Does the coronavirus merit investment, or personal, concern or consideration?

Seems about right. I heard something along similar lines of “half the time it would take to get a sunburn” gets you enough for your daily Vit D levels. The actual time will vary as your article says with the season, time of day, and your skin tone.

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Summary of recent research publications from the journal Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00502-w

One cited good antibody responses in the elderly, similar to others, boding well for vaccine effectiveness.

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In a first, genomics shows that mink can pass SARS-CoV-2 to humans. Uh, could someone authoritative explain to my wife that it is only live mink? :smile: The pelts are not carriers.

Speaking of minks, a side point. My grandfather who lived in OK, would go mink hunting in season. (long before a dislike for animal pelts) He would sell the skins & make pretty good side money. :wink:

If it’ll deter her from asking you to buy her another mink coat, why would you want to clear that up? :wink:

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That’s one vaccine that will be coming later rather than sooner.

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Very interesting!

UK, Covid 19 vaccine on hold due to suspected adverse reaction. Later on it mentions Clinical holds are not uncommon.

But, more important the article states Phase 3 started in the US in late August. It aims to enroll 30k participants in 80 states.

So the studies go on… Most important that we are hearing good vaccine news projected daily. :relaxed:

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Sturgis motorcycle rally was a ‘superspreader event’

In early August, more than 460,000 motorcycle enthusiasts converged on Sturgis, S.D. for a 10-day celebration where few wore facial coverings or practiced social distancing. A month later, researchers have found that thousands have been sickened across the nation, leading them to brand the Sturgis rally a “superspreader” event.

“…the “public health costs” of the rally as “substantial and widespread,” which could have infected as many as 266,796 people. He and his co-authors estimate that dealing with the fallout from the rally will involve more than $12 billion in health care costs.”

And all those BLM shouting and looting events could have infected as many as 538,174 people with economic costs as high as $127 billion based on long term economic destruction and healthcare costs. See I can pull non-peer reviewed numbers out of my ass too. Funny how we don’t have any studies on the BLM impact - not sure if it wasn’t the kind of thing that looks good on an academic resume, the journals wouldn’t take it, or the policies of NY and other states of having contract tracers forbidden from asking about protest attendance were successful in hiding the relevant data.

If you assume a week for incubation from the start of the Aug 8 event, which seems low since it takes time to spread and direct cases there would be a minority if this had been a super spreading event, the cases in the US rose from 5.5M to 6.5M in the month from 8/15 to today. So they’re saying this event caused 25% of all cases in the US since? Deaths during that period rose by 21k. You’d think with a claim like that they would be able to find more than just over 100 cases in the home state of SD linked to the event or more than a single old sick biker who died (and of course he might have gotten it elsewhere, who knows?). I suppose if you make generous assumptions about how the cases in the US are undercounted by 10x or something maybe it’s a reasonable estimate (ie 2.5% and not 25%), but then again if all those extra cases don’t show up in hospitalizations (where they would be definitely detected nowadays), maybe all those extra cases aren’t that serious after all.

Among the obvious flaws of the paper, the main one is attributing to this event all the relative rise in cases in counties associated with more attendees vs fewer attendees, and not say the state fair that had 200k people this year, schools reopening, or probably most importantly the general rising trend of cases in those counties/states anyway that was already going on before the rally. When you’ve got an epidemic going on, the trend in cases doesn’t turn on a dime (unlike the way the trend in TSLA stock might), so finding the right alternative benchmark for what might have happened without the event is more subtle than the analysis they did.

I’m sure some people got the virus at the event, and I’m sure there was more community spread afterwards. But these specific numbers are hard to believe and not in any context relative to the existing spread of the virus.

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Governor Noem states, “report isn’t science it’s fiction” fake news.

Why don’t we see or hear public health reports on peaceful protest gatherings of rioters & looters in the media? NEVER, only glaring reports at a gathering of possible President Trump supporters.

The Sturgis rally is one of the largest in-person US gathering since the outbreak of Covid 19.
Yes, BIG group.

We visited Sturgis SD, a few years ago. Not in August, at that time it was a very quiet peaceful small town. You could drive through town in 10 minutes. But we could see the huge parking area in the outskirts of town.

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AstraZeneca could resume trials next week…

" Many Trump supporters wondered why neither the media nor public health professionals condemned those protests, when they seemed to plainly contravene social distancing guidelines. But most people at those protests wore masks, and there was virtually no indoor socializing of the kind that aerosol scientists say poses the highest risk of viral transmission. That combination prevented those protests from becoming superspreader events.

