Texas, Ohio, Michigan, New York and Virginia.

The U.S. is seeing a significant rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations as it enters Labor Day weekend.

According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 15,067 new COVID patient hospitalizations for the week ending Aug. 19. That marked an 18.8% jump from the week before, and a staggering 86.9% increase over the past month. However, that is still down almost 61% compared to the same time last year.

The minimizers have their go-to phrase - "compared to last year".

Opinion | Cats With Bird Flu? The Threat Grows.

But Jha’s “nothing to see here” response is, in many ways, the logical outcome of Biden’s decision to essentially throw in the towel when it comes to Covid. Thanks to the official ending of the Covid public health emergency, millions—particularly low-income people—are now on their own in terms of access to the ubiquitous-in-Jha’s-mind-only tools of Democratic lore. So why bother telling anyone to worry when they might not be able to get the help they need? Instead, better to tell them that everything’s fine, that masks don’t need to be in the picture—or even that they “don’t need to know what virus they have and don’t need to be buying tests all the time,” as Shira Doron, the chief infection-control officer for the Tufts Medicine health care network in Massachusetts, told The Washington Post.

Jha and Doron and their ilk can speak so soothingly because they are part of the class that is much more insulated from the worst effects of Covid. People like them—the ones with money and access—can afford the expensive Covid tests. They can ensure that Paxlovid reaches their door quickly. They’ll be first in line for the new boosters. Some of them even have a concierge physician on speed dial for when things get hairy. Meanwhile, they offer the rest of the country the policy equivalent of “You do you” and “Let them eat cake.”

Absolute ghouls.

A tweet...

At least 8 hospitals across the U.S. have brought back mandatory masking due to a dramatic increase in #Covid cases. 12,613 new #Covid admissions for the week ending Aug. 12 marked a 22% jump from the previous wk & the 5th wk of increase. Deaths up 8.9%

It's always been assumed that how much virus you are exposed to mattered, and now we have evidence.

We really should be doing what we can to filter indoor air, mask in common public areas, and generally try to lower our exposure to this virus even if vaccinated. We should be encouraging people to make a CR box, or buy a good hepa filter, and run it if a houshold member is sick. It's infectious as hell, but you aren't guaranteed to get infected if you take measures to reduce the amount of virus you are exposed to.

But instead of having a comprehensive plan to do any of this, our leaders have decided to just infect people as much as possible to build "immunity", or cull the herd, or whatever the fuck is most profitable for shareholders.

Question being asked: What is the risk of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 after developing immunity following a vaccine, prior infection, or both if exposure to the virus is very high, moderate, or low? They did not study the severity of symptoms. (2/)

How? The authors used the existing database of the Connecticut Department of Correction, where infection data based on high frequency of testing for SARS-CoV-2 on ~9300 residents across 13 facilities were available. (3/)

What did they find? Prior infection, vaccination, or both provided significant protection against infection when the exposure was moderate (index case was within their cellblock) or low (no exposure was documented in cellblock co-residents) against Delta or Omicron. (4/)

However, when the viral exposure was intense (with infected cellmate - exposure is 24/7), none of these groups had enough immunity to protect against infection with Delta or Omicron virus. (5/)

I am on vacation somewhere in the USA south of Richmond, and my triple or quadruple "vaccinated" partner Grimes has contracted covid. Don't worry though I'm still negative and max vaxxed.

alt text: Eric Topol @EricTop01 More than 3 years in, with tens of millions of people still suffering, this is the comprehensive list of validated treatments for #LongCovid, as established through rigorous, randomized clinical trials

*list is blank.

There will be no collective thanksgiving, no elegies, no closure. As we have seen time and time again throughout human history, pandemics do not end—they echo.

The last paragraph of this essay stuck with me so I thought I'd share it. I wish we could collectively grieve over this awful thing that has happened and is happening to us.

Is archive.today not working for you? AernaLingus's comment has the CBS news link.

The Washington Post is officially concerned about the new variant that just dropped. No paywall on the article.

But BA.2.86 stands out in the omicron family tree because of how much it has morphed. It has more than 30 mutations on its spike protein, the part of the virus that pierces through the cell and that vaccines train the body to fend off. Experts believe the antibodies forged through battles with earlier variants will have a difficult time recognizing this new foe.

“This is a radical change of the virus like what happened with omicron, which caught a lot of people defenseless,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “Even if they had a vaccine or prior infection, it could still get into them and infect them again or for the first time. We are facing that again.”

The biggest unknown is whether the BA.2.86 will be transmissible enough to cause a surge. A variant adept at evading immunity would not take off in a population if it does not spread efficiently and multiply.

