Never had Ebola outbreaks happened in so many countries at the same time.
I wonder if this is due to greater international mobility in West Africa then vs. prior decades?
That link is really interesting. It's been kind of lost in all the COVID angst, but in recent years there's been a huge amount of progress in treating diseases and responding to epidemics especially in poorer countries.
in recent years there's been a huge amount of progress in treating diseases and responding to epidemics especially in poorer countries.
That's a good point, and the linked article is interesting.
At least in rural areas, you can probably get Ivermectin easily in a poorer country. I've heard that helps.
We're pretty much just marking time before we get a pandemic that spreads as easily as covid and has a death rate that is closer to Ebola.
5 is correct. In some ways we got lucky with Covid. (In other ways we didn't.)
Once a dozen people on my street die of the same disease in the same week, I'll go back to washing my hands.
I felt two underappreciated things with Covid were:
1. it did not affect children
2. no one had to flee their home. There are so many natural disasters that displace people and destroy homes, but a pandemic mostly does not.
The kind of alarming thing was how little value was attached to the lives of teachers once it became clear that children weren't in as much danger of dying.
I don't know. The flip side of that is that it was actually significantly less dangerous to be a teacher than it was to, say, work in a restaurant. And this was pretty well understood by spring 2021.
Another thing about Covid that I think is underappreciated is that most of the actual dying when it was real bad happened in hospitals with no visitation allowed, so most of the public didn't get a real sense of how bad it could be. I think this played some role in the general resistance to precautionary and mitigation measures.
That's why los resturantes are having trouble with staff now.
Duolingo means my keyboard is now suggesting Spanish words.
spreads as easily as covid and has a death rate that is closer to Ebola
But Ebola doesn't spread as easily as COVID, does it? Enough to be genuinely scare, sure, but there is typically a tradeoff between fatality & transmissibility, if not one you can rely on.
Don't more quickly fatal diseases have less sustainable rates of infection?
Also "didn't affect" and "didn't kill at a high rate" are different things.
Yeah but with kids, my impression is that it was much closer to the "didn't affect" end of the spectrum. Like, they weren't symptomatic and weren't even superspreaders, and at most had mild cold symptoms (with caveats for kids with underlying health conditions, which is certainly serious.)
16: In my life, we've had AIDS (high death rate, not easily transmissible) and COVID (low death rate, easily transmissible). I think we're gearing for something in the middle of both of those with an overall impact of a higher death rate than covid. Because that's what would make a story for someone to mock us with in about 100 years and it's pretty clear we are destined to be some other generation's bad example.
I think we've got plenty of material for future mockery already. Remember when we elected Donald Trump president?
But yes, I do think that sooner or later a disease will emerge that combines virulence and transmissibility in a way that leads to a much larger death toll.
Give it a week and Fox/the NY Post will have us whipped up about the cow-to-human transmissible avian flu.
Does that mean we're not supposed to have sex with either cows or humans or birds?
23,24: All due to those vaxophile/vache-ophile Dimmycrats. Moo.
25: Correct. All at once or not at all.
Dhimmicrats! Man, that takes me back. Several right-wing stroke-outs ago...
19: I guess it depends on how much emphasis you place on the rare cases like the link to MIS-C.
W/r/t transmission, it seems like we did too shit a job to be able to say much about kids and transmission but I'll admit having checked out of trying to figure out who was full of shit on the news and social media and which preprint was garbage and which was ok a long time ago. So maybe things are more certain about the role of kids specifically. I certainly don't know the research.
I mean, in a multigenerational household, if the kids are in school and the parents are working and the grandparents get infected at home, who is more likely to have brought it home if both kids and parents got sick first? I don't know. We can all agree that banning even outdoor dining at restaurants in malls that were otherwise open for business probably didn't prevent transmission, at least.
I'm using the word mall loosely but also southern California has some fake urban mall designs where there's outside seating at some establishments. I could sit outside at a few different places at the mall near my current apartment, for example.
I can't believe I laughed at 28. Something to do with it coming after 27, I think. Sometimes these threads are beautiful.
