Coronavirus

Shellhead wrote: Everyone relax, 640,000 dead Americans is really not a big deal.

Pretty f'n heartless thing to say IMHO.

Oooooooooh, you were trying to be sarcastic!

Anyway, clearly the discussion here can't remain professional, or at least courteous, so I'll take another year haitus from it and ya'll can go back to wanting to throw fellow americans into the sun.

Get a kid expelled because they refused to wear it properly?

Who said that? Stop scattin'. The two articles on the subject I've seen indicate the kids are separated from the remainder of the students for the rest of the day if they're not wearing a mask. That's what my local school has announced will happen as well.

Masks are a best-practice. Don't know why anybody gives a damn about wearing them. It's absurd we're even having a debate on it in this country. But it isn't going to matter, the schools are going to be closed soon. The "rounding the corner on Delta" line is contrary with any of the data I'm seeing, which shows yesterday as our worst confirmed positives since January's crisis. My daughter's hospital is desperate for nurses and has no beds, in spite of Maryland blessedly being 49th in the nation for confirmed positives per 100,000.

We just have to do this each time it pops up. It's the new normal, get used to it, get nice masks. They're going to be around for a while.

www.reuters.com/world/us/children-hospit...d-number-2021-08-14/

As of today there is a plan for adults to get a 3rd booster shot 8 months after their second shot. For me, that would be late November. Sign me the fuck up.

It's ok. I've heard that we're rounding the corner on delta.

The Michigan and State theaters (owned by the same non-profit) in Ann Arbor show a lot of small/independent-type films. We're members, both to support the theaters and because we like that type of cinema. They just required proof of vaccination to enter and have had a mask mandate since they reopened. I'm pretty geeked about it, because it's a sign of the trend that, yes, vaccination will be required to participate in wider society, which it should've been all along. Please don't @ me about immunosuppressed/vulnerable people. Part of the reason they need extra protection is because of all the assholes who won't get the vaccine (i.e. the reason we're still struggling as badly as we are with the virus.) It's being worked on. This is just a first step toward coercing the people who need to be coerced to give a shit about other people. Now for public transportation...

The store manager where I work is finally getting vaccinated today, along with his family. It took a young healthy close friend of his going to the ICU the other day to convince him. I don't understand that mindset at all, but better late than never I guess.

1,000,000 doses of vaccine delivered in the U.S. yesterday.

That is good news, because we are back to a daily death count in the USA that matches last April.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended on Aug. 12 and Aug. 13, 2021, respectively, that people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised receive a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

One reason for this recommendation is high hospitalization rates among immunocompromised people who are vaccinated. As of July 2021, nearly half of the vaccinated people hospitalized with breakthrough COVID-19 infections were immunocompromised – despite making up only 2.7% of the U.S. adult population. In comparison, the rate of breakthrough cases among vaccinated people who are not immunocompromised was less than 1%.

-- Jonathan Golob, assistant professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Michigan.

Things are getting pretty shit down in Australia and NZ right now. Looks like delta has broken through the paradise and is screwing up all the gains made.

Delta is so crazy contagious, I'm not surprised unfortunately.

It's been crazy/frightening seeing how fast Delta spreads. NZ locked down with 1 case on Tuesday night and now, a few days later, we have 51 confirmed cases with infections spread throughout the country. Latest news has it at over 10,000 close contacts with locations of interest including a university, schools, the casino, supermarkets and a number of popular bars and eateries. All high traffic places.

These numbers are only going to go up before we see the effect of lockdown as people are now getting tested in record numbers.

There's some predictable moaning from commentators on the right, but tempered with begrudging deference. The opposition parties learnt the hard lesson last lockdown that they'll get absolutely punished in the polls for taking a Trump-esque stance or opposing the way lockdown's being handled. The public has no appetite for it so they're pretty much relegated to obscurity during this time and have to delicately snipe while needing to agree with what the PM is doing.

Fortunately the vast majority of the population are playing by the rules of lockdown. The PM read out the number of arrests and warnings issued for breaches yesterday and it was miniscule. Like 30 throughout the whole country.

One high profile loon staged an anti-lockdown protest outside a TV station on Friday and was quickly arrested and then banned from the internet. Good times.