“It is still a possibility we either see this variant spread very widely as happened with the original omicron,” said Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist who monitors coronavirus variants at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, “or it doesn’t end up spreading very widely and we continue to have these XBB variants.”

This one might fizzle out, or it might not. That we are finding it in multple countries already is a bad sign, but the important thing is that we do nothing.

The CDC has been winding down surveillance of covid this year and saying "we have the tools" and to not be alarmed by this, it's to be expected and all part of the plan, etc, but this new variant was spotted by people volunteering their time and positing their findings on twitter, not the CDC.

His advice: Get the vaccine, wear an n95 indoors, and avoid public indoor spaces.

“I find it very distressing that we, as a society, aren’t willing to talk openly about COVID,” Dr. Dick Zoutman declared.

“The media are almost completely silent, and it’s really perplexing,” Zoutman said of the disappearance of COVID-19 from the headlines in the fourth year of the pandemic. “We are missing a huge opportunity to protect our loved ones, our children, our elderly, our vulnerable … by taking simple interventions.”

Although the mortality rate for COVID-19 has declined thanks to mass vaccinations, the infectious disease specialist stated that long COVID threatens the health of the general population.

“We don’t understand all the implications of long COVID,” he said of the lingering symptoms that may develop after the acute phase of the illness. “Basically, this virus gets into your body and it doesn’t leave. …And it invades the lining of the blood vessels and every organ of your body,” he explained.

“Long COVID syndrome occurs in at least 10 per cent of every infectious episode and may be as much as 30 per cent. Stop and think about that: if you get COVID twice a year, that’s a 20-60 per cent chance that you’re going to get long COVID. And the next year, it’s now 40-120 per cent. Almost certainly … you’re guaranteed statistically to acquire some form of long COVID.”

"You can't wear a mask forever" coughs in your face "I'm following CDC recommendations and washing my hands."

Less than two weeks into the school year, a Kentucky school district has canceled in-person classes for the rest of the week after nearly a fifth of its students came down with Covid, strep throat, the flu and other illnesses.

The Lee County School District, which has just under 900 students, began classes Aug. 9 but noticed attendance drop to about 82% on Friday, Superintendent Earl Ray Schuler said.

By Monday, the rate dipped to 81%, and 14 staff members called in sick, Schuler said.

It's immunity debt from those strict never-ending kentucky lockdowns, right? Or maybe they all forgot how to wash their hands?

Three years into the global COVID-19 pandemic, an estimated four million Americans report that long COVID is severely impacting their daily lives. Scientists are still trying to better understand the condition that brings with it severe brain fog, blood clots, and a whole host of awful medical conditions that don’t go away. Now, a study published August 21 in the journal Nature Medicine found fallout from COVID-19 can persist even two years after infection.

Biden is cleverly increasing regular workers bargaining power by letting covid disable millions!

The team also tallied the risks for over 80 different complications that are associated with long COVID and turned it into a health metric called a disability adjusted life year (DALY). Each DALY stands for one year of typically healthy life lost to illness. The team found that long COVID created over 80 DALYs, for every 1,000 people who weren’t hospitalized due to their initial infection.

Based on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease study, long COVID creates a higher burden of disability per every 1,000 Americans than cancer (roughly 50 DALYs) or heart disease (about 52 DALYs).

“Our findings highlight the substantial cumulative burden of health loss due to long COVID and emphasize the ongoing need for health care for those faced with long COVID,” said Al-Aly. “It appears that the effects of long COVID for many will not only impact such patients and their quality of life, but potentially will contribute to a decline in life expectancy and also may impact labor participation, economic productivity, and societal well-being.”

Oh wait, some good news:

The team noted one encouraging note that the risks of death or hospitalization to those who were not sent to the hospital—the majority of people infected with the virus— declined and became insignificant at six and 19 months.

I'm glad covid is over and we don't have to worry about reinfections!

Decreasing the risk of long COVID should be a focus of public health policy, according Al-Aly. “Reducing the risk of infection and transmission with updated vaccines — including vaccines that block transmission — may be a critical strategy to reduce the risk of long-term health problems,” he said. “We also need an urgent, coordinated approach that matches the scale and gravity of long COVID to find treatments as soon as possible.”

I'm sure our new leadership at the CDC will get right on it!

Not a huge surprise with everything we know, but still yikes

from: https://somerandomchick.jouwweb.nl/the-covid-cartoons

alt text

1: JUST WORRY THAT BEING SO SCARED IS BAD FOR you.

2: I'M NOT SCARED. i'm NOT scared I'm just not taking UNNECESSARY RISKS.

