COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

Do you have a special misinformation site you use, because you can't seem to get anything right. Australia is 80% one shot and 77% both shots. Even if it were 90% how would it refute "most of what you babbled on about," because it's not possible to know who "you" is or what they "babbled on about" because you didn't reply to anyone, quote anything, or even mention a name. Well now you're just throwing hand grenades into the discussion in an obvious attempt to distract attention from the fact that you've been unable to present any true or substantive arguments.--Percy

Again, the average age of covid deaths is not 85. This incorrect figure probably comes from the fact that approximately half of covid deaths are people 85 and over, but that's not how you calculate an average. The average age is probably fairly high, though, likely in the 70's somewhere.This is also disturbing in the lack of concern for the infections low-risk people cause in higher risk age groups.--Percy

You're just throwing out random nonsense now while replying to no one in particular nor to anything anyone actually said.--Percy

A study based in Scotland and released this week by Nature Medicine found that:

• Unvaccinated pregnant women are more likely to become hospitalized for covid-19.
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• Their babies are more likely to die within a month of birth.

During the period studied, December 2020 until October 2021:

• 77% of infected pregnant women were unvaccinated, more than three times more likely.
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• 90% of infected pregnant women who required hospitalization or critical care were unvaccinated, nine times more likely.

Sources:

• Washington Post: Unvaccinated pregnant women more likely to experience severe covid symptoms and newborn deaths, study says
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• Nature Medicine: SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination rates in pregnant women in Scotland

--Percy

There's a new omicron variant called BA.2. The original omicron variant is called BA.1. Initial indications are that BA.2 is about 120% more transmissible than BA.1. This is a much smaller increase than that of BA.1 over the delta variant, which was 500%. There is as yet no indication that it increases hospitalizations or is more vaccine resistant, but it is very early days in collecting data. It has spread significantly in the UK and Denmark, and there are already cases in the US. (https://www.medpagetoday.com/...ial-reports/exclusives/96833)--Percy

Let us celebrate former Washington State Trooper Robert LeMay's life and death as well as the illnesses and deaths he caused by not getting vaccinated (for apparently anything) and thereby becoming a vector of disease to who knows how many over his 50 years. That he quit his job rather than get vaccinated is a testament to his determination to make sure he caused as much misery as possible.Let us mourn his passing. No longer will his sweet exhalations shower us with viruses, no more will his soulful body take a bed from someone in need. He will be missed.--Percy

How does Ron DeSantis sleep at night? is an op-ed piece by Dana Milbank in The Washington Post that describes a couple looks at the data revealing that the highest death rates have been in states led by Republican governors.Doug Haddix produced a report using CDC data that showed that since last July the 14 states with the highest death rates were all led by Republican governors, including Florida, Ohio, Arizona and Georgia, all around 140 deaths per 100,000. By contrast DC was at 27 and California at 58.Charles Gaba, a health-care analyst best known for running numbers related to Obabacare, used Johns Hopkins numbers and got largely the same results.Of course we knew this already. The only thing new here is that they used more recent data. So now we know that both early and late in the pandemic, living in a red state is bad for your health.A side comment: mask mandates and indoor constraints falling by the wayside all across the country. Many think this too soon, myself among them. The end of the pandemic is in sight, but ceasing our efforts now is akin to jumping out of an airplane just because the airport is within sight. The situation has improved enough that opening things up and setting our masks aside will do less harm than when the pandemic was raging, but it still means that some people will die needlessly. Well, at least they were free.--PercyPS: I post a lot of links to Washington Post articles, but I just noticed that they've dropped their "10 free articles per month" policy. It's now completely behind a paywall, except for their covid pages. I'll begin quoting more and/or describing more of what articles say. Same for the New York Times.Edited by Percy, : Typo.