(Also Minivet, so sorry for you and your family going through this crisis -- I hope your dad makes a full recovery. Take care of yourself, too: IME it's hard-to-impossible to remember to do that, but it really is important.)
There's not nearly as much beastiality since Emerson went to live on a farm.
Thanks lurid. I actually had a getaway to a hot springs resort the day after I returned, so that was nice.
18 and 19: I have a sense that it got better at infecting kids when omicron hit, just genuinely adapted to human transmission at that point. And plenty of unvaccinated kids did die then or get MISC even without underlying conditions. You were lucky that your kids weren't affected but many healthy kids were. Sure, not to the same degree as old people, but with kids the goal should be no deaths. As a percentage of the people who got infected with polio virus in the 50's, the number who got paralytic polio wasn't that high, but it was still too many kids and still worth vaccinating all kids against it.
">https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/covid-19/"> Among the 4.4 million COVID-19 deaths1 reported in the MPIDR COVerAGE database, 0.4 per cent (over 17,400) occurred in children and adolescents under 20 years of age. Of the over 17,400 deaths reported in those under 20 years of age, 53 per cent occurred among adolescents ages 10-19, and 47 per cent among children ages 0-9.
So sure, 17k is 17k too many, but it's not just staring fondly at my own healthy kids to say "we were lucky as a society that it largely spared kids".
I'll fix the formatting in a few hours.
38: That's only because the numbers are so large that you would say that. If you had been told that there was a new virus that was going to kill 17k kids, you wouldn't say that. Only 1% of kids infected with polio developed paralysis; it's usually a mild illness.
Death is not the only outcome that matters. Hospitalizations and long COVID count too.
So thank goodness for vaccines for kids as well as adults.
I wonder if this is due to greater international mobility in West Africa then vs. prior decades?
That must be part of it, especially the distribution outside Africa and outside Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. But I'm guessing bigger than that (for total numbers anyway) was bad luck, that the outbreak began in a large market town near the triborder; perhaps also that all three countries are quite small geographically; and maybe most of all just bigger populations (Guinea; Liberia; SL) and more urbanization (estimated annual change in urbanization roughly 2015-20: Guinea 3.54%; Liberia 3.41%; SL 3.12%).
That's only because the numbers are so large that you would say that.
Yes?
40: that was one thing that surprised me about polio. I bet if you asked most people they'd say it was always paralysis, sometimes deadly, and that's why it was so feared. But "it's just the sniffles" applied to polio, too.
Pebbles was the sickest she's ever been with COVID (to be fair, I don't think she's ever really been sick otherwise ), and we suspected some lingering but hard to prove effects: unusual fatigue for months, and two incidents of a racing heart rate (that we can't get to replicate and it hasn't happened in eight months. Fingers crossed.) And that was post vaccination! I have no idea why it hit her so hard. The Calabat barely tested positive and had no symptoms.
But agreed -- this pandemic looks at lot different if it had hit kids the way it hit the elderly. It can be true that 17,000 deaths is lamentable, and that it could have easily been much worse.
People were dying in hospitals even among those who shouted loudly about the disease being fake or not dangerous. My suspicion is that lots of people figured that they could ignore medical advice and, if something did go wrong, the doctors could still fix it.
Lotta stories about antivaxxers begging for their loved ones to get it once they were put on ventilators and doctors having to explain that's not how vaccines work.
My gut feeling is data but your stories are just anecdotes.
Becuase our feelings are so numerous.
It's hard for me to internalize the idea that I could be otherwise healthy and die from an infection I caught from normal daily activities. I suspect it's even harder for people who get their medical information from Alex Jones.
and, if something did go wrong, the doctors could still fix it
Too many magical cures on hospital TV shows?
It's hard for me to internalize the idea that I could be otherwise healthy and die from an infection I caught from normal daily activities.
Don't worry about it, your kid would be fine and probably not the reason you got sick.
I think it's just that vaccination and antibiotics and standard public health measures have been effective enough that people forget what happens if you don't keep working at it.
54: I have to pay for his college though.