1: But COME ON. WhAT ARE ThE CHANCES. ANYWAY?

2:JusT FOR LORG coVID, IT'S ABOUT ONE IN FIVE.

1: I DON'T KNOW... THAT SOUNDS HiGH TO ME.

2: IT'S WELL DOCUMENTED NOW. you CAN LOOK IT up. GETS MORE LIKELY EVERY TIME you GET IT. TOO. AND IT DAMAGES EVERY ORGAN. HARMS BLOOD VESSELS AND you CAN'T EVEN FEEL THAT HAPPENING. SO NO THANKS. IT'S WAY MORE SCARY NOT WEARING A MASK.

1: WELL IT JUST SEEMS SILLY TO ME TO THINK ABOUT ALL THAT. I MEAN, WHAT ARE CHANCES?

editors note: didn't want to type text, machine copied letters inaccurately lower case or upper. got lazy

The Biden administration’s effort to provide free Covid-19 vaccines to the uninsured will not start at retail pharmacies until mid-October, weeks after the government plans to make an updated version of the shot available to the broader public.

The gap in timing, which comes as Covid hospitalizations have ticked up in recent weeks, means that millions of Americans without health coverage will not be able to immediately get a no-cost vaccine at popular places like CVS and Walgreens, even as it will be widely available for those who have insurance.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the delay in pharmacy availability, with spokesperson Kathleen Conley saying the government is still finalizing contracts with companies like CVS and Walgreens that will allow them to distribute the vaccines for free.

The CDC expects the updated vaccine rollout to begin the third or fourth week of September, she said. But the contracts with pharmacies will likely not be finished until mid-October.

The uninsured will instead need to go to federal health centers or individual providers for free vaccines during the first stage of the fall vaccination campaign. That adds a layer of complexity, public health officials warn, that could discourage people from getting the shot.

“That’s going to put a gap in the program,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, which helps coordinate immunization programs across the country. “These kinds of things, they make a big difference when you’re trying to manage a program and you want to ensure [the] vaccine’s accessible in every county.”

As many as 30 million uninsured or underinsured people face paying out-of-pocket for Covid vaccines for the first time this fall, after the government’s Covid public health emergency declaration expired in May. That figure could include millions of people who recently lost Medicaid coverage for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

Oh look, more horseshit from the Biden regime and their handling of the ongoing pandemic that is going to exacerbate how much they're already fucking over marginalized communities.

~~I don’t want to reveal anything more specific publicly to protect my irl identity, but my matrix account is linked on this account if someone would be so kind as to dm on there!~~

Edit: iraglassceiling is helping thank y'all for upvoting!

That doesn't mean anything! That's not a thing! That has no basis in material reality!

If people are still getting infected all over the world all year, it's still a pandemic!

The pandemic didn’t fall out of the sky. Looking back, it’s easy to see so many warning signs.

The acceptance of white yoga anti-vaxx moms hosting parties to infect their kids with bizarre diseases is an obvious one. I live in a blue area, so these people were very present pre-pandemic. I very seldom run into them now, but when I do, I see that they’re also anti-maskers. Big Mask is in league with Big Pharma. Death drive is very present in the psyche of the bourgeoisie because they know, deep down, that capitalism cannot continue forever, and they would rather destroy themselves and everything around them than admit this.

Then there’s Americans’ total lack of interest in masking pre-pandemic, even though in Asia people voluntarily masked in order to protect each other years before the pandemic started. Making a collective effort to protect one another? Forget it! I've got crumbs from the table of imperialism I need to lick up off the floor!

Also the poisonous environment of America pre-pandemic. This country was founded by settlers deliberately infecting indigenous people with horrifying diseases in the name of profit and land theft (A very, very blue area in Massachusetts, Amherst, still bears the name of the guy who did this), and nothing has changed. Everyone being sick in so many different ways—from being forced to eat poisonous food, being forced to drive for how many hours each day, never having time to exercise, never having decent health care, never having the most basic health education, always being economically stressed —but then being blamed for all their problems. You have basically lived in Mordor all your life, but it’s your fault for not looking like Legolas, you just haven’t worked hard or smart enough, and you are insane if you question this. (Marxists referencing LOTR is like liberals referencing Harry Potter I suppose…)

We also can’t forget individualism. Every American, deep down, thinks he is a cowboy. The contempt for intellectualism (and science) has also been talked about in America for decades. Liberals are obviously not immune here. At this point they really are just as contemptuous of science as chuds. Their peaceful protests are just a rebirth of medieval flagellants—they're happy to punish themselves for enjoying capitalism, but not so happy to actually destroy capitalism itself. Most doctors have also literally gone mask-off during the pandemic, but some scientists at least (Rob Wallace for instance) are still doing their jobs, still uncovering new ways in which this nightmare is fucking us, and very few people are listening.