China's getting hit with the BA.2 subvariant of omicron. We're around only 11% BA.2, though there are other estimates that place it higher. Denmark's timing was unfortunate, dropping their constraints just as BA.2 was gearing up. Only a couple weeks ago BA.2 was around 4% of infections in the US, now it's nearly 11%. Danish scientists believe BA.2 is about 1.5 times more transmissible than BA.1. Immunity from BA.1 appears to provide roughly equivalent immunity to BA.2. Preliminary analyses of vaccine effectiveness against the two subvariants rate it as roughly equal, but it will soon be about six months since the booster shots. After that vaccine decay will begin to become evident.The consensus that might be emerging is that covid will become endemic with at least annual booster shots necessary.This might be a good time to mention again that infections and vaccines do not provide immunity. What they do is prime the body's immune system to fight off the next infection, should there be one, making it less likely that it will become full blown illness.--Percy

I was in the grocery store yesterday, a once a week outing, and mask wearing was something south of 10%. As a state we seem to believe the pandemic over. I wondered how many of my fellow shoppers knew that our state, New Hampshire, is one the country's most severe hotspots, that BA.2 is now the dominant subvariant in the state, that case rates in our county had been dropping until a few weeks ago, at one point reaching 6 cases per 100,000 before rising again. They're now at 10 cases per 100,000 and rising. My state doesn't do number on weekends, but tomorrow's number, which I won't find out until Tuesday morning, will likely be around 12.I also wondered how many of my fellow shoppers understood how serious this illness is. Very few, I thought. They've probably all heard the stories about loss of taste and smell and lung damage and kidney and liver damage and neurological damage and and deaths, but they don't internalize the meaning with any immediacy. They hear about it, but they almost never, if ever, see it. A neuropsychologist friend believes that in 20 or 30 years the country will be hit with an Alzheimer's epidemic with many who believed they'd escaped a bout with covid unscathed finding out they were wrong.I have a friend who caught covid at the beginning of the pandemic. In May of 2020 he fainted while driving his municipal handicap bus and crashed into the side of a daycare (no one in the building was injured). He was hospitalized, diagnosed with covid, given a pacemaker because of an irregular heartbeat, and fired from his job to become involuntarily retired. He also has long covid and is still unable to exercise for any reasonable period of time. He refuses to get vaccinated, even though a second bout in his current condition could be devastating to his already compromised health. For myself, I am relearning the lesson that it isn't possible to make a human being do something they don't want to do, even when you supposedly have an in because they're a close friend. Push too hard and they're not a friend anymore.We're never going to beat this thing. Probably beating it completely was never possible, but we're going to be living in a world where it is much easier to become ill with covid than it has to be. My wife and I have decided that at some point soon we'll begin living normal lives again, meaning easting out again and traveling freely with mostly no masks. We don't know exactly when that will be. A few weeks ago we thought it would be very soon, but with numbers rising again it seems further off. We'll have to wait and see how severe this current increase in cases becomes. Will it top out at 15 or 20 per 100,000, or will it just keep going? No way to know yet.Though the country is done with covid, covid isn't done with us, and that's very bad news for us all.--Percy

Here's a graph that appeared in today's Post at We Study Virus Evolution. Here’s Where We Think the Coronavirus Is Going.: --Percy

I don't think vimesey was being sarcastic.New York City is the most densely populated area of the country, but though its death rate is high (1 in 208) it doesn't have the highest the country, not even close. Juniata County in rural Pennsylvania has a death rate of 1 in 142. Harlan County, Kentucky, is 1 in 131. Van Buren County, Tennessee is 1 in 125. Twiggs County, Georgia is 1 in 118. Upson County, Georgia is 1 in 114. Franklin Parish, Louisiana, is 1 in 113. McMullen County, Texas, is 1 in 83.The high death rates tend to be in rural counties of red states, so the high death rate in ultra-urban and ultra-liberal New York City needs an explanation. I can understand a higher case rate because of the high population density, but not a higher death rate. Not only is New York City highly vaccinated, it also has excellent hospitals that can be reached very quickly compared to urban counties where a decent hospital might be a hundred miles away.Looking this up, the high death rate seems to be because of the huge number of deaths early in the pandemic before vaccines became available.--Percy