In that earlier paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the authors also surmised that even as protests brought thousands together in outdoor environments, they drove others indoors, whether out of fear of violence or concerns about viral spread. “This enhanced mitigation offset the effects of diminished social distancing,”

", no such offset was evident in Sturgis, where people moved around more, not less, once the bikers arrived,

"Bikers came to Sturgis from around the country. They congregated in local bars and restaurants, which allowed indoor seating. They attended concerts and motorcycle races. Then they went back to their states of residence — and, according to the new research, carried the coronavirus with them. More than 90 percent of the attendees came from outside South Dakota.

“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally,” the authors of the study conclude, “represents a situation where many of the ‘worst case scenarios’ for superspreading occurred simultaneously: the event was prolonged, included individuals packed closely together, involved a large out-of-town population (a population that was orders of magnitude larger than the local population), and had low compliance with recommended infection countermeasures such as the use of masks. The only large factors working to prevent the spread of infection were the outdoor venue, and low population density in the state of South Dakota."

That’s what the SD Governor Noem is saying. Low density, outside events (mostly), warm weather. True, bikers did congregate in local bars.

Nothing compared to the day-in-day out congregation of looters & rioters in large Democrat cities.

Month long deadly activities committed, & Biden & cronies not complaining one iota. (until just recently, when the polls started showing a bump downward).

Dems want to compare ONE Sturgis Bikers affair vs death in the streets nightly in many of the largest cities in America. NO WAY!!

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Yes, I read your article, you don’t have to requote it. As for protests, I think they mainly occurred in left leaning areas who seemed to have a lot of covid cases. But they also specifically ignored and didn’t look for the connections via their contact tracers, so really all they can say is they don’t know if protests were superspreading events, or perhaps, nobody can prove they were (even if it’s likely from basic logic and what we know about the virus).

I’ll go out on a limb and say the BLM protests killed more black people than cops have in the last decade. Oh, and I mean with the virus, not the actual people they killed during the riots and looting.

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Yes, continue pushing your narrative that relies on there being a chance in hell that testing positive today can be accurately traced directly back to eating inside a restaurant over a month prior. Especially when considering a group of people who clearly havent been hiding away in their basements isolated from everyone.

I’d even bet that at least half those same cases could be traced directly back to the protests, too, if you tried hard enough. Contact tracing is a farce in this context. Contact tracing for a virus like HIV? Sure, transmission requires pretty clear and deliberate behavior. But when those same people are still claiming that you could become infected from merely walking into a room where an infected person had breathed hours earlier, how can they state anything definitive about a given case’s provenance? Or at least do so with a straight face?

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And yet if you read what I wrote, I didn’t deny it was a likely spreading event. Whether it was super or not, no one really knows, but it’s possible. What I took issue with was claiming that 1/4 of all US cases in the past month were due to this event.

I mean, if it were true it’d be great news! Surely if we shut down just 3 other big events across the country, and we’d have the virus beat in a month and we all go back to living our normal lives. But somehow I don’t think it’s that simple.

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That seems like an exaggeration. It started an estimate of infections stemming from the event. There were around 1.4 million new laboratory confirmed infections in the last 30 days. There were somewhere around 2.5x as many estimated infections over that period (IHME estimated and confirmed daily infections(, and me estimating between the two charts. That makes around 3.5 million estimated new infections. 267000 is not 25% of 3500000.

The claim of that event affecting 1/4 of the new cases seems way too large to be true. I can believe that it was a superspreading event however but that magnitude seems unrealistic. Still, IMO it’s a self-inflected wound that was unnecessary. We should do what we reasonably can do to reduce spreading when it’s predictable. In this case, the gathering was predicted to be dangerous in the midst of a pandemic and regardless of the actual size of the spreading, it should have been avoided (postpone or just skip this year).

IMO the BLM protest are also spreading events. I don’t believe the looting and rioting are however considering those typically involve a much smaller portion of the protesters (and thus potentially more distancing, lower infection counts). And to be perfectly frank, if the looters contract COVID-19 as part of this activity, I’m not gonna be hypocritical that I feel very sorry for them. But the difference is whether the protest can be postponed or not. Waiting until we have enough vaccinated to have herd immunity to protest the death of George Floyd and others makes the protest meaningless and completely disconnected from the moment. If you wanted to make sure this country does not take any meaningful action (other than the typical thoughts and prayers BS from elected officials), the best way would definitely be to postpone the protest until it’s convenient (aka never) to tackle the issue.

So are the protest spreading events? I think so too and there should definitely be media coverage and research done on the effect. If only to re-emphasize that people at those protests take distancing and face covering more seriously. But unlike the biker rally which had no significant impact for the country, these should be allowed to proceed due to the otherwise negative impact on race progress in this country.

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