“Juking the stats” is a phrase from The Wire (watched it in my liberal days), but we see government officials at every level doing this constantly with covid. It’s become very difficult to figure out just how bad the pandemic is, though there are things the bourgeoisie is unable to cover up—deaths and life expectancy, for instance. Diseases associated with long covid have continued to climb, even if there are shithead doctors out there who claim that long covid is just in your head. (They were also doing this with chronic lyme pre-pandemic!)

So in a way, the pandemic is not really something new. It’s just a massive intensification of factors in American “life” which were already well-established. Disabled people were already being ignored even by Marxists before the pandemic, but now there’s a lot more of them, they’re in so much more danger, and it’s easier to become disabled than ever before.

Barring revolution, I think things will continue to get worse. (There are rumors of nurses striking to bring back mask mandates, which is a positive sign.) I’ve also wondered—if Trump “wriggles out of this one,” and if he becomes president again, will liberals go back to pretending to care about the pandemic? What’s stopping them from saying that Biden did a good job during the pandemic, but Trump is fucking it up now? It would also be a pretty effective way to mobilize large numbers of people against him.

As an aside, the pandemic has taught me that the apocalypse isn’t necessarily what we expect it to be. Had anyone made a film about this pandemic before it started, absolutely no one would have believed it.

Edit: this thread is also about LOTR and the Foundation trilogy.

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@LongCOVIDPhysio/videos
Website: https://longcovid.physio/about

Has a podcast and a website and stuff. Seems OK, but really vague and kinda' useless from what I'm skimming. No obvious criticisms of how society's being run right now that I spotted. Worried if not this, then other future astroturfed groups will start where they say long COVID will be easily taken care of via rehabilitation, which as far as I can tell, will just be ordering people back to work in increasing number of hours.

Dear Members and Staff of the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC):

We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, recognize the pivotal role you play in setting guidance that shapes infection control and prevention practices in hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care settings across the nation and around the world.

We urge HICPAC and the CDC to ensure the following elements are upheld in updates to infection control guidance in health care settings:

 1. Fully recognize aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens.

HICPAC and the CDC should ensure that updated guidance includes the use of multiple control measures that have been shown to effectively prevent transmission of respiratory pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2 and others, including:

 • Ventilation to remove aerosolized viral particles and other pathogens, including the use of negative pressure isolation and other engineering controls.
 • Respiratory and eye protection for health care workers providing care to patients with suspected or confirmed respiratory infections.
 • Safe staffing is essential to effective infection control and prevention. Updated CDC/HICPAC guidance must recognize this and must not make allowances for health care employers to circumvent measures necessary to protect worker and patient health due to staffing concerns.

 2. Maintain and strengthen respiratory protection and other protections for health care workers caring for patients with suspected or confirmed respiratory infections.

N95 filtering facepiece respirators represent the minimum level of respiratory protection available and are essential to protecting health care workers from respiratory infections. HICPAC and CDC should clearly and explicitly incorporate elastomeric and powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs) into any updated guidance on health care infection control. PAPRs and elastomeric respirators can provide a higher level and more reliable protection than N95s, be more comfortable to wear, and more cost-effective for employers to implement.

 3. The CDC must maintain an approach in any updated infection control guidance that is clear and explicit on the precautions that are needed in situations where infectious pathogens are present or may be present in health care settings; don’t adopt a crisis standards approach.

 4. CDC and HICPAC should engage with stakeholders, including direct care health care workers, their unions, patients, and community members to provide them with the ability to review and provide essential input into guidance updates.

We are concerned about the lack of transparency in your process to update the CDC’s guidance document, Isolation Precautions: Preventing Transmission of Infectious Agents in Healthcare Settings (last updated in 2007). Changes to this guidance will impact health care workers, patients, and communities in every state, but you have no clear mechanism to garner input from those health care workers, their unions, or patients and community members before the updates are finalized.

As COVID cases rise once again, we are unprepared for the "mass disabling" event caused by long COVID

An alarming scientific pattern is revealing itself across intersecting areas of research, which suggests that long COVID could be linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's – having to do with the misfolding of alpha-synuclein proteins in the human nervous system. This misfolding is possibly triggered by an initial COVID infection and can lead to unwanted accumulation of alpha-synuclein and the formation of Lewy bodies, resulting in neurological disorders.

Long COVID patients are quite possibly experiencing the early stages of neurodegeneration.