Anyway, my kid is days away from adulthood and that wasn't what I was thinking of by "normal daily activities." I mean not using IV drugs and stuff.
55: post vaccination/sanitation/wealthy nation, that's a reasonable assumption. Most diseases are fixable. Except this one wasn't, and one party had an interest in selling the idea that it was just a cold.
Right, but I don't think you get to shove the genie back into the bottle so easily.
There are no bad Arby's nor good Arby's. They have transcended our archaic bourgeois axes of "quality" and "edibility".
There are no bad Arby's. There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example, bad health inspectors.
Arby's can not fail us. We fail Arby's. This is why they took away our potato cakes.
The Arby's by my old office closed and put up a sign that they would be back next year. I assumed they had changed plans when I saw a mid-rise apartment go up in that spot. But I was wrong and you can now live in an apartment building with a ground floor Arby's. If you are worthy.
True. It was a stand-alone restaurant with a surface parking lot in an area with very expensive real estate.
60-66. Yesterday's men. Hangry Joe's is the way.
I'll wait until they get their Michelin star.
59: The funny thing about poliomyelitis is that it really only started to affect the middle class in the first half of the 20th century because of increased hygiene. Before that everyone got polio as an infant and it wasn't that big of a deal. After 1916, kids did not see it until they were over 3 or as young adults and some of them wound up paralyzed. So vaccination (which you put first) definitely remains crucial.
Death is not the only outcome that matters. Hospitalizations and long COVID count too.
Long COVID isn't really a thing, or, rather, it is a thing but not specific to COVID - there was a study recently that screened people for the sort of symptoms that normally get classed as "long COVID" and just as many people (in fact slightly more) had them a year post getting the flu as had them a year post getting COVID. But we don't talk about "long flu". https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/15/long-covid-symptoms-flu-cold
The kind of alarming thing was how little value was attached to the lives of teachers once it became clear that children weren't in as much danger of dying.
From where I was sitting, we had constant hysteria from the teachers' unions demanding priority access to vaccines, not to mention hugely damaging school closures for months (damaging in no small part because a lot of teachers couldn't be bothered to do proper online education and just let the kids coast for most of a year) but OK.
The unions fought back here too, where we have them. I thought the case for their getting vaccinated quickly was strong. But the people pushing hardest to open the schools were not usually also pushing to protect teachers while doing so. They were arguing that the kids were safe and then just kind of stopping.
I had a cold in early January and am still getting over long rhinovirus. (I've retained a bit of a cough.)
You can get a cough using blood pressure medication, if you want one without having to deal with a cold.
The challenge with long rhinovirus is the Vietnamese people trying to poach you.
72: I don't think teachers had a particularly strong case for getting vaccines early, at least not compared to other in-person workers. There were two good reasons for prioritising people by profession: either their job led them into proximity to vulnerable people like the elderly or the chronically ill, in which case we vaccinate them so they don't pass on an infection to their contacts. Or what they do is vital to society in general, so we vaccinate them to stop them getting sick and being unable to do their jobs.
Teachers weren't coming into contact with a lot of vulnerable people, because schoolchildren are young, so "vaccinate them to protect their contacts" doesn't apply. (Unlike, say, shop assistants or bus drivers). And schoolteachers weren't providing a vital life-critical service, so "vaccinate them to keep them well so they can stay at work" doesn't apply. (Unlike medical staff or air traffic controllers.)
a lot of teachers couldn't be bothered to do proper online education
At least in the US, essentially no public school teacher or administrator anywhere had been ever been trained to do it and everybody was just making it up on the fly. Below a certain age, I'm not sure it's even possible to do properly.
Medical staff did get very first dibs here. The critical service teachers provide is teaching.
Long COVID isn't really a thing, or, rather, it is a thing but not specific to COVID - there was a study recently that screened people for the sort of symptoms that normally get classed as "long COVID" and just as many people (in fact slightly more) had them a year post getting the flu as had them a year post getting COVID.
That's interesting, and is different from other studies that I've seen -- which had shown that there was overlap between post infection symptoms for COVID and flu but, IIRC, it was about 3 times more common for COVID.