In a country where nearly half the people don't even seem to accept the germ theory of disease, how successful can any CDC style organization be? And then there's the very human tendency to stop being prepared or at least as prepared for things that don't happen very often.Still, the CDC's handling of the pandemic was atrocious. True, they had to deal with Trump for the first year, and maybe Trump wounded them so severely that it greatly hindered their ability to deal with it since, but the sad truth, at least as I experience it, is that I don't agree with many of the CDC advisories. They've often served as enablers for efforts to roll back restrictions as things start to improve, instead of waiting until they've actually improved significantly. Their guidances often seem heavily influenced by what they believe people can be cajoled to do, rather than conforming to what actually needs to be done.It's no wonder people are confused. I think the CDC is itself very confused at this point. For example, maybe BA.2 is the last serious variant for a while, but maybe not. The CDC doesn't seem to be taking the new variants in China into account. True, we don't know whether they're serious or not, but if we don't treat them as if they might be serious now, then if they do turn out to be serious we won't be ready, and it is the CDC's job to make sure we're ready, not to do what is politically expedient.--Percy

To transfer a file from a Mac to an iPhone is easy (AirDrop is built into Apple products), so can I assume your computer is a Windows machine? If so you have to use iTunes. There's more clicking involved, but it still isn't that hard.Another way to go is to attach the file to an email, then open the email on your iPhone and move the attachment wherever you want. Or vice-versa.If you want something that's more specifically file-centric, try FileZilla. It runs on Windows, Macs and iPhones.--Percy

I was just trying to help, not get into a Mac vs. Windows discussion. You said you'd been told by the Genius at the Apple Store that you couldn't transfer files between your Windows machine and an iPhone, and I was just trying to let you know that that's not true. They might call them geniuses, but they're really not.But about comparing Windows and MacOS I don't know that you can get an accurate measure of MacOS by how well it does Windows things in the same way that Windows does them, just as you couldn't get an accurate measure of Windows by how well it does Mac things in the same way that Mac does them. My use of the word "easy" was only in reference to AirDrop, not anything else. It turns out there's an AirDrop compatible tool for Windows, so you can use AirDrop to move files between iPhone and Windows.iPhone has a builtin called Files that uses a hierarchical directory structure and can hold any file type.I just thought of another way to transfer files between an iPhone and Windows. There's a Windows app called Microsoft Remote Desktop that runs on iPhone, and you can see your Windows directory structure from it and move files back and forth between Windows and iPhone using either copy/paste or drag/drop. I can connect my iPhone wirelessly to either my Mac or my Windows machine, for sure using Bluetooth, probably WiFi, too. The software for this website is developed and maintained on a Mac, and I wrote the RideGuru app for iPhone/iPad on a Mac (it's in the app store). (Prior development experience was on Unix/Linux, prior to that VAX/VMS, prior to that DECSystem-10/20.) In many contexts you can choose between copy/paste and drag/drop.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

Fauci says the US is likely to see a fall surge. He acknowledges that the Northeast (where I live) is currently experiencing a surge but apparently believes it will remain local to the Northeast and that the rest of the country will continue to have low numbers through the summer.Fauci doesn't explain why the Northeast is an anomaly and not a harbinger, and what I see when I look at the numbers is the very early stages of an increase for the country. The only thing we have going for us is that the spread of respiratory diseases tends to fade during warmer months.People in general continue to be idiots. In my state as the numbers have gradually ramped up over the past few weeks mask usage has ramped down. Grocery store mask usage was around 10-15% this week. My wife attended a few courses Friday and Saturday and was the only one wearing a mask until an afternoon ice cream social when a few more people put on masks (except when eating, of course). Over the past few weeks our county has gone, per 100,000, from 6.2 to 9 to 11 to 13 to 15 cases daily (it's a 7-day moving average).The most common idiotic behavior we see, even from the CDC, is that as numbers begin to come down, restrictions and mask mandates are lessened or abandoned. Clarifying, they begin to ease the constraints as the numbers *begin* to come down, not after they've come down.--Percy