistent with my priors. The belief that this can and will happen may in fact be the biggest and most foundational prior I’ve got.Report
Living in one of those places – no they won’t. Two weeks ish ago the governor of Alabama admitted publicly that this is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated and expressed what appeared to be genuine surprise that so few people were getting vaccinated, social distancing and wearing masks. But she change NOTHING in state level policy or executive orders.
Our governor in Mississippi steadfastly refuses to consider mask mandates or vaccine mandates – though thankfully the school districts around us have mostly masked up as school is starting. He won’t lockdown the state again no matter who begs him too.
And Florida’s Governor seems to take a point of pride in rigging the system to kill the maximum number of Floridians possible, while also rigging the counting system to try and mask said death. He does so because he believes it’s how he gets elected President if Trump doesn’t run.
Louisiana’s moderate governor may go a few steps back down the road, but even the arrival of federal Disaster Medical Teams in Baton Rouge has yet to move him.
There will be no national lockdown, and not likely any lockdown or mandates in the red portion of America, no matter how much death it brings.Report
I don’t think there will be lockdowns or new mandates either. I think the fear and chaos will drive vaccination until it passes whatever threshold it takes to calm things down. There have been news stories in the last ~week or two saying the rate is finally increasing again, particularly in those places where it is low. Sadly far more people will die then really need to but I see no solution other than to let it play out.Report
We don’t have the same form of government. It would have to be state by state, and the red states are not going to shut down even in the face of massive death.Report
I’m group F for Florida Man. The unvaccinated represent a threat of grievous bodily harm*, and Stand Your Ground should apply.
* In several ways:
1. They’re virus factories, and vaccination is not 100% effective.
2.The more infected, the higher the chances of a really nasty mutation.
3. They’re taking ICU beds away from people with less avoidable problems.Report
At the beginning of the summer, I was a huge fan of using the carrot.
Now at the end of the summer, I’m fine with the stick. I saw this today and it struck me as a good policy:
Now it does seem to be gameable (just borrow a friend’s positive test and get two weeks off!) but, assuming that someone won’t do that, it seems like a good nudging policy.Report
“Man, I had a bad cold. Two weeks in the ICU!”Report
Eh, I don’t think that’s particularly good policy… it’s disproportionate. Better would be:
1. If you’re sick and vaccinated we’ll pay you sick leave… as long as it takes.
2. If not vaccinated, no pay… (other than whatever the current policy is for sick-days that your lawyers will tell you you have to do anyway).
Plus, you won’t be setting yourself up for the inevitable stupidity of re-hiring certain ‘important’ people after you’ve (symbolically) fired them… or not actually firing some of those people in the first place…
It would be even better policy if Lowes brought people into their warehouses/stores to vaccinate folks where they work… giving them a bonus for getting it, and giving them the next day off with pay. Which, by the way, is how my son was vaccinated by Amazon at the warehouse job he was working.Report
It may not be good policy, but with the existence of Long Covid and the potential for lawsuits about unsafe workplaces (plus the drain on profits that sick leave undoubtedly represents to a great many bean counters), its probably seen as great fiduciary decision since corporations are ALL ABOUT short term profit maximization these days.Report
Yes and No… sure, anyone can sue for any reason… but absent an actual Vaccine mandate, if their concern was lawsuits, they’d follow the maximal public guidance which would be for masking indoors. Or, if it’s truly a fear of hypothetical future lawsuits then they would be compelled to fire the unvaccinated *before* they get sick because that’s literally how the virus spreads. Firing people after they got sick doesn’t slow the spread (hence, unsafe working conditions) and is simultaneously punitive… and likely will hit a lot of people that team good thinks shouldn’t be hit disproportionately.
Lowes is attempting to drive policy beyond corporate CYA, and… I’ll put a marker down that they will fail and/or retreat when they realize that their policy disproportionately targets POC who are proportionally less vaccinated… not to mention the inevitability that they won’t fire ‘someone’ who they need or want to keep. It’s posturing getting ahead of good policy. It happens a lot.
And that’s assuming the tweet is even truly Lowes’ policy… which it might not be.
The large chain one of my daughters works at is taking the CYA approach… shoppers don’t have to mask, but employees do. That’s pure CYA.Report
Add huge amounts of economic damage and disruption to that list. The virus doesn’t have to exist any more, they’re insisting that it must.Report
If we had those little like buttons I would click it immediately for this comment.Report
Most of the people in Israel that are in serious condition are vaccinated:
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/coronavirus-who-are-the-serious-patients-in-israel-675924
This is mostly the case with the over60 contingent, but for those who are saying that the vaccines prevent serious COVID19, this is a challenge to that statement.Report
153 over age 60 fully vaccinated out of 250? In a fully vaccinated population of 5.39 Million? 0.003% of the vaccinated population is people over 60 with serious COVID? Color me unimpressed statistically.Report
The key question to ask here is what percentage of people over age 60 are vaccinated. If it’s significantly more than 73%, then the vaccine is likely to be very effective against serious disease. If 2% of the population is unvaccinated and that group is 27% of serious cases, that’s pretty good.
Here are the most recent data I could find:
https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/06/14/access-covid-19-vaccine-israel
60-69 at 86.6%, and the older groups at 93-95%.
It’s hard to get a good idea of the effectiveness without a more detailed breakdown of serious infections among vaccinated individuals by age. I would guess that they’re clustered towards the high end.
It’s important to remember that we can’t expect magic. Some people, especially the elderly, have weak immune systems that don’t respond to vaccination as well as we might like. Plus the vaccines aren’t targeted to the currently dominant strain. They give your immune system a big head start, but it has to do the rest of the work, and it has to do it fast enough to keep the viral load from getting out of control.
And no, the issue isn’t that it’s a non-sterilizing vaccine. The delta lineage was already starting to spread by the time the vaccines were approved, and it’s had no trouble spreading in countries with low vaccination rates. It was selected to spread better among unvaccinated populations; vaccine escape was a spandrel.
Anyway, the vaccine does protect against serious illness even from the delta lineage, just not perfectly.
Probably the best solution going forward is a) to keep up moderate NPIs, b) ramp up vaccine production to get the world vaccinated, and c) roll out boosters targeted to one or more variants of concern.
In the meantime, you should probably patent your design for a sterilizing vaccine. You’re sitting on a gold mine.Report
Astral Codex Ten remains worth visiting. I got the email earlier discussing the comments from Acemoglu And AI and Scott discusses something I did not know:
Holy crap.
That indicates “theory of mind”.Report
Googles ‘gain of function’ and ‘AI/ML’Report
Yeah.
I keep having to remember that the point of the Turing Test wasn’t to prove something about computers, but to prove something about me.Report
I’m vaccinated. I mask up. I wash my hands. I social distance and I’m working from the same desk at my house I have been since March 2020. I’ve done everything I can to stay safe. So when my family needs to eat, I go out, I’m as quick as I possibly can be, and I go at off peak hours.
Because I care about my fellow man too.Report