Teachers weren't coming into contact with a lot of vulnerable people, because schoolchildren are young, so "vaccinate them to protect their contacts" doesn't apply. (Unlike, say, shop assistants or bus drivers). And schoolteachers weren't providing a vital life-critical service, so "vaccinate them to keep them well so they can stay at work" doesn't apply. (Unlike medical staff or air traffic controllers.)
Teachers should have been immediately vaccinated behind medical staff, and then schools re-opened.
We did it in an awful way here, but ended up being lucky in hindsight - all teachers were forced back in person, starting in September 2020. It was super shitty and nerve-wracking. They were required to teach dual-modality, which is definitely the worst of the various ways of handling both remote and in-person students. But then the school board managed to wrangle them vaccines in January. (Then remote learning was ended altogether in March.)
My belief is that teachers should have all been prioritized by February, and then once you've got vaccines and masks, I think it's okay to require (most, not all) teachers to be in person.
The critical service teachers provide is teaching.
And the critical service that advertising copywriters provide is advertising copywriting, and the critical service that cinema refreshment sellers provide is selling refreshments in cinemas. (I did say life-critical, not just critical, and I said that for exactly this reason.)
80: interesting. I had a quick look for other studies and found this one https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/long-flu-has-emerged-as-a-consequence-similar-to-long-covid-19/ which says that the risk of death is higher post COVID infection than post flu - but the Queensland study is looking at measures of impairment, so they may be measuring different things.
Teachers should have been immediately vaccinated behind medical staff, and then schools re-opened.
So, ahead of people over 75, including people in care homes.
80: interesting. I had a quick look for other studies and found this one https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/long-flu-has-emerged-as-a-consequence-similar-to-long-covid-19/ which says that the risk of death is higher post COVID infection than post flu - but the Queensland study is looking at measures of impairment, so they may be measuring different things.
Whatever I was remembering was older, and it looks like there are more recent studies. Looking at articles I have bookmarked I find this which doesn't give specific numbers for frequency but talks about the overlap between long COVID and other post infection syndromes: https://www.vox.com/22298751/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-hauler-symptoms
"A proportion -- usually around 30 percent -- of survivors of any medical condition report high rates of fatigue, sleep disturbance, brain fog, pain, depression, and anxiety that interfere with their ability to live fully," she said. Diseases like cancer and Covid-19 may have different causes, but they share something in common when symptoms persist: If doctors can't find a biological explanation for what's troubling their patients, patients have trouble being believed. "I think a lot of patients [feel], 'This physician doesn't get it,' or, 'This physician thinks it's all in my head.'"
And this, which I haven't looked into study design, but may be where I'm remembering the 3x frequency (it compares COVID to Flu for the period of 28-180 days after infection and finds a 3.7% increase in new symptoms over baseline for COVID and 1.5% for flu -- so less than 3x): https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/long-covid-long-flu-long-pneumonia-yes-they-all-happen
83: Those are the teachers I'm talking about! Wisdom is the best teacher.
84: ah, thanks. And that's looking at six months after infection, while the Queensland study was a year after infection, so they aren't inconsistent...
I thought laboratories of democracy meant different states prioritized vaccines differently. In some states, standing in line for many hours sounded like the priority criteria. California had some categorization that was complicated and I can't remember exactly. Teachers were in an earlier group but behind medical staff and the elderly and certain risk categories related to other health issues, and I'm not sure if they were ahead of other people in public-facing jobs like transportation, retail, etc.
Apparently some monkeys attacked and bit a guy in Hong Kong and now the guy is hospitalized with something called "B virus." I didn't finish the article but by a process of pure reason, I assume the biting monkeys will travel to North America and spread disease rapidly after everybody rejects the CDC's advice to avoid the biting monkeys.
I probably won't get within 50 miles of Kansas this year, so I'll be fine.
Apparently some monkeys attacked and bit a guy in Hong Kong and now the guy is hospitalized with something called "B virus."
B virus... spread by monkeys.
Monkeybox, clearly, spread by